Book Reviews Archive - Page 64 of 79

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,…

Adam & Eve by Sena Jeter Naslund: Book Review

Lucy Bergmann's husband Thom, is a brilliant physicist who is searching for life on other planets in the near future. He is killed in the opening chapter of the book, and we're led to believe that religious nuts who didn't want his discoveries published might have been behind his death. A few years later, Lucy herself is being pursued by a group of religious nuts as she transports an ancient document that will cast a new light on the story of Genesis. I do love Sena Jeter Naslund. I really do. I was thrilled when I won an ARC of her newest book through Shelf Awareness. I was so disappointed when I didn't understand it. I didn't understand it at all. I hate to write this, because it feels like I'm getting a little personal, but the plot was a mess. I don't know if this was supposed to be a religious thriller/conspiracy book, a pointed statement on the role of religion in world politics, a coming-of-age story, a meditation on marriage and self-identity--I just don't know. There are at least two distinct plots involving Lucy, and I don't understand how they fit together at all. While the scenes set in Eden were gorgeous and lush, I don't really understand how they were necessary. Oh, I get that it's something about the nature of man, but still, it's a long, beautiful section with about zero payoff that I could see. In case you're wondering, questioning religion does not offend me, so that's not the problem. The one thing I did love is Adam. I've written a long-ish blog post already about how much I love him. He's pretty much physically perfect, gorgeous, well-sculpted, loving, caring, but he's a little damaged emotionally and mentally. I don't know if there's a woman…

The Mischief of the Mistletoe by Lauren Willig: Book Review

Arabella Dempsey has just seen all her hopes dashed. She's been a companion to her aunt since she was a child and fully expected to inherit from her. She realizes that isn't going to happen when her aunt marries a much younger man--the very man that Arabella has been fantasizing about. Does it get any crueler? But Arabella is nothing if not determined and she determines to make her own way in the world and goes to work as a teacher in an all-girls school. Her first day there she literally bumps into everyone's favorite bumbling idiot, Reginald Fitzhugh. You might know him as Turnip. Turnip because he has the brains of one. But Turnip has a big heart and a younger sister and a secret message in a Christmas pudding, and it all adds up to one very fun book. I confess that I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to Turnip in the other books, but I did love the big doof in this book. He's handsome, and not the brightest crayon, but he has a gigantic heart. He's wrapped around his younger sister's finger, he's rich but doesn't even think about class as a general rule. Everything he's thinking moves across his face, and he's not afraid to defend a lady's honor. Heck, he's willing to play an even bigger idiot and thus put his life on the line for his country! A gentleman indeed! The action in this book takes place in between The Seduction of the Crimson Rose and The Temptation of the Night Jasmine. Well, it actually overlaps with Night Jasmine. It was interesting to see some of those events from a different perspective. Oh, and another thing. Jane Austen as a character. Need I say more? I always read Lauren Willig's books…

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…

At Home by Bill Bryson: Book Review

We take so much in our daily lives for granted. Bill Bryson looked around his house one day, realized how little he knew about the everyday objects surrounding him, and, being Bill Bryson, decided to research and write a book about them. I read this slowly as my before-bed book, and I'm not sure that was always a good idea. Reading about how ingenious rats are as I hear the pitter-pat of little rodent feet in my attic space is not necessarily a good idea. But at least now I know who invented the traps my husband set out! This book is hard to describe. It's roughly arranged by room, but my gosh, it travels around on some tangents. I'm not complaining. It all flowed together naturally and I only questioned how I had gotten to one subject if I really stopped to think about a particular chapter title. "The nursery" goes from childbirth to child labor to poor house conditions to the repression of wealthy children to conditions at boarding schools. But I promise you it all flows together, and it's all interesting in the way that only Bill Bryson can pull off. I am not a huge fan of non-fiction, so I don't know that I could really have enjoyed this as much if I had read it straight through with no breaks, but as an in-between book, I really enjoyed it. I'm now full of trivia about all kinds of things that could even remotely be considered to have anything to do with private life. They always say that truth is stranger than fiction. Bryson proves it. I read some of the more outrageous tidbits to my husband, who pretty much refuses to believe that they're true. But I don't question Bryson's research, so I believe him…

The Gendarme by Mark Mustian: Book Review

Emmett Conn is 92 years old and he has started having seizures and disturbing dreams/flashbacks. His early years are a mystery to him anyway. He awoke in a British hospital in WWI, a Turkish soldier mistakenly picked up after he was severely wounded. That's as far back as he can remember. But now in his dreams he seems to be re-living a past where he was a soldier in charge of a group of Armenian people in what later came to be known as the Armenian genocide. Are these real memories? And what of the beautiful girl with different-colored eyes? Was she real and did he love her? I feel like this is a very literary book and I should have something very smart and literary to say, but that's just not my style. I can only tell you what I liked and didn't like. I had never even heard of the Armenian genocide until sometime in the past year or two. It was actually a passing reference on GoodReads. I left it at that. I'm disappointed in myself. I'll be the first to spout off with how we have to remember the Holocaust so we don't repeat history, but I didn't bother to at least look at Wikipedia and see what happened to the Armenians. And they are in danger of being forgotten. I saw this author (who is of Armenian descent) speak at the Decatur Book Festival, and he said that Hitler, only about 20 years after all this happened, even said something like, "Who even remembers the Armenians?" Shameful. Anyway. This book is told from an aggressor's point of view. He personally didn't feel strongly one way or the other about the Armenians, he just wanted to join the army and fight in WWI. Before that could…

The Outer Banks House by Diann Ducharme: Book Review

Abby Sinclair is the neglected daughter of a plantation owner. Three years after the end of the Civil War, she is still mourning the loss of her uncle and her family is still adjusting to the loss of their slaves. When her father decides to move the whole family out to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for the summer, Abby is excited to see the ocean for the first time. Something about the wildness of the ocean stirs up a wildness that had almost been lost in herself. And then she meets "Banker" Benjamin Whimble, a dirty, uneducated young man who nevertheless has something to teach her. I loved the descriptions of the Outer Banks in the 1860s. It's hard to think of them as they are now, crowded with houses up to the water's edge in places, and read about how no one built close to the water in this time period because of the harshness of the storms. At the very beginning, Abby runs clear across Nags Head from the sound to the ocean, finding nothing but sand on the way. I'm thinking about the traffic, outlet malls and shops and restaurants, and the Wright Brothers Memorial that she would meet today. "Progress" is of course inevitable, but reading something like this makes me wonder if it's worth the cost. I liked watching Abby come into her own. The loss of her uncle, who was more truly her father than her father is, has left her reeling. She's withdrawn and bookish, and she's starting to be pushed around a little too much by her parents. She slowly and believably starts to regain her old confidence and to even make some surprising decisions for herself. I liked Benjamin a lot. He sees the world clearly through his intense…