Keep Quiet – Lisa Scottoline

Initially I was very intrigued by this book. I love a mystery – especially a murder mystery, so I felt good about my coming reading adventure. When I started to read it, I thought I was reading The Deepest Secret all over again. The fact that it was sounding so familiar did not discourage me from continuing on. I could have put the book down but instead I took it as an opportunity to either be extremely/pleasantly surprised or exceptionally disappointed. Well, despite my 50/50 chances of a positive outcome, turns out the odds were not in my favour for this book.

Just like The Deepest Secret, Keep Quiet is about an individual who accidentally hits an innocent person with their car and then flees the scene of the crime. It’s the classic narrative dilemma of whether the individual should stay at the crime scene and let the law determine their fate or flee in hopes of not jeopardizing their bright and hopeful future. In these narrative cases, it’s always family and self before the law. Whichever path they take at this fork in the road, we usually have a pretty good idea of what’s to come. So while the timelines of the stories twinned for quite some time, it was towards the end of Keep Quitethat I lost all hope; it was so predictable. It was another one of those books where you could skip a bunch of chapters and still feel confident that you knew what was going on. What was also disappointing was how predictable the characters were. And I think this has to do a lot with how the author executed dialogue. The characters almost started to sound like robots… or a really shitty play where the actors are trying not read off their scripts but in turn it sounds terribly choppy and becomes very unappealing. Again, characters aren’t everything for me but when characters and plot are failing me, I can become quite the critic.

Now, the book obviously didn’t get published out of thin air – there were a few scenes that I wasn’t necessarily able to predict. However, these scenes weren’t catchy enough to keep me intrigued. It actually took me a lot longer than usual to read this book because I just couldn’t get throuuughh it. Perhaps I’m being harsh but I would love to hear something argue otherwise. I am definitely looking forward to my next book, I have yet to hear a bad thing about it…

Kimberley

Our Souls at Night – Kent Haruf

This book was short, sweet – and absolutely beautiful. I could even describe the novel as endearing. From its small size and length, to its simple language and sentence structure, I truly just wanted to hug the story (as odd as that sounds).

The story is about an older widowed woman who approaches her neighbor and asks if he would want to keep her company at night. She has trouble sleeping alone and has thought about how nice it would be to get to know someone while working towards having restful nights. The woman is also a grandmother who eventually looks after her young grandson for a period of time, as a result of her son’s toxic and dysfunctional marriage.

I think I just felt really fortunate to be a part of the characters lives. I can’t say I have ever read a story from the perspective of a grandmother. And I think seeing the world from the perspective of a loving grandmother is what made the story so endearing. I sometimes think that the perception of a lot of older people is that as they get older, they begin to turn their brains off or stop worrying about things they used to worry about. However, this story reminded me that we can’t go down this path of thinking. If anything, the older we get, the more bits and pieces of information there is in every crevasse of our brain; they have so much accumulated information from over the years that they think and worry about things younger generations just can’t understand.

This book also reminded me how love has no age. And love comes in all shapes, sizes, colors and patterns. Love is as unique as the individuals who share it and no one can judge another’s love. At the end of the day or night (just like the title implies) all we have is our souls and what they are made of.

I loved how for such a simple book it gets you thinking about some of the move complex feelings known to mankind. It’s actually quite an exciting feeling – you’ll understand what I mean, I promise.

Kimberley

hausfrau – jill alexander essbaum

It’s been a long time since I read a book that actually made me gasp while reading the very last page. [Note: Reconstructing Amelia kept me on my toes throughout its entirety, however Hausfrau took me on a calm, yet interesting, journey only to slap me across the face in its final stages.]

The opening line of the novel is a good indication of what’s to come… “Anna was a good wife, mostly.” The “mostly” is where we roll our eyes and say: alright – I know where this is going… but you do and you don’t. When it comes to marriage and behaving mostly good, of course we know what that means. But it’s the possibility of finding out what is on the other dark side of mostly where the author captures our attention.

I think what also kept me so interested in the book was the fact that I felt little connection to the main character, Anna. Many times in the past I have explained how I was very tempted to stop reading a story because of how removed I felt from its characters. But in those cases, the characters weren’t doing anything to break my trust – I simply just didn’t like them or they didn’t excite me. However, in this instance, Anna is not a nice person. She acts in ways that gives you no choice but to greatly dislike her caliber as an individual. I really did my best to empathize with Anna but the frustration of wanting to slap her across the face became quite distracting at times. But I guess that’s where my intrigue of wanting to know the other half of mostly was fulfilled. It was that tension and collision between mine and Anna’s morals that was so interesting.

All in all I would say this was a pretty good book. I will say if it ended the way I thought it was going to end about half way through the story, I would have been quite disappointed. However, because the author threw a massive curve ball at the end of the story, it made the wait all very worthwhile.

Kimberley

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon

I thought this book had an extremely powerful message. I think for some people, it’s hard to read or learn about people who are different from themselves, however, when reading this book you can’t help but want to learn about people’s differences.

To be honest, I knew nothing about this book. I have been its cover around for years and I knew many people read it but I never inquired. My nana handed it down to me and suggested I read it so we could talk about it (it’s an easy sell with telling me we can then chat about a book) I immediately began reading.

As I started to read, I felt really confused. But I suppose that’s the joy of knowing nothing about a book – you go in blindly and you can either choose to accept its content or completely reject it. I didn’t let my confusion stand in the way of my acceptance.

The book is about a 15-year-old autistic boy, who comes from a divorced and dysfunctional family. Obstacles of any kind are hard but compound it with family dysfunction… and you’re in for a treat.

The novel’s events aren’t particularly revolutionary, however, it’s the narrators perspective that draws the reader in. This is the first book I have ever read that is from the perspective of an autistic person. And the thing is, reading from his perspective made me compassionate from all humans. This book is an excellent reminder of the good ol’ saying: never judge a book by its cover. How someone appears on the outside is zero reflection of what is on the inside. For instance, if someone is doing an action that at first we find weird, like tapping or humming, it’s important to step back and ask ourselves why someone would do that. Do they have anxiety? Addiction? Mental health issues? Autism? Is it a coping mechanism? No one is ever in a position to judge.

I often wonder if every single person in the world was capable of compassion, I wonder how different the world would be? If we always took the time to hear someone out or tried walking a mile in their shoes, how much kinder would the world be? To what degree would history be erased? This book is an excellent venue to get you thinking about how we act on a day-today basis and reflect on ways we can change for the better – all because of a young boy who is determined to solve a mystery.

I would be interested in reading a similar book. I am always up for a book that gets my wheels turning.

Kimberley

Perfection – Julie Metz

Perfection is a memoir – “a historical account or biography written from personal knowledge or special sources.” And in this case, the novel was written from experiences and personal knowledge (knowledge she didn’t foresee acquiring). The book is about a middle aged woman who sadly discovers that her recently deceased husband was secretly juggling multiple women behind her back… any committed woman’s worst nightmare.

The novel is exactly how I summarized it. There was no mystery or suspense – it was simply cold hard facts about some of the marital realities that many women encounter. The reader gets deep into the mind of the unfaithful husband when the author puts actual letters/emails that he sent to his mistresses. There were many moments where I felt badly for the woman – the fact that you can do everything right (by conventional standards) and still get burned, is a tough fact of life but we all go through at some point in our lives.

I think this book could either be amazing for women who can relate or absolutely terrible for women who can relate. Amazing because the reader could experience compassion, sympathy and comfort knowing that they can and do survive these difficult times. But on the other hand, it could be terrible because it could potentially lead the reader back to those feelings of betrayal and sadness and discomfort. I guess we all have our ways of dealing with things that trigger unhappy memories but I suppose this is one you can accept or decline to endure.

As someone who has personally experienced betrayal, it just doesn’t feel right giving the novel a harsh review. But that’s the beauty about memoirs and biographies; you can’t give an interpretation or evaluation of someone life – because it’s their life! It doesn’t seem fair saying that a literary depiction of someone’s life was boring or weird or poorly executed. In that being said, I will just touch on the writing style. At some points the novel felt very longwinded. I understand that it is important to be detailed in order to draw a vivid picture in the readers’ mind but there is also a threshold. I just felt that times the author was painfully longwinded, to the point where I really held myself back from skipping a few pages because I really didn’t think I would miss anything. However, despite the occasional word vomit, there were definitely lessons to learn from this woman’s experience and if you too have experienced betrayal, this book is a refreshing perspective on renewal.

Kimberley

Reconstructing Amelia – Kimberly McCreight

I am very pleased to say that a new member has joined my “All-time Favourite Books” club – and her name is Reconstructing Amelia.

This book was AMAZING. The world did not exist when this book was open. When I began the book and realized that it started with a prologue AND a line from one of Virginia Woolf’s novels – I knew I was in for a treat.

The book is about a teenaged girl, Amelia, who dies unexpectedly at her school. Her mother is told that the death was suicide, however, we quickly learn how people will go to extremes to hide the truth.

I wish everyone could experience the wonderful feeling of wanting to know what happens next in the plot but at the same time, never wanting to story to end – thrilled by the unraveling of the story but saddened as the thickness of the novel becomes thinner and thinner in your right hand (luckily for me I have my fellow bookworm at work who can relate to this feeling and talk about it).

When it comes to mysteries, usually I am engaged but never as emotionally attached as I was with this book. McCreight took me on a very unexpected emotional roller-coaster, which I think is why I couldn’t put the book down; I kept wanting to see what I personally would experience next.

I think also what captured me was how progressive the book was. It explores the nitty gritty of adolescence in the 21^st century. The author doesn’t simply mention bullying and LGBT communities, she tackles the issues head on, showing how when these issues aren’t faced head on, there can be serious consequences for those suffering. Growing up I was bullied but I definitely don’t believe that you had to have been bullied to appreciate the issues addressed in this book. I so badly wanted to jump inside the book, grab the characters by the shoulders and shout It’s going to be okay! Don’t give up! The author did an amazing job of making the reader not only empathize with the characters but with children all over the world fighting the same battle.

Reconstructing Amelia wasn’t just a mystery, it was a socially conscious narrative, which, I will admit definitely tugged at my women studies heart strings.

ps. please please please let there be a sequel.

Kimberley

A Circle of Wives – Alice LaPlante

Now – if only the book was as uplifting (or as catchy) as when you sing the novel’s title to the tune of Elton John’s Circle of Life…

To be honest, once you have read the back of the book, you have read the entire story. I felt like everything I needed to know was already given to me, and the pages between what was given to me, was just useless fluff. The story begins with Dr. John Taylor being found dead in a hotel room in his hometown. Detective Samantha Adams, a small-town sheriff, is thrown into solving the case. While Dr. John Taylor was saving lives, he was also very busy leading several of his own. More specifically, Dr. Taylor was married to three very different women in three separate cities. The women eventually meet one another at the Dr.’s funeral and Detective Adams eventually solves the murder mystery.

I usually try not to read other reviews when I am writing my own, however, I was really curious to see how other people felt about this book. Personally, I felt it was completely anticlimactic. The reviews I read claimed the novel to be thrilling! and a wild ride of love! – spare me.

I felt like the story had so much potential! When you first hear what the book is about, you think to yourself wow – that sounds so good! But sadly, the book doesn’t live up to its own expectations. It took me forever to read this book because there wasn’t an ounce of me that was committed to the story. The fact that I was able to read the story in such fragmented timeslots shows that it wasn’t crucial to the structural integrity of its developments. Every other chapter is about Detective Adams or the women Dr. Taylor was married to. And then within those chapters, the women talk about their personal lives, with and without the Dr. You didn’t need to flow from one chapter to another in order to absorb the story as a whole. If you felt like reading about a woman bitch about her life, just pick up this book for a bit and then get back to your own life.

I know I am being harsh but I am just disappointed. I feel like there was 250 pages of potential that was wasted on women reminiscing about their past. I know plenty of other places where I listen to these types of conversations and I didn’t need it from a book I hoped to enjoy.

Kimberley

The Countess – Rebecca Johns

So I now love biographies – probably because I am so nosey! But regardless, this one has won over my heart. I had a lot of fun with this book because a fellow bookworm read it at the same as me. For about a week or so, we began each workday with a quick gossip session about Elizabeth Bathory. I love how reading is such a solitary activity but at the same time brings countless amounts of people together.

I use the term biography very loosely here. The Countess is a work of historical fiction. A biography is an account of someone’s life written by someone else. However, for the sake of this novel, some events/character feelings cannot be proven 100% correct. Therefore, it cannot be categorized as a biography. The novel is about Countess Elizabeth Bathory, a powerful Hungarian noblewoman who evolves from a young love-lost girl, to an obscured murderer. The author does such an amazing job of vividly portraying Elizabeth as a woman, murder, mother, wife, lover and enemy. The reader’s understanding of Elizabeth isn’t at all fogged by the apprehension of wondering what accounts of her life are real versus embellished for the sake of the novel.

For a novel that takes place in 1611, one might think that the ability to relate or visualize life in this period may be strained. This isn’t the case at all. There are actually a few scenes in the novel that I know I won’t be able to get out of my mind for quite some time. There were moments where she described smells and the colour and consistency of blood perfectly. The author’s ability to make you feel like you are a fly on the wall or a peasant standing beside Elizabeth is remarkable. The Countess is written in first person (the perspective of Elizabeth) which I believe really adds a different dimension to the story. Because Elizabeth plays so many roles in so many different peoples lives, you see how it is possible for her because we get to hear the voices inside her head. My feelings towards Elizabeth changed in unison with her roles – one minute you are empathizing with her and the next you are glad she is locked up for life.

The Countess isn’t something I would normally delve into but it made me really excited and hopeful for exploring similar novels. Any suggestions?

Kimberley

The Pocket Wife – Susan Crawford

The concept of marketing is fascinating to me – and not just because I am in marketing and communications as a profession. As aware as I am of selling tactics, it doesn’t mean I don’t fall for them – sometimes I feel like my consumer susceptibility increases because of my heightened awareness. In that being said, I fell for the good ol’ book cover quote. More specifically, underneath The Pocket Wife a quote reads: A fast-paced, thrilling debut.

When a cover quote successfully describes a novel it’s great! You don’t feel cheated or lied to. However, when you begin to wonder if a quote accidentally got put on the wrong novel, that’s when you start beating yourself up for falling for this selling tactic. So yes, you guessed it, when it came to this book – I felt cheated.

When I read fast-paced I got excited. I love when an author doesn’t waste any time getting into a story. And that is one thing Crawford did well, she jumped right into the heart of the story, scrapping the fluff and diving right into the suspense. Within paragraphs we learn about every character, where the story takes place and how there is a murder in a quaint suburban neighbourhood. However, despite intriguing me with all this action right off the bat, I quickly began to lose interest.

“Fast-paced” could/should be substituted with choppy, disjointed or jagged. I felt like the story really jumped around. I wondered if it was because I would read for a bit and then put the book down (but who doesn’t do that?). So I would reread a few pages and then continue – this still didn’t help. It’s one thing to keep the story moving, it’s another thing to make the reader feel like they are doing an inadequate job of following along.

Don’t get me wrong; there is something for everyone – especially in the world of novels. Some people may really enjoy novels like this one but for me, as much as I say I crave an exciting novel, there still needs to be a modest amount of linear flow. I just didn’t feel a connection with this book. But the great thing about reading experiences is that they are as unique as the reader.

Kimberley

The Lemon Orchard – Luanne Rice

This book was a wonderful and pleasant surprise! It is a perfect example of how discounted books are not any less enjoyable, or credible, compared to those placed front and centre on store shelves. This book was in the 80% off section of Chapters (even though I have so many unread books, the deal was just too good to pass up!). But to my initial point, the book deserves more credit than the discount table – only because I do know that there is a stigma attached to discounted books.

The book begins with a prologue (my favourite) where the reader learns about the death of Jenny – Julia, the main character’s daughter. We quickly learn how for five years Julia has been trying to cope with the deaths of her daughter, as well as husband. To escape her anxious mind, she finds sanctuary in her uncles lemon orchard. There, she unexpectedly falls in love. She doesn’t just fall in love with this man’s heart but commits herself to discovering every inch of his past. And I know that sounds a bit intrusive but it turns out to be quite beautiful – the ways in which people mend themselves through finding hope in others.

Anyways, it has been a very long time since I experienced disappointment for the right reasons. I was sad when the story ended because I really wanted to experience the next chapter of the character’s lives. I don’t think the author has any plans of writing a sequel but I definitely believe the story and the characters were substantial enough to continue their stories. I also feel like the front cover doesn’t do the novel justice. The creepy hand resting softly on the woman’s shoulder alludes to some sort of forbidden (even erotic) love. And while a relationship does develop between two characters, it deserves a lot more credit than what we think the relationship is going to be like due to the subliminal messaging of its cover. This is all just a very longwinded way to say read the book. And even if you don’t read the book, take this as a lesson for giving the discount section a gander, you never know what treasures you may find.

Kimberley