While We're Far Apart by Lynn Austin

From Lynn Austin's web site:

In an unassuming apartment building in Brooklyn, New York, three lives intersect as the reality of war invades each aspect of their lives. Young Esther is heartbroken when her father decides to enlist in the army shortly after the death of her mother. Penny Goodrich has been in love with Eddie Shaffer for as long as she can remember; now that Eddie's wife is dead, Penny feels she has been given a second chance and offers to care for his children in the hope that he will finally notice her and marry her after the war. And elderly Mr. Mendel, the landlord, waits for the war to end to hear what has happened to his son trapped in war-torn Hungary.
But during the long, endless wait for victory overseas, life on the home front will go from bad to worse. Yet these characters will find themselves growing and changing in ways they never expected--and ultimately discovering truths about God's love... even when He is silent.

From Laura:

This book starts in the summer of 1943 when Eddie Shaffer decides he needs to enlist in the war to get away from the memory of his dead wife, and needs to find a place for his two children, Esther and Peter, while he's gone. He figures to leave them with his mother, but she refuses. Enter Penny, the girl next door who, of course, has been in love with Eddie forever and offers to watch the children for him. She moves in to his apartment in the Jewish neighborhood, with the Jewish landlord, Mr. Mendel living downstairs. Esther and Mr. Mendel are both looking for answers on why God would take loved ones from them, and we see the struggles they both have with their different faiths. They all eventually become friends, and wait for their loved ones to come home from the war.

There's a lot of history in this book, especially about the fate of the Jewish people in Europe during the war. I thought the characters were all good, and well written. I felt like I could relate to all of them. The relationships, however, were not very well written. There's a lot of interaction with the children and Mr. Mendel, but really not very much with Penny and the children, or Penny and Eddie (which I kinda wanted to see). We get letters to Mr. Mendel from his son and daughter-in-law, but we don't get to see letters to the family from Eddie. I guess I had a hard time deciding who the book was about, and it left me wanting for different interaction. Maybe not more, just different. Overall, I am only giving this book 2 stars. There were some good things about it, but I don't think it was worth the time put in to it.

"The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown

Yes, I realize I'm about 10 years behind on this book, but better late than never, right? I tried to listen to this book about 7 years ago. Our landlord asked if I liked to read, and when I admitted that indeed I do, she gave me this book to listen to. I had a hard time getting into it, however, and four years later I found tape 2 still in the cassette player. Yes, I did say cassette. I did not make it very far into the book. This time, however, sitting at work listening to this, I could not get enough! The narration was a little hard for me at first, but after a couple hours, and I was hooked on the story, I didn't mind it so much. For those of you who are like me and did not read the book when it came out and did not see the movie and know nothing or very little of the story, this is the plot, as written on Dan Brown's official web site.

While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. Solving the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of da Vinci…clues visible for all to see…and yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.
Langdon joins forces with a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, and learns the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion—an actual secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and da Vinci, among others. The Louvre curator has sacrificed his life to protect the Priory's most sacred trust: the location of a vastly important religious relic, hidden for centuries.
In a breathless race through Paris, London, and beyond, Langdon and Neveu match wits with a faceless powerbroker who appears to work for Opus Dei—a clandestine, Vatican-sanctioned Catholic sect believed to have long plotted to seize the Priory's secret. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle in time, the Priory's secret—and a stunning historical truth—will be lost forever.
In an exhilarating blend of relentless adventure, scholarly intrigue, and cutting wit, symbologist Robert Langdon (first introduced in Dan Brown's bestselling Angels & Demons ) is the most original character to appear in years. The Da Vinci Code heralds the arrival of a new breed of lightening-paced, intelligent thriller…surprising at every twist, absorbing at every turn, and in the end, utterly unpredictable…right up to its astonishing conclusion.

I thought I had the bad guy all figured out about half-way through. It turns out I was really wrong! I love it when that happens. =) I loved the ending and how everything came together and Sophie gets some answers. I loved the characters, too. I didn't have a hard time relating to any of them, although I will admit I had some difficulty remembering which foreign name went with which character at the beginning, but that could just be me. By the end I had a picture of everyone with their own name. I can see how this book would stir up controversy because it uses very real things - the art and the landmarks - so it made me feel like all the information is true, and if I were to go to these places and study symbology, then I would come to the same conclusion the author did. But it is a work of fiction. Brown's interpretations may not be my interpretations of the same thing. Overall, it was fun, the characters likeable, a bad guy that's not the one you think it should be, and an eye opener to how the world could be. I would recommend the book to anyone, I think, even if you did already read it. =)