The Light in the Ruins

I love Chris Bohjalian. His latest, "The Light in the Ruins", did not disappoint. During WW2, in Italy, an Italian nobleman's family is forced to play host to Nazis, who overrun their country estate. Ten year later, someone is killing off the remaining living members of the family. It was heartbreaking and beautifully told and really made me think about the idea of how much choice we really have in certain matters.

Room 1219; Street Dreams, The Whole Enchilada

"Room 1219" by Greg Merritt was a fascinating look at the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle case of the early 1920s. Arbuckle was tried three times (the first two juries were hung) for the manslaughter of actress Virginia Rappe, who died of a ruptured bladder a few days after a party Arbuckle had over Labor Day weekend in San Francisco. The Arbuckle case changed Hollywood: up until that point in time, the studios controlled the press and the image of Hollywood was of golden men and women who never did anything wrong. After Arbuckle the media started printing Hollywood scandals and gossip, and the studios scrambled to clean up their image. Poor Arbuckle, although acquitted of any wrongdoing, never gained back the goodwill and fame he enjoyed before the scandal, and died young of a heart attack. Only two people really know what happened in that room that day, but the evidence leans towards Arbuckle not having done anything to hurt Virginia Rappe.

"Street Dreams" by Faye Kellerman was great, I can't wait to read more of her books. Cindy finds a newborn discarded in a dumpster and sets out to find out what happened to her parents. She finds the mother easily enough, a young woman with Down's Syndrome who witnessed her boyfriend being beat up six months early and she was raped by a gang of thugs. No one has seen her boyfriend, David, since. Cindy, with her dad's help, set out to get to the bottom of a horrible crime. It was well written and I really liked the characters, they seem like the kind of people I'd like to just hang out with.

"The Whole Enchilada" by Diane Mott Davidson is her 14th Goldy Schultz mystery. I honestly don't know why I keep reading them, I don't like them. I'm just dumb like that, I guess. Once again, I like the characters, and I think that's why I keep reading. They mysteries are always really hard to figure out and feature new characters I can't keep track of. And since I went vegan I can't really make any of her recipes anymore. But I like Goldy, and Marla, and Tom, and Julian, and Arch. So I keep reading :)

You Are Beautiful; Richard Burton, My Brother; Seven Minutes in Heaven; Save Yourself; And the Mountains Echoed; Any Empire; Beggar King

"You Are Beautiful" by Ken Paves was wonderful. Paves is hair stylist to the stars, and he thinks all women are beautiful, even without having fancy clothes, makeup, and hairdos, so he wrote the book to inspire and encourage all the everyday "normal" ladies out there. It was very inspirational, and he had a lot of great advice on how to be your best self everyday and enjoy what you have rather than fighting it and always being depressed about not being more or different. I'm trying really hard to take his great advice to heart and use it :)

"Richard Burton, My Brother" by Graham Jenkins was a touching memoir written by a devoted brother. Graham acknowledged Richard's faults, like excessive drinking, but also pointed out how kind and generous and loving he was. It was nicely done.

"Seven Minutes in Heaven" by Sara Shepard was a great ending to the Lying Game series, although I admit I will be incredibly sorry to see this series go. I have really enjoyed it. I didn't see the ending coming a mile away (I'm so dense like that) but it was great and really wrapped things up perfectly without being overly sappy or silly.

"Save Yourself" by Kelly Braffet was pretty good. Owen King's wife's third novel takes place in a small, nondescript working town in Pennsylvania. Patrick and Mike are clinging to a rough existence after their father is imprisoned for running down and killing a kid while drunk. It's hit Patrick hard, who quit his warehouse job and works the night shift at a convenience store. Mike is trying hard to have a normal life with his girlfriend, Caro. And then there's Layla, who is so disappointed by her parents trying to manipulate her that she's ended up in another terrible situation with a weird cult, and she's drug her younger sister Verna into it. It was well written and just heartbreaking. I felt for these people, who really tried to make better decisions in life but still ended up in the same bad spots.

"And the Mountains Echoed" by Khaled Hosseini was just brilliant. I love his books. As small children, Pari and Abdullah are inseparable. Abdullah will do anything for his little sister. When his family falls on hard times, their father sells Pari to a wealthy barren woman named Nali, hoping she'll have a better life. The novel what happens to Pari, Abdullah, Nali, and others touched by their story, spanning 60 years.

"Any Empire" by Nate Powell is a graphic novel protesting war that I wasn't terribly impressed with. It didn't make much sense, and I just couldn't get into it. I feel, in a graphic novel with so little text, the pictures really need to make the story pop, and these just didn't work for me.

And finally, the third hangman daughter's book by Oliver Potzsch, "Beggar King". It was pretty good: Jakob goes to the large city of Regensberg when he gets a notice that his little sister is ill. When he arrives he finds she and her husband have been murdered and he is being framed for the crime. While being tortured, he discovers a horrible conspiracy that runs much deeper than the murder of his sister. 

While We Were Watching Downton Abbey; Double Feature; The Space Between Before and After; Death Angel; Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile

"While We Were Watching Downton Abbey" by Wendy Wax was great. In a tony Atlanta building, three women with very different backgrounds become friends while watching "Downton Abbey" together in the building's screening room. Samantha is wealthy, married to old Atlanta money, but doesn't feel like she deserves her amazing husband. She thinks Jonathan married her out of pity and is afraid to show him just how much she really loves him for fear he won't return her feelings. Brooke is still reeling from her divorce: after working two or three jobs to put her husband through medical school, he left her for a younger, thinner woman. Even worse, he moves his newly pregnant wife into the building with Brooke and their two daughters, so she has to see them all the time. And after years of struggling as a single mom, Claire has taken a year off and is determined to write her breakout novel. These three need each other more than they realize, and it was a touching and sweet book about adult female friendship.

I really, really wanted to like "Double Feature" by Owen King, SK's youngest son. I just didn't. It was an interesting story: in college, Sam borrows money and sells everything he owns to make his movie. He has a partner named Brooks, who is a bit off but Sam doesn't realize just how crazy Brooks is until he finishes the film and Brooks intersplices his own strange film into it, destroying the original and all the copies of it. Sam is devastated by the loss of his vision and ten years later is still reeling from it. He has no healthy relationships and lives with a hermit. He has a complicated relationship with his mostly absent father, a semi-famous actor named Booth Dolan. Like I said, I wanted to like it, but it just wasn't that interesting to me.

"The Space Between Before and After" by Jean Reyonlds Page was pretty good, although I felt at times the characters were a bit overly dramatic. Holli has been worrying about her son Conner for months, since he left school and moved to Texas with his young girlfriend Kilian. Conner and Kilian are living in a trailer behind her grandmother's house, and it seems like Grandma Raine is starting to slip a bit. Then Kilian gets sick and Holli learns she has Cystic Fibrosis and is also pregnant. Holli doesn't want Conner throwing his life away by marrying a woman with a death sentence hanging over her head and being stuck as a single father. She's also dealing with her own feelings of abandonment since her father remarried after her mother's death when she was young and her stepmother sent her to live with her grandmother so she wouldn't ruin their new family. It was a quick read about how life can get really complicated really fast sometimes.

"Death Angel" by Linda Fairstein is her latest Alex Cooper mystery. Coop and the gang are investigating a murder in Central Park. There was a lot of interesting history on the Park, which I admittedly know very little about (and have never even seen, since I've never been to New York). I'd like to read more about it when I have time (HAHAHAHAHA...) since it sounds pretty interesting. Anyway, I enjoyed this one, even though there was a lot going on and sometimes the way Coop and her friends talk to each other makes me squirm. They seem so *mean*. I guess maybe that's just how some people communicate with each other? I don't know. If my friends talked to me like that I think I'd break down in tears.

And finally, "Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile" by J. L. Bourne, the sequel to "Day by Day Armageddon", which I really loved. Our unnamed narrator has some sense of safety in Hotel 23, where he's holed up with some other survivors. There are some weird things going on out in the world, though, and he hooks up with some other military and goes on a doomed mission that leaves everyone in the helicopter dead except for him. Going hundreds of miles overland to get back "home", he meets another survivor and the two of them eventually make it back to Hotel 23. The book ends with their home being bombed and the survivors heading for a carrier ship out in the Gulf. The Admiral of the ship orders him to go on a mission to China to look for a rumored vaccine. Fun!

Execution of Noa P. Singleton; Hangman's Daughter; Walking Dead Vol. 18; Transmetropolitan; Dark Monk; You Make Me Feel So Dead

Elizabeth L. Silver's "Execution of Noa P. Singleton" was great, incredibly heartbreaking. Noa is on death row for killing her father's young, pregnant girlfriend, Sarah. Sarah's mother who once championed the death penalty for Noa, is now hiring attorneys to try to get the sentence commuted to life in prison, but Noa is fighting her. Noa wants to die, feels she deserves to die, not for Sarah but for something else she has lived with for a very long time. Marlene, Sarah's mother, just wants to keep Noa alive long enough to find out why she killed her daughter. It was very sad but good.

"Hangman's Daughter" by Oliver Potzsch was really great, I enjoyed it a lot. Set in a small Bavarian town in 1659, the local hangman, Jakob Kuisl, is working against the clock to prove the local midwife is not a witch after children are murdered with a mysterious mark on them. Jakob's daughter, Magdalena, and her boyfriend, Simon, set out to help Jakob discover the truth before it's too late.

"Walking Dead Vol. 18" by Robert Kirkman was pretty boring, actually. I can't remember the last time I really enjoyed these books. I keep reading them, though, silly me :) Rick makes a deal with Negan that seems to sell out his townfolk. Carl tries to take on Negan himself with not so great results. Honestly the series has run its course.

Warren Ellis's first volume staring Spider Jerusalem, "Transmetropolitan", is a great graphic novel set in a dystopian future.  Spider was a famous journalist who has spent the last five years living on a mountain away from civilization when his book publisher calls him up demanding the book Spider owes him, or he'll sue. Spider reluctantly leaves his mountain and heads back to the city, where he gets work being a real journalist again and observing the crap going on around him. I liked it a lot: it was dark and edgy and fun.

"Dark Monk" by Oliver Potzsch is his second book in the Hangman's Daughter series, and like the first one I really enjoyed it. Kuisl, Magdalena, and Simon are on an interesting quest to solve a mystery of the Knights Templar.

And finally, "You Make Me Feel So Dead" by Robert J. Randisi. I read an Advanced Reader copy a few weeks ago, his latest Rat Pack mystery. Eddie G. is babysitting Elvis in Las Vegas as a favor to the Colonel, who is worried about the crowd E is running with. Eddie has also promised his friend Danny that he'll figure out what's going on with his secretary, Penny. Penny's ex-boyfriend turns up dead after blackmailing her, and it looks like Danny might be on the hook for it. Elvis, Frank, Dean all want to help Eddie clear Danny's name. As usual, it was great fun and I enjoyed this quick read.

Mary Coin; The Hundred Dresses; If You Could See What I See; Book of Human Insects; Big Brother

"Mary Coin" by Marisa Silver draws its inspiration from Dortothea Lange's portrait "Migrant Mother". Silver builds up a whole fiction around the woman, whom she calls Mary Coin. It was sweet and sad, but I'm actually now interested in hearing the real story behind the woman in the photo.

"The Hundred Dresses" by Erin McKean was fun. Illustrated drawings with explanations and history behind 100 iconic styles. If I say "the Marilyn dress" or "the Dynasty dress", most people can conjure up in their mind exactly what I mean. It's amazing how these styles stick in our collective psyche like that. Beautiful drawings, too.

I read an Advanced Reader Copy of Cathy Lamb's latest, "If You Could See What I See". I didn't particularly care for it. I found her characters rather one dimensional, caricatures, if you will. There was the Scotch drinking, cigar smoking, tough lovin' Irish granny, the overseas supplier who doesn't understand English very well, etc., etc. The storyline was kind of silly, too: Meggie returns to Oregon after her disastrous marriage to a mentally ill man falls apart to help save her family's lingerie business. There was actually a scene where she had her employees discuss what bra they were wearing during important times in their lives, and people actually remembered these things. Um...okay. Anyway, it definitely wasn't my cup of tea.

"Book of Human Insects" by Osamu Tezuka was great. A graphic novel set in the 1970s, it's about a young woman who is basically a human leech: she attaches herself to talented people, steals off them, makes a name for herself in whatever field they're in, then moves on to the next victim, leaving the last person emotionally drained and naturally bitter. It was nicely done.

"Big Brother" by Lionel Shriver was very sad. Pandora is stunned when her older brother Edison comes to visit her and she discovers in the four years since she last saw him that he's gained over 200 pounds. Her health conscious husband can't stand having Edison in the house and her stepson makes fun of him behind his back. Pandora wants to help, but doesn't know what to do. In the second part of the book, she proposes that they move in together for a year, and she will be his diet coach. Edison agrees, and although they struggle, together, for one year, they both lose weight and Edison gets down to his previous size. Pandora then admits in the third part of the book that she made up the entire second part of the book (I actually kind of suspected as much, but I was really rooting for Edison because HE DID IT! as a serial dieter I can take great hope in someone else's amazing achievements). Edison went home after two months with her, got heavier, and died a few years later, fatter than ever. Pandora admits that her fantasy about actually being able to help Edison is just that: fantasy. No one can force someone to help themselves. Truth, sister. It was a fascinatingly epic look at our relationship with food, weight, and our own bodies that makes me think Shriver has battled some food demons of her own. If not, then wow, kudos to her for nailing it.

Run, Brother, Run; My Beef with Meat; Boleyn King; Cuckoo's Calling; Detroit: an American Autopsy

"Run, Brother, Run" by David Berg is about the murder of his older brother, Alan, back in 1968. Alan wasn't perfect: he drank, gambled, wrote hot checks, but he was a good brother, son, husband, and father to his kids. David details his dissatisfaction with how poorly prosecuted the trial of Alan's accused killer, Charles Harrelson (yes, that Harrelson) went, allowing him to get away with it, essentially. David's story of uncaring cops, con artists stealing from a grieving family, and an ineffectual prosecutor are sad but probably all too common.

"My Beef with Meat" by Rip Esselstyn didn't have a whole lot of new information, since I've read his other book and his dad's books and Dr. Campbell's "The China Story", but it would be a good introduction for others who don't know much about how to start eating a plant strong diet. It was short and straight to the point.

"Boleyn King" by Laura Andersen was disappointing. It had a great premise: what if Anne Boleyn had given birth to healthy son after Elizabeth? Neat idea, I just wish Anderson would have done it differently. She skipped from Anne giving birth to William to the eve of William's 18th birthday, when he's taking over the monarchy, no longer under his counselor's thumbs, since he's reached his majority. I would have enjoyed more backstory: seeing Henry with his son, seeing how Henry interacted with Anne after she did her duty, etc. It's basically the same story as what really happened, only instead of Elizabeth trying to quash Catholic uprisings it's William. Eh, it's the first of a trilogy and I'm not too excited for the next two.

So last week the story broke that J.K. Rowling had published a book under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith called "The Cuckoo's Calling". Instantly hold lists at libraries swelled and bookstores sold out. I managed to get on the hold list at my library early and got the book Thursday. It was pretty good, I liked it, better than "The Casual Vacancy", that's for sure, but it's my type of book to begin with: Cormoran Strike is a down on his luck private investigator who is hired by wealthy John Bristow to investigate the death of his supermodel sister, Lula. Police ruled it a suicide, but John doesn't buy it. Strike is inclined to believe the cops, but he goes along with it because he needs the money. Along the way he discovers John was right. It was an interesting story and it seems like she was setting it up to be able to write more stories featuring Strike. I hope she does, I like him.

"Detroit: an American Autopsy" by Charlie LeDuff was so incredibly depressing. LeDuff grew up in Detroit and moved to New York to work for the Times. He and his wife and daughter return to Detroit in 2008, just in time to see what very well might be the final collapse. He details firefighters working with holes in their shoes, crack dens being lit on fire by residents who then block the fire trucks from coming through, homicide detectives taking the bus to crime scenes because they don't have a running car, a homeless man frozen in ice for over three months before anyone bothers to chainsaw him out, and many, many other atrocities. It's sad how a city once so full of promise and prosperity has fallen so low. I'm afraid the rest of the country might go the way of Detroit if we don't get things cleaned up here soon.