Book Addiction

Second Glanceby Jodi Picoult

From the back cover -

A developer has slated an ancient Abenaki Indian burial ground for a strip mall, and now strange happenings have the inhabitants of tiny Comtosook, Vermont, talking of supernatural forces at work.  Ross Wakeman is a ghost hunter who’s never seen a ghost - all he’s searching for is something to end the pain of losing his fiancee, Aimee, in a car accident.  He tried suicide - any number of times.  Now Ross lives only for a way to connect with Aimee from beyond.  Searching the site for signs of the paranormal, Ross meets the mysterious Lia, who sparks him to life for the first time in years.  But the discoveries that await Ross are beyond anything he could dream of in this world - or the next.  Expertly entwining an powerful drama of the heart’s redemption and the disturbing history of eugenics, Picoult “proves there’s little she can’t do… with this foray into the fantastic.”

My thoughts -

I actually don’t think the above description does this book justice.  From that description, I didn’t think it sounded all that great, but I figured I’ve already read almost all of her books, I might as well try to finish them up.  I was pleasantly surprised by this novel.  Not only are the characters expertly crafted (as is typical with Picoult’s books), but the story truly fascinated me.  There’s a LOT more to this book than ghosthunting, and - SHOCKINGLY - there is NO courtroom drama to tie things up all neatly like is usually the case in her novels.  Picoult did excellent research in the area of the history of eugenics in the United States (something I’d learned about in college, but it was very interesting to see if played out in this story), and those parts kept me sucked in, wanting to know more about this particular family’s involvement with that movement.  Another great thing about this novel, which I think differentiates it from some of Picoult’s other work, is that I didn’t figure out every plot twist in advance.  There were some genuine surprises, and those surprises fit perfectly with the rest of the story.  Ok, of course there were a few times when I thought, “this really is not believable”, as is usually the case with parts of all Picoult’s books.  But overall, I loved the plot and every twist that the characters experienced.

Highly recommended, especialy for Picoult fans, and for nonfans, I’d suggest picking this, Plain Truth, or My Sister’s Keeperas your first foray into Picoult.  Personally, I’ve now read every one of her books except Songs of the Humpback Whale, which I’ve been trying to get my hands on for ages (anyone want to spare a copy?  Let me know!!).

9 stars.

Has anyone else reviewed this book?  Please share!

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

From Amazon.com -

Jacob Jankowski says: “I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other.” At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn’t always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn’t a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn’t write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.

Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob’s life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the “menagerie” and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and… he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August’s wife. Not his best idea.

The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there’s trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the “revenooers” or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. It is easy to see Marlena’s and Rosie’s pink sequins under the Big Top and to imagine their perfect choreography as they perform unbelievable stunts. The crowd loves it–and so will the reader. The ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely.

My thoughts -

Hands down, one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.  I was utterly captivated by this story, by Jacob’s story, by the amazing animals, especially Rosie the elephant, the crazy Uncle Al and the even crazier August, and the enchanting Marlena.  This is obviously a story about a circus in the midst of the Depression, but it’s more a story of a young man’s coming into his own, a young woman scraping for her independence, and the absolute and total love and loyalty an animal can show for a human being, and vice versa.  Parts of this book were difficult for me to take in, I have a VERY difficult time reading about animal cruelty, and Gruen spared nothing in her descriptions of how some of these animals were treated.  But at the same time, those descriptions were important to the story because they made the whole thing that much more realistic.  Of course I know nothing about circuis life, or the 1930’s, but I truly felt like Jacob was a real person, narrating his real memoir of his life as a young man. 

And the ending… man, what an ending.  This novel tied up so neatly I almost couldn’t believe it… but it was so beautiful that I could, because I wanted so badly for things to turn out right.  I strongly recommend reading this book, it will captivate you as it did me, you will fly through it, and you will be glad you met Jacob and heard his story, because it is such an amazing one.

10 big, bright yellow stars.

Read Trish’s review here, Julie’s review here, Care’s review here, Kristen’s review here, Natasha’s review here, Di’s review here, and Jaimie’s review here.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstressby Dai Sijie

From the back cover -

In this enchanting tale about the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening, two hapless city boys are exiled to a remote mountain village for reeducation during China’s infamous Cultural Revolution.  There they meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation.  As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour these banned works, they find transit from their grim surroundings to worlds they never imagined.

My thoughts -

I found this book to be just kind of ok.  Honestly, it really dragged for me in the beginning and if it wasn’t so short I don’t think I would have finished it.  But since it’s only 180 pages, I figured I might as well see how it ends.  I really love the concept of this book, and the description made me feel like I would just fall in love with it.  But I think perhaps it just fell flat for me - I didn’t feel close to any of the characters, and the writing style simply did not draw me in the way I need a book to do.  I finally started caring about what happened in the story when I only had about 50 pages to go, so that made it easy to finish up, but for the majority of this novel, I was pretty much underwhelmed.

5 stars.

Read Kimbofo’s review here.

Sarah by Marek Halter

From the back cover -

Sarah’s story begins in the cradle of civilization:  the Sumerian city-state of Ur, a land of desert heat, towering gardens, and immense wealth.  The daughter of a powerful lord, Sarah balks at the marriage her father has planned for her.  On her wedding night, she impulsively flees to the vast, empty marshes outside the city walls, where she meets a young man named Abram, son of a tribe of outsiders.  Drawn to this exotic stranger, Sarah spends one night with him and reluctantly returns to her father’s house.  But on her return, she secretly drinks a poisonous potion that will make her barren and thus unfit for marriage.

Many years later, Abram returns to Ur and discovers that the lost, rebellious girl from the marsh has been transformed into a splendid woman - the high priestess of the goddess Ishtar.  But Sarah gives up her exalted life to join Abram’s tribe and follow the one true God, an invisible deity who speaks only to Abram.  It is then that her journey truly begins.

From the great ziggurat of Ishtar to the fertile valleys of Canaan to the bedchamber of the mighty Pharaoh himself, Sarah’s story reveals an ancient world of beauty, intrigue, and miracles.

My thoughts -

This book was actually an amazon.com recommendation after I had The Red Tenton my wishlist, and after reading The Red Tent (and loving it), I thought I would really enjoy a story that was supposed to be similar.  This book, however, just does not compare.  The writing is not as good, the characters are not as fleshed-out, and the story isn’t nearly as captivating.  Sarah is not a bad book, it’s mildly entertaining, quick and easy reading, and I think a lot of people would enjoy it.  It just wasn’t anything great.  Especially when I had my hopes up pretty high for another amazingly interesting Bible retelling, I definitely did not get what I expected.  Still decent, but I will not be reading the other two books in this trilogy.

Rating - 6.5/10.

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

From the back cover -

Ten year old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend, Ellen Rosen, often think about the way life was before the war.  It’s now 1943 and their life in Copenhagen is filled with school, food shortages, and the Nazi soldiers marching in thier town.  The Nazis won’t stop.  The Jews of Denmark are being “relocated” so Ellen moves in with the Johansens and pretends to be part of the family.  Then Annemarie is asked to go on a dangerous mission.  Somehow she must find the strength and courage to save her best friend’s life.  There is no turning back.

My thoughts -

I read this book for purely sentimental reasons.  I LOVED it when I was a little kid, and when I saw someone reviewed it a while back I decided to mooch it and reread.  Obviously, it lived up to my every expectation because I practically had the entire story memorized anyway.  But it was a fun read, curled up in bed one night I read it in one sitting and I’m glad I revisited it.  I’d definitely recommend this book to kids and adults (like I said in another post about kids books, I’m terrible with knowing what books are good for what ages, so when I say “kids” I’m not totally sure what I mean by that).

Rating - 10/10

Cane River by Lalita Tademy

From amazon.com:

Lalita Tademy’s riveting family saga chronicles four generations of women born into slavery along the Cane River in Louisiana. It is also a tale about the blurring of racial boundaries: great-grandmother Elisabeth notices an unmistakable “bleaching of the line” as first her daughter Suzette, then her granddaughter Philomene, and finally her great-granddaughter Emily choose (or are forcibly persuaded) to bear the illegitimate offspring of the area’s white French planters. In many cases these children are loved by their fathers, and their paternity is widely acknowledged. However, neither state law nor local custom allows them to inherit wealth or property, a fact that gives Cane River much of its narrative drive.

The author makes it clear exactly where these prohibitions came from. Plantation society was rigidly hierarchical, after all, particularly on the heels of the Civil War and the economic hardships that came with Reconstruction. The only permissible path upward for hard-working, ambitious African Americans was indirect. A meteoric rise, or too obvious an appearance of prosperity, would be swiftly punished. To enable the slow but steady advance of their clan, the black women of Cane River plot, plead, deceive, and manipulate their way through history, extracting crucial gifts of money and property along the way. In the wake of a visit from the 1880 census taker, the aged Elisabeth reflects on how far they had come.

When the census taker looked at them, he saw colored first, asking questions like single or married, trying to introduce shame where there was none. He took what he saw and foolishly put those things down on a list for others to study. Could he even understand the pride in being able to say that Emily could read and write? They could ask whatever they wanted, but what he should have been marking in the book was family, and landholder, and educated, each generation gathering momentum, adding something special to the brew.

In her introduction, Tademy explains that as a young woman, she failed to appreciate the love and reverence with which her mother and her four uncles spoke of their lively Grandma ‘Tite (short for “Mademoiselle Petite”). She resented her great-grandmother’s skin-color biases, which were as much a part of Tademy’s memory as were her great-grandmother’s trademark dance moves. But the old stories haunted the author, and armed with a couple of pages of history compiled by a distant Louisiana cousin, she began to piece together a genealogy. The result? Tademy eventually left her position as vice president of a Fortune 500 company and set to work on Cane River, in which she has deftly and movingly reconstructed the world of her ancestors.

My thoughts:

Typically, I do not enjoy family saga type stories.  Every one I have read just seemed too long and drawn out, I never end up liking the characters, and it seems like everyone I pick up I fail to enjoy the writing style of the author as well (two good examples - Fall on  Your Knees and We Were the Mulvaneys).  And honestly, this book fell into all those categories too.  It simply was not my type of book.  I tried to like it, and some parts I breezed through, finding myself caring about the characters and curious about what would happen to them, but generally I was not overly impressed with it.  The cool thing is, however, that I didn’t realize until midway through the book that Tademy wrote this about her actualfamily lineage.  The last third of the book is the story of Tademy’s great grandmother.  When I understood the painstaking work that must have gone into her research about her own family to put the book together, I appreciated Tademy a lot more.  I still didn’t love the book, but I think it’s pretty amazing how much work went into it (and probably crazy emotions, can you imagine learning actual facts about ancestors that were slaves?).  I do think this book was very good, it just was not my cup of tea personally.

Rating: 7 out of 10.

Read Eva’s review here.