Mistress of Nothing, by Kate Pullinger ****

Lady Duff Gordon is the toast of Victorian London society. But when her debilitating tuberculosis means exile, she and her devoted lady's maid, Sally, set sail for Egypt. It is Sally who describes, with a mixture of wonder and trepidation, the odd menage (marshalled by the resourceful Omar) that travels down the Nile to a new life in Luxor. When Lady Duff Gordon undoes her stays and takes to native dress, throwing herself into weekly salons, language lessons and excursions to the tombs, Sally too adapts to a new world, which affords her heady and heartfelt freedoms never known before. But freedom is a luxury that a maid can ill-afford, and when Sally grasps more than her status entitles her to, she is brutally reminded that she is mistress of nothing.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book, and enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. It's a winner of the Canadian Governor General Literary Award, which is two sided sword. While the award usually indicates that the book is well written, I've found books by Canadian authors to be typically very dark. This one wasn't. It was moody but not depressing as it talked about the difficulty of being a lower class female (ie - a maid) during the Victorian times and described the characters' time in Egypt. It also had a great description of the Egyptian setting and culture without distracting from the story.

Girls in Trucks, by Katie Crouch **

Sarah Walters, the narrator of GIRLS IN TRUCKS, is a reluctant Camellia Society debutante. She has always felt ill-fitted to the rococo ways of Southern womanhood and family, and is anxious to shake the bonds of her youth. Still, she follows the traditional path laid out for her. This is Charleston, and in this beautiful, dark, segregated town, established rules and manners mean everything.

But as Sarah grows older, she finds that her Camellia lessons fail her, particularly as she goes to college, moves North, and navigates love and life in New York. There, Sarah and her group of displaced deb sisters try to define themselves within the realities of modern life. Heartbreak, addiction, disappointing jobs and death fail to live up to the hazy, happy future promised to them by their Camellia mothers and sisters.

When some unexpected bumps in the road--an unplanned birth, a family death--lead Sarah back home, she's forced to take another long look at the fading empire of her youth. It takes a strange turn of events to finally ground Sarah enough to make some serious choices. And only then does she realize that as much as she tried to deny it, where she comes from will always affect where she ends up. The motto of her girlhood cotillion society, "Once a Camellia, always a Camellia," may turn out to have more wisdom and pull to it than she ever could have guessed.

I can't say I loved this one. Each chapter tells a story about a debutant as she progresses from high school to her 30's, during which she drinks too much, does drugs and sleeps with a lot of men. The first chapter (story) seemed kind of funny, but they went down hill from there. The stories told in the chapters seemed kind of random and without reason - one is a letter that an otherwise minor character leaves behind for her cheating husband after she dies. I kept waiting for something to happen that would explain what had come before, or tie things together. It never happened.

I didn't like the main character, and didn't really like the supporting characters. There was no underlying plot that caught and held my attention... it seemed a lot more like a collection of tales from a frat house than a story of a debutant.

The Weight of Silence, by Heather Gudenkauf ****

It happens quietly one August morning. As dawn's shimmering light drenches the humid Iowa air, two families awaken to find their little girls have gone missing in the night.
Seven-year-old Calli Clark is sweet, gentle, a dreamer who suffers from selective mutism brought on by tragedy that pulled her deep into silence as a toddler.

Calli's mother, Antonia, tried to be the best mother she could within the confines of marriage to a mostly absent, often angry husband. Now, though she denies that her husband could be involved in the possible abductions, she fears her decision to stay in her marriage has cost her more than her daughter's voice.

Petra Gregory is Calli's best friend, her soul mate and her voice. But neither Petra nor Calli has been heard from since their disappearance was discovered. Desperate to find his child, Martin Gregory is forced to confront a side of himself he did not know existed beneath his intellectual, professorial demeanor.

Now these families are tied by the question of what happened to their children. And the answer is trapped in the silence of unspoken family secrets.

To be perfectly honest, the only reason why I bought this book was because Amazon kept recommending it to me. For almost a year, it seemed like almost every time I ordered a book, Amazon would come back and say if I liked that one, I'd like this one too. I don't normally like stories about missing children - I find them too disturbing - but this one was good.

I can't say much about the plot without giving it away, but I will say it was a new take on this sort of story. The focus is more on Callie and her family than it is on Petra.   For Callie, the question is more about what led to her disappearance than where she was, and for Petra the question was where she'd gone.  Actually, I was almost finished the book before I understood what was going on with Petra. It's more Callie's story, but Petra is an integral part that helps tie everything up at the end. Good book.