Book Reviews

Sunday Sentence | March 6, 2016

Green-Island

 

“Babe squalling at her breast, her robe falling open, she chased them down the alley until one of the boys finally turned, and with no sign of hesitation, leveled his rifle at her.”

Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter

f5b0e41325260a2b830f6a706700852bEarlier this month, I snagged a deal on Living Social that got me a three-month Audible.com membership for just $8.00 per month. Normally, a membership runs $14.95 per month, so it was kind of a no brainer: a discount involving books that I could read while I drove to work when I couldn’t normally read? Uhm, okay. Sign me up.

I downloaded Karin Slaughter’s Pretty Girls, as my first “read”. I thought a mystery would be a good pick for an audio book, because I wanted something that would keep my attention and have enough action to keep me engaged in this consumption format. Well, let me tell you what. Pretty Girls was a perfect audio pick; and I realized this when I had to pull over at one point to catch my breath. Yeah, that really happened.

Pretty Girls centers around sisters Claire and Lydia, sisters whose lives were irrevocably changed when their older sister Julia was kidnapped and never found. Fast forward 20 years and the sisters don’t speak and live vastly different lives: Claire is married to one of Atlanta’s most successful businessmen, and Lydia is working to maintain sobriety while raising a daughter on her own.

It was the tragedy of their sister’s disappearance that drove them apart and the murder of Claire’s husband that brings them together. The reunion is hardly welcome, and the two women must now navigate life with old wounds ripped open and new secrets as Claire learns her husband’s murder was not a simple random act of violence.

Pretty Girls is not for the faint of heart. It’s gritty, gristly, and gruesome. It will make your heart race and plummet. If you are new to audio books, I highly recommend listening to voice actor Kathleen Early read this dark and twisted story that will stay with you long after the last word is spoken.

4 Stars

 

Infinite Home by Kathleen Alcott

Infinite HomeIf supermodel Kate Moss and superpopstar Taylor Swift had a love child, I am convinced it would be Kathleen Alcott. But super looks aside, this young woman is super talented and has written what I am confident will be one of my favorite books this year. And because I loved it so much, I want everyone to read it and love it just as much as I did! I loved it so much that if you read it and don’t love it, I probably won’t be able to take it, and I certainly won’t want to hear about it. But I will still like you. Probably.

Kathleen Alcott’s Infinite Home is the story of misfits and castaways connected by their physical home—a New York brownstone managed by Edith, a widow, who is estranged from her adult children. Edith’s residents include Edward, the depressed stand-up comic who is no longer funny; Adeleine, a gorgeous and anxious agoraphobe, who connects to life through things, not people; Thomas a young artist rediscovering life after a stroke; and my favorite, Paulie, a thirty year old man living with Williams Syndrome and the innocence and wonderment of a child.

At the start of Edith’s declining health, her absent son Owen intervenes seeking to evict everyone and take over the building. This threat creates fear, connection, and experiences the the tenants could have never imagined. The result is at times humorous and heart wrenching.

The writing is lovely. I went back over a number of the passages… needing to savor them more. Passages like these:

Regarding Edith’s husband’s death:

“In the first months without him, Edith marveled at how many different types of quiet there could be.”

A glimpse of the endearing Paulie:

“One night he got out the Christmas decorations Claudia had asked him to please leave in the closet for the rest of the year and he pulled out the string of white lights that pulsed. He brought them up to Thomas’s floor and bunched them into a knot and put them in a big glass jar and plugged them in right next to his door. Hell thought Thomas would like how he had put everything bright in one place and tangled it all together.”

It’s because of sweet Paulie, that I want to travel to see the magic of the fireflies. Read Infinite Home and you will want to go too.

5 Stars

Sunday Sentence | February 28, 2016

Nora Ephron

“…the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read, but it doesn’t happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I’m truly beside myself…”

By |February 28th, 2016|Memoir|0 Comments

Fate and Furies

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff is one of the most talked about books from 2015. After Snotty Literati read it, we couldn’t stop talking about it.

Check out our conversation about Fates and Furies and chime in with your own thoughts in the comments!

Fates and Furies Cover Image

Sunday Sentence | January 31, 2016

Maisie Dobbs

“Even if she hadn’t been the last person to walk through the turnstile at Warren Street tube station, Jack Barker would have noticed the tall, slender woman in the navy blue, thigh-length jacket with a matching pleated skirt short enough to reveal a well turned ankle.”

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera

Signs Preceding the End of the WorldEvery year, I try to read a handful of books I might not normally read. These aren’t books that are “out of my comfort zone” like zombie apocalypse, vampire YA stuff… but books that can expand my reach and reading experience. Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera is the perfect kind of book to do this.

Signs, written in Herrera’s native Spanish and translated by Lisa Dillman, tells the story of Makina, a young Mexican woman making the dangerous trek across the U.S./Mexican Border to deliver an unmarked package and find her brother. Marina’s brother crossed over a year ago, with the sketchy promise of land acquisition.

In just 107 pages, Herrara give us a glimpse into a world many of us don’t know, but may talk–or even argue–a lot about. It’s a world of many unknowns and uncertainties; and one that delivers a solemn punch about the realities of how humans choose to treat one another.

4 Stars

Soppy: A Love Story

So, I am a sucker for a sweet story. And one with cute little drawings too? Sign me up!

Soppy is the totes adorbs collection of Rice’s web comics that are based on real-life interactions with her boyfriend. The book will only take you a few minutes to read, but it will bring a smile to your face and put an “awwwwwwww” in your throat. I mean, look at these images. Am I right?

Soppy

I mean, right?

Sunday Sentence | January 3, 2016

FatesandFuries

“It was taken for granted by this trio of adults that Lotto was special.”

What I Read in 2015

Best Worst HandsMy goal was to read 30 books this year and fill out my Book Bingo Card and drumroll please… I did! Here’s what’s worth mentioning, good and bad.

Best Book Published in 2015: Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf. Now, I probably only read five books that were published this year, but this took my breath away. In traditional spare prose that packs a punch, Haruf’s final, posthumously, published work is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

Best Book Regardless of Publication Date: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. Thank goodness I read this book before it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction or I might never have picked it up. Those Pulitzer people aren’t the arbiters of such great taste. However, if I won one for say, book-blogging, I would brag the hell out of that shit… oh let me tell you. Here’s where my writing partner and I, aka Snotty Literati, reviewed All the Light We Cannot See.

Best Book I Reread: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Obviously. One of my book clubs read it in anticipation of Go Set a Watchman’s release. I even pre-ordered it. Ugh. In the end, I couldn’t do it. I cancelled Go Set a Watchman, I mean, Amazon gets enough of my money, and I went on knowing in my heart of hearts that TKAM is the best work produced my Ms. Lee, and likely the Greatest American Novel. Period.

Best Book by an Author I Have Read Before: I Am the Messenger by Markus Zusak. This is the same guy that wrote the wildly popular and all-time favorite of mine The Book Thief. Once an author reaches the kind of fame they do with a book like The Book Thief, their other works can rarely match up. And I Am the Messenger doesn’t… but it’s still really, really good. It definitely reads as more YA than the supposedly YA Book Thief, but I can’t recommend it enough.

Best Book I Read with The Book Babes Book Club: Not counting the aforementioned books that were all read for book clubs, I am going with A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Bachman. Translated from Sweden, this is the sweet tale of a crotchety old cranky crankenheimer whose life gets softened and turned around in ways he least expects. It’s totally a feel good book without the artificial corn syrup that can be mixed in by lesser talents.

Worst Book I Read with The Book Babes: The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George. Let me spare you. It has moments of lovely phrasing, and then wording that hits your beautiful reading experience like an elderly man flashing you out of nowhere. Unless this is your thing, move along. So many books. So little time.

Best Book I Read with the First Draft Book Club (FDBC) at Changing Hands Bookstore: Again, not counting any previously mentioned books, Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg. You may recall Clegg from his 2011 memoir Portrait of An Addict as a Young Man. This literary agent-turned-sometimes-writer has some real talent. The story centers around June Reid, and the unfathomable event—losing her daughter, her daughter’s fiancé, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend in a house fire. It takes June escaping across country and the interconnected stories of others to understand what actually happened. Now, I didn’t read his memoir but dove right into his first novel, but I couldn’t put this debut novel down. He says is love is behind the scenes, working the deals, but I would love to read more of his fiction.

 Worst Book I Read with the FDBC: Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins. Let me start by saying she’s a strong writer and someone I will likely read again. But this book was just not my cuppa. In the end, which I didn’t get to because I couldn’t finish it, Watkins had clearly done her homework, but it seemed she thought this term paper could be tweaked into a novel that would please her professors and the reading public. It just didn’t work for me. But, hey! It might work for you. It did for tons of way more important people than I am who put it on their Best of 2015 lists.

Best Book I Should Have Read by Now: It’s a tie between Bel Canto by Ann Patchett and Americanah by Chimamanda Ingozi Adichie. Why do I ever wait to read anything by Patchett… it’s a wonder. But here’s what Snotty Literati thought of Bel Canto. And, when you are done with that, you can check out our review of Americanah.

Best Collection of Short Stories: I finally got around to reading The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. I wasn’t going to read it, but Snotty Literati reads the National Book Award fiction winner each year and Jennifer said, “If we are going to read Redeployment by Phil Klay, then we have to read the best war stories ever written.” And there you go. Well, kudos to Jennifer. I don’t know if The Things They Carried are the best war stories ever written, but they are damn good, and scary, and sad… so very sad. But mostly, they are important. You should read them if you haven’t. Here’s our review of O’Brien and Klay’s collections.

Best Non-Fiction Read: I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, even though I do buy my fair share of it. This year, I read Daring Greatly by Brene Brown. It’s a non-traditional leadership book, but I think it should be required reading for everyone. Brown, a PhD in social work, has spent her life studying vulnerability and shame. She breaks down the harm of living in shame (and we all do) and the riches that can be achieved with living more authentically and vulnerability. It’s not new age-y, it’s not self-help mumbo jumbo—it’s real and it’s good.

Now, I would love to hear from you! Please share in the comments what you loved, hated, and were indifferent about this year.