Sweet Land Stories ... by E.L. Doctorow

This is fun reading, a collection of 5 short stories. Half an hour or so reading for each story, all different themes. And they were all quite riveting in their own rights. I actually wanted to get to the end as quickly as I could. And the endings were not your usual all ends well kind of short stories. In life, not everything goes the way we hope it... the stories reflect that.

These are all stories with an American bent. In A House On The Plains you find a 'widow' of many deceased husbands making a living out of marrying those poor men. A murderer who made murdering an art and a way of life, to improve her station in life.

In Baby Wilson, you have the kidnapping of a baby by a young woman who is a little bit off her rocker but still loved by the guy in her life. A crazy woman walking straight into a hospital and lifting a baby under the very nose of the nurse. But the love of her life went to great lengths to cover for her. Suffice to say the baby was returned to the rightful parents and they went on to have their own little Jesu (their baby), faraway in Alaska, where they escape from the clutches of law.

In Jolene, you have a girl whose life seems to go wrong even with every change after each tragedy. The same ghosts revisit her. Married at 15 to escape her foster father's advances, the uncle of her husband did the same. Things got real messed up... a few marriages down her life, still the same messy story; talk about life being a vicious cycle.

In Walter John Harmon, the life of a cult; of people looking for that piece of Utopia. It is so us to try to grab and grasp at the opportunity of perfection and happiness. And of the hope to come. We can be so blind sometimes. And in the end, when Walter John Harmon ran off with one of his commune member's wife, the commune members were still trying to justify their 'faith'.... blind faith.

And in Child, Dead, In The Rose Garden.... well, that's just a mini mystery thriller, of how a dead child ends up the Rose Garden in White House. It's a story that goes around trying to solve the mystery of the dead kid's body in the garden, the kind that has the Secret Service and FBI in it.

Book 12... light and easy.