Jackie’s Comments (group member since Jan 02, 2009)

Jackie’s comments from the Reading List 2009 group.

#34 A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

We Indie folks can sure pick some dark books to love. This book, the #1 IndieNext list pick for April 2009, is an infinite loop of love turning to hate and hate turning to love and what all that kinetic passion does to the people who experience it. Set mainly in rural Wisconsin in the depths of the winter of 1907, this is a story of a wealthy man and his mail-order bride at it's very basic root. Both of these people have dark histories that they are trying to forget--or are they? They are strangers to each other--or are they? All that is true in this book is that nothing is quite as it seems. Ulterior motives abound. Yet, in a strange and twisted way, it basically ends in a version of "and they lived happily ever after". Don't worry--that isn't really a spoiler. It's a long and crooked path to get to that ending, with many Victorian flourishes along the way.

#33 Sworn To Silence by Linda Castilllo

She's a new name in the thriller category, but she fits right in with the heavy hitting veterans who have read a praised her amazing debut. The lead character is unforgettable--Kate Burkholder is the chief of police in the small Ohio town where she
grew up, though Kate the child and Kate the woman are vastly different. Violence and trauma took away Kate's young Amish innocence and made her the tough "English" (the term the Amish use for the non-Amish) cop she is today. But is she tough enough to stop a brutal serial killer terrifying her town, especially since the new murders have echos in
them from her past? Add a burned-out BCI agent and a cast of characters rife with small town quirks and you get a fantastic, page turning, electrifying read.

Do be warned that there are some rather graphic descriptions and some harsh language in this book, so those sensitive to that sort of thing should probably stay away.

Castillo has garnered praise already from the likes of Sandra Brown, Lisa Scottoline, Chelsea Cain, Alex Kava and C.J. Box. I think all of their fans will love this book, and I'd throw in Lisa Gardner and Lisa Unger into that mix as well. (What is it about the name Lisa and thriller writing, I wonder?) She's definitely going to be an author to keep an eye on.

Book #32 Day After Night by Anita Diamant

This book deals with an handful of women at Atlit "displaced persons" camp in Palestine just after World War II. A quota had been set for how many Jews could immigrate to the new Eretz Yisrael, but of course hundreds of thousands more were trying to get in. They got rounded up and sent to these camps, run by the British, which were heartbreakingly similar in appearance to the concentration camps that many of them had just gotten out of. The treatment was far better, but they were still prisoners held behind barbed wire and sleeping in huge dormitories with separate men and women's areas. One particularly jarring moment was when a woman become hysterical at the sight of that barbed wire as she stepped off the bus--that really just cut me to the bone. These people have to stay at the camps until their paperwork is found or created and space on a kibbutz is made for them or family already in the country come to get them.

The women that Diamant introduces us to are varied in personality and life experience, how they coped with the war and who they are trying to be in it's aftermath. Survivors guilt and and fierce will to live, starting over yet again, grief like a new appendage for most and so much more make this a rich tapestry of humanity in a situation I had
never heard a word about until now. With Isreal so much in the news today, I think this is a thoughtful and timely book that will open new areas of understanding--knowing what happened at the beginning helps to inform the now. These women will linger in your head for long after you finish this book. Diamant is truly a master at writing memorable and amazing female characters who resonate in the minds of her readers.

Book #31 A Fortunate Age by Joanna Smith Rakoff

The folks at Scribner are really excited by this debut novel. IndieNext is really excited about this book. Me--not so much actually. It's clear that Rakoff can tell a story and create dimensional characters--I will absolutely give her points for that. The problem is that there are too many stories and too many characters seen in too short of glimpses to ever get attached to them. This is a story of several college friends in the 8 or so years after college who all seem to be just hanging around waiting for SOMETHING to happen to them. In the meantime, they get married or attached, have children or not, work, complain about money, and wonder why their parents give them such a hard time while cashing the checks they still get from them. The one character who actually DOES something to make his life happen disappears almost completely from the book, reappearing mysteriously at the very end seemingly in possession of adulthood and some sort of clue about life. The rest of them still haven't figured much out at the end of 400 excruciating pages--kind of like "Friends" without any of the comedy. This will NOT be appearing on my recommends shelves.

Book #30 Goat Song by Brad Kessler

Writer Brad Kessler and his photographer wife Dona had a successful Manhattan life, but longed for the country, for fresh air and the chance to grow their own food. At last they found the perfect place in Vermont, and decided to become dairy farmers--specifically goats. They string fencing over a 3 acre square, refab an old chicken coop into a barn, and buy their first 4 goats. And so the adventure begins. And what an adventure it is. This is a love story between human and animal, past and present, earth and food. Kessler has an eye for detail in his storytelling that lets you hear the soft "talking" of the goats, smell the hay, feel the sun on your face and the cool forest breeze on your skin. And while there is plenty of the nitty gritty of life with goats (manure and hormones, antics and worries), there is also the joy of being there when a man realizes his dream as his first tomme of cheese glistens from it's mold in perfection and promise on a warm summer night. It's the cold but mesmerizing trek through snow covered woods trying to figure out where a coyote went. It's helping your neighbors just because you can, and savoring the spice of food grown, picked and cooked with your own two hands. I LOVED THIS BOOK!!!

Book #29 A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

This new novel by renowned author Kate Walbert gives us glimpses into the lives of 5 related women over four generations. It begins in England in 1914 when Dorothy Townsend chooses to starve herself to death in the name of women's suffrage, leaving her two children orphaned. So begins the legacy of how this family's women deal with what was called in the 19th century "The Woman Question". Bouncing about in time to show various vignettes between the women and their families over the years, it's a fascinating study of society's treatment of women and their various reactions to it over the past hundred years or so.

Book #28 Madewell Brown by Rick Collignon

Though this is a book meant to be an answer to a mystery created in an earlier book, "Perdido", it stands alone quite well. It involves a forgotten
team in the Negro League baseball of long ago, one old man who tells it's stories over and over, another old man who keeps a dark secret about it until his death bed, and the younger people who inherit the stories and the pall of the secrets. It's a rambling story, changing voices and eras effortlessly, but a fine one, showing the importance of memory and oral storytelling in keeping the past alive long enough for the present to learn from it.

Book #27 Starvation Lake by Bryan Gruley

First time novelist Bryan Gruley (though seasoned writer--he's the Chicago Bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal) creates fascinating,multifaceted, believable characters in this book that you just KNOW you'd recognize if you walked past them on the street. Their quirks and their mysteries draw you in, as does the overlying story of new details emerging, literally, from the depths about the death of a beloved hockey coach. Presumed an accident, when bullet ridden evidence washes ashore 10 yearslater years of cover ups and lies begin to unravel in the hands of two reporters for thetown's small newspaper. Warning--this book will keep you up late into the night because you just have to know a little bit more before you go to sleep, and then...you know how THAT goes!

This is supposed to be the first book in a new series. If Gruley keeps writing like this, it's going to be a popular one. Fans of Dennis LeHane will especially like this book, I think.

Book #26
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris (audio book, which I'm counting as a 'read' because it was unabridged)

I don't ususally do audio books--I generally don't have the attention span to "just" listen to a story. But this week David's been keeping me company while I sort through years worth of former treasures and wishful thinking preparing for an upcoming move this spring. There was something poetic about him telling me about his past while I was sorting through mine. I definitely prefer the live recordings to the somewhat sterile "read by author" stuff, but Sedaris is funny no matter what. He kept me upbeat and moving, and I will always appreciate him for that more than anything. Now if he'd just hire me a moving company....

Book #25 Broken by Lisa Jones

Colorado author Lisa Jones set out to write a book about Stanford Addison, a quadriplegic medicine man and horse breaker who lives up in Wyoming's Wind River Indian Reservation. And certainly he was a main character (and an EXTREMELY fascinating one whose broken body freed him to soar), but "Broken" is more about Lisa herself. She finds a home, and more importantly herself, interviewing this amazing man and hanging out with his large, eclectic and somewhat wild family. She's fearless about telling her story, even when it paints her and her own family in a less than flattering light. I think women everywhere, especially women who feel a bit "broken" themselves by what their life has handed them, will identify with her. In addition, she does a tremendous job of capturing the spirit of the west as it lives and breathes today within the shadows of it's violent past. The 'medicine" in this book is thought provoking and hope-giving, especially Stan's tale of what the animals taught him about medicine, healing and living life. Read this book and see what all it has to offer for yourself--an to yourself.

Book #24
How To Buy A Love Of Reading by Tanya Egan Gibson

Gibson had me at the title, I have to say. And the premise is very interesting: after 15 year old Carly admits on a school questionnaire that she's "never met a book I liked", her very rich, very status conscious parents decide to commission a book just for Carly. They actually hire an author to move into their house(well, mansion, complete with it's own bra museum) and write a book that Carly would actually like to read. That starts a lot of balls rolling in their little, monied town. The true story is about relationships: overweight and somewhat outcast Carly and her best friend model-perfect but strung out womanizer Hunter; the author Bree and her long ago love Julian who happens to be hiding out in this same berg; the complex machinations of high society marriages in which social standing means more than personal happiness. I identified with Carly so much I cringed and cried for her as her mother alternated between bullying and ignoring her and as she continued to love others with her arms wide open even as they continued to not deserve her. I ached for Hunter's empty life and his need to escape. All of the characters in this book, the author's first, are drawn with great depth and sensitivity. There are times when things got a bit muddled, when flashbacks or fantasies
or fictional tv shows seemed to get tangled into the story a bit too much, but overall the beauty of the story, and it's somewhat tragic, somewhat deeply satisfying ending, make all of that ignorable and this debut book very much worth the read.

Book #23
Anything But Typical by Nora Raleigh Baskin

This is a charming and disarming book written in the voice of a 12 year old autistic boy. Jason writes wonderful stories on a website called Storyboard because that is the one place that he can make himself understood. The rest of the time,especially since he's been mainstreamed into the public school system, he can't make himself heard or understood by the "neurotypical" folks, even his family. A young girl also on Storyboard writes back to him with emails getting away from stories and more just friendly chatter. This is a new and treasured thing for Jason--a friend who sees him as talented and
interesting instead of "different". But when a chance comes along for Jason and his correspondent to meet, his world is thrown into panic as he struggles with who he is and who he'd like to be. This is truly a wonderful book, designed for ages 10-14, but I was enthralled with it and I'm a rather high multiple of those ages.

Book #22 The Lie by Chad Kultgen

The star rating was difficult to me. The book is well written, but so dark and horrifying it's difficult to give it an "I liked it" rating. So take that with a grain of salt.

I have a sort of morbid fascination with this author after reading his first book The Average American Male. To say his writing style is saying misogynistic is like saying the Grand Canyon is a big hole. It terrified me that when I gave that book to a guy friend of mine he gobbled it up and reviewed it by saying "Ya, that's pretty much how we think". This gave me a full body shudder that I've never been quite able to shake.

Kultgen's second book, The Lie, trumps the first soundly. This is the story of three college kids--2 males, one female. One guy is relatively normal, at least at the beginning of the book. The other guy is an over privileged fiend that goes out of his way to invent humiliating sexual situations to put women in and has an extensive catalog of offensive descriptions for and opinions of women. Completing the triangle is a status conscious, brainless and seemingly soulless young woman. The book tells the tale of how
these 3, over the course of their 4 years at college, do their best to destroy each other.

There is some suspense, or at least a hovering sense of impending doom, that kept me turning the pages of this book. It is definitely NOT for the faint of heart or the easily offended. It is sick, twisted, dark and hypnotic. And yes, I will be giving my copy to that same guy friend to see what he thinks. I'm afraid. Very afraid.

Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk fans will easily fall into the Cult of Kultgen.

Book #21 The Wildwater Walking Club by Claire Cook

Summer is coming and so ,of course, is a new, hilarious book by Claire Cook (Must Love Dogs, Summer Blowout, Life's A Beach). This one follows 32 days in the lives of 3 neighboring women who come together for fellowship and understanding as they set their pedometers for their daily walks. Noreen just took a buyout from her job and got dumped by her boyfriend. Tess is a school teacher suffering through her daughter's last contentious summer at home before leaving for college. And Rosie is a "tweener", raising young sons and taking care of her father and his lavender farm after the death of her mother. Cook once again blends familiar and serious issues with her keen sense of humor to serve up yet another summer treat for her vast legion of fans.

Book #20 Reunion by Therese Fowler

Therese Fowler's sophomore book shows that she just keeps getting better and better. Reunion tells the story of Blue Reynolds, a nationally popular talk show host with a past that she's hidden for years--a short time in her heartbroken youth that led her to partying, doing drugs and ultimately giving a baby up for adoption. She discretely begins to search for that child 20 years later, ironically at the same time her career leads her to the same man who broke her heart back then. Past and present collide in many ways for Blue, making this a very interesting read indeed with a satisfying but teasing ending. Fowler is very good a creating multi-dimensional characters that stay with you long after the last page is turned.

Book #19 Home Game by Michael Lewis

This is a hilarious account of learning to be a father in the 21st century. I actually gave this book to a guy friend of mine who is struggling with the idea of marriage and fatherhood in the near future, and he stayed up all night reading and laughing, which is amazing since he's even more of a reluctant reader than he is a reluctant grownup. Myself, I was able to read it in just a few hours--it's light and amusing but makes some real points about the naturalness of maternity versus the learned behavior of paternity. This should make a fun gift for any expectant or new father this coming Fathers Day.

Book # 18 Labor Day by Joyce Maynard

I haven't read anything by Maynard before, but she's certainly on my list of authors to read more of now. This story, which I easily devoured in a lazy day at home, is touching on so many levels. Told through the eyes of a 13 year old boy, it's the story of five days when an escaped criminal comes to live with him and his mom, changing their lives forever. Henry feels responsible for his recluse mother, Adele, and spends all of his time with her. He's a bit of an outcast himself, being rather small for his age yet beginning the inevitable battle with his raging hormones. They meet Frank in one of their rare shopping excursions in town, and both immediately take to the bleeding man with the kind eyes. Frank does just enough "bad guy" stuff to help them pass a lie detector test should the need ever arise, but mostly he brings both of these broken people out of their shells and into remembering what being loved and being a family is like. This gentle story of love and hope is sure to be a hit.

Book #17 "Hunted" by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

This is book 5 in the House of Night teen vampire series, and it advances the story of fledgling vampire Zoey and her friends another few havoc ridden days. I really do love this series--this is a far more clever vampire world than the one Stephanie Meyer created in her Twilight Saga. There's more action, more ethics, and overall more intelligence to the story. The thing I hate about series--having to wait another year or more to find out what happens next!!!

Book #16 The Leisure Seeker by Michael Zadoorian

Instead of riding out the last of their lives in doctors' offices and nursing homes, this octogenarian couple decide to take one last trip in their trusty RV down what is left of Route 66 (sneaking away from their very worried children to do so). This book is a meditation on growing old and facing death--sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, but always ringing with a clear and intelligent voice. She's got end stage cancer, he's got Alzheimer's, but what's important is that they both still have each other for one last hurrah. And the end...well, read it for yourself.

Book #15 Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak edited by Smith Magazine

It took me maybe 30-40 minutes to read through this book, giggling a bit, wincing a bit, stopping for a brief moment to ponder the story behind the simple 6 words each author offered. The emotion--love, joy, pain, betrayal, boredom, frustration, confusion, devotion, and more--that can be conveyed in 6 words is astounding. I am in awe. This is a fascinating project of Smith Magazine's that I hope lives long--it's too interesting to give up on.

I, of course, had to come up with my own (though it seems like someone else MUST have said it, too):

"Thought I was smarter than this."