Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer **

Book Description:

Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer's bestselling Everything Is Illuminated, is a nine-year-old amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist. Like the second-language narrator of Illuminated, Oskar turns his naïvely precocious vocabulary to the understanding of historical tragedy, as he searches New York for the lock that matches a mysterious key left by his father when he was killed in the September 11 attacks, a quest that intertwines with the story of his grandparents, whose lives were blighted by the firebombing of Dresden. Foer embellishes the narrative with evocative graphics, including photographs, colored highlights and passages of illegibly overwritten text, and takes his unique flair for the poetry of miscommunication to occasionally gimmicky lengths, like a two-page soliloquy written entirely in numerical code. Although not quite the comic tour de force that Illuminated was, the novel is replete with hilarious and appalling passages, as when, during show-and-tell, Oskar plays a harrowing recording by a Hiroshima survivor and then launches into a Poindexterish disquisition on the bomb's "charring effect." It's more of a challenge to play in the same way with the very recent collapse of the towers, but Foer gambles on the power of his protagonist's voice to transform the cataclysm from raw current event to a tragedy at once visceral and mythical. Unafraid to show his traumatized characters' constant groping for emotional catharsis, Foer demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty. 

I decided to throw in the towel on this book last night, after a second failed attempt to get through it. The dialogue was hard to follow - whole converstations would occur in one paragraph, and I'd have to jump back and forth to try to figure out who was saying what.  And, I found the characters to be weird... if I encountered them on the street, I'd probably cross the road.  It's too bad, because I thought this one had potential.

The Next Accident, by Lisa Gardner ***

This thriller has just the right mix of suspense, intrigue, and murder, topped off with a little romance to make it sizzle. Pierce Quincy, hard-boiled FBI agent, and Rainie Conner, ex-cop turned P.I., team up to catch the perpetrator of several ingenious murders. The psychopath staged the death of Quincy's daughter Amanda, then his ex-wife, and is now going after Quincy's remaining daughter, Kimberly.

I picked up this book because I'd read a few from Gardner's Det. DD Warren series and liked them. This one wasn't part of that series, but it was pretty good - it was an original storyline, I thought. I don't think the mystery was a great shock when it was solved, but the story kept me interested.

The one complaint that I have was the references to a dream that the one character (Raine) was having about a baby elephant... I can't tell you specifics because I flipped past it, but suffice to say that the baby suffered. I don't think that it added anything to the storyline, and I wish it had been left out.