Spoilers Ahead The premise is much more intriguing than its execution. The brain of a dying rich old man is transplanted into the body of a young woman who has been murdered. The whole book could delve into the meaning of identity and gender but all it does is talk about sex. I don’t think it ever actually describes anyone having sex (current romance fiction is more explicit). But everyone
February 19, 2011
Life Among the Savages
Shirley Jackson is the original Mommy-blogger. Or would be today. In her day she sold her stories to women’s magazines. Life Among the Savages (four children and small town locals) is grimly comic. Her wry observations are delivered in a deadpan tone. You can sense that it wouldn’t take much to push her into setting the same scenes of domestic madness a bit more horrifically as she did in “The
February 18, 2011
The Mote in God’s Eye
I pulled The Mote in God’s Eye off AJM’s stack of books to be discarded. I’d read another Niven-Pournelle novel, Oath of Fealty in the mid 1980s and enjoyed it. AJM didn’t like their style and abandoned The Mote in God’s Eye early into it. One of the things Niven-Pournelle do well in both books employ an ensemble cast to tell the story from multiple viewpoints. They even include a
February 13, 2011
The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing
These days it seems that anything written by a woman gets lumped into the “chick lit” bin. However, I think The Girls’ Guide… truly qualifies for that label and it reminds me that I’m really not a girly girl. I’ve never seen a single episode of Sex in the City either. I like the main character, Jane. She is self-deprecating and has a wacky sense of humor. I found the
February 12, 2011
Shanghai Diary
I finished reading Shanghai Diary within 24 hours of buying it. The memoir of an eleven year old girl who, in 1939, retrieves her father from the Gestapo and escapes Germany with her parents is a compelling read. In any Hollywood movie, the escape would have signalled the happy ending. However, most of the world had already closed its borders to Jewish refugees, and Ursula’s family flees to the only
August 29, 2006
All the Names
“…memory… is very sensitive and hates to be found lacking, tends to fill in any gaps with its own spurious creations of reality”
July 17, 2006
Alamo House
I’m biased towards novels that evoke a concrete sense of place. Bram Stoker described Whitby so accurately that I felt giddy with recognition when I saw it. Fiction makes familiar the streets of San Francisco, the burroughs of New York, and the glitter of LA. However, portrayals of Smalltown, USA, tend more toward the metaphorical than the actual. Curious about how other writers set their works in a mid-sized city
December 15, 2004
In His Arms
In His Arms: A Novel.
Camille Laurens. Translated by Ian Monk.
Random House. 2000.
ISBN 0-375-50652-7
January 25, 2004
Aubrey/Maturin Novels
Nothing in my history could predict I would love twenty books about two men fighting naval battles in the Napoleonic Wars, but I do!
February 3, 2002
The Earthquake Bird
The Earthquake Bird.
Susanna Jones.
Mysterious Press, New York. 2001