The Lilac Girls

One of my FB friends suggested I read The Lilac Girls, a novel by Martha Hall Kelly, published in 2017. The recommendation came because I had read another novel about the concentration camps during WWII.  I am not particularly drawn to stories of The Holocaust, but I have found some of the narratives compelling. This is the story of three women brought together by Ravensbruck, a notorious concentration camp for women during WWII. It is the debut novel by Kelly, but it is a well-written, powerful story based in history, a story that is so compelling for the author that she is writing a prequel to the story that takes place during WWI.

The narrative is divided into segments by character, Kasia, Herta, and Caroline, so there are individual segments about one character, and then another character, and then a third.  This technique is used throughout the novel and allows the reader to build a relationship with each of the primary characters.  The narratives begin in 1939 and end in 1959, long after World War II ends, but the story has not.  It is important to read the entire narrative to understand the full circle of the events, which continue into the United States with the character Caroline,  a wealthy patron of the arts and former actress, who establishes a relationship with one survivor of Ravensbruck concentration camp and is able to arrange circumstances to bring full closure to one aspect of the imprisonment experience.


This is a heavy book to read and it takes commitment to read from cover to cover. The story of the women called Rabbits by the Germans, is horrific and hard to experience.  There are no human rights for the women held captive, but the human spirit dominates and allows them to help one another in the worst of all possible situations.

Catch and Kill

Ronan Farrow has a famous family name, but his claim to fame is being a meticulous researcher in search of serious stories.  In this book, he reveals that he does the research, but the narrative itself is not very interesting. Reading Catch and Kill is sort of like going through someone's work folder of miscellaneous facts, people, places, and things.  Several times I was tempted to just put it down and forget it, but I was determined to see it through to the end--and it took every ounce of my determination to do that.

Yes, there's a lot of fact-checking, and double-checking, and then going back and making sure everything is correct.  He wants the reader to know that he didn't make up anything for the book to sell better, but I think it would sell better if it were half the length it ends up to be.  Endless accounts of who you met/talked to, what was said, how it was fact-checked, and where it fit into the narrative is simply tedious.  The reader needs the Cliff's Notes, not the Encyclopedia Britannica version of events.

Was Harvey Weinstein a predator? Yes. Did Matt Lauer sexually abuse women? Yes. Did other men mentioned also engage in inappropriate behavior with women? Yes. Does Ronan Farrow have the research to back up all these allegations? Yes.

End of story.

Cilka

Cilka is 16 years old when she first enters Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in 1942. Cilka’s Journey is a novel written by Heather Morris, the author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, and it is the story of a young girl who all too soon becomes the victim of a corrupt political system that brutally incarcerated dissidents, as well as individuals whose ethnicity set them apart from the political system.

Cilka survives by doing whatever it takes to overcome her situation and circumstances. She is forced to prostitute herself in order to survive, a fact that is used against her by fellow detainees who are jealous of Cilka’s good looks and quick mind. Cilka survives, but her story could have ended much differently.

This is not an easy book to read because of the horrific experiences of the Gulags and what human beings were subjected to by the government of the USSR. According to Morris’s endnotes, “from 1929 until Stalin’s death in 1953, in excess of 18 million people passed through the Gulag system and they were from many countries, occupations, and faiths. Nobel Prize-winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was both a victim of the Gulag and a chronicler of the forced labor camps which are known as the Gulag Archipelago.” The Gulags were located in the most remote parts of the USSR and the living conditions were brutal.  Cilka survives and, surprisingly, thrives in the environment into which she has been thrust, including living in Vorkuta’s prison camps, the most brutal of all the Gulags.

Cilka’s story is hard to put down.  Her strength as an individual is amazing, and she shares that strength with other women who may not have otherwise survived their ordeal.  Cilka is a natural leader, very smart, and quite clever at turning adversity to her advantage. I recommend this book to any woman who wonders how she would survive the worst that life has to offer. We never know our strength until it is tested, and this novel is the ultimate test of not just mental fortitude, but physical ability to deal with the harshest of environments and survive.

Summer of '69

Summer of ’69 is a novel written by Elin Hilderbrand. Reading the dust cover synopsis, it sounded like a nice summer read; however, actually turning the text page by page is a different experience.  The story is ponderous, the prose is redundant, and the actual plot is quite thin.  I started the novel, lost interest, read a couple of other books, and then returned. Starting over, I expected the story to be better than I remembered, but it isn’t, so I’m done reading at page 300 of the total 418.

The redundant prose is annoying:  “Pick’s eyes, she notices, are Lorraine’s eyes, the frosted blue of sea glass,” followed immediately by “He’s as brown as a berry.”  She says “That’s either wonderful or the saddest thing Kate has ever heard; she can’t decide which."

The ponderous story drags by, sentence by sentence.  “So this is Bitsy Dunscombe fueled by one too many, Kate thinks. She gets ugly—not only her language, but her face as well. Her expression contorts into a hideous mask with narrowed, accusing eyes and twisted lips. If she says anything about Tiger, Kate will slap her or throw a drink in her face. The piano player will stop right in the middle of ‘Try to Remember,’ and the revelers at table 1 will gape first and gossip later, and who could blame them?”

The actual plot is a typical coming-of-age story about a 13-year-old girl who has a crush on an older boy. She is so typical that there’s nothing unique about her, and she certainly isn’t worthy of hanging an entire novel on. So far, the most exciting thing to happen to her is she gets her period and then her first bra, and I’m ¾ of the way through the novel

I simply cannot force myself to finish reading this story at this time. It reminds me of Downton Abbey, a series I dreaded.  I watched several episodes, but never bonded with either the characters or the plot, even though I have friends who were entranced by the series and wouldn’t answer the phone for anyone when Downton Abbey was on.

I’ll pass this book on to someone who will appreciate it and pick up my next read, James Patterson’s The Inn.  I’ll let you know how that goes.

Where the Crawdads Sing

We all need a place to go, to escape the realities of our daily lives, a place that author Delia Owens calls the place “Where the Crawdads Sing,” which is the title of her best-selling novel about a young girl who is abandoned to raise herself in a swamp after her mother dies and her father walks off one day. The story of Kya is mesmerizing, told with rich detail and gritty emotion and fascinating insights into swamp life. Kya is a survivor, a person who went to school for one day, then retreated to her swamp where she feels safe and protected. She learns how to fend for herself while studying the rich plethora of animal and insect life that occupies her time during the day so she only has to cope with the isolation of the nights.


A   young man, Tate, befriends Kya and teaches her how to read and write. Once she knows those two basic skills, she begins to catalog all the insects, the swamp creatures, and the migrating birds that form her world. She collects empty shells and discarded feathers, and other memorabilia of her habitat, then she curates the story of each object/item/collectible and paints a picture to show its origin. Tate is her only friend and she cherishes his visits. She also feels drawn to Jumpin’, a black man who purchases the mussels and other seafood Kya brings him almost daily, and sells her gasoline for the engine of her small boat. Jumpin’ doesn’t need what Kya brings him to sell, but he knows that she’s alone and has to have foodstuffs in order to survive. The third important person in Kya’s life is Chase, the nearby town’s man about town, the good-looking athlete from a well-to-do family who pursues Kya in spite of her oddities.  It is only when Kya reads in a newspaper that Chase is engaged to be married that she realizes that Chase has used her. She sends him off and vows never to be involved with him again.


Nature is the backstory, the neighborhood for the people and events of the novel. The reader can almost smell the fetid earth and hear the callings of the various birds that make the swamp home. Kya becomes a living representation of Mother Nature as she tells her story among the wildlife of the swamp. It is a fascinating story that sometimes moves slowly through the richness of the telling, and, at other times, moves quickly as Kya struggles to survive. This novel is not for everyone as it takes time and patience to read through the many events in Kya’s life, riding with her in her swamp boat as she tours her environment and catalogues it for the mere love of the recordkeeping, but it’s definitely a novel worth reading.

Book Boyfriends

I live life vicariously through what I fondly call “trashy romance novels,” but what others in today’s world call “book boyfriends.” I like the complete life cycle captured between the covers of an afternoon’s read – and it always ends well. Usually it’s a boy meets girl, they hop into bed together, then they find out about each other’s real life and have to find a way to either walk away in one piece or live happily ever after.

Lately, I’ve become addicted to Kaylea Cross’s assorted series of stories, most of which revolve around “superman” male characters and strong, forceful, but loving female characters. No matter the challenges to the relationship, they stay strong and come out the other end of adversity with a smile on their faces. The men are often either active military (such as Special Forces); retired military with special skills (such as piloting aircraft or advanced computer skills); or those who work for private contractors without benefit of military training. They most often work as a tightly-knit team, and the concept of teamwork is wound throughout the stories, emphasizing how a strong team can overcome most adversity.

Now the one part of the whole series that I’m not particularly interested in is the sex scenes. Back in the day there were love scenes, but today—it’s straight-up down and dirty sex for page after page after page. Because I like the stories without the sex scenes, I simply page through that part of the book and begin reading again after the sex is finished. It’s a simple fix to a personal preference, and I don’t try to shove my morality down anyone else’s throat. If you like the graphic sex part of the story, read it: I’ll save my reading time for something else.

I gave one of my friends one of the books to read and was shocked at the reaction she had. She literally pointed her finger and accused me in a rather loud voice of polluting her life with a trashy book. When I told her I enjoyed the story, she went straight for the raunchy sex, which is usually just one scene in any detail. I told her she should do what I do and turn the pages until the story is back: simple problem; simple solution. Well, she wasn’t easily placated and warned me not to give her any more of “those books” to read as she was offended by the content of the book I did give her.

You know, life is too short to be so caught up in such childish things. A simple, calmly-delivered “I didn’t like the sex scenes in the book you gave me” would have been fine. After all, we're all entitled to our own opinions.

Now, you'll have to excuse me: I have another Kaylea Cross to read this afternoon.

Go Set a Watchman

Just as Scout learned as a child that it is a sin To Kill a Mockingbird, she learns in her adulthood that life needs a watchman, a person who can illuminate a pathway through the darkness of human behavior. Harper Lee’s second novel, the rest of the Atticus Finch story, pits father against daughter in a coming of age story that touches on a seminal moment in time in that relationship. Atticus Finch is not a racist; if that is the only message a reader walks away with after finishing Go Set a Watchman, the reader is unable to “get” the story Harper Lee tells.

The story begins with Scout coming home for a visit, during which she quickly learns that the more things in her life change, the more things from her childhood stay the same. She has high expectations for Maycomb and its people, and lofty, unreachable expectations for her father, Atticus. Scout has romanticized her father and is devastated when she thinks that he has failed her idolatry of him. She lashes out at her beloved Atticus, still seeing him through her childish eyes, rather than as an adult. Scout admits that “I did not want my world disturbed, but I wanted to crush the man who’s trying to preserve it for me.”

The turning point of the story occurs in the courthouse wherein the most well-known scene from To Kill a Mockingbird occurs. Once again Atticus is at the front of the room, but this time he’s there for a community meeting that includes discussion of the legislation and the NAACP. The agenda focuses on changes coming to the South, changes that can create equal opportunity for all Southerners, not just the white folks. Uncle Jack tells Scout that “… it takes a certain kind of maturity to live in the South these days,” a concept that Scout is reluctant to accept. Scout believes that change is today this/tomorrow that, but her Uncle Jack and her father, Atticus, help her to work through the difficult concept that change is a process, not an event.

Her uncle clarifies for Scout that “… the white supremacists fear reason, because they know cold reason beats them.” A reasonable person can see more than one side to an issue, and Atticus taught Scout to reason. Scout’s beloved Atticus has not changed: he adapts to what goes on around him and plots a wise course because he does know how many of his fellow citizens believe what he believes and need a voice of reason in what can only be turbulent times. Scout is incredulous that she can engage in a screaming fight with her father, but all he says when she comes to pick him up from work is “Ready?” Scout’s thoughts are revealed: “You can say ready to me. What are you, that I tried to obliterate and grind into the earth, and you say ready?”

The looming battle is clear: “Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.” Dr. Finch reminds Scout that she’s a rarity, a truly “color blind” Southern girl. He reminds her that “The only differences you see between one human and another are differences in looks and intelligence and character and the like. You’ve never been prodded to look at people as a race, and now that race is the burning issue of the day, you’re still unable to think racially. You see only people.”

What Scout has forgotten is that Atticus “… certainly hoped a daughter of mine’d hold her ground for what she thinks is right—stand up to me first of all.” As father and daughter prepare to go home, Atticus says to his daughter, “I can take anything anybody calls me so long as it’s not true.” He knows that the future is going to be difficult with citizens taking sides in a centuries old battle, but he’s proud that his daughter will be a voice of reason.

Soundbite of History

It is a large book of non-fiction, 480 pages including the 13 pages of sources used, hardly a tome most people would characterize as a page-turner, but it is. Bill Bryson, who is one of America’s finest modern writers, takes a look at One Summer (the title of the book), the summer of 1927, and presents a confluence of people, places, and events that forever changed America, and, by extension, the rest of the world. There are people’s names that will ring a bell in the reader’s memory, such as Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, and Al Capone, and other important people whose names are not so well-known, such as Charles Francis Jenkins, Robert G. Elliott, and Willis Blakely.

Charles Lindbergh did more to advance aviation in 1927 than any other pilot, and, yes, there were other pilots, as well as regularly-scheduled flights between major cities in Europe. I had always pictured the Wright brothers initial flight as a “one of,” but was surprised to know that Europe was well ahead of the United States in the development of aviation. Lindbergh’s contribution stemmed from crossing the Atlantic Ocean, thus validating inter-continental flight development. His relentless publicity tour of the United States following his memorable flight across the Atlantic forever linked Lindbergh’s name to the development of aviation, but what he primarily accomplished was publicizing aviation, not creating it.

Also during the summer of 1927, the name of Alfred Ponzi, perhaps only known for what became a Ponzi scheme, made his name forever synonymous with generating huge amounts of money on the backs of hapless investors who lost everything they put into Ponzi’s investment schemes. The motion picture industry thrived with the advent of talking films, wherein the soundtrack was invented that would allow characters to talk and actions to have appropriate noises. Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly climbed a flagpole on top of a building and spent 49 days sitting there. Mount Rushmore began to take shape, but its sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, did not live to see it completed. Most interestingly to me, this is also the summer when four financiers met in secret to formulate financial plans that led directly to the stockmarket crash and the Great Depression of 1929.

Bryson’s work is a study in American history and should be required reading for every student in the United States school system, whether at the high school level or under-graduate degree programs at community colleges, as well as universities. The narration is easy to read while also being content rich. The strands of the story, from May through September 1927, are woven carefully to form a cohesive over-view of what it was like both in America and the world during this time, and forms the significance of people, places and events in a way that brings the story alive. The twelve pages of bibliography, in a very small typeface, as well as the end notes, also prove to any student that there are sources available to tell any story – if the writer cares enough about the subject matter to research it.

James Patterson, Author

Patterson used to be a better writer, with tighter plots, less wandering and unnecessary verbiage, and an action-driven writing style that kept me hanging from beginning to end. When Patterson began partnering with co-writers, the books became longer, less focused, more rambling, and with absolutely no punch at the end, just sheer relief when the book finally ended. After Andrew Gross’s partnership with Patterson, I stopped buying Patterson’s publications because they were, in a word, boring, and read like a college creative writing class’s collaborative final exam effort hodge-podged together just to get a good grade for using all of the elements of fiction in one poorly-conceived and executed story. [I do, however, continue to purchase Gross’s novels as they are reminiscent of Patterson at his best and, in my opinion, are better.]

A picture is worth a thousand words, and best writing practices show, don’t tell; somewhere in the writing process of his past Patterson forgot that basic guideline, but NYPD Red is old-style Patterson at its best. His characters are well-crafted and allow the reader to develop them based on actions and dialog, rather than the author telling the reader the way the character is supposed to be through extensive, meaningless verbiage. If the readers aren't savvy enough to develop the storyline internally, they aren’t real readers, but page turners who should wait for the movie version.

NYPD Red is a good read that kept me engaged and charging my Kindle battery. After reading the tease for the new Alex Cross novel, I’m going to order that next as it has the same “sound” as Red: action-packed, tight characterization that shows, rather than tells, what’s important for the story.

11/22/1963

Stephen King is not my favorite writer; as a matter of fact, I avoid his literature because his over-blown, over-written horror stories do not engage me. However, his stories translate into outstanding films because what takes King a thousand tedious words to describe creates incredible mere seconds on the screen. Prior to my most recent King read, his best book in my experience is On Writing, an oft-recommended “memoir of the craft” that left me wondering how King can so clearly define “good writing,” then fail to use those skills in his own writing. I recently added another King read to my recommended reading list, an alternative exploration of changing the world by preventing Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, TX on November 22, 1963.

Again, as is common in my King experience, the book would benefit from some strong editing as it gets tediously long with no real reason for the length, analogous to beating a dead horse in some aspects, but the story premise is strong. A male English teacher (protagonist) walks through what King calls a rabbit hole and into the past, armed with explicit historical notes from another time-traveler, a Vietnam vet, who uses the benefit of his experience to determine that preventing the Kennedy assassination would not only save the thousands of lives lost during the Vietnam War, but also save the world. Parallel to the conviction that changing one event can better the outcome for the world is the “butterfly” theory, that the flapping of one butterfly’s wings affects the world and there is no way to determine what those affects are. King presents convincing ideas about both theories without demanding that the reader choose either A or B.

I am also one who wonders often what if, but my old head tells me that life happens the way it happens for a reason, including all those horrific events that we all wish never happened, a theory to which I could not subscribe when I was young and burned with the desire to stand the world on its head and right every wrong, even those over which I had absolutely no influence or control. Stephen King and I are of the same era, so I related to his intellectual query, his interweaving of ideas and/or theories about a critical time in our history. Those who were there not only don’t forget, but we use that experience as a bedrock for who we are now, what we became when Kennedy challenged US not to ask what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country. We took those words personally, and we took his assassination personally. Our generation may still live in shoulda, woulda, coulda, which seems to be the motivation for King’s novel, 11/22/1963.

King researched the people, the places, and the events. He doesn’t pick a favorite theory and ride it from exposition to denouement, but he creates a story that the reader experiences with the protagonist, a man who accepts the challenge to travel back in time and spend 5 years searching to know whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or as a part of a conspiracy. The protagonist’s goal is to kill Oswald before he can kill Kennedy, but before he can take that action, he has to know definitively whether Oswald acted alone because if he were part of a conspiracy, killing one assassin would not solve the problem.

King uses the term “think-hunch” to explain how we combine our knowledge with our intellect and/or experience throughout our lives, and posits that we rely on the “hunch” part almost more than we believe or act on what we think. Modern science has validated a single shooter, including ballistic recreations of the “magic bullet” plausibility that verifies that one bullet could have caused 7 separate wounds, beginning with the Presidential kill shot. While our intellect may accept that evidence, our “hunch” may be yeah, right: I don’t think so.

Determining whether the assassination is a conspiracy or the act of a single shooter, however, is not King’s point: his point is to explore how preventing Kennedy’s assassination may have affected the world. My generation knows how the assassination changed our own interpretation or interaction with the world we each experience, but did Kennedy’s death bring about change for the better or would his life have accomplished that goal? King thinks one way, but his hunch opens another pathway, so there is no definitive answer either for the conspiracy theorists who believe they have the answer, nor for those whose hunch is that life definitely would have been better had Kennedy lived.

Up to that point, I enjoyed reading the novel; however, the last several chapters are weak, unfulfilling, tacked on, as if King could not allow the answer to exist within each reader. If there is no answer, don’t provide one! Anyone who takes the time to read this particular novel is capable of challenging the premise of the story and drawing a conclusion. Change is neither good nor bad: it is merely different.

Leave it there.

Reading Rip-Off

Iris Johansen is one of my preferred storytellers, especially the stories about one woman’s (Eve Duncan) search for the remains of her daughter, Bonnie, who was kidnapped and apparently murdered when she was 7 years old. One of the police officers attached to the investigation of Bonnie’s disappearance is Joe Quinn, a loner who falls hard and fast for Eve. Eve eventually uses her artistic ability to reconstruct faces from skulls, an ability that allows other families to have closure after the remains of their missing children are found. However, Eve’s quest for closure about the loss of her daughter remains elusive.

Johansen's trilogy allegedly finishes telling the stories of Eve, Joe and Bonnie, a trilogy that began with Eve and continues with Quinn. Last night, I finished Quinn, but it was challenging to do so. Johansen usually tells a good story, maintains a smooth, quick pace from beginning to end, and engages the reader in the resolution of the conflict. Not so in Quinn, a story that drags endlessly to a non-resolution designed to guarantee future sales of the final book, Bonnie, on sale October 18, 2011. While a cliff-hanger may work for TV series, it falls flat at the end of a novel, especially when it’s no longer about Eve, Quinn, or Bonnie, but Catherine.

Yes, that’s right: Catherine, a woman whose son Eve helped save from a dastardly villain and who feels that she owes Eve a favor in return. Thus, Catherine goes into the forest to hunt down suspects in Bonnie’s murder, leaving Quinn in the hospital and Eve refusing to leave him until he’s able to walk out on his own two feet, which really goes against her crusading character. Bonnie, the spiritual incarnation, appears to Joe, to Eve, to John Gallo – oh, you don’t know John? Well, he’s the co-protagonist of Quinn, Eve’s sexual partner when she was a mere 16-years’ old, a liaison that resulted in Bonnie’s birth, but also, perhaps, Bonnie’s abductor and murderer.

Yeah, you got it: Quinn has little to do with Joe Quinn, but everything to do with Johansen's next series. Instead of reading about Joe Quinn, the reader has to slog through Catherine and John's physical sparring, martial arts matches, and budding sexual attraction while endlessly stalking one another in the woods. The chase is boring; the dialog is unbelievable; the sexual tension is gratuitous; and Joe Quinn is a negligible character in the book with his name!

Okay, so I anticipated the resolution of the Eve/Bonnie/Joe storyline, but never as a gimmick to start another series featuring Catherine Ling and John Gallo! Two books into what I thought would be the resolution, Johansen is using that tease to keep going and going and going. From page 216 through the end on page 374, it’s Catherine and John Gallo: Eve and Joe are barely incidental to all those pages! I’m disappointed and, frankly, don’t give a hoot about either Catherine or John Gallo because all I wanted – in one well-written final book – was to resolve Eve’s quest to bring her daughter home.

Although I prefer to hold hard-cover tomes in my hands, to turn the pages one by one as I share the adventure with the fictional characters, I will forgo purchasing the final book in the trilogy until it comes out in paperback. I don’t care about either Catherine or John Gallo, so I don’t want to wade through another 370+ pages to find out (1) if Bonnie is still alive or (2) her remains are finally returned to Eve for burial or (3) who dunnit. As for following the Catherine/John storyline, nah, not going to do that either because I don't like being played by pretending to write the resolution to one series to start another.

A Pale Imitation

I just finished reading a James Patterson novel that I did not enjoy nor even much like, perhaps because I kept comparing Patterson’s plot to Harper Lee’s masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird. An epoch novel stands alone, a pinnacle achieved once. The author who tries to emulate the writer of such a novel often falls woefully short, which is my problem with Alex Cross’s Trial, the newest James Patterson tale.

Great writing has both depth and breadth, an intensity that engages the reader, absorbs the reader into the story. The setting becomes real; the characters well-known; the action believable. There is a gnawing feeling of reading history, rather than fiction, in the words of a great novel. Patterson’s story is far too obviously just another work of fiction: thin, uneven, unbelievable, completely unremarkable, yet destined for the best-seller list. Good marketing makes a modern best-seller, not necessarily good writing.

Ben Corbett is no Atticus Finch! He lacks the courage of his convictions, the wisdom of the ages, the intensity of purpose that make Atticus unique. The judge is a mockery of justice, a racist who is acknowledged and accepted as such – and it underpins the story! Corruption is rife in the small town, deception is a way of life: the best friends of childhood are the worst enemies of adulthood. These are not good people doing bad things; these are bad people who refuse to do anything good. I would say "compare these people in this time and place with Lee's," but there is no comparison to be made. Lee knew it and wrote it well; Patterson didn't.

In telling the story of Detective Alex Cross’s family, Patterson probably means to add depth to the beloved main character in the Alex Cross series; however, the result is opposite the intention. The grandfather, Abraham, is a strong character ala Tom Robinson, but Ben Corbett is so shallow, so woefully inadequate that the strength of Abraham falls victim to the weakness of the story. Whereas Atticus has his daughter, Scout, to reflect and make meaning of life in the small Southern town, Abraham has his grand-daughter, a young woman who gets a kick out of telling a lie in the courtroom to achieve her goal. Neither Atticus nor Abraham would ever have been party to such blatant deception, but Ben Corbett lets it slip by, upset but not morally outraged. In building Alex Cross’s legacy on a lie, the strength of the character developed through the strength of his family is weakened and made ineffectual.

I am disappointed that James Patterson would write such an apparent ghost of a great classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, then corrupt the honesty of the story to achieve a goal only he can define. A good book stands on its own merit and a bad book fails for lack of it: this book can be donated to the library so other readers don’t have to pay the money to buy it themselves.

You Had Me at Hello

During our FOL day in La Jolla this past Saturday, one of my Friends highly recommended a book she recently read, written by an author I, too, have read, so we stopped by the bookstore and I purchased a copy. Yesterday, I began reading the 728 page doorstop and couldn't put it down! I'm not sure what time I finally fell asleep, but I fought it because I wanted to keep reading.

Wally Lamb, the author of The Hour I First Believed, has written two other novels that I have also read: I Know This Much Is True and She's Come Undone. Lamb's one of those writers who writes the way I would write if I, too, were a writer. He tells the story with words that are exactly right both the way they are used and in the context. He creates characters who are real: noble sometimes and ignoble other times, flailing about to handle life as it comes at them. Often his flawed individuals seem to mature past their flaws, but the flaws always remain, waiting to unfurl at what could be either the most opportune time -- or the most inopportune time. Who we are is a result of who we've been, and we never really completely eradicate our past selves in our present selves, but sometimes we do learn to co-exist. Lamb constructs an engrossing and conflicted web of people, places and events, the threads of which weave a perfect finished product that simply has to be experienced by a reader.

The narrator, Caelum, is a teacher who's working on his third marriage. He's learned the lesson of the life-sucking force some students bring to school with them, but he's become jaded by his inability to interact with those students. Rather than setting boundaries, he tapes black construction paper over his classroom window, locks the door, and retreats to a corner so he can be alone, not realizing that any one of those actions would have worked and all three of them are over-kill. His third wife, Maureen, is a school nurse; there are problems with their marriage stemming perhaps from her affair with a colleague that resulted in the move to Littleton, Colorado and employment at Columbine High School, but perhaps more significantly relating to the lack of intimacy with her husband, who guards himself all too well from intimate relationships with anyone: students, colleagues, friends, family. Maureen needs forgiveness, but Caelum wants contrition, two mutally exclusive needs that become the impetus for an inexorable slide into a dead marriage.

When his beloved Aunt Lolly dies, Caelum flies back home to deal with what has to be done, leaving Maureen to make her arrangements and join him for the funeral. Every detail he needs to know about his Aunt requires him to call Maureen: he has distanced himself too well from the woman who raised him when his parents could not. The places he's lived open the windows to his past. As he's reacting emotionally to his childhood, he sees on the news that there has been an incident at Columbine High School -- and he recognizes the faces of both students and staff fleeing the campus. His first thought is that Maureen works on the first floor, so she could not possibly be in the second-floor library, which seems to be ground zero for the carnage; he calls her to assure himself that she is okay.

At this point, the story explodes, almost as if this transforming event is the catalyst Caelum needs to confront his deepest fears and come to grips with life as it is, not as it isn't.

I'm just about the half-way point, so I'll be reading this week: leave a message.

Page Turners

I bought the two-inch thick new novel, Scarpetta, hoping that it would be as engaging, interesting, and clever as all the other Patricia Cornwell novels that feature Dr. Kay Scarpetta. It's not. Watching Patricia Cornwell hype her new novel in a TV ad, I fell for her hook: you'll never figure it out. I now know that I won't ever figure it out because I'll never finish reading it!

One of Cornwell's strengths is her storytelling, which is glaringly lacking in this tome. I'm sure that there's a great story buried in the 500 pages of the hard-cover edition, but I've restarted my reading three times now, and I'm not motivated enough to read the unread 400 pages and find it. To phrase a teen reader: this is b-o-r-i-n-g! I especially became bogged down when I read a conversation that was so phony, so forced, so unnatural that I found myself reading word-for-word, as a two-year-old novice would read. Perhaps I'll never know the denouement, or perhaps I'll simply read the last 100 pages and figure out the middle for myself. Either way, the novel is a huge disappointment.

I also bought Kathy Reichs' newest, Devil Bones, as I've enjoyed some of her other work, as well as the TV show based on her writing, Bones. Again, the pace is so slow that it's hard to stick with the book night after night. Maybe my lack of interest has to do with the inclusion of devil worship and Satanism, but I think it's just a story that bogs itself down with too much detail, too much description, too much trying to make a point that may not have to be made to finish the story. I'm half-way through the 300-page story and may not make it the rest of the way. [Updating: I did finish the story and it gets much better as it picks up steam. Clever plot temporarily side-tracked by the Santeria, which is pretty much what the characters have to figure out, too]

On the other hand, I picked up an original in paperback, Six Seconds, written by Rick Mufina, that is dynamite. The story caught my attention and kept me reading long past my bedtime, which is the sign of a well-crafted plot. The characters are real, their conversations natural, and the revelation of details is short, sweet, and to the point -- so the story keeps moving toward the climax. It's intricate, not obvious, which is another facet of a novel that I appreciate.

I'm going to weed out all the books I have stashed here and there, which I usually pass on to reader friends. This time, I'm going to donate them to my friend's favorite library, a small library in a small town that can benefit from doubling their fiction section with my contribution. And before I plunk down my cash to purchase future hard cover editions, I'm going to sit and read at least the opening 20 pages and see if it's worth paying more now or waiting for the less expensive soft cover edition to be disappointed.