Jennie Shortridge

Wow! I know it's become cliche to say a book is compelling but never was a book more fit for the verb than When She Flew. From the moment I broke the spine I had to find out what happened next. I even neglected my precious computer. This is seriously good reading.

Thirteen year old Lindy has been living undetected with her Iraq vet father for 5 years in a wildlife sanctuary in Oregon when she is spotted. Police are sent to investigate and make sure the girl is in no danger. Officer Jess show more Villareal disagrees with her Sergeant who has decided that Lindy should be put in foster care until her safety is verified. Jess has a sense about people and her sense tells her that separation from her father will cause more damage to Lindy than good, so she does something she has never done before: she goes against protocol and helps the father and daughter escape from police custody. Jess is just doing what she believes to be right but it will have farther reaching consequences than she could have imagined.

There is just nothing about this book that I didn't love. The characters were all sympathetic and courageous(except the mom who, thankfully, was given very little ink). Lindy was beautiful and brave. Jess was strong and full of righteous conviction. The reactions of the police department as well as the community felt genuine. Even the excessive cussing was what I believe would be accurate to this type of situation. This was a story that could definitely be real. In fact it was based on a real circumstance that the author touches on in a small interview in the back of the book.

What I admired the most about this novel was that everyone (except mom) was trying to do the right thing. They were all honorable in their own way. They stayed in character and they developed consistently within that character. I kept rooting for the good guys and dreading the dangerous possibilities. The cover blurb says, "Taut, beautifully rendered." I agree 100%.

You should read this book. Seriously. Now! show less

This is a fabulous book about identity, how we interpret our past, and the changing nature of love. In it "Jane Doe" finds herself knee deep in San Francisco Bay, with no idea who he is or how she ended up there. After the media takes hold, it turns out "Jane" is Lucie Walker of Seattle, who disappeared ten days ago and has had her fiancee, Grady, frantic. As Lucie tries to piece together who she is, and why she lost her memory, she discovers that the person she is now is different from the show more one she was not two weeks ago. She likes different things, dresses differently, and has a different attitude--especially about the people in her life. It's overwhelming, and Lucie struggles, all the while terrified that some new discovery she makes about her life will send her over the edge once again. There were moments when I was convinced the story was going to get all schmaltzy, and then Shortridge would get SERIOUS, and you'd be sucked right back in. This is a great thought-provoking book, and I enjoyed it immensely. [I listened to this on audio--a good production.] show less

Jennie Shortridge writes Women's Fiction with a bit of an edge. She often features characters who are slightly down on their luck, or who make spectacularly bad choices. When I realized that Love Water Memory utilized an amnesia plotline, I feared that she had jumped the shark. Not another "bump on the head turns a bitchy woman into a better person" story, I grumbled.

But fortunately Love Water Memory did not disappoint. True, amnesiac Lucie learns that in her former life she was a driven, show more shopaholic fashionista who didn't give her neighbors or her fiance Grady's family the time of day. But as she digs into her past, aided in part by her irascible Aunt Helen, the reader realizes that Lucie is dealing with something a lot more traumatic and painful than a simple personality adjustment.

Also, Lucie isn't the only character on a journey. Grady, whose overbearing mother and sisters have both loved and tormented him since his father's death many years ago, has to come to terms with both the new Lucie and the old, prickly Lucie whom he inexplicably loved. Like Lucie, he also has a past tragedy that in many ways he has never left behind. Even elderly Aunt Helen has some epiphanies about her actions and the ways she unintentionally contributed to Lucie's problems.

Lucie and Grady's relationship is engaging and tender, albeit occasionally frustrating, with several instances where they make assumptions about each other that could have been allayed with a little bit of communication. But it's easy to root for the couple, who obviously were meant for each other deep down, even though their relationship was doomed before Lucie's memory loss.

It has been three years since Jennie Shortridge's last release and I was overjoyed to see her back in print. I hope her next book won't take as long to reach my eager hands. show less

Something prompts Officer Jess Villareal to volunteer for a search mission the night she meets Ray and Lindy — something visceral, something she can’t quite explain. Knowing only that a young girl was spotted in the dense woods of Oregon, alone and running from passersby, the Columbia Police Force heads off to find her. And everyone knows they don’t leave the forest until they do.

And the story of Ray and his 13-year-old daughter Lindy is discovered — along with their clean, show more well-stocked camp in the woods, a place they have lived undetected for years. An Iraq War veteran, Ray lives a quiet life filled with Bible verses and patrolling the perimeter — all an attempt to keep his daughter safe. Unable to work and plagued by memories of his younger brother’s death in the war, Ray does the only thing he knows how: loves his daughter. Honestly, openly and steadfastly. But is that enough?

Jennie Shortridge’s When She Flew alternates between Lindy’s first-person narrative accounts of life as one of the “forest people,” as the media dubs them, and the third-person look at Jess’s attempts to reconcile the love she feels for her distant daughter, Nina, with the way that love has been outwardly demonstrated to Nina. It’s a novel about family, really — how we’re tethered to them, but how we would return even if we weren’t.

Shortridge does a remarkable job of making Ray, a man who could be construed as mentally ill, into a sympathetic character — a man we feel for and with as he struggles to keep his daughter close, the only person left in his life he feels he can protect. But something about the novel’s slow pacing kept me from turning the pages . . . perhaps the fact that by the halfway point in the novel, we were still in the same day we were when it started. Like Jess, overcome with exhaustion, I felt like we were never going to get out of that forest! Where was the daylight? And where was the impetus? The characters were interesting, but the pacing dragged me down.

But overall, I would recommend When She Flew to fans of contemporary fiction who will appreciate a book told from the perspective of a policewoman — definitely a different sort of character. None of the characters in Shortridge’s novel felt like caricatures or stereotypes; they were unique, warm people. The novel introduces Big Themes — like inadequate assistance for our war vets — but doesn’t really expound on them. Does it need to? I’ll let you be the judge. show less