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meatier and thus took longer for me to get through...

The Night Ship by Jess Kidd - Partially based on a true story (the first part, anyways), it's 1629 and a young girl who just lost her mother sets sail for the Dutch East Indies on The Batavia, heading for the house of the wealthy merchant father she never met. While onboard, she's not the "little lady" everyone expects her to be and spends her time going on adventures and searching for a mythical monster. Meanwhile, in 1989, an eccentric young boy loses his mother and is sent to Beacon Island to live with his curmudgeonly grandfather who's also an outsider. The book tells both their stories, mostly (but not always) alternating chapters and highlighting the similarities between the children who lived 360 years apart. This was my first book by this author so I don't know if the unique "voice" and writing style of The Night Ship is the usual for the author or something she tried just for this book but it was lyrical and mesmerizing and very successful. Solid A, maybe even an A+.

The Shore by Katie Runde - Set in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, a mother and her two teenage daughters are trying to navigate their summer in the usual style while the father is dying from a brain tumor. The book alternate viewpoints, with the older daughter falling for a summer worker and hoping to lose her virginity, the younger daughter figuring out her sexuality and making up a persona and posting on a message board for women who are losing/have lost their husbands to brain tumors (and reading all her mother's posts) and the mom trying to decide if she wants to remain in the seaside town and continue running the vacation home rental business she created with her husband or pull up stakes after her husband's death and start over in a rural midwestern town. Not the cheeriest of reads but Runde does an excellent job capturing the complex emotions that come with watching a loved one struggling at the end of their life. B+

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich - In 2008/2009, in a small rural (is that redundant?) North Dakota town being beat down by a recession, a teen with a tragic past who's set to inherit his family's sugar beet farm is desperate to marry the indigenous daughter of one of the farm's truck drivers. But so is a homeschooler who is also involved with the daughter. The Mighty Red made a number of "best books of 2024" lists, won several awards and is apparently beloved by many, many readers...I didn't quite get the appeal. I felt the book was maybe a bit overreaching, with a LOT of different themes (young love, old love, classism, racism, capitalism, economics, and on and on) and a LOT of different characters (many with really odd names--Kismet, Diz, Sport, Hugo, etc., though "Hugo" isn't all that odd...). The "tragic past" was teased for SO long and was almost a letdown by the time of the big reveal. And the writing was almost TOO poetic, to the point where sometimes a sentence didn't make much sense (but it sure sounded good). It took me the better part of the month to read, and ultimately I *did* enjoy it, but as I've stated many times before, I read (and watch TV or movies) more for pleasure than education and frankly, I got a little frustrated with the meager story and being constantly bombarded with Really Important Lessons. So it's hard for me to grade this book...it was very, very well written, and obviously a lot of people loved it (and if you're one of them, I'd love to hear your thoughts) so I'll go with a B.

This month, I also dug back into the fanfic archives and read some old school NCIS fanfiction. I've not watched the show since DiNozzo left, with the exception of the episode memorializing Ducky, so I've obviously missed a lot. And I'm OK with that <g>.