Firefly Lane

By: Kristin Hannah 4/5

   The story of friendship. I had picked out this book to read with my best friend. I wanted us to reconnect over a good novel long distance through email. Unfortunately we have not connected as we both have been super busy.

       This is a 479 page book, and I managed to not be able to put it down. This fiction of two girlfriends that in the 1970s are in different social worlds come together in unlikely circumstances. They of course swear to be BFFs forever and ever, and manage to follow each other all the way through college. Like many BFF novels, you know what the issues are going to be between girlfriends, and those are of course boys! The cool sexy one, gets what she wants, unloved and left by her mother Tully is always the center of attention and the life of the party. Kate, coming from a loving supporting catholic family, finds her time during college dating many guys but her main love was books. Then real life starts and one finds true love and they go on through the trails of friendship and life. The ending is surprising and the reader should be prepared for tissues.

     This is a fast read, that many women and girls could identify with a character. Whether you are Ms. Popularity, Tully, or Wallflower Kate, or a grandmother, or a struggling teen, there is a heroine personality in all of the female characters. I though I first I identified with Tully, as her past and her emotions, though I find myself identifying with Kate and her struggles with her friendship of her BFF. I find her same battles and feeling wronged by someone who is very introverted. In the end, maturity takes over and love is the winner!

The Moonstone

By: Wilkie Collins 2.5/5

The Short Version:

First I was disappointed by this book for many reasons. First and foremost it was long, so long, especially after having read “The Woman in White”.  I also had this book as an audio book  and it was downloaded off of librivox.org which is a non-profit with many readers. One reader didn’t speak English so she couldn’t read and kept stumbling on the words, another reader, possibly the same one, had cars and horns in the background recording. Having this in the background is very distracting considering the book was taking place in 1848!

The book dragged on and on and for a change of pace, dragged on some more. There where a thousand different characters. This is how I characterize them:

-Beteridge – Grumpy self concerned old man, that looks down on women as silly and frivolous. He is the narrator for the better part of the story.

-Ms. Cluck who apparently is a hag, ugly, and only concerned with her crazy notions of religion, which is what she preoccupies herself and her time with. She is so unwilling to back down she forces religion and her religion down the throats of main characters.

-Rosanna is apparently homely conniving thief, who can’t get it in her head where her place in the house is…. She is crestfallen to the point of obsession over a man who could car more for a paint brush than her as a human being.

-Franklin Blake is obsessed with Rachel, the Miss of the house, and would do anything like a puppy dog in love for her.

-Rachel, the Miss of the house who always gets her way no matter what, isn’t amazingly pretty but dresses well so it gives her status. She can’t seem to know what it is she wants and has the “fickle mind” that Beteridge accuses women of.

-Gottfried Applewhite is a smooth talker, and a pimp who is  pretender of philanthropic needs. He is the pimp of today that weasels his way into matters of importance.

-Sgt. Cuff the main policeman is self absorbed and knows he is a legend.  

And the list goes on with many many characters that are added and their histories and lives talked about for what purpose. The story is the story of an object, the Moonstone, and its travel. Who stole it and how? It is sad to say you won’t find out until the antepenultimate chapter when you have been taken up and down with pages and pages of narrative from all these different characters. Mr. Collins could have made the book more fun had he got to the point. There was too much going on. Maybe being in the 21^st Century, I wouldn’t understand a book like this, whose suspense is built throughout weeks as the story is published a few pages at a time. I am a person who likes immediate satisfaction.  Though my biggest grudge against this book is why its considered A CLASSIC?!?!  Does have to be written a bajillion years ago to make it be important? And conclusively what was so important about this book? The building of characters… no thanks. I prefer our good adventure novels of today’s time! 
 

Three Cups of Tea

By: Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin    5/5++++

   I don’t even know how to start my review on this magnificent book! It was so nice and pleasant to read such great book where it shows grassroots organizations are the way to go!
   Who would have thought such a change can be made by one man, who found compassion from people all around the world? Who would have thought that compassion can be found in the most horrifying situations and shows that human nature will always care for its children? I loved this story of Greg Mortenson and his journey to change the way we fight terrorism. The book took you on a wonderful journey into the lives or ordinary village life in rural Pakistan and then Afghanistan, where people speak different, look different but in the end have the same compassion for youth and children as it exists anywhere!
  I think this book makes you understand a culture from a different angel, other than all Muslims are terrorists, you can sympathize with those people. Like every religion, everyone has fundamentalists and anything that is way over the top, like religion, a craze, a fashion, isn’t going to be good. Those we are afraid of, like those in the villages Dr. Greg visited, are the same people we are all afraid of. They are beyond normalcy or beyond any thoughts of decent human behavior! We can not as Americans class everyone into those people. Like people in other parts of the world classify Americans as heartless, arrogant, bastards and that is not true of all of us.
  I do think that everyone needs to read this book. You get such a deep understanding of the needs of these people, their culture and their fundamental way of life that it would be silly not to take these into account when dealing with them.

If you want to help you can reach Greg Mortensen via Facebook, Twitter, http://www.ikat.org/ .

The Honeymoon

By: James Patterson 3/4

I am just starting to get into these types of action books though I do enjoy especially since I am listening to them while driving home from work, which makes my commute a lot faster.

This is my second James Patterson book and I do enjoy it, and I think that I enjoyed this one a tad more than the first one, “The Lifeguard”.  I was actually rooting for the villain, a sexy lady that kills for money! It was OK, will I remember this book in detail in 1 year probably not but I will keep listening to James Patterson. It does concern me that there is a whole lot of very explicit sex, and there is nothing wrong with that, but I did see a little girl of 12/13 years reading a James Patterson book. HMMm Reading is all good but should she really being reading such graphic stuff, I guess now anything to keep them reading!

Izzy and Lenore

By: Jon Katz 4.2/5

Like many books I read, I find books about humans and animals fun and feel good. There is no helping in getting the warm fuzzy when reading books like “Marley & Me” or “The Art of Racing in the Rain”, and that is why Jon Katz’s book “Izzy and Lenore” is another feel good, warm fuzzy, happy tears read. Having never heard of Jon Katz and going solely on Judging a Book by Its Cover, I picked up this unlikely favorite as a “buy two get one free” deal at Barnes & Noble.
 
I was pleasantly surprised on his easy going style of writing and the surprise of what the book is actually about, yes Izzy and Lenore make a presence, but it is beyond the bonds of human and animal. It is about the unknown sense and feelings of animals and their awareness towards death. I am not surprised that an animal might be more intuitive of the needs of the dying than we as humans have, who are so uncomfortable with the idea of death. It begs us to try to understand what is this strange fear we have, does it make us realize our own mortality? Does this create a bond we will never know about between a deathbed patient and an animal?

Jon Katz does a great job of writing from his point of view and not giving his animals human emotions that we tend to do as animal lovers. He also talks a lot of his life struggles and his need for these spirits and characters (in the case of Lenore) in his life. I am willing to pick up another of Jon Katz’s books with a certain nervousness to not be reading about the same stuff.

 

 

Snow Falling on Cedars

By: David Guterson 4/5

This was one of my challenge books for 2010, as I have always had this book in possession for a few years now and never ever picked it up to read, even though I have heard great things about it. 

I didn’t even really know what it was about when I first picked it up, or when it was taking place. Snow Falling on Cedars takes place in a few times mostly during WWII and then 10 years after the war, taking place on a small island in the Northwest of America. Since those times many things have changed including perceptions of people and the way we look at the world. The story involves many different families on an island, a close tight community that is mixed with Japanese Americans at a very difficult time.

The story is a trial story, intertwined with individual stories of linked stories on the island. The story can be a story of childhood love lost, or of a murder trial that is unjust and prejudice, or the story of a small town during a brutal snow storm, or of maintaining relationships. There are many characters like Hatsue, Ischmael, Kabuo, Carl Hein, Susan Marie, and more, of which we learn a little by little of their intertwined lives.

This was my first experience with David Guterson and his work, and I am not even clear if he wrote more books. I love the intertwined lives, and the suspense of the trial. Is there a deeper meaning in this book? Maybe.  Does the snow resemble cleanness and impurity of the island? I guess not, I could not see that, as there are very few people who are hesitant to point a finger at JAP! 

The story does have 4 different settings that actions happen, which is the town, the sea and boats, the strawberry fields, and the cedar forest. Looking simply at the forest it seems to be the place of secrets as if the trees that are together can better hide a person, and yes even a secret love affair. The sea is open, and large calm and at time ferocious. The dense fogs that lays across the harbor also can hide many secrets as well, as secret dealing between fisherman that by character are men of few words.  Most scenes on the sea talk about the calmness of things to come. The strawberry fields are scenes that take the reader to think about the larger aspects of life, like the future and families.  Most of these scenes are talking about children and working  in them, they create a sense of security, which is why maybe a lack of field for Kabuo meant a lack of this secure feeling. And lastly the town, which seems to have the most harsh scenes of brutal winter storms. This to means might portray the brutal and mixed up feelings of the people in the town about the war and a people that they were trained to think to hate.

The reason I give this book only a 4 out of 5 is due to the amount of pages and sometimes and unnecessary discussion of family backgrounds that were unnecessary, such as learning about Ischmael’s father, or maybe the life of Fujiko as maybe I don’t see the point of learning that much. I would have liked to learn more about the main characters. 

The Lifeguard

By: James Patterson 3/5

The book is a girl meet, boy and fall in love while looking for stolen painting. Of course the hero is no to be blamed and he is at no fault. Girl and Boy fall in love and get married, one is a life guard the other an FBI agent. Dr. Gache by Van Gogh