Immortal

Immortal by Traci L. Slatton

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


The same person who referred me to The Help and Cutting for Stone told me I HAD to read this book. She warned that I would hate it at first, but that it would get better and better. I kept waiting for it to get better, and it never did. I didn't care about the main character, Luca, a decendent from Seth who inheriets an extra-long life span. Despite living for almost 2 centuries, he never seems to learn anything. He has special powers and yet he hardly ever uses them for anything other than killing. He is the same at the beginning as he is at the end. The only redeeming quality about this boring book is that it does detail the history of Florence. That's it.



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Cutting for Stone

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I loved this book. I loved the poetry of the language, the pacing and action of the novel, the characters with whom I fell in love with--especially the father Ghosh and the narrator Marion--and the setting in Ethiopia,complete with breathtaking landscapes, the political instability at times, and the heart and soul of its people. Highly recommended!



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Operation Mincemeat

Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory by Ben MacIntyre

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I love it when nonfiction reads better than fiction. Who could make this up? Borrowed from a little-known mystery story, British spies take a body and plant false documentation on it to convince the Germans they are attacking Sardinia instead of Sicily. It's amazing the amount of work it takes to make the documents and the story believeable. It's amazing how the Germans retrieved the information, and how the British were able to tell they had opened it--(ah! the importance of an eyelash!). It's amazing the group of creative, smart people that were employed in espionage--Ian Flemming, le Carre,--and the characters--guys who went undercover as women, the brother of the inventor of ping-pong, a guy that hunted locusts in Africa after the war. It's really a fascinating story and made even more readable by MacIntyre's telling--it reads like the best of novels.



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Her Fearful Symmetry

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Audrey Niffenegger writes so eloquently of the lonliness of missing someone you love, of how much characters long to be together yet for some reason can't, that it brings me to tears every time. It is refreshing for characters who ache to be together, rather than look for ways to escape their relationships.

Niffenegger does a great job introducing us to 2 sets of twins; Elspeth, one of the eldest twins has died and she has bequethed her estate to her twin neices. Elspeth slowly realizes she is a ghost and begins to try to communicate with her neices. Niffenegger does a brilliant job fleshing out these quirky characters. Elspeth's progression as she learns of her powers as a ghost are organic and realistic. The tone of the book, set in and around Highgate Cemetary is both appropriately dark and hopeful. And the plot, with it's secrets is original without being overwrought.

But then 3/4 through the book, it's like she had to wrap things up for a deadline. After the climax, things seemed hurried and too neatly wrapped up.

My favorite part is the side story of Martin, the neighbor with OCD, who slowly takes back control of his life in order to reclaim his wife whom he loves so much.



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Waiting to Exhale

Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


We are introduced to four black women in the early '90's in Phoenix. They are in various stages of their life: Bernie just found out her wealthy husband is divorcing her to be with a white woman; Savannah is moving from Denver to Phoenix to further her career and change her scenery; Gloria is a single mom who comforts herself with food instead of lust; and Robin is a single girl who will sleep with any fine man she finds in hopes of finding Mr. Right.

And then the book meanders through their lives. They meet men. Mostly they are jerks. They break up. They meet more men. They are new, different jerks. They are part of a Black Women's Organization that is explained in way too much detail, that then does nothing. But then nothing really happens in the book. They just complain about how boring their lives are. That makes for a pretty boring book--realistic, maybe, but boring.



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Trail of Crumbs

Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home by Kim Sunée

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I feel like memoirs are tricky to critique. These are memories of a person's life--would I make the same decisions as them? Is the story of their life interesting? Do I like the person telling the story?

I will say that Sunee is a good, solid writer--full of imagry, concrete details, good dialouge. I found her story interesting and exotic--a Korean orphan abandoned in the marketplace when she is three and haunted by that abandonment ever since. She travels abroad, meets a wealthy stranger and falls in love, and becomes mistress of his house in Provence and step-mother to his daughter. They travel and eat, and she includes delicious-sounding, if esoteric recipes (most would require a trip to a gourmet grocery store).

But then she decides she isn't happy and leaves in search of happiness. Here, the book gets a little tedious with her list of men, her back and forth with her wealthy ex, her sessions with a psychiatrist. Then it neatly wraps up in one page during a trip to the jungle, where she is finally able to "forgive herself" and look forward. Why? How? But I did want to keep reading to find out what happened next.







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stuart: a life backwards

Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I think I was expecting a different type of book. Or maybe I just wasn't in the mood, but I could never fully get into the life of Stuart, a homeless man in England. Masters writes Stuart's life backwards as a sort of mystery to figure out how Sturart ended up on the streets. That was actually Stuart's idea, and the best idea of the whole book. The rest seems sort of rambling, too much about Masters trying to write the book, and in the end, what makes Stuart homeless is pretty much what you'd expect: abuse, mental problems, drugs. No great mystery.



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