Book 44- Every Last One

Every Last One is a profoundly sad and powerfully written novel by author and columnist Anna Quindlen.

This is an unforgettable and beautifully written portrait of a mother and wife, of a woman who survives an unspeakable horror brought upon her life.

Mary Beth had built a wonderful life for herself and for her family. She and her husband Glen and their three children have a great life together. They are survivors. When one of her son's becomes depressed she gets him help. But in the midst of helping him she misses other things happening and her perfect world is shattered.

This is an amazing novel. I don't want to say any more so not to give any detail away. I've always been a fan of Quindlen's columns and this is the first novel of her's I've read. I enjoy her writing style most certainly, and they way she weaves a character is breathtaking. Excellent novel. Tragically sad, but excellent.

Book 43- Jane Austen Ruined My Life

This started out very strong- the first paragraph made me laugh but by the end of Jane Austen Ruined My Life (by Beth Pattillo) it was merely chick lit. Dang!

Emma Grant gets divorced and loses her job, so she's homeless, penniless and loveless. And it's all Jane Austen's fault, or so Emma thinks. So in an effort to try and resurrect her career, if nothing else, she goes to England in search of the lost letters of Jane Austen.

Once Emma arrives in London she stays at her cousin's house only to find her best friend from college, Adam. Adam and Emma reconnect with each other and even though their friendship is blooming again, she can't tell Adam what she doing because he's a college professor like her and she doesn't want him to infringe on her project.

While she's looking for the missing letters she meets some quirky women who claim to be the guardians of the letters. This group, called the Formidables, make her complete tasks before she can 'see' the letters. And she develops a crush on her friend Adam.

It just screams Chick Lit; I was hoping by invoking the Austen name it would be more substantial but to no avail.

Book 42- A Thousand Days in Venice

A Thousand Days in Venice [An Unexpected Romance] is a love story memoir by Marlena de Blasi. She chronicles her first trip to Venice, Italy and the relationship she has with the city, and the relationship she doesn't want to have, because it's the city of love and magic. After she succumbs to the city, she returns often and then one day, the magic of the city takes her over with an encounter with a strange man.

And in an instant, they have fallen in love. And after a few days and a visit, they plan to marry. Marlena plans to give up her career, her cafe, her home, most of her belongings, her life as she knows it, to move to Venice for this love affair, this romance, this first time with love, and she's well into her 50s when this happens.

This isn't something she does as a young woman, but as a grown adult.

And she does it in a rush. They don't take time to get to know each other, they rush, head long into this romance, and from their meeting in December, she moves in June to Venice and they marry in October. Ah sweet Venice, so she can marry her Venetian, a man she calls the Stranger. To a man who speaks very little English and she, a woman who speaks very little Italian, except for food.

I do like the whirl wind of it all. I like that she argues that she didn't want to wait, didn't need to wait, didn't need to go slowly, because why wait when you found the person you're in love with, why wait to be with him any longer? And the magic of it all, is that he felt the same way about her. It was an instant.

Now, what I didn't like, or maybe I should say, who I don't like is her Venetian, her Fernando. He's sort of an ass. And after she gets to Venice, it became rather mired in the "I'm living here so I have to learn everything" drudgery. She just seemed to go on and on about the slowness of the Italian culture, from cooking to planning the wedding to re-doing their apartment; it was such a long process of telling of the long process- blech.

I was hoping it would be rather like the other books I've read but there was very little love of food, though there are recipes at the back of the book. There is quite a bit of just... well, love. Love of the Stranger, love of Venice, learning to love herself, love her apartment, love of wanderlust, but very love WITH food, Fernando mostly didn't even love food. And I felt like this book had an author who lost her self, lost her own identity, who she was, with this huge transformation. I wholeheartedly agree that moving around the world for love is wonderful, but as I read I just felt like de Blasi gave up who she was for this adventure.

Or maybe it burst my bubble a bit. I've always wanted to visit Italy, especially Venice, but after much of her description, other than of the city itself, I think my frustration would come full tilt in dealing with the mindset of the people, rather than letting me fall slowly in love with the city of love.

Food, memoirs, women

So, I'm thinking about a "reading theme" for myself for the summer. I'll read other stuff, but I was thinking of trying to read several books of a particular type.

I really enjoyed the book Julie and Julia: 356 Days, 524 recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment (and I also loved the movie!) last year. Another one of my favorite books I read last year was I Loved I Lost I Made Spaghetti. And earlier this week I finished The Sharper the Knife, The Less You Cry and enjoyed it immensely. What do all these have in common? They're memoirs of women who have made some life changes that usually revolve around food, cooking, eating, or all three. For some reason, this particular genre has hugely interested me. I don't know if it's the journeys these women take, if it's all the food, if it's their writing styles, their voices.... I don't know, but I do know that I really like this particular style. I usually enjoy a memoir by a woman (Eat Pray Love seems to be the exception to that rule since I hated that book- yeah, I'm the only woman in the world who hates that book, it seems. So, shoot me!) and I've read several. But the one's about food/ cooking and the woman searching for something in life really speak to me.

I have no desire to go to a cooking school but I do love food. I love to cook and I LOVE to eat. I like to be creative in the kitchen when time and resources allow for such. The food part is always interesting. And life and food always generate some wonderful metaphors and analogies from "Life is like a box of chocolates" to "people are like onions. Keep peeling back the layers.." sort of thinking.

The women who've written the three books I've read so far are pretty smart women, too. I like how they've written their stories, and they don't seem to take themselves too seriously. I also like that all these start at the adult point in their lives. Food may been important to them since they were children or someone in their childhood might have influenced their food love, but these are memoirs not biographies so I like forgoing the long drawn out family stories about food- blah blah blah. I like the here and now, "I am woman, hear me cook" sort of stories.

The one thought that gives me pause is that if I read several more of these books, will I burn myself out? Will I feel as if I've over indulged in this decadent dessert type of reading to the point where I'll be sick? (I said I like food metaphors and analogies.)

I've made a list of titles:

• Garlic and Sapphires: The secret life of a food critic in disguise
• Cakewalk: A Memoir
• Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life
• Spiced: A Pastry Chef's true stories of Trials by Fire, After Hours Exploits, and What really Goes on on the Kitchen
• Under the Table: Saucy tales from Culinary School
• Lunch in Paris: A love story, with recipes

I've always enjoyed books about food. I read several fiction writers who incorporate food in their story lines and characters. It just seems to be something I'm drawn to.

Now I just have to see what the local library has, what Half Price Books has and what I can get ILL and from Amazon. And if anyone here has any of these and wants to share, please let me know!

Maggie

Book 41- The Likeness

STOP!!! SPOILER ALERT! And this review is only a spoiler alert to the first book in this series, In The Woods. If you plan to read the novels by Tana French, and haven't read the first one yet, go no further! These two novels are completely tied together! Now, if you don't care and have no desire to read an intricate, complex, and engaging thriller, with well developed characters, an intriguing storyline, and an author who uses words wonderfully, well, then.... by all means, read on!

SPOILER FOLLOWS...


Tana French's second novel The Likeness follows right on the heels of her first one, In The Woods, and picks up a few scant months after it ends, with Cassie Maddox having transferred out of the Murder squad to Domestic Violence and she's in a serious relationship with Sam, and Rob Ryan is gone.

First and foremost, I want to say that The Likeness was about a million times better for me since I read In The Woods. I'm trying to objectively think about if this could be read as a stand alone, and I certainly don't think so. Cassie's mindset and her nerves are still shaken from the case in Woods, and influences all the choices and decisions she makes in this novel.

In The Likeness, the Murder Squad finds a dead body of a young woman who is the doppelganger of Cassie. And not only is this girl identical to Cassie in look, but she has also identity theft Cassie- no, she's not Cassie Maddox Dublin Cop, but she stole her undercover persona, Lexi Madison.

So Cassie goes undercover and pretends to be Lexi, moving in to the house with the 4 other Trinity University grads students with whom she lived. And Cassie manages to pull it off, trying to find her killer, letting people think she was only wounded and critical but recovered. She can work the case from the inside and she's bait, seeing if the killer will come after her again.

This is an excellent novel. I loved it. I think I liked it better than the first one. I love an author who treats readers like they are smart- so French's vocabulary made me happy. I love her words. I also thought she wove an intricate storyline and mystery together that was utterly fascinating.

Her characters are engaging and well throughout. They're interesting and developed. Cassie struggled because of what happened to her in Woods, and it was interesting to see that she carried this guilt, fear, and pain over into this novel. And how it affected how she continued to do her job. Not only was Cassie amazingly developed, but so were the four prime suspects, "Lexi's" housemates.

I liked everything about this novel. I can't wait to see if French writes a third!

Book 40- The Sharper the Knife, the Less You Cry

This is a memoir of Kathleen Flinn, an American rat race exec who, at age 40-ish, loses her cushy London job and decides to spend her entire life savings, move to Paris with her boyfriend, and attend the Cordon Bleu cooking school, even though her French language skills were extremely limited. In The Sharper Your Knife, the Less you Cry: Love, Laughter and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School she chronicles her experiences in Paris during her time as a student, on a personal level, and as a "professional" student of the renowned school.

I loved her voice and her storytelling style. This is the type of memoir that I love to read, one that tells her story so it reads like fiction, her wit and food! She seems to have told "it like it is" and while she didn't pull any punches, she was still positive about her experience at the famous cut throat academy that graduated the likes of, none other than, Julia Child.

Wonderfully told story and the food sounds to die for. I couldn't cook a dang thing she gave a recipe for, but I like knowing the food it there and that I could try if I want. Excellent memoir of s smart woman going after what she wants, with a good outlook, not afraid to laugh at her self, or cry a little, and without all the whining! LOVE IT! Just what a memoir should be!

Hoping movie is better than the book

Everyone seems to always say "Oh, the book is so much better than the movie!" And for me, 99 times out of 100 that is correct. I can think of very few excepts... I think The Time Traveler's Wife was a better film than movie (read my movie review and my book review if you want). And other than that, I can't really come up with the flip-flop.

BUT! I saw a preview for the film version of Eat Pray Love. It stars Julia Roberts, one of my all time favorite actress's ever and I am hoping beyond hope that the film is better than the book. I hated the book, as you can see if you go here to read my review. I think I might be the only woman on the face of the Earth who hates that book, so I have very high hopes that Roberts makes this a visual feast for the eyes, because the written word didn't leave me wanting more.

The only reason I'm going to see the film version of this dreadful story is because of Roberts. Only she could save it.

Guess we'll see, come August!

Book 39- One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd, a novel

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus is an incredible fictional account of something that could've really happened.

Chief Little Wolf of the Cheyenne Nation proposed an idea of President Grant: the Cheyenne would trade 1000 horses for 1000 white women in an effort to continue to perpetuate the Native bloodline while teaching the Indians how to assimilate to the ways of the white man. Grant, while feigning outrage in public, he privately made the deal.

This is the story of the first wave women who agreed to go west to help "Christianize the savages." The story told through the journals of May Dodd, a plucky woman who was sent to a mental institution by her family because she fell in love and lived in sin with a mean below her station. She only way to escape her imprisonment at the asylum was to agree to this government proposition. The women who agreed would go west, marry a Cheyenne brave, birth him 2 children and then they were free to leave. If they couldn't bare children within two years, they were also then free to leave.

This is an amazing story of the courage of women. May Dodd endured with strength and a positive attitude. She also found love and she found a way of life that suited her, and she found true friends. May's journals, although fictional, depict the harsh realities of the nomadic life of the Native Americans post- Civil War, but also the beauty. This novel is a story of survival and of the inhumanity of men against other men. It was haunting and touching.

My heart nearly broke for May and the other women. I know it's fiction but I couldn't help get wrapped up in the lives of these women, their energies, their joys and so very real fears, and to giggle along with them as they learned the way of life like nothing before.

Excellent novel. One of the best I've picked up this year.

Book 38- What French Women Know

What French Women Know about Love, Sex, and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind by Debra Ollivier was a wonderful look and the cultural differences between French and American women regarding sex and love.

I can say I thoroughly enjoyed Ollivier's take on the hang ups American woman have about everything and the few hang ups French woman have. She crafts this anthropological insight with humor, personal anecdotes, fun, and research.

What's more, not only do I appreciate Ollivier's writing style and her topic, but it was a great way to look at the attitude of woman here in the States. And I realize that, using Ollivier's declarations about French women's perspectives, I'm more French that I realized.

This is certainly worth the read.

Book 37: The House at the End of the Road...

The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three generations of an interracial Family in the American South by W. Ralph Eubanks is not what I was expecting. I thought I was going to get a memoir style work of non fiction that would explore Eubanks's family, with anecdotes and told in storytelling, prose fashion.

What I got instead was a detailed account written in mostly text book style about the Jim Crowe law South, and an academic look at racial identity and attitudes that were prevalent in the 18th century and still alive today. It was also sparsely sprinkled with a biography of his family, and a bit of personal journey.

I feel it a difficult task to critique the life of a person, but I can critique a writing style. I really think it would've been interesting to learn more about Eubanks's folks, and his black grandmother and white grandfather who were living in the South at a time when interracial marriages were against the law and any child of that union was considered Black and a bastard. I would've liked more stories about the family's struggle with the black and white relatives perspective on that union.

Instead I feel Eubanks became mired in the anthropological study, in the cultural biased, and in the study of racism... it's not what I was expecting, nor what I was wanting to read. I don't mind "thinking" but I wasn't in a good mindset for something that required quite a bit of thought and concentration. And it wasn't what I was expecting, which made this a displeasure for me.

Book 36- Letter to my Daughter: a novel

This little novel, Letter to My Daughter by George Bishop, is a little story with a large impact that will make you laugh and cry and even, sometimes, break your heart.

Laura's daughter runs away and while waiting for her return, she reflects on the relationship she WANTED with her teen daughter, not the one she ended up having. She also explains her own years as a teen girl, coming of age during the Vietnam era, a teenager with racist parents yet who sent her to a Catholic school, about her first love, her first friends, her first heartbreak.

It's a touching story, a quiet story. What a wonderful first novel, and with the voice of a woman, to a teen girl, author George Bishop surprisingly captures the female psyche perfectly. Anyone who's a parent should read this.

Book 35- Worst Case

Worst Case by James Patterson is the third book in the Detective Mike Bennett series.

Bennett is a widower with 10 children, an Irish priest grandfather, an Irish nanny named Mary Catherine, and is a police detective in NYC.

In this third outing, Patterson writes with Michael Ledwidge in typical Patterson style- quick thoughts, choppy sentences, and a fast paced mystery. I like Bennett, especially in this novel, as he hunts a kidnapper and killer of New York's wealthiest children, racing against time, also a popular devise in Patterson's writing.

Also, readers are treated to possible romance between Mike and a feebie assigned to help with the case, and the home fires are burning a bit brighter as Mary Catherine finally lets Mike know that she, too, is interested.

I'm a moderate fan of Patterson, usually on a lower level because I can read his stuff quickly, it's beach quality, and it's cotton candy for my brain. I really like the Mike Bennett series, though. Mike is a more developed and a round character. he also had a neat story line. I like his almost as much as I do the Alex Cross series! This is a good one; add Mike Bennett to your reading rotation!