Loved this book! I was sad to see it end! I couldn't put it down and haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.
Highly recommended!

it's not that it was a bad read...it turned out to be something totally different than what I thought it was. it was not the spooky horror psychological read I was expecting....I haye giving bad reviews like this. but it was not my cup of tea

When Althea Leary abandons her nine-year-old son, Jasper, he’s left on his uncle’s farm with nothing but a change of clothes and a Bible.
It was that opening line, that drew me towards this book.
This certainly was a different read, all in a good way. While it was interesting and enjoyable it felt a little creep.

a brilliantly written story.

Loved this book
Didn't want it to end
Highly recommended

When nine-year old Jasper Leary's mom tells him to pack up as they are going to visit his uncle Leo on his farm, Jasper is excited. He likes his cousin Wayne and all the animals on the farm. His excitement turns to worry when his mother leaves, telling him to be good and that she'll see him soon.

As days and then weeks go by, no one wants to talk about his mom. He helps out on the farm and enjoys visits with his dad on the weekends but wants to know what is happening, where his mother is, and when he will return to Detroit and his life. He starts to learn things about his mother as she was growing up. She is the black sheep of the family and brought them disgrace and misery with her running around and her bad reputation. Apparently she even burned down the family home. Desperate to learn more about her, Jasper explores the ruins of the house and finds a book. He is excited to discover that it is his mother's diary.

He starts to read it and soon finds that she was mixed up in bad things. Jasper is determined to find the answers for himself and soon his journey takes him deep in the world of crime, bootlegging, drugs and a nearby Indian reservation. Along the way he realizes that there are few, if any, grownups he can trust, and he becomes more and more determined to find out where his mother is and if she is ever coming back. Can Jasper find his answers before evil finds him?

D.M. Pulley has written an interesting mystery about rural life in the 1950's. Jasper is more naive than a child today would be. His unquestioning acceptance of the adults in his life and his determination to find the answers that are being kept from him make him a memorable character. The gradual revealing of the mystery and the realistic ending make this a satisfying read. This book is recommended for mystery readers.

I loved D.M. Pulley's The Dead Key so much, I was really excited at the chance to review another one of her books thanks to NetGalley. This is a pretty intricately woven mystery, telling the tale of young Jasper Leary, whose mother drops him off at his uncle's house in rural Michigan and up and disappears. Jasper has to grow up pretty fast, learning how to live on a primitive farm while being used to city life. His father weaves in and out of his story, and it seems clear that he knows more than what he's letting on. Everyone seems to be dancing around the issue - Althea has disappeared before, but never for this long and never without coming back.

Jasper is a lovable character in that he's naive and can have some pretty flawed thinking. Pulley really helped the reader come down to the level of a nine-year-old, what he might understand and might not quite understand yet. In addition, Jasper is so well-protected from what's going on that it's really hard to discern what is real and what's being constructed for him to believe. Jasper is prone to outbursts of emotion and during one of these, he runs through the fields of the farm until he finds a burned-out old shell of a house. Exploring inside, Jasper finds something. A diary - his mother's diary from when she was a girl.

As Jasper begins to get into the tale of what part of her childhood might have been like, it's clear that there were some negative formative experiences that she went through that Jasper can't quite understand. But as he uncovers the mystery of Althea as a girl, he gets tangled up in the mystery of Althea as a woman, as a mother. This book is slow to unfold, but once you're in it, you're IN IT. You're easily able to escape to 1950s Michigan and I was eagerly turning the pages trying to see if I could solve the mystery, only to be confronted with more dead ends and more mysteries to unfold.

Being someone that lost her mother, sometimes it's hard for me to read stories like this, because the sense of loss is magnified by Jasper's sense of loss of his mother. He uncovers dark things about his mother, dark things about the town he's in, dark things about pretty much everyone. Those kinds of things are always hard to come to grips with. The ending of this book was brilliant and heartbreaking and really a surprise to me. A fantastic read for sure!

Young boy aged 9 is left with relatives and doesn't understand why. When he finds his mother's journal from her teenaged years, we find a clue into why she is gone. This story is one of personal redemption.

D. M. Pulley’s historical fiction novel, The Buried Book, follows nine-year-old Jasper as he works to discover what happened to his mother, who disappeared after she dropped him off on her brother’s farm. Jasper’s dangerous journey takes him to the seedier parts of early 1950s Detroit to the Michigan farmlands of his uncle to the mysterious lands of the local Indian reservation.

Jasper is a small-for-his-age, shy boy, and he isn’t very happen when his mother abandons him at his Uncle Leo’s dairy farm in the country. He likes his stern uncle just fine, and he loves his Aunt Velma and his older cousin Wayne. They don’t treat him as if he’s a burden; they try to teach him how to farm and survive out in the country. But he doesn’t understand why his mother would steal him away from his father in Detroit and drop him with her family in the country, and he goes looking for anything that can help find her or make him understand why she left. It’s in the burnt out shell of her childhood home that Jasper finds her childhood diary, and he slowly begins to understand the childhood traumas that made his mother the woman that she is today–and how the trouble that she got into as a teenager can follow from her to Jasper in the present day.

I really loved how each chapter started with the questions that a psychologist or therapist were asking someone. They set up a little about the chapter and what Jasper would find out or happen to him next. Jasper finds himself in a very dangerous world of grown ups playing dangerous games that no child should ever be a part of while he’s looking for his mother. He often wonders if his mother is alive or dead, and if she’s alive whether or not she’ll ever come back for him. Jasper does a lot of growing up throughout The Buried Book, and he learns a lot of hard lessons for a kid of nine years old to learn–especially in that time period of our country where racism, sexism, the mob, and crooked cops reign supreme.

I shed quite a few tears for Jasper during my time with this book. Life isn’t fair to this unfortunate nine year old, and more importantly, the adults around him who think they know best don’t always know the truth. Jasper learns this the hard way throughout his search for his mother, and he learns that he can trust very few people. But he doesn’t give up, no matter how hard or treacherous the road ahead of him becomes.

The Buried Book is a gritty look at farm life in the 1950s, and D. M. Pulley really did her research to get the aspects of a dairy farm right. My in-laws farm, and I lived on a dairy farm during graduate school, so a lot of the sights, sounds, and smells were very familiar to me. She definitely gets things right. The characters from around the farming community were so vivid and real–a lot of them seemed just like the farmers and their kids that I knew growing up in my small town.

I give The Buried Book a five out of five. This coming of age historical fiction really blends suspense and at times thrilling aspects beautifully. The characters were unique and varied, and they definitely fit the era. The story of a son willing to go to the ends of the earth to find out what happened to his mother, and a mother who tries to shelter her son from her sins at any cost, was very gripping and I had trouble putting this book down. Well-written, descriptive when need be, and accurate on the historical details, The Buried Book is such a joy to read.

Engrossing page turner that will make you think about children's devotion to their parents. I'd not read Pulley's earlier book and was pleased to get an ARC from Netgalley for this one- and now I'm going to look for her again. This is well written and plotted. You will pull for this kid all the way.