Best Books of 2023 – Chapter 2

Another discovery through my daily BookBub e-mail, it was the book cover of The Codebreaker’s Secret by Sara Ackerman that caught my eye and prompted me to explore this book further and then upon reading the synopsis, prompted me to hit the purchase button.

This historical novel starts out in Hawaii 18 months after Pearl Harbor and tells the story of a female codebreaker working at the secret decoding operation on the island.  In addition to her real war function, she is also searching for answers to how her only brother, a pilot, was killed on December 7^th, 1941.  Almost the entire novel is set in Hawaii, and I could easily picture in my mind the scenes she described, particularly when the story moved to Waikiki Beach, where my wife and I celebrated our 40^th wedding anniversary several years ago.

The story follows her emotional search in 1943 through her brother’s best friend, also a pilot but then begins to weave what seems like an unrelated storyline in 1965.  Seemingly unrelated to me at least until I realized one of the characters was in both storylines.

Having first learned about the real-life operation and successes of this decoding operation through the movie Midway, this novel features another real-life and almost of equally significant decryption triumph.  The chapters interweave focus on her decoding activities as well as her blossoming feelings for her brother’s best friend.  As the story in 1965 progresses, you begin to learn how interrelated the timelines are until the climax of the book ties everything together nicely with explanations for all prior events.

In the Author’s Note, I appreciated how Ackerman highlighted the non-fiction part of the story which makes her historical fiction version even more plausible.  If this period of our history interests you, then I think you too will enjoy this book.

I must once again credit my daily BookBub for bringing this book and author to my attention for I had never heard of Julie Clark, a fairly new author with her first book having been published in 2018.  Her second novel, The Last Flight, came out in 2020.  Reading the short blurb, I was intrigued by the plot and so did not hesitate to hit the purchase button.

Imagine two women, Claire, and Eva, both needing to escape their past lives, encountering each other in the same JFK airport terminal near their departure gates, and deciding to switch boarding passes and in essence, identities.  Claire was originally heading to Puerto Rico on a business trip for her husband’s non-profit organization and Eva was heading back home to California.  They switch places and what seems like a perfect plan then turns to disaster when the plane heading to Puerto Rico goes down in the ocean.  But did Eva actually get on that plane?

The story follows dual timelines in alternating chapters, with present day Claire, now presumed dead, assuming Eva’s identity and trying to make a new start for herself.  For Eva’s story, the timeline starts six months before the crash and works its way forward.  As these chapters progress and the story unfolds, we learn more and more about the lives of these women and why they need to escape.  The climax of the book brings us back to just a short time after the crash with a most surprising ending.

An added treat for me in this book was it is set in and around the campus of the University of California in Berkeley (UC-Berkeley) where my daughter went for graduate school.  As scenes are described, I can easily picture them in my mind as I had been to those same locations visiting my daughter while in school.  But even if you have never been on campus, I can assure you that you will thoroughly enjoy this intriguing book.  In fact, I have already added Ms. Clark’s third book to my Wishlist.

One of my favorite books that I read in 2022 was The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave.  As soon as I finished reading it, I added this one, Eight Hundred Grapes, an earlier book of hers to my Wishlist.  During this past winter, I purchased and read it—in three days!  It was that good I hated to put it down.

I knew from reading the blurb that this novel was about a family-owned winery in Sonoma County and the owner’s daughter who was days away from being married at the winery when a series of unexpected events turns everything upside down.  It was a story filled with many “what ifs” and explorations of how individual’s lives were affected by the choices they made, often wondering how differently their lives would have turned out if they had chosen to follow a different path based on a different decision.  I have written before about some of the decisions I made in my life and how different it would have been if I had not, and this book touched those emotions.

As I read the book, and learned about the unique way this family managed their winery, it made we want to visit a winery once again in Sonoma County as I had done in years past.  I learned the intriguing story of how the parents built the winery where they did and the lives their three children pursued separate from the winery.  Without giving too many details, I thought the book had a great ending, though not the one I was expecting.  If you read Dave’s book I previously wrote about and enjoyed that one, then you are in for a treat with this one as well.

It was my sister who encouraged me to read this book by Laura Hillenbrand and I am so glad she did. What an incredible true story!  And it was one of which I was not at all familiar.

This book tells the amazing story of survival of Louie Zamperini, a former Olympic runner whose aircraft crashed in the Pacific Ocean, endured weeks in a raft swarmed by sharks, strafed by enemy aircraft, and eventually captured by the Japanese and imprisoned until after the end of the war.  Reading of the abuses he suffered while a POW at times is hard to bear but offers hope of what a resilient human can actually achieve under conditions of extreme and inhuman treatment.

His story does not end there but continues after his liberation suffering through what we would now diagnose as PTSD, and his redemption to overcome it and the founding of a boy’s camp to help those in need.  It is an authoritative telling of this story as Louie was alive and interviewed by the author for the book and is filled with numerous photos.  In 2014, it was the basis for a movie of the same name which I will now have to watch as well.  If you choose to read this book, you will be amazed at all the details and will not be disappointed.

     To be continued…