Paperback Archives - Page 13 of 27

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon: Book Review

Joe Kavalier is a Jew living in Prague just as the Nazis are taking control of the city in the late 1930's. With the aid of his escape artist teacher, Joe smuggles himself out of the country and all the way to New York City. Joe is just what his cousin, Sam Clay, has been looking for. Sam is a New York boy with a love of comic books and a huge imagination. Unfortunately, his artistry doesn't live up to his stories. Joe immediately gets a feel for the comic book form and the two form the comic book duo, Kavalier and Clay. Through the medium of the comic book, Joe takes on the Nazis years before America gets into the war. He also saves up money to try to bring the rest of his family to safety. Despite his best intentions, Joe lives his life while trying to fight the bureaucratic forces of Germany and America to bring his family to safety. I was a little torn about the rating for this one. It was four stars right up until America finally entered the war (about 2/3 of the way through). After that, I just didn't care anymore. I can't explain why without giving anything away. So three stars it is. I liked the characters of Sam and Joe. They were well-developed and believable. I don't know much about comic books, but I liked the chapters that gave the setup for their more popular comic book heroes. I read in the praise for the book that it's supposed to be funny. I must have not gotten those parts. There were a few parts that amused me, but mostly I found the book to be quietly heart-breaking. Reviewed August 31, 2008 Read an excerpt. Find author Michael Chabon on his…

The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany

The twelve men making up the parliament of Erl go to their ruler one day and ask for a magic lord. The ruler agrees to grant their request and sends his son to steal and marry the King of Elfland's daughter. But of course finding her and keeping her can't be that easy. In the introduction to this edition, Neil Gaiman compares Lord Dunsany's writing to the King James Bible. I honestly wouldn't have thought of that, but the description is perfect. The language is beautiful, but, for me, dense and a little hard to wade through. I kept thinking of those old fairy tale books by Andrew Lang, like The Orange Fairy Book. As I remember it, those books had very little dialog and just describe the story happening. That's how this was. I also mentally compared it to a beautiful, old silent movie. You're watching this beautiful story unfold, but there's no dialog. I guess I like a lot of dialog. As I read the book, I kept thinking of a phrase my yoga teacher uses: "like you're moving through honey." That's the pace at which this book moves: like you're moving through honey. I normally tear through books so I never quite got my mind slowed down enough to fully enjoy and understand this book. When I did manage it, for a couple of paragraphs at a time, I could see what all the fuss is about. But the rest of the time, I just wished we could get on with the story. That is, if I didn't fall asleep first. By the end, Lirazel had gotten on my nerves. She wanted to have her cake and eat it too. Who doesn't, really? But asking her father to use his last all-powerful rune to give it to…

The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad: Book Review

After following the Northern Alliance troops around Afghanistan and reporting on the fall of the Taliban, journalist Åsne Seierstad finds herself in Kabul. She stumbles upon a bookshop and goes in. She and the proprietor, Sultan, hit it off at first and she is invited to spend a little time with his family. She thinks she has found an enlightened Afghan man and asks him for permission to live in his house for a while and write about everyday life in an Afghan household. She finds out that some of his politics and beliefs are more liberal than one would expect, but he still very much rules his family with iron authority. There was one chapter that I loved, "Billowing, Fluttering, Winding." Seierstad sets out to make the reader experience life inside the burka, and I felt that she pulled it off very well. I felt closed in and like I had blinders on. I felt like I had to physically turn my head to see anything around me. I felt lost in a sea of mostly-anonymous burkas. The only way to differentiate between other women was by the bits of their shoes that were peeking out. When the narrator loses track of the other women she's with, I realized how hard it was going to be to find them. It was beautifully, effectively done, and it's worth reading for that chapter alone. I like that the author included a list of the 16 decrees that the Taliban broadcast when they took power. Some of them weren't really all that surprising, but others left me shaking my head in puzzlement. "Prohibition against the washing of clothes by river embankments." What? Are they afraid that women are going to have a "wet burka" contest or something? I don't understand that one.…

Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes: Book Review

After many years vacationing in Italy, Frances Mayes and her--husband? I don't think that's ever clarified--decide to buy a home in Tuscany. They search for a while, but nothing really calls to them. Then they stumble upon a home called Bramasole in the town of Cortona. It's a wreck, but they can't get it out of their heads. They go over and over all the reasons that they shouldn't buy it. And then they follow their hearts and move in and get to work. First of all, I just need to say that this book has little in common with the movie except for the title. As she kept writing about "our house" and "our money," I kept looking back to see if I was missing something. She's buying the house with someone? And not just anyone, but a significant other? This was supposed to be about remodeling a house in Tuscany and romance with handsome Italians! What happened here?!? Still, I enjoyed it, even more than the movie. So what if there aren't any romances with Italian men? I got to read beautiful descriptions that left me feeling as if I had just soaked in the heat of a Tuscan August, and left me feeling as if I really had been living life at a slower pace. Mayes is a very evocative writer and I was lost in the Tuscan countryside almost immediately. I didn't envy them the work they were doing, but I loved reading about the connection she was making with the house, the previous owners, and the roots she was growing. She refers often to the nonna that she imagines previously lived in the house, and wonders what she would think of the changes they are making and the food they are cooking. The nonna becomes…

Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb: Book Review

This is a story told from many points of view. First is Zebulon Vance, the real life Civil War governor of North Carolina. We follow him from his days as a hotel porter fresh off the farm until his rise to governor. Next is Malinda Blalock, a tough mountain woman who follows her husband to war and beyond. Then there's Rattler, a modern day man with a touch of the second sight who realizes that the Civil War re-enactors of the mountains are calling up uneasy spirits who are best left alone. I enjoyed reading about my region's role in the Civil War. I'd heard somewhere that we were exceptionally torn apart during that conflict because we weren't wealthy landowners and so had no clear-cut reason to join either side. This book showed that. The voices of the different narrators were done very well. They were each very distinct. The only negative I have to say about it is that Malinda's voice didn't ring entirely true. The author gave it a good try, but she didn't quite get the accent and the language right. Lee Smith does a much better job with our Appalachian dialect. There was one other narrator in the book, but he had a very minor role. In fact, I'm not entirely sure why his parts were even included. He only had a few chapters, but I felt like they could have been cut out completely without really hurting the story. I'll be a little devilish here and say that I also enjoyed the way McCrumb wrote about our transplants from Florida. They were sort of caricatures, and we don't really think they're all like that, but we do feel like some newcomers think us locals are barbarians who should just leave and let them enjoy their…

From a Whisper to a Scream by Charles de Lint: Book Review

A serial killer has been viciously murdering women in the Combat Zone, a seedy area of Newford. He makes a mistake when he kills a wealthy man's daughter, apparently mistaking her for one of the prostitutes he normally targets. There's a witness to this one too. He swears the killer stepped out of the side of a building and disappeared the same way. Detective Thomas Morningstar has mostly left his Kickaha traditions behind on the rez. But something about these killers doesn't feel right, so he seeks help in the most unexpected of places. And then there's Chelsea, a teen who's already experienced a lifetime of hurt. She's been told that her abusive father is dead, but she can still feel him out there. Searching for her. And she knows this time he won't stop until she's dead. This is a re-read, and I wrote in my initial one-sentence summary, "This is too dark for me." I'm re-reading the Newford books in order, and it was time for this one. It's still too dark for me. I do like horror, but this is a little too real. The so-called "horror" element doesn't feel real, but the abuse is the true horror. It's nothing gratuitous, but it is more graphic than I would like. Being inside the mind of a pedophile left me feeling dirty and more than a little disturbed. It's hard for me to read that kind of thing at any time, but especially when it involves children. I miss that none of the Newford regulars showed up in this book. Part of what I love about the Newford books is spotting some of my favorite characters and finding out how they're doing. I know that sounds crazy, but after multiple re-reads of my favorites across 20+ books and…

Empire Falls by Richard Russo: Book Review

Miles Roby is the manager of The Empire Grill in the heart of Empire Falls, Maine--or what's left of it, anyway. This once-thriving industrial town is dying now that the factories have all closed. Empire Falls still has a tightly-knit, optimistic community though. There are constantly rumors about new buyers for the factories. Miles feels as if he's the only skeptic, watching from behind his counter as his town is slowly sinking. I'm finding this to be a really hard review to write. That's because as I read the book, I didn't really feel like I was reading fiction. It seems like a new factory closes somewhere in my area weekly (not really, but it's not been great) and these characters felt like neighbors. None of them are perfect, and they're all struggling with things that we can relate to. I feel like I'm trying to write a review of small-town, blue-collar American life, and that's not something that I review, that's just something that we live. And I guess that I couldn't really give Russo a higher compliment than that. Sure, there are things that I didn't necessarily enjoy, but when a book is so spot-on that you feel like you're reading about the next town over, there's not much else to say. There were times when I laughed (Father Tom and Max Roby were always good for that), there were times when I was a little heart-broken, there were times when I felt victorious, and there were times when I was beyond horrified. I really did not see the stuff at the end coming. It was one of those things that always happens "somewhere else," so when I had lost myself enough to feel that I was a part of Empire Falls, it was shocking that it happened…

The Ice Limit by Douglas Preston: Book Review

It's only been about a week since I read this book, but I'm already hazy on the details, so this will be vague. Basically, this super-rich guy hires an engineering firm with a perfect record of doing the "impossible" to extract a meteorite from the ground of a Chilean island off of Cape Horn. In the wintertime. Without Chile's government officials finding out about it. Of course things go wrong. This was an odd mixture of a book that I couldn't put down and a book that felt like it was creeping along. I could have done without a lot of the day-to-day engineering feats they pulled off. They didn't all add to the story's plot. I was pretty conflicted about who the bad guys and good guys were. This isn't a very black-and-white book. I saw where it was going. Overall, I think anyone who reads the back cover has a good idea what's going to happen. But there's a sudden twist in the very last sentence, and I even saw that coming from a little way out. Maybe because I've read both Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything and Dan Brown's Deception Point recently. In fairness, without those, I would have been clueless and maybe a little more weirded out. And that brings up the fact that I couldn't help comparing this book with Deception Point. The plots weren't all that similar, but they do both involve unique meteorites. I would recommend Deception Point instead of this one. I read it much more quickly, heavy foreshadowing and all, and just overall enjoyed it more. This book wasn't bad, it just wasn't great. I've only read one other Preston/Child book, Thunderhead, and I would recommend it instead of this one too. I enjoyed it. I will keep…

Rise of the Evening Star by Brandon Mull: Book Review

Kendra and Seth are nearing the end of the school year when a new guy joins Kendra's class. The other girls talk about how cute he is, but all Kendra sees is a disgusting goblin who plays cruel tricks on people. A mysterious stranger offers to help them get rid of the goblin (or kobold, as they find out the creature is truly called). All they have to do is steal an object that will get rid of the creature. Things are never that easy for Kendra and Seth, so eventually they wind up back at Fablehaven, where they find out the Society of the Evening Star is intent on infiltrating the preserve and finding a powerful artifact. Seth has calmed down a lot since the first book, thank goodness. He's still crazy, foolhardy, courageous Seth, but he's a little more aware that his actions have consequences. Since Seth has changed for the better, I actually enjoyed this a little more than the first book in the series. I like what's going on with Kendra. Her brush with the Fairy Queen in Fablehaven has left her with some unusual abilities, and I have a feeling that we haven't even seen the beginning of what she can do. I like her a lot as a character, so this story arc has me intrigued. The ending--! I had a sneaking suspicion something like that might be coming, but I have a feeling that younger readers might be a little blindsided by the sudden twist. The characters suffer a lot of bad injuries, and that surprised me a little in a book that I personally would consider to be aimed at 9-12 year olds. I didn't find it to be anything over the top, but parents might want to keep that in mind…

Inkheart by Cornelia Funke: Book Review

Meggie Folchart and her father, Mo, find themselves on the run from a mysterious man that Meggie knows only as "Capricorn." Capricorn is chasing after them, trying to steal a book that they own, and he won't stop at anything to get it. First off, let me say that I'm about 20 years older than the reader this book is written for. I enjoyed it, but I didn't fall in love with it. The big thing that kept me from giving it five stars was that I felt a little bit like the plot moved around in circles. I found myself thinking, "Are we really back here again?" It seems to me that with some creative editing/storytelling the plot would have moved along nicer and the book wouldn't have been quite so big. That was really the only bad thing for me though. This was the first of a trilogy, but it tied up everything pretty well. There weren't any major cliffhangers that left me feeling like I will never be able to wait to find out what happens next. The translator did a fantastic job. If I hadn't known that this was originally written in German, I would never have guessed. Everything flowed along very smoothly. I really liked the characters. The bad guys were really bad, but the good guys were a little more complicated. Meggie and Mo could be a little cranky, and Elinor was always cranky, but she had a softer side too. This all made them seem real and more likeable. There were tons of quotes in here that I loved: "Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly." "If you take a book with you on a journey...an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting…