About the Book:

Sagesse LaBasse, the teenage protagonist of Claire Messud’s The Last Life, lives in a fragile world held together by the secrets of its past. Her family owns the Hotel Bellevue, a summer retreat for the well-to-do, set on the cliffs of southern France; the view is back toward Algeria, which her paternal grandparents fled during its struggle for independence from France. As her grandmother laments, “Every morning, I wake up and look out my window at the Mediterranean sea, vast and creeping, and I smell the pines and the heat on the breeze, rising up the clifftop, and I’m in Algiers again. I live, still, in my heart, in Algeria.”

The loss of their homeland is always present to the LaBasses, and the consequent search for identity both reflects and compounds other difficulties. Sagesse’s father (“fleshy, ingratiating, explosive”) languishes under his own father’s control, and is often unfaithful to Sagesse’s mother, an American who tries to pass as French. Meanwhile, their young son, Etienne, is so severely mentally and physically impaired that his birth is likened to “the clanging of their prison door.” Sagesse’s grandmother looks on with cool resignation, and her grandfather, the family’s hot-headed patriarch, will let no one rest. When, late one night, the old man fires his rifle into a group of children swimming at the hotel’s pool, no one is seriously injured, but the family’s livelihood is put at risk, and long-simmering resentments find an outlet.

Sagesse is the perfect narrator for this fractured situation. She is neither French, nor American; not a girl, yet not quite a woman. Her grandfather’s rash act causes her to lose her friends at school, and she is forced to “seek out the very pot-smokers I had…readily disparaged little over a month before.” These new friends, upon realizing her family’s past (having been French colonists, they are suspected of being racists, and members of the National Front) and relative wealth, also abandon her. With guests trickling away from the hotel, and tensions rising within the LaBasse family, Sagesse tries to understand what remains, and what place there might be for her.

Fortunately, while her life may be painful, she never finds it dull. Sagesse’s language is rich and evocative, full of descriptive power. Here, for example, she witnesses the market: “There were vegetable men and fruit women and stalls selling both, blushing mounds of peaches alongside plump and purple eggplants…pale, splayed organs of fennel pressing their ridged tubes and feathered ends up against the sugar-speckled, wrinkled carcasses of North African dates…the fishmongers sold their bullet-eyed, silver-skinned, slippery catch, blood-streaked fillets and orbed, scored steaks, milky scallops and encrusted oysters….” And here, a painting of the Bay of Algiers: “its apron of azure sea, erratically white-capped, broken by the sandstone finger of the port…the white rise of the city, a thousand precise terraces and roofs climbing into the sunlit sky, the European curlicues and the higgledy-piggledy casbah, all their outlines drawn as if with a single hair, interspersed with delicate little palms and cypresses and other trees of variegated greens, and with broad, brown avenues like branches.”

A brilliant, complex world is formed by the accretion of these images, and they are juxtaposed and spur each other seamlessly, multiplying atmosphere and complicating plot lines. While most of the novel’s events take place around 1990, Sagesse tells of them from a time almost a decade later (when she is a graduate student of the “history of ideas” at Columbia). This frame, constructed of occasional asides and short passages, allows a fluidity where revelations from the past and future cause momentum to shift and whirl — the dead rise, their movements sharper and words more portentous with the reader’s knowledge of coming tragedy. This later perspective also enables Sagesse to add deft hints and wise commentary. Looking back on herself, for instance, she says, “Children do not have words to ask and so do not imagine asking; not asking and not imagining, they eradicate distance: they take for granted that everything, someday, will be understood.”

Book Review:  ★★★★★★

This is a book that I am still on the fence about.  I can’t really claim to have loved it or hated it.  For some reason, I just felt like this book was never really going any where — and I kept wondering when it was going to get to the point.  It is a strange mix of an interesting story, and an impassive protagonist.  It left me frustrated and wanting more, while at the same time appreciating the story telling skills of Ms. Messud.

I think there were two major problems that really rolled into one major issue for me in this book.  The protagonist, Sagesse, (Literally translated — wisdom), is a young teenage girl standing in the middle of two vastly different cultures, and a family tree that contains even more national influences than that.  With her family origins coming from the United States, France, Algeria, and growing up on the Mediterranean, Sagesse just doesn’t seem to fit in any where.  But what made it hard for me to make a connection with this character was the fact that she didn’t seem to have any emotions about anything.  She just seemed to be very aloof, and impersonal.  The choice of language that Sagesse uses at times through out the book seemed to magnify that draw back.  At times in this book I found myself wondering if this was a young woman that felt anything at all — which made it hard for me, as a reader, to get involved in the story.  I just couldn’t get invested with the characters as a whole.  This is especially apparent in what Sagesse has to go through, with all the trauma, loss, and personal struggle to find a place to belong, and yet no emotional reaction to anything.

I did enjoy the basic story.  It had a lot of elements that really made for an interesting background.  And the vast differences of the various nationalities, and the struggles of Sagesse, as a teenager, proved to be very interesting for a story line.  Unfortunately this strength couldn’t overcome the things about the book that kept frustrating me.

For more information about this book, and its author be sure to visit the following websites:

Salon Book Review

The New York Times Book Review

New York State Writers Institute Biography

When you buy a product (not just books – any product), via one of my links, The Book Worm’s Library earns income from the sale and as always, it’s much appreciated as all affiliate income is used to support the blog by contributing to giveaways, postage, travel, and attending book industry related events. We appreciate all those that help to support our blog, and have provided links below for the direct links to this book.

Originally posted 2012-03-29 14:53:31. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

About the Book:

“Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Téa Obreht, the youngest of The New Yorker’s twenty best American fiction writers under forty, has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation.

In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards. Secrets hidden in the landscape itself.

But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. After telling her grandmother that he was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there alone. A famed physician, her grandfather must have known that he was too ill to travel. Why he left home becomes a riddle Natalia is compelled to unravel.

Grief struck and searching for clues to her grandfather’s final state of mind, she turns to the stories he told her when she was a child. On their weeklytrips to the zoo he would read to her from a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which he carried with him everywhere; later, he told her stories of his own encounters over many years with “the deathless man,” a vagabond who claimed to be immortal and appeared never to age. But the most extraordinary story of all is the one her grandfather never told her, the one Natalia must discover for herself. One winter during the Second World War, his childhood village was snowbound, cut off even from the encroaching German invaders but haunted by another, fierce presence: a tiger who comes ever closer under cover of darkness. “These stories,” Natalia comes to understand, “run like secret rivers through all the other stories” of her grandfather’s life. And it is ultimately within these rich, luminous narratives that she will find the answer she is looking for.”

About the Book:  ★★★★★★

Some books — as crazy as it sounds — a reader will fall in love with even before opening the book.  This book is one of them.  (Ok — I will admit it.  I love tigers.  I have always been fascinated with them.)  And once I started reading the book, I was not disappointed. 

The setting was the only part of the book that I found a little frustrating.  And it wasn’t in a bad way really.  It was just that sometimes I felt like it wasn’t really grounded in a tangible place.  I felt like I should have known where it was — but then something would happen and I would find myself confused again about the location.  That is not to say that this is necessarily a bad thing in this story.  This sense of slight confusion about time and place actually added an extra depth to the story for some reason.  It helped the reader to feel some of the confusion of this war torn country, and the discomfort of feeling that the world the characters inhabited was constantly shifting, and nothing was what it really appeared to be.  This helped add credibility to the slightly mystical quality of the story line — and in the end it actually worked.

The characters, however, were absolutely captivating.  I found myself constantly wanting to know more about each of the characters, and their history.  The story is developed in such a way that only pieces of the story are developed at a time, and they alternate between characters throughout the book.  So the only thing you become aware of right from the beginning is the present state of the Tiger, the Tiger’s Wife, and the three main characters — the Deathless Man, and a Natalia, and her grandfather.  The reader then follows the characters through the back stories that brought the characters to the present point in time throughout the remainder of the book. 

The writing and story development are both very effective in this book, and combined with the strong characters and the intriguing setting this book is a wonderful read.  Added to these is the mystery of the subtle ways in how these characters lives come together and as a reader I found that this book was one that was hard to put down.

For more information about this book, and its author be sure to visit the following websites:

Tea Obreht Website

LA Times Book Review

Author Interview

The Cornell Daily Sun Interview

When you buy a product (not just books – any product), via one of my links, The Book Worm’s Library earns income from the sale and as always, it’s much appreciated as all affiliate income is used to support the blog by contributing to giveaways, postage, travel, and attending book industry related events. We appreciate all those that help to support our blog, and have provided links below for the direct links to this book.

Originally posted 2011-11-02 10:11:23. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

About the Book:

“We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life-daily and hourly. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

When Man’s Search for Meaning was first published in 1959, it was hailed by Carl Rogers as “one of the outstanding contributions to psychological thought in the last fifty years.” Now, more than forty years and 4 million copies later, this tribute to hope in the face of unimaginable loss has emerged as a true classic. Man’s Search for Meaning—at once a memoir, a self-help book, and a psychology manual-is the story of psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s struggle for survival during his three years in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Yet rather than “a tale concerned with the great horrors,” Frankl focuses in on the “hard fight for existence” waged by “the great army of unknown and unrecorded.”

Viktor Frankl’s training as a psychiatrist allowed him a remarkable perspective on the psychology of survival. In these inspired pages, he asserts that the “the will to meaning” is the basic motivation for human life. This simple and yet profound statement became the basis of his psychological theory, logotherapy, and forever changed the way we understand our humanity in the face of suffering. As Nietzsche put it, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Frankl’s seminal work offers us all an avenue to greater meaning and purpose in our own lives-a way to transcend suffering and find significance in the act of living.”

Book Review:  ★★★★★★

This is another book from the World War II/Holocaust theme literature.  Written by a survivor of more than one of the concentration camps of Nazi, Germany, overall Frankl has a very good insight on the survival instinct of humans.  This authority is due to the three years he spent surviving camps that were known to kill most people within 6 months.  At least for those that weren’t sent immediately to the gas chambers.  Frankl’s insights into the mind set of surviving is a powerful statement on not only what goes into surviving harrowing experiences — but gives us a look into how those that survived nightmares even beyond the imagining of men, and how they have the ability to overcome.  

This is a book that isn’t the typical harrowing trip through the brutality of the concentration camps.  In fact, the thing that sets this book apart from others is that it focuses on the ability to survive in the midst of unmitigated brutality.  Frankl gives the reader more than an eyewitness account of life in a concentration camp.  The primary focus of this book is more of the psychological effects of the concentration camp environment, and how it played into destroying its victims.  And, as a Psychiatrist, Frankl also looks into how survivors managed to beat the Nazi’s in the quest to destroy.  Frankl submits that the act of survival was not in the physical body — but rather in the psyche of the victims. 

The last half of the book focuses on the psychological theory that he developed as a result of his experiences, and what he went on to teach as one of the modern approaches to the ability to survive.  Frankl lost me a little bit through that point.  However — the story behind how he developed this theory is not only powerful, but compelling.  The concept that those who survived did so through their own psychological determination to do so.  He then goes on to demonstrate how those who succumbed to the brutality of the world around them did so at such a time when they sacrificed their personal identity, and with it the personal desire, and commitment to live.  The point at which a person abdicates in identity of self to the group or whole, and identifies with an image thrust upon them by their captors is the moment that death becomes a certainty.  Frankl’s description of how he came came to understand the psychological impact for brutality is not only engrossing, but insightful.

This is a powerful book about the struggle of life and death.  Frankl’s perspective is not only powerful, but unique in all the books that exist in this genre.  He gives us a significant insight into the power of the identity of self, and how much it plays into not only who we are, but how we survive times of great stress, abuse, challenge, and trauma.  This is a book that I consider one of the must read classifications, because of the insight it has to offer on people, and how truly complex they can be.

For more information about this book, and its author be sure to visit the following websites:

Viktor Frankl Society

Man’s Search For Meaning

Author’s Obituary

Study Guide

When you buy a product (not just books – any product), via one of my links, The Book Worm’s Library earns income from the sale and as always, it’s much appreciated as all affiliate income is used to support the blog by contributing to giveaways, postage, travel, and attending book industry related events. We appreciate all those that help to support our blog, and have provided links below for the direct links to this book.

Abe Books

Originally posted 2011-08-15 06:00:14. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

About the Book:

It is 2008 and Carrie McClelland can’t hit the right note for her next novel, but an unplanned detour in Scotland, and a stop at the castle that inspired Count Dracula, sets her on a different path; a path that took her back in time exactly 300 years, to that same castle, and to a rebellion doomed to failure. Alternating between the contemporary setting and the past, The Winter Sea takes us at every turn into little known worlds; historical footnotes writ large, a history of Scotland and the Jacobite rebellion of 1708 and the possibility of genetic memory. Historical fiction at its best and Susanna Kearsley at hers, The Winter Sea evokes the writing of Thomas Raddall, Daphne Du Maurier, and Mary Stewart.

Book Review:  ★★★★★★

Generally speaking, I am not a sad ending type of person.  I have always felt that life has enough sad endings, without our help in the matter.  So, as I started to get into this book — after several false starts — and I started to see the direction this was going, I really had to talk myself into finishing the book.  And I am so glad I did!  Mainly because all of my opinions about this book were formed in the last quarter of the book.  And that is not to say the first three quarters were bad.  This was actually an enjoyable read — and Kearsley is a very talented author. 

Simply put, I am amazed at Kearsley’s ability to get a reader to hate and love the same book with equal amounts of passion for both responses.  And it is a testament to her writing abilities that she can keep a reader through all of those varied responses, and have them coming out the other side glad they read the book.  Strictly speaking, Kearsley actually develops two different story lines throughout this book.  Since the main character, Carrie McClelland is an author, struggling to write her own “historical fiction” account of one of her ancestors — she comes away finding that sometimes history and fiction have a lot more in common than we might think.  And it is these two very different, and yet disturbingly similar stories that hold the plot together.  Written in alternating chapters, I found that it was the shifting back and forth that was the only part of this book that really frustrated me.  But not in a bad way.  I simply found that just as I was getting excited to find out how one would develop — the story would shift back to the other story — leaving me continuously hanging until the very end.  (Which is not really a bad thing as far as reading a good book goes.)

A couple of the characters, such as Graham could have been developed a little bit better.  He seemed to loose a little bit of depth in the shadow of the other strongly built characters who dominate this story.  And Colonel Moran suffered from much the same dilemma.  But over all the other characters of the book were well established and fun to get lost in their lives.  Combine that with the fun setting and historical background of Scotland and you have the makings of an ideal story for any lover of history, romance, political struggles, and the fickle tides of chance. 

I particularly loved the character of Carrie Mclelland, and her straight forward approach to life.  I was really able to identify with her no nonsense approach.  She knows what she wants out of life, and she isn’t afraid to go after it.  She doesn’t believe in playing games, and prefers to meet the challenges of life with a very real commitment to overcoming the challenges in front of her.  For some reason I was just really able to identify with her. 

I also really loved the Scottish setting.  This could have been simply the gift of Kersley in presenting the mystical and sometimes haunting  elements that make up this proud and strong people.  Or it could be my own family history lore coming to the front.  But either way I loved how this setting rings with both truth and the sense that the reader has actually stepped into this political quagmire that made up the times of the story. 

The love story part of this book is not really overwhelming, and in fact plays well into the story as a whole.  And while the events of the time take center stage — the romance backdrop is essential to the continuity and movement of the story.  This may be because the male counterparts to the heroins were not as fully developed as I usually like — so the romance portion of the story couldn’t develop as fully as it does in some other books I have read.   But overall, I actually found that a story that plays down the romance, and isn’t being written simply for the sex scenes, but rather as a furtherance of the story as a whole is more my preference.

For more information about this book, and its author be sure to visit the following websites. 

Susanna Kearsley Website

Interview with the Author

Dear Author Book Review

Blogging For a Good Book Book Review

When you buy a product (not just books – any product), via one of my links, The Book Worm’s Library earns income from the sale and as always, it’s much appreciated as all affiliate income is used to support the blog by contributing to giveaways, postage, travel, and attending book industry related events. We appreciate all those that help to support our blog, and have provided links below for the direct links to this book.

Originally posted 2011-12-20 08:05:41. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

About the Book:

Haunting and harrowing, as beautiful as it is disturbing, The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian monastery as World War II ends. The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning. In lyrical prose informed by a poetic consciousness, Michael Ondaatje weaves these characters together, pulls them tight, then unravels the threads with unsettling acumen.

A book that binds readers of great literature, The English Patient garnered the Booker Prize for author Ondaatje. The poet and novelist has also written In the Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; two collections of poems, The Cinnamon Peeler and There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do; and a memoir, Running in the Family.

Book Review:  ★★★★★★

This is a book that just didn’t quite do it for me.  I know that there was a lot of hype surrounding the st0ry — particularly when the movie came out.  And, in all honesty, I never saw the movie.  But the book just didn’t seem to work for me some how.  I generally don’t mind unreliable characters, if they are done well — and I have always loved historical fiction.  But this was just a bad combination of several things that just drove me nuts from beginning to end. 

The characters were the first thing that stood out as something that just didn’t quite mesh.  As I’ve already stated — I generally don’t mind unreliable characters.  In fact, I find that when they are done right they can add a certain mystery, depth and dimension to a story that you wouldn’t have otherwise.  After all — as a reader you are never really sure about what they are saying, remembering, or know.  But when you end up with an entire novel with ALL unreliable characters — and a limited character line up to begin with — the element of mystery turns into a down right quagmire of uncertainty — and even confusion.  In the end — Kip was the only character that gave the story any cohesion and for the story to end the way it did, especially in relation to him just frustrated me.

Another thing that really kept me wondering was the disconnected feeling of the story, itself.  There was no real flow throughout the story.  It kept shifting in time, place, and storyline, to the point where I was really uncertain of what was going on at times.  And while in the end they all came back together, more or less — it made for a particularly hard read.  For this reason, this is not a story that I would recommend that you could sit down and do a fast read through over a weekend. 

I did love the setting in this one.  The isolation of this nearly destroyed church in the way back hills of Italy really came to life, and it gave the feel of being in the wake of a war — as they country-side is left in devastated ruin.  But even this, due to the way the story was developed, has a certain disconnect from the raging events that are going on outside the peripheral of the story line.  The constant references to events that happened during the war remind the reader that this is a novel set during World War II — but you still come away not really sure that there was really a war raging in the midst of this almost idyllic setting.  It is this quality of the book that gives it a feeling of almost isolated removal from reality as a whole.  And in the end, I just found that this book left me wanting more, and less — in more ways than one.

For more information about this book and its author — be sure to visit the following websites:

Reading Group Guide

Michael Ondaatje Biography

Author Interview

When you buy a product (not just books – any product), via one of my links, The Book Worm’s Library earns income from the sale and as always, it’s much appreciated as all affiliate income is used to support the blog by contributing to giveaways, postage, travel, and attending book industry related events. We appreciate all those that help to support our blog, and have provided links below for the direct links to this book.

Originally posted 2011-10-03 06:44:33. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

About the Book:

“On a winter night in 1964, Dr. David Henry is forced by a blizzard to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy. Yet when his daughter is born, he sees immediately that she has Down’s Syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split-second decision that will alter all of their lives forever. He asks his nurse to take the baby away to an institution and never to reveal the secret. But Caroline, the nurse, cannot leave the infant. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child herself. So begins this story that unfolds over a quarter of a century – in which these two families, ignorant of each other, are yet bound by the fateful decision made that long-ago winter night. Norah Henry, who knows only that her daughter died at birth, remains inconsolable; her grief weighs heavily on their marriage. And Paul, their son, raises himself as best he can, in a house grown cold with mourning. Meanwhile, Phoebe, the lost daughter, grows from a sunny child to a vibrant young woman whose mother loves her as fiercely as if she were her own.” The Memory Keeper’s Daughter articulates a silent fear close to the heart of every mother: What would happen if you lost your child, and she grew up without you?

Book Review:  ★★★★★★

The writing in this book left me feeling like  Ms. Edwards had a great idea for a story — but didn’t get much farther than the framework of a book, and then called it good. I kept waiting for the story to go deeper, and delve into the emotional, mental, and physical substance that a story like this should have promised — and I came away feeling like the surface had only been scratched.

It is the story of a young couple, expecting their first child.  On the night of one of the worst storms of history, they find themselves isolated from the city, and unable to reach the hospital.  So the father, a doctor by profession, ends up delivering the baby himself.  The surprise is in the fact that there are twins, and the mother has a very traumatic birth.  When one of the twins is born with Downs syndrome, Mr. Henry — the father has the nurse who is assisting take the child away, and the mother spends the rest of the book feeling as if she has lost a piece of herself, even though she is never told of the existence of this removed child.

Granted this book does explore the ramifications of coming to terms with the loss of a child — although the Ms. Henry doesn’t realize that is what she is trying to do.  And the despair, guilt, mourning, and depression that haunt this home, and family is, at times almost palpable.  Or at least in my mind I could envision it that way.  But I felt like the actual presentation of that feeling was shallow at best — and left me wondering where the rest of the story had gone.  I mean, this trauma ultimately tears apart a family, as both parents spend the rest of their lives trying to come to terms with their grief.  And Mr. Henry can never get past his guilt.  With all of the secrets, and the attempts of trying to go on living, while the family is crumbling around you.  This is a book that I was anticipating would be all about shattered trust, relationships, and relationships that should have been and never were.  And at face value it was — but I just didn’t feel like Ms. Edwards heart was completely into telling this story.

I really did enjoy the concept of the story — I just wish it had been more fully developed.  I came away feeling like the story had barely just begun, when it ended, and the characters were so two dimensional that I never connected with them.  This is a book that I would personally give a pass t0, and for me — I am still waiting for the ending.

For more information about this book, and its author — be sure to visit the following websites:

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter Website

Author Interview

When you buy a product (not just books – any product), via one of my links, The Book Worm’s Library earns income from the sale and as always, it’s much appreciated as all affiliate income is used to support the blog by contributing to giveaways, postage, travel, and attending book industry related events. We appreciate all those that help to support our blog, and have provided links below for the direct links to this book.

AbeBooks.com

Barnes and Noble

Originally posted 2010-12-03 13:12:53. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

About the Book:

The Visible World is an evocative, powerfully romantic novel about a son’s attempt to understand his mother’s past, a search that leads him to a tragic love affair and the heroic story of the assassination of a high-ranking Nazi by the Czech resistance.
The narrator of The Visible World, the American-born son of Czech immigrants living in New York, grows up in an atmosphere haunted by fragments of a past he cannot understand. At the heart of that past is his mother, Ivana, a spontaneous, passionate woman drifting ever closer to despair. As an adult, the narrator travels to Prague, hoping to learn about a love affair between his then young mother and a member of the resistance named Tomas, an affair whose untimely end, he senses, lay behind Ivana’s unhappiness. Ultimately unable to complete his knowledge of the past, he imagines the two lovers as participants in one of the more dramatic (and true) moments of the war, and through the deeply romantic story he tells, creates not only the ending of their story but the beginning of his own.

The Visible World is a literary page-turner and an immensely moving novel about the vagaries of love and our need to make sense of life through the telling of stories.

Book Review:  ★★★★★★

This is one of those books that I’m not quite sure what to make of.  The ending was very interesting, the beginning was bizarre, and the middle didn’t quite bridge the disparity between the two.  Coming away from it I felt that it gave a pretty impressive demonstration of the difficulties that the generation following World War II had, in coming of age amidst secrets, and broken parents.  However, I am not sure the story developed far enough to adequately explain how this state of being came to be. 

On one level it is a love story — and a pretty typical one at that.  Man and woman fall in love, but the woman meets another man and finds they are destined to become star crossed lovers.  It seems to be pretty straight forward.  Very little in the way of twists — even with it set in the middle of World War II torn Czechoslovakia.  I just felt like the predictability of this book was very high.

I also struggled with the character development.  Ironically, it is Tomas — her lover that ends up being the most fully developed through all of this.  And as the story winds down, his death doesn’t play out the way you are expecting from the introduction.  Also, he is the one that seems to attach himself to the reader.  While Ivana, and her eventual husband hang almost as ghosts, haunting the perimeter of this story, Thomas becomes a powerful entity in the book, who faces extreme moral dilemmas. 

I also struggled with the flow of this story.  I found that at times it would start a chapter in a place, and while reading I suddenly realized I wasn’t sure how I came to be at this particular place in the novel.  It just had a confusing, and even disorienting rhythm to the general construction of the story. 

But on another level,  it is the combination of these two traits, which separate appear to be pretty significant weaknesses of the story, but in tandem make a very strong foundation for the overall development.  The haunting nature of the narrator’s parents adds to the mystery of the book in a much stronger way than the outright telling of the story.  The shade like quality of the characters gives the book depth and dimension in a way that a full, in-depth story telling approach wouldn’t. 

For more information about this book, and its author be sure to visit the following websites:

The New York Times Book Review

Reader’s Guide

Liberreview Book Review

Bianca’s Book Blog Book Review

When you buy a product (not just books – any product), via one of my links, The Book Worm’s Library earns income from the sale and as always, it’s much appreciated as all affiliate income is used to support the blog by contributing to giveaways, postage, travel, and attending book industry related events. We appreciate all those that help to support our blog, and have provided links below for the direct links to this book.

Originally posted 2012-04-12 06:51:04. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

About the Book:

To most people, Folly Beach, South Carolina, is simply the last barrier island before the Atlantic. To some, it’s a sanctuary, which is why Janie Hamilton’s mother encourages her to buy the local book store, Folly’s Finds, hoping it will distract Janie from the loss of her husband in Afghanistan.

Janie is at first resistant, but intrigued after finding love letters and an image of a beautiful bottle tree in a box of used books from Folly’s Finds, and decides to take the plunge. The store’s seller insists on one condition: Janie must allow Lulu, the late owner’s elderly sister, to continue selling her bottle trees from its back yard. Historically, bottle trees were brought by African slaves to the American South, and Janie had grown up with one in her backyard, and it has always been a symbol of refuge to her.

Janie generally ignores Lulu as she sifts through the love letters, wanting to learn more. But the more she discovers of the letters’ authors, the closer she feels to Lulu. As details of a possible murder and a mysterious disappearance during World War II are revealed, the two women discover that circumstances beyond their control, sixty years apart, have brought them together, here on Folly Beach. And it is here that their war-ravaged hearts can find hope for a second chance…

Book Review:  ★★★★★★

This is another fantastic read.  It is a book that rocketed to my favorites list in the first couple of chapters, and remained their long after I had finished reading.  White has proven herself an adept author when it comes to handling multiple story lines, and a broad variety of characters — and being able to pull them all together in an amazingly fascinating whole.  This story spans two wars, and a wide expanse of mysteries that have arisen out of those wars.  Combined with that is an unusual cast of characters with very unusual interests, a small town, a small town bookstore, and even a reference to an unexplained historical mystery of a sunken World War II, German U-Boat, and the an intriguing look at the potential espionage activities during that infamous war.

The characters and setting of this book come together to create a story with a distinct personality, and resonance.  This is not a book that is simply read as a passing, light read.  The setting, a small, Southern town, isolated on an island is a distinct character presence all its own.  And White does a great job of creating not only the unique feel of a small, Southern town, but also the mystical, almost other world feel that exists in these towns with history.  This story incorporates the feel of the Southern setting with the eccentricities of the small town people to build a readable story that covers three generations, and fifty years worth of canvas.  This setting gives a great depth, and even a distinct dimension to this story that draws the reader in and holds their attention.

Another interesting twist that was incorporated into this story was a little known history of a German U-boat sunk less than thirty miles of the American East Coast.  When I first came across this history I was reading Shadow Divers — the diver’s account of their finding and identifying of this missing submarine.  This crazy story is one that has proved to be one of the last mysteries of the World War II era — as it is not commonly known that there was an enemy submarine that ever got close to the American continent, following the attack on Pearl Harbor.  White has done a wonderful story in pulling this little known historical mystery into her own work, and building a story that proves to be both fascinating for the questions it raises, as well as giving readers a wonderful book to get engrossed in.

White has demonstrated a great gift for not only writing a great story about the Southern states — but she also manages to build multiple mystery story lines within an all encompassing, cohesive whole.  Her characters are unique, with fun quirks and idiosyncrasies that give the reader a great amount depth to get engrossed in.  The mysteries are all great stories in and of themselves — however, they all make an overall story that is well thought out, and crafted with the reader’s enjoyment in mind.

For more information on this book, and about this author be sure to visit the following websites:

Karen White Website

Linus’ s Blanket Book Review

Book Addiction Book Review

When you buy a product (not just books – any product), via one of my links, The Book Worm’s Library earns income from the sale and as always, it’s much appreciated as all affiliate income is used to support the blog by contributing to giveaways, postage, travel, and attending book industry related events. We appreciate all those that help to support our blog, and have provided links below for the direct links to this book.

Abe Books

Barnes and Noble

Originally posted 2011-05-17 06:00:37. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

About the Book:

In his black-walled fortress at Inuyama, the murderous warlord, Iida Sadamu, surveys his famous nightingale floor. Constructed with exquisite skill, it sings at the tread of each human foot. No assassin can cross it unheard.

Brought up in a remote mountain village among the Hidden, a reclusive and spiritual people, Takeo has learned only the ways of peace. Why, then, does he possess the deadly skills that make him so valuable to the sinister Tribe? These supernatural powers will lead him to his violent destiny within the walls of Inuyama – and to an impossible longing for a girl who can never be his. His journey is one of revenge and treachery, honor and loyalty, beauty and magic, and the passion of first love.

About the Book:  ★★★★★★

This book proved to be a real unexpected read, that is well worth the time.  Looking for something that was a break for all the textbooks I am currently having to read, as well as the reading requirements for my English Literature classes — I was looking for something that was more story, and less analysis and study.  So I picked this one up because it appeared to be as far away from the academic world as possible.  However, I wasn’t quite prepare to find another favorite book.

The Japanese culture is one that is rich, and full of fascinating nuances that provide an excellent backdrop for stories.  Their historical background gives us an interesting insight into the importance of honor, and respect that are such strong elements of this nation’s people.   Stories set in the Japanese culture provide insight into how these characteristics developed, as well as help us understand how the Samurai, and the various factions in the social structure developed, and manifested much of their influences over time.

This book also has excellent character development.  Takeo provides an interesting look into the divided nature of people — as he struggles to merge his divergent lives into one whole.  Torn between loyalties, and caught in a political power struggle, with abilities that are inherent to his biological nature, and a mental dedication to the commitments he has made, Takeo is a great look at the complexity of the human psyche.

Takeo also gives us a great look into the difficulties that people have growing up.  This is not an unusual struggle.  And when he finds himself torn between the peace loving, christian background, and the tribally torn political upheaval of the country around him — we find that coming of age is never an easy prospect.  Through Takeo we come to learn the importance of loyalty to family, dedication to friends and loved ones, and the power of first time love — all of which are important lessons that everyone has to learn in the course of life.

The book is written in alternating narration voices between Takeo, and that of Kaede — who is destined to become the love of Takeo’s life.  But they are faced with a tremendous number of barriers keeping them apart. The pending war between the Otori and other tribes, the “Tribe’s” impending claiming of Takeo as one of their own, his “Hidden” background, and the hunting down of the Hidden peoples — all of these combine for an in-depth plot, and develop into a fantastic story.

For more information about this book, and its author be sure to visit the following websites:

Lian Hearn Website

On Writing Tales of the Otori

Book Club Study Guide

When you buy a product (not just books – any product), via one of my links, The Book Worm’s Library earns income from the sale and as always, it’s much appreciated as all affiliate income is used to support the blog by contributing to giveaways, postage, travel, and attending book industry related events. We appreciate all those that help to support our blog, and have provided links below for the direct links to this book.

Abe Books

Barnes and Noble

Originally posted 2011-04-05 06:00:35. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

About the Book:

Disfigured by the blow of an abusive husband, and suffering her entire life with severe social anxiety disorder, the widow Mary McAllister spends almost sixty years secluded in a white marble mansion overlooking the town of Mill River, Vermont.

Her links to the outside world are few: the mail, the media, an elderly priest with a guilty habit of pilfering spoons, and a bedroom window with a view of the town below.

Most longtime residents of Mill River consider the marble house and its occupant peculiar, though insignificant, fixtures. An arsonist, a covetous nurse, and the endearing village idiot are among the few who have ever seen Mary.

Newcomers to Mill River — a police officer and his daughter and a new fourth grade teacher — are also curious about the reclusive old woman. But only Father Michael O’Brien knows Mary and the secret she keeps — one that, once revealed, will change all of their lives forever.

Book Review:  ★★★★★★

This is a book that I have vacillated over buying for a while now.  The cover looked interesting, as did the title — but when I read the description, I just couldn’t make up my mind.  I finally took the plunge since I am between semesters, and I wanted something to read that wasn’t assigned reading.  I have to say that even though assigned reading isn’t always something I would voluntarily pick up and read — they are almost always well written and have volatile topics to reflect on.  Unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing here.

Both the story line and characters were predictable in the extreme in this book, and I found myself wondering if it was going to go any where.  I was particularly intrigued with Mary, and felt like there could have been a lot of insightful back story developed through her.  But in the end I felt like she remained illusive, unknown, and unknowable — even to the reader.  Ultimately I felt like most of the characters all had odd quirks and strange personality issues — as well as physical challenges to over come.  But somehow, over all the author just seemed to stay with a sappy drama with little in depth development.

This is a story that I would have expected more suited to a Lifetime chickflick presentation.  And it certainly qualifies in my category of chick-lit.  However, if you are looking for a read that has little mental engagement, and a great deal of over-emotional drama — this one would qualify.  It is the perfect beach read — and would be a good option for the approaching summer months, in the lighter read category. 

For more information about this book, and its author be sure to visit the following websites:

Darcie Chan Website

Author Interview

Kirkus Reviews Book Review

All The Books I Can Read Book Review

When you buy a product (not just books – any product), via one of my links, The Book Worm’s Library earns income from the sale and as always, it’s much appreciated as all affiliate income is used to support the blog by contributing to giveaways, postage, travel, and attending book industry related events. We appreciate all those that help to support our blog, and have provided links below for the direct links to this book.

Originally posted 2012-05-02 08:35:16. Republished by Blog Post Promoter