did not finish: Split Second by Catherine Coulter

Posted on July 14, 2011 by pagesofjulia

Caveat: I read (part of) an uncorrected advance proof.

I quit on page 59. Supposedly a suspenseful thriller, but I walked away quite contentedly, so you can judge the success of the suspense elements as you will. In only 59 pages, I saw formulaic elements. One example: woman reacts instantly with disdain for man with Bad Reputation, but is uncontrollably drawn to him, as she notes that actually he’s never been anything but sweet to her. Will they end up together? Come on. If I can guess at sub-plot endings before page 59, you’ve lost your audience.

The writing is terrible. “Lucy brewed herself some strong tea, swallowed two aspirin, a good way to prevent a hangover for her, and walked to the study…” The dialogue is slightly better than the third-person narration, but still feels stilted and forced; real people don’t talk like this. Events don’t flow together; the action is choppy. (Yes, uncorrected advance proof. But if a sparkling gem of a thriller comes out of this I’ll eat my pants. And then I’ll criticize the publisher for disservice to the author in releasing a rather awful ARC of a great book.)

Coulter has a huge fan base, and this book will sell, no doubt. I can’t speak to her earlier work – and really I can’t speak to this one as a finished and complete novel, but the first 59 pages of the ARC are uninspiring. Proceed at your own risk.

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The Hard Way by Lee Child (audio)

Posted on July 13, 2011 by pagesofjulia

Okay, you all know I’m a big fan of the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child. I have read 9 of the 15 currently out (with The Affair to come in September, yay!). So please take me seriously when I say this is the best one I’ve read yet!

As has become my habit, I listened to this one as an audiobook in the car. I love the narrator, Dick Hill. I think he has just the right mix of slow, serious cadence (imbuing Reacher’s words with the gravity they deserve), and a lightheartedness in the right moments.

And like all the Reacher novels, this novel is fast-paced, suspenseful – I mean real edge-of-the-set, sitting-in-the-driveway-biting-my-nails-while-Husband-wonders-what-I’m-up-to suspense – and action-packed. Reacher is his usual superhero self. Mysterious characters approach him as he tries to mind his own business, and (with limited reluctance) he enters their world, to try and save a kidnapped woman and child. But wait! Are the bad guys really who we think they are? There is intrigue, including military and international intrigue. There are beautiful, sexy, strong, independent women; some of them are also traumatized. There are loyal sisters. Reacher is cool, funny, comforting, and simultaneously rock-hard strong and smart, and brutally violent. (Only when it’s appropriate, of course.)

In The Hard Way, Reacher is recruited by a team of mercenary ex-special forces soldiers to assist in solving the kidnapping of the boss’s wife & step-daughter. As things unfold, he discovers that he hasn’t been told everything – like the fate of the boss’s first wife, kidnapped five years prior, and the fate of two former employees. His loyalties shift; he’s not sure who he can trust. He meets a former FBI-agent, who was involved in the earlier kidnapping case, who may turn out to be a partner of sorts.

I think part of what made this one extra-special to me was the extremity of the danger and trauma at stake, and the happy ending that our sympathetic characters are teased with, the happiness they MIGHT achieve if Reacher is successful. There are some gruesome images offered up; this is not for the faint-at-heart. But if you love a lone ranger with iron-clad morals, a heart of gold, and a Rambo-style ability to inflict pain on those who deserve it, in a world of beautiful/handsome good guys and really bad bad guys, Reacher may be for you. In fact, it’s rather like the traditional Western novel in that lone-ranger sensibility. But these have an intelligence lacking in the traditional Western (not trying to call them stupid; bear with me). Reacher thinks things through in a split second, and we get to share his thoughts on bullet trajectories, angles, percentages, and the weighing of one possible outcome against another. It’s very cerebral at the same time that it’s very physical. I love it.

Before this novel, I didn’t think I’d have favorites within the series. They’re all pretty great. But I’d put this one up there, and if you’re curious, I’d also pick out Echo Burning as a favorite. It was my first Reacher novel, and I picked it up because of the setting: far West-Texas desert on the Mexican border, which is an area where I have spent some very good times. That got me in the door, and opened up the whole series for me, and I’m SO grateful. It had another extra-high-stakes plot (at least for me… I mean, they’re all high stakes, but these two got me somehow, I don’t know. maybe you’d be “got” by a different pair of them) and that setting that I appreciated so much. Also a real knock-down, drag-out OK Coral sort of final scene that really got me going.

Do you read Reacher? Which one is your favorite? And if you don’t – why not?!? No, I jest, sort of. We don’t all have the same tastes. But for suspense and action, I couldn’t recommend it more highly. If not this one, what’s your favorite series? And do you have a favorite within it?

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The Eyes of the Panther by Ambrose Bierce

Posted on July 12, 2011 by pagesofjulia

This week’s Story of the Week is The Eyes of the Panther by Ambrose Bierce. I read it in just a few minutes, and after adjusting to the somewhat clunky transition (is it just me? I had to go back and reread) on the second page, I really enjoyed it. It’s spooky; it reminded me of Poe, actually. I was not familiar with Bierce but did enjoy the introduction to him – particularly the mention of his relationship with Hearst, who figured in the book I just finished, Newspaper Titan. Small world. I love it when my reading overlaps itself like that.

At any rate – this is a short story about a woman’s explanation of her own insanity, and I don’t want to tell you more than that. It is quietly disturbing, in an enjoyably, cozily spooky way, and not in an unable-to-sleep-after-reading-it way (for me at least). Go check it out.

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Immigrant Picnic by Gregory Djanikian

Posted on July 11, 2011 by pagesofjulia

The 4th-of-July Story of the Week was not a story but a poem called Immigrant Picnic, by Gregory Djanikian. I enjoyed this Armenian-American poet’s celebration of a 4th-of-July picnic in all its multinational, English-as-a-second-language diversity. Please enjoy, below.

Immigrant Picnic

It’s the Fourth of July, the flags
are painting the town,
the plastic forks and knives
are laid out like a parade.

And I’m grilling, I’ve got my apron,
I’ve got potato salad, macaroni, relish,
I’ve got a hat shaped
like the state of Pennsylvania.

I ask my father what’s his pleasure
and he says, “Hot dog, medium rare,”
and then, “Hamburger, sure,
what’s the big difference,”
as if he’s really asking.

I put on hamburgers and hot dogs,
slice up the sour pickles and Bermudas,
uncap the condiments. The paper napkins
are fluttering away like lost messages.

“You’re running around,” my mother says,
“like a chicken with its head loose.”

“Ma,” I say, “you mean cut off,
loose and cut off being as far apart
as, say, son and daughter.”

She gives me a quizzical look as though
I’ve been caught in some impropriety.
“I love you and your sister just the same,” she says.
“Sure,” my grandmother pipes in,
“you’re both our children, so why worry?”

That’s not the point I begin telling them,
and I’m comparing words to fish now,
like the ones in the sea at Port Said,
or like birds among the date palms by the Nile,
unrepentantly elusive, wild.

“Sonia,” my father says to my mother,
“what the hell is he talking about?”
“He’s on a ball,” my mother says.

“That’s roll!” I say, throwing up my hands,
“as in hot dog, hamburger, dinner roll. . . .”

“And what about roll out the barrels?” my mother asks,
and my father claps his hands, “Why sure,” he says,
“let’s have some fun,” and launches

into a polka, twirling my mother
around and around like the happiest top,

and my uncle is shaking his head, saying
“You could grow nuts listening to us,”

and I’m thinking of pistachios in the Sinai
burgeoning without end,
pecans in the South, the jumbled
flavor of them suddenly in my mouth,
wordless, confusing,
crowding out everything else.

Is lovely, no?

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Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Posted on July 9, 2011 by pagesofjulia

What an odd, fun, creepy little romp this was! I had been fascinated by the idea of this book months before it came out. The story is this: our first-person narrator, Jacob, has always been close to his grandfather. Grandpa Portman has told him stories all his life of the peculiar, magical children he grew up with, in a home for orphaned refugees during World War II. He even has pictures: a levitating girl (on the cover); an invisible boy; a skinny boy lifting a giant boulder. As Jacob grows up a bit, he begins to understand that perhaps Grandpa’s stories were just that, stories; but when Grandpa dies in a mysteriously disturbing fashion, in Jacob’s arms, and with the strangest of last words, he begins to wonder again. Under the care of a psychiatrist, Jacob travels with his father back to the tiny Welsh island where Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was located. The story he begins to unravel… well. I don’t want to ruin anything for you.

This is really a YA (young adult) book, for two reasons: 1, the reading level, and 2, the young adult protagonist. Jacob is 16 or 17 years old. I found it very enjoyable, though, and I don’t read YA very regularly. It was a quick read, partly because of the rather basic reading level. But here’s the unique bit: there are quite a few pictures mixed in with the text. Grandpa Portman had a collection of pictures; Jacob has a few of his own; he discovers a cache of pictures in his explorations of Cairnholm Island. And every one of the pictures mentioned in the story is included, so we get to do our own examining of them alongside Jacob. This was very cool, because the oddness (or perhaps, the peculiarity) of these pictures is a large part of the point of this book. And here’s the kicker: while this is a work of fiction, and the impossibility of the photos is obvious, I found an interesting detail at the back of the book. The author writes, “All the pictures in this book are authentic, vintage found photographs, and with the exception of a few that have undergone minimal postprocessing, they are unaltered.” I don’t know what “minimal postprocessing” might entail, but it made me go back and reexamine the pictures all over again, knowing that they each have a real life mysterious story behind them. I love it: an additional facet to this curious tale.

This is a paranormal story, even one of time travel. I don’t necessarily spend a lot of time in these areas, but I found Jacob to be a likeable (if doofy – is this a regular facet of YA, too?) protagonist, and his Grandpa was a real hero. The peculiar children were extremely likeable and fascinating. I had a lot of fun with this diversion from my more normal reading.

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Very Bad Men by Harry Dolan

Posted on July 8, 2011 by pagesofjulia

A clever, complex thriller in which a killer hunts the perpetrators of a decades-old crime.

Anthony Lark has three names written down in his notebook, and he’s hunting them down one by one as part of his mission to avenge a 17-year-old crime. David Loogan (introduced in Bad Things Happen) is content with his life in Ann Arbor, with girlfriend Elizabeth Waishkey (who’s a police detective) and her daughter Sarah, and with his job as editor of a mystery magazine. Lucy Navarro is a tabloid reporter trying to dig up a story linking the old crime with a current political campaign. But David is drawn into the murky waters of Lark’s crusade, and Elizabeth is assigned to the investigation, so David feels compelled to help Lucy in her inquiries–especially after she disappears suddenly.

This fast-paced and intelligent thriller is told in David’s voice, but offers insight into Lark’s troubled psyche as well, as he battles the demons that make the words in his notebook breathe and tremble. Readers of the mystery genre will have a little extra fun with David’s work editing mystery stories; we even learn which authors Lark follows. Teenaged Sarah is a spunky addition to the diverse mix of characters trying to solve the crime: amateur David, tagging along with Elizabeth, the experienced professional; and indomitable Lucy, whose past holds a secret or two. Then there are the political players: an aging senator about to retire and his up-and-coming daughter-in-law, who may be tied to an old bank robbery. Complex and well-developed characters, a mind-bending plot and a wry tone make this novel impossible to put down.

This review originally ran in the July 8, 2011 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

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Two for Texas by James Lee Burke

Posted on July 7, 2011 by pagesofjulia

Another good one from James Lee Burke; and such a quick read, too.

Son Holland and Hugh Allison escape together from a prison in Louisiana in an opportunistic and unplanned series of events that includes killing a prison guard. With Son struggling to recover from a gunshot wound, they flee into Texas, where the Mexican army is skirmishing with General Sam Houston’s troops, and various Indian tribes make up a plurality of fighting factions. It’s a lawless land, whose chaos does help Son and Hugh stay lost, but the brother of the murdered prison guard is on their trail. The older, more experienced Hugh (a friend of James Bowie) acts as a big-brother figure to the younger Son, who’s had his share of violence and hard times but retains some innocence and some righteous virtue, both for better and for worse. The two pick up an Indian woman, Sana, along the way, who will turn out to be an ally.

Son and Hugh decide to join Houston’s army as a defense against being recaptured and thrown in prison. Even if the tortures of their earlier incarceration weren’t unbearable enough, a return would mean certain slow, painful death. They catch up with Houston and spend several fateful months in the General’s camp, and are there during the battle at the Alamo, as well as Houston’s final defeat of Santa Ana’s Mexican army at San Jacinto.

My little paperback copy of this novel does not include any notes from Burke to tell me how much of this story is fiction. I surmise that Son and Hugh are entirely fictional characters. Certainly, the battles at the Alamo and San Jacinto are a part of history, as are the many big names Burke drops: Houston, Austin, Fannin, Milam, Bowie, Crockett, and more. But I think the story of these two men is Burke’s creation.

I enjoyed this quick read. At only 148 pages, it took me about a day in my free moments. It offers Burke’s usual fine descriptive writing, and I thought both of the main characters were well drawn: they had personality; they felt real; I was invested in their personal outcomes. The battle scenes and the rough edges on the soldiers, Houston’s ragtag troops, and the outlaw character of Texas at the time were all visceral and (in my embarrassingly limited knowledge) true to history.

An easy read with poignant characters and a good, readable (if cursory) history of the Texas Revolution, in Burke’s usual fine writing style.

[If you’re concerned: there is some blood-and-guts in the battle scenes, to be sure (how could there not be?) but it’s fairly conservative.]

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The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Posted on June 30, 2011 by pagesofjulia

THIS is how I like my nonfiction! See, Castaneda? Like this! I can’t exactly explain the difference. There’s just something very narrative, conversational, interesting about this. Similarly, Dethroning the King, Janet Malcolm, Annie Londonderry, etc. It’s not sensationalist; it’s just exciting. Written like a thriller or like a work of fiction, but no less serious a work of nonfiction for it. How to explain? Let me quote a very average paragraph for you, from page 27:

Each man recognized and respected the other’s skills. The resultant harmony was reflected in the operation of their office, which, according to one historian, functioned with the mechanical precision of a “slaughterhouse,” an apt allusion, given Burnham’s close professional and personal association with the stockyards. But Burham also created an office culture that anticipated that of businesses that would not appear for another century. He installed a gym. During lunch hour employees played handball. Burnham gave fencing lessons. Root played impromptu recitals on a rented piano. “The office was full of a rush of work,” Starrett said, “but the spirit of the place was delightfully free and easy and human in comparison with other offices I had worked in.”

See, that second sentence is long and convoluted and uses biggish words, but it flows and communicates; it doesn’t impede communication, and what it certainly doesn’t do is brag.

All right, rant aside, this is an excellent book! I started it Friday night and finished it Sunday afternoon. Not to repeat the back-of-the-book blurbs, but this work of nonfiction absolutely reads like a thriller; it’s difficult to put down. Very enjoyable. After years (literally) on my TBR shelves, I picked it up because I had such a groove going, after Annie Londonderry and Clara and Mr. Tiffany, two books set in the same era with overlapping locations – Annie in New York, Boston, and Chicago as well as all around the world, and Clara in New York, with the Chicago World Fair playing a role as well. I enjoyed both of these books so much, and especially the extra immersion in time-and-place I got by reading them back-to-back, that I wanted to go straight into The Devil and the White City next. And I’m so glad I did.

The story is this: Daniel H. Burnham, along with a huge cast of other talents and characters and against all odds, pulled together the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, better known to us as the Chicago World Fair. Concurrently, a man named Herman Webster Mudgett but known by his most-used alias, Dr. H.H. Holmes, murdered an unknown number of people, at least 27 but estimated as high as 200, in Chicago on the very edge of the fair grounds. Larson tells the story of the fair, of the serial murders, and of a larger time-and-place from the points of view of these two men, mostly, with side journeys into several other lives.

The World’s Fair is a character unto itself, as is the city of Chicago. Larson gives us the styles and morals of the time, and helps us to understand how it was that dozens of people, mostly young women experiencing a freedom unknown to their parents’ generation, could disappear into Holmes’ grasp. We see the wonder and beauty and ambition and angst of those who worked to produce the landmark event that was the White City, as the fair was known. We see the everyday struggles that allowed Holmes to methodically go about his evil pleasures.

Larson walks a fine line in trying to enter the heads of historical figures, especially the elusive Holmes, and still call his book nonfiction; but he’s got me convinced. He points out that everything in quotation marks is attributable, and defends the two murder scenes he chooses to portray with the evidence available to him in his research. In fact, as an aside, I enjoyed his “Notes and Sources,” and the brief story of his research there. He even mentions, in some cases, in which library or rare book room he found a particular elusive source. Further, also from Notes and Sources, page 395-6:

I do not employ researchers, nor did I conduct any primary research using the Internet. I need physical contact with my sources, and there’s only one way to get it. To me every trip to a library or archive is like a small detective story.

I know all of us booklovers (and librarians) enjoy that.

This is an engaging, riveting read. The historical value is vast. I’m always amazed by how the pieces of our history fit together. Am I the only one? I feel like there are so many names, personalities, and events in our history, but we learn them as individual bits; it’s always a little thrill when they come together in ways I don’t expect. For example, reading that Elias Disney worked as a carpenter and furniture-maker in the building of the fair, and went home to tell his sons, including little Walt, stories of the “magical realm beside the lake.” Isn’t that a charming little anecdote? Several of these connections are left in suspense, too; if your history is a bit weak in the right places, as mine was, you get these happy little surprises. I like that.

I found this book captivating, and I recommend it as a pleasurable read that may sneak some learning in on you. I invite readers of thrillers and evocative nonfiction to enter this fantastic, glittering, magical, and deadly – and true – world.

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did not finish: Mañana Forever? Mexico and the Mexicans by Jorge G. Castaneda

Posted on June 29, 2011 by pagesofjulia

I couldn’t do it. I wanted to like this book so much! In fact, I think I should just send you over to Raych’s review of Popular Crime, because I’m about to repeat everything she said, but about a different book. It’s funny how that works.

Mañana Forever? had a great pull for me. I was excited about getting to know “Mexico and the Mexicans” better; I like Mexico and the Mexicans, and I think they’re as apt as any country-and-its-people to make good book-fodder. The first bad sign was the preface, which dragged on and on in academic-speak, which rather goes against the impression I got (from product descriptions) that this books was written for Regular People. It also purported to outline the book’s goal, but instead went round in circles, as if still deciding what that goal might be. It listed and outlined the chapters, then told an anecdote involving H1N1 (the “swine flu”), and then GO chapter one. I began the book frustrated by the preface but ready to move on into the good stuff.

The first chapter nearly killed me. I like the idea of Nancy Pearl’s Rule of 50, but I couldn’t do it. I was too frustrated by chapter 1, which ends on page 33. (Ah, but the preface was 15. Do I get to claim 48 pages? That should be close enough. Really, two pages weren’t going to convince me. I promise.) Castaneda is Mexican-American himself, but just as I don’t belong to the camp that feels it’s okay for black people to call each other the n-word, I didn’t take to the negative lean of this chapter. It’s entitled “Why Mexicans Are Lousy at Soccer and Don’t Like Skyscrapers,” and the answer is, because they’re staunch individualists, always, no exception. Thus, no teamwork (soccer) and no sharing (apartment buildings – which aren’t necessarily synonymous with skyscrapers in my head, but whatever). He’s a bit critical, but more outrageously, he’s pretty vague in his justifications for his argument. When he completely lost me, though, was with math. Excuse me for holding an author of nonfiction (and an established academic, professor, PhD, and former foreign minister, in his third book) to this kind of standard, but. I offer you this sentence.

Out of a total of roughly 1 million homes delivered between 2004 and 2008, 800,000, or 97%, included one or two dwellings per plot, whereas only 32,000, or 3%, were vertical, multifamily homes, or in plain English, apartment buildings or ‘projects.’

1 million = 1,000,000. 800,000 is very easily divided into this number. I see 8 out of 10, is what I see. I’m no math major, but I’m pretty sure that 800,000 out of 1,000,000 is NOT 97%. I’m pretty sure that’s 80%. He lost me there, and lost me more in the next sentence, in which he says x over y “takes up much more space and thus more square feet.” After this, it was all I could do to not take out a red pen and start circling things. (This is a library book.) Rugged individualism is “often nearly always” self-sacrificial and self-destructive, and the chapter closes with this:

The individualism we have rapidly portrayed and criticized is just one of the multiple traits, though perhaps the most important one, that has become no longer just an obstacle, but an insurmountable hurdle to the country’s progress, as well as the heart of its past glory and unending fascination for the foreign regard.

No longer just an obstacle, but a hurdle! Gasp! No, Castaneda, you did not “rapidly” portray. These were the most difficult 33 pages I’ve read in recent memory. Sentences like this one required that I reread; I kept losing my place. This is the kind of writing I’m willing to be pretty forgiving of in galley copies (you know, pre-publication, don’t-quote-from-this-copy, still to be edited), but this isn’t a galley. I’m not sure if you should fire your editor, or if s/he should fire you. You have failed to grasp a reader who was eager to be grasped. The End.

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Jersey Law by Ron Leibman

Posted on June 28, 2011 by pagesofjulia

A hard-boiled legal thriller with lots of laughs and an accent that’s all Jersey, but with a sensitive side as well.

Accomplished D.C. lawyer Ron Liebman evokes a sharply realistic and very funny New Jersey underworld in his second novel, Jersey Law (following Death to Rodrigo). Fans of Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer will enjoy the well-meaning but mildly rule-bending team of Mickie and Junne, criminal defense attorneys for inner-city Camden’s drug dealers and lowlifes. They defend drug kingpin Slippery Williams; they spar with the DA; and they carefully balance the letter of the law with watching their backs. Junne (short for Junior), our narrator, places us firmly in the Camden streets with his conversational style, what he would call “street jive.” Don’t mind the sentence fragments; they make the book breathe in Junne’s terse Jersey voice.

Mickie and Junne have been friends since middle school, and have their practice down to a fine art. When one of their clients decides to testify against another, however, their loyalties are tested. If they warn the client, who is an old friend, men will certainly die, and they will have broken client confidentiality; if they don’t, it may mean their own demise. And then there’s their new secretary to worry about: Tamara is working hard to keep her nephew off the streets and out of the gang life. Tamara is an excellent example of one of Liebman’s strengths as a novelist: he creates funny, sympathetic characters we care about in spite of their flaws.

Junne’s large Italian family, Mickie’s womanizing and their shady lawyer-landlord fit perfectly in with the scenery. By turns poignant and suspenseful, Jersey Law is consistently funny, ending on just the right note for a sequel.

This review originally ran in the June 28, 2011 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

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