It's time for my monthly book review hosted by The Cephalopod Coffeehouse over at http://armchairsquid.blogspot.com/?m=1
For October I decided to review The Ghost Writer by John Harwood. It wasn't the best book I read this month, although there really weren't any standouts. Since tomorrow is Halloween I thought that a horror novel would be appropriate.
Well. This book was definitely creepy in parts. It's the story of a young boy named Gerard growing up in Australia whose mother had immigrated from England before he was born. Her early life is a mystery, and she refuses to tell him much of anything about her past. He sneaks a look inside a locked drawer one day and discovers a photograph of his great grandmother, who wrote and published ghost stories in the 1890's. His mother goes absolutely mad with rage when she finds him going through the drawer but still won't tell him anything about why there's the need for such secrecy. Shortly afterwards, a mysterious young girl named Alice writes to him and wants to become pen pals. Then things get really weird....
Things get a bit confusing sometimes because several of Viola's (the great grandmother) stories are told in the course of the novel. Her children and grandchildren find and read them, and it's quickly apparent that some of them are actually coming true. The characters are hard to keep straight after a while, and the ending is kind of messy. But there are some genuinely spine - tingling moments..my favorite is when a woman is reading in a library, and a thick fog starts to creep up around her. Then she realizes that a porcelain doll is coming after her in the fog....and she can hear the rustling of it's dress....and as she tries to feel her way out, she keeps waiting to feel it's cold little porcelain hand touch her....the thought made me shudder! There's not much creepier than porcelain dolls, in my opinion!
Overall, The Ghost Writer was a good Halloween read, but not something I would bother re-reading.
Showing posts with label The Cephalopod Coffeehouse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Cephalopod Coffeehouse. Show all posts
Friday, October 30, 2015
Friday, September 25, 2015
The Cephalopod Coffeehouse September Book Review--The Little Stranger
It's time for The Cephalopod Coffeehouse, hosted by The Armchair Squid.
My favorite read for the month of September, without a doubt, was The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.
From the Goodreads site:
The Little Stranger
by Sarah Waters
The Little Stranger follows the strange adventures of Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country doctor. One dusty postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, he is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for more than two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline-its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.
Sarah Waters might just be my new favorite novelist. I seem to gravitate to female British authors and Waters is so very skillful. I read The Paying Guests early in the month, and was really impressed with it. My only criticism of that book was that the ending fell a little flat. I wanted to try one more of Waters novels since I liked her writing style so much. And The Little Stranger is one of my favorite kinds of stories: a gothic tale in the vein of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.
The book is creepy, but in a very subtle way. It takes it's time and the dread builds slowly; from the very beginning you're not sure whether the house is haunted, the people are all going mad, or if someone is deliberately trying to terrify the Ayers family. Waters is an excellent writer, and the book is so well written that you keep turning pages even when the plot is moving slowly. And the ending is so very worth it! It's masterfully done, in my humble opinion., so much better than the ending to The Paying Guests. I've been pressing The Little Stranger on my friends (the ones who like this sort of novel) and I wish one of them would hurry up and finish soon so I can discuss the ending with someone! The last couple of chapters will send a cold chill down your spine and leave behind a lingering haunted feeling. 4.5 stars.
Friday, August 28, 2015
The Cephalopod Coffeehouse August Book Review---Among Others by Jo Walton
My favorite read for the month of August was Among Others by Jo Walton.
15 year old Morwenna is a Welsh teenager in the 1970's struggling to deal with the loss of her twin sister. Her mother, who dabbles in magic, is mentally ill, and Morwenna believes her to be evil and the cause of her sister's death. She has been sent to live at a boarding school by her father (a man she barely knows) after her mother is deemed unfit to care for her. Morwenna believes in magic, and she sees spirits and fairies and all kinds of otherworldly creatures. Those magical entities, and her love of books, are her only sources of solace in a world filled with grief and loneliness. Has she inherited her mother's madness, or does she really see these "others"? It's up to the reader to decide.
I identified with this young girl's longing to find her place in the world, and the way books and reading help her escape the painful parts of her reality. It's a bittersweet coming of age story, and it's beautifully written. This was my favorite book for the month of August.
15 year old Morwenna is a Welsh teenager in the 1970's struggling to deal with the loss of her twin sister. Her mother, who dabbles in magic, is mentally ill, and Morwenna believes her to be evil and the cause of her sister's death. She has been sent to live at a boarding school by her father (a man she barely knows) after her mother is deemed unfit to care for her. Morwenna believes in magic, and she sees spirits and fairies and all kinds of otherworldly creatures. Those magical entities, and her love of books, are her only sources of solace in a world filled with grief and loneliness. Has she inherited her mother's madness, or does she really see these "others"? It's up to the reader to decide.
I identified with this young girl's longing to find her place in the world, and the way books and reading help her escape the painful parts of her reality. It's a bittersweet coming of age story, and it's beautifully written. This was my favorite book for the month of August.
Friday, July 31, 2015
The Cephalopod Coffeehouse monthly book review--All the Light We Cannot See
I'm joining in the monthly book discussion over at The Cephalopod Coffeehouse and sharing a review of my favorite read for the month of July.
The best book I read this month, and probably so far this year, was All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.
This is the story of a young blind girl named Marie-Laure LeBlanc and a German orphan named Werner that takes place during WW2. Marie-Laure is the daughter of a locksmith and curator from the Paris museum of natural history, and she and her father have fled to the walled city of St Malo, which is occupied by German forces, to wait out the war with her reclusive great-uncle, an emotionally fragile veteran of WW1. Marie's father builds her small models of all the buildings and houses of San Malo, and then teaches her to navigate the city streets so that she can have a measure of independence.
Werner and his little sister, Jutta, are living in an orphanage at the beginning of the book. Their father was killed in a coal mining accident, and all the boys in that area expect to grow up and work in the mines. Werner is small for his age and somewhat frail, but he's brilliant and has a special aptitude for working with radios and transmitters. When a German officer who lives nearby hears of his ability to repair radios, he sends for him to fix one. He's so impressed with the boy's work that he gives Werner a recommendation to go a Nazi military training school. Werner is totally unsuitable for military training, and the school is full of horrors, but his brilliance and aptitude for engineering is recognized immediately and developed for the Third Reich's war machine.
Each chapter is short and switches between the point of view of Marie, Werner, and a German officer who's obsessed with finding a valuable jewel that has been smuggled out if the Paris museum along with other national treasures to keep them safe from the Germans. Marie's father and two other men all left Paris with jewels....one real and two fakes, and no one knows who got the real one. The officer is slowly hunting down the real one, which Marie's father has.
It's quickly apparent that Werner and Marie-Laure are destined to cross paths. Their stories are told with such poignancy that it will break your heart. The writing is beautiful, but the plot is quite sad. As in real life, there are very few happily ever afters during wartime.
Normally when I think of WW2 I think of the suffering of the Jewish people and of the horrors they had to endure, but until I read this book I never considered how terrible the war was for other people, too. The boys forced to fight for the Nazis, the townspeople in San Malo, the allied soldiers, even ordinary German citizens just trying to survive during wartime.....what a terrible, terrible thing war is. What a waste.
This book will stay with me for a long, long time. The beautiful, heartbreaking humanity of it makes it worthy of the Pulitzer prize it received. 5 stars.
The best book I read this month, and probably so far this year, was All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.
This is the story of a young blind girl named Marie-Laure LeBlanc and a German orphan named Werner that takes place during WW2. Marie-Laure is the daughter of a locksmith and curator from the Paris museum of natural history, and she and her father have fled to the walled city of St Malo, which is occupied by German forces, to wait out the war with her reclusive great-uncle, an emotionally fragile veteran of WW1. Marie's father builds her small models of all the buildings and houses of San Malo, and then teaches her to navigate the city streets so that she can have a measure of independence.
Werner and his little sister, Jutta, are living in an orphanage at the beginning of the book. Their father was killed in a coal mining accident, and all the boys in that area expect to grow up and work in the mines. Werner is small for his age and somewhat frail, but he's brilliant and has a special aptitude for working with radios and transmitters. When a German officer who lives nearby hears of his ability to repair radios, he sends for him to fix one. He's so impressed with the boy's work that he gives Werner a recommendation to go a Nazi military training school. Werner is totally unsuitable for military training, and the school is full of horrors, but his brilliance and aptitude for engineering is recognized immediately and developed for the Third Reich's war machine.
Each chapter is short and switches between the point of view of Marie, Werner, and a German officer who's obsessed with finding a valuable jewel that has been smuggled out if the Paris museum along with other national treasures to keep them safe from the Germans. Marie's father and two other men all left Paris with jewels....one real and two fakes, and no one knows who got the real one. The officer is slowly hunting down the real one, which Marie's father has.
It's quickly apparent that Werner and Marie-Laure are destined to cross paths. Their stories are told with such poignancy that it will break your heart. The writing is beautiful, but the plot is quite sad. As in real life, there are very few happily ever afters during wartime.
Normally when I think of WW2 I think of the suffering of the Jewish people and of the horrors they had to endure, but until I read this book I never considered how terrible the war was for other people, too. The boys forced to fight for the Nazis, the townspeople in San Malo, the allied soldiers, even ordinary German citizens just trying to survive during wartime.....what a terrible, terrible thing war is. What a waste.
This book will stay with me for a long, long time. The beautiful, heartbreaking humanity of it makes it worthy of the Pulitzer prize it received. 5 stars.
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