Paperback Archives - Page 20 of 27

Alice at Heart by Deborah Smith: Book Review

Alice has always been the odd one in her small Appalachian community. She loves water, her hair grows incredibly fast, her feet are slightly webbed, and somehow her personality has just never "fit in." She's done her best all her life to blend into the background, but she gets quite a bit of publicity when she rescues someone. She hates being in the public eye, but ultimately it brings her to the attention of some women who can give her answers about her past and why she's so different. Let me say right up front that I won this book in a GR giveaway. I don't think that's affected my rating and review, but in the interest of full disclosure, there it is. The book started off a little disjointed for me because I wasn't very clear about what to expect. But by the time I was 20-30 pages in, it was all coming together and I was starting to enjoy the book. It only got better all the way through. I liked the characters and the mystery of what happened the night a boat sank, 40 years ago. I liked the family histories and legends of the characters. I particularly liked the way that the fantasy element was woven in like it was no big deal. Just make this one little leap of faith and all of a sudden you've got the real world with a little more magic in it. That's always fun. The book had a feel (but not a plot) a little like the movie Practical Magic and the book Garden Spells, with maybe just a little of the drama and mystery of The Pilot's Wife thrown in. Fans of these books would certainly enjoy this one. Reviewed October 24, 2008 Read an excerpt. Find author…

Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin: Book Review

I don't even know where to start with a synopsis for this book, so I'll just skip that. I have a feeling that the reason I'm not giving this book 5 stars shows more about what I'm lacking than about what the book is lacking. I felt myself on the verge of a huge epiphany throughout the book, but I just never got there. That has left me incredibly frustrated. Maybe reading through other reviews will help me see what I'm missing. The language is absolutely gorgeous. It's just one of those books that is so dense and beautiful that you feel like you could eat it. This was partly a love letter to New York. The author doesn't blindly love his city, he loves it warts and all and sees its potential to be something so much more than it is. Mostly this was a book full of beautiful symbolism that I think was trying to tell me something about life, love, justice, time, immortality, and faith in mankind. Maybe. I was tempted to put this on my "mythology" shelf, because it felt like Helprin was creating something of a modern, American mythology. I have notes scribbled here about what I think this means or that means, but something would always happen to show me that I was wrong in my interpretation of something. I finally just gave up and read the book without trying so hard to figure everything out. I hoped that everything would come clear to me in the end, but it didn't. Readers who enjoy lush language, people who love New York, and people who want a book to chew on for a while will probably love this. I truly hate to admit it, but this one defeated me. Reviewed March 30, 2009 Read an…

The Word Made Flesh by Eva Talmadge: Book Review

I pulled this out of its mailer and my husband took one look and said, "Oh, crap. You're going to have a tattoo soon, aren't you?" I was a little hesitant to open it for fear of that very thing myself. I don't have anything against tattoos on other people, they just aren't for me. Let's just say that, working in health care, I've seen too many wrinkled, formless tattoos on those who never thought they'd grow old. Yeah. Not for me. But in looking through the tattoos in the book, I can admire the artistry, but many of them really are more Literary than what I normally read. I'll pick up the classics every now and then, but I typically read for entertainment, not necessarily enlightenment. So the tattoos of Kafka and company don't mean a whole lot to me. The tattoos of quotes were interesting, and they did leave me pondering if there's a quote that means so much to me I would have it permanently etched on my body. Nothing yet, but I'll keep you posted. There were more popular tattoos included, such as tattoos for Harry Potter and Twilight, and I at least understood those a little more. The ones that intrigued me the most were part of a living story. Each person has one word from a short story written by Shelley Jackson specifically for this project tattooed on their body somewhere. The short story isn't written down in its entirety anywhere. The people who have the tattoos have read the story but no one else ever has or ever will. It sounds so very cool to be part of a living story. Okay, so we live our personal stories daily. I hope you know what I'm trying to say. It would be cool to…

Bending Toward the Sun by Leslie Gilbert-Lurie: Book Review

Rita Lurie is a Holocaust survivor. Her story is remarkably similar to Anne Frank's. She hid in an attic in Poland for two years at the very end of WWII. Her family's hiding place was nowhere near as carefully-planned as the Frank family's though. They fled Nazi soldiers in the night and eventually found a family friend who let them stay with him. Imagine 15 people, including children and a baby, hiding in an attic for two years with no food supply mapped out. The children couldn't run around a make noise and be children. They had no heat source. They didn't even have much light. They lived on what the men could forage at night. Needless to say, they were very sick and malnourished when they finally emerged. Rita was five when they went into hiding, but the experience left a deep and lasting mark on her psyche. Now, where this memoir is different from others that I've read is that it doesn't stop with Liberation. That's only the beginning, in fact. How does such a horrific experience mark your life forever after? Also, how does it mark your children and their children? It's not like you come out of hiding and return to a perfectly normal life. I have to say that the first time I ever thought about these questions was when I read The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman. Spiegelman shows that his father was hard to live with, and sometimes it was because of his experiences as a Holocaust survivor. He's a hoarder and a control freak. Spiegelman's mom, also a survivor, was clinically depressed. That opened my eyes a little bit. So when I was offered this book for review, I jumped on it. I was surprised by the ways that the Holocaust affected…

One Good Knight by Mercedes Lackey: Book Review

Princess Andromeda feels like she can't do anything right. Her mother, Queen Cassiopeia, always seems to be disappointed in Andie's appearance and her tendency to have her nose in a book. Finally, Andie finds a way to prove her value as a researcher to her mother--just in time to help try to discover a way to keep a marauding dragon happy. Unfortunately, the method she discovers involves sacrificing a virgin weekly. When Andie's name is drawn, can she find a way to save herself, or will this be a job for a Champion? And what exactly attracted the dragon to the kingdom in the first place? This was the second in Mercedes Lackey's Five Hundred Kingdoms series. I didn't enjoy the overall plot as much as I enjoyed the first in the series, The Fairy Godmother, but the story was still fun and there were a few little things that I did like more in this book. First of all, there were no silly sex scenes. It wasn't bad in the first book, but they felt sort of pointless, so I definitely didn't miss them here. Second, they used a good copyeditor for this book. Most of the distracting italics are gone (a very good thing!). The story was still unpredictable and interesting, I just didn't care about the characters as much. Speaking of characters, Elena and Alexander make a few cameos in this book. I liked them so much from the first book that I was thrilled to have them show up here. Overall, still fun fluff, but start with The Fairy Godmother and don't expect quite as much from this one. Reviewed August 21, 2008 My review of the first in the series, The Fairy Godmother. Read an excerpt. Find author Mercedes Lackey on her website, her blog,…

Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin: Book Review

Children are missing from Cambridge, the town's Jews have been blamed, and King Henry II is receiving less revenue while the Jews are in hiding. Clearly something must be done. Enter Adelia Aguilar. She has been trained at the world-renowned and forward-thinking school of medicine in Salerno, Italy. Her specialty? Corpses. She is a mistress of the art of death and the dead "speak" to her. She's called in to examine the body of the one child who has been found and, along with her friends, try to find the killer. This was a page-turner for me, mostly because of Adelia. She feels completely real. She's super-intelligent but hopeless in society. She's great with her patients but clueless as to how to interact with them outside the examining room. She's a feminist in a time before the word was dreamed of. She tries to hold herself aloof from everyone, but her heart's too big for that and she ends up caring in spite of herself. She feels like someone I would like to know in real life. The other characters are a great supporting cast. For the most part, they're reasonably well-rounded and I wound up caring about them too. My favorite was the little urchin, Ulff. The mystery was solid. I did guess part of it, but not the whole thing. I did end up being very surprised by the end. One thing that did bother me, and I'm not quite sure who to "blame" for this, is that this book takes place around the time that The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett ended, but this one felt like it could have been centuries later. Maybe it was just me, but Follett's England under Henry II was a brutal, hopeless, scary place, and Franklin's England at the…

Everything is Going to be Great by Rachel Shukert: Book Review

After college, Rachel Shukert ended up working for free for a well-known experimental theater director. The play took a brief tour of Europe, and Rachel was thrilled when she found out that her passport had not been stamped. That meant she could stay in Europe as long as she wanted without a visa, since no one officially knew she was there. Setting out to "find herself," she ends up living with two of her gay best friends in Amsterdam, jobless, but more than willing to try out the local booze and dating scene. I'm not the right reader for Everything is Going to be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour. Call me a prude if you want, but I somehow (thankfully) avoided the stage of life that Rachel Shukert describes in her memoir. I don't understand the appeal of drinking until you end up in the hospital, or waking up with a man you met for the first time the night before. So when I ran into both things within the first few pages of this memoir, I knew this wasn't going to be a book that I connected with. If you did go through this stage, perhaps you'll enjoy this memoir more than I did. It is funny, but, like I said, I just didn't really connect with what Rachel was going through inflicting on herself. The book is well-written, and I did end up cheering for Rachel in the end, but the lifestyle described in the pages is a turn-off for me. Thanks to Harper Perennial for sending me a copy for review.

Once Upon a Marigold by Jean Ferris: Book Review

My seven-year-old cousin and fellow lover-of-all-things-fairy, Natalie, convinced me to read this by reciting the cover blurb to me: "Part comedy, part love story, part everything-but-the-kitchen-sink." What fairy tale fan could resist that? Not this one! I loved that the defining characteristics of the characters weren't their beauty or lack thereof. Chris is intelligent, kind, and loyal. He's also an inventor. He's the first in the kingdom to use p-mail (pigeon mail). Princess Marigold is a reader, also intelligent and kind, and very concerned with making sure that she becomes a good strong ruler of her kingdom. She even asks commoners' opinions on the qualities that a good ruler should have! Even the minor characters are generally defined by their personalities, good or bad. Looks really didn't come into play at all. I found that a little refreshing. The story was a little predictable. We first meet Chris when he's a six-year-old runaway living in the woods. As he grows older, he starts to notice Princess Marigold, who he can watch as she reads on her terrace in the castle. He wants to be her friend, and he wants to know why she frequently looks unhappy. You can probably guess the general outline of the story, beginning to end, just from that. But there were still several surprises along the way that kept the story fresh. Ed the troll might have been my favorite character. Oh, I really liked Chris and Marigold, but Ed made me laugh. He loves to use common sayings, but he can never get them right. Here's one: "But now that you have your act on the ball, you can do better...All you have to do is keep your shoulder to the grindstone and your nose to the wheel." Too funny! And he's working hard to…

Random Magic by Sasha Soren: Book Review

Professor Random has sneezed Alice right out of Wonderland. He sends young Henry Witherspoon into the book to find her and put her in her place before the world as we know it comes to an end. But Henry accidentally gets sent into the wrong book. Luckily, he meets the unflappable doodle witch, Winnie Flapjack, who takes him under her wing and helps him find his missing Alice. This book is for those people who actually believe that it's about the journey and not the destination. Me? I just want to get where I'm going. The book was fun, and I enjoyed seeing where Winnie and Henry were going to end up next and how they were going to get out of their current mess. The overall plot of finding Alice isn't a very big deal in the book though. It's more of an excuse to throw everything together. I enjoy books more if everything flows together better. Winnie's solutions to problems were ingenious. Change live to dead? She can do that, no sweat. Defeat a crazy queen in chess? Sure. Take on a boat full of pirates? All in a day's work to Winnie. Henry was a different matter. He was a loyal little thing with a big heart, but he was a little slow. He never learned to just do what Winnie said; he was always questioning her. He always came out the worse for it. The pacing was a little off for my taste. Some of the vignettes dragged on too long for me. Oh! I almost forgot! The prologue is confusing. As far as I can tell, it has very little to do with the rest of the book. So just skip it. My sister grabbed this and read it while she was house-sitting for me,…

Dracula by Bram Stoker: Book Review

I have somehow never seen "Bram Stoker's Dracula" or any of the other movie incarnations of this book. In fact, I was surprised to read the back cover of this book and find out that the book is about Dracula moving to Enland to set up shop. So, I had no expectations going into it. Overall, I enjoyed the book. It's written in a journal/letter style, which I (mostly) liked and found interesting. I liked seeing what was going on with the main characters as we went along. The voices of the narrators kind of all blended together though. Mina was different, but Jonathan and Dr. Seward were pretty interchangeable for me. If there wasn't a clue in the content, I very often had to flip back to see which one was supposed to be writing this section. And I thought Van Helsing's "accent" was terrible! This intelligent physician/lawyer makes some horrible grammar and syntax mistakes that didn't come across as real to me. Granted, I'm not an expert at that kind of thing, but there's my opinon. Speaking of characters--the characters in this book were all (with the obvious exception of the vampires) too noble and good for words. A typical, paraphrased conversation between characters (I think spoiler free): "If I should show signs of becoming a vampire, give me your oath that you will do the honorable thing and destroy me in the appropriate way." "I would lay down my very life to prevent such a thing from happening, but if it should, I would gladly fulfill such a duty to you, in order that you might go to your eternal reward in Heaven." Is this for real? Okay, the book's over a hundred years old, but still... Now for my big pet peeve: the way Mina is…