Assassin's Quest (The Farseer Trilogy Book 3) by Robin Hobb

  My Rating: 4.7

King Shrewd is dead at the hands of his son Regal. As is Fitz—or so his enemies and friends believe. But with the help of his allies and his beast magic, he emerges from the grave, deeply scarred in body and soul. The kingdom also teeters toward ruin: Regal has plundered and abandoned the capital, while the rightful heir, Prince Verity, is lost to his mad quest—perhaps to death. Only Verity’s return—or the heir his princess carries—can save the Six Duchies. But Fitz will not wait. Driven by loss and bitter memories, he undertakes a quest: to kill Regal. The journey casts him into deep waters, as he discovers wild currents of magic within him—currents that will either drown him or make him something more than he was.

Hobb is a masterful writer. She makes her books feel light and easy to read but they actually pull you in where you care deeply for the characters as well as the world she creates. She does all of this effortlessly, or least it feels that way to the writer. Gifted! This is the last of the Fitz Trilogy until he reappears later in the series. I will miss Fitz. Next is the Mad Ship Trilogy I will definitely continue on in this series.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

My Rating: 5.0

I have had girlfriends recommending this book to me for years. I knew two things about it, neither of which were selling points: 1) It is a Western 2) It is long.  When I started it, it seemed very slow and rambling and I thought "I don't think this book is for me". My girlfriend made me promise to read 100 pages before I gave up on it.  By about page 50 I was hooked.

Wow.  I loved it.  I loved all the characters but especially Gus (my gf is going to call her next dog Gus!). This is about a cattle drive from Texas to Montana.  I 'felt' what it was like to live in those times.  This is amongst my all time favorite books. Did I say 'wow' already?  Amazing! Read it.  You won't be sorry.

Unwind by Neil Shusterman

My rating: 5.0 

Absolutely brilliant! This is the kind of book that makes you want to recommend it to everyone....including complete strangers.    In this dystopian novel,between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, parents can have their child "unwound," whereby all of the child's organs are transplanted into different donors, so life doesn't technically end. Connor is too difficult for his parents to control. Risa, is a ward of the state without enough to warrant being kept alive. And Lev is a tithe, a child conceived and raised to be unwound. This is about their intertwined fates.

Shusterman is a master at having the story unfold, wrap around you and pull you in.  So many controversial issues that impact you and yet, the story feels light and you can't wait to turn the next page.  I am so glad that I am late to the game in discovering him as I won't have to wait for the sequel. The only question I have is, why is this book only getting 5 stars?  I want to give it 10!

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Let me preface this review by saying I do not care for mystery thrillers or books about ghosts.  I also am one of the heathens that didn't care for East of Eden and, this book had quite a few similarities in my mind to the characters of East of Eden.  The fact that I loved this book and was able to get past all of those things is a testament to the expertise of the author.


This mystery thriller is about Vida Winter, a famous author, whose life story is coming to an end, and Margaret Lea, a young, unworldly, bookish girl who is a bookseller in her father's shop. Vida has a reputation of giving everybody a different version of her life, each time swearing it's the truth. Vida now swears she wants Margaret to write "the truth".

The writing is excellent and the story unfolds in such a way that I couldn't wait to read what would happen next.  Just when I would piece two things together and would think "Oh"  And then "Oh!"  And then "OH!", Margaret Lea would also put those two things together and Setterfield would lead me further in to the story to discover the next two inter-connecting pieces right before Margaret Lea did.  I realized the author was skillfully leading me into the forest as I happily followed the crumb trail.  Only at the end did Margaret Lea go "Oh"  And then "Oh!"  And then OH!", while I sat reading going "What?!?" and the author skillfully led me to the final unfolding of the story.

Setterfield does so many beautiful things that I can not do justice to her writing by trying to capture it here.  Read the book and discover it for yourself.

I can't wait for Miss Setterfield's next book which, unfortunately isn't due till July 2012.


Rating: 4.8 Excellent

Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett

I picked this book as it was in my queue.  I couldn't remember who recommended it (thank you!!!) or what it was about.  The only preconceived notion I had was that Ann Patchett had written Bel Canto and I enjoyed that immensley.  I was probably 100 pages in before I discovered that one of the "characters" name was Ann Patchett and I quickly realized I wasn't reading a beautiful work of fiction but, an even more amazingly beautiful memoir.

This is about friendship -- between Lucy Grealy and Ann Patchett -- and shares many insights into the nature of devotion. One of the best instances of this concerns a fable of ants and grasshoppers. When winter came, the hard-working ant took the fun-loving grasshopper in, each understanding their roles were immutable. It was a symbiotic relationship. Like the grasshopper, Grealy, who died of cancer at age 39 in 2002, was an untethered creature, who liked nothing more than to dance, drink and fling herself into Patchett's arms like a kitten. Patchett tells this story chronologically, in bursts of dialogue, memory and snippets of Grealy's letters, moving from the unfolding of their deep connection in graduate school and into the more turbulent waters beyond. Patchett describes her attempts to be a writer, while Grealy endured a continuous round of operations as a result of her cancer. Later, when adulthood brought success, but also heartbreak the duo continued to be intertwined, even though their link sometimes seemed to fray.

This gorgeously written chronicle unfolds as an example of how friendships can contain more passion and affection than any in the romantic realm. And although Patchett unflinchingly describes the difficulties she and Grealy faced in the years after grad school, she never loses the feeling she had the first time Grealy sprang into her arms.

Rating: 4.6 Recommend

Labor Day by Joyce Maynard

I fell in love with Joyce Maynard in reading "The Good Daughters" and couldn't help but return to her work right away.  Historically, when I fall in love with an author and read another book too quickly, it is a mistake and I quickly realize that I should space them out and not o.d. on them.  Not so with Joyce Maynard.  I can't get enough of her and this book just added to my craving.

On Labor Day weekend,13 year old Henry manages to coax his mother, who rarely goes out, into a trip to PriceMart, where they run into Frank, who intimidates them into giving him a ride. Frank, it turns out, is an escaped convict looking for a place to hide. He holds Adele and Henry hostage in their home, an experience that changes all of them forever, whether it's Frank tying Adele to the kitchen chair with her silk scarves and lovingly feeding her or teaching the awkward, un-athletic Henry how to throw a baseball. The bizarre situation encompasses Henry's budding adolescence, the awakening of his sexuality and his fear of being abandoned by his mother and Frank, who are falling in love and planning to run away together. Maynard's prose is beautiful and her characters winningly complicated, with no neat tie-ups in the end. A sometimes painful tale, but captivating and surprisingly moving.  I cried at many points of this novel.

I continue to be amazed how Maynard can make her novels light, easy to read with a "beach read" feel and yet, when you read the final page, you realize how many complex layers have been captured and that it is a much deeper novel than it felt like the whole time you were reading it.  Exquisitely wonderful.

Rating: 4.9  Fabulous!

The Good Daughters by Joyce Maynard

Two families, the Planks and the Dickersons, are mysteriously entwined in this exquisite novel that centers on decades of life at a New Hampshire farm. Youngest daughters Ruth Plank and Dana Dickerson, born on the same day in the same hospital, take turns narrating the struggles they face as children. Ruth feels a coldness from her mother; Dana is unsettled by her kooky parents constantly uprooting her and her brother Ray. Regardless, the Planks pay a yearly visit to the Dickersons no matter where they've ended up living.

Each daughter narrates a different chapter and, between the two, you get the complete picture of their lives.  This feels light but, ends up being a much deeper book on many levels.  Thoroughly enjoyable.

Rating: 4.7 Recommend

What I Was by Meg Rosoff

An unnamed man recounts his time as a disgruntled student at St. Oswald's boarding school; upon ditching an outdoor physical education class jog, he stumbles upon a mysterious fellow teen named Finn who lives alone and off the grid in a hut by the sea. The protagonist, enraptured by his newfound friend, makes it his business to spend as much time as possible with Finn, a major challenge considering school curfews and that the hut can only be accessed during low tide. Weeks go by and Finn falls ill, setting the stage for a surprising revelation that will dramatically transform both boys. Rosoff's unconventional coming-of-age tale is elegantly crafted and elegantly portrays how we often become who we need to be.

I really enjoyed this book and find myself reflecting on it.  I think it will stay with me for a long while.

Rating: 4.6

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

This begins in modern day London, slightly in the future, and as its heroine has a 15-year-old Manhattanite called Daisy. She's picked up at the airport by Edmond, her English cousin, a boy in whose life she is destined to become intricately entwined. Daisy stays at her Aunt Penn's country farmhouse for the summer with Edmond and her other cousins. They spend some idyllic weeks together--often alone with Aunt Penn away travelling in Norway. Daisy's cousins seem to have an almost telepathic bond, and Daisy is mesmerized by Edmond and soon falls in love with him. Their world changes forever when an unnamed aggressor invades England and begins a years-long occupation.  This is an easy enjoyable read and I enjoyed the quirkiness of it not being a conventional novel.

Rating: 4.1 Good

Twisted by Laurie Halse Anderson

Tyler Miller was a socially invisible nerd ("Your average piece of drywall who spent too much time playing computer games") before he sprayed some attention-getting graffiti and became a legend. Sentenced to a summer of physical labor, he enters his senior year with new muscles that attract popular Bethany Millbury, whose father is Tyler's dad's boss. On probation for his graffiti stunt, Tyler struggles to balance his consuming crush with pressure that comes from schoolwork and his explosive father.  While this was mildly entertaining it also felt very immature and was definitely no where near on par with Anderson's Wintergirls.

Rating: 3 Just OK

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

This is the story of an adolescent girl, Lia, suffering from anorexia.  Lia and Cassie had been best friends since elementary school, and each developed her own style of eating disorder that leads to disaster. Now 18, they are no longer friends. Despite their estrangement, Cassie calls Lia 33 times on the night of her death, and Lia never answers. As events play out, Lia's guilt, her need to be thin, and her fight for acceptance unravel in an almost poetic stream of consciousness in this startlingly crisp and pitch-perfect first-person narrative. The text is rich with words still legible but crossed out, the judicious use of italics, and tiny font-size refrains reflecting her distorted internal logic. All of the usual answers of specialized treatment centers, therapy, and monitoring of weight and food fail to prevail while Lia's cleverness holds sway. This is an amazing book that I inhaled in <24 hours.  It is real, haunting and I know it will stay with me.  I would caution parents to read/screen it before allowing their young adults to read it as it does broach intense heavy subject matter in a straightforward manner.  Thanks Liz for introducing me to this amazing author.  I can't wait to read her other works.

Rating: 4.9 Recommend

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

Lindsay escapes from a New Zealand jail and arrives in Bombay with little money, an assumed name, false papers, an untellable past, and no plans for the future. Fortunately, he meets Prabaker right away, a sweet, smiling man who is a street guide. He takes to Lin immediately, eventually introducing him to his home village, where they end up living for six months. He also meets Karla, an enigmatic Swiss-American woman, with whom he falls in love. Theirs is a complicated relationship, and Karla’s connections are murky from the outset.

Lin is a tough guy with a tender heart, one capable of what is judged criminal behavior, but a basically decent, intelligent man who would never intentionally hurt anyone, especially anyone he knew. He is a magnet for trouble, a soldier of fortune, a picaresque hero: the rascal who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. His story is irresistible. Shantaram brings out the humane side of the Lin who couldn’t help but fall in love with innocence of people and led his life in abandon savoring each and every tide of life in his own stride.  I have fallen in love with Prabaker and his optimistic ways and constant smile.

Do not let the fact that this is almost 1,000 pages deter you - it flies by! Consider it "more for your money" :-)  This is amongst my list of top books of all time.  A definite must read!

Rating: 5 DEFINITE Recommend

The Easter Parade by Richard Yates

Two sisters, Sarah and Emily, are the children of divorced parents. We observe the sisters over four decades, watching them grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable and stalwart, settling into an unhappy marriage. Emily is precocious and independent, struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates's classic novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished family's past, and how both finally reach for some semblance of renewal.

Yates is one of my favorite authors.  He writes so powerfully and effortlessly.  In just a sentence or two, you are captured by the characters and feel immersed in their lives.  I love how he writes with force and simplicity.  As with all of Yates books, he captures suburban middle America so well.  His books are not happy -- usually dealing with dysfunctional families, alcoholism and dissatisfaction with jobs and life.  He works capture the lives of the characters so well.  When I finished this book, I felt a dissatisfaction but, find that it is staying with me and the richness continues to unfold.

Rating: 4 Recommend

The Pleasing Hour by Lily King

A year in France brings a young American new reserves of sympathy and maturity in this poised, accomplished first novel. Nineteen-year-old Rosie, King's sensitive narrator, arrives in Paris on the first day of the school year, set for her job as the Tivot family's au pair. The other au pairs (in French usage, filles) are cosmopolitan students drawn to French culture. Rosie, however, has come here to flee her past: she became pregnant as a deliberate act of charity, giving up her baby so her infertile sister could have a child. But that decision has only heightened her omnipresent sense of loss. Her months with the Tivot family on their houseboat bring her new and difficult human connections: to the inquisitive, needy 12-year-old Lola and her younger brother, Guillaume; to their unhappy, astringent mother, Nicole; and to their father, Marc.  This is a light easy read yet contains much more than meets the eye.  Very enjoyable and well written.  As one reviewer said, "it left us feeling as we've become fluent in a foreign language".

Rating: 4.2 Recommend

Where Rivers Change Direction by Mark Spragg

This is a luscious little book that captures a by growing up in rural Wyoming.  It is both a sweet book about this wonderful little boy and a wonderful story of how every boy should be raised - with horses and in the wilderness and allowed to have solitude and discover who he is.

Mark Spragg learned early to read the stars, at 11 he was instructed to quit dreaming, and he went to work for his father on the land. "I was paid thirty dollars a month, had my own bed in the bunkhouse, and three large, plain meals each day." The ranch is a sprawling place where winter brings months of solitude and summer brings tourists from the real world--city types who want a taste of the outdoors and stare at the author and his family as if they were members of some exotic tribe: "Our guests were New Jersey gas station owners, New York congressmen, Iowa farmers, judges, actors, plumbers, Europeans who had read of Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull and came to experience the American West, the retired, the just beginning." By the age of 14, he and his younger brother are leading them on camping trips into deep woods. "No one ever asked why we had no televisions, no daily paper. They came for what my brother and I took for granted. They came to live the anachronism that we considered our normal lives."

I don't generally like auto-biographies and would never have picked this up were it not for a friend raving about it.  I lovied this book - thanks Luce!

Rating: 4.8 Recommend

The Disappeared by Kim Echlin

At first, I found the lack of quotations around the speech was offputting.  I kept reading and it wasn't long until I was lost in the sparse an beautiful prose.  This is an easy page turning read that makes you remember that wonderful mix of deep pure love and being young and not needing money to have so much enjoyment.

Canadian novelist Echlin (Elephant Winter) derives a powerful, transcendent love story from the Cambodian genocide. Anne Greves, a motherless 16-year-old student, meets a Cambodian refugee, Serey, working as a math instructor amid the heady music scene of late-1970s Montreal, and they fall irredeemably in love. Serey's family got him out of Pol Pot's Cambodia, although he is waiting to be able to return and find them; Anne's father, a successful engineer of prosthetics, does not approve of Anne's exotic, older boyfriend, and when, as her father predicted, Serey leaves her, disappearing for 11 years, Anne journeys to Phnom Penh to find him. There she comes face to face with the terrible fallout of the collapsed Khmer Rouge dictatorship. The beautifully spare narrative is daringly imaginative in the details, drawing the reader deep inside the wounded capital city. Anne's single-mindedness drives the action, although her insistence on Western values of accountability knocks hollowly against the machinery of a ruthless military state. This is a book with such beautiful prose that I frequently found myself rereading sentences.

Rating: 4.9 Highly Recommend

Peace Like A River by Leif Enger

I had a friend recommend this book to me over and over again and I definitely wasn't disappointed once I finally read it (thanks Luce!!) This is a wonderful epic tale in a book that you won't want to put down. It is impossible not to love Reuben, the young boy who narrates this novel, as well as his father, a man who is driven by his faith and love of his family.

 

However, there is far more that will captivate you as no other book has done. I am completely amazed by the superb prose and eloquent style. This is truly a gem that I couldn't wait to get back to and thoroughly enjoyed.

Rating: 5   Definite Recommend

Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese

There is a reason that I picked this book as the first book to start my recently founded Book Club.  It is spectacular and I wanted to set the bar high for all future reads.  In a magnificent, sweeping novel that moves from India to Ethiopia to an inner-city hospital in New York City over decades and generations. Sister Mary Joseph Praise, a devout young nun, leaves the south Indian state of Kerala in 1947 for a missionary post in Yemen. During the arduous sea voyage, she saves the life of an English doctor bound for Ethiopia, Thomas Stone, who becomes a key player in her destiny when they meet up again at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa. Seven years later, Sister Praise dies birthing twin boys: Shiva and Marion, the latter narrating his own and his brothers long, dramatic, biblical story set against the backdrop of political turmoil in Ethiopia, the life of the hospital compound in which they grow up and the love story of their adopted parents, both doctors at Missing. The boys become doctors as well and Vergheses weaving of the practice of medicine into the narrative is fascinating even as the story bobs and weaves with the power and coincidences of the best 19th-century novel.

Rating: 5 Definite Recommend!

The Reader by Bernard Schlink

The richness of the translation comes through in every page.  Michael Berg, 15, is on his way home from high school in post-World War II Germany when he becomes ill and is befriended by a woman who takes him home. When he recovers from hepatitis many weeks later, he dutifully takes the 40-year-old Hanna flowers in appreciation, and the two become lovers. The relationship, at first purely physical, deepens when Hanna takes an interest in the young man's education, insisting that he study hard and attend classes. He never learns very much about her, and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany's Nazi past, and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: What should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? "We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable.... Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?"

Rating: 4.7 Definite Recommend

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

A young, ostensibly thriving couple living with their two children in a prosperous Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. However, like the characters in John Updike's similarly themed Couples, the self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their inability to feel fulfilled in their relationships or careers. Frank is mired in a well-paying but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. As their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfillment are thrown into jeopardy. I will be reading more Yates in the future.

Rating: 4.8 Recommend