All New X-Men Vol. 5: One Down by Brian Michael Bendis (Writer), Stuart Immonen (Penciler), Wade Von Grawbadger (Inker), Sara Pichelli (Artist), Justin Ponsor (Colorist), Marte Garcia (Colorist), Cory Petit (Letterer)

In the previous book, Jean is being torn between her two loves of Hank and young Scott until Scott leaves to go with his father and Hank had too many demands of her.  Kitty is nursing a broken heart over Colossus. The X-Men face off against the Purifiers who are after a mutant named Laura who is also known as X-23 is the clone of Wolverine.  Young Scott seems to calm her down, but now he's gone.

This comic opens with older Hank talking to the Watchers about how he can't send the X-Men back in time and how he had changed the timeline.  They look at what could be at what Hank doesn't want to happen. There are two short comics inside about the romance between Peter and Kitty and Logan and Jean that are pretty hilarious.

Older Scott has an intimate talk with Jean that she misinterprets and tells him that he is the man she hopes Scott would become. He tells her that they can never happen and that Emma Frost will be training her just like Charles had been training her back in her time. Jean had developed a new power that she needs to learn to use.

Laura leaves only to be attacked by someone that looks like young Scott. She makes it back to the bunker to warn the others. But it's too late the attack is about to begin.  A group from the future has arrived to take out the X-Men in order to change the future.  This book takes the series to a whole new level. The characters from the future are amazing and a total surprise. It's great having Laura around and it's great fun watching Angel chase after her trying to catch her.  I can't tell you how much I loved this comic. I really recommend this book.

Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/All-New-X-Men-Vol-One-Down-ebook/dp/B00MC2HK8E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1535730535&sr=8-1&keywords=all+new+x-men+vol+5

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Set during and in the years after the Civil War, this novel depicts four strong young women who grow up to become productive adults. There is Meg, the oldest who is sixteen and concerned with propriety and hopes to marry a rich husband in order to afford to fine things her family used to have when they were in better circumstances.  Then there is Jo, who is fifteen and a tomboy who is the writer of the family and dreams of becoming a famous author and providing a good life for her family with the money from her writings. Then there is sweet Beth who is fourteen who is the musician of the family and plays the piano and sings beautifully. Then there is Amy who is twelve who is an artist who dreams of becoming famous for her art and wants to belong to high society and marry a rich man one day if her art does not make her rich.

For the first half of the book, the Civil War rages and their father is off acting as a chaplain to the troops.  Their mother, or Marmee, takes care of them with help from the servant Hannah.  Meg has a job as a governess that she hates and Jo spends her time keeping the rich Aunt March company which is a trial in and of itself.  Beth helps out at home and does school work there and Amy for a while goes to school, but can't handle the teasing and eventually after a particular incident of discipline involving the teacher they pull her from school and have her home taught.

Laurie, or as Jo calls him, Teddy, is Mr. Lawerence's grandson and their neighbor.  He is sixteen and very rich and very lonely and soon the five of them become close friends with Jo and Laurie becoming especially close as they have a lot in common.  They have adventures and spats as when Amy burns Jo's book that she is writing when Jo and Meg don't let her go with them and Laurie to a theatre program one day.  Jo refuses to forgive Amy until something drastic happens.

Then they get the telegram that their father is ill and their mother leaves immediately to go to Washington D.C. to be with him to nurse him back to health.  Mr. Brooks, Laurie's tutor goes with her. While there he asks if he can marry Meg when he has enough money to support them and they agree but he has to wait three years and Meg, of course, has to agree.  Meanwhile, Beth has taken ill and is dying and might not make it.

The second half of the book is taken up with Meg's married life and marrying off everyone else. I would be very happy if the book ended in the first half, which is how it originally ended. The second half tends to tick me off as none of it goes the way I think it should. I should add that I hate Amy as a character. She is shallow and vain and cares about what other people think too much.  I'm not too wild about Meg either. She is so concerned with propriety and wants fine things above all else sometimes.  No one could help but love Beth who has a self-esteem problem and is chronically shy but oh so good.  But the character we are supposed to love and which I do is Jo. She is full of life and fun and love.  For those that don't want to be preached at, and be preached at I mean given life lessons, this book does a little bit much of it, but it can be forgiven because the writing is good and the story is good.  Towards the end, I began to skim when they began to moralize the most. Overall I recommend this book because it is a classic and worth reading to make up your own mind about it.  Maybe you'll like the ending that I hate so much.       

Quotes

Talent isn’t genius and no amount of energy can make it so.

-Louisa May Alcott (Little Women p 370)

Link to Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/Little-Women-AmazonClassics-Louisa-Alcott-ebook/dp/B073W9TT71/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1535546660&sr=8-2&keywords=little+women+book

Captain America: Home of the Brave by Mark Waid (Writer), Chris Samnee (Writer), Matthew Wilson (Colorist), VC's Joe Caramagna (Letterer)

Captain America goes to Burlington, Nebraska not long after he reawakened and the town is being terrorized by a group called the Ramparts. He quickly dispatches with them and saves the town. Ten years later he is riding through Nebraska and comes across the same town only now its called Captain America. Again the Ramparts try to terrorize the town and Captain America must fight them off, but he has some help from an unexpected source.

While traveling through America looking for a place to live Steve stumbles into a town that recognizes him. He also runs into trouble with the Swordsman who plans to flood the town if Captain America doesn't come and meet him.

Captain America finds himself frozen again and wakes up in a future America wasteland where nuclear weapons have been used on American soil wiping out a large number of people and causing damage to some of those left.  A King Babbington runs things with Rampart and was the one who caused the nuclear attack in the first place. Liang has been fighting back with a group of mostly kids.  Now Captain America wants to take back the country from Babbington and he will have help from two surprising people.

Captain America also goes up against Craven the Hunter and must try to outwit him.  This is an interesting comic that pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle even though you don't realize it at the time.  Captain America is his typical stubborn self and because of this bad things happen which weigh on him mightly.  This book was a basic Captain America book, but I still enjoyed this book because it was written well and drawn excellently and I greatly recommend it.

Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Captain-America-Waid-Samnee-2017-2018-ebook/dp/B07D51BV5D/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1535369927&sr=8-1&keywords=captain+america+home+of+the+brave

Saga Vol 3 by Brian K. Vaughan (Writer), Fiona Staples (Artist), Fonagrafiks (Letterering and Design), and Eric Stephenson (Coordinator)

In the previous comic, Alana and Marco land at his parents' house and they are not pleased at first to see Alana, but his father comes to care about her and her mother comes to accept her.  Marco's father dies from an illness he has been hiding and they decide to head off to their favorite author's house on a distant planet.  Meanwhile, Freelancer The Will is trying to gain the freedom of a slave girl and Gwendolyn, Marco's ex-fiancee who has hired the Freelancers for Wreath to find Alana and Marco has arrived to see what is up with The Will and settles the problem with the slave girl and gets them on a spacecraft with his special cat that can tell when people are lying. The slave girl can tell when they are close to Alana and Marco and when they are almost upon them their ship gets attacked and knocked onto a planet.

Alana, Marcus, Izabel, the spirit, Marcus's mother, Klara, and baby Hazel land on Quietus where D. Oswald Heist the author lives and find a broken down drunk who isn't all that interested in seeing them at first until he realizes that they really got his work.  Quietus is anti-Wreath and he quickly gets them inside his lighthouse home.  Heist and Klara bond over being on different sides of a battle and losing loved ones. 

The Will is seeing his dead ex-girlfriend Stalk who is telling him to stay on the planet and convince the others to stay as well. The four are waiting on people from Wreath to come and fix the ship, but until then they are stuck on this weird planet. The Will hits on Gwendolyn and gets slapped down on the ground.  Other odd things begin to happen.

Meanwhile, two reporters are looking into the story of Alana and Marco and the official version of her being kidnapped by him that isn't holding up to them the tabloids.  But it will prove to be pretty dangerous to go forward with this story.  Prince IV is heading toward Quietus and worried about his pregnant wife.  This series just keeps getting better and better. Klara is as pigheaded and annoying as ever and Alana and Marco are as dreamy-eyed yet tough as can be.  Heist turns out to be quite a surprise.  The Will and Gwendolyn continue to change your minds about them.  This is a fabulous book and I highly recommend it.   

Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Saga-Vol-Brian-K-Vaughan-ebook/dp/B00IX2IDF6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1535120510&sr=8-1&keywords=saga+vol+3

Star Wars Last Shot: A Han and Lando Novel by Daniel Jose Older

This book opens with a time sometime after Return of the Jedi and Lando is back on Cloud City with a droid making company.  He's managed to get the Twi'lek Kaasha Bateen to bring her class there so he can see her.  They are spending a night alone when one of his droids attempts to kill him.  He catches a glimpse of a man in a green cloak running and leaving the planet once he gets away from the droid.  This is Fryzen Gor who has told him to turn over the Phylanx that he got with the Millennium Falcon ten years ago.  Only he didn't have the Falcon then. Han did.  So he goes to Han and Leia's and baby Ben's house and punches Han in the face for his trouble.  Han tells him that ten years ago he was with Chewie and Sana his "ex-wife", but that they have it exactly.

This book flips back and forth through time and goes to when Han and Chewie were at Maz's castle and Sana comes up to them with a proposition. She needs a fast ship to get something out of there fast and she can pay a lot of money to do so.  What she doesn't tell them is the number of people that are after what she has or what she is looking for which is the Phylanx.

It also goes back in time to fifteen years ago when Lando was with L3-37 and they chased down something that L3 was after in a far-off section of space.  Imperial ships were after this man and what he had, but L3 wants Lando to get it from him.  For some reason that eludes Lando, this is very important to L3.

In the present day, Lando, Han, Chewie, an Ewok slicer named Peekpa, Kaasha, and Taka a pilot with a prison transport ship that they need for the mission plan to go to a prison colony to get some information on Gor.  When they arrive, the Republic fleet is there going toe to toe with some pirates so they have a little bit of trouble getting docked on the moon but even more trouble leaving the place when their cover is blown while they're inside.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and the complex issues it brought up concerning artificial intelligence.  It's also fun to see Han and Lando work together again.  It's also pretty cool to read about Lando and L3 and Han and Sana two very different relationships, yet quite complicated in their own way.  This book is a great read and a real adventure.  I highly recommend this book.

Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Shot-Star-Wars-Lando-ebook/dp/B079KSMJHG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1534940699&sr=8-1&keywords=last+shot+star+wars

Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate

This book is split up alternating between two people's stories: Avery Stafford in present-day Aiken, South Carolina who left her job as a federal prosecutor in Maryland to help her sick dad with his job as a Senator just in case he needs to step down she can take his place and May Weathers Cranford/Rill Foss who grew up on the Mississippi River in 1939 but was kidnapped with her three sisters and one brother and sent to an orphanage in Memphis while her parents were at the hospital having a difficult birth with twins.

A chance encounter at a party at a senior care center Avery meets May who notices that Avery looks just like Fern, her sister.  May accidentally takes Avery's dragonfly bracelet which had belonged to her grandmother.  Avery's grandmother is suffering from dementia and is in a home herself.  When Avery goes back to get the bracelet she stops to talk to May and finds an old photograph of a couple in her room of a woman that looks just like her grandmother and herself.  But May isn't giving up any of her secrets today.  Avery, however, does snap a picture of the picture.

When she goes and sees her grandmother she asks if she knows May and her grandmother avoids the question.  When she shows her the picture she says the word "Queenie" and becomes a bit panicked and says that they can't know about Arcadia.  So, Avery goes hunting in her grandmother's house inside her old day planners and finds a clue. A notation to call a Trent Turner in Edisto where she has a home that the family use to get away at.

Avery calls the number and tries to get information out of Trent Turner's grandson, Trent, who says that his grandfather left something for her grandmother but her grandmother has to come and pick it up. When an opening comes up in the busy schedule she takes it to go off to visit the house in Edisto where Trent is and convinces him to turn over the envelope which contains a boy's birth certificate.  The two of them decide to investigate further inside his grandfather's outbuilding where he did his finding people side business. While there they find a picture of four women on the beach together wearing dragonfly bracelets and one of them is her grandmother and one of them is May.  They all bear a resemblance to each other.

Trent explains that the work his grandfather did was for certain people like himself who were victims of the Tennessee Children's Home Society. It was run by Georgia Tann and she stole children off of the road or conned poor parents out of signing over their children to her. These children were put into deplorable orphanages and then perhaps adopted to rich couples, such as actresses June Alison and Joan Crawford. Brothers and sisters were separated.  Children were killed or disappeared never to be seen again. Some were molested. She had politicians, police, and social workers in her pocket. She worked from the 1920s to 1950 when she died. That's when everything came out. But the records were sealed until 1995. But kids, when they grew up, hired detectives, like Trent's grandfather to hunt down lost family members.

As Avery is questioning the life that seems mapped out for her including a readily made fiance that she has known since birth, May's story unfolds from her life on the river to live in the orphanage trying to save her brother and sisters and find a way back home to her parents. This is an incredible and powerful book and hard to imagine it happening except that it did. The author based the things that happened to May and her siblings on things recounted by survivors.  I really loved this book. This book is truly a must read. 

*For those that need to know. While the character of Mr. Riggs is a child molester in the book he is referred to as one who messes with kids and that is all. No scenes of molestation are described in this book.

Quotes

I drop her on the cot and turn away and grab my hair and pull until it hurts. I want to pull all of it out. Every single piece. I want a pain I understand instead of the one I don’t. I want a pain that has a beginning and an end, not one that goes on forever and cuts all the way to the bone.

-Lisa Wingate (Before We Were Yours p 180)

 Life is not unlike cinema. Each scene has its own music, and the music is created for the scene, woven to it in ways we do not understand. No matter how much we may love the melody of a bygone day or imagine the song of a future one, we must dance within the music of today, or we will always be out of step, stumbling around in something that doesn’t suit the moment.

-Lisa Wingate (Before We Were Yours p 315)

A woman’s past need not predict her future. She can dance to new music if she chooses. Her own music. To hear the tune, she must only stop talking. To herself, I mean. We’re always trying to persuade ourselves of things.

-Lisa Wingate (Before We Were Yours p 317)

Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Before-We-Were-Yours-Novel-ebook/dp/B01M14UN1J/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1534766361&sr=8-1&keywords=before+we+were+yours

Mr. Confidence by Rahiem Brooks

Set in Philidelphia in 2008, it involves Don Juan Jackson who has just gotten out of prison and is picked up by his best friend Lex.  Lex's mom had been imprisoned when he was very young for killing his father and Lex was taken in by the rich white couple that his mom worked for.  Then when he was in high school his aunt took them to court and he was sent to live with her in the ghetto which is where he met Don Juan.

In 2003 Don Juan was under house arrest and living with his baby momma, Sherry. while at the same time dealing with a pregnant girlfriend, Saleena.  Saleena gets mad one night and decides to go after Sherry who is returning home after a night on the town.  She is not happy about this and blames Don Juan.  When Saleena arrives the two women begin to go at it in the yard, yelling at each other and a crowd has gathered.  Don Juan shoots off his gun in order to get the crowd to back off and stay out of it.  The cops show up and clear everyone off. The next day Saleena called his PO and told him he had shot a gun and the guy locked him up. At the hearing, Saleena told of how she had a miscarriage that was caused when he shot at her.  That was enough to show that he had violated his probation so he went back in for 3-6 years, but because of various things, he wound up staying in for six years.

All Don Juan wants is to take care of his daughter Tiffany and have visitation with her.  When he gets out he cashes his check for $20,000 and gives $3,000 to Sherry for child support and sets up a time to see Tiffany. Sherry has moved on and has a fiance named Rob who doesn't much care for Don Juan being back, but then neither does Sherry.

Lex is telling Don Juan that dope is old news and that white collar crime is the new thing. Stealing identities, fake credit cards, and the like.  He sets up Don Juan in a nice house with a Range Rover and some money to start off with.  Then the two begin the con game with the fake identities and trying to get fake cards to charge stuff with under false names.  Don Juan gets a lot of stuff for Tiffany and some clothes for himself including a briefcase that will be used later for some purpose.  Soon, however, Rob approaches Don Juan and lets him know that he's a cop and that he is interested in getting Pops the local money man and drug procurer. And Don Juan had planned on contacting Pops for some start-up money to buy drugs.  Rob has pictures of Don Juan and Lex and the places they are going into and says he knows what they are up to, but that he'd rather have Pops than them.  So what is their next move?

This is a difficult book to read.  The women seemed to be "whores" or the one Madonna, who is the teacher Lex is trying to date.  She won't go out on a date with him or anything as long as he is still with his fiancee.  Sherry is a very bitter woman who slips into bed with a man she doesn't even know is an undercover cop which is a massive no-no in this world.  But when she finds out she wants to be comforted by Don Juan like she wants to possibly get back together with him.  And he thinks about it for a hot minute. The three of them a family for the sake of Tiffany, but he can't seem to do it. But even Sherry is still a "whore" at heart, going from one man to another as her needs suit her.  When Don Juan gets out of jail, Lex sets him up with two real whores in a limo ride on the way back to Philly.  Saleena has turned into a crack "whore" who has slept with a multitude of men and is now Pops woman.

The storyline is slow to start and seems ludicrous to be honest. But it does drag you in and perhaps surprise you a bit.  You do wonder where it is going to end up and who will be left standing out of prison.  The writing is okay but the characters lack depth.  They seem two-dimensional street criminals trying to make a buck and stay out of jail.  Overall this was a so-so book and I can neither recommend nor not recommend it. I leave it up to you to make up your own mind about it.  I received this book as a pre-published copy and this did not affect my review in any way. 

Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Mr-Confidence-Rahiem-Brooks-ebook/dp/B07491NJBY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1534341594&sr=8-2&keywords=mr.+confidence