Catching up

More Carol Goodman, and I'd say this is my favorite of hers so far. The Ghost Orchid is considerably more tinged with the supernatural than anything else I've read by her, and apparently that was just what I needed right now. As always with Goodman's books, it's a great balance of solid writing and not-so-heavy reading.


I can't remember how I happened to find How Far is the Ocean from Here. One day, the library notified me that the copy I requested was in, and even though the subject matter isn't something I'd have normally picked up, I figured I must have had a reason for requesting it. And I'm very glad I gave Amy Shearn's novel a chance. It's a cast of quirky characters brought together in a motel in the middle of nowhere by a young surrogate mother on the run. The premise is perhaps movie-of-the-week with an alt-indie twist, and somehow Shearn makes it work -- it's often just too much, and at the same time, it's just right. Without giving anything away, I found the ending too neat, especially compared to the messiness of life throughout the book. But discounting that, it's very good writing and a satisfying read.

Disappearing acts

My second venture on the Stephenie Meyer bandwagon: I finished New Moon last night. This one left me more perplexed as to why so many adult women are obsessed with these books. For teenagers, I get it completely, but for me, the teen angst is just a bit too much to take. I spent most of the book being annoyed with Bella's logic (lack thereof?), and quite a large chunk of plot toward the end seemed incredibly forced. I didn't dislike it, but I'm not becoming a devotee by any means. (Of course, I'll have to read the next two...) And the Edward love? He's just not my type. Assuming I got over the vampire problem, he's way too protective with a few too many moments of irrational behavior. I'll take old-school Angel and Buffy any day over whiny Bella and crazy Edward.


Maggie O'Farrell's The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox was an enjoyable read, but not terribly memorable. The ending stayed with me but the characters have pretty much already escaped my (admittedly over-extended) mind. The story was intriguing and kept me reading, and I have no real complaints about the writing. It was pretty good. How's that for an underwhelming review?

California dreaming

I learned after I finished The Ruins of California that it actually started out as a memoir, and then Martha Sherrill discovered some secret she could neither print nor leave out. I'm not sure whether I would have read it differently if I had known there was some autobiography to the novel -- I suspected as much anyway, when I read that both the author and her protagonist were raised in Los Angeles. Inez, the narrator and main character, tells us about her life split between her mother, a former flamenco dancer, and her bachelor father, with his revolving door of girlfriends and man-on-the-town lifestyle. I found it a little slow going at the very beginning but soon became completely absorbed in Inez's coming of age. For most of the book's 10-year span, she straddles a fascinating border of exposure to the free-living California of the '70s and her own innocence, which I suppose is common to any teenager in any time or place. Sherrill's novel is fast-paced enough to hold the reader's interest while being entirely character driven; the story really is simply Inez's development from child to young adult, though the culture of California at the time is captured here as well.

Finally!

After an annoyingly long series of abandoned books, I finally managed to get through a couple of quick and enjoyable reads. Most recent was Jacqueline Sheehan's Lost and Found, which I had been eyeing on my mother's bookshelf for a while primarily because of the very cute dog on the cover. It's hard to go wrong with cute dogs. I think this qualifies as chick lit, and certainly it was quite predictable, but it was a sweet book and hey, a dog is a major character. Really, hard to go wrong.


Before that I breezed through The Kindness of Strangers, by Katrina Kittle, though it's not a breezy book by any stretch of the imagination. The subject matter was quite disturbing -- a woman finds out her best friends have been running a pornography ring with their children as the focus. Kittle handles it well, though, much in the style Jodi Picoult. Kittle uses similar shifts in characters' perspectives to narrate the story, which makes it move at a good pace. A good read, but one I was glad didn't stick in my memory for very long.

Island turmoil

I didn't really like this book, but it's hard for me to say exactly why. Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones, is certainly well written, with interesting characters, but the story just dragged for me. It seemed perhaps like there was too much happening -- Jones wanted to get in the political context of the island, but without ever thoroughly explaining it; he wanted to capture the mother-daughter struggles, but those never seemed fully real; and he wanted the quirky Mr. Watts to have his background and reality, but that got a bit lost in everything else. Intermixed with all this is the children learning Great Expectations from Mr. Watts, which were the most engaging parts of the book. I wanted more of that and less of so much else.

I'm including this for the Eponymous Challenge -- though he starts as a character in the book-within-the-book, Pip does actually become a character in a variety of ways.

Things remembered

As an adventure/fantasy/fairy tale, The Book of Lost Things does its job well. John Connolly tells the story of David, who, after the death of his mother, finds himself lost both figuratively and literally. His quest takes him through the darkest of fairy tale worlds, where he battles challenge after challenge (finding help along the way, in typical epic form). What perplexed me about this book was the setting. David's real life is set in England during World War II, which seemed like it ought to have an allegorical purpose. Perhaps I missed it, but without a more distinctive parallel, the setting struck me as a little too arbitrary. Indeed, it had usefulness to the plot, but that plot point could have been handled just as smoothly in another setting. I also found the ending unsatisfying -- without giving anything away, the end was too commonplace for such a fantastical story. If you're willing to overlook the problems in reality, David's travels through the stories and fairy tales are captivating enough to make this a worthwhile read.

A world of plenty

At 539 pages, Abundance weighs in as my longest book of the year so far. It was actually a fairly quick read, though, relatively speaking. It reads almost like a diary of Marie Antoinette's life as Dauphine and then Queen of France. I don't think it's the fault of Sena Jeter Naslund's writing, but Marie Antoinette just isn't that interesting. She's rather spoiled, good-hearted but selfish, completely unaware of the world around her -- yes, we get the picture. It's difficult to make a compelling character out of someone who comes across as utterly uncomplicated. Regardless, the book was interesting enough to finish, and I'm planning to read Naslund's Ahab's Wife in the near future, which I've heard has a much stronger and more interesting main character.