Book Review: Rally 'Round Green

Author: Judy Christie

Title: Rally Round Green

Description: This is the fourth book in this series that I’ve read and reviewed.  In this installment, there is a threat to the Green school district, where Lois’ husband Chris is a coach and teacher. Of course, the paper must lead the effort of the citizens to “rally round Green.”

Review source: I got the first four books from the author at ALA.

Plot: I thought the plot in this one was one of the better plots. Although not as initially destructive as the tornado in an earlier book, the closure of a local school is something many small towns have had to face, and Christie does a good job of exploring the impact such an event would have on the town as a whole.

Characters: The supporting characters are all there—Lois and Chris are struggling with renovating their old house. The newspaper employees and Lois’ friends all have stuff going on, and there are a couple of interesting new villains.

Writing style: Homey and folksy as with the previous books.

Audience: I’d call it Christian women’s fiction.

Wrap-up: This series did grow on me, as I felt that Christie improved with each title in the series. It’s not enough of “my kind of reading” for me to make an effort to seek out book five, though. 3.5/5*

Book Review: The Unsinkable Mr. Brown

Author: Brian David Bruns

Title: The Unsinkable Mr. Brown

Description:  Bruns (his name means “Brown” in Romanian, thus the title) arrives in Romania to visit a girl he barely knows, Bianca. The first part of the book describes their time together in Romania; when they fall in love, Bruns decides to join her in her occupation—crewing on a cruise ship. He starts as a waiter, a job which is almost never held by an American, and moves up to working the art auctions.

Source: One of seven books nominated for Foreword’s award in the travel category (I’m a judge this year).

Writing style: Humorous and a bit disjointed.

Audience: Would probably appeal more to humor readers than travel readers, though Bruns has gained somewhat of a following among cruisers for his other books about life as a Carnival employee.

Major ideas: Working on a cruise ship isn’t as glamorous as you might think.

Wrap-up: I enjoyed this book, but I did find it somewhat scattered. I wasn’t convinced by the love story either; Bianca comes across as capricious and self-centered. 3/5*

Review: Kilimanjaro

Author: MG Edwards

Title: Kilimanjaro: One Man’s Quest to Go Over the Hill

Description: Edwards decides to tackle Kilimanjaro as a sort of midlife challenge to himself as he debates the path his life will take in the future. With three like-minded friends, he plans an attempt on Kilimanjaro. He takes us with him through the process from planning to aftermath.   

Source: One of seven books nominated for Foreword’s award in the travel category (I’m a judge this year).

Writing style: Edwards’ writing style grew on me. He gives some personal detail without giving too much information, and the same can be said of the climbing detail. The result is a saga of the trip that doesn’t get bogged down or go too fast. He does seem to relate his own climb to Hemingway’s Snows of Kilimanjaro story a little much—the book would stand on its own without this conceit.

Audience: Those who enjoy first-person travel narratives or stories of people tackling bucket-list type quests.

Major ideas: Edwards knows that the climb will be the most physical challenge he has ever tackled. He’s having difficulties in his career, and figures if he can master Kilimanjaro, he can face the challenge of changing his life’s path in other ways.

Wrap-up: I enjoyed this book. It’s an independent publication, so the quality (i.e. small black and white pictures) could have been better, but overall, I would recommend. 4/5*

Review: Every Love Story is a Ghost Story

Author: D.T. Max

Title: Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

Description: Max did not know Wallace, but he has used his writings and interviews with friends, relatives, and acquaintances to piece together this biography.   

Writing style: I would say this is a pretty even-handed treatment. Wallace’s deep depression and substance abuse—and later attempts at recovery—are dealt with frankly but not sensationally. The author mostly sticks to the facts he has unearthed and leaves speculation about Wallace’s motives or thoughts out of the book, as he should.

Audience: Anyone who is a fan of Wallace or interested in literature or biography. It’s also a pretty good portrait of someone who is trying desperately to live a full life while hampered by severe mental illness.

Major ideas: There’s a lot here about fiction as it was developing in the last three decades or so, and a lot about living with mental illness. Too much about either for me to try to encapsulate in a sentence.

Wrap-up: A well-done portrait of a true genius who left us too soon. 4/5*

Review: He's Gone

Author: Deb Caletti

Title: He’s Gone

Description: Dani wakes up one morning to find her husband Ian missing from their bed. At first she makes excuses—he went in to work, he’s visiting one of his daughters. But no one knows where he is, he doesn’t come back, and Dani can’t quite remember what happened the night before. As time passes and the search intensifies, Dani spends the time remembering their relationship; begun in adultery, she wonders if the marriage wasn’t somehow stained from the beginning.  

Review source: Library Thing Early Reviewers

Plot: The plot is nothing remarkable—Ian has disappeared, and all the possibilities for where he might be are examined, one by one.

Characters: Dani is the first person narrator, and the other characters are those closest to her: Ian, her ex-husband, Mark, her daughter, Ian’s first family, and so on. Dani considers each of these people and their relationships in detail as she reviews the past few years of her life with Ian.

Writing style: Very interior. The book is more of a musing upon marriage than a mystery. Can a relationship that started in infidelity to two spouses ever rise above that level of deception and selfishness to become a true marriage? Or will the partners always wonder if previous infidelity will lead to future betrayal?

Audience: Women’s literature, sort of mystery, but mostly not.

Wrap-up: Unlike some other recently-read material, this book does actually end with a solution to the puzzle, and one that is actually believable. I did, however, wish for an end to the soul-searching a little bit sooner. 3/5*

Review: One Life

Author: Scot McKnight

Title: One Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow

Description: McKnight claims that the church has traditionally emphasized the wrong elements of the Christian life, thus giving a mistaken impression of what it means to follow Jesus.   

Source: This was the freshman One Read at Southeastern University this year. I started the book along with them but took a little longer to finish it.

Writing style: McKnight is a professor at a Christian school, and that’s his voice here; the book sounds very much as though it is written to students, and examples from his relationships with various students are sprinkled throughout the book. The author continually refers to One.life, and the period there really started to get on my nerves as he referred to kingdom.life, sex.life, etc. etc. What exactly does that period mean and why is it there? Maybe you have to be under 30 to get it…

Audience: Young Christians.

Major ideas: Following Jesus might not be exactly what your church has told you.  The main distinction is McKnight’s de-emphasis of personal acts of piety and stress on bringing the kingdom of God to earth by increasing peace and justice. 

Wrap-up: This idea isn't knew, but McKnight conveys it in an engaging way. 3.5/5*

Review: The Man in the Empty Suit

Author: Sean Ferrell

Title: The Man in the Empty Suit 

Description: The narrator—we never learn his name—invented time travel, and to celebrate, he throws a party on the 100^th anniversary of his birth, to which he travels every time he has aged 365 days. The year he gets to wear The Suit, he’s excited about visiting the party, but something happens that has never happened before—one of his selves turns up dead, and it’s a self that’s not too far in the future from him. If he wants to continue to live, he has to use the clues he’s left himself to figure out how to prevent the killing. A beautiful woman shows up at the party as well, and who she is and why she came—and how to save her life—become other puzzles that the narrator must solve before time runs out.

Review source: Netgalley

Plot: The first half of the book had me totally gripped. This kind of self-referential time travel is fascinating. I thought the book slowed a little once the narrator left the party.

Characters: The narrator is the main character—the ONLY character for much of the book, though he shows up in many incarnations, which he names (the Youngsters, including the Inventor, and the Elders, including Seventy, Yellow, and the Screwdriver. Not to mention the Body.) In many ways he is completely self-absorbed and self-focused—which makes sense, since he is the only person he interacts with—but when he leaves the party, he suddenly becomes selfless, which strikes me as a little artificial.

Writing style: The author keeps things moving briskly for the first half of the book, but then the action slows way down. I have to admit that by the end I was mighty confused. I could probably have worked things out with an elaborate diagram of who was tethered to whom, as I’m sure Ferrell did, but I didn’t want to go to the bother.

Audience: Science fiction, time travel, or mystery fans.

Wrap-up: You’ll probably want to turn to page 1 and read it again, just to figure everything out. 3.5/5*

Book Review: Walking on Broken Glass

Author: Christa Allan

Title: Walking on Broken Glass

Description: Leah deals with her dysfunctional marriage and the loss of her baby by drinking. At the opening of this novel, she decides that she can’t spend the rest of her life drunk, and she makes the decision to check herself into a rehab center. This book centers on Leah’s rehab program and what happens when she returns home.

Review source: Free on kindle

Plot: Nothing is contrived or easy here. Leah’s relationship with her husband is teetering on the brink of divorce. Her rehabilitation isn’t pretty or effortless. This is a Christian novel in that Leah takes finding her higher power seriously, although the author doesn’t make Leah’s embrace of Christianity easy either.

Characters: Leah, her husband, and her best friend are the main characters, and they and the supporting characters are all real people with good and bad qualities who do good things and who also turn around and fail once in a while.

Writing style: Told in brutally honest first person.

Audience: Certainly anyone who is struggling with substance abuse—or with the death of a child or another tragedy—would empathize with Leah. Chick lit readers in general would probably enjoy this well-written book, if they didn’t mind the spiritual content.

Wrap-up: This isn’t the type of book I normally read, but I was engaged from the outset with Leah’s struggle to turn her life around. 3.5/5*

Book Review: Blood Men

Author: Paul Cleave

Title: Blood Men

Description: The main thing you need to know about Edward Hunter is that his father is in jail for murdering prostitutes—lots of them. Edward has tried to move on from his father’s arrest and the subsequent destruction of his family, and has created a nice, normal life with a wife who he loves and a little girl. Then he and his wife accidentally end up in the middle of a bank robbery, and his wife becomes an innocent victim. Frustrated by the seeming indifference of the police, Edward initiates contact with his father to see what other options might be open to him as the son of a serial killer. From there, things just get wilder.

Plot: Unique and gripping. Even though he is driven by the quest for vengeance and he (and the reader) have no idea how much violence he is capable of, Edward is a sympathetic main character. A couple of twists at the end left me reeling.

Characters: The main characters are Edward, his father, and the detective who is assigned to the case.  Lots of nasty bad-guy types as fodder.

Writing style: It’s a thriller and fits the genre well—one of those books that actually affects you physically, so that you’re gripping the book a little harder and breathing a little more quickly as you read.

Audience: Probably should stick with the thriller crowd. There was some pretty graphic violence and overall, the book was really dark. Not my usual type of read, but worthwhile.

Wrap-up: Don’t pick it up unless you can handle some shocks to your system. 4/5*

Book Review: The Man Who Knew Too Much

Author: G.K. Chesterton

Title: The Man Who Knew too Much

Description: This is a collection of short detective stories.  It really reminded me of Sherlock Holmes—written around the same time, very much centered around deduction, etc. Not being much of a Holmes fan, I’m not sure why Holmes was so successful and Horne Fisher (Chesterton’s detective) not so much. Maybe Chesterton is too topical; the stories are very much late nineteenth century Britain.

Review source: As one of those hoary classics, this book was free on kindle.

Characters: Horne Fisher is the detective and he is the only character who is in all of the stories, although there is a Watson-type fellow who shows up now and again.

Writing style: Typical for the era… requires a bit of concentration, but rewarding if you stick with it.

Audience: Chesterton fans, Holmes fans, those who like detective short stories.

Wrap-up: I read ‘em one at a time on the treadmill and they kept me going pretty well. 4/5*

Book Review: Glow

Author: Amy Kathleen Ryan

Title: Glow

Description: Two spaceships left a deteriorating Earth to colonize New Earth. Both were equipped with all they would need for a decades-long journey, but one was secular and one was religious. Kieran and Waverly were born aboard the secular ship, the two oldest of the next generation of space colonists. After years of no communication from the other ship, their ship, the Empyrean, was attacked and the girls were taken captive. The story is told from Waverly’s point of view, as she struggles to rescue her mother and to return to the Empyrean, and from Kieran’s as he struggles for control of the ship after the adults leave to rescue the girls.

Review source: ALA

Plot: The plot was pretty interesting. The idea of separating colonists by religious belief was a new one to me, and it certainly comes into play. Because the book is the first in a series, though, basically nothing is resolved at the end.

Characters: I’ve heard this book referred to as “the next Hunger Games,” and it certainly seems like that author had it in mind as she chose her characters. We have the main character, a girl, who is quite tough, and two boys who like her. Neither of the boys are especially sympathetic, as they fight one another for control of the ship.

Writing style: One of the main reasons I’m not a science fiction fan is that the authors can never seem to tell a story in a reasonable amount of time. Other genres, they can manage it! But sci-fi, even a three-book series is short. I don’t like books that don’t resolve.

Audience: It’s a YA, sci-fi, Hunger Games clone.

Wrap-up: As I mentioned, I’m not a big sci-fi fan, so I’m not going to go out looking for the next book in the series. 2.5/5*

Book Review: Cry, the Beloved Country

Author: Alan Paton

Title: Cry, the Beloved Country

Description: An old priest from rural South Africa goes to Johannesburg to find his sister and his son, with whom he has lost touch. Transplanted from their rural lives, they have succumbed to bad company, temptation, and poverty. While the sister agrees to return to their small village to raise her son, the priest’s son, Absalom, has suffered a different and heartbreaking fate. Meanwhile, a rich white landowner finds that his son has been murdered in a burglary gone bad.

Review source: This was a book group selection.

Plot: I pretty well described the plot above, but the plot is barely important compared to the characters and the writing.

Characters: Stephen Kumalo and uJarvis, Absalom and Arthur, are white and black, young and old, poor and rich. They are both richly drawn characters and representations of South African people.

Writing style: This book is literally beautiful. It’s just poetry.

Audience: everyone.

Wrap-up: One good thing about the book group is that it gets me to read some classics that I should have read by now, but just haven’t, somehow. This book surpassed its reputation and all of my expectations; it was lovely, and it broke my heart. 5/5*

Book Review: The Lincoln Conspiracy

Author: Timothy O’Brien

Title: The Lincoln Conspiracy

Description: Washington D.C. police detective Temple McFadden happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time; he sees a man murdered and ends up with a couple of documents that two powerful, clever, and possibly lethal men want really bad. Lincoln has just been assassinated, and Booth shot, but the Capitol is still buzzing with the aftermath of the crime and the challenges of reforming a nation after the Civil War. When the documents appear to have information about Lincoln’s assassination, McFadden decides to keep them and try to discover why people are so eager to get them.

Review source: Library Thing Early Reviewers

Plot: I love how O’Brien brought in actual historical characters; the research here seemed meticulous and the characters interact with “real people” in an entirely believable way (check out the story of Elizabeth Keckley).  There are plenty of plot twists; it took me awhile to figure out what was actually going on, but O’Brien ties it all together by the end.

Characters: The characters are probably the reason I enjoyed this book so much. I loved the main character and his wife and their friend Augustus; McFadden seems to have devoted friends all over Washington, and they all add color to the story.

Writing style: O’Brien keeps the plot moving but doesn’t neglect character or historical detail to do it.

Audience: Mystery fans, Lincoln buffs, those who like historical fiction.

Wrap-up: You can probably tell I like this book an awful lot. I would read any books in this series that O’Brien writes in the future.  5/5*

Book Review: Perfume

Author: Patrick Suskind

Title: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Description: Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born in eighteenth-century France with two unusual traits. First, he has no scent (this leads all of his foster mothers to reject him); second, he has the best sense of smell in history. He can smell anything , anyone; he remembers every smell; he desires to create new scents and perfumes and learns everything he can about them. Unfortunately, this, combined with his lack of human emotions, leads him to take, well, rather extreme steps to collect scents that he covets.

Plot: This isn’t a mystery, nor is it a thriller. The best I can describe it would be that it is the book that results when the author asks himself, “What if there were a person who cared only about what he smelled?”

Characters: All of the major characters in the book are repulsive. Grenouille himself does not seem human.

Writing style: What I really enjoyed about this book was the description of smells of all sorts. In this way, it seemed to do for smells what Ann Patchett does for music in Bel Canto.  In other words, sometimes an author can write about one specific thing in a way that seems revelatory to me, and that’s what Suskind does here. Also, I was really interested in the details about perfume creation in the eighteenth century.

Audience: Literary fiction.

Wrap-up: I was riveted by this book for the writing, not for the characters, which is usually the case with me. 4/5*

Book Review: Witches (YA)

Author: Rosalyn Schanzer

Title: Witches!: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem

Description: A nonfiction account of the Salem witch trials, written for grades 6-10.

Source: ALA

Writing style: Documentary, and incorporating primary source material from time to time. There are some accounts of torture and stories of supposed devil-worship that might bother some kids (or their parents).

Major ideas: The author speculates about what might have caused the witch hunts, but she does not go out on a limb to assert any radical theories. She tells the story chronologically and points out—rather subtly—the opportunities that people had to make moral choices and the outcomes of those choices.

Wrap-up: This was an engaging tale of a truly horrifying period in America’s history. I should also mention the scratchboard illustrations, which I thought lent some sophistication to the book. 3/5* (just because I’m not the target audience)

Book Review: Orwell's Luck (YA)

Author:  Richard Jennings

Title: Orwell’s Luck

Description: The narrator (we never learn her name) finds a partially paralyzed rabbit on the morning paper on New Year’s morning, and determines to care for him until he is healed. This rabbit appears to have some special qualities, however. He may be communicating with her via the daily horoscopes.

Review source: ALA

Plot: Pretty cute. Will the rabbit send a message? Will the rabbit survive?

Characters: Orwell, the rabbit, is significantly the only character in the book who actually has a name. Everyone else has a role: the mom, the dad, the sister, the cat, the dog, the neighbors.

Writing style: Ostensibly narrated by a twelve year-old girl, this narrator is extremely well-spoken with a wide vocabulary. She is also thoughtful, entertaining plans at various points in the narrative to be a detective, a veterinarian, and a philosopher.

Audience: I’d estimate 5^th – 9^th grades. It was a one-hour read for me, and I enjoyed it.

Wrap-up: Pick it up if you enjoy clever, thoughtful YA lit, or if you have a middle-schooler who loves animals, reading, or both. 4/5*

Book Review: The Devil in Silver

Author: Victor LaValle

Title: The Devil in Silver

Description: Pepper gets into a fight one night, defending the honor of a girl he sort of likes. Because their shift is almost over and they don’t want to do the paperwork, the cops dump him in a mental hospital for 72 hours of observation, rather than arresting him. When he tries to fight his way out, Pepper is drugged into insensibility and wakes up a month later. Complicating matters is the mysterious patient who has an entire hall to himself and may be feeding on the other patients.  

Review source: Netgalley

Plot: This book is billed as horror, and at first it comes across like a typical horror novel (what IS that thing?) Somewhere along the way, though, it shifts, and becomes a musing on the nature of normalcy, the utter impersonality of “the system,” and the process of self-realization.

Characters: There are some pretty interesting characters here; Pepper, of course, but also his (are they really) friends Dorry, Loochie, and Coffee, and the other residents of the mental ward. Even the hospital personnel  come across as more than stereotyped caricatures.

Writing style: The character study in this book struck me as more successful than the horror aspect.  I’m not sure exactly how horrified we are supposed to be by the Devil, but he never seemed all that scary. Much scarier was the completely believable explanation for Pepper—completely sane—being incarcerated in a mental hospital indefinitely.

Audience: I’m sort of stumped here. Horror readers might like it, but I’d push it at folks who read literary fiction.

Wrap-up: After the cheap horror effects of the first few chapters died down, the book drew me in more and more. I’ll give it a solid 4/5*

Book Review: The Customer-Driven Academic Library

Author: Jeannette A. Woodward

Title: The Customer-Driven Academic Library

Description : Woodward’s contention is that as library tasks have become more specialized, the librarians have retreated more and more into their offices, leaving the library employees with less  training to do the crucial work of interacting with the customers.  

Writing style: Very readable, though the book isn’t about style but about ideas.

Audience: Academic librarians.

Major ideas: I’ve had this idea about university faculty as well. Although the naïve bystander might think that faculty are there to help students, I’ve learned that faculty are there to get tenure.  Woodward pushes this idea back on the library, and it’s a convincing argument. Although she doesn’t dwell on personality, I believe that most librarians are introverts, and are more comfortable not dealing with people as a major focus of their jobs. By indulging ourselves in this way, however, we run the risk of hastening the demise of the academic library; if the only workers anyone encounters are students, they will quickly begin to question why librarians are being paid to hide in the back rooms.

Wrap-up: This small book doesn’t contain all of the answers to the present library crisis, but it does present a persuasive argument that academic librarians need to spend more of their professional time interacting with students and faculty and less time indulging their penchant for the ivory tower. 4/5*

Book Review: Parting the Waters

 Author: Taylor Branch

Title: Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963

Description: An extremely detailed account of the rise to prominence of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his allies and detractors.  

Writing style: I’d call it “dry.” Lots of conversations reported verbatim. I can’t imagine the years of research that must have gone into the writing of this book.

Audience: Those interested in modern American history and the Civil Rights movement.

Major ideas: I have to admit, I didn’t know much about the early history of the civil rights movement. What I learned that surprised me: there was significant infighting among those who sought to improve conditions for African-Americans in the South, some civil, some not-so-much; MLK was often conflicted about which path to take; Kennedy wasn’t much for civil rights; sometimes I am just so ashamed of how people can treat one another.

Wrap-up: This book was on the Entertainment Weekly list that I’m trying to read through or I would not have picked it up—I would not read this book on my own. It was 922 pages of extremely detailed text and took me 3-4 years to read. So, it wasn’t my favorite read of the year, but I’m certainly not sorry I took the time to learn about this aspect of our nation’s history. 3/5*

Book Review: Enchantment

Author: Thaisa Frank

Title: Enchantment

Description: Short stories. Depressing magic realism.

Review source: Publisher

Plot: There are dozens of stories in this book (50 or more?) so it is hard to identify an overarching theme. There are several stories, though, about being seen—people blending in to inanimate objects so they cannot be seen, or being forgotten as though they were never there. I would say that most of the stories are about broken connections between people.

Characters: Mostly from the women’s point of view. These stories are pretty short—many are just two or three pages—so not much time for character development, more like a snapshot.

Writing style: Dreamlike, detached… Many of the stories contain elements of the magical. I can’t remember that any of the stories had happy endings, so a sort of sadness pervades the book.

Audience: Literary fiction

Wrap-up: I read this book because I had read Frank’s earlier Heidegger’s Glasses. I’ll say upfront that I’m not much for short stories; I much prefer the extended narrative of the novel. Short stories become just dizzying to me, especially if I’m reading more than one at a sitting, as I did with this book. In addition, I just happen to be re-reading Olive Kitteridge now as well. So it was up against a Pulitzer winner. The difference between this book and Olive is that I get that feeling of sustained, connected narrative in Olive. There were some connected stories here, but the typography of the story titles made it difficult to figure out exactly how that worked. 2.5/5*