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.

The Surgeon, by Tess Gerritsen ****

A serial killer is on the loose in Boston. The victims are killed in a particularly nasty way: cut with a scalpel on the stomach, the intestines and uterus removed, and then the throat slashed. The killer obviously has medical knowledge and has been dubbed "the Surgeon" by the media. Detective Thomas Moore and his partner Rizzoli of the Boston Homicide Unit have discovered something that makes this case even more chilling. Years ago in Savannah a serial killer murdered in exactly the same way. He was finally stopped by his last victim who shot him as he tried to cut her. That last victim is Dr Catherine Cordell, who now works as a cardiac surgeon at one of Boston's prestigious hospitals. As the murders continue, it becomes obvious that the killer is drawing closer and closer to Dr Cordell, who is becoming so frightened that she is virtually unable to function. But she is the only person who can help the police catch this copycat killer. Or is it a copycat? To complicate matters even further, Detective Moore, often referred to as Saint Thomas as he continues to mourn the loss of his wife, is getting emotionally involved with the doctor.

This book has languished at the back of my closet, unread for months.  I thought that it was a mystery-romance, heavier on the romance, so I was in no rush to read it.  The reason why I picked it up is because I just saw the show "Rizzolli and Isles" for the first time and quite liked it - and apparently the show is based on the series of books that started with this one.

This was a good, somewhat procedural, mystery novel.  I whipped through it in a couple of hours.  There were no big surprises, and I felt almost no connection to the main characters.  However, it was an easy, entertaining read.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield ***

Former academic Setterfield pays tribute in her debut to Brontë and du Maurier heroines: a plain girl gets wrapped up in a dark, haunted ruin of a house, which guards family secrets that are not hers and that she must discover at her peril. Margaret Lea, a London bookseller's daughter, has written an obscure biography that suggests deep understanding of siblings. She is contacted by renowned aging author Vida Winter, who finally wishes to tell her own, long-hidden, life story. Margaret travels to Yorkshire, where she interviews the dying writer, walks the remains of her estate at Angelfield and tries to verify the old woman's tale of a governess, a ghost and more than one abandoned baby. With the aid of colorful Aurelius Love, Margaret puzzles out generations of Angelfield: destructive Uncle Charlie; his elusive sister, Isabelle; their unhappy parents; Isabelle's twin daughters, Adeline and Emmeline; and the children's caretakers. Contending with ghosts and with a (mostly) scary bunch of living people, Setterfield's sensible heroine is, like Jane Eyre, full of repressed feeling—and is unprepared for both heartache and romance. And like Jane, she's a real reader and makes a terrific narrator. That's where the comparisons end, but Setterfield, who lives in Yorkshire, offers graceful storytelling that has its own pleasures.

The above description, which I had to do some searching for, is neither the one I read before I bought this book, nor the one on the back of the book.  It is, however, an accurate description of the story.  Maybe it was because I was expecting something else, but wasn't as impressed by it as I expected to be.  The Thirteenth Tale is a fairly good book, but I found it to be very dark and somewhat depressing.  

More than one person told me that they read it in a sitting, because they couldn't put it down.  While I didn't dislike it, it didn't hold my attention for very long.  I rarely read more than 20-30 pages before my mind started to wander, which is why it took me over two weeks to complete.  It wasn't a bad book, just not as good as I'd hoped.

Book of Negros, by Lawrence Hill ****

This novel is published as Someone Knows My Name in the USA, Australia and New Zealand, and appears in Canada as The Book of Negroes in Canada.

Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle - a string of slaves - Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic "Book of Negroes". This book, an actual document, provides a short but immensely revealing record of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the US for resettlement in Nova Scotia, only to find that the haven they sought was steeped in an oppression all of its own. Aminata's eventual return to Sierra Leone - passing ships carrying thousands of slaves bound for America - is an engrossing account of an obscure but important chapter in history that saw 1,200 former slaves embark on a harrowing back-to-Africa odyssey.

This one took me a couple of weeks to work through.  It was a good story, though, telling the life story of a woman (girl) who is stolen from her African village at 11 and taken to the States to be a slave.  It held my attention throughout  - at time disturbing, but never too graphic.  The first half reminded me quite a bit of the book "Sacajawea" by A Waldo, which I read many, many years ago.

Secret Daughter, by Shilpi Somaya Gowda****

On the eve of the monsoons, in a remote Indian village, Kavita gives birth to Asha. But in a culture that favours sons, the only way for Kavita to save her newborn daughter's life is to give her away. It is a decision that will haunt her and her husband for the rest of their lives, even after the arrival of their cherished son. Halfway around the globe, Somer, an American doctor, decides to adopt a child after making the wrenching discovery that she will never have one of her own. When she and her husband Krishnan see a photo of baby Asha from a Mumbai orphanage, they are overwhelmed with emotion for her. Somer knows life will change with the adoption, but is convinced that the love they already feel will overcome all obstacles. Interweaving the stories of Kavita, Somer, and Asha, "Secret Daughter" poignantly explores issues of culture and belonging. Moving between two worlds and two families, one struggling to survive in the fetid slums of Mumbai, the other grappling to forge a cohesive family despite their diverging cultural identities, this powerful debut novel marks the arrival of a fresh talent poised for great success.

Secret Daughter is a story that mostly revolves around three women - an Indian woman who has to give up her daughter, an American Woman who adopts her daughter from India and the baby who is born in India, raised in America and goes back to get to know her family and the culture.  (Her father immigrated from India to America before she was born.)  This was not a gripping story that I struggled to put down, but I thought it was a good solid book.  I liked the descriptions of India and its culture, and I thought the author did a good job of describing the difficulties between mother and child... or really, the difficulties for anybody trying to keep their family together. I enjoyed it.

Born to Die - Lisa Jackson **

The resemblance between Dr. Kacey Lambert and B-movie actress Shelly Bonaventure is a standing joke in the town of Grizzly Falls, Montana. So much so, that Kacey is momentarily shocked to read about the fading starlet’s death. Still, it’s not as if there was any real connection between them. And when a fatally injured jogger who also bears a striking similarity to Kacey is rushed into the ER days later, Kacey is ready to rule it another sad, strange accident. Detective Selena Alvarez suspects otherwise. An autopsy confirms that the jogger had traces of poison in her blood at the time of her death. Selena and her partner, Regan Pescoli, can find no motive for the murder. But Kacey has started to notice ties between the dead women’s lives and her own—all close in age, born within miles of each other—and all with ties to the man Kacey has just begun seeing, single father Trace O’Halleran. Now, with more look-alikes dying, Kacey must question her judgment, her safety—and everything she’s ever believed about her past. The deeper Kacey digs, the more reason she has to fear. The body count is rising, the killer is getting bolder and more brutal. And Kacey knows it’s only a matter of time before hers is the next name on a list of those who were born to die…

I think the only way this book could be described would be far fetched.  Lisa Jackson writes good mysteries, but she seemed to have been digging through the dregs to come up with this plot.  A bunch of women, the biological results of artificial insemination, start dying.  The clinic where they came from is long gone, but somehow somebody has tracked down babies who resulted in sperm donations from the same man 30 years ago and is killing them.  Most of them don't even know that they came from artificial insemination, and yet he somehow tracks them down... and they're all pretty much in the same city.

Jackson writes engaging stories.  Her main characters still drew me in, but the plot and the supporting characters were too unbelievable for me to really get into the story.  Finally, the ending was laughable, it was so unlikely.  I'm normally a Lisa Jackson fan, but this one was a bomb.