A Cup of Light by Nicole Mones January 21, 2007

I really enjoyed Nicole Mones’ previous book, Lost in Translation, so I eagerly picked up this one, hoping it would be just as good. I didn’t like it quite as much as I liked the previous book, though it was well written and had very interesting characters.

The main character of the novel was an appraiser of porcelain, and traveled to China to look at a collection, and uncover a sort of mystery. I really don’t have an interest in porcelain, so the descriptions of it had a tendency to seem endless, making me want to skim through them to get to the main story. The main character made the book much more interesting, as she had a hearing loss that she used to her advantage, something that improved her memory and made her more vulnerable to the world around her.

I didn’t find the mystery of the novel very compelling, but the love story certainly was. Nicole Mones is a very talented author and I will certainly read her again, even if she writes about porcelain.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn January 21, 2007

I bought this book because I’d heard so many good things about it, even though the words “dark” and “creepy” were used many, many times in the descriptions that I read. In fact, that’s what kept me from reading it right away. I have to say, now that I’ve finished the book, that it was a dark and creepy story, and not one that I would want to revisit anytime soon.

The author is an extremely talented writer, and the main character of the novel, Camille, was flawed and interesting. Camille was a reporter who traveled from Chicago to her home town in Missouri to cover a story about two young girls who went missing. And it was easy to understand why she never went back to her hometown—that was one screwed-up place. And the story of her family just got worse and worse. At first, it was hard to understand why she would stay so far away from her family, and then it was hard to understand why she didn’t stay further away.

I thought the author had a lot of interesting things to say about family and beauty and love. But the book was so relentlessly dark that I was just glad to be done with it. It really kept my interest, though after I finished it I didn’t even want it in my house anymore.

Household Words by Joan Silber January 21, 2007

I was about a third of the way through this book when I realized it didn’t really have a plot. And I didn’t mind at all. This novel was a very in-depth character study of a woman named Rhoda, who, at the beginning of the novel, was expecting her first child. The story began in 1940 and continued over an almost 20-year period, all taking place from Rhoda’s point of view. She didn’t narrate the novel, but the story was told from her point of view.

Rhoda was not always the most likeable character, but she was certainly fascinating, mostly in the relationships that she had with her daughters. You could clearly see how she was driving her daughters away from her with her behavior towards them, so that even though their actions were continually a surprise to Rhoda, they were less of a surprise to the reader.

Rhoda led a seemingly ordinary life, but the author turned it into something extraordinary. Even though I didn’t always like Rhoda, I felt like I understood her motives and her behavior.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert January 21, 2007

This was a really good book. The author wrote about her search for spirituality as she traveled across Italy, India, and Indonesia. It’s a very personal book, as she began her journey after she left her husband, and dealt with the grief over the loss of her marriage and another love.

I loved the author’s description of her time in Italy, the people whom she met and befriended, and her endless search for the best food she could find. I loved the way that she became comfortable with her aloneness, and the way that she stopped being so afraid of being alone. In fact, I found her time in Italy to be more spiritual than her time in India at an ashram, where she seemed to be fighting herself as she threw herself into spiritual practices that didn’t seem to fit her. And in Indonesia, she went to learn from a medicine man, but she learned just as much from herself and the culture around her.

This is a terrific book by a terrific writer, and I recommend it highly!

Skylight Confessions by Alice Hoffman January 9, 2007

I don’t think Alice Hoffman can write a bad book. This one grabbed me from the start and I finished it in a day. The story begins with Arlyn, who has just lost her father, her only family, and who decides that the next man she sees walking down the street will be the one she is fated to be with. After a few hours of waiting, she meets a student from Yale who has stopped to ask for directions. She is so convinced that he is her fate that she ignores the fact that they don’t really seem all that compatible, and by the time she realizes this, she has a son whom she adores and cannot figure out how she can leave the life she created.

So many lives are changed and created by the decision that Arlyn makes, and this story is about all of them. And, because it is an Alice Hoffman book, there are ghosts and elements of magic throughout which makes for a very compelling story.

Speak Softly, She Can Hear by Pam Lewis January 9, 2007

Carole, a high school student who lives a comfortable and overprotected life, makes a pact with her best friend to lose their virginity before they graduate high school. The two girls decide that an attractive and mysterious boy named Eddie will be the one to help them accomplish this goal. But what starts out as a kind of game between friends turns into something much more sinister, and changes Carole’s life completely.

I don’t want to reveal too much of the story, since it’s a really good one with a lot of twists and turns and unexpected revelations. Carole is a very sympathetic character whose life goes in directions that she never could have expected, and every choice she makes is cringe-worthy and at the same time perfectly understandable. This is the kind of book you just can’t stop reading because you have to know how it ends.

Lost in Translation by Nicole Mones January 9, 2007

Two Americans—one a translator who lives in China and the other an archaeologist—begin a search for the long-missing bones of Peking Man, which the archaeologist believes he can find. Alice, the translator, lives in China as a means of escaping her father, a well-known racist politician in the U.S. Her part in the search for the bones of Peking Man takes her in directions that they never could have imagined.

I thought the story of the search for the bones of Peking Man was a really interesting one, and I was completely hooked by it. At the same time, the descriptions of the culture in China was equally fascinating as seen through the eyes of Alice. She had chosen to live in a country in which she would never be truly accepted or thought of as an equal, and her love for the country nonetheless made her a really interesting character.

This is a really well-written and interesting book that has everything—a mystery, political intrigue, and a love story. I couldn’t put it down.