February RandomKit: Escape or Rescue

Your choices for February are escape or rescue from any situation. Many of us in the U.S. woke up this morning hoping for an escape or rescue from the 2 winter storms sweeping across the country! When I chose these topics weeks ago, there was no hint I would be spending the day I write this with 5" of snow on my lawn (that's a lot to me) and a high temperature for the day 26 degrees lower than the average for this day! Woe is the former Sunny South!

But as you know escape/rescue can relate to any perilous situation whether it be physical or mental, and I think it's safe to say, they can be found in any genre. There are many online lists you can access if you need help with your choice.

Let us know what you plan to read, and if you have suggestions, please post those too!

"Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are."– Mason Cooley

Great topic! I'm going to try to read We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance by David Howarth. A student got me this for Christmas.

I am planning on reading The Escape of the Amethyst a non-fiction book about how the British Frigate Amethyst escaped from Communist China after being fired upon in 1949.

I plan to read The Stolen Lady by Laura Morelli. This is a fictional account of the rescue of art from the Louvre in 1939. The author is an American art historian.

One nonfiction escape I've read in recent years and recommend is The Girl With Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee.

>1 clue: Excellent topic! We don't have a lot of snow but it is extremely cold - unusually cold even for this frigid climate.

I plan to 'escape' by reading Prisoners of the castle: an epic story of survival and escape from Colditz, the Nazis' fortress prison by Ben Macintyre.

I have some which might fit here but I'll wait and see if I can think of better fits.

Oh, fun! (At least to read about. :-) )

Oh, that's an unusual theme! And so many options...

What a great theme! I'll have to think about it for a while.

>3 DeltaQueen50: I like how you worked the February birthstone in there as well! Clever!

>1 clue: oh, perfect for one of my dusty TBR books by Alistair MacLean or Hammond Innes or Helen MacInnes!!!

>10 fuzzi: I'm glad to know these authors are still on someone's shelves! Helen MacInnes was my favorite author for years.

>11 clue: Still on my shelves too!

I'm going to plan on reading The Free People's Village, which I've been anxious to read ever since it came out. It's about the fight to rescue a neighborhood that a corporation is looking to demolish.

>9 JayneCM: I hadn't even noticed it is February's birthstone! I actually chose the book as the February theme for the Reading Through Time Challenge is "Aquarius and Amethyst". (Which I just figured out most likely means February!)

That's an interesting one. hmmm. book shelf browse required.

My first impulse for a book about a rescue is to see if I can dig out The Bad-ass Librarians of Timbuktu which has been on my TBR for a fair while (if only I can remember where I last saw it)

I'm thinking I might read Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books by Aaron Lansky for this.

Great theme...I'll go search my TBR!

I have We are displaced : my journey and stories from refugee girls around the world which has been sitting waiting to e read for a while. Should be a good fit.

>16 Damiella: Oh yes! I just borrowed this from the library! Thanks for the tip that it will fit here.

I plan to continue my Narnia reread with The Horse and His Boy, in which said boy escapes enslavement with the help of a talking horse and the two travel to Narnia.

Options for me:
- The Man Who Lived Underground / Richard Wright (escape)
- The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter / Hazel Gaynor (rescue)
- The Mountaintop School for Dogs / Ellen Cooney (rescue)

Just finished System collapse, the new Murderbut book, which is about rescues and escapes on several levels. Murderbot is part of an effort to rescue colonists from a dangerous planet as well as predatory corporate efforts to conscript them as slave labor.
It also has to escape the same corporation on a mission gone wrong.

I read Prisoners of the castle: an epic story of survival and escape from Colditz, the Nazis' fortress prison by Ben Macintyre.
Macintyre’s narrative is fascinating, covers much more than escape attempts and is well worth reading for entertainment value as well as historic.

I read Peg and Rose Stir Up Trouble by Laurien Berenson in which Rose is rescued by Peg from a dangerous situation involving a killer.

I read Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education by Stephanie Land, about the author's senior year in college as a single mother fighting to escape grinding poverty.

I found a book on my TBR that I think would be really interesting for this RandomKIT: Beyond These Walls: Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto - A Young Girl's Story by Janina Bauman.

Kiss of the Spindle by Nancy Campbell Allen involves both escape -- the heroine is trying to break a curse -- and rescue -- the hero is smuggling victims of political persecution out of the country.

Also, here's the wiki, in case anyone wants to add or refer to it: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/2024_RandomKIT#February:_Escape_or_Rescu...:

>29 christina_reads: Thanks, I forgot to post the link!!

>29 christina_reads: Thank you! Haven't gotten to mine yet, but the link is always handy!

I finished Beyond These Walls: Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto - A Young Girl's Story by Janina Bauman. It was a quick read - very scary and disturbing what the author went through during the German occupation of Poland, and quite a page-turner as I followed her numerous escapes from the Nazis as her and her mother and sister moved from place to place one step ahead of the Nazis.

I have finished The woman in white where Laura Fairlie must be rescued from her dastardly husband and a sinister Italian count.

I read My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor, based on the true story of a resistance group in Rome, Italy, during WWII, led in part by the indomitable Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty. The group helped rescue escaped Allied prisoners, Jews, and many others. The story is told by different members of the group in their own voices which makes for a marvelous reading experience, in spite of the painful, tragic circumstances. The first book in a planned trilogy. I can hardly wait for the other two to come out.

I'm going to count Starling House by Alix E Harrow for this one.

The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter / Hazel Gaynor
3.5 stars

Unmarried and pregnant, Matilda is 19-years old in 1938 when she is sent across the ocean to live with a distant relative in Rhode Island, Harriet, who watches the lighthouse there.

One hundred years earlier, in England, a storm washed up survivors of a shipwreck, including Sarah. Sarah’s two young children died in the wreck. Grace Darling is the lighthouse keeper’s daughter who saw the survivors still in the water, so she and her dad went to help them. Grace become a local hero after this. (And apparently, Grace Darling was a real person.)

Matilda has a book on keeping lighthouses that she brings with her. The inscription includes one from Grace to Sarah and Sarah to (a different) Matilda.

I listened to the audio and it was good. I did lose focus at times, but I think I caught the main happenings in the book. Harriet also kept secrets and it took time for her to open up to Matilda. I liked her, though she did seem “gruff” at times. I liked all the characters, really. The women were pretty tough and self-sufficient – or certainly tried/wanted to be as much as they could in their time periods. There were a lot of characters, though, and there were times that it took me a bit to figure out which time frame and character’s POV I was listening to. It did say when the POV changed, but since I know my mind wandered some plus putting away the audio and picking it up later sometimes made it a bit tricky.

This month I read a book on the rescue of orphaned elephants. The Elephant Girl by James Patterson and Ellen Banda-Aaku.

I finished T. Kingfisher's The Hollow Places, about a woman who enters a portal in her uncle's shop that leads her to a dangerous alien place. She eventually manages to escape from it.

The Man Who Lived Underground / Richard Wright
3 stars

This actually consists of a novella-length story, plus a nonfiction essay. The short story is the one of the title. It’s set in the 1940s(?) (that’s when it was originally written, anyway), and a black man, Fred, leaving work, just having been paid in cash, is “arrested” by the police and “questioned”/tortured. Initially not knowing even what they police were talking about, it turns out the neighbours of the people Fred worked for had been murdered in their home earlier in the day. Fred manages to escape and moves underground via the sewers from building to building for a few days.

The essay talked about how the author grew up with his very religious Grandmother and how some things from that experience related to this story.

Overall, I’m rating it ok. The essay got pretty philosophical, so wasn’t all that interesting to me. The story itself was better, but also a little bit odd while Fred was underground. I definitely did not see the end coming (but maybe I should have?).

>36 LibraryCin: Oh, I have to look for this book. I remember reading and learning about Grace Darling when I was in grade school. She was still a hero then (and I'm sure she still is). She used to be mentioned during the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) fundraising campaigns. The Institution is 200 years old this year.

>40 VivienneR: I also remember reading about Grace Darling.

I have completed my read of Escape of the Amethyst by C.E. Lucas Phillips. Between two rather exciting events the book is quite dry as it lays out the politics of the day and the set up of the naval frigate.

I read A Wolf Called Wander, where the wolf has to escape from another pack.

In Das Feuerschiff, the crew of a lightship save three men who turn out to be gangsters and not all of them escape with their lives.

I listened to Slightly Wicked, a Regency romance by Mary Balogh, and discovered that it fits this KIT perfectly: The heroine escapes her ghastly relatives for whom she has to work unpaid when she flees one night after being wrongly accused of stealing, and she is ultimately rescued from them when she marries - her bridegroom also rescues her family from poverty when he pays all of her brother's debts and uses his connections to find a suitable career for the young man.

>45 MissBrangwen: I didn't think I had any books by Mary Balogh, but your post had me checking and I have 3! I'll have to read one this year.

It's a bit tangential, but I am currently reading The Stone Chamber, a mystery by Kate Ellis. One of the crime scenes is an escape room.

I'm enjoying reading what everyone has read and big surprise, I've picked up a couple of BBs.

I had said earlier that I was going to read Laura Morelli's The Stolen Lady however I later read she recommended reading The Last Masterpiece first, although this isn't a series. I've read about a third of Masterepiece and so far think it will be very good.

Some were rescued, but not all

The Cold Vanish / Jon Billman
3.5 stars

When Jacob Gray disappeared in Olympic National Park in Washington state, his dad Randy would not give up looking. Luckily, Randy had the stamina and money to be able to continually look for his 22-year old son. The author, Jon Billman, was often along to help out. This book is primarily Jacob’s search story, but the author also brings in many other missing persons cases (missing in the “wild”/in nature) in the U.S. and Canada, some who were found and others not.

I don’t personally know anyone who has gone missing and not been found, but I know someone whose brother has (and my brother does know him – the one who went missing). I couldn’t help but think about him at various points while reading this. That’s beside the point of what I thought of the book, however.

Some of the stories peaked my interest more than others, but with as many as there were, it’s hard to remember them when a short time was spent on many (as opposed to the bulk of the book on Jacob’s case). The book also highlighted differences in the types of searches, for how long they last, etc, depending on where a person goes missing; much of that comes down to cost. It included stats and went into a few various “oddball” theories like Bigfoot and UFOs (Jacob’s father Randy insisted on following any and all leads, no matter how “out there”).

I read Sleep With Slander by Dolores Hitchens, a 1960 private eye novel about rescuing an abused child.

I finished a re-read of Treasure Island by R L Stevenson (1883), which features lots of scrapes and escapes by our hero Jim Hawkins. I really enjoyed this re-read, which I did mostly on audiobook (read by Michael Page) and some on physical book. The first time I read this tale about 7 years ago, I wasn't as impressed but I think the audio narration this time enhanced my enjoyment quite a bit.

On reflection, Katzenberge also fits here, as it describes the story of a family who survived being displaced from their homes in Galicia (now Ukraine) and had to settle in the Silesian villages from which the Germans had fled or been expelled.

I changed my mind about my book for this. I read The Water Keeper by Charles Martin which the first book in a series about Murphy Shepard who rescues girls from sex/slave traders. Highly recommended.

I just re-read The Sharing Knife: Beguilement, which has a whole lot of escaping and rescuing going on.

I'm reading Here in Avalon, which came out in January and I'm finding it compulsively readable. It's fiction about two sisters and a cult, and I'm not sure yet whether the cult is the escape from reality or the other way around.

I've completed The Last Masterpiece: a novel of WWII Italy by Laura Morelli. It is about the rescue of art in Italy during WWII.

I finished The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis, the third of the Narnia books. In this book the boy Shasta escapes the cruel fisherman he lives with, and travels to Narnia together with Bree, a Talking Horse. They escape a lot of dangers throughout their journey, and also rescue Archenland, Narnia's neighboring country, from being overrun by an enemy army..

I completed We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance by David Howarth 4.5*

I finished We are Displaced for this challenge.

Thanks to everyone for participating! I see lots of good reading here.

Here's the link to next month: https://www.librarything.com/topic/358447#n8428003