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Juliet by Anne Fortier: Book Review

Julie Jacobs is stunned the day she finds out that her great-aunt Rose, who raised her and her twin sister Janice, has died. She's even more surprised when she finds out at the funeral that her real name is Giulietta Tolomei and Rose wanted her to go back to Siena, where she was born, and find a treasure that her mother left for her in a safety deposit box. Of course things are never that easy in real life or in fiction. Julie is soon in the middle of a treasure hunt, being pursued by ruthless treasure hunters, and wrapped up in the long ago story of Romeo and Juliet. Overall, I just loved this. It was full of excitement and suspense and romance and Italian scenery and Siena and gelato, and just so much Italian life. What's not to love? There are two different storylines, that of Julie in the present and Romeo and Juliet in 1340. Shakespeare got the bare bones right, but the details are quite a bit different, let me tell you. The biggest change is that their story takes place in Siena rather than Verona. I loved the descriptions of the city, and I especially loved that the author worked in il palio, a famous, highly-competitive horse race Romeo rides in. Just so much excitement! He's a hero to win any girl's heart! Julie in her own past was very irritating. Her sole purpose in life was to be the exact opposite of her twin, even if she managed to hurt herself in the process. She comes into her own in Italy though, and starts to finally get over it. There, I mostly liked her. She's developing a spine and she's not too guilty of being the stupid girl who does everything wrong. I was…

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson: Book Review

In the interest of avoiding spoilers for the second book, I'll just say that this picks up immediately after that awful cliffhanger of an ending in The Girl Who Played With Fire. So much has been said that I don't feel like I have a whole lot more to contribute. I (mostly) raced through the book, frantic to find out how big this conspiracy was, how far they would go, whether or not they would finally get caught, and how it would all go down. Salander wasn't quite as large a figure in this one, for obvious reasons if you've been reading the trilogy, so I missed her. She was still the same old inscrutable, fascinating Salander in the parts she was in. She's growing though. I wish Larsson had been able to write more books about her so we could see how she ultimately turns out. Three things bothered me. One was the setup of Salander's initial location. Vague enough? That would never happen here in the US. Not where I work anyway. Can you say armed guards (at the least) and different floors? So I'm left wondering if Larsson took an easy way out to steer the book where he wanted it to go or if Sweden is that different. Surely not. At the very beginning, there's a whole lot of telling and not much showing. We're told what Blomqvist and the police got up to in the few hours immediately after the end of the second book. Why not just write that part as actual scenes happening in real time? It probably wouldn't have taken up much more space and there was certainly enough happening to have kept my attention. I have had a problem with the amount of detail Larsson includes throughout the entire series. This…

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz: Book Review

Oscar Wao is a loser. There's really no kind way to put it. But it might not be entirely his fault. His family is from the Dominican Republic, where the evil dictator Trujillo held sway for an unbelievable amount of time. Oscar's family fell into Trujillo's bad graces way back in the day and they haven't really been happy since. Everyone believes Trujillo laid a fukú, or curse, on the family forever. Everybody knows at least one Oscar. You know the type. The geek/nerd who loves all things sci-fi/fantasy. The one who's desperate to fit in. The one who doesn't understand why he doesn't fit in. The one who breaks your heart as you watch him trying to fit in by doing all those things that keep him from fitting in in the first place. Yeah, you know exactly who I'm talking about. How many faces just flashed through your mind? Oscar was a heart-breaker when he was seven but he lost his mojo. Now he breaks the reader's heart. I wanted so badly for just one thing to go Oscar's way. Everybody deserves a break, right? Well, this is the real world, and sometimes it just doesn't happen. But Oscar does learn some things on his brief, wondrous journey, and while I might not applaud his choices, I can understand them. The story was a little hard to get through. We dip into Oscar's life, his sister's life, his mother's life, and his grandfather's life. The parts in the Dominican Republic under Trujillo were pretty brutal, but necessary to understand where this family was coming from. The narrator is Oscar's college roommate. He's a fast-talking, wise-cracking, womanizing smartass. I loved him. It read like he was telling me the story instead of having me read it. He's funny, he's…

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving: Book Review

3.5 Stars. This came awfully close to being a 3 star read for me. The book just seemed to get longer and longer. It was finally about 100 pages longer than my attention span for the story. But once I got to the end, I realized that everything was essential, even what I thought were tangents. John [...]

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou: Book Review

The first volume in Maya Angelou's autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is not an easy read. It picks up when she's three and her brother is four and they're being shipped from California to Arkansas--alone on a train. They live with their paternal grandmother for years. Maya writes poignantly and heart-breakingly, but never with self-pity, about life as an African-American girl in a segregated South. I'm having a hard time writing this review. I occasionally run into this problem with memoirs. Who am I to judge what someone has had the courage to put on display for all the world to read? They have generally lived through experiences that I don't even want to think about. Maya, or Marguerite as she's mostly called in the book, is a "tender-hearted" soul. She's intelligent, she's a reader, she's a dreamer, but she has no prospects, simply because of the color of her skin. She unflinchingly lays down her history. There were parts that I had an unbelievably hard time reading, but by sharing them, Maya lets the world remember what segregation leads to, and even lets others who have shared some of her experiences know that they are not alone. Some sections left me feeling sickened by the casual cruelty of humanity, others left me infuriated for the same reason. I was never indifferent. It's not all darkness and misery though. She has good times growing up too. There's one scene at a picnic that stands out as a beautiful bright spot. And when she meets some of the women who become her mentors, they are spots of hope also, encouraging us to reach out to those less fortunate than ourselves. I did feel like this book just kind of stopped. I guess you could say that it stopped…

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller: Book Review

This is the story of Captain Yossarian, who is serving in World War II as a navigator on a bomber based in Italy. Yossarian is caught in a "Catch-22" where he wants to be grounded, but he can only get out of flying more missions if he's crazy, but if he was crazy, he wouldn't mind flying missions. The book really skips around, so that you're never quite sure whether you're reading something that happened in the past, or if the story has now moved forward from the beginning point. But it's not really confusing, it all does make some sort of sense in the end. Don't let the whole "World War II bomber" thing mislead you. The book is generally one big farce, that, to me, has an underlying theme about the absurdity of war. I read this when I was a senior in high school. I remember enjoying it then, and I enjoyed it this time. It was a little bit of a different experience this time around. The first time I had no idea what to expect, so the humor was generally more humorous and the suddenly serious parts were definitely more of a slap in the face. This time, I have a few more years on me, so I can appreciate the frustration of bureaucracies and "superiors" who don't have any idea what they're doing. And, knowing what it was that broke Yossarian gave everything a little bit of a different feel. There was one part that just went on too long. It moved past funny and got into tiresome. Other than that, I just loved it. Reviewed December 6, 2007 and slightly revised September 24, 2010 According to the American Library Association website, Catch-22 was "banned in Strongsville, OH (1972), but the school board's action…

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez: Book Review

Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza fall in love when they're very young. Ultimately, Fermina chooses to marry Juvenal Urbino, a wealthy, well-respected doctor from a good family. Florentino decides to wait for Dr. Urbino to die so he can renew his pursuit of Fermina. As he waits, he has 622 affairs. The best thing about this book for me was the beauty of the language. Even as a translation, García Márquez's writing is lush, descriptive, and transportive. This was the first description I fell in love with: "He almost always ate lunch at home and had a ten-minute siesta on the terrace in the patio, hearing in his sleep the songs of the servant girls under the leaves of the mango trees, the cries of vendors on the street, the uproar of oil and motors from the bay whose exhaust fumes fluttered through the house on hot afternoons like an angel condemned to putrefaction." I just read this and I was there. I love when authors do that to me. But at heart, I'm a reader in search of a good story with good characters. The language bogged the story down a bit, which I could probably have overlooked, but I also disliked Florentino. That was more of a deal-breaker for me. In 622 affairs, there's a bit of a trail of destruction, and that left me disenchanted with the romantic idea of waiting for your true love. I did enjoy reading about Fermina and Urbino's years together as they try to make a marriage work. One of their arguments practically had me laughing out loud. It was over a silly thing, but those seem to be the arguments that are the worst. García Márquez got all of that so right. I really wish I could bump this up to…

Changeless by Gail Carriger: Book Review

Alexia Maccon, née Tarrabotti, is awakened one morning by her husband bellowing out orders and questions. He doesn't take time to answer her questions, but of course she finds out what's going on later. Something or someone has found a way to completely negate whatever magic makes supernatural beings, well--supernatural. This has London in an uproar. When the phenomenon seems to be traveling north to Scotland, Lord Maccon sets out in that direction too. He wants to investigate further, plus he needs to check in with his old pack. Alexia just can't be left behind, so one dirigible ride later, she joins him up there to find the pack in disarray. Another fun entry into The Parasol Protectorate! I swear I smiled and giggled the whole way through. Alexia is just as hardheaded and Lord Maccon is just as Alpha. Yum-mmmeeeee. *Waggling eyebrows lasciviously* Alexia is settling into her role as the Woolsey pack's Alpha female with ease. It's a role she was practically made for. There's one confrontation with a member of the pack who has just returned from India that left me laughing. She handled him as only Alexia can. She manages to get herself into even more trouble this time around, believe it or not. A strange French inventor, Madame Lefoux, makes an appearance too. We're never quite sure what her role is in everything, but she had me hopelessly intrigued. She is to Alexia as Q is to Bond. Talk about a tricked-out parasol! She hooks Alexia up! MacGyver would be jealous of this thing! She's wonderfully eccentric and I couldn't help but love her even as I wondered about her loyalties. Ivy Hisselpenny and Alexia's sister Felicity have a much-larger role in this book, and all I have to say about that is, "Poor Tunstell.…

Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende: Book Review

3 Stars. Even though this novel was written in first person, I felt as if I were watching the story unfold behind glass. I never got pulled into the story completely. I was never particularly interested in Aurora. I was more interested to see what scheme Paulina would come up with next in late-nineteenth century America and [...]

One for the Money by Janet Evanovich: Book Review

Stephanie Plum has just gotten laid off from her job as a lingerie buyer for a company that turned out to be owned by the mob in New Jersey. Her Miata has just been repossessed, she's sold everything of value, and her refrigerator is empty. Out of desperation, she goes to see her cousin Vinnie, a bail bondsman, about a filing job. That's just been filled, but the secretary lets her know that there's an opening for a bounty hunter, and the money's good. Stephanie blackmails her way into taking a case that will pay out $10,000 if she can bring the guy in. It turns out the fugitive is someone she has a long history with who appears to be a cop gone bad. He's been arrested for cold-blooded murder. Of course, Stephanie is unbelievably unqualified for this job, but a mixture of desperation, pride, and stubborness take her a long way. This was a quick, fun read, but there was still plenty of murder and mayhem for most mystery/thriller readers. This was actually pretty funny. I don't think I ever laughed out loud, but I probably giggled a few times. I had expected it to be a little funnier and less violent from what someone had told me about it, but this was still a good book. One thing that did irritate me was that the author pretty much gave driving directions to every place Stephanie went in the book. That might make it more real to the people from Trenton, NJ, but to me it was just distracting fluff for me to skip over. The characters were what really made the book. You have to like Stephanie. She comes across as just an average woman who's gotten in over her head, but she doesn't let that stop…