We take a break from World Equestrian Games coverage for this weekly meme hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

The Passage by Justin Cronin – I’m a bit late to the party on this one so most people probably have a general idea of the story.This will be a Semi-Spoiler post. 

It starts with the discovery of a virus that slows the aging process. Unfortunately it also turns people into crazed bloodthirsty killers. Whoops. So the test subjects escape as they always do in these books and start to destroy humanity. The last test subject is a six year old girl named Amy who appears to have the slow aging without the vampire qualities. She is taken and hidden away while North America collapses. I liked this part of the book. It reminded me some of World War Z.

Then it jumps ahead 90 years. The descendants of a group of quarantined children during the epidemic now live in a society with very strict rules about how to survive in a world overrun with monsters. This part drug along for me. They are forbidden to try to contact the outside world. Of course someone finally does build a radio. He gets a signal that turns out to be coming from Amy who just showed up at their Colony. There is also a message to return her to Colorado if you find her.

The last part of the book is a small group’s journey from the colony in California to Colorado. They get to see what the world beyond their walls is like. I liked this part.

This is the start of a series. If you don’t realize that, the ending will frustrate you since nothing is resolved, they are about to start a big adventure, and it ends ambiguously. I liked the ending but I’ve heard people complain about it.

It was super long but the story moved right along except for the middle part.

Keeping the Feast: One Couple’s Story of Love, Food, and Healing in Italy by Paula Butturini – The author is an American journalist living in Europe. During the fall of Communism she was severely beaten by Czechoslovakian police. Five weeks later she got married to John, the Warsaw bureau chief for the New York Times. Twenty three days after that he was shot and nearly killed by a sniper in Romania. His wounds took a year to heal but then he fell into a deep depression that it took years for him to recover from. They retreated to Italy to work on his depression. This book is a memoir of their life and the meals that held her sanity together. She developed a routine of making three meals a day from fresh food from the Roman markets as a method of healing body and spirit.

The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan –
This is the first book of the Kane Chronicles, the new series from the author of the Percy Jackson series. This series is based in Egyptian mythology. Carter and Sadie Kane have been raised separately since an accident killed their mother six years ago. Carter is living a nomadic life with his Egyptologist father. Sadie is raised by her mother’s parents who won a custody battle and only allow her to see Carter and her father two days a year.

On a visit their father is captured while doing what looks like magic in the British museum. Now these siblings who don’t know each other have to work together to figure out who or what their parents are and to stay alive to find out their own powers.

I liked this book. It is very different than the Percy Jackson series. Their guardian is Bast, the cat goddess who retains feline characteristics even in human form. She’s a great character. She gets distracted by a crane with a wrecking ball and has to chase it. She doesn’t think taking things is stealing because she’s a cat and everything she sees is automatically hers! So true….

The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag by Alan Bradley- This is the sequel to The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. In this book Flavia investigates the murder of a puppeteer. I’m not crazy about these books. I’m not a fan of mysteries in general but this seems disjointed.