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Review Date: 4/12/2013
Compelling and fast-moving tale of the aftermath of a fictional in-flight incident that left passengers dead and injured. Crichton tackles corporate infighting and infotainment "news" for the zing and supports it with the nuts and bolts description of the internal investigation by the plane's manufacturer.
Review Date: 11/7/2009
Michener's trademark study of a particular region doesn't work well in this ponderous study of Alaska. Only the World War II sections spark the least bit of interest.
Review Date: 5/16/2018
Second of a series.
The murder of a young woman pulls her friend, ex-cop Elena Estes, into the ultra-rich world of South Florida's polo-playing elite, where rich men take what they want and throw away the rest.
The murder of a young woman pulls her friend, ex-cop Elena Estes, into the ultra-rich world of South Florida's polo-playing elite, where rich men take what they want and throw away the rest.
Review Date: 10/1/2006
Helpful Score: 6
Sandra Dallas' talent lies in finding beauty, strength, and compassion in the small, simple moments of women's lives. She has done it again in this Civil-War-era novel, once again using the theme of quilting to highlight her characters' lives. Even as Alice uses patience and skill to make otherwise useless bits and pieces of fabric into expressions of love that are both beautiful and practical, so does the story piece together bits and pieces to create a skillfully wrought portrait of the characters' lives and time.
Review Date: 11/2/2024
After writing dozens of damsel-in-distress novels, Clark can probably crank them out in her sleep. In fact, she may have done just that with this one.
Using the country-manor-mystery as a template, the novel plops a dozen main characters on an ultra-luxurious cruise ship as it makes its maiden voyage from New York to Southampton. The all-alone lady of the title is a gemologist fleeing a disastrous wedding supper at which her (now former) fiancé was arrested for fraud. She's looking to get away from the media uproar and pay for her passage via a series of lectures on the sumptuous ship. Also on board is an eccentric octogenarian with a priceless emerald necklace which bears a curse and also attracts the attention of an international jewel thief known only as The Man With a Thousand Faces. (Come on, Mary, you can do better than that.) The alert reader will identify the villain almost immediately.
Half the main characters are embezzlers or petty thieves, and the others are so unsympathetic that it's hard to work up much concern over their fates as the danger level ratchets up. Recurring characters Alvirah and Willy Meehan (introduced in her novel 'The Lottery Winners') make another appearance here, being unbelievably kind and -- in Alvirah's case -- an enthusiastic amateur sleuth.
All in all, it's a pleasant enough fantasy-escape novel that won't keep you awake nights. (And if you can land Clark's agent, your dreams might just yield something equally marketable.)
Using the country-manor-mystery as a template, the novel plops a dozen main characters on an ultra-luxurious cruise ship as it makes its maiden voyage from New York to Southampton. The all-alone lady of the title is a gemologist fleeing a disastrous wedding supper at which her (now former) fiancé was arrested for fraud. She's looking to get away from the media uproar and pay for her passage via a series of lectures on the sumptuous ship. Also on board is an eccentric octogenarian with a priceless emerald necklace which bears a curse and also attracts the attention of an international jewel thief known only as The Man With a Thousand Faces. (Come on, Mary, you can do better than that.) The alert reader will identify the villain almost immediately.
Half the main characters are embezzlers or petty thieves, and the others are so unsympathetic that it's hard to work up much concern over their fates as the danger level ratchets up. Recurring characters Alvirah and Willy Meehan (introduced in her novel 'The Lottery Winners') make another appearance here, being unbelievably kind and -- in Alvirah's case -- an enthusiastic amateur sleuth.
All in all, it's a pleasant enough fantasy-escape novel that won't keep you awake nights. (And if you can land Clark's agent, your dreams might just yield something equally marketable.)
Review Date: 1/22/2018
Weiner's novel about a middle-class mom and blog writer who falls into an opiod addiction isn't perfect, but it avoids becoming a Hallmark Movie.
Allison Weiss is well on her way to trouble when the book opens, burning through her prescription pain meds faster than she can get her multiple doctors to prescribe them. The real trouble starts when she discovers an online source that lets her bypass the doctors completely.
Allison Weiss is well on her way to trouble when the book opens, burning through her prescription pain meds faster than she can get her multiple doctors to prescribe them. The real trouble starts when she discovers an online source that lets her bypass the doctors completely.
Review Date: 11/21/2022
The "all-girls filling station" turns out not to be the main point of this big-hearted novel, which is actually two stories in one -- discovering who you are and what it means, juxtaposed with a loving tribute to the WASP flyers of WWII.
Review Date: 11/7/2009
Helpful Score: 3
The cover blurb says this is a novel about love that crosses over into obsession. I'll have to take their word for it, because I couldn't get through it. The Dickensian style and the incredibly unlikeable narrator made it just too dreary to be worth the effort.
Review Date: 6/2/2020
Overall, the autobiography of "Dr. Ruth" Westheimer never really rises to any particular heights.
Readers who are interested in the lives of German Jewish children sent out of the country during the Second World War will get a superficial look at how the children were cared for, but won't really get an overview of the programs, or how it affected the children and shaped their subsequent lives.
Readers who want the inside story about the diminutive sex educator and media darling of the 80s won't get much more than an "and then I did this radio program and got famous." There's not much about how external events shaped the sexual mores of Americans and made them receptive to this particular celebrity at that particular time.
If you're looking for anything deeper, you won't find it here. What you'll find is a mildly interesting story about a young woman who persevered through setbacks and disappointments, but there's not much heart in it.
Readers who are interested in the lives of German Jewish children sent out of the country during the Second World War will get a superficial look at how the children were cared for, but won't really get an overview of the programs, or how it affected the children and shaped their subsequent lives.
Readers who want the inside story about the diminutive sex educator and media darling of the 80s won't get much more than an "and then I did this radio program and got famous." There's not much about how external events shaped the sexual mores of Americans and made them receptive to this particular celebrity at that particular time.
If you're looking for anything deeper, you won't find it here. What you'll find is a mildly interesting story about a young woman who persevered through setbacks and disappointments, but there's not much heart in it.
Review Date: 4/30/2011
Bragg's memoir covers much the same kind of territory Frank McCourt explored in "Angela's Ashes" -- a grim childhood marked by a drunken, often-absent father and a mother who struggled as best she could to make a life for her children, this one set in Alabama rather than Ireland. Like McCourt, Bragg writes so beautifully that the reader is able to get past the worst of the ugliness.
Review Date: 2/26/2016
A roman a clef novel about the death of a college student turns a spotlight on her real-life sorority sisters, oe of whom is implicated as the killer in the fictional work. To save her own reputation, she enlists the help of the women whose lives were also entangled in the dead girl's last days.
Review Date: 11/9/2016
Four-in-one collection of Barry books -- "Marriage and/or Sex", "Babies and Other Hazards of Sex", "The Taming of the Screw", and "Claw Your Way to the Top". Funny stuff.
Review Date: 9/18/2024
Couldn't get into this weighty and slow-moving tale of a blind French girl and an orphan German boy whose life paths cross in the closing days of WWII.
Review Date: 4/4/2013
A worthy successor to "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" and "The Money Pit", this sweet and funny tale, subtitled "Building a Family in a Falling-Down House" outlines the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of a young family buying an outragous mansion and trying to occupy it before it falls down around their ears.
Review Date: 5/22/2018
Despite the fact that the cover blurbs promise "a razor-sharp critique of the absurd expectations" of modern affluence, this is merely a story of three women who each loses something of value and has to figure out whether it was really worth all that much to begin with.
Janice loses her husband of 29 years and her title of World's Perfect Silicon Valley Wife, and then is threatened with being denied half her soon-to-be ex's windfall IPO profits.
Eldest daughter Margaret loses her boyfriend and the magazine she has struggled to start goes down the tubes when an anticipated merger falls through.
And 14-year-old Lizzie loses a ton of weight, her virginity, and her reputation.
After setting this triple-play into motion, Brown slows down the pace until the last 50 pages or so drag on interminably. If you've already invested your time up to this point, you might as well hang on for the final denouement, but you probably ought to pack a lunch. It's a long haul.
Janice loses her husband of 29 years and her title of World's Perfect Silicon Valley Wife, and then is threatened with being denied half her soon-to-be ex's windfall IPO profits.
Eldest daughter Margaret loses her boyfriend and the magazine she has struggled to start goes down the tubes when an anticipated merger falls through.
And 14-year-old Lizzie loses a ton of weight, her virginity, and her reputation.
After setting this triple-play into motion, Brown slows down the pace until the last 50 pages or so drag on interminably. If you've already invested your time up to this point, you might as well hang on for the final denouement, but you probably ought to pack a lunch. It's a long haul.
Review Date: 12/13/2019
This disjointed tale starts off gangbusters but then disintegrates -- perhaps purposely, as a reflection of the disintegration of the main character.
Helen Knightly, after a lifetime consumed by an increasingly demanding and erratic mother, puts an end to the relationship by killing her. At first, it seems Sebold might be setting up for a murder-or-mercy-killing tale, but Helen's increasingly erratic actions after the fact, make it clear that's not where this story is going.
The problem, perhaps, is that this story really doesn't go anywhere except back and forth through Helen's past. By the final page, she seems to have made a decision, but if the preceding pages give any indication, she may change her mind again and again until someone else makes her decision for her.
Helen Knightly, after a lifetime consumed by an increasingly demanding and erratic mother, puts an end to the relationship by killing her. At first, it seems Sebold might be setting up for a murder-or-mercy-killing tale, but Helen's increasingly erratic actions after the fact, make it clear that's not where this story is going.
The problem, perhaps, is that this story really doesn't go anywhere except back and forth through Helen's past. By the final page, she seems to have made a decision, but if the preceding pages give any indication, she may change her mind again and again until someone else makes her decision for her.
Review Date: 10/16/2016
Breakneck pacing in this thriller about black ops experimentation with genetic enhancement of species for military application. When a cargo of genetically enhanced lab animals is set loose by a shipwreck, a Louisiana veterinarian and border patrol personnel attempt to recapture the animals and -- more importantly -- identify and apprehend the organization responsible for creating them.
Review Date: 7/30/2017
Helpful Score: 1
This one is really difficult to rate, since it is utterly unique. It's not an easy read, and may require periods of time away from it in order to fully absorb the content.
LeGuin's treatise (?) outlines an imagined future civilization located in central California after The Big One (or several Big Ones). The landscape, climate, and culture of this far-future country is nearly unrecognizable, and LeGuin uses the notion of a "future archaeologist" (though the term is undoubtedly incorrect), setting down language, songs, stories, descriptions of rituals, technologies, and philosophies of a fully-imagined culture.
It is an immense work; one can scarcely begin to comprehend how she put it together or how she chose what to include and what to ignore. LeGuin's clearest message comes in the voice of "Pandora", when she says "This is a mere dream dreamed in a bad time, an Up Yours to the people who ride snowmobiles, make nuclear weapons, and run prison camps by a middle-aged housewife, a critique of civilisation possible only to the civilised, an affirmation pretending to be a rejection, a glass of milk for the soul ulcered by acid rain, a piece of pacifist jeanjacquerie, and a cannibal dance among the savages in the ungodly garden of the farthest West."
Whatever else it is, it stands alone. LeGuin -- so far as we know -- never set additional writings in the Valley of the Na. Unlike other science fiction / speculative fiction / fantasy writers, she appears to have not been bitten by the multi-novel saga. After devoting years to the development of a living, breathing, truly alien society, she simply walked away from it.
Whether that was a good thing will be found only in the mind of each reader. ANd that may have been her point all along.
LeGuin's treatise (?) outlines an imagined future civilization located in central California after The Big One (or several Big Ones). The landscape, climate, and culture of this far-future country is nearly unrecognizable, and LeGuin uses the notion of a "future archaeologist" (though the term is undoubtedly incorrect), setting down language, songs, stories, descriptions of rituals, technologies, and philosophies of a fully-imagined culture.
It is an immense work; one can scarcely begin to comprehend how she put it together or how she chose what to include and what to ignore. LeGuin's clearest message comes in the voice of "Pandora", when she says "This is a mere dream dreamed in a bad time, an Up Yours to the people who ride snowmobiles, make nuclear weapons, and run prison camps by a middle-aged housewife, a critique of civilisation possible only to the civilised, an affirmation pretending to be a rejection, a glass of milk for the soul ulcered by acid rain, a piece of pacifist jeanjacquerie, and a cannibal dance among the savages in the ungodly garden of the farthest West."
Whatever else it is, it stands alone. LeGuin -- so far as we know -- never set additional writings in the Valley of the Na. Unlike other science fiction / speculative fiction / fantasy writers, she appears to have not been bitten by the multi-novel saga. After devoting years to the development of a living, breathing, truly alien society, she simply walked away from it.
Whether that was a good thing will be found only in the mind of each reader. ANd that may have been her point all along.
Review Date: 12/13/2016
It's always hard to say just what an Anne Tyler novel is **about**, since they tend to be slice-of-life portraits of people at crossroads. This one actually covers 50+ years, following a young couple who meet in the emotion-charged days after Pearl Harbor, marry after a whirlwind wartime courtship, and proceed to shred each other to pieces for 30 years. The novel doesn't end with their divorce, however, but wanders on in episodic updates as children grow up, the lost is found, and people die.
Review Date: 3/10/2013
Couldn't get into this fantasy in which a man recently released from prison is sucked into what appears to be a battle between ancient gods and newcomers.
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