Every Secret Thing (Laura Lippman)

Hardcover

I was sucked in from the very first scene, which was a birthday pool party with a bunch of pre-teen girls. The cliquishness of the girls and the odd-man-out invitee that comes with the "everyone's included!" mentality of that particular age-group's parents were spot-on. I was almost nauseous with uncomfortable recollection.

When the outsider is sent home early, she talks just fast enough to get another of the girls sent with her...and it's on the walk home that the rest of the story is set in motion. An unattended baby in a carriage becomes a child who must be cared-for (Lippman really understands the pre-teen imagination), which turns out to be an incredibly bad idea.

The entire book continues with the high quality of description and plot -- I bought it all. I was invested and dying to find out the "why" and, indeed, even the "what." Such a quick read and pretty satisfying.

B+

The History of Love (Nicole Krauss)

Audiobook

There were four voice actors involved in the reading of this story, as it was told from three distinct first-person perspectives and one third-person limited-omniscient. I was fine with the third-person reader: she was competent enough. I hated two of the first-person readers, actually going so far as to make childish faces and mock their stilted, stupid deliveries, even all alone in my car. But I lived for Leopold Gursky's sections (read by the brilliant George Guidall).

I think this book probably sucked. I was thoroughly uninterested in the portions read by the bad readers... I hated the characters and their small problems. I was entranced by Leopold, but could it be that I was actually just a little in love with Guidall's masterful delivery? Seriously, anyone who doesn't hire him to do their audiobook is a simpleton. No, I think that Leo's portions had to have been good stuff. I thought about them even when not in the car...there was poetry there.

But it wasn't "all Leo all the time," so it wasn't great. And, also, I felt betrayed by an endgame revelation -- an out-of-nowhere "that character was a figment" bomb. Horrible. So, one part awesome, one part not bad, two parts boring as hell, and one crappy reveal = not good.

C-

Winter's Bone (Daniel Woodrell)

Paperback

I've got a few problems with this book, the biggest of which is probably the fact that I live in the Ozarks (Springfield...but still) and kind of hate that the characters in this book now define our population for many readers. Most of us have never come across the cruel, loose, hillbilly mafia types depicted here.

Our 16-year-old heroine, Ree, is about to lose her house. Usually, this would be a problem for her parents to solve -- but her mom spends her days in a rocking chair, outside the realm of reality, and her father's bail-jumping disappearance is why her house is in jeopardy. She's gotta find pop and fast. In order to do so, she rambles all over the Ozark hills asking after him and getting told off, threatened, and brutally gang-beat for her trouble.

This is one of those rare instances where the movie far outshines the book on which it's based. The Ree on the page is too much a part of her disgusting culture to really feel her outsider-status. In the movie, she's tough but slightly above the others -- you understand her dream of joining the army as a need to escape to sanity rather than just the next step on the loser trail it seems in the book.

C+

History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life (Jill Bialosky)

Hardcover

Jill lost her sister Kim to suicide about 20 years ago. Kim was a young college student and Jill - older by a decade - was by then married and in a different state. The surviving sister tells us that she wants to uncover, to understand, why her sister made the decision to end her life. After reading, I'm pretty sure that Jill is probably the worst person to shed any light on Kim's choice.

1) She's too close to the victim to be useful in an objective capacity and too far to be useful in an insightful way. I feel like I could have done a much better job coming up with some real answers to "why" -- and I might have started with the full-length mirror on the refrigerator, mentioned in passing, as though it's a NORMAL THING that doesn't smack of pressure to be perfect.

2) It's more speculation that discovery. There's way too much "I imagine she thought blahblah" and "she may have said yadayada" and "perhaps she sucked in her stomach." This is supposed to be a history, not a novel.

3) It's self-serving. There's an icky feeling that Jill, someone who obviously barely knew her much younger sister, wants the attention squarely on Jill. Kim's pain is obviously Jill's gain as Bialosky puts several of her own poems in the text and -- yowza -- they're quite ungood. One of them actually caused me to guffaw as it spoke of "twentysome cats" and their "twentysome pairs of feet." Poor two-legged cats.

A waste of pages about a wasted life. Doubly tragic.

F

Josie and Jack (Kelly Braffet)

Paperback

Josie (16) and her brother Jack (a couple of years older) lost their mother about a decade ago. The siblings are usually on their own, which suits them just fine. Their father is only around on the weekends, when he takes time to humiliate them, cram the pair's heads with a week's worth of of homeschool "lessons," and generally make the two miserable.

Within the first 20 pages, I was sure that what I *thought* was happening would be revealed soonish -- but the author makes the decision to tease it out until about the last 20 pages, which somehow made it all the more sordid. Yes, of COURSE it's incest.

The book is decently written and, at times, unbearably tense, but the "yuck" factor is overpowering. I actually think it would have been better if Jack were just a control-freak asshole rather than all Flowers-in-the-Atticky without the innocence. I just felt slimy when I finally got to the end.

C

The Red Garden (Alice Hoffman)

Audio/Hardcover

The book got markedly better when I moved from audio to physical book -- mainly because Nancy Travis (the reader) has such a distinctive voice that I kept hearing NANCY rather than the mood and nuance of the story she was speaking.

This is a group of linked stories set in the city of Blackwell, MA, spanning generations. We see its first settlers, then shift forward several years to see the city through another's eyes, then shift again... and again... and again.

I was surprised that the device worked so well. I wish I had read it from the beginning rather than starting out with just the hearing, because I think it would have been easier to hold in my head how this descendant related to the figures in earlier stories (I'm a visual learner), but it didn't really hurt it to think of each story as stand-alone. There was truth and beauty and sadness along with a rich sense of history that so few of us enjoy about our OWN hometowns; we're so nomadic that most of us are starting our adult lives from scratch rather than building on the lives of our ancestors.

I really liked this, while still feeling slightly disconnected from it all -- but I have the suspicion that it was the Travis-effect rather than a fault of the book itself.

B+

Dead Until Dark (Charlaine Harris)

Paperback

One of my friends is all about True Blood television series and the Sookie Stackhouse books on which it's based. I was interested anyway, due to extensive coverage in EW, so when she brought me a copy of the first book, I happily agreed to read it. This book singlehandedly blew the reading "buffer" I'd built up...I have to read 52 books this year and I WAS about four ahead but it was such a slog to get through these pages I'm now simply on-pace.

What a sophomoric mess. The sex scenes (and there are lots of them) honestly read as though they were written by someone who's never HAD sex, but has fantasized a lot about it. I read several passages out loud to my husband just for the guffaw factor; e.g. at one point a naked shapeshifter (don't ask) is described as having a "neat butt." Since he had until seconds before been a collie, I momentarily pictured a literally neat -- as in tidy -- anus, which I honestly think isn't any weirder a thing to think than the phrase "neat butt" as a compliment rather than "hot ass."

The book's sloppy plot revolves around the mystery of a serial killer bumping off fang-bangers (i.e. people who like having sex with vampires), and the culprit is 1) out of left field and 2) given the added crime of post-mortem incestuous sex -- as though killing women for their choice in sexual partner wasn't enough to make sure the reader would hate him. Oh, and also, Elvis -- sorry, "Bubba" -- is a dimwit vampire. Though for some obtuse reason, Ms. Harris thinks it's clever to never outright confirm what she hints all around about his identity. Since having Presley show up as a vampire is the one clever thing about the book (so that's why people keep seeing him! Oh, and that explains the "Aaron" rather than "Aron" on his stone!), I don't understand her coyness in copping to it.

Boy this book sucked.

F

Note: When I upload the photos to go along with these reviews, I save the jpeg under the acronym of the book, so City of Thieves was "cot" and The Risk of Darkness was "rod." I had to laugh at the appropriateness of the name I gave to the Dead Until Dark book cover's jpeg.