Eight Days on Planet Earth by Cat Jordan

An unusual girl shows up in the field next to Matt's house, waiting for her ride home - a field still famous 50 years later as the crash site for a UFO. Her story can't be true, but Matty can't seem to write her off as just another nutcase.

He may be falling in love. It may be teenage hormones. Or it might be merely a distraction from all the other things going on in Matty's life. But in any event, Priya has somehow captured his interest ... along with the undying devotion of his dog, Ginger.

I loved this book, mostly because I was never sure where it was headed.

Matty's perspective on the world shifts as he explains things to Priya - it gives him a new reason to reconsider the mundane. It also brings him back to the stars, something he once shared with his dad but has left abandoned of late.

A Dublin Student Doctor by Patrick Taylor

I'm back to reading this "Irish Country" series. I got a few behind.

This one is told mostly in flashback - the "modern" 1960s story (about knock on the noggin for a familiar regular) is mostly a framing device for the reminiscence about Fingal's days in med school and his first romance with the pretty young nursing student Kitty O'Halloran.

I liked that this one shifted less back and forth, and left me longer in the storyline. It also filled in a lot of backstories, not just on the romance with Kitty, but with Fingal's dislike of the doctor in the next town over and also how he decided to become a general practitioner.