West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge

West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge is a really good work of historical fiction that begins with 105-year-old Woodrow Wilson Nickel furiously writing down a story, one from his life in 1938.

Nickel is an Okie, a farmboy from the Dust Bowl, making the book reminiscent of The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah. He came to the east coast after the deaths of his baby sister and both parents, and made it through the Great Hurricane of 1938, which killed seven hundred, including the only family he had left, his cousin. Also surviving the storm were two giraffes who crossed the Atlantic, slated to go to the San Diego Zoo. 

The giraffes were to traverse the country in the care of Riley Jones, who Nickel would know as the Old Man, and Nickel after learning of their destination saw the giraffes as a way to get him to California. Nickel also came across Augusta Red, a young women he finds himself smitten with, who states she's taking pictures of the giraffes for Life Magazine. He in a stolen motorbike tailed the truck with the giraffes, then conned his way into driving they and the Old Man, and she tailed them in a green Packard. 

They embarked on the twelve-day road trip across the country to the San Diego Zoo, and zoo director Mrs. Belle Benchley. The Old Man was a lover of animals, treating the hurricane giraffes that he referred to as the darlings with great care, and grew to see how well Nickel worked with the two, who he knew as Boy and Girl. Red continued following them, spending time with Nickel and telling him of her heart trouble. When passing through Texas, they wound up at Nickel's burned down home, and he told the Old Man what happened there with his father after his mother and baby sister died. A flash flood then hit them and Red saved the rig from falling over with the giraffes in it, ruining her car, camera, and the photos she hoped would be in Life. 

Boy then saved Nickel and Red when someone tried to steal the giraffes, the second person to do so, and the book is a compelling adventure tale. Also interesting is the newspaper headlines included that cover Europe and what the Nazis are doing. There's also so much poverty, with the cross-country trip coming across Hoovervilles, scores of people living in shanties. At the beginning, it wasn't entirely where the book going, but it winds up being a history lesson, travelogue, and story of love and animals and unexpected endings. It's told first-person by Nickel and at the start it notes that the story he writing in notepads was to someone, and it comes out at the end who it was. Lovely book.

Culpability by Bruce Holsinger

Culpability by Bruce Holsinger is an excellent novel that's a work of suspense, family dynamics, and the consequences of AI, including moral and ethical responsibility around artificial intelligence.

Detailed is the Cassidy-Shaw family, with seventeen-year-old Charlie, fourteen-year-old Alice, eleven-year-old Izzy, father Noah, and mother Lorelai. The book starts with them on the road in their autonomous minivan, with Charlie behind the wheel and Noah in the passenger seat, as the adult responsible for Charlie's actions. There's an accident that leaves dead a retired couple from the other car involved.

Several weeks after, the family goes to a house on Chesapeake Bay and come across technology mogul Daniel Monet there with his teenage daughter, Eurydice, and people that work for him. While Charlie and the daughter develop a relationship, Alice and Izzy start exhibiting odd behavior, and it comes out that Lorelai and Monet know each other. She's a star in the field of AI and it's ramifications, with a dual doctorate in engineering and philosophy, and received a MacArthur Fellowship. 

Police wanted to interview the family about the accident, and it was interesting the way things progressed, with each person playing, and revealing their part in what happened. While he was behind the wheel of the minivan driving on autopilot, Charlie was texting with Izzy about Alice, and Alice screamed, causing him to jerk the wheel, taking control of the car away from the autonomous driving system. The question of fault in the car accident is very up in the air given the autonomous vehicle, and revealed is that Lorelai created the autonomous driving system, on behalf of Monet. Charlie and Eurydice go missing and the ending is unexpected, and circles back to autonomous systems and responsibility for their actions. It's a compelling read.

The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer

The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer is a lovely debut novel about thirty-six-year-old Clover Brooks, who lives in New York and is a death doula, spending time with people at the end of their lives.

Clover's parents died when she was six, and lives with her dog and two cats in the apartment that she was raised in by her grandfather. He passed away in his office at work thirteen years ago and Clover kept many of his things, as if he still there. She had never been in a relationship and was a loner, with her best friend her eighty-seven-year-old neighbor Leo that she played mahjong with. 

Clover met her new neighbor and eventual friend Sylvie, and then Sebastian, who she met at a death cafe meeting. Sebastian's grandmother Claudia was terminally ill and he hired Clover to spend time with her. Claudia had been a photojournalist in the 1950s, and was to marry someone in the U.S. after returning from holiday in France. She met a local, Hugo Beaufort, and sailed to Corsica with him for ten days. She then still came back to the U.S. and got married, largely because she was expected to. 

Clover and her new friend Sylvie researched and found there a Hugo Beaufort born in France in 1931, listed as a resident of Maine. She went to try to find him, only to discover he had passed away a couple of months prior, but she met his grandson, Hugo. Upon hearing about Sebastian's grandmother, Hugo guessed that she Claudia, who his grandfather had talked about her right before he died, and said she was the reason he moved to America. He and Claudia each requested their ashes be scattered in Corsica, where they were together. 

Hugo found letters his grandfather had written to Claudia but not sent, the last one saying he had seen her with her husband and she looked happy, so he's going to leave her be. Clover gave to Claudia the letter, and others Hugo wrote which said Claudia the love of his life. She died content and her final words to Clover were "learn from my mistakes, my darling. Don't let the best parts of life pass you by because you're took scared of the unknown. Be cautiously reckless." Clover then came upon her neighbor Leo in the last moments of his life after a heart attack and he said to her "the secret to having a beautiful death is to live a beautiful life. Promise me, kid, that you'll let yourself live."

Clover received a package that Claudia had arranged to be sent, with a digital camera and several lenses. She embarked on a three-month trip traveling the world, documenting her time in a notebook from Hugo. The two then met in Corsica and scattered together in the sea Claudia's ashes and Hugo's grandfather's ashes. 

It's a nice read and Brammer closes with "you can find meaning in anything if you look hard enough; if you want to believe that everything happens for a reason. But if we completely understood one another, if every even made sense, none of us would ever learn or grow. Our days might be pleasant, but prosaic. So maybe we just need to appreciate that many aspects of life - and the people we love - will always be a mystery. Because without mystery, there is no magic. And instead if constantly asking ourselves the question of why we're here, maybe we should be savoring a simpler truth: we are here."