Leave No Trace by Mindy Mejia

Title: Leave No Trace

Author: Mindy Mejia

Read by:  Patricia Rodriguez

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Length: Approximately 9 hours and 56 minutes

Source: Review Copy from Simon & Schuster.  Thank-you!

A man and his 9-year-old son leave for a camping trip in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and are never seen again.  Their campsite is found destroyed by bears and it is thought that they were killed in the wild.  Ten years later, Lucas Blackthorn is found breaking into an outfitter store in Ely Minnesota.  Where has he been all this time and where is his father Josiah?

Lucas is brought to Duluth and put into a mental institution.  Maya is a speech therapist at the institution who was once a patient there.  Will she be able to break through Lucas’s reserve and determine where he has been and what happened to his father?

Leave No Trace is written by Mindy Mejia who also wrote the wonderful Everything You Want Me to Be, which was a perfect suspense novel.  Leave No Trace didn’t quite measure up to Everything You Want Me to Be, but it was a good suspense novel.  It dealt with abandonment and a search for one’s mother.  It also dealt with the definition of “crazy.”  Who is the crazy one when you really start to look at people?  Is wanting to live without people and without a roof crazy?  I like how the story was told peeling off layer after to layer to found out Maya’s past as well as Josiah’s over time.  The book was narrated mostly by Maya, but there were a few chapters from Josiah’s point of view as well.

I also really enjoyed the setting of the novel.  I live in Wisconsin and am from Michigan originally.  My husband is from Minnesota.  I have been to Duluth and north, but I have not been to the Boundary Waters yet.  I plan to get there some day!  I thought it was the perfect setting for a place where one could lose oneself.

Patricia Rodriquez did a fine job as narrator of this audiobook.  It was an engaging story that was very interesting to listen to on my long weekly commute to Milwaukee.  I recommend this book on audio.

Overall, Leave No Trace was a wonderful suspense story with a great setting and interesting characters.  It was also a great audiobook to keep you riveted with the story on a long drive.

Laura’s Top 10 Books of 2017 (and 2016)

I sadly started my top 10 book list last year and never posted it.  So, I decided this year to make things simpler by making my list just a list with links to the original reviews.  Let’s discuss what you think of my list in the comments below.  What were your favorite books of 2017?  Were any the same as mine?

These are the ten books I loved the most that I read in the year 2017.  It doesn’t mean they were necessarily published in 2017.  I also didn’t count books that I was reading again for the second time (On the Shores of Silver Lake for example by Laura Ingalls Wilder).  These were the books I read and then couldn’t stop thinking about long after I’d read the final page.  They are a mix of non-fiction, historical fiction, suspense, romance, and a classic that should be on everyone’s list (So Big by Edna Ferber).

1. Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
2. The Alice Network by Kate Quinn
3.  Everything You Want Me to Be by Mindy Mejia
4. The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir by Jennifer Ryan
5.  So Big by Edna Ferber
6. Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
7.  Forty Autumns by Nina Willner
8.  The Café by the Sea by Jenny Colgan / Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery byJenny Colgan
9.  Pioneer Girl Perspectives by Nancy Tystad Koupal
10. The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See

And my top 10 from 2016 that I never published as I was writing riveting summaries of each one and never got finished!  Are any of these books your favorites?

1. The Grace of Silence by Michele Norris
2. The Innkeeper of Ivy Hill by Julie Klassen
3. Five Presidents by Clint Hill 
4.  Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave
5. The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo by Amy Schumer
6. The Poisoning of Michigan by Joyce Egginton
7. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling
8. The Avaitor’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin
9.  So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
10. Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach

Runner’s Up:  Matilda by Roald Dahl, From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Everything You Want Me to Be by Mindy Mejia

Title: Everything You Want Me to Be
Author: Mindy Mejia

Read by: Caitlin Thorburn, Jeff Harding, & Jon Moraitis

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Length: Approximately 10 hours and 44 minutes
Source: Simon & Schuster Audio Digital Review Copy – Thank-you!

Everything You Want Me to Be riveted me.  Other audiobooks I’ve had to turn off lately after a long day of work to listen to music in order to keep me awake on my drive home.  Everything You Want Me to Be was so intriguing that even after a fifteen hour work day, it kept me wide awake on the hour drive home wanting to know more about the story.

Hattie Hoffman is a senior excited to finally be graduating and realizing her dream of moving to New York City to become an actress.  Always feeling out of place in her small town in Minnesota, Hattie longs for a more sophisticated life.  She lives life always trying to be everything everyone wants her to be.  She is the perfect actress.  When she meets the perfect man online, she steps into a dangerous love affair.  Who is Hattie Hoffman?  The perfect daughter, friend, high school girlfriend, or is she far more sinister?

When Hattie is found murdered, her father’s best friend, the Vietnam Veteran and county Sheriff Del, investigates her murder. As he tries to close in on her real killer, he realizes that Hattie is much more than the sweet and sassy girl he watched grow up.  She had become a real woman who lived life trying to be everything everyone else wanted her to be.  Del must also confront his own demons along the way.

The third point of view in this novel was a new teacher in town, Peter, who misses the bright lights of Minneapolis moving to this small town with his wife to care for his ailing mother-in-law.  Feeling more and more out of the picture as he wife cares for his mother in law, Peter finds himself yearning for a different life.  When his star pupil is murdered, Peter finds himself in the crosshairs.

This book was told from three point of views, but what I thought was a unique format.  Del’s view point was in the future trying to track down Hattie’s killer, while Hattie and Peter’s viewpoints were from the summer before Senior Year leading up to the murder. I loved the unique perspectives and how it shaded the tale depending on whose viewpoint you had.  I’ll admit I thought I had this story figured out early on with who the points of view were and some heavy foreshadowing and the book played into this assumption, but it still managed to surprise me. 

Mejia wrote a book that was not only a fabulous psychological thriller, but also great characters.  I really felt for Hattie.  She felt out of place in her small town and tried to please everyone, but felt she couldn’t really be herself.  At times I was also annoyed with her as she was only a teenager and often made poor decisions.  The place and the characters in the story all felt real.  I’d love to see a movie of this novel.

I really like when a novel is told from several points of views to have different narrators for each point of view in an audiobook.  Everything You Want Me to Be did just that.  I love that each character had a unique voice and it kept me in tune with who was speaking at the time.  The only complain I had was that the accents were strange.  At times the sheriff sounded like an old west sheriff, but the action all takes place in a small Minnesota town.  Having a husband from Minnesota, it threw me off every time I heard this odd accent.

Overall, Everything You Want Me to Be is a gripping psychological thriller with unforgettable characters.  I highly recommend it!