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Thursday, September 22, 2011

Flash and Bones by Kathy Reichs

Kathy Reichs is one of my favorite authors.  She's one of the few authors whose books I buy in hardback as soon as they come out.  Carol Goodman is another one.  This book conveniently was released right before my mother's birthday, so I purchased it as her present.  She read it, mailed it to me.  I read it, and mailed it to my older sister.

Flash and Bones is another Temperance Brennan book, the forensic anthropologist who works in North Carolina and Canada.  Many of her books, this is book 14!!, involve jumping back and forth between to two places, but this book just stayed southern.  Dr. Brennan is called to investigate a body found in an oil drum, leading her to a cold case involving a young couple who vanished years before, the sinister underworld of NASCAR, and a missing CDC doctor.  As usual, Tempe is witty, sarcastic, and fantastic at her job.

My only dislikes of the book were the location, (I prefer her cases that are in Canada.  Not sure why), and the lack of any resolution of her personal life.  A few books back her personal life unraveled and its still dragging on.  Grrrrrr!

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Amaryllis in Blueberry by Christina Meldrum

Amaryllis in Blueberry has been on my "to read" list since before it was even released.  I read that its similar to Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, which I love, so just that right there entered it immediately to my list.

Dick and Seena are two parents with four daughters.  The Slepy's spend each summer in 1970's Michigan. The family is Catholic, although each family member believes to a different degree.  The book addresses the issue of how outward appearances of religious devotion doesn't always match true belief.  The youngest daughter is Amaryllis, dissimilar to her sisters in looks and her ability to read emotions on people in the form of colors, see the future, and sense the past. The three elder daughters are all Mary's: Mary Grace, the beautiful one, Mary Catherine, the obsessive devout one, and Mary Tessa, the one who questions them all.  Dick is religious, Seena is obsessed with mythology.

The summer of 1976, Grace ends up pregnant, and Seena's secret that Amaryllis was secretly fathered by an Indian is out.  Catie stops eating as a permanent fast for God, and Tessa wonders how she ended up in such a crazy family.  Dick turns to porn and a prostitute, which makes Seena rethink his role as husband and breadwinner.  Amaryllis observes her whole family with her blueberry colored eyes.

To escape impending doom, the Slepy's move to Africa.  Dick is a doctor and believes he can establish a hospital in an unnamed west African country for redemption.  Once in Africa, the Slepy's find truth, love, and individual redemption.

To say this book is based loosely off the The Poisonwood Bible is an understatement.  It's very very similar.  White family from middle America goes to Africa in hopes of "saving" it, either through religion or modern medicine.  A family of all girl children, each vastly different, and all struggling to establish an identity within the confines of the family.  Sibling rivalry, different reactions to Africa, a troubled child, a favored child.  Maybe its not fair to compare the two books as such, but its hard to disassociate the two.

Meldrum is a very poetic, somewhat abstract writer.  Part of the charm of the book is her writing style, which distracts from the lack of solid plot.  The book moved along at a snails pace (not necessarily in a bad way), until the end where so much action happened in a very short amount of time.  I was disappointed the book ended where it did.  It almost seemed too short, and somewhat...unfinished?

Still worth the read though, especially if you like a more lyrical writer.  For a strong, well developed plot about a white family in Africa, I'd stick with The Poisonwood Bible. 

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Pretense by Lori Wick

It's been a long while since I've read any Christian fiction.  I've read a good portion of Lori Wick's books, many I liked, some I didn't.  Pretense is only one of two of her contemporary fiction books I've read.  One of the many complaints about Christian fiction books is that so many of them, Lori Wick's included, take place in the past, and I've always felt a vague "that's not really relatable" vibe from them.  This contemporary novel does away with that feeling, since the book starts in the 1980's and continues for 15 years.

Pretense begins with Delancey and Mackenzie, two sisters only 13 months apart in age, as elementary school aged children.  They live with mom, a stay at home mother, and dad, an Army colonel.  As the novel progresses, the sisters get older, the family moves due to the Army, mom and dad find Christianity, their parents both pass away, finding careers, and eventually love and marriage.

I like the two sisters.  I would have been friends with them in high school.  I can relate to the sister squabbles, and the inevitable rebellion against their parents.   As adults I admire many of their choices and predictably they both find God.  I also like the emphasis on family that's harder to find in today's world, but so prevalent in the books written in an earlier time period.  I love Mackenzie dealing with her aloneness, because it's just so relatable.

My favorite Lori Wick book is The Hawk and the Jewel, but this one might be a close second.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

I've been so busy traveling that I haven't read nearly as much as I planned.  But I did find this gem while reading Lady Chatterley's Lover on an airplane.

"Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening."

  -D.H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterley's Lover


I'm about halfway through it, and enjoying the character of Lady Chatterley, even if the book moves slightly slow.