The Sunday Salon – Back after an unexpected break

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Well, I’m back.  (Gold star if you can tell me what book this line is from.  Hint: it’s the last line.)

Last week turned out to be a bit of a debacle in terms of blogging.  I had no intention of leaving things blank around here but a work conference took up a big part of my life and I couldn’t find the energy to do anything so Just Book Reading went quiet for a week.  Not the end of the world I know but since I do enjoy writing, it was a bit of a disappointment on my end.

While work did manage to suck the energy out of my writing, it didn’t do the same for my reading.  Conference work is boring with a decent amount of downtime so I did manage to read off and on.  I finished:

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen — This one is wicked in terms of the social commentary and very enjoyable.  I only have Lady Susan and Mansfield Park to finish in my Complete Works of Jane Austen book.  And, well, there is Emma but I’ve never been a fan of that one and after several attempts to read it failed, I may skip it once more.

Abandoned by Amanda Stevens — This is a short story prequel to The Restorer which I read over a week ago and liked.  In Abandoned, some parts felt as though they weren’t fleshed out but that also may have been due to the fact that I read this after finishing The Restorer and was expecting it to fill in some additional background on certain characters which wasn’t the point of the story.  Once I got past my expectations, I enjoyed it.

Heat Wave by Richard Castle — I have no idea how this one ended up on my Nook; I think it may have been a recommendation from my uncle but can’t be sure.  After some ghosts stories, a classic take on a gothic novel, and a failed attempt at classic children’s literature, I thought a cop story might just be what I needed.  It was short which was also appealing.  It was goofy, clichéd, I figured out the killer early on, and parts made me laugh out loud, but I found it fun.  Odd how that works some days.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hogdson Burnett — I don’t remember reading this one as a child but I’m familiar with the story from the movie.  I started it earlier in the week but left off on page nine.  I’ll go back but I need to be in the mood for it and wasn’t this week.

I started Poison by Sara Poole yesterday and that will probably be my reading for today.

Some links to peruse:

A peek inside homes of writers.

Culinary book clubs.

People aren’t using the iPad to read.  Not surprising to me.

That’s it for me.  Happy Sunday.

Review – Don’t Breathe a Word

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Don’t Breathe a Word

By Jennifer McMahon

HarperCollins

ISBN: 978-0-06-168937-6

3.85 stars

I want to say this was a fantasy story but I’m held up by reality on this one.  Did I like this book?  Yes and no.  Yes, in that the story was well paced, full of twists, and slightly disturbing in a way that makes you keep reading because you must absolutely know what happens and are afraid to put the book down for fear of not finding out.  No, in that sometimes reality is too disturbing and you want to walk away and forget what you read and imagined and go back to a life happy without disturbing images in your head.

Lisa is an imaginative child so much so that she not only imagines but believes she has found the fairy king in the woods behind her house.  Woods full of strange tales, horror stories, and dilapidated stone homes.  When she goes missing, there’s more to the story of a girl and a fairy king and it’s so much more disturbing than anyone, especially her brother, may have wanted to imagine.  Her brother, now a man in his twenties happy in his life and relationship with his girlfriend, Phoebe, Sam would rather forget parts of his childhood and move on but it’s not meant to happen.  When a woman claiming to be his sister appears saying she’s returned from the land of the fairies, the simple life Sam and Phoebe have together is ruined.

Sometimes when you’re reading, especially a story about a young girl gone missing, you know it’s going to turn out badly and all that was at work was sad, despicable, human behavior.  But sometimes you also want to believe there is another fantasy world where she could have been taken and McMahon does a good job of making you really wonder about that.  Is it all an elaborate ruse to fool you and hide psychotic behavior?  Why can’t there be a happy ending here?  I can tell you, without ruining anything, there is no happy ending here and yes, at times you will find yourself repulsed by the characters behavior. You’ll be uncomfortable with the lies they yield and live.  You’ll be utterly disgusted and disturbed by what they do.  Sadly, it’s also compelling and I’ll admit I had a hard time reading and putting this book down.

That’s also what’s making me a little wishy-washy on this.  Did I not like it because it made me uncomfortable?  Well written books should do that to a certain extent.  But ultimately, I can’t say I loved it and I don’t honestly know if it was because of the subject matter.  Having a visceral reaction to something I read doesn’t mean it’s not good if my reaction was negative, does it?

Either way this book gets credit for holding me nearly hostage for several hours to finish it before my heart stopped pounding.  If nothing else, McMahon knows how to get hold of a reader.

Don’t Breathe a Word will be released May 2011.

I won this book as part of the Early Reviewers Program on LibraryThing.

Review – The Other Life

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The Other Life

By Ellen Meister

Putnam

ISBN: 9780399151713-4

4 stars

If I knew I had another life, I would constantly wonder. Would I be jealous? Would I second guess my choices knowing there may be an alternative? Would I have the courage to try out that other life? This is what made Meister’s book so appealing to me — yes, we can all fantasize about another life but it doesn’t exist. For the main character in The Other Life, it does.

Quinn Braverman is living a happy life in Long Island with her husband Lewis and son Isaac. Pregnant with their second child, Quinn is crushed when she finds out something may seriously be wrong with the baby. Doctors can’t answer her questions and more than ever she longs to talk to her mother who committed suicide shortly after her marriage to Lewis. The simple, stable life she worked so hard for is slowly slipping away with each new day. But Quinn has a secret, one she barely lets herself think about — she has another life. In her staid Long Island home, hidden in the basement behind an old ironing board is a portal to her other life. For years she stayed away from it never even letting herself imagine what it would be like but the stress associated with her pregnancy and the decisions she and Lewis may have to face regarding their baby’s life finally weigh on her. She finds herself hovering around the portal until one day, unable to ignore it any longer, she gives in and goes through. She finds herself back in the Manhattan apartment she shared with her ex-boyfriend and even more surprising — her mother, Nan, is alive and well in this other world.

The complications associated with Quinn’s pregnancy are certainly a reason for wanting to escape, but in truth, she wants to know why her mother took her own life. While Nan always had mental health issues which Quinn understood to be the underlying cause for her suicide, she never fully accepted her death. She misses her especially now when she’s questioning whether or not she will be able to care for a possibly disabled child. She keeps going back to her other life in the hope of understanding her mother better, but in many ways it seems she’s doing it to not just to escape a difficult situation — which her pregnancy definitely is — but she wants and needs closure over her mother’s death. But can she really leave her husband and child forever? Unfortunately, having a life with her mother in it means leaving everything she cherishes behind.

Parts of this book fascinated me and others infuriated me. Quinn is a character you can identify with. She’s any woman living a life that one day takes an incredibly unexpected turn and she wants escape or at least a way to understand why things are happening. She has that means of escape and when she uses it the first time, I felt I understood, but when she kept going back I become frustrated with her. It was almost as if she really was trying to decide whether or not to abandon her family. Fortunately, Quinn isn’t a character I stayed annoyed with for very long. She was too likable for that, for me at least. Plus, I became fascinated by what she would find each time she slipped through the portal.

In many ways this is a family story barring the other life portal which is just a means of examining the character’s life choices and her wondering if she made, and is making, the right decisions. Something we all do wonder about from time to time which makes this a particularly interesting story. Quinn is a strong character but she has her faults and I liked that she wasn’t able to do away with any of these faults simply by slipping into another world. Nan, Quinn’s mother, is another character I found myself drawn to much the way Quinn is. In the end, Meister leaves you with a bumpy road but one you’ll want to travel.

In addition to this blog, I also do reviews for The Book Reporter website. The above review was done for the Book Reporter which can be found here. The book was provided to me by the publisher.

Teaser Tuesdays – The Restorer

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.  The idea is to give everyone a look inside the book you’re reading.

Play along: Grab your current read; Open to a random page; Share two teaser sentences from that page; Share the title and author so other participants know what you’re reading.

I started The Restorer by Amanda Stevens last night and thought I’d share a teaser this fine morning.

“It suggests the flight of the soul, although it’s a little more ambiguous than a dove or a winged effigy.”

He glanced up.  “What the devil is a winged effigy?” (page 66 on Nook)

The Sunday Salon

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It’s been at least two weeks since my last Sunday Salon.  Life’s been slightly busier than usual but this weekend has brought everything back to slow and relaxed which means I have time this morning to write a post and read a few.

Oddly, I don’t have a ton to discuss book-wise as my reading has been somewhat slow.  I’m reading a non-fiction book this week (Livia, Empress of Rome by Matthew Dennison) and non-fiction tends to take me longer to read.  On a whim, I decided to start a second book (The Hypnotist by MJ Rose) which I rarely do being the one book at a time person I am so now I’ve got two going and I’m not sure I’m making progress on either.  Both are good, it’s just been a slow week on the reading front.

Since I don’t have much to talk about and I don’t feel the need to moan about work or really anything else for that matter, I’ll leave you with some links.

Impossible books titles.  We’ve all seen them; we love to hate them or mock them ruthlessly.

This falls under things that baffle me.  While I love to read, I don’t think I actually want to smell like a book.  Just weird.

There are always discussions about what being well-read means to people and here’s one more to add to the list.

Bad movie adaptations.  Ya know ya want to look.

The ways digital books have changed our lives.

Review – The Winter Ghosts

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The Winter Ghosts

By Kate Mosse

Putnam

ISBN: 978-0-399-15715-8

4.25 stars

I’ve wanted to read a Kate Mosse novel for a while now.  Why I haven’t picked one up earlier is a mystery to me.  Fortunately, I had this book with me on a business trip and found myself so entangled with the story that my flight being delayed over and over again didn’t have the slightest impact.

Freddie Watson is a troubled person.  Still badly grieving the loss of his brother during WWII, he conjures up memories of his brother and talks to him for comfort when the pain gets too bad.  A stay in a mental institution hasn’t done much except to convince him he’s damaged.  In an attempt to find peace and quiet, and possibly a break from the ghosts that surround his life, Freddie takes a trip through the French Pyrenees and while driving through a blinding snow storm, he crashes his car.  Not badly hurt, he finds his way to a small mountain town where an inn keeper is willing to take him in.  She offers him a room, dry clothes, and the opportunity for a bit of socializing as the town will be hosting a celebration that night.  In an uncharacteristic attempt at fun, Freddie decides to go to the event but gets lost on the way.  He finally makes it and is seated next to a beautiful woman he falls instantly in love with.  After speaking to her all night and releasing a few of his tightly held stories about his brother and how he’s obsessed with his death, a fight takes place at the dinner and he runs away to the hills with her.  When Freddie is found the next morning, all he wants is to find the woman he met at the dinner but a fever soon makes his searching impossible and he’s forced back to the inn.  In a daze, he struggles to understand what happened to him and whether or not the woman he met was even real as no one seems to believe him.

There’s a strange coldness to this story and it’s not that it takes place during winter in the Pyrenees.  Freddie is hurting so much he turns himself off from life and when he finally finds something to make him happy, he finds out the woman he has fallen for is most likely a ghost or possibly even a figment of his imagination.  Is he slipping back into the depths of his mental problems or has he found something no one else knew existed?  I won’t say more because I don’t want to ruin it if you plan to read this one.  I will say I enjoyed it immensely and not just because my flight was delayed.  It was a thoroughly engrossing book.

Today’s Book – Livia, Empress of Rome

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I read non-fiction much slower than fiction so I’m not surprised to find myself less than 100 pages into Livia, Empress of Rome two days later.  While I’m enjoying the book, it can be at times slightly hard to follow.  It’s not the author’s fault either since records of Roman women, even the ones that marry emperors, were not kept with any regularity.  The story is told through the men in her life, which is interesting, but at times frustrating since a good deal of the time you’re left reading about a man whose role in Livia’s life was minimal but their meeting was the only way to mark the passage of time in her life.

Roman lifestyles, marriage in particular, are fascinating to read about and slightly disturbing.  Women are used as pawns, not to say they didn’t have a say in who or when they married (most didn’t but in households where a marriage was based on love, some thought may have been given to the daughter’s wishes but it would have been unusual) but most of the time are traded easily as property which is how most if not all are thought of.  For instance, Livia’s second marriage to Octavian (Emperor Augustus in later years) happens while she is pregnant with her second child from her first husband.  Of course, out of courtesy, Octavian waits to marry her until after she gives birth.  A few days after she has the baby, they marry and the child is returned to Livia’s first husband as was the custom when a man marries a woman pregnant with another’s child.  Crazy.

What I’m enjoying most is not necessarily the information about Livia, she is an interesting person though, but the background on Roman life.  Debauched is a good description this early on but not the only one that can be used.  I’m sure I’ll have more when I get to the end of this one.