Book Review: The Beach House, by Jane Green

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The Beach HouseThe Beach House
Jane Green
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I first saw The Beach House when I was working on a project for a writing conference I attended last August, but I resisted buying it. Then, last fall, I finally picked it up, because I was missing the sea and liked the title.

In this novel, Nan Powell, a sixty-five year old widow who lives in a sprawling home in a New England beachfront town, is faced with loneliness and a house that is both too large and to big to maintain, so she decides to rent out rooms for the summer.

As inevitably happens, the various tenants, who include a newly divorced mother and her teen-aged daughter, a recently divorced man who is coming to realize that he’s gay, and her own son who has never been able to commit to one woman, draw together to form a quirky, if loyal extended family.

What could be boring and predictable, in author Green’s deft hands, is lovely and poignant, at least in some places, and outright funny in others.

Goes well with a summer day and a pitcher of lemonade.

Reviewed Elsewhere: True Colors, by Kristin Hannah

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True Colors
by Kristin Hannah
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From time to time, I review books for other blogs, ezines and podcasts, but I still want to track what I’ve read. I recently reviewed True Colors for ALL THINGS GIRL. Here’s the first paragraph:

In her last novel, Firefly Lane, which was released in paperback earlier this year, author Kristin Hannah gave us a stirring story exploring the often-adversarial relationships between mothers and daughters. In her newest book, True Colors Ms. Hannah once again displays her deftness at portraying relationships between women, this time with a brutally honest portrayal of three sisters in a somewhat dysfunctional family.

The rest of the review can be found here.

Booking Through Thursday: The Best?

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Each week, Booking Through Thursday asks a book related question. This week, the question is:

What were your favorite books from 2008?

I don’t usually do lists of favorites, because my taste in books changes so often, and I read so quickly, that sometimes, I don’t even remember to list or review.

But since you asked, here are a few:

  • The Eight, by Katherine Neville: I’ve loved this book for two decades. I remember working at the campus candy store at USF, and reading about it in the pink pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, and then picking it up at Printer’s Ink on the way home from school, and reading it on the train. It remains a favorite, to this day.
  • The Fire, by Katherine Neville: I loved this as much because Neville’s leading men are always so intriguing as because I’d waited twenty years for her to produce a sequel to The Eight.
  • Home from the Vinyl Cafe, by Stuart McLean: A collection short stories about a man who owns a record store, and his wife. Funny, contemporary, and full of Canadian flavor.
  • The Seduction of the Crimson Rose, by Lauren Willig: The most recent (to date) of the series that began with The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, a series that is an homage to The Scarlet Pimpernel but with a feminist sensibility.
  • The Southern Vampire Mysteries, by Charlaine Harris: I began reading this just before Halloween, and read the most recent just before Christmas. The series True Blood was not the first time I’d heard of them – many friends had recommended them – but it certainly helped make the decision.

Book Review: Nights in Rodanthe, by Nicholas Sparks

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Nights in RodantheNights in Rodanthe
Nicholas Sparks
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When it comes to Nicholas Sparks novels, I generally prefer the movies. It’s not that he’s a bad writer, particularly – people seem to love his work – but I can’t quite grasp all the fuss. His stories tend to be on the sad side, he explores broken relationships an awful lot…I must be missing something.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading Nights in Rodanthe over a period of a couple of nights, as it was the perfect book to read in the bath. Two divorced adults, both needing a new love interest, a rambling old bed and breakfast, a violent storm – bubblebath fodder on every page.

I even appreciate that the ending wasn’t perfect, that this was a much more plausible story than, say, a Silhouette novel.

But I still can’t see WHY Sparks’ work is so popular, because, to be honest, I’m underwhelmed.

(And no, I have NOT seen the movie.)

Goes well with: Candlelight, a bubblebath, and driving rain.

Teaser Tuesdays: Life After Genius, by M. Ann Jacoby

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On Teaser Tuesdays readers are asked to:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between 7 and 12 lines.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

My teasers are:

“You wrote some kind of paper, didn’t you? Gave a big presentation in front of a bunch of important people. Your mother can’t stop talking about it. How proud she is of you. How much smarter you are than all the other bridge players’ sons.” The woman laughs as if she has just told a joke, then grasps hold of Mead’s wrist. “Do you mind?” she says. “I’ve never touched a genius before.”
— from Life After Genius, p. 122, by M. Ann Jacoby

Book Review: Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas, by John Baxter

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Immoveable Feast: A Paris ChristmasImmoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas
John Baxter
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John Baxter has long been one of my favorite essayists, and not just because he writes about life as an ex-pat living in Paris.

In his most recent offering, An Immoveable Feast, (and yes, the title is a reference to a certain Hemingway publication) Baxter is his usual charming self, as he writes of his adventures in planning the Christmas Feasts to end all Christmas Feasts, for his wife’s very picky, very French family.

While the entire book is incredibly amusing, my favorite chapters involve the hunt for a whole pig, still in its own skin, to be roasted for dinner. Apparently, it is not the custom to serve pork in its skin, in France, and only something extremely un-French will be able to really impress the family. Baxter relays the expressions of butchers and other vendors so well that you can hear the accents and see their gesticulations.

The flaw in this book? It made me so hungry I had to keep putting it down so I wouldn’t drool on the pages.

Goes well with: Bacon. Lots and lots of bacon. And a slice of mince pie.

Reviewed Elsewhere:The Flavor Bible by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg

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The Flavor BibleThe Flavor Bible
by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg
Get it from Amazon

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From time to time, I review books for other blogs, ezines and podcasts, but I still want to track what I’ve read. I recently reviewed The Flavor Bible for ALL THINGS GIRL. Here’s the first paragraph:

Although it does contain several recipes, The Flavor Bible, by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, is not a cookbook. It isn’t really a bible either, for that matter. If I had to classify this book it would be half dictionary, half encyclopedia, and all wonderful.

The rest of the review can be found here.

Teaser Tuesdays: Belladonna, by Anne Bishop

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On Teaser Tuesdays readers are asked to:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

My teasers are:

As she turned away from the mirror, she was drawn to the watercolor that hung on the wall next to her bed. Titled Moonlight Lover, the view was of the break in the trees near Sebastian’s cottage, where a person could stand and see the moon shining over the lake. The dark-haired woman in the painting wore a gown that was as romantic as it was impractical, and looked as substantial as moonbeams. Standing behind her, with his arms wrapped protectively around her, was the lover. His face was shadowed, teasing the imagination to find the details, but the body suggested a virile man in his prime.
~Belladonna, by Anne Bishop. Page 61.

Review: The Zookeeper’s Wife, by Diane Ackerman

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The Zookeeper's Wife The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story
by Diane Ackerman
Get it from Amazon.

The Zookeeper’s Wife sounds rather grim on the surface: it’s about the keepers at the Warsaw Zoo hiding Jews during the holocaust. As the blurbs on the back say, it’s a rough subject to find in such a beautiful book, and yet, beautiful is what this story is.

Antonina and Jan live in a modern glass house inside the zoo. When the Nazis arrive in Poland, many of their animals are sent to German zoo’s, while others are slaughtered for sport, and yet, because one of the ranking officers is a zoologist, of sorts, the pair are allowed to remain in residence for most of the war, and eventually the zoo houses both a munitions station, and a fox farm.

At the same time, Jan and Antonina are smuggling Jewish people out of the ghetto, using their zoo as an initial stop on a sort of “underground railroad.” Some of these Guests are housed in the old aviary, in the rabbit house, in the pheasant house, and are referred to by the names of the animals whose cages they occupy. Others are hidden in closets, walls, tunnels, etc. around the the house, and still others move in, hiding in plain site.

Throughout this book, which reads like a novel though it is not fiction, even when things are at their worst, Antonina holds her strange family together, and a thread of hope runs through it all.

Goes well with: a bowl of hearty soup, artisan bread, and a cold gray day.

Teaser Tuesday: The Zookeeper’s Wife, by Diane Ackerman

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On Teaser Tuesdays readers are asked to:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

My teasers are:

But spring floated outside the small rupture in time the war had gouged. For people attuned to nature and the changing seasons, especially for farmers or animal-keepers, the war snagged time on barbed wire, forced them to live by mere chronicity, instead of real time, the time of wheat, wolf, and otter.
— The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story, by Diane Ackerman. Page 223.