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Review: Just Like Heaven by Julia Quinn (Audiobook)

24 Jun

Just Like Heaven (Unabridged Audio CDs)My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

Description via Goodreads:

Honoria Smythe-Smith is:
A) a really bad violinist
B) still miffed at being nicknamed “Bug” as a child
C) NOT in love with her older brother’s best friend
D) all of the above

Marcus Holroyd is:
A) the Earl of Chatteris
B) regrettably prone to sprained ankles
C) NOT in love with his best friend’s younger sister
D) all of the above

Together They:
A) eat quite a bit of chocolate cake
B) survive a deadly fever AND the world’s worst musical performance
C) fall quite desperately in love
It’s Julia Quinn at her best, so you KNOW the answer is . . .
D) all of the above

Honaria is one of my favorite romance heroines in a while. Often, I feel this way because I feel some kinship with the character. In this case I like her quite simply for being herself.

She was a sweet, appropriately naive girl that cared about her family. She wasn’t perfect (which would be annoying!), but her flaws weren’t in my face, either.

The romance actually developed over time, which is my preference. It actually seemed to make sense for both of the parties involved! Their personalities complimented one another, and they had time to know that.

For most of the book, I thought this was going to be one of the most chaste romances I’d read in quite some time. That changed near the end, and if that scene wasn’t entirely in character, it was otherwise well done (brief but emotional and intense).

I’m having trouble identifying what made this book work so well for me, other that the vague comment “it was the writing”. Really, that’s what it is– a very well written book.

I haven’t read a lot of Julia Quinn’s books, but I’ve been very impressed by those I have. I look forward to reading more.

Audio Notes

Sound Bytes @ Devourer of Books

For more audiobook reviews, check out Sound Bytes

Narrator: I enjoyed listening to Rosalyn Landor narrating Just Like Heaven.

Production: No issues, no extras.

Audio vs. Print:  In general, I found listening to this book to be a very pleasant experience.  The one issue I had is one I frequently have listening to romance novels as audiobooks.  The, um, exciting scenes never seem to occur at convenient times.  I feel odd hanging out with my daughter while the hero and heroine are having passionate sex, so I have to pause the audiobook for awhile.  Even with that, I wouldn’t hesitate to listen to another Julia Quinn romance.
Check out other Audio Book Reviews at Sound Bytes at Devourer of Books!

I received Just Like Heaven for review from Harper Collins Audio.  Thank you for the opportunity to read and review this book!

 
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Posted by on June 24, 2011 in books, reviews

 

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Review: Every Last One by Anna Quindlen (With Audio & book club notes)

17 Jun

Every Last OneMy rating: 4 of 5 stars

It took a while for me to get into this one, but I’m not sure if that was the book or that was me. I was somewhat impatient with the time spent building the characters and their life, even though I normally appreciate this in a book.

Summary via Goodreads:

Mary Beth Latham has built her life around her family, around caring for her three teenage children and preserving the rituals of their daily life. When one of her sons becomes depressed, Mary Beth focuses on him, only to be blindsided by a shocking act of violence. What happens afterward is a testament to the power of a woman’s love and determination, and to the invisible lines of hope and healing that connect one human being to another. Ultimately, as rendered in Anna Quindlen’s mesmerizing prose, Every Last One is a novel about facing every last one of the things we fear the most, about finding ways to navigate a road we never intended to travel.

The strength of the first half of the book is the portrait of a family I could relate to.  I don’t know that family, but I can imagine them living on a street nearby (although of course my daughter and her friends aren’t going to get involved with anything like Ruby and her friends did– drinking and teen sex eating disorders and so on.  La La La.  My fingers are in my ears, I can’t hear you!).

I think the problem (such as it is) was that I knew Something was Going to Happen, just from reading the description on the back of the book. That’s part of the experience here– trying to guess what is going to happen and when. Which hints in the text are going to be built on? Or is it going to come completely out of the blue?

Once It happens, the book just grabbed me, and I couldn’t stop listening. All in all, I liked the characters, particularly Mary Beth. This isn’t to say she was perfect– far from it. She was human, with strengths and flaws. The kids were also fairly well fleshed out. In the family, only her husband never really came alive for me.

Particularly interesting were the snapshots of Mary Beth’s friends, as they would come into focus over the course of the book. One would be highlighted at a key moment, a different one at another time.  Some are faithful to her throughout the story, some come and go, and we see small (and not so small) glimpses into their lives.

All in all, this is a book about characters, and these are worth spending the time with.

 

Book Club notes

We had a great time discussing Every Last One.  We all liked the book, although everyone found it extremely intense.  We all thought the characters were very well done, and discussed the strengths and weaknesses.  We talked about their relationships with each other, and the ways we did and didn’t relate to the characters.  We talked about whether key events could have been avoided, and what aspects of the past contributed to the path that was taken.

I’d recommend this for book clubs that enjoy character driven discussions.

Audio Notes

Sound Bytes @ Devourer of Books

For more audiobook reviews, check out Sound Bytes

Narrator: Hope Davis was seamless in this book.  She was the voice of Mary Beth, and I didn’t stop to consider her as an independent entity.

Production:  No issues, no extras.

Audio or Print?  Audio worked fine for me overall.  There were two reasons (not major ones) that push me a little toward thinking print might have been even better.

First (and irrelevant for many), the print version has a Reader’s Guide that might have been useful for Book Club.

Second, in the first half, the book sometimes felt a bit slow, and might have felt less so, since I can read print faster.  In the second half, I wanted to go faster at times, because I was so wrapped up in what was happening!

Both of these are minor.

I really did enjoy getting to know Mary Beth, and I wouldn’t hesitate to listen to another one of Anna Quidlen’s books.

 
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Posted by on June 17, 2011 in Book Club, books, M, reviews

 

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Review: The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson (with audio & book club notes)

18 May

The Finkler QuestionMy rating: 2 of 5 stars

Summary via Goodreads.com:

Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular and disappointed BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other – or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czechoslovakian always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results.

Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor’s grand, central London apartment. It’s a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you had less to mourn?

Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends’ losses. And it’s that very evening, at exactly 11:30pm, as Treslove hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country as he walks home, that he is attacked. After this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change.

OK, I just didn’t get it. I didn’t care about any of the characters or their struggles. If the people had been interesting or even pleasant, then I could have bought into the search for Jewish identity. If the struggle to define identity as a Jew (or a Jewish wannabee) had seemed more universal, then I could have forgiven the abrasiveness of the characters.

As it was, there was no hook to get me into the story, and I remained uninterested until the end.  (And then the end didn’t really make sense, but I didn’t care.  I was simply relieved to be done.)

But was it a bad book?  I haven’t a clue. I’m not going to try to judge this one objectively.  Certainly, the words were all put together in the correct order, there were characters with very distict POVs (even if they seemed quite flat to me), there was a deeper issue being examined…  and enough people saw enough in the book to award it The Booker Prize.

I still didn’t like it.

(My experience with The Finkler Question prompted me to post a discussion of my experience with literary prize winning books.  Please check it out and tell me what you think.)

Audio Notes

Narrator: I think Steven Crossley did a good job with difficult material.

Production: I didn’t notice any issues.

Audio vs. Print: Although I don’t think I would have liked this book much better in print than I did in audio (and my book club discussion confirms this thought), it does have one characteristic that doesn’t lend to an enjoyable audiobook experience for me.  I’ve noticed that I have a much harder time with unlikeable main characters in audio than in print.  I think the issue is that I feel like I’m spending time with someone when I listen to them talk.  Add this to the fact that it takes much longer to get through an audio book than I print book, and I think print would have been a better choice for me.

Book Club Notes

I read The Finkler Question for one of my book clubs.  There were five of us at the meeting.  I’m the only one that had finished reading it.  Three others had made it most of the way through, as well as one other member that couldn’t attend .  I discussed it with her later.  None of us liked it.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of dislike that leads to a good, spirited discussion.  We all didn’t get what the appeal was, and just couldn’t get up much interest in any aspect of it.  We discussed the one scene that we did find funny, the pros and cons of the various characters, the universality (or lack thereof) of the question of Jewish identity. We glanced over the discussion questions one group member had printed out before giving up and going on to catch upon each others lives.  The total book discussion time was about 30 minutes.

 
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Posted by on May 18, 2011 in Book Club, books, M, reviews

 

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Review: The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist (with audiobook and book club notes)

13 May

The UnitMy rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

The Unit was a chilling portrait of the near future, not because it is our future, but because of what it says about our present.

Summary via Audible.com:

When Dorrit Wegner turned fifty, the government transferred her to a state-of-the-art facility where she can live out her days in comfort. Her apartment is furnished to her tastes, her meals expertly served, and all at the very reasonable non-negotiable price of one cardiopulmonary system. Once an outsider without family, derided by a society bent on productivity, Dorrit finds within The Unit the company of kindred spirits and a dignity conferred by ‘use’ in medical tests. But when Dorrit also finds love, her peaceful submission is blown apart and she must fight to escape before her ‘final donation’.

The strength of this book is absolutely in the world it builds– the details of how people were selected as being “dispensable”, their bodies sacrificed for the good of others who are needed, and the picture of a society that allows this to happen.

All that is shown directly is the world of The Unit, as the the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material is known to those that reside within. Life here is easy, for the most part, unless a drug being studied has particularly unpleasant side effects, and the residents are content, with time available to spend on the activities they had neglected in their life before.

It is clear that life in this Unit isn’t representative of the world as a whole, and probably not of the other Reserve Bank Units (I’m guessing there are is at least one designated for those citizens that do not go along with the plan quite so quietly. I’m guessing their stay is much less pleasant, and significantly shorter.). Through the characters in the Unit, and the stories from their past lives, we learn about the world that put them there.

I really enjoyed the characters. They were people I would have liked and enjoyed time with. Except the small detail that I’m married with a child, I’d fit in well with these people when I hit 50 in not that many more years.  I’d probably even go quietly, given the incentives they had, if it wasn’t for my immediate family ties.  This is a sobering thought.

More than that, they worked well to build an intriguing, believable world, and a compelling story that I cared about.

In the beginning, I had occasional issues with the language of the book (due to it being a translation, I suspect), with written constructs that didn’t quite flow for me. Either I got used to them or the issue cleared up fairly quickly.

I read this with one of my book clubs, and we had a fantastic discussion of it. I’d recommend reading The Unit, on your own or with a group.

Audio Notes

Narrator: I enjoyed Suzanne Toren’s narration.  She was a good match for the character of Dorrit.

Production: I had no issues with the production– I found listening to be entirely natural.

Print vs. Audio: The Unit lent itself well to audio, but I don’t think that listening added to my appreciation of it. (In fact, due to an error of my own, listening detracted to my enjoyment.  I had thought that the book from Audible was two parts long, about 8 hours each, and was setting my expectations of the arc of the story accordingly.  I thought I was about 40% in when the story took a very major turn, and I felt manipulated by this happening with over half the book to go.  Then I thought I was halfway through, and wondering where on earth the book could go from here, and then I realized the book was over).

I’d say whatever format is most convenient for you will be fine.

 Book Club Notes

In general, our book club meetings are 2 hours long.  If we have 1 solid hour of book discussion, I consider the book to be a success.  The Unit kept us going for pretty much the entire time.  We had different interpretations of events, we all had thoughts about the plausibility and sustainability of the world as represented.  We talked about our feelings of being dispensable in society now, even if we don’t meet the criteria outlined there.  We talked about the impact of the book having been written in another country– both translation issues and differences in societal attitudes.  And so on.

I’d highly recommend The Unit for book club discussion.

 
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Posted by on May 13, 2011 in Book Club, books, L, reviews

 

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Review: Written in Bone by Sally Walker (audiobook)

27 Apr

Written in BoneHey, this is post #500 on this blog!!!!

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Listening to this book was so cool!

On a hot summer day in 2005, Dr. Douglas Owsley of the Smithsonian Institution peered into an excavated grave, carefully examining the fragile skeleton that had been buried there for four hundred years. “He was about fifteen years old when he died. And he was European,” Owsley concluded. But how did he know?

Scientists discovered this grave inside the remains of James Fort, in Jamestown, Virginia. They were excavating the site with the goal of better understanding the Europeans and Africans who lived in Jamestown and the Chesapeake Bay area during the 1600s and 1700s. Who were these people? How did they live? And how did they die?

Just as forensic scientists use their knowledge of human remains to help solve crimes, they use similar skills to solve the mysteries of the long-ago past. From the skeletons, the burial practices, and remnants of objects found nearby, scientists can determine gender and ancestry, along with probable age, what the person ate, what lifestyle he or she lived, and the cause of death. In some cases, further research helps scientists speculate on who the dead were.

Join author Sally M. Walker as she works alongside the scientists who use state-of-the-art methods to decipher clues from America’s colonial past. As you follow their investigations, Walker will introduce you to what scientists believe are the lives of a teenage boy, a ship’s captain, an indentured servant, a colonial official and his family, and an African slave girl. All are reaching beyond the grave to tell us their stories, which are written in bone.

I’ve been a fan of fictional forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan since long before the TV show Bones. I like what she’s able to do with contemporary bodies, but I’m always interested in the asides about her ventures with older, more historic graves.

This book goes into many of the details of this process, using some bodies from colonial Jamestown.

The book goes into details of isotopes, of bone measurements, and of soil composition. It then takes this information as well as details as to how the body is positioned, and what is found nearby, and builds a portrait of the life of this individual. An attempt is made to match this portrait to the historical record, trying to identify who has been located.

The audience clearly is middle grade, but the information isn’t so simplified as to be uninteresting. The age of the intended audience is clear when the narrator gives a brief explanation of negative numbers, but it usually is fairly universal.

I came at this book interested in the scientific aspect, but the historical viewpoint also grabbed me. While listening, I kept thinking of the opportunities for a classroom unit featuring a truly integrated curriculum. I’m going to suggest it to the 5th grade teachers at my daughter’s school, since they cover Colonial America as well as basic human anatomy that year.

Audio Notes:

Narrator: Greg Abbey was a competent narrator, and I enjoyed listening to him.  For the target audience, I wonder if a somewhat less deliberate narration might be more engaging.

Production:  Good.  There was a disc of bonus material that I never looked at– My CD drive is broken, so I used another computer to load the book onto my MP3 player.  I suspect that would be interesting to explore, but I didn’t do so.

Print or Audio: I think that the print would be such a different experience that I can’t even begin to guess without actually looking at the book!

 
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Posted by on April 27, 2011 in books, reviews

 

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Review: The Wizard of London by Mercedes Lackey (audiobook)

16 Apr

The Wizard of London (Elemental Masters, #5)My rating:3.5 of 5 stars

I picked this up at the Audible.com sale for a fun read, even though it is book 5 of a series.  I enjoyed it and it fit what I was looking for, and I don’t think that coming in late was a problem.

The best part of this book was the magical world presented. It’s an alternate history, set in England in a past much like ours. There was a world of elemental mages, with the power to control an element and the magical creatures associated with that sphere, and those with more psychic gifts– like speaking with the dead as well as various battle related skills.  There were enough details to make it rich without growing tedious.  The magic tied into mythology, bringing in The Snow Queen, Robin Goodfellow and the Wild Hunt, among other references.

The characters were also interesting, particularly David Alderscroft. He’s a basically good guy being lured by the pull of power, led by a mentor who is much more than she appears.  He has the potential to wield enormous influence and power, but has to decide what’s important to him.

Isabelle Harton also had an intriguing story, linked long ago with David’s. After their relationship ended, she went to India, and found her husband. Together they have built a very satisfying life, including a school for children of British citizens living abroad– particularly those with magical talents of the non-elemental variety.

At the center of the action are two very talented young girls, attending the Harton School. I had a problem when reading that if their age was given in the first part of the book, I missed it. If I’d been reading a print version I would have gone back to check, but that’s much harder when listening. I kept trying to guess, and my estimates ranged from 8/10 to 15/17. I did figure it out (11/13), but I think I would have liked the book better if they had been older. As it was, it felt more like events were happening to them, and they weren’t mature enough to make good decisions about their involvement.

I’m planning to go back and fill in earlier books in the series. I don’t think they are particularly tightly linked, but I’d like to explore this world a little more.

Audiobook Notes:

Narrator: Michelle Ford was an effective narrator, with a pleasant voice and enough differentiation between characters to make the book easy to follow.

Production: I didn’t have any issues with it, but it didn’t bring anything extra to the book.

Print vs. Audio: Whatever is more convenient.  I don’t think the audio added to or detracted from the experience.

 
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Posted by on April 16, 2011 in books, reviews

 

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Review: Feed by M.T. Anderson (with Audiobook and Book Club notes)

07 Apr

FeedMy rating: 4 of 5 stars

This audiobook was quite an experience!

Summary via Audible.com:

Titus’ ability to read, write and even think for himself has been almost completely obliterated by his “feed”, a transmitter implanted directly into his brain. Feeds are a crucial part of life for Titus and his friends. After all, how else would they know where to party on the moon, how to get bargains at Weatherbee & Crotch or how to accessorize the mysterious lesions everyone’s been getting? But then Titus meets Violet, a girl who cares about what’s happening to the world and challenges everything Titus and his friends hold dear. A girl who decides to fight the feed.

Feed clearly extrapolates trends in our current society, both technological and societal, and sets up a frightening vision of where we are heading.

In addition to the Internet-style Feed directly to the brain, there were schools run by Schools Inc., since the government didn’t want to pay enough money to keep running the schools themselves, and besides, the old-style schools didn’t teach anything useful or interesting anyway.

The US government that seems to be uniting the rest of the world against it, and the US population isn’t really playing attention, whether by their own choice, or by the choice of those that run the Feed, I’m not really certain.

All of this in a book published in 2002– we don’t seem to be changing course away from any of this.

The world built in the book had amazing breadth, but didn’t present the same depth. I think this was a deliberate choice on the part of the author, to emphasize the aspects that tie into the points the author was making. I suspect that if the novel had not been targeted at a YA audience, more of this would have been presented in the book. I was left with a number of questions, but none that were important to the characters, events and messages of this book.

I have only one quibble with the Feed world, and that’s that I think the Feed technology would have been established long before society reached the point where shuttles between the Earth, the Moon, and various planets were common. That’s a minor thing, however, and overall, the world here was fascinating.

I had the same problem with Titus that I often have with young male leads in YA books. He was a little to realistic, and I often got annoyed with him. The relationship that Titus has with his group of friends (and they have with each other) is fairly shallow, and that’s the its supposed to be. Titus was a deeper character than his friends (a scary thought), but for much of the book, he’s primarily focused on the pursuit of fun.

It was the outsider character of Violet that introduced him to an alternative way of looking at the world, and made the book work for me.

Violet introduces Titus to a new way of looking at the world, and at the Feed.  She also challenges him on a more personal level– a challenge that he finds even more intimidating than the more intellectual questions she pushes him with.

The book is also funny (although often cringe inducing as well, such as the fashions for decorating the skin lesions that are mysteriously appearing on everyone, or the beef farm, with the hedge maze made of cultivated filet mignon).  The slang is both catchy and funny.

Audio Notes

Narrator: David Aaron Baker did an amazing job.  He showed the life Titus was living at the beginning and at times throughout the book, a life fully dedicated to having fun and going along with his friends and The Feed.  He really excelled when Titus was actually asking the questions, and questioning what was happening around him.

The Production: Wow. It really brought the Feed to life, including music and sound effects for the flood of messages flowing constantly flowing through. Feed chat messages were more lightly processed. Luckily, all this was presented judiciously– I could easily have been overwhelmed (and for the first 30 minutes, I was, by the story and the production of it), but it settled down to a level I could appreciate.

Print vs. Audio: I really feel like the audio added to the book to the point of making them hard to compare.  I simply can’t imagine the straight print, even after flipping through someone else’s copy of the book.

Book Club Notes

I read Feed with one of my book clubs.  I was sick, and almost missed the meeting, but decided I really wanted to be there, and I was past the contagious stage.  I wasn’t at full power, however, and my notes here may reflect that.

All 5 of us enjoyed the book, although the first bit had several of us worried.

We spent time on the plausibility of the world (high), and on the current trends being extended.  We were particularly impressed given the age of the book.

We talked about the characters (we all liked Violet’s father) and we talked about where the names came from.

We looked at the lives of various characters, and talked about who we didn’t see reflected in the book, and about how the society functioned.

Overall, I think it made a good choice for our book club.

 
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Posted by on April 7, 2011 in Book Club, books, M, reviews

 

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Book Thoughts: True Grit by Charles Portis (audiobook)

29 Mar

True GritMy rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m not calling this a review because I’m in a more rambling mood than critical one.

I have an unreasonable prejudice against Westerns.  Maybe I was traumatized by one as a small child, and have blocked the memory to protect myself.  Then again, maybe I just pay too much attention to the stereotypes of manly men and gun battles.

True Grit is the story of a 14 year old girl that heads into Indian country with a US Marshall and a Texas Ranger in order to find the man that killed her father and bring him to justice.

I finally went to see the movie because it had a lot of Oscar buzz, and there wasn’t really anything else that interested me playing at the time I was available.  I liked the movie more than I thought I would, but I didn’t love it.

I figured that would be the end of it, but not long after, the book showed up on the Audible.com $5 book sale.  I’d heard that the movie was very faithful the the book, and decided I was $5 and 6 hours worth of curious.

I suspect this would have been a very different book for me if I’d listened to it before seeing the movie, and I’m not sure I would have enjoyed it as much. I’ll never know, of course.

The narrator had much the same cadence to her delivery as Hailee Steinfeld did in the movie, even though her voice was different.  Somehow this was enough to bring the visuals of the movie into my mind in a way that rarely happens for me, even when I read a book after watching the movie.  In fact, I very rarely visualize a book when reading (whether print or audio), so this was an interesting experience for me.

An side effect was that when the shooting started (What, it’s a Western!) I wasn’t in the mood to deal with that at the time  (I hid my eyes during the movie.  Not a great idea when I was driving, and since the picture was in my head, it probably wouldn’t have helped anyway).

I actually spent two days going back and forth between True Grit and a Doctor Who novelization (which also contained shooting, but since it was between Sontarans and people who were infected by alien spores and could then shoot light from their hands, somehow didn’t bother me as much).

Why did this story work for me?  Because of the character of Mattie, who is by no means your average 14 year old.  She’s a great character, and reminds me a little of one 14 year old I know, not in any detail, but in her spirit– her grit.   Mattie was sassy and self confident, but completely unaware of how she appeared to others. Watching Mattie and Rooster grow through the book (and movie) was a treat.

So, am I going to go read more Westerns?  Probably not, although I may pick up Lonesome Dove at some point, since so many bloggers have raved about it over the last year.  I am a little more willing to entertain the idea.of reading (or watching) them in general.

 
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Posted by on March 29, 2011 in books, reviews

 

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Review: Dying for Mercy by Mary Jane Clark (audiobook)

24 Mar

Dying for MercyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars

A quick moving, entertaining mystery. I’m not entirely sure it all held together, but I’m not going to worry too much about it.

Summary via Goodreads:

When death shatters the serenity of the exclusive moneyed enclave of Tuxedo Park, New York, Eliza Blake, cohost of the country’s premier morning television show KEY to America, is on the scene. While attending a lavish gala at her friends’ newly renovated estate, Pentimento, Eliza’s host is found dead—a grotesque suicide that is the first act in a macabre and intricately conceived plan to expose the sins of the past involving some of the town’s most revered citizens.

Determined to find out the truth, Eliza and her KEY News colleagues—producer Annabelle Murphy, cameraman B.J. D’Elia, and psychiatrist Margo Gonzalez—discover that Pentimento holds the key. Nestled in the park’s sprawling architectural masterpieces, picturesque gardeners’ cottages, and lush, rolling landscape, the glorious mansion is actually a giant “puzzle house,” filled with ingenious clues hidden in its fireplaces, fountains, and frescoes that lead them from one suspicious locale to another—and, one by one, to the victims of a fiendish killer.

As Pentimento gives up its secrets, it becomes clear that no amount of wealth or privilege will keep the residents of Tuxedo Park safe. But just when Eliza unearths one final surprise, she comes face-to-face with a murderer who believes that some puzzles should never be solved.

My first experience with the author was with her more recent To Have and to Kill. I thought her writing style didn’t work well with the cozy mystery, but thought it might work better with this series, which seemed a little grittier.

I was right about that. My guess that her TV experience would lend some appeal to her writing about a TV morning show host also proved true.

The mystery was (deliberately) convoluted. I took it for the entertainment value, and chose not to worry about things like how the bad guys were really making everything much worse for themselves, and how unlikely some of their actions were.  Even the framework of the puzzles promised more than they delivered, but that actually worked for me, given the character of the puzzlemaker.

I found the setting in the closed community of Tuxedo Park to be intriguing, an unfamiliar world within a familiar one.  I really liked how the closed setting forced a situation where those involved all knew one another– a very small town in a much larger community.

I enjoyed the character of Eliza Blake. She’s a tough, smart woman. There were references to events that had happened before, and I’m interested in going back to fill in the details, and to get to know the secondary characters a little better.  They weren’t particularly well fleshed out in this book, but I suspect that the cumulative picture is more interesting.

Audiobook notes

Narrator: Isabel Keating does a competent job with Dying for Mercy.  I didn’t love her voice, but it wasn’t distracting, either.  Her voices for the different characters worked well to distinguish between them.

Production: This was a solid production, with no real issues.  It’s a small thing, but I really appreciate that the large number of chapters meant that each disc could start at a chapter break.

Audio or Print? Your choice.  I don’t think the audio version adds to or detracts from the book.

 
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Posted by on March 24, 2011 in books, reviews

 

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Review: Room by Emma Donoghue (with Book Club and Audiobook notes)

08 Mar

RoomMy rating: 4 of 5 stars

A very intense, compelling book. I didn’t always enjoy it, but I did appreciate it.

From the Room website:

To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world….

It’s where he was born, it’s where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. There are endless wonders that let loose Jack’s imagination-the snake under Bed that he constructs out of eggshells, the imaginary world projected through the TV, the coziness of Wardrobe beneath Ma’s clothes, where she tucks him in safely at night, in case Old Nick comes.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it’s the prison where she’s been held since she was nineteen-for seven long years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in that eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But Jack’s curiosity is building alongside her own desperation—and she knows that Room cannot contain either indefinitely….

Interestingly, the strengths of Room were often what made it uncomfortable reading.

First was Jack as narrator. He’s an incredibly imaginative and precocious 5 year old, but he is 5. He’s written well enough for this to be an issue at times. I’ll also note that there were times when he thought things that I didn’t think fit his age, even as advanced in some ways as he was, then I realized that he’s an incredibly unreliable narrator– I shouldn’t believe everything he says about himself.

In the end, Jack’s voice was far more of a plus than a minus for me.  His view was something truly unique in my experience.  The story would not have been as compelling if not seen through his eyes.

Which leads to another strength of the book that was sometimes an issue for me. Yes, the book was compelling, often uncomfortably so. The subject matter isn’t pleasant, although Jack doesn’t see it that way. Nonetheless, I sometimes just had to stop reading and take a break.    The room would start to feel claustrophobic, the meaning of the creaks that Jack was hearing (and counting) would become clear, and it would just be too much for me.

Again that a book could have that much of an effect on me this can be seen more as praise than condemnation. I will say that reading did get easier as I worked through the book.

One last thing that could be a strength or weakness in Room: Jack’s mother was a very well developed, interesting character, in spite of us only seeing her through her child’s eyes.  In the book, she did one thing– one very important thing– that I just couldn’t understand, viven. (I suspect those that have read the book know exactly what I mean, any more information would be a significant spoiler.) Everything else, all of her decisions about how to raise Jack, how to handle the situations that arose, it all made sense to me (even when they were different from what I would have done).

But when she does something that doesn’t make sense to me make her less human as a character, or more? It certainly gave me something to think about.

In the end, that’s the best part of Room– the questions that are asked (and answered) about these two people and the world they live in– the world inside and outside of Room.

Book Club Notes

My book club had a fantastic discussion of this book– enough so that we didn’t have much time for our usual chat and catching up with each others lives.  It’s a good problem to have.

We talked a lot about Ma’s decision that I talked about in my review, and I’m much more comfortable with it now (that is, comfortable that she could have made it.  It’s still a very uncomfortable choice). We talked a lot about her, the position she was in, and how she was able to cope as well as she did.

We talked about what the future would hold for Jack and Ma, about how realistic each character was, and the choices they made. We talked about other, equally realistic directions the book could have taken, and were happy this was the book we had.

We talked about what made the book work, at which point each of us thought about giving up reading it, and that we were all glad we didn’t.

I highly recommend Room for reading group discussion.

Audiobook Notes

Narrator: There are four narrators for Room, one of which carries most of the story, reading as Jack.  I don’t know whether it was Michal Friedman, Ellen Archer, Robert Petkoff, Suzanne Toren.  Michal Friedman was listed first, so I’m guessing she was Jack.  I admit, I was worried that the high pitched, very slightly whiny voice (very reminiscent of a 5 year old)  was going to get on my nerves, but after about 30 minutes it was no longer an issue.  Other than that, all four did a fantastic job.

Production: Excellent.  The decision to have “Jack” narrate the book, switching to the other voices only for direct quotes from other characters, really kept the feeling of the story coming from inside Jack’s head, but made it clear when there was real input from the world outside of him.

Print or Audio:  I think the audio adds to the experience IF you can cope with Jack’s voice.  If you aren’t sure, I’d say give it some time and be prepared to switch if needed.

FTC disclosure: I picked up a copy of Room from the publisher at BEA last May.  I decided I wanted to listen to the audio, so I passed that copy along to a book club member.

 
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Posted by on March 8, 2011 in Book Club, books, M, reviews

 

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