Book::  The Friday Night Knitting Club

Author:Kate Jacobs

Review:  I was pleasantly suprised at how good this book was.  It is really not about knitting, but rather the lives of the women who attend the club.  The primary focus is the owner of the shop and her teenage daughter.  The daughter's father is black, and the mother white.  The father suddenly comes back to New York after 14 years and wants to be involved, not just with the daughter, but with the mother as well.  There are several endearing characters in the club: the grandmotherly figure, soon to be single mother, grad student with troubled marriage, designer trying to break out, middle aged career woman who is out of work.  It all comes together suddenly at the end, and makes the trip worthwhile.

Book: The German Bride

Author: Joanna Hershon

Review:  It took me awhile to get into this book, because it is in Third person narrative.  Eva is a rich Jewish girl in 1860's Germany.  After she and her sister, Henriette, get their potraits painted, Eva starts an affair with the Catholic painter Heinrich.  After the affair turns sexual, Eva puts an end to it, but when she and her sister run into Heinrich later, she finds herself sneaking out to see him.  Unfortunately, Henriette follows her despite the fact that she is seven months pregnant.  The result is that Henriette is able to keep their parents from finding out about the affair and ruining Eva's life, but she looses her life and that of her child.  Eva is so distraught that she accepts a marriage proposal from a Jew who has moved to the American West.  The life that Abraham promises her is not the reality.  When they reach Santa Fe, she finds that they don't even have a home.  And she never really gets one, because he gambles away all of their money. 

I had a hard time getting into this novel, but then it seemed to end too soon. 

Book: Mister B. Gone

Author: Clive Barker

Review: I was hesitant to even pick up a Clive Barker book.  I had read one of his works previously and found it overly gory.  This was even more of a disappointment.  The idea of the book is that a demon is trapped within it's ancient pages, and he spends chapter upon chapter asking the reader to burn the book.  The only thing I liked about that was how the pages were made to appear slightly singed already.  The demon Jakabok Botch tells the story of how he was pulled from the Ninth Gate of hell into this world, and only like two of the adventures he had up here.  It ends with Guttenberg inventing the printing press and a war between heaven and hell, as to how it may be used.  An alright concept, with a lousy execution.

Book: The Secret Life of Bees

Author: Sue Monk Kidd

Review:  I read this one in only a day.  Lily is a sad teenage girl.  She accidently shot her mother when she was four.  Her stand in mother is Rosalee, a former black peach picker on her father's farm.  Her father is awful to her.  It is 1964 and Johnson has just signed the Civil Rights law.  When Rosalee gets herself arrested, Lily breaks her out and they make a run for Tiburon SC.  A name that she got from one of her mother's possessions.  She arrives at August Boatwrights house.  She is a beekeeper, who has a house full of love.  Lily learns that her mother had once been there, and had left her to go there.  The story has heartbreak, but Lily also finds a place where she is loved.  The story is very real, that parents aren't perfect, and even her father is not really a monster.

Book: The Djinn in the Nightengale's eye

Author: A G Byatt

Review:  As one might guess from the title, this book is in the form of a fairy tale meets real life.  I was a bit confused when I started reading, because ther are three tales that prelude the actual story.  I assume that they are included to add something to the story, but then the author also includes more classic tales with the main story.  Dr Gillian Perholt is a naratologist.  In other words, she knows lots of fairytales.  She is getting older, and her husband left her for a younger woman, but she didn't really mind that much.  She finds a Gin in a bottle, who of course gives her three wishes.  In their discourse, the genie tells his own tale which consists primarily of unrequited love.  Gillian wishes for a younger body, but not an overly young body, her own when she was about 35.  She is taken by the Gin's tales of love, and wishes that he would love her.  The Gin tells her a tale about wishing, and it becomes obvious that she should grant him his freedom as her final wish.

Book: Katya

Author: Sandra Birdsell

Review:  This was an interesting story of Katya, who is a young girl growing up in a Mennonite farming community in the steppes of Russia.  Apparently, Russia was one of the places that Mennonites fled to due to religous oppression in Germany.  They became very successful, which put them in a bad situation once World War One started, and then the Russian Revolution.  Katya's father is the overseer of Privol'Noye plantation.  She has an older sister and 3 little brothers and later a baby sister.  Her father is somewhat cheated by the owner, he is not given promised land, and his children have to start working in exchange for an education that was previously free.  Things go from bad to worse, once the revolution starts.  The peasants come in and take over the plantation, it is horrible that they waste all the stored food and shoot the milk cows, rather than making an effort to take care of the land.  Then a killing frenzy starts, Katya is able to escape with her little sister Sara.  Eventually, she is able to immigrate to Canada, where she grows old, and tells her story to a young man.

I love books where I get to learn new things.

Book: The Shipping News

Author: Annie Proulx

Review: This was a good book.  Quoyle is the unlikely main character of the book.  He is an overweight loser, whose wife is sleeping around on him to the point that she is not even living in their trailer anymore.  He does his best to take care of their two young daughters, who his wife, Petal, sometimes claims to have forgotten completely.  When his wife dies, he is still completely crushed.  His Aunt convinces him to get a new start with her, by moving to their homeland of Newfoundland.  It sounds like a lousy place to live to me.  There ancesteral home is still standing on the rock that it was dragged and bolted to.  Quoyle gets a job writing the shipping news for the local paper.  They meet all kinds of great characters in the slowly dying town, and a family secret is revealed as well.  Quoyles daughter, Bunny, is stuggling with understanding death, and is more confused than ever, when their friend wakes up during his own funeral. 

Book: The Watchmen

Authors: Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons

Review: This is a comic book published in 86-87.  Bryan saw it in the library and insisted that I read it.  It is a rather dark look at a future where masked vigilantes had once been heroes, but are now obsolete and have been made illegal.  The story opens with a questionable death.  One of the former heroes appears to have been murdered, by being thrown out of a shatter proof window in a highrise.  Rosharch, one of the heroes who refused to quit, starts to investigate.  He finds that the victim was "The Comedian", a former hero, who had since worked for the government.  There is a hero who has real superpowers.  The government dubbed him Dr. Manhattan, but he is really a scientist who was the victim of an unfortunate accident.  This has left him with some amazing abilities, like being able to walk through walls, teleport, see the future, see and manipulate atoms.  He is part of the reason the vigilantes are obsolete.  Yet the world is becoming a worse place.  When Dr. Manhattan retreats to Mars, will the former vigilantes be able to solve the mysteries of their kind being killed, and will they be able to save the world from one of their own?

Book: The Faraday Girls

Author: Monica Mcinerney

Review: The Faraday Girls are five sisters.  They are: Juliet, the surrogate mother; Miranda, the drama queen; Eliza, the sports trainer; Sadie, the "runt of the litter"; Clementine, the scientist.  The youngest, Clementine, finds herself pregnant at seventeen.  She takes a very mature view that the father will probably not be involved and that she can still put herself throught school and raise a child.  Her sisters make a promise to help her until Maggie is five.  The sisters start to flag after a few months, and Clementine is overwhelmed.  Sadie, who is not doing well at university, volunteers to become the nanny.  This causes some bitterness between Sadie and Clementine.  When Maggie turns five, all of the sisters start to move away to jobs or get married, except Sadie.  In a panic, Sadie kidnaps Maggie briefly.  Maggie is reunited with her mother and grandfather, but Sadie becomes an outcast.  It is revealed that their deceased mother, was not the saint their father makes her out to be, and in fact hated Sadie.  Twenty years later, Maggie is sent to find Sadie. 

I was suprised that this book did not have a storybook ending, and the characters were very realistic.

Book: Keeping Faith

Author: Jodi Picoult

Review: Because this author has several best sellers, I picked one out from the library.  This one was pretty good.  Mariah catches her husband in the act, when she drops by home with her daughter Faith and his girlfriend walks out of the shower.  It is revealed that Mariah had tried to kill herself seven years before, and her husband had her committed.  After Faith has an unusual accident, she starts talking to an imaginary friend she refers to as her Guard.  Mariah takes her daughter to a psychiatrist because of her own history, and the fact that she was medicated when she was pregnant with Faith.  The doctor can find nothing wrong with her, and suggests that Faith my be speaking to her God, not her Guard.  The doctor innocently reports this at a conference, and the story falls into the hands of a TV show host, who makes a living debunking religious stories.  Faith's story becomes more believable when she brings her dead grandmother back to life after a heartattack. 

This was a page turner, I kept wondering how they were going to resolve the little girls relationship with God.

Book: The Persian Bride

Author: James Buchanan

Review: A young Englishman finds himself in Iran in 1974.  He speaks Persian, and is able to forge documents to get a job teaching at a girls school.  He falls in love and marries the daughter of a high ranking Iranian official.  They have to flee with the help of a Russian diplomat/spy.  John only gets to spend a year with his bride and their baby daughter before they are forced apart during the serious upheavals of Iran in the seventies.

This book was a bit confusing in places, but the story of John searching for Shirin is incredible.  They spend years in prisons being tortured, because it turns out that she is the illegetimate daughter of the Shah.  I would recommend getting some of the backstory on Iran's polictial history before trying to read this.

Book: local Girls

Author: Alice Hoffman

Review: This is the story of a girl growing up in the Long Island Suburbs.  As a young teen, she and her best friend Jill sneak out of the house at night, and sometimes play pranks on the neighborhood. As they get older, Jill gets pregnant and drops out of school, Gretel's brother ends up working permanently at the Food Star rather than going to Harvard, and her father leaves her mother for a younger woman.  On top of all of that her mother's cancer returns.  It sounds like a lot of bad luck, but realistically is a pretty average life.  There are a few "miracles" in the story that I found to be a bit far-fetched, but all in all it was a decent read, although I'm not sure there was much point to the story.

Book: In the company of secrets

Author: Judith Miller

Review: This was a pretty good book, but is only the first in a series, so I was left wanting more.  Olivia is a servant in England, and wishes to escape to America.  Her employer's daughter, Lady Charlotte, offers to pay her way, if she can come along.  Charlotte is a spoiled little girl, who has no problem lying and using other people.  Charlotte's lies get Olivia in trouble, because she becomes employed for Mr. Pullman, the railcar magnate.  Olivia starts working at his hotel under the misconception that she is a skilled chef.  Charlotte is in the family way with a rich American investor, but what she didn't know was that he was married with children and refuses her child.  The web of lies that they create to explain themselves causes problems in Olivia's lovelife, worklife and spiratual life. 

The book does get a little preachy, like Olivia hearing the voice of the holy spirit, but it was not unreasonable that someone in this time period would have a strong faith, so I guess it is ok.

Book: Neverwhere

Author: Neil Gaiman

Review: I was not very impresses with the great Neil Gaiman.  He is a famous writer of comic books, like Sandman.  This book was pretty predictable, even though the premise was far-fetched.  Richard finds himself pulled into another world.  He stops to help a seemingly homeless girl on the streets of London, and finds the next day that he no longer exists and people are no longer acknowledging him.  He finds that there is another London, beneath the streets, in the sewers and subways.  It is a mgaical place, that seems to exist outside of time.  He must find the girl who started his problems, Door.  There is a predictable quest and Richard is rewarded with getting his life back, better than ever, then guess what happens.

Book: Middlesex

Author: Jeffrey Eugenides

Review: This is a pulitzer prize winning book, and international bestseller.  It tells the story of Cal, who was raised as a girl, but becomes a man.  She is a hermaphrodite, due to her familes questoinable marriage choices.  Her grandparents were Greek immigrants who were fleeing the Turks in the 20's.  Her grandmother and her brother have fallen in love due to lack of other options.  Her grandmother concedes to marrying her grandfather, because she does not expect to survive the war.  While the plot of the book was interesting, I found the writing style frustrating and hard to get into.  The author keeps jumping around, and then seems to spend an uncessary amount of time rehashing the sordid history of the family.  Thus, the book was difficult to read, and pretty long too.

Book: A tree grows in Brooklyn

Author: Bettye Smith

Review: This book was very good.  It is recommended reading for some schools, probably because there is a theme of education being the way out of poverty.  The book is told from the POV of Francie.  A girl growing up in the early 1900's in Brooklyn.  The writing is beautifully descriptive.  The foreword by Anna Quindlin states that in the first 20 chapters nothing much happens.  While this is true, Francie and her family are so charming it is hard not to love them.  In general, I have no affection for New York, but Francie shows how wonderful Brooklyn was, even though she was desperately poor.  Francie's father is the child of Irish immigrants and had to drop out of grade school to help support his family after his father died.  He has a drinking problem, but is still a good father and husband in other ways.  Francie's mother works as a maid to keep bread on the table.  Francie loves to read, and seems to be destined to become a famous writer.  After Francie's father dies when she is 14, her mother also has another baby.  It looks like Francie will not be able to return to school.  Francie's family is so hardworking and determined that they are able to keep going on only pennies a day.  While there is nothing specifically tragic that happens in the book, it is still quite compelling.

Book: The lady and the unicorn

Author: Tracy Chevalier

Review: This book is by the author of The girl with the pearl earring.  I enjoyed this book more.  It revolves around the creation of a tapstry for a noble family in the 1400's, it is based on actual tapestry.  The book is written from the POV of several characters.  The first is the artist, Nicholas, who is commission to design the tapestry.  He is a big flirt, and gets himself in trouble by accidently flirting with the daughter of the noble family.  Nothing really happens, but it does affect their lives.  His big line is about the unicorn's magic horn, and it works on a few girls in the story.  One of the most interesting characters is Alienor.  She is the weaver's daughter, and she is very skilled, but completely blind.  The nobleman's wife is also a good character.  She only bore daughters, so is now worthless in thee eyes of her husband, so she longs to retire to the convent, but can not do so until her husband dies.  I always enjoy a book where I learn something.  Getting some historical perspective on the art was interesting, even if the work was fiction.

Book: An Absolute Gentleman

Author: R M Kinder

Review:  This book was ok.  It is written from the POV of a serial killer, who is also a English Professor(assistant prof anyway).  It was acutally written by someone who had known a serial killer, Robert Weeks.  Rather than write a thriller, or a true crime story, the author is trying to show that the killer is normal most of the time, and even human.  I agree with that assessment, however, it does not make for a very exciting read.  Also, the author was careful to step around the unpleasantness of the actual killings.  She/he is always alluding to certain events and leaving our imagination as to what exactly happened.  The book starts to pick up towards the end, when the killer makes his last kill.  He struck too close to home and got himself caught.

Book: The Island

Author: Victoria Hislop

Review:  I enjoyed this book.  The beginning is a little confusing as to what the narrative style will be, but in chapter 2 it switches to the story of Alexis' family history.  Alexis is traveling in Europe and decides she wants to see the village on Crete where her mother grew up.  Her mother has always been secretive about her past, but sends her daughter with a letter of introduction.  The village is right across from Spinaloga, an island that was used to keep lepers, until it was essentially cured in 1957.  Alexis is shocked to learn that her great-grandmother and her great-aunt both had leperousy.  The story is heartbreaking in places and it is interesting to learn what their lives would have been like

Book: The Kindness of Stangers

Author: Katherine Kittle

Review: This book was good, and an easy read.  Sarah Laden husband passed away two years ago, leaving her with a 17 year old and 11 year old to raise.  In her darkest hour her friend Courtney was there to help her keep going.  Sarah spots Courtney's son Jordan walking from his house in the rain.  Jordan used to be her son Danny's best friend, but the two have had some mysterious falling out.  Sarah picks Jordan up and offers to give him a ride to school.  Jordan insists they stop for him to use the bathroom, and the unthinkable happens.  Jordan attempts suicide using a powerful injection of painkillers.  What unfolds is even more shocking.  Jordan's parents were using him child pornography ring, that Sarah was even unknowingly catering for.  Sarah's family takes Jordan in while they wait for his parent's trial, and show what effect the Kindness of Strangers can have. 

I really enjoyed the new viewpoints on child abuse in this book, it was not the same old victimization that is prevalent in similar stories.