*THE GARDEN OF LAST DAYS* by Andre Dubus III

One early September night in Florida, a stripper brings her daughter to work. April's usual babysitter is in the hospital, so she decides it's best to have her three-year-old daughter close by, watching children's videos in the office, while she works.Except that April works at the Puma Club for Men. And tonight she has an unusual client, a foreigner both remote and too personal, and free with his money. Lots of it, all cash. His name is Bassam. Meanwhile, another man, AJ, has been thrown out of the club for holding hands with his favorite stripper, and he's drunk and angry and lonely.From these explosive elements comes a relentless, raw, searing, passionate, page-turning narrative, a big-hearted and painful novel about sex and parenthood and honor and masculinity. Set in the seamy underside of American life at the moment before the world changed, it juxtaposes lust for domination with hunger for connection, sexual violence with family love. It seizes the reader by the throat with the same psychological tension, depth, and realism that characterized Andre Dubus's #1 bestseller, House of Sand and Fog—and an even greater sense of the dark and anguished places in the human heart.

***Rate this as a 3/5. I read House of Sand and Fog and liked it as well. However, I felt that it should have not taken 535 pages to tell a story that happened over only a few days.

*THE SISTER* by Poppy Adams

It's ten to two in the afternoon and I've been waiting for my little sister, Vivian since one-thirty. She's finally coming home at sixty-six years old, after an absence of over forty years."And so begins the tale of two sisters, Ginny and Vivian, reunited after a long estrangement. Ginny's been living in the family's sprawling Victorian home--now creaking and leaking, with a ghost of its lavish past lingering--and keeping mostly to herself. But Vivian's arrival shakes up her sister's carefully ordered world, bringing old memories and resentments to the surface. What dark, unspoken secrets are hiding in the family's past?We soon learn that Ginny and Vivian were born into a long line of distinguished lepidopterists, scientists who study moths and butterflies. Their eccentric father continued the family tradition, and was completely devoted to his work, spending long hours in the laboratory on the upper floor of the house and eventually apprenticing young Ginny as his assistant. As the years passed, his determination to make his mark in this elite field consumed the entire household. Ginny and Vivian's mother, lonely and neglected by her husband, descended into alcoholism and violent mood swings. And before long, rifts opened that may never be repaired.Now, so many years later, the sisters are drawn back into this stormy world of their childhood. But Ginny is ever observant of the present, wondering why her sister has returned, keeping track of her every move, refusing to accept Vivian's version of their past. As Ginny becomes more and more agitated, she turns to what she can understand and control: her beloved science. And, perhaps more like her father than anyonerealizes, she finds herself tempted by the "most convenient solution."Told through Ginny's unforgettably eerie voice--both childlike and sinister--this is a haunting novel about passion, trust, betrayal, and a family that destroys itself in the name of love.

*** Rate this one 3/5. I had to force myself to finish the book, but I did finish it. A story of madness or slowly progressing insanity. An english tale of 2 very different sisters, one who chose to venture out into the world and one who stayed in a very dysfunctional home until she was old and mad.