Whew -- Intense Stuff

Right Behind You by Gail Giles

Man, this was good. Young adult fiction about a teenager, who, when he was 9 yo, set another child on fire. He spends several years in a juvenile ward and then had to move to another state because of how angry the community was. Really really good stuff. How do you forgive yourself? How do you define a good/bad person? What is forgiveness/redemption? Yep. I liked it. 292 pages

Buffy

The End of the Year Approaches -- Where is everybody?

Hurry Down Sunshine: A Memoir by Michael Greenberg
Very good memoir relating the author's (then) 15yo daughter suddenly starts showing bipolar behavior. Interesting to read a parent's perspective -- we so often try to figure out what we've done wrong. Also good to read the honest accounting of his relationship with his wife.
233 pages.

December by Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop
Fiction about an 11yo girl who stops speaking. Good. Very interesting to read immediately after Hurry Down Sunshine.
239 pages.

The Little Book by Selden Edwards
Such good stuff. Wheeler Burden. living in 1988 San Francisco, suddenly & unexplicably finds himself in Vienna in 1897. Enter Freud, Mahler, and all kinds of other goodness. I liked it, if you couldn't tell. So many many intersections of people and events.

405 pages

The Black Tower
What really happened to Louis-Charles, the son of Marie-Antoinette and King Louis XVI? Great first sentence: "I'm a man of a certain age -- old enough to have been every kind of fool -- and I find to my surprise that the only counsel I have to pass on is this: Never let your name be found in a dead man's trousers." Lots of real historical characters in this one, too.

352 pages

The Book of Murder by Guillermo Martinez
short. author from argentina, translated from spanish. i liked it. "a chilling crime story in which the line between reality and deception has been erased" 215 pages.

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
Whew. So intense. First in a new young adult series. Sadly it was just published -- I'm ready for the next installment. from the book flap:

Todd Hewitt is the last boy in Prentisstown. But Prentisstown isn't like other towns. Everyone can hear everyone else's thoughts in an overwhelming, never-ending stream of Noise. There is no quiet, no privacy, no room for secrets. Or is there? Just a month away from the birthday that will make him a man, Todd and his dog, Manchee -- whose thoughts Todd can hear, too, whether he wants to or not-- stumble upon an area of complete silence. Which is impossible. Prentisstown has been hiding something form him, a secret so awful that Todd and Manchee are suddenly running for their lives. But how can you feel when your pursuers can hear your every thought? And where can you run when there's nowhere to go?

479 pages



Buffy

the holy longing

by Ronald Rolheiser

I wanted to really like this book, but I could only sort-of like it. The premise is that we all have a crazy and wild fire inside of us; what we do with that fire is our spirituality. The rest of the book is all about what we should do with the fire.

I love the premise! The rest of the book I found myself never fully trusting. There were parts that I underlined; there were parts I rolled my eyes at. I'm glad I read it, but I wish the author had done something different with his premise.

241 pages.

-Tamie

The Post-Birthday World & Child 44

The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver

Man, did I like it. I want to say it hit me like a freight train, but that's too instant -- it was more like medicine I took that I didn't know would make me dizzy.... lots to think about for me -- in some ways, really related to my own life. It reminded me of Sliding Doors -- though part of what struck me about the pbw -- the part where it was a conscious decision on the main character's part that affected the path the rest of her life took -- is not present in sliding doors --- more of a "fate/timing" kind of thing...........

517 pages

by Tom Rob Smith

A good one -- not cheery, but good.... First few pages set in 1930s Soviet Union, rest of the book takes place in 1950's S. Union. From the book flap:

Quote:

The mere suspicion of ideological disloyalty ... sends millions of innocents into the Gulags or to their executions. Defending the system from its citizens is the MGB, the State Security Force. And no MGB officer is more courageous, conscientious, or idealistic than Leo Demidov.

When Leo begins to believe that a murderer is on the loose -- an impossibility in Stalin's Soviet Union, where there is no crime -- he quickly becomes one of the suspected ones.

Knocked out my desire to trust ANYONE for a while, I think.
Another first novel.

446 pages

Buffy

the translator

I just finished The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur. I really "enjoyed" reading it, if you can enjoy reading a book about genocide. I would love to meet Daoud Hari, the author, whose heart is soft and wide open. Beautiful. For more of my thoughts on the book, go here.

-204 pages....from Tamie