Category: Book Reviews (Page 37 of 40)

The Good Husband of Zebra Drive by Alexandre McCall Smith is book 8 in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series.

This is a series I particularly love. The characters are incredibly charming, the adventures and mysteries are secondary to the human-behaviour stories being told, and at the end of a long day I can depend on Mma Ramotswe to give me a good laugh.

These are just fun, well-written books.

Often with a series there is the risk of the author running out of steam or of the plots losing their shine, not so with this series. Thank you Alexandre McCall Smith.

The Falconer’s Knot by Mary Hoffman is a novel about two teenagers in medieval Italy. One is Chiara, whose brother sells her to a nunnery because he can’t afford to keep her, and the other is Silvano, who is taking refuge is the neighbouring friary. Silvano is accused of murdering a man in a nearby town. The two are unlikely apprentices but soon find solitude in their new lifestyles. The fact that they get to enjoy each other as eye candy every once and a while doesn’t hurt.

Mary Hoffman is one of my favourite writers. She has another series for teens called Stravaganza, which is also set in Italy but during the Renaissance. It’s a trilogy and involves time travel.

I love Hoffman’s books because although the reading level is aimed at teens, the story is better written than many adult novels I read. My perception is that teen writers have to work extra hard to succeed. Their books are a hard sell–imagine trying to grab the attention of a teenager, to find a subject that will be new but not totally foreign, that involves sex but sex that won’t get banned by parent groups and librarians.

The Falconer’s Knot is a mystery. Silvano is taking refuge in the friary while his father tries to find the true murderer, but he is soon pegged as a suspect in a series of suspicious deaths in the friary. His only friend in the friary, the Colour Master, is also under suspicion. Over at the nunnery, Chiara is getting her hair chopped off and sporting the nun’s habit. She is also working with the nuns’ Colour Master.

The Colour Masters are creating pigments used for church frescos. This side story is really interesting because the information about religion and the painting of the frescos in Italy during the Middle Ages is interwoven in a non-intrusive way.

Overall this is a fun book. I’m not adept at figuring out mysteries so I couldn’t guess the ending, but in these types of literary mysteries that’s never really the point. This is just another damn-fine book from Mary Hoffman.

Bringing sexy back.

We had quite the Sunday night. I finished Kris Radish’s book The Sunday List of Dreams, and we saw the movies Perfume and Little Children. All three are thematically linked by stories of sexual repression.

In Perfume the protagonist is killing women in order to capture their scent. In Little Children unfaithful partners are endulging in the sex they don’t get at home and sexual predators are trying to control themselves.

As I say, it was quite the Sunday.

Kris Radish’s book stands well above the movies though.

The Sunday List of Dreams is about Connie, retired nurse, getting on with her list of dreams.

1. Stop being afraid.
2. Let go.
3. Get rid of SHIT. Starting with the garage.

Funny enough it’s the shit in the garage that gets her into shit.

Connie discovers a box of files belonging to her oldest daughter Jessica. Jessica lives in New York and is a very busy CEO of a manufacturing company. Connie lives in the Mid-West. Her other two daughters are happily married with children. But Jessica has gone astray. They don’t talk as much as Connie would like.

Well it turns out the box of files contains early business plans and sketches for Jessica’s company. She sells sex toys.

That’s enough to jump start Connie. She on a plane to New York to find out what the hell Jessica is up to. Mother madness. Full panic. Rescue Jessica.

There is a very funny oh-my-god moment (for both mother and daughter) as Connie enters Jessica’s store for the first time.

Nothing like seeing your mother surrounded by dildos. Nothing like visiting your daughter’s sex shop for the first time.

Things, of course, fall apart and come together, and despite very few plot surprises, The Sunday List of Dreams is a good romp.

One of my favourite lines in the book:
Quote: Look at yourself. Not your face, sweetie, your self … If you are giving driving directions to someone else it really helps to know the map.
—The Sunday List of Dreams by Kris Radish

iGeneration is by Jason Logan, the illustrator who brought us If We Ever Break Up, This Is My Book.

iGeneration: Shuffling toward the Future is a quirky little book about technology and its control over our lives.

The whole book is illustrated, in fact, it’s very light on text. But it is pretty cute.

One of my favourite pages is “What the hell am I supposed to do whilst my music is downloading?” One suggestion is to create a false cache history to disturb your parents. For example,

panda-child-acid.xxx
makeabomboutofcommonhouseholdproducts.com
freeoldmansex.nz.org
prisons+welfare+lifeplan.com
make_some_cash_while_in_prison.com

I’d post a video review when I get a chance. The book is funny enough that you should have a look at it.

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard is one of my favourite plays, in part because I had to study the hell out of it in unversity and in part because it is one of the first dates that James and I had.

I was excited to see Stoppard’s new play Rock ‘n’ Roll is now published. Rock ‘n’ Roll premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London, in June 2006.

The cover is a very striking yellow, and the edition that I have includes an introduction from Stoppard. I find the author introductions to plays most fascinating. When I was in school I hated reading any of the extra bits, but now I’m much more interested in the context for the story, what references the author is trying to make, what he or she hopes the reader gets out of the text. The introduction to Rock ‘n’ Roll doesn’t disappoint, and it is a good recap of what was going on in Prague and Cambridge from 1968 to 1990, more directly what effect the Communist regime was having on musicians, philosophers and students.

In case you don’t know Tom Stoppard, he was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and moved to England as a child in 1946.

Quote: The Amazon copy says:
Catapulted into the front ranks of modern playwrights overnight when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead opened in London in 1967, he has become recognized as a contemporary comic master, the brilliantly acclaimed author of The Real Inspector Hound, Enter a Free Man, Albert’s Bridge, After Magritte, Travesties, Dirty Linen, Jumpers, New-Found-Land, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Artist Descending a Staircase, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage), and Rock ‘n’ Roll. He has also written a number of screenplays, including The Romantic Englishwoman, Despair, and Brazil.

Rock ‘n’ Roll highlights the moments of friendship and tension between Jan and Max. Jan is a lecturer at Cambridge who returns to Prague just as the Soviet tanks are rolling into the city. He’s a music fan and in addition to a brief history of Czechoslovakia, you get a brief history of The Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Lennon, Andy Warhol, and Frank Zappa. Max is a Marxist philosopher with a free-spirited daughter and a Sapphic philosopher wife who is dying from cancer. Over a 20-year period Rock ‘n’ Roll offers little windows into Jan and Max’s acceptance and resistance to the Communist regime.

The remarkable thing about the play is that it’s heavy in a light way. There’s a sense of bouyancy and humour. In many ways it reminds me of Chekov’s plays, but without the dark, foreboding sense that, as James says, “it’s a godless world and we’re all going to die.”

Rock ‘n’ Roll–a new play by Tom Stoppard–read more on Amazon.ca

Audrey Hepburn: The Paramount Years by Tony Nourmand (published by Chronicle Books) is a beautiful book of photos and essays on Audrey in front of the camera and behind the scenes. In addition to the photos, there’s lots of great images from the movie posters.

Watch my video review on YouTube.

Clare Clark is the author of two very fine novels, both of which deal with elements of the underground and unsavoury human behaviour. Her first novel The Great Stink is set in Victorian England, more specifically in the labyrinthine London sewer system. Hence the great stink. But Clare’s writing far from stinks, it is tight and interesting.

Yes, The Great Stink is a historical novel, but not one with a familiar setting. The Great Stink deals with a sewer engineer, William May, and the solstice his finds in cutting himself in the solitude of the sewers. That is until a murder is committed in the underground and he is implicated.

See what I mean? Underground and unsavoury.

Don’t be dismayed by the setting though, the details of the sewer structures, their repairs and the times of Victorian England are in perfect harmony with the strange and complex story of William May.

Not only do I highly recommend The Great Stink, I’m a fan of Clare’s latest novel, The Nature of Monsters.

In 1718, pregnant Eliza Tally is packed off to London. She is to work as a maid for apothecary Grayson Black, have the child or get rid of it, and do so while protecting the perception of her own virtue and the good name of the father of the child. What transpires instead is a tragic and twisted tale of scientific experimentation on mothers and unborn children. Eliza and a second maid, Mary, are psychologically tortured by the apothecary and his wife in hopes that they will bear monsters instead of healthy babies.

Eighteenth-century England is a time of deep interest in science, medicine and literature, but it is also a time of home remedies and superstitions. A pregnant woman caught in a fire can expect her child to be born with a red birthmark. If a hare runs across a pregnant woman’s path she can expect the child to be marked by the animal–perhaps it was a hare that created half-moon Mary.

Half-there or not, Mary charms Eliza, who discovers the apothecary’s goal and is driven to save Mary. It is too late for her own child.

Both novels are visceral. There is the putrid smell of the sewers in The Great Stink, the descriptions of cutting and the horrors of murder. In The Nature of Monsters it is the monsters of the novel–Grayson Black, his wife and the apothecary’s assistant, along with Eliza’s lover and her mother–who act as monsters. Betrayal and sacrifice for science are the elements of horror here.

Most horrifying to the reader are the descriptions of leeching, bleeding and opium use, which are counter to our modern-day understanding of medicine. We have 250 more years of discovery under our belt, and yet it is the many scientists of this time whose experiments inform today’s understanding of the mind and body. So it is the readers’ good fortune to have such an adept storyteller and historian weaving the tale of Eliza and Mary with the medical curiosities of the day.

I am a fan of Clare Clark. Both novels are great and I truly think readers of The Great Stink should seek out The Nature of Monsters and vice versa. My only caveat for newbies to Clare’s work is to be prepared for the world she transports you to, it is inevitably underground and unsavoury, in the best of ways.

The stories we tell ourselves and others is how we make sense of the world.

In searching for who said the above quote I came across, “Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn’t be human beings at all” (Philip Pullman).

I was searching for the origins of these quotes in reference to Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods. Gaiman has written a book of stories, myths and legends that collide and at times are at war.

American Gods are the gods who have come to America in the minds of its immigrants. Odin, Easter, Ganesh, Anansi. The ancient gods are the left to their own devices, poised to disappeared as they are pushed out by America’s newest gods. The ones we make sacrifices to daily: TV, big cars, the internet, warfare in the name of liberty, the pursuit of happiness.

Both worlds become Shadow’s world. Shadow, who did time for assaulting his bank-robbing partners for cheating him of his share of the proceeds, who is hired by Wednesday to rally the old gods against the new, and Shadow, who represents our look into the shadows. Gaiman asks us to take a closer look at the things that sometimes catch the corner of our eye. The things that we hope not to be true, but deeply believe to exist.

As our protagonist, it is Shadow’s job to make sense of this world. To tell the story. To sort things out. To know under which cup the nut is, into which hand the coin drops.

I enjoyed this book.

Anansi Boys is still my favourite, maybe because I read it first. But American Gods is one of those novels that will hang in my mind like a remembered dream.

I wanted to write about the power of narrative, how it informs what we do, how we understand ourselves, our country, our beliefs. Instead of telling you my story, why don’t you read this one.

Fans of historical fiction must seek out this book.

The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox (McClelland & Stewart, 2006)

Michael Cox is a first-time author from Northamptonshire, UK. and he’s written the confession of Edward Glyver. Fictional? Of course … or is it?

Indeed it is.

Cox, however, has used a literary technique that I quite like. He adds another layer to the story by introducing J. J. Antrobus as the editor of the work. This fictional character borders that fine line between fiction and nonfiction. Allowing readers to be momentarily disoriented–is this a novel or historical work?

The device also allows Cox’s “editor” to add footnotes to the text, informing the reader, in a non-intrusive way, of tidbits of information–some of it fictional and some of it historical. I won’t tell you the end of the novel, but this device does increase the reader’s understanding of the story, in particular the knowledge that this “confession” has been found and the “true” story revealed to future generations.

The writing reminds me of Dickens, or a Victorian-England writer of your choice. The book starts out at quite a clip, has a little lull early on, and then you pretty much roar through the 600 page tome.

Quote: “After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper …”

See, speedy intro.

You might wonder how the reader is to sympathize with a main character who kills an innocent man, just to make sure he’ll be able to do it when face to face with his enemy, but this is a story of deceit, murder and revenge. Edward Glyver is definitely one of the most likeable of the leading ladies and lads.

More about the book

Edward Glyver, book lover, scholar and murderer. He discovers upon the death of his mother that he is not who he’s been raised to believe he is. In a twist of circumstances, the boy who had him expelled from school is the man set to inherit Glyver’s intended fortune.

There’s drama, passion, strong writing, a captivating story, interesting characters, and all sorts of goodies.

The Meaning of Night website has a number features about the book and the author.

You can download Part One in PDF.

Having read the book already, I’m less interested in that aspect, however, I did enjoy Michael’s message to readers:

Quote: Thanks for visiting The Meaning of Night website.

I hope readers of the novel will enjoy browsing the images and other material gathered together on the site, and that they’ll provide some entertaining insights into the world of the novel’s narrator, Edward Glyver.

What I’ve tried to do in The Meaning of Night is to create an imagined world that’s solid and circumstantial, but which exists somewhere apart from the mundane and the everyday, a world in which extraordinary things happen, but which still remains plausible and somehow real.

The novel is also a homage to the primal power of story, and to the great storytellers I admire ÔøΩ people like Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rafael Sabatini. These are the writers I return to again and again, and who have inspired The Meaning of Night. If I’ve succeeded in creating a story that grips the reader from the first line to the last, then I’ll feel I’ve done my job.

So if you’ve already read the novel ÔøΩ thank you. If you haven’t, I hope you will soon.

Best wishes,

Michael Cox

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly is a spin on Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Twelve-year-old David recently lost his mother and now his father is remarried. Rose is pregnant and when little Georgie comes along the family moves into Rose’s larger family home. David is a reader and a recluse so he’s only happy tucked away in his attic room, where he can read old books and be miserable and jealous of his father’s new-found happiness with Rose and Georgie.

One night David slips away into another world, one of fantasy and adventure. He must make his way to the King, who has a book that might be able to restore him to his world. Along the way there are a number of stories that build upon the Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

I enjoyed this book and thought it was well crafted, but I couldn’t get rid of the eerie sensation that I knew the plot and what was coming next. The Book of Lost Things would be a great read for teens and adults but I suspect that someone uninitiated into the world of Grimm’s would find it more exciting than someone who’s well-versed in fables and fairy tales.