Through A Glass Darkly by Karleen Koen

Karleen Koen's sweeping saga contains unforgettable characters consumed with passion: the extraordinarily beautiful fifteen-year-old noblewoman, Barbara Alderley; the man she adores, the wickedly handsome Roger MontGeoffry; her grandmother, the duchess, who rules the family with cunning and wit; and her mother, the ineffably cruel, self-centered and licentious Diana. Like no other work, Through a Glass Darkly is infused with intrigue, sweetened by romance and awash in the black ink of betrayal.

(from goodreads.com)

I give this book 2 out of 5 stars.

Normally, I don't bother with romance novels.  The plots are usually too cookie-cutter for me.  There's a lot of love, lust, hurt, then resolution and everyone lives happily ever after.  blah blah blah.  This book, however, was a free download on my kindle and it had some decent reviews so I decided to give it a try.  The characters were interesting and the storyline was not dull.  The main character (Barbara) is a child (and yes, I say child even though she gets married) of 15.  She has a soft spot for her grandmother and young children.  Her grandmother and all the children in the story are very endearing.  Koen does a good job making you like the Duchess and her grandchildren.  My favorite part of the story was when a shocking turn of events sweeps through the family and reminds the reader of the cruel hardships and lack of proper medical healthcare that were rampant in that time of our history. 

Contrasting the beloved relationships between the children and their grandmother is the sadistic relationship the children have with their mother, Diana.  The author does her darndest to make you bleieve Diana is evil and to be feared.  She manipulates and bullies people into doing what she wants.  She is the perfect "bad guy" until you meet Phillipe. 

Barbara has a girl-hood crush on a man (Roger) who's something like 3 decades older than her and her family arranges for her to marry him, which she does.  She gets the man of her dreams and he gets her grandmother's prime real estate in London.  They travel to France and she does some growing up.  He starts to fall in love with her and she's sickeningly puppy-love-struck for him but their adventures in married life are not quite what one would expect.  Roger is your typical historical romance novel hero.  He's occassionally a jerk but the heroine always forgives him because he swoops in and saves the day or buys her expensive presents.  See, the thing about Roger, though, is that he's hiding a very dark secret that, when it gets revealed, devastates Barbara and smashes her expectations to smitherines.  This revelation was very well-written and leaves the book with a cliff-hanger that tempts me to buy the sequel, Now Face To Face.    

In a nutshell, this book is about a girl who grows up to realize the world isn't what she expected it to be.  I thought it was an "ok" read.  I wasn't overly disappointed when it ended but, like I said, the cilff-hanging ending makes me want to read the sequel just so I can find out what happens.  I may borrow it from the library because I just don't think I can convince myself that it might be worth money to read another one of these long-winded tales.  Oh, did I mention it's more than 700 pages long?  No?  Well, it is.  I've been known to enjoy long books because I hate when a good story ends but another 700 pages of this stuff?  Meh, guess we'll wait and see if the next post I make is about the sequel. 

 

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart—he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone—but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

(from goodreads.com)

I give this book 5 out of 5 stars.

I absolutely LOVED this book.  There is no part of it that I can say anything negative about.  The plot was complicated yet simple and it reached out and grabbed ahold of me from the first page.  I have always adored fairy tales (in fact, my college honors thesis was based on fairy tales and urban legends) and that is what initially drew me to this book.  Eowyn Ivey does a marvelous job painting a world where the lines between reality and fantasy are so blurred that you often find yourself wondering if a fantastical element could be possible in reality.  The characters are also very well thought out.  They are each strong yet vulnerable, sympathetic yet aggravating, and very true-to-life. 

The story takes place in the wilderness of Alaska in the 1920s.  A middle-aged couple seeks adventure and independence on a farm in the middle of nowhere.  The town is so small it doesn't even have a doctor.  That first year is rough for the couple and things start to look very bleak.  Then, the couple makes a snow child (a child-sized version of a snowman) and voila!  The author begins to weave the classic fairy tale into her plot.  Without even realizing it, you find youself hoping that the snow child is a real child that the couple can care for and keep safe.  She comes and goes as she pleases and her innocent facade holds many secrets that the reader can't wait to have revealed. 

My favorite thing about it is that the author meanders through time at her own pace.  Sometimes she spends several pages focused on the span of single day, then she'll skip over an entire year in a sentence.  She shows the characters growing older and wiser.  She shows the goodness in each person that we all secretly wish for in our own reality.  She reveals that bad decisions don't define a person.  It is possible to betray someone in the heat of the moment then regret it and make amends through a heartfelt act.  It is possible to hurt someone over and over again and still have them look at you with love in their eyes.  It is possible to love someone and let them go without knowing when, or even if, they will return to you. 

How subtle is it to fall in love?  When does a child become a woman or a man?  Is it when they kill their first hunt?  Is it when they share a first kiss?  Is it when they risk their own physical health to be near the person they love? 

House Rules by Jodi Picoult

When your son can't look you in the eye...does that mean he's guilty?
Jacob Hunt is a teen with Asperger's syndrome. He's hopeless at reading social cues or expressing himself well to others, though he is brilliant in many ways. But he has a special focus on one subject - forensic analysis. A police scanner in his room clues him in to crime scenes, and he's always showing up and telling the cops what to do. And he's usually right.
But when Jacob's small hometown is rocked by a terrible murder, law enforcement comes to him. Jacob's behaviors are hallmark Asperger's, but they look a lot like guilt to the local police. Suddenly the Hunt family, who only want to fit in, are directly in the spotlight. For Jacob's mother, Emma, it's a brutal reminder of the intolerance and misunderstanding that always threaten her family. For his brother, Theo, it's another indication why nothing is normal because of Jacob.
And over this small family, the soul-searing question looms: Did Jacob commit murder?

(from goodreads.com)

I rate this book 2 out of 5 stars

Two weeks ago I would have told you that there was no way in hell I'd ever rate a Jodi Picoult book less than 4 stars...then I read House Rules.  It's not only that I'm disappointed; I feel betrayed.  The reason is this:  I bought this book wanting to read something that will broaden my perspective and twist my heart until it hurts, which is something that Jodi Picoult has always done in her stories.  I expected to laugh and cry and want to share this book with all of my friends.  What I got, instead, was something that seemed like Jodi Picoult wrote half of then handed to a fanfic writer with zero publishing experience to finish up for her.  It felt sloppy and after the first several chapters it was predictable. 

Personally, I don't know anyone who has been clinically diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome (AS). I bought this book because I was interested in the storyline and I wanted to learn more about AS.  Although I have no direct experience with AS, I feel as though Jodi Picoult did a good job introducing it to the readers.  For majority of the book I felt sympathy for Jacob and his family as they struggled with his predicament.  However, there's a point in the book where you realize that there are no hidden layers to the story and what you see is what you get (so to speak).  They repeat the same phrases over and over, pretending that it's sufficient evidence to send Jacob to prison for murder, when it's painfully obvious to the reader that Jacob's communication problems are causing this predicament and his family (who supposedly has had to deal with this for decades) just doesn't know how to ask him the right questions to get the truth.  This is one of the things I found hard to stomach:  if his mother and brother have had to translate Jacob's nonsensical verbage to the world for his entire life then why didn't they realize that he was trying to say something other than what they were interpreting?  It was obvious to the reader that he had something to say and Jodi Picoult's usual method of delivering storyline twists was sadly watered down and fell very flat when Jacob's truth did finally come out.

Jodi Picoult's way of capturing an audience's attention is, thankfully, still amazing.  Even though I grumbled and griped underneath my breath, I still genuinely wanted to keep reading.  The way she creates sympathetic characters with very human traits and down-right likeable-ness is one of the things I love about her.  Unfortunately, in this book, that's about all I loved.  I must say one last thing about the ending....it sucked.  All that build up and then it just ends.  No real resolution, no telling what happens next, if they all live happily ever after or if they all die in a tsunami.  It just ends. 

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

Six years after the phenomenal success of The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger has returned with a spectacularly compelling and haunting second novel set in and around Highgate Cemetery in London.

When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina. These two American girls never met their English aunt, only knew that their mother, too, was a twin, and Elspeth her sister. Julia and Valentina are semi-normal American teenagers--with seemingly little interest in college, finding jobs, or anything outside their cozy home in the suburbs of Chicago, and with an abnormally intense attachment to one another.

The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders Highgate Cemetery in London. They come to know the building's other residents. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword puzzle setter suffering from crippling Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Marjike, Martin's devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth's elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt's neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including--perhaps--their aunt, who can't seem to leave her old apartment and life behind.

(from goodreads.com)

I rate this book 4.5 out of 5 stars

I have neither read nor seen the Time Traveler's Wife and my opinion on that storyline has nothing to do with why I chose to read this book. 

This book was a little slow in the beginning.  It took me a few days to get through the first few chapters, which I admit is mostly due to lack of sleep, but once I got past those first fifty pages or so, it was smooth sailing.  It has everything that I enjoy in a story:  suspense, drama, human emotions, some strange details that are so unrealistic they become believable in a fictional world, and a good, old fashioned ghost.  I love the way the author weaves shiny strings of hope into the dismal lives of her characters so that by the end of the book you don't know who you're rooting for anymore.

The twins are a fantastic example of spoiled, sheltered girls.  They begin the story as typical American post-teenagers who are pathetically dependant on each other and their parents.  They have no concept of the future and have made no plans for themselves beyond breakfast and a morning television show.  They are the same in appearance yet different in demeanor and personality and as the story unfolds, it is easy to find oneself charmed by both girls. 

A maternal aunt bequeaths her fortune to the girls with the condition that they live in her apartment for a year before they sell it (if they choose to sell it) so off they go to London to experience new adventures in Highgate Cemetary.  The people they meet are unusual, to say the least.  They develop relationships and each girl begins to mature in her own way.  The author cleverly displays different types of intimate relationships and it is easy to find yourself drawing comparisons between lovers, siblings, parents, and friends.  I also enjoyed the way the author used humor to lighten the mood before adding a sinister note that makes you feel uneasy without being able to pinpoint why. 

Overall, I thought it was very well written and I was happily drawn in by the characters and storyline.  The only negative comments I have are that the beginning was a bit slow and the ending was a tad bit disappointing, but those things barely account for much when you consider the thorough enjoyment I derived from this fictional world of fantastical people.

Hello and Welcome!

Hello!  Welcome to my new blog!  Thanks for stopping by and reading some of my ramblings.  I hope you enjoy my musings and that you find out about books that you might want to read for yourselves.  As all grand ideas start, I've got a ton of things that I want to do with this blog and I just hope that my schedule and reliance on my techie-brother will be sufficient for me to bring some of these ideas into fruition.  Mainly, I want to do book reviews.  I will read whatever catches my eye in a book store, library, or thrift store then I'll come online and blog about it for you (and also for me since I've gotten so lax about reading that I find I'm re-buying and reading the same books because I simply forget about them after the first go-around).  Anywhoo, I've got an awesome friend who is also an avid reader and I'd like for her to chime in her opinion whenever she can.  Somewhere way down the line, I'd like to add a sort of book club kind of thing where I pose questions to go along with certain chapters of books and some of you can comment with your own opinions so that we can read together!  I'd also like to do book giveaways and some other fun stuff but that, too, remains to be seen!  SO that's my plan in a nutshell.  I hope you check back soon to see what's going on in the Buk Cafe