Last night, we saw this beauty in our back porch. I noticed the nest several days ago but finally got a glimpse of its owner.
Looking forward to reading Adele Barger Wilson's Bonding with the Barn Swallows.
I also found this website, Your Guide to Texas Birding, helpful,
Texas Swallow Species and How to Tell Them Apart | BirdingLocations
Mickey, a police officer, narrates the Long Bright River, a compelling story of two sisters on opposite sides of the law. Both Mickey and Kacey come from the same hardscrabble neighborhood in Philadelphia. They were raised by their taciturn grandmother, Gee.
This part of the story is easily recognizable. Since their mother died of an overdose and their father abandoned them, they are raised by a bitter grandmother. She bitterly laments the death of her daughter who overdosed and left her to two children to raise.
Gee raised the girls without much joy or hope. The only bright spot in the girls' lives is their fierce bond and a secret hiding place where their girls share their favorite knick knacks and correspondence
The community Moore describes, Kensington, is a real community carefully researched by the author. Kensington is a working class district known for poverty, homelessness, and drug use.
What is the long, bright river? The reader does not know at first. Moore is writing about the "invisible people", the homeless and vulnerable, that most ignore.
Mickey has become a police officer whose job compels her to interact with this drug using crowd. Meanwhile, her younger sister, Kacey, has become one more of the nameless and invisible.
One of the working girls alerts Mickey that her sister has disappeared. Though she has a young son, Mickey does some investigating. At this point, the novel shifts into high gear and becomes a thriller.
Mickey's choice to investigate her sister puts her in danger especially as there is a serial killer on the loose, one who is specifically targeting the ladies of the evening.
Rumors circulate that the perpetrator may be one of Philadelphia's own PD. This puts Mickey in even more danger. She never knows who may be observing her or who may be hostile to her unendorsed investigation.
The killer could be anyone on the force. She even suspects her ex and her former partner who frequent Kensington at odd times. To top it all, someone has been bothering her landlady and asking questions about her.
Moore deliver a first-rate thriller while also drawing attention to poverty, drug abuse, prostitution and other social problems in the Philadephia community.
Long Bright River has recently been adapted into a miniseries on Peacock starring Amanda Seyfried.
In Wanderers an unknown pathogen wreaks havoc across the United States.
While all this sounds familiar to what we’ve experienced with Covid-19, Wendig actually began devising the novel in 2016–four years before the Covid 19 outbreak.
In addition to the pathogen, characters also grapple with an AI that becomes sentient and autonomous, Black Swan.
Sadie explains how discomfiting the technology can be:
“Imagine that you create this thing, this quantum computer mind, and you begin to train it, and you realize it has a mind of its own. And then, on day, it tells you something: It has been speaking to itself in the future, and it believes that civilization will one day end.”
Though she believes she controls it, the AI begins to act independently. Predicting the pandemic, Black Swan takes control of a nanotech company and its swarm of nanotech bots. Black Swan’s actions ensure that a portion of humanity will survive albeit at a great cost.
The lives of a disgraced scientist, an aging rock star, a teen-aged aspiring photographer, and a preacher intersect in this trenchant novel. As they become personally drawn into the crisis, each of them grapples with the politicization of the pandemic and the moral uncertainties of AI.
If you enjoy The Last of Us, you may enjoy this novel.
Chuck Wendig has also written Star Wars: Aftermath (2015), Invasive (2016), and The Book of Accidents (2021).