This simple little novel, frankly, left me cold. A slow pace, pedestrian language and dialogue, an uninspired plot and a “surprise” ending which goes nowhere, left me rather stunned that this book was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Brooklyn is the story of Eilis Lacey, a young Irish woman in the post-war years who lives with her country mom and smart ambitious older sister Rose. Three brothers have left home to work in Dublin. Dad died years earlier. As little to no work is […]
A Tale of Loss, Redemption and the Human Condition
A challenging but tenderly rendered novel about the consequences of loss. Intertwined plots focus on the traumatized marriage of Vermont couple Laura and Terry Sheldon who two years earlier had lost their young twin daughters to a flood, and also on the fragile psychological state of 10-year-old Alfred, a young African-American foster child placed in the Sheldon’s home. The author successfully switches viewpoints from one character to the next, without losing the flow of the story and at the same time giving us an inside […]
Dresden Files in short story format
This collection of stories from Butcher’s famous The Dresden Files are a nice discovery for someone who thought she had read all of Harry Dresden’s adventures and had to sit and twiddle her thumbs until Butcher’s inspiration—or publisher—next strikes. The stories range from Butcher’s first-ever Dresden story written as a college assignment to a post-Harry reminiscence, of a sort, by his would-be lover. The thing that makes these stories such fun is that they are written from various perspectives, including that of his enigmatic vampire […]
Fast-paced conspiracy thriller — not exactly Bourne quality
The favorite subject of political thriller authors nowadays is high-level global conspirators buried within the US government, and The Dark Hour is unfortunately a rather cliche example. This time the conspirators, who all seem to share a disdain for the common man and an ability to use murder with impunity on behalf of their ill-defined cause, call themselves “The Network,” and they go back generations, are all wealthy, powerful, and nefarious, and guaranteed to get caught in the end. In The Dark Hour, they are […]
No excuse for another Reacher knock-off by Baldacci
Baldacci brings John Puller back for another attempt at a Reacher-like hit, but –while slightly better than the first book Zero Day—The Forgotten doesn’t come close to his early stuff. Indeed, Baldacci had a hit-em-out-of-the-park winner with one of his earliest novels Wish You Well, and I’ve been waiting ever since for something with the same degree of character, substance and, frankly, beautiful writing. In The Forgotten, Baldacci tries to capture our interest with the hot-button topic of human slavery in the modern era, but […]
Gothic crime and Victorian intrigue
A Victorian novel in the form of an epistolary, this is the supposed journal of 17-year-old Richard Shenstone, who has just been sent home, or “rusticated,” from Cambridge because of misdeeds that are only slowly revealed in the course of the novel. Richard has recently learned that his father, once a respected deacon of the church, has died of a heart attack while under suspicion of embezzlement of church funds–and worse–and that his mother and older sister are living in dire circumstances in a delapidated […]
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