The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

Summary:
In this tightly wound story, Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: a week on a luxury cruise with only a handful of cabins. At first, Lo’s stay is nothing but pleasant: the cabins are plush, the dinner parties are sparkling, and the guests are elegant. But as the week wears on, frigid winds whip the deck, gray skies fall, and Lo witnesses what she can only describe as a nightmare: a woman being thrown overboard. The problem? All passengers remain accounted for—and so, the ship sails on as if nothing has happened, despite Lo’s desperate attempts to convey that something (or someone) has gone terribly, terribly wrong…

My take: 1 look
I put this one down after trying again and again to get "into" it. When there are excellent suspense novels ripe for the picking on the shelves of the local library, this one does not hold muster. I did a quick survey on social media when I found myself struggling with the book, and found that it is quite polarizing. People either love it or hate it. Well, count me as one of the latter.

Not recommended.

The Cellar by Natasha Preston

Summary:
 Nothing ever happens in the town of Long Thorpe – that is, until sixteen-year-old Summer Robinson disappears without a trace. No family or police investigation can track her down. Spending months inside the cellar of her kidnapper with several other girls, Summer learns of Colin’s abusive past, and his thoughts of his victims being his family…his perfect, pure flowers. But flowers can’t survive long cut off from the sun, and time is running out….

My take: 1 look

Ugh. I had high hopes for this one based on a review I read. However, I know now that the review must have been from a middle-school-girl. 

It has been a few months, but I recently read "The Butterfly Garden" by Dot Hutchison, which is a story along these same lines. Abducted girls who are deemed "perfect", kept by a seemingly normal older man, and the latest addition is very young. When I got to the part where he names them after flowers and eventually has sex with them, I stopped. There was nothing compelling that I could read, especially at 347 pages, that would interest, intrigue, or captivate me that I had not seen a thousand times. It's practically every third "Criminal Minds" episode.

So, skip this one. Read "Girl with a Dragon Tattoo" instead. It's better written, more visceral, and you will be more apt to read the series than anything you will find here.

Not recommended.

Fury by Salman Rushdie

Summary:

Malik Solanka, historian of ideas and world-famous dollmaker, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family in London without a word of explanation, and flees for New York. There's a fury within him, and he fears he has become dangerous to those he loves. He arrives in New York at a time of unprecedented plenty, in the highest hour of America's wealth and power, seeking to "erase" himself. But fury is all around him. Fury is a work of explosive energy, at once a pitiless and pitch-black comedy, a profoundly disturbing inquiry into the darkest side of human nature, and a love story of mesmerizing force. It is also an astonishing portrait of New York. Not since the Bombay of Midnight's Children have a time and place been so intensely and accurately captured in a novel.

My take: Not finished

I am putting this one down. I have vacillated between finishing/not finishing long enough, and reached my decision this morning.

Why put it down? Because it's an exhausting read. It's the non-stop self-pitying rant of an extremely wealthy man who can't find happiness. A man who abandons his wife and son (after thinking seriously of murdering the former) in London for the fury of New York. In a nutshell, he wants the fury of New York to overpower the fury he feels within himself.

What I suspect is a thinly veiled autobiography (and you know how I hate those, Holden Caulfield), Fury is full of beautiful writing and wonderful quotes for publishers about the excess of America. However, it descends quickly into whining. Beautifully written, irrepressible whining.

It is not very popular to dislike Rushdie's writing. People think of him as so esoteric, on a different plane, writing at a higher level than most. Perhaps his vocabulary is larger than the average fiction reader, but that only serves to give his writing a sense of arrogance. I can imagine him writing and thinking, "No one understands me. No one will "get" this."

This was the first Rushdie book I have tried, and I will more than likely try another one. After all, perhaps some of his earlier writing, before he was jaded by wealth and beautiful women half his age, will prove to be a bit more accessible for us common folk.

Not recommended.

Looking for Alaska by John Green

Summary:

The main character in this book is Miles “Pudge” Halter. Pudge moves from Florida to a boarding school in Birmingham, Alabama where he meets a girl named Alaska. Pudge spends his time trying to “figure out” Alaska. Pudge has some terrible pranks pulled on him being the new student at school and during his free time he enjoys sneaking around drinking and smoking with his friends. Fiction- boarding schools, death

My take: 1 look

All due respect to fans of John Green, but you may  not count me among your number. This is the fourth book I have read by Green, and can only recommend one (The Fault in Our Stars).

Let me start by saying that Green has a good niche with teenage girls and boys. It is very important to solidify a love of reading in the younger years, and Green seems to have tapped into this, much the way John Hughes tapped into teenage angst in his slew of 1980s coming-of-age films. Hughes spoke to my generation. Green speaks to today's generation.

That being said, I found this a sad redo of 1999's The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. Perks is better written, more compelling, and less irritating (by far) than Alaska.

Alaska is the epitome of teenage angst. She is moody, spontaneous, insistent, volatile, and charismatic to all of the teenage boys around her. I found her to be extremely irritating and developed no sympathy for her whatsoever. When her fate was sealed (no spoilers here), I couldn't have cared less.

The Colonel was just as irritating. Honor, retaliation and a sense of duty seemed to drive him. Unless, of course, these things were required of him. Then it seemed to be every man for himself.

Pudge, bless his heart, was at the middle of this gang of miscreants. He seemed to be so enamored by the other's dominant traits that he just blew where ever their wind gusts carried him.

All-in-all, these characters were caricatures of the aspects of growing up a teen in a boarding school. Living in Alabama, I am very familiar with Indian Springs School, on which this was patterned. There is nothing flattering in here, I assure you. Nor is there anything compelling. Green must have hated his time there.

Not recommended. Read Chbosky's Perks instead. You'll thank me.

Shocked! Shocked, I say!

On my online Shelfari bookclub, Bibliophiles, we were asked to list our faves and least fave books for 2014. When I did a quick search on my ratings for 2014, I was SHOCKED!!

I only listed THREE books with 5 looks in the entire year! Here they are:

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
Haiku Mama by Kari Anne Roy
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

I can't even believe it. What gives?

Am I choosing unwisely?

Am I becoming more discerning?

I had a LOT of 2 look ratings, but no 1 stars.

A lot of 2 look. Really, too many to list. You can search on the "2 looks" tag to see them.

I am going to have to think about this!

A Visit from the Fizzle Squad

You will, I'm sure, remember that I didn't care for Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer-prize winning novel, "A Visit from the Good Squad". To refresh your memory:

My review: 1 look
This book won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?! This is what the Pulitzer Prize Board said: "inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed." Allow me to translate this for you: rockers getting old, hating it and fighting it every step of the way.

HBO is making a series out of it?! Well, they made a movie out of one of my most-hated books, White Oleander, so I can't say this surprises me. This book could read like a bunch of related short stories, so a series is probably not a bad idea. Especially when you consider the garbage on television now.

My take on this book is that it's sophomoric, pandering and whiney. Think "Housewives of New Jersey" with record contracts. You may want to read this one because of the hype, but I wouldn't recommend it unless every other book at the library is gone.

You can see that I didn't really mince words here.

So, you can imagine my astonishment, amazement, wonder, incredulity, bewilderment, stupefaction, and disbelief when I read this from Alexandra Alter in The Wall Street Journal: As of February 2013, the project had reportedly "fizzled" meaning it was no longer in development.

I told you so, anyone?

Creepy Book of the Day: Love You Forever by Robert Munsch

 

Summary:

A young woman holds her newborn son and looks at him lovingly. Softly she sings to him: "I'll love you forever. I'll like you for always. As long as I'm living, My baby you'll be" So begins the story that has touched the hearts of millions of Americans. Since publication in 1986, "Love You Forever" has sold more than 15 million copies in paperback and the regular hardcover edition (as well as hundreds of thousands of copies in Spanish and French).

My take:
I am going to lose some of you here. This book seems to be very polarizing, and I am on the "this book is hella creepy" end of it.

First, the mother holds her son as an infant. She holds him as all mothers do, in a rocker, gazing lovingly down as he sleeps in her arms.

It is a beautiful illustration and reminds mothers of all ages what it was like to be totally in love with your newborn.

That's when it starts to get weird.

Mom has an unnatural attachment to her child. She creeps in at night, evidently on her hands and knees, and peeks at him sleeping.

She gets him out of bed while he is asleep so she can hold him. Who knows what time it is. It may be 3am. She just feels that she needs to hold him. She probably can't sleep because he is too far away from her if she is in her bedroom and he is in his.

Poor kid.

He grows into the typical teenager, but you can see from this illustration that he probably needed to have his tail beat a little more often. If my teenage boy walked through the house at this age, leaving a wake of grime and dirt behind him, you had better believe that baseball glove in his hand would be replaced with a mop and dishcloth.

The boy finally gets his mama's breast out of his mouth and moves out. By the looks of the mother, this "boy" must be in his 40s. What does the mom do? Drives through town with a freaking ladder on the roof of her car. When she gets to his apartment, she puts the ladder outside his bedroom window,  because of course, it's the middle of the night, and climbs through the window so she can pick him up and rock him as he sleeps.

This poor woman is insane. As you can see from the picture, even the cat is trying to escape. And he must be medicated, because he is not waking up. And does she have on a dress? She climbed a ladder in a dress and Sunday shoes? Man, oh man.

 Mom eventually (and thankfully) gets old enough that she can no longer follow him and cradle him creepily in the middle of the night, so the son cradles her. What gives? This is a seriously codependent relationship. And where is her husband? He either left her craziness, or she killed him in his sleep.

I vote for the latter.

And the cycle continues...as the man-child now looks down at his poor, unsuspecting child.

Norman Bates, anyone?

The sequel could be called "I Love You to Death".

October Baby by Eric Wilson

Summary:
"You saw me before I was born." Psalm 139:16 (NLT) As the curtain rises, Hannah hesitantly steps onto the stage for her theatrical debut in college. Yet before she can utter her first lines, Hannah—unscripted—collapses in front of the stunned audience. After countless medical tests, all signs point to one underlying factor: Hannah's difficult birth. This revelation is nothing compared to what she then learns from her parents: she was actually adopted … after a failed abortion attempt. Bewildered, angered, and confused, Hannah turns for support to Jason, her oldest friend. Encouraged by his adventurous spirit, Hannah joins his group of friends on a Spring Break road trip, embarking on a journey to discover her hidden past … and find hope for her unknown future. In the midst of her incredible journey, Hannah finds that life can be so much more than what you have planned.

My take: 1 look
Hannah is in college, finds out that she is adopted and completely freaks out on the only parents she has ever known, leaving them in her dust to find the woman who tried to abort her and get some answers.

This is the reason I don't enjoy Christian fiction. It's forced, smaltzy, and lame. The main character is so irritating and whiney and self-righteous that I couldn't swallow any of it. The adoptive father is over-the-top protective, prying and suffocating to his daughter. She's an adult, for goodness sakes! This book is written on, I would guess, a sixth grade level. So, if you are a 12-17 year old girl, enjoy.

All said, I didn't finish this one and do not recommend it.

Review system

I have noticed that I am giving more and more books three looks, and this troubles me. There is a huge spectrum in my three looks than is apparent in the number alone. It could be just a notch above two, which I consider a bit of an insult and means that I probably will not read more bu that author. But it's not quite a four, which means to me that I will think about the book often after reading it. I really need a scale of one to ten to adequately rate many books.

To help with this, I decided on a picture system. That way, when I finish a book, I can choose the picture to which I most relate as I think of said book.


Here is my picture for one-look books. This is a book that I have either invoked the "100 page rule" on or finished and thought it was just terrible. I think the boy here says it all. He has just taken medicine or perhaps he has been kissed by an overweight and equally overbearing distant relative. Maybe he walks in the house from an afternoon of playing outside to smell the cooking of broccoli (and you know how cooled broccoli stinks - why is that?).  He is my perfect one look face. I will cross this author off my TBR list.

 

My choice for two looks is this sad feline. This is not the look of a terrible book, as seen above, but the look of complete disappointment. I invested the time to read (and finish!) the book and I will never be able to retrieve that lost time. The book was not worth it and I probably will not read more by this author, unless it comes highly recommended.



This is where most books fall for me. I hate to call a three-look book average or mediocre, but the fact of the matter is that it has simply and only met my expectations. It was well-written and I will probably read more by that author. I will not, however, think of the book later, will easily be able to pick up another book, and will not rush out to recommend it to others.



I love this picture! It portrays exactly how I feel about four-look books. This is a book that I really don't want to rush to the end because I want it to last a bit longer. What keeps it from being five looks? Perhaps it is a bit predictable. Perhaps the writing style is somewhat common. Perhaps the reading level is lower than it could have been. Whatever the reason, I will talk this book up and add the author's other words for reading in the near future.  



And this is five looks. Love, consuming, aflame. These are books that I could not put down, will read again, bought after reading, took in my purse so I could share with others, couldn't get out of my mind, read the same author immediately and still think of weeks, months and years later. There aren't many in this category.

 Now, with all of this explained, I scratch my head at times over the scores that I have given books in the past. Perhaps the book really spoke to me at that point in my life and I gave it five looks (Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie comes immediately to mind, which I would never give more than four looks today, and very probably three at the most). However, I am loathe to change a score once I have conferred it because it speaks to my impression at that time.

I am also curious about my own reluctance to bestow five looks. I think a book must be life-changing to achieve that score. The whole thing makes me chuckle and I remind myself that this is just for fun...

101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived by Alan Lazar

Summary:

From Santa Claus to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from Uncle Sam to Uncle Tom, here is a compelling, eye-opening, and endlessly entertaining compendium of fictional trendsetters and world-shakers who have helped shape our culture and our lives. The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived offers fascinating histories of our most beloved, hated, feared, and revered invented icons and the indelible marks they made on civilization, including: # 28: Rosie the Riveter, the buff, blue-collar factory worker who helped jump-start the Women's Liberation movement # 7: Siegfried, the legendary warrior-hero of Teutonic nationalism responsible for propelling Germany into two world wars # 80: Icarus, the headstrong high-flyer who inspired the Wright brothers and humankind's dreams of defying gravity . . . while demonstrating the pressing need for flight insurance # 58: Saint Valentine, the hapless, de-canonized loser who lost his heart and head at about the same time # 43: Barbie, the bodacious plastic babe who became a role model for millions of little girls, setting an impossible standard for beauty and style.

My take: 1 look

I was very disappointed in this book. I loved the premise and the list itself, but found the description of each character to be more of a commentary on the author's opinion than less on the history of the character and almost none of how society has been shaped/impacted by the existence of the fictional person. I don't care that the myth of Cinderella should not be taught to our daughters and certainly find it horribly subjective to call Adam the "first male chauvinist pig."

There was much potential here, only to be squandered by a group of authors more interested in writing of an OpEd and less of an informative, non-emotional book.

Not recommended.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Summary:

WICKED above her hipbone, GIRL across her heart Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker’s troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille’s first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. NASTY on her kneecap, BABYDOLL on her leg Since she left town eight years ago, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed again in her family’s Victorian mansion, Camille is haunted by the childhood tragedy she has spent her whole life trying to cut from her memory. HARMFUL on her wrist, WHORE on her ankle

As Camille works to uncover the truth about these violent crimes, she finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Clues keep leading to dead ends, forcing Camille to unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past to get at the story. Dogged by her own demons, Camille will have to confront what happened to her years before if she wants to survive this homecoming. With its taut, crafted writing, Sharp Objects is addictive, haunting, and unforgettable.

My take: 1.5 looks
I can't give this one one look because I didn't hate it, or even have trouble finishing it. At the same time, it doesn't quite deserve two looks. It was so over-the-top that it was completely unbelievable and even became somewhat amusing. The characters were completely overdrawn and lacked sympathy of any kind.

Camille was supposed to be an adult, but her childhood seemed to have stunted her so greatly that she never matured past about 13 years old. No, I don't believe that. She had trauma and a mother who was vacuous, yes, but nothing to cause the level of complete and idiotic behavior displayed in the story. The cutting, drinking, sexual promiscuity and drug use with her teenaged sister would have been plausible if taken alone, but the pervasive use of all was overblown, exaggerated and too much.

Amma was another badly drawn player in the story. A thirteen year old girl with the mean streak of an adult and a full blown psychotic nature with an unending supply of illegal drugs. I don't believe for a second that girls from normal families would follow her behavior or example, regardless of the small size of their town. Her cries for help seemed real, but the author used them instead to underline the psychosis instead of adding another layer and making Amma more complex.

Finally, Adora and Alan rounded out the ridiculous characters in this ill-fated novel. Each on both sides of the spectrum regarding personality, written to the hilt. Again, completely unbelievable, without depth and verging on being caricatures. The Munchausen by Proxy was obvious from the beginning, as was the identity of the killer. To have not figured this one out by page 50 would truly be an insult.

Away from the flawed characters, the writing was terrible. It read maddeningly in one-liners, like it was written by Sergeant Joe Friday of Dragnet fame. The start and stop of the lines caused readers' whiplash and ensured there was no flow whatsoever to the telling of the story. A reader could almost hyperventilate if reading this one aloud.

I was impressed by the comment from Stephen King on the back cover of the novel, extolling the smart writing and sharp insights of the book. I can only assume the publisher found a person somewhere who shares the famous name and was willing to give a quote.

Not recommended.

Great House by Nicole Krauss

Summary:
A powerful, soaring novel about a stolen desk that contains the secrets, and becomes the obsession, of the lives it passes through. For 25 years, a solitary American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet's secret police; one day a girl claiming to be his daughter arrives to take it away, sending her life reeling. Across the ocean in London, a man discovers a terrifying secret about his wife of almost 50 years. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer is slowly reassembling his father's Budapest study, plundered by the Nazis in 1944. These worlds are anchored by a desk of enormous dimension and many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or give it away. In the minds of those it has belonged to, the desk comes to stand for all that has disappeared in the chaos of the world — children, parents, whole peoples and civilizations. Nicole Krauss has written a hauntingly powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss.

My take: 1 look
I agree with another reviewer in her surprise that this book won an award. While there is supposed to be a common thread running through the book, the desk, I found the writing to be disjointed, unrelated and completely boring. All of the characters were one-dimensional, unsympathetic and easy to leave.

I have another book on my list by Krauss, and will read it, but if I have the same impression, it will be the last book by this author that I read.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Summary:
Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding new work circles Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, but the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other people whose paths intersect with theirs in the San Francisco 1970s music scene, the demimonde of Naples, New York at many points along the way from the pre-Internet nineties to a postwar future, and on a catastrophic safari into the heart of Africa. We meet Lou, Bennie’s charismatic, careless mentor; Scotty, the young musician who slipped off the grid; the uncle facing a failed marriage who goes in search of seventeen-year-old Sasha when she disappears into Italy; and the therapist on whose couch she dissects darker compulsions. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about time, survival, and the electrifying sparks ignited at the seams of our lives by colliding destinies. Sly, surprising, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

My review: 1 look
This book won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?! This is what the Pulitzer Prize Board said: "inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed." Allow me to translate this for you: rockers getting old, hating it and fighting it every step of the way.

HBO is making a series out of it?! Well, they made a movie out of one of my most-hated books, White Oleander, so I can't say this surprises me. This book could read like a bunch of related short stories, so a series is probably not a bad idea. Especially when you consider the garbage on television now.

My take on this book is that it's sophomoric, pandering and whiney. Think "Housewives of New Jersey" with record contracts. You may want to read this one because of the hype, but I wouldn't recommend it unless every other book at the library is gone.

The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan

Summary:
A bit on the elderly side (he turns 201 in March), but otherwise in the pink of health. The nonstop sex and exercise he’s still getting probably contribute to that, as does his diet: unusual amounts of flesh and blood (at least some from friends and relatives). Jake, of course, is a werewolf, and with the death of his colleague he has now become the only one of his kind. This depresses Jake to the point that he’s been contemplating suicide. Yet there are powerful forces who for very different reasons want—and have the power—to keep Jake alive. 

Here is a powerful new version of the werewolf legend—mesmerizing and undeniably sexy, and with moments of violence so elegantly wrought they dazzle rather than repel. But perhaps its most remarkable achievement is to make the reader feel sympathy for a man who can only be described as a monster—and in doing so, remind us what it means to be human. One of the most original, audacious, and terrifying novels in years.

My review:
1 look
I am no prude, but when I got to yet another description of anal sex, I put this one down. I mean, good grief, we get it already: werewolves like sex. Putting this stinker on my "do not bother" list. Because I hated it so much, I'm pretty sure Hollywood will turn it into a movie.