Where Are the Children?

Synopsis
Seven years ago, Nancy's two children disappeared. They were found murdered and Nancy was convicted in their deaths. Freed on a technicality, she has relocated to Cape Cod, where she has rebuilt her life. Now her two children from her second marriage have gone missing.

My thoughts
When I was in middle school, one of my friends recommended Mary Higgins Clark's mysteries. For a couple years, I devoured everything of hers that I could get my hands on. Her heroines were smart, successful, resourceful, and chic - and they always got the guy in the end. My enthusiasm waned sometime in high school, and when I picked up one of her books after college I didn't even bother finishing it because it was so formulaic and predictable.

Where Are the Children? was Clark's first bestseller and I remembered liking it, so I picked it up at the library. It's one of those books that you can fly through in a few hours. It was enjoyable to read and it reminded me what I like best about Clark's writing. She pays a lot of attention to detail and the inner monologues of her characters.

The story is chilling. Two children go missing and that's bad enough, but you have the added twist of a mother who's been convicted of murdering her children from her first marriage. As a reader there's never any doubt that Nancy is innocent of both crimes, but it's understandable that the investigation immediately focuses on her.

You have to suspend disbelief for a lot of mysteries, but this one in particular stretches credulity. There are an awful lot of big coincidences that allow all the threads of the novel to come together at exactly the right moment. There are also some enormously cheesy lines ("Now, listen, bum, and listen good.") But the ending is very satisfying.

Bottom line
Read some of Clark's other books before this one. Try Weep No More, My Lady; Remember Me; or Loves Music, Loves to Dance.

Fine print
Where Are the Children?, by Mary Higgins Clark
Genre: mystery
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

Embassytown

Synopsis
Oh God. So there's this remote outpost at the edge of the universe. Humans have colonized it and get along with the indigenous Hosts. Until a new Ambassador shows up and ruins everything. Okay, so that's the basic premise. It sounds like your run-of-the-mill science fiction story, but it's more complex. The book makes you think hard about language, religion, colonialism, and human nature.

My thoughts
I wasn't smart enough for this book. So that kind of put a damper on my enjoyment of it, but it was exciting and I did like it.

The most intriguing aspect of the book was its ruminations on language. The Hosts are pure creatures who cannot lie, and Language is everything to them (hence the capital L). Unless there's a word for something, the Hosts cannot conceptualize it. To get around this, they need similes to express the concept that one thing can be like another. The catch is that there are highly structured rules concerning similes. Similes must be based on something that has actually occurred, so the Hosts stage events so that a new simile (and therefore new ideas) can enter their language. Humans are a corrupting influence on the Hosts. The Hosts invite them to festivals where the humans tell lies and the Hosts try to emulate them.

The tragic twist is that the humans bring an illness that decimates the Hosts, and there are only two ways to stop it. The Hosts must murder all of the humans (obviously untenable for our human heroine) or they must learn to lie, ruining their relationship with Language. It's powerful.

Bottom line
Probably not worth it unless you're a hardcore science fiction aficionado. I'll try some of China Mieville's other novels, though.

Fine print
Embassytown, by China Mieville
Genre: science fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

Twenties Girl

Synopsis
A twentysomething with a broken career and an even brokener love life is haunted by her dead great-aunt.

My thoughts
This was a really fun read. This is my third Sophie Kinsella book (after The Undomestic Goddess and Remember Me - I haven't read any of the Shopaholic series) and my favorite so far. I loved this story in particular because it's a buddy comedy and a romantic comedy in one. The wacky heroines in this story are Lara Lington and the ghost of her great-aunt Sadie, who's stuck in the 1920s and upset over the loss of her necklace. Sadie can't move on to the afterlife until she's found the necklace, and since Lara is the only one who can see her it becomes her mission to find it. And Lara's got enough to deal with without a tracking down some random relative's random bauble - her boyfriend has broken up with her and her business partner has deserted her and their fledgling enterprise. Things get even more interesting when Sadie falls in love with a business exec and insists that Lara woo him since she can't do it herself. There's a lot going on and it takes a while to set everything in motion, but once the story gets going the action and laughs don't stop.

Kinsella's manner of storytelling is infectiously, buoyantly bubbly. Her characters are always optimistic (sometimes borderline delusional) and I feel better after I hang out with them for a little while. She's also hilarious. The situations her characters get themselves into and their reactions to them are often laugh-out-loud funny.

I was a little skeptical of the paranormal element of the story. I wasn't sure a story with a ghost would be all that good, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Throwing a ghost into the story was (somewhat ironically) an inventive way of injecting some life into what can be a stale genre.

The one serious message from this book: call your lonely elderly great-aunt. Lara and Sadie's relationship is lovely, but it's also a bit sad because they're not contemporaries and Sadie eventually has to move on.

Bottom line
Grab this book, curl up with a nice bottle of wine, and enjoy!

Fine print
Twenties Girl, by Sophie Kinsella
Genre: fiction, chick lit
Photo from Goodreads
I own this book.

Mockingjay

Synopsis
In the final book of the Hunger Games trilogy, Katniss becomes a mascot for the resistance and takes her fight all the way to the Capitol.

My thoughts
I liked it, and I admire what Suzanne Collins tried to accomplish, but I wasn't satisfied with it.

First, the good. Collins continues with the action sequences that made the first two books such page turners. I tore through Mockingjay just as quickly as I did the first two.

More importantly, Collins hones her moral message. In too many books, good and evil are clearly delineated. The good guys can do no wrong and the villains are thoroughly, unquestionably corrupt. But things aren't so simple in Mockingjay. Katniss becomes part of the larger rebellion, but has she merely traded one oppressive regime for another? Before Katniss has time to come to grips with this, she's forced to grapple with something much more serious - the question of whether the rebels could commit unthinkable atrocities to win the war. Collins is intentionally ambiguous on this point. It's horrifying to think about, especially when you consider it in the context of actual modern wars (particularly the civil war in Syria).

And now the major reason I wasn't completely satisfied with the book: the abrupt ending. Collins delivers a shocking plot twist in the book's last pages, an event which would have had major repercussions for Katniss. Instead, everything is resolved quickly and neatly and then the trilogy just ends.

Bottom line
A strong YA series.

Fine print
Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
Genre: YA fiction, dystopian fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I own this book.

Catching Fire

Synopsis
Katniss won the Hunger Games, but now the Capitol is out to get her.

My thoughts
I just realized I never posted a review of Catching Fire even though I read it almost a year ago. I flew threw The Hunger Games on vacation and snatched Catching Fire off my bookshelf as soon as I walked in the door. And I flew through Catching Fire, too. It was a page-turner, although it was considerably weaker than Hunger Games (but not weak enough to dissuade me from picking up the final book in the series).

My main problem with the book is that it makes Katniss too important. Even if Katniss won the Hunger Games and embarrassed those in charge, it's too flimsy to support or even spark a revolution.

The love triangle gets fleshed out a little better, but the damage is already done. There's no conceivable way Katniss can end up with Gale even though he's a decent guy and he's probably a better match for Katniss than Peeta is. And speaking of Peeta ... he becomes too perfect and one-dimensional.

Finally, I think I might have actually groaned aloud when Katniss finds out she has to compete in the Hunger Games: All-Star Season. I wanted something new, not a rehash of the first book. But ... I was wrong. Suzanne Collins is really good at writing about the Hunger Games. The action is always riveting and unpredictable, and she pulls out all the stops to come up with new horrors for the characters. And that's why I ended up enjoying the book.

Bottom line
Not as good as the first book but good enough - and fast enough - to read.

Fine print
Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
Genre: YA fiction, dystopian fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I own this book.

The Rebels of Ireland

Synopsis
Generational saga that traces Ireland's tumultuous history from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century.

My thoughts
I knew that Ireland was a Catholic nation oppressed by its minority Protestant rulers, but this book made it more real. It follows generations of interconnected families. The Irish families followed become the movers and shakers who attempt to reform Ireland, sometimes through parliamentary channels and other times by fomenting rebellion. Their English foils are less well fleshed out as characters. They're more like mindless borgs whose only purpose is to annihilate the Irish. There is a lot of historical and political background to wade through, but Edward Rutherford explains everything clearly.

The problem with generational sagas is that just when you're getting attached to individual characters, they die and you have to get acquainted with the next generation. This was definitely an issue for me, but I was surprised at how skillfully Rutherford gave the families themselves personalities. And many of the individual stories were so compelling that I couldn't help but be drawn in. Rutherford's writing especially shone when he described the various rebellions and the Famine. The last chapter, which dealt with the Easter Rising, was the strongest. It had a love story (and my favorite female character in the entire book), but it also brought the story full circle in several different ways.

I've only been to Ireland once - seven years ago and only for a few days - and it made a strong enough impression on me that I was able to remember certain Dublin buildings and streets when they were mentioned in the book. The characters also visit the ancient monastic ruins at Glendalough, which is the one place outside of Dublin I was able to see. It's an incredible site and this book made me want to go back and explore Dublin and the surrounding countryside.

I didn't realize that this book was the sequel to The Princes of Ireland, which covers Irish history from the introduction of Christianity all the way up to the Reformation. I'd be interested in reading that as well as Rutherford's other historical works. But they're all very long. At 863 pages, The Rebels of Ireland evidently exhausted the copyeditor, who went AWOL for the last chapter. There are a number of typos, and a character named Rose inexplicably becomes Rosa for the last four pages.

Bottom line

A good read if you have Irish roots, if you're going to Ireland, or if you're interested in learning how Ireland got the way it is today.

Fine print

The Rebels of Ireland, by Edward Rutherford

Genre: historical fiction

Photo from Goodreads

I own this book.

Absolution

Synopsis
Literary bigwig Clare Wald hires an unknown named Sam Leroux to write her official biography. The one thing Clare won't talk to Sam about is her daughter Laura, an anti-apartheid activist who disappeared in 1989. Both Sam and Clare (almost literally) have skeletons in their closets, which are revealed as the story plods to an ending that is whatever the opposite of thrilling is.

My thoughts
I was so excited about this book. It was supposed to be one of the best debut novels of 2012. It's set in South Africa and has the hook of a missing person mystery set against the backdrop of the fall of apartheid. Unfortunately, it read like an incoherent echo of Ian McEwan's Atonement.

The most frustrating aspect of this book was that neither of the characters had committed any real sins that needed to be absolved. Contrast that with Atonement, where (spoiler alert) the central character told a lie that led to all sorts of awful things and then everyone died in World War II before she could atone for it. Both books also use the novel-within-a-novel conceit, but Absolution muddles it with present-day narration from both Sam and Clare plus flashbacks to Sam's past PLUS Clare's imaginings of Laura's last days. It's ambitious, but it's too much.

I did finish this book, but I didn't read every word - I skimmed a lot of the last third. There was a lot about Clare's garden and I'm not sure what the last 50 pages were for. They didn't reveal anything new to me - they rehashed what Sam had learned and provided some closure for Sam and Clare, but I didn't care about that because I didn't care about them.

Absolution takes a bleak view of present-day South Africa. The apartheid regime was truly horrifying, but both sides committed atrocities. The scars of apartheid, like the scars of slavery in the United States, will be with us for many generations. I knew that in the back of my mind, but it was something else entirely to realize how that still impacts everyday life in South Africa. I always like "traveling" to other places when I read, and this book was no exception.

Bottom line
Read Atonement if you're after a mechanically perfect story. Watch Cry Freedom if you want to learn more about apartheid South Africa. Read J.M. Coetzee or Nadine Gordimer for outstanding South African literature.

Fine print
Absolution, by Patrick Flanery
Genre: fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from my library.

Fire from Heaven

Synopsis
The formative years of Alexander the Great, the first of a trilogy.

My thoughts
Much of the book centers around Alexander's complicated family life and his warring parents, Olympias and Philip. They married for political reasons, and Philip is suspicious of Olympias's use of magic. Because of Olympias's sorcery, Alexander isn't entirely certain of his paternity. Is he mortal Philip's offspring or the result of a union between Olympias and a god? Alexander is closest to Olympias, but he is Philip's heir. As he grows up he learns the arts of war and he and his father reach an uneasy truce. But Olympias and Philip continue to spar with each other, and Alexander is often caught in the middle. Alexander is also embarrassed by his father's extramarital affairs, and Philip's threats to disinherit Alexander backfire - instead of obeying him, Alexander becomes rebellious. The drama builds until Alexander is forced to choose between them, and Mary Renault does a good job building layers of suspense until the final act.

Thank goodness for this book's matter-of-fact attitude toward Alexander's relationship with Hephaistion. Renault writes in an author's note that homosexual relationships among men weren't unusual in the ancient world, and Renault depicts Alexander and Hephaistion as true soul mates. They share an immediate connection with each other and their friendship grows as they grow up. Hephaistion acts as a steadying influence on Alexander. Alexander confides in Hephaistion, and Hephaistion develops a second sense of what Alexander needs and when he'll need it. In some ways he understands Alexander better than Alexander understands himself.

The book's one weakness is that Alexander is a little too perfect. He never makes mistakes and he is more godlike than human.

Bottom line
Well-researched historical fiction with beautiful, vivid writing.

Fine print
Fire from Heaven, by Mary Renault
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

Middlesex

Synopsis
A multi-generational saga reveals how the narrator ended up with a chromosomal abnormality that allowed him to be mistaken for a girl until he was a teenager.

My thoughts
I was skeptical of this book when my book club selected it almost 10 years ago. The cover looked overly serious and the premise sounded overly ambitious. And everyone in my book club had a strong opinion on Middlesex. You either loved it or you hated it. I was in the "loved it" camp. It's in my all-time favorites list, and I decided to read it again to see if it was really as good as I remembered it. It was better.

The story is told by 41-year-old Cal Stephanides, an American expat living in Germany. Cal flashes back to a small village in war-torn Greece, where his grandparents' elaborate courtship begins. From there, the story moves to the booming metropolis of Detroit, where Cal's parents grow up. Cal, born Calliope, grows up in a city that's consumed by racial strife, and her family joins others in the white flight to the suburbs. The story takes delicious twists and turns until it finally reaches the pivotal moment - when Callie discovers she's not a girl. And then it deals with the aftermath. (This is the only complaint I have about the book. When Callie/Cal moves away from her family and the characters I'd come to know and love, the story suffers. There are colorful new characters, but they don't have the same depth. And running away was necessary for Cal to come into his own, but I just wasn't as excited about this part of the book.)

The beauty is in the storytelling. Jeffrey Eugenides's writing is infused with love and enthusiasm for his Greek heritage and the city of Detroit. Brilliantly, he uses a production of the play "The Minotaur" as a metaphor for Callie's chromosomal abnormality. Callie's grandparents (all four of them) attend the play about the half-man, half-beast monstrosity the night her parents (both of them) are conceived, thus passing along the genes that will lead to Callie's deformity.

The city of Detroit is just as much a character in the story as Callie or any of her family members. Eugenides describes streets and buildings the way they were in the city's heyday, the way you'd get all misty-eyed about a lost loved one.

The book is nearly perfect - fascinating plot, complex characters, dry humor, and perfect pacing.

Bottom line
Read it - it's a book that will appeal to a diverse array of people from geneticists to linguists.

Fine print
Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
Genre: fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book.

Marie Antoinette: The Journey

Synopsis
A biography of the privileged but unfortunate French queen.

My thoughts
Marie Antoinette, the queen of France during one of the most tumultuous times in European history, is a rich subject for a biography. Antonia Fraser does a good job combing through the mountains of correspondence to, from, and about Marie Antoinette to sketch a sympathetic portrait of her.

Marie Antoinette was a contemporary of Catherine the Great, and it was interesting to read a biography of one and then the other. I found a few similarities between the two famous monarchs - both were forced to leave their families for marriages with men who were physically and emotionally immature. Both were originally from countries that were hostile to the ones they married into. Both were expected to bear heirs and not much else (yet they ultimately eclipsed their husbands - albeit for very different reasons). Both were stifled by a court life that was overly regimented and restrictive. And ... that's pretty much it. Catherine the Great became an effective ruler while Marie Antoinette was swept away with the rest of the monarchy in the French Revolution (which, in turn, horrified Catherine and confirmed her belief that enlightened despotism was not a practical way to rule an empire). Marie Antoinette was the youngest daughter of Maria Theresa, yet her education was severely lacking. Catherine the Great impressed adults with her precocious intelligence when she was a young girl, and as a woman she made a point to educate herself by reading the works of the Enlightenment. Catherine learned to manipulate and work with the politicians and courtiers around her; Marie Antoinette never did. Marie Antoinette was more successful than Catherine in only one area - marital relations. Her relationship with Louis XVI was initially awkward, but they matured into a caring team.

Fraser is a talented historian, but she does a bit too much apologizing for Marie Antoinette. The fact that she was borderline illiterate wasn't her fault, according to Fraser; the blame lies with her negligent tutors and a mother who was far too busy running an empire to properly educate one of her backup daughters. (Marie Antoinette was the fifteenth of sixteen children and was sent to France only after smallpox killed one of her sisters and scarred another so badly that she was considered unfit for marriage.) She may have been flighty, but you can't blame her for that either - that was simply the culture of the French court. She was undoubtedly extravagant, but that was the nature of European royalty.

Even so, the deck was stacked against her. The political climate in France made revolution almost inevitable, although Louis XVI's shaky leadership certainly exacerbated the situation, and the fact that Marie Antoinette was Austrian by birth marked her as a potential enemy no matter who her husband was. The fall of the monarchy, Marie Antoinette's long months in captivity, and her ill-fated attempt to flee to Austria are all compelling reading.

Bottom line
A complete picture of one of the most unfairly maligned historical figures in Western civilization.

Fine print
Marie Antoinette: The Journey, by Antonia Fraser
Genre: biogrphy
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

Alice, Let's Eat

Synopsis
Calvin Trillin writes of his two great loves - his wife and his appetite.

My thoughts
Trillin wrote one of my favorite pieces in The Best American Travel Writing 2009 - a delightful piece on finding the best Texas BBQ restaurant that I loved despite the fact that I know about as much about barbeque as I know about quantum physics.

Alice, Let's Eat is simultaneously a series of humorous vignettes about food and a love letter to his long-suffering wife. Trillin conveys their playful affection for each other - she always trying to restrain him from overeating, he insisting that she's the abnormal one for trying to limit him to three square meals a day. It's bittersweet knowing that Alice passed away in 2001.

There's never a dull moment with the Trillins. To compensate for going solo to a private dinner for "grown-up food writers" concocted by a French chef whose cooking Alice desperately wants to try, Trillin gets tickets for a church fair where the food may or may not include polecat.

This is food writing at its best. You need your sense of taste to enjoy food, and it's nearly impossible to render a meal into an interesting story. Trillin succeeds because he focuses on the pursuit of the meal and the characters he meets along the way. Every single story has laugh-out-loud moments. "I spent an embarrassing number of years in the belief that marshmallows grew on bushes," Trillin confesses at one point in one of my favorite lines. Some of the funniest passages concern Trillin's strong opinions on matters ranging from his love for his home city of Kansas City to his outright hostility to any food that might be healthy.

By the end of the book I felt like I knew the Trillins. I'm not a foodie, but I'd love to have eaten a meal with them. Definitely a meal cooked by someone else, though. I tried to make one of my husband's favorite dishes this week. He commented, "Well ... it would probably taste like croque monsieur to someone who'd never had it before." And then he made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Bottom line
Hilarious, as Trillin always is.

Fine print
Alice, Let's Eat, by Calvin Trillin
Genre: food, humor
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library. It was one of those lovely old hardcovers from that era when a hardcover cost half as much as a paperback does today and there was a slip on the inside back cover with due date stamps from the '70s and '80s.

The Kingmaker's Daughter

Synopsis
The Cousins' War through the eyes of Anne Neville, daughter of Lord Warwick and wife of Edward of Westminster and Richard III.

My thoughts
This is technically the fourth book in Philippa Gregory's series of the Cousins' War, but The White Queen, The Red Queen, and The Kingmaker's Daughter all take place more or less concurrently. The Kingmaker's Daughter rebounds from the somewhat disappointing White Queen, but it's still not as strong as The Lady of the Rivers, chronologically the first book in the series.

This series views the Cousins' War through the eyes of the women who schemed and prayed for York and Lancaster. Gregory depicts Anne Neville as an insecure child pawn who grows into an intelligent, decisive woman. But no matter how strong or independent Gregory tries to make her, Anne Neville remains a woman in a time when women were considered the property of their fathers and then their husbands. As a result, there's a lot of Anne eavesdropping on pivotal conversations, hearing about battles second hand, and wringing her hands when she finds herself in a situation she doesn't have the power to change. There's nothing Gregory can do to make Anne Neville one of the principal players in the Cousins' War when she was mostly an observer. The decisions weren't hers to make, so Anne spends her life dealing with the aftershocks of her father's and husbands' decisions. But there's still plenty of drama and Gregory works skillfully with what she has.

The  novel follows Anne from early childhood, when she's a gawky girl in her older sister Isabel's shadow. Isabel is married off to George Duke of Clarence and their father Lord Warwick plots to put George on the throne. The family dynamics are one of the strengths of this book. Warrick's wife and daughters have no choice but to obediently follow his orders, and the relationship between the sisters is nicely drawn. There's a natural sibling rivalry between them, but they also depend on each other for support in the face of their father's ruthless ambition. Warwick's attempt to replace Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville with George and Isabel fails tragically and spectacularly, and it's one of the most harrowing parts of the entire series. Warwick forces his family to flee, and Isabel, pregnant with her first child, goes into labor in a storm at sea. Gregory suggests that if Isabel had been on dry land with midwives to assist her, everything would have been fine. But Isabel nearly dies and her child is stillborn. It's difficult to read and it's a damning indictment of the male-dominated world of medieval England. Warwick's ambition matters more to him than his own daughter.

Licking his wounds after his ignominious flight from England, Warwick devises a new plan to seize the throne. He marries Anne to the son of his lifelong enemy, Margaret of Anjou, who Anne has been brought up to fear as "the bad queen," and throws his support behind the Lancastrians. This also fails tragically and spectacularly, and Anne loses both her father and her husband in separate battles that she (and the reader) hear about piecemeal from various sources. (Minor quibble: at several points later in the book Anne looks back on Edward of Westminster and her short marriage to him with an affection that I found totally baffling considering that she didn't really know him and didn't like what she did know of him.)

Anne finds herself utterly bereft - her father and husband are dead, her mother has abandoned her to seek sanctuary in a nunnery, her domineering mother-in-law is imprisoned, and her sister has turned on her as a traitor to the Yorks. It's at this point that Gregory decides to give Anne a spine and she runs off with Richard Duke of Gloucester. Their marriage is depicted as a love match, and it's nice to see Anne finally happy (even if the cynical part of me wondered whether Richard was in love with Anne or the wealth and power their marriage brought him).

This series is well done. I'm in awe of the painstaking research Gregory did to sketch a detailed portrait of the women of this era. The women in this series are barely mentioned in the larger historical record, but they come to life in these novels. They matter. Most of the historical record was written by men and not much was recorded about the women of medieval Europe because they weren't the primary decision-makers. Gregory infuses the historical record with a refreshing dash of girl power. It's fun to read even if it isn't the way it actually happened. In some ways the scanty documentation of women gives Gregory more freedom - she's able to invent personalities and events to suit her version of history. And the women in all of her books - not just this series - are definitely more creatures of the 21st century than their own era. They're more independent and less deferential.

Bottom line
Gregory has me hooked on this series. They're like Pringles - once you pop, you can't stop. I love women in history, and this period of English history is rich with drama.

Fine print
The Kingmaker's Daughter, by Philippa Gregory
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

Catherine the Great

Synopsis
The story of a German girl named Sophia who had no Russian roots but married the grandson of Peter the Great and overthrew her incompetent husband to seize the throne and become Catherine the Great.

My thoughts
Catherine the Great was a truly remarkable woman and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert K. Massie knows how to tell a story. (Especially this story. Russian history is confusing, and Massie does a good job making things interesting while explaining the convoluted rules of Romanov succession and keeping the endless foreign ambassadors straight.)

Catherine made her own destiny. She was married at the age of sixteen to the emotionally stunted Romanov heir, Peter, who either could not or would not consummate the marriage. Both Peter and Catherine eventually had extramarital affairs and Massie hints strongly that Catherine's son Paul may have been Sergei Saltykov's child rather than Peter's. Paul was taken from Catherine and raised under the direction of Peter's aunt, the Empress Elizabeth. Catherine was ignored while she recovered and she passed the time by reading the works of the Enlightenment, which influenced the early years of her reign. She began to cultivate friendships with political factions that were opposed to Peter's pro-Prussian leanings (Russia and Prussia were bitter enemies, but Peter's early upbringing had been German). These became significant when Elizabeth died and Peter assumed the throne and immediately halted the Seven Years' War with Prussia on terms that were immensely favorable to Prussia. By this point, Peter was openly hostile to Catherine and was making noise about setting her aside in favor of his mistress. Catherine's supporters rallied behind her and she seized the throne.

As empress, Catherine strove to be an enlightened despot. Early in her reign, she explored the feasibility of emancipating Russia's serfs but found no support among the nobility (the serfs were not freed until the reign of her great-grandson Alexander in 1861). As her reign progressed, she was forced to put down rebellions and she was shaken and horrified by the French Revolution. She came to realize that governing Russia required a heavier hand than Montesquieu, Voltaire, and the other scholars of the Enlightenment advocated.

Catherine was a power on the international scene. She installed one of her former lovers as the titular monarch of Poland and then initiated the partitioning of Poland between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. She also targeted the weakening Ottoman Empire and extended Russia's territory to give it ports in the Black Sea. Catherine ruled alongside (and sometimes fought against) some of the "greats" of European royalty - Frederick the Great of Prussia and Maria Theresa of Austria for starters. (And speaking of them, I'd like to request biographies on these two because I don't know nearly enough about them.)

Catherine blazed her own path when it came to her love life as well. Empress Elizabeth's "favorite" had been accepted in her court and Massie points out that this was de rigueur in other European nations as well. But two factors made Catherine's love life remarkable. First, Catherine had a rather large number of acknowledged lovers. Second, the mature Catherine was something of a cougar. Massie prints excerpts from some of the correspondence between Catherine and her favorites to show Catherine's passionate personality. Some of the most tempestuous letters are between Catherine and Gregory Potemkin, who Massie speculates may have actually married Catherine. His tenure as a favorite was relatively short, but after it was over Potemkin remained one of Catherine's closest and most trusted advisers right up until his death.

Bottom line
A meticulously researched and expertly paced biography of one of the most fascinating European monarchs.

Fine print
Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, by Robert K. Massie
Genre: biography
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

The Makioka Sisters

Synopsis
The four Makioka sisters struggle with love and marriage in the early 1940s in Osaka.

My thoughts
It's a little simplistic to describe The Makioka Sisters as "Pride and Prejudice set in Japan," but it's not completely off the mark. Of the four Makioka sisters, two of them are already married; when the book starts they're trying to find a suitable groom for the third sister, Yukiko. Meanwhile, the fourth sister, who can't get married until Yukiko does, pursues love and career on her own terms.

It's a long book - more than 500 pages - I was really able to get a feel for the characters. I especially related to Taeko, the youngest sister, because she's the most modern. She falls in love with two different men and goes into business for herself - definitely not the path a traditional young Japanese woman was expected to follow. Tanizaki does well with the subtle tension between Tsuruko, the oldest sister, and her younger sisters. Tsuruko and her husband are technically the heads of the family, but they live in Tokyo and are physically and figuratively out of touch with the rest of the family. Tanizaki depicts both the affection and the wariness in the sisters' relationship.

I was also interested to see European characters in this book. The Makiokas' neighbors are German, some acquaintances are Russian (one of them is named Vronsky, a little shout-out to Anna Karenina), and Taeko takes French lessons and considers traveling to France at one point.

However, parts of the narrative bit did meander, and I was frustrated by the fact that the action often took place "off-screen" and then was relayed to the reader by conversations between the characters. My translation also had a couple of funny quirks. There was an entire footnote to describe sushi, but you were on your own if you wanted to know the background of the Battle of Sekigahara.

Bottom line
Interesting and insightful. I'd like to read more of Tanizaki's works.

Fine print
The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki
Genre: fiction, foreign literature
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

Franklin and Eleanor

Synopsis
Hazel Rowley attempts to delve into the unconventional marriage of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

My thoughts
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt are two of the most remarkable Americans of the 20th century and Rowley does a very good job describing their personalities and explaining the context of the times. However, she's somewhat less successful in capturing the dynamic of the marriage, which was the appeal of the book.

The book is subtitled "an extraordinary marriage," and it certainly was. Rowley has exhaustively researched the available correspondence between Franklin and Eleanor themselves and between each of them and their close friends, potential lovers, and employees (which are sometimes one and the same). It's clear that Franklin and Eleanor had a great deal of respect for each other, and each of them needed and depended upon the other. (At least to some degree. They were both fiercely independent and self-sufficient.) I felt like I only gained a superficial understanding of what made their unorthodox relationship work. This isn't really Rowley's fault; the only people who knew how the Roosevelt marriage worked were the Roosevelts themselves, and their relationship was so complicated and multi-faceted that even they probably weren't entirely sure what was going on all the time.

To say that the Roosevelts did not have a smooth marital relationship is a vast understatement. They were overshadowed at their own wedding in 1905 by Theodore Roosevelt - Eleanor's uncle, Franklin's distant cousin, and the president of the United States. From the beginning, they had to live under the scrutiny of Franklin's overbearing mother, who controlled the purse strings and lived next door. Franklin's affair with Eleanor's secretary, Lucy Mercer, devastated Eleanor. They remained married, but the character of the marriage changed. Then came Franklin's battle with and recovery from polio and his decision to seek public office.

This is actually where the dual biography loses steam. A portrait of a marriage is a difficult subject when the interests and everyday lives of the individuals in that marriage diverge, and Rowley's book in effect becomes two separate biographies somewhere around here. Rowley loses the thread that held the marriage together, that shows how Franklin and Eleanor worked together and how they regarded each other. The latter part of the biography is slightly weighted toward Eleanor because of the two she is easier to relate to. Franklin comes off as charming and brilliant, but he's also arrogant.

Bottom line
Find a good biography of one and then read a good biography of the other.

Fine print
Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage, by Hazel Rowley
Genre: biography
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

The Lady of the Rivers

Synopsis
Jacquetta, a Burgundian princess, is married off into the English royal family as a teenager. She gains her footing and forges her own destiny - and that of a dynasty.

My thoughts
This is technically the third book in Philippa Gregory's "The Cousin's War" series, but it's chronologically the first. Jacquetta is Elizabeth Woodville's mother, and The Lady of the Rivers succeeds where The White Queen stumbles. The forbidden love story between the widowed Jacquetta and her late husband's groom is vivid and passionate, even after they've settled into a comfortable married life and produced a bevy of children.

The narrative of The Lady of the Rivers flows better and than it does in The White Queen and I felt a connection with Jacquetta that I just didn't feel with her daughter Elizabeth when I read The White Queen. This is partially because The Lady of the Rivers is a coming of age story and I was able to watch Jacquetta grow from a proud Burgundian princess into a strong-willed and powerful member of the Lancaster court. The Lady of the Rivers is also more successful at weaving the water goddess Melusina into the narrative than is The White Queen. In The White Queen Jacquetta and Elizabeth whistle up winds and mists and storms to defeat their Lancastrian foes, which felt like a cheat to me. The use of magic was more intuitive and less invasive in The Lady of the Rivers. And the book ends with a sweet tie-in to the beginning of The White Queen.

Not only is it more entertaining and satisfying than The White Queen, it also fills in some important background information. Margaret of Anjou, who haunts The White Queen from afar, is more fully fleshed out here. Philippa Gregory does an incredible job straightening out a very complicated era in English history. My husband and I watched the premiere of The White Queen on STARZ last weekend and I had to keep pausing the action to fill him in on the relationships between the characters. I read Alison Weir's non-fiction history The Wars of the Roses six years ago and found it similarly confusing. Everyone had the same names, which was complicated further by the fact that they were sometimes referred to by their family names and sometimes by their titles. I had no such confusion with Gregory's books. And Gregory writes decent battle scenes, too. She sends Jacquetta with Margaret of Anjou to watch the action, which was very effective. Later, she depicts the anguish of women watching for their men to come home from battle.

Bottom line
Read this first and then move on to the rest of the series. It's a fast, engaging read, and it sets up the rest of the action nicely.

Fine print
The Lady of the Rivers, by Philippa Gregory
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book.

White Oleander

Synopsis
Astrid's psychopathic poet mother murders her ex-lover, throwing Astrid into the worst of the foster care system.

My thoughts
I liked this book in spite of itself. It's one of those insufferable poetry-written-as-prose novels where you get dense paragraphs of dreamy, elaborate thoughts and descriptions and six pages later you're still waiting for the point of it all.

But Astrid is such a remarkable character that I had to admire her. She's delicate yet resilient in the way only teenagers can be. She worships her selfish, manipulative mother but has to grow up on her own when she's put into foster care after her mother is sent to prison for murdering her ex-boyfriend. Astrid is placed in one foster home after another, each with its own unique set of horrors, and she grows tougher as she navigates each one. There's the ultra-religious woman with the boyfriend Astrid seduces (or the boyfriend who seduces Astrid - it's hard to tell). There's the racist woman who uses Astrid as a free babysitter. There's the woman who seems nice but who starves her foster children. But the most heartbreaking is Claire. She seems like the ideal mother; she takes a genuine interest in Astrid and encourages her to dream big. But it slowly becomes obvious that Claire is dealing with deep psychological issues of her own. So just when Astrid has found someone who cares for her and a place where she feels comfortable, it's all cruelly snatched away from her.

White Oleander is a sobering look at the U.S. foster care system, but it needs to be taken with a boulder of salt. Astrid's experiences with the foster care system seem cobbled together from a collection of news articles about the most abusive foster parents and then stretched and exaggerated for dramatic effect. The majority of foster parents are genuinely good people who perform a service I'm not a strong enough person to take on myself.

It's such a depressing story - and it takes nearly 500 pages to tell - that it's tough to stick with it. But it's also strangely uplifting. Astrid just doesn't give up and she grows in amazing ways throughout her harrowing journey. I will say that Janet Fitch is a master storyteller. She has a gift for inserting monster plot twists that are plausible and exciting. The story never went the way I thought it would, and I never felt like Fitch took the easy way out of untangling any of Astrid's myriad problems.

Bottom line
A good story bogged down by fussy, flowery storytelling.

Fine print
White Oleander, by Janet Fitch
Genre: fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

The White Queen

Synopsis
Commoner Elizabeth Woodville goes from Lancaster loyalist to York queen.

My thoughts
The drama is lacking in what should be a riveting book. Elizabeth Woodville was a fascinating woman, the wife of Edward IV and the mother of the princes in the Tower. She was a commoner when she married Edward IV for love (some say she ensnared him with witchcraft) during a lull in England's tumultuous Wars of the Roses. Their union and her family's rise to power alienated some of Edward's staunchest supporters and contributed to Edward's overthrow and the restoration of Henry VI, the previous ruler. Edward fled to Flanders, leaving Elizabeth and their children to seek sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, where their fourth child (and first son) was born. Less than a year later, Edward reclaimed his throne and ruled in relative peace until his untimely death in 1483. His twelve-year-old son came to the throne as Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York, was named regent. But before Edward could be crowned, Richard declared Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville invalid and their children illegitimate. This cleared the way for him to seize power as Richard III. Edward V and his only living brother (also named Richard) disappeared and were presumed to have been murdered by ... someone. Exactly who killed them and why remains one of history's most intriguing mysteries. (When I visited the Richard III Museum in York in 2006, there was a whiteboard that allowed visitors to write in their own suspects. There were votes for everyone from George W. Bush to the unpopular coach of England's national soccer team.) Anyway, by the end of The White Queen, Elizabeth is left not knowing whether her sons are dead or alive and she has entered into a secret alliance against Richard III with Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry Tudor, the heir to the Lancaster claim to the throne.

Elizabeth Woodville was a strong and determined woman and there's a lot of rich material to work with, but there's very little heart or soul to The White Queen. Instead it seems more like a 400-page laundry list of "this happened and then this happened and let's drop this name because it will be important in 80 pages." And the supernatural element that Gregory tries to include feels contrived and cheapens the actual history.

The strengths of the novel lie in Philippa Gregory's ability to breathe life into the uncertain parts of history - whether both princes died or one escaped, who killed them, and whether Elizabeth's eldest daughter (also named Elizabeth) fell in love with her uncle Richard III (ick). She also does a good job describing the futility and brutality of war, particularly a civil war.

I picked up this book because on August 10 STARZ will debut a new series based on The White Queen and the other books in Gregory's "The Cousins' War" series. The hook is that it's the Wars of the Roses from the perspectives of the women who played pivotal roles in the conflict. I probably won't reread this one, but I've already moved on to the next book in the series and I'm interested enough in Gregory's retelling of history that I'll probably read the rest of the books, too.

Bottom line
It's such an amazing story that I'd recommend it despite the lackluster storytelling.

Fine print
The White Queen, by Philippa Gregory
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book.

Bridget Jones's Diary

Synopsis
Neurotic twentysomething Bridget Jones searches for a career and a man, not necessarily in that order.

My thoughts
So I'm about 17 years late on this book, but it was worth it. I'm what Bridget calls a Smug Married; I guess I deserve that because I thoroughly enjoyed watching her flail around in the dating pool and I'm very happy I got to live vicariously through a fictional British nutcase for a couple days.

Part of the charm of this book is Bridget's histrionics. No one does hyperbole like the British, and Helen Fielding takes the everyday frustrations that we all experience and raises them to the nth degree. The result is pure comedy and Bridget is a fantastic character. She's recognizable and easy to relate to, but her experiences are much funnier than anything that would happen in real life. Fielding even manages to take the decidedly unfunny subjects of a parent's midlife crisis and the crumbling of a marriage and makes them funny.

Minor quibbles: the book veered off into the truly unbelievable at the very end, and I was a little unsatisfied with the romantic resolution because it was too perfect. The Pride and Prejudice tie-in was clever but distracting.

There's a sequel and now a third book coming out later this year. If Bridget couldn't program her VCR in 1996, I'd hate to think how she's dealing with her iPhone today. It's tempting, especially since the original book is so dated, but I think I'll skip the pre-order and wait for the reviews. And who am I kidding? At the rate I'm going I won't get around to reading it until 2030 anyway.

Bottom line
Quick, funny book. Perfect for vacation or escaping from the in-laws.

Fine print
Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding
Genre: fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book.

The Lute Player

Synopsis
The crusade of Richard the Lionheart, told by his mother, his lute player, and his sister-in-law.

My thoughts
This is a long book - more than 500 pages - and a lot happens. But what's more striking is what doesn't happen.

This book is remarkable in that it was published in 1951 and it presents Richard I as a homosexual man. Norah Lofts was ahead of her time; she writes Richard without judgment. But she doesn't go any further. The legend (as I remember it) goes that Richard was kidnapped and held captive on his way home from his crusade. No one knew where he was, but his lute player Blondel went from castle to castle searching for him. Blondel would sing a verse from a song he and Richard had written and then he'd pause. He finally found Richard when Richard replied with the next verse from wherever he was locked up. In my imagination, Richard and Blondel were in love, but Lofts shies away from writing it this way and Blondel doesn't even get to tell this most dramatic part of the story. Instead, Richard's sister-in-law, who wasn't even there, gets to narrate this part.

None of this actually happened anyway, but it makes a nice story. There was a medieval lute player named Blondel and he did go on crusade. Richard and his wife Berengaria of Navarre did not have a happy marriage, although Lofts created Berengaria's bastard half-sister Anna for the book. This led to an extremely unsatisfactory love quadrangle: Anna loved Blondel, who loved Berengaria, who loved Richard, who loved Blondel. Fortunately, Eleanor of Aquitaine's point of view was free of this messy narrative and all the better for it. Eleanor is a fascinating woman and I enjoyed her chapters a lot. She also balanced out the hysterical Berengaria nicely.

Bottom line
Solid historical fiction, if a little dated. There's also that anticlimactic ending.

Fine print
The Lute Player, by Norah Lofts
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book.

False Impression

Synopsis
A wealthy heiress is murdered, an art specialist is fired, the FBI is investigating her sketchy boss (and, by extension, her), and that's before you throw in a bit of globe-trotting and a Romanian gymnast turned assassin.

My thoughts
I read the first two installments in Jeffrey Archer's Clifton Chronicles, Only Time Will Tell and The Sins of the Father (the third and final book, Best Kept Secret, was published in April). I enjoyed them, so I thought I'd pick up another Archer book - and I ended up liking this one far more than the coming-of-age saga of the Clifton Chronicles.

Part of it was the fact that I liked the protagonist. Actually, I kind of wanted to be the protagonist, what with her extensive knowledge of art and her long-distance running skills. Anna Petrescu is working for a swindler creditor who wants to get his paws on a financially troubled heiress's Van Gogh. The heiress turns up dead when she decides to sell the painting on Anna's advice and we're off to the races on a fast-paced thriller that spans three continents.

There were a few missteps. The story would have been just as dramatic if Archer hadn't used 9/11 as a backdrop (in fact, it feels a bit exploitative to use 9/11 as a plot device). You also have to be able to suspend disbelief for a good portion of the book. But that wasn't a problem for me since I'm trusting and gullible by nature.

Bottom line
Fantastic beach or plane read.

Fine print
False Impression, by Jeffrey Archer
Genre: mystery
Photo by Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

Synopsis
A collection of Gloria Steinem's published writings.

My thoughts
Steinem is such an established feminist icon that it's hard to imagine her as anything else. But she wasn't always and in many ways she never set out to become one of the faces of feminism. This collection of essays shows her evolution from a freelance journalist writing an exposé on the New York Playboy Club to a publishing dynamo at the helm of Ms. magazine. Steinem's admirable strength and courage are clear, but I was surprised at how much humility, uncertainty, and even vulnerability she revealed in her writing.

"I Was a Playboy Bunny," first published in 1963, put Steinem on everyone's radar. She got a job as a bunny in New York's Playboy Club and exposed the lies behind the perky smiles and wiggly bunny tails. It was advertised as an empowering job for a modern woman, but Steinem's piece exposed it as anything but. There was a demerit system of dubious legality, a "uniform" that was painful to wear, and a poisonous work environment. And that's before you even get to the lecherous customers. It was startling to realize what a different world it was for women just a few decades ago. We've come a long way, but the other essays in this collection make you realize that there's still a long way to go.

"The International Crime of Genital Mutilation" was one of the first articles to raise awareness about female genital mutilation. Reading it more than 30 years later, I was inspired to do some research and was disheartened by what I discovered. Despite decades and decades of international efforts to end genital mutilation, the World Health Organization estimates that 140 million women are "currently living with the consequences of FGM." 140 MILLION. I don't even know how to imagine that many people.

Only slightly less alarming are Steinem's articles on pornography. I always thought the argument that women who "star" in porn flicks find it liberating was ridiculous, but I was horrified when I realized the extent of the exploitation in the industry.

"Ruth's Song (Because She Could Not Sing It)" is one of the most powerful essays in the book. It's a very personal ode to Steinem's mother, who went from a headstrong journalist who married for love to a nervous shell of a woman who couldn't function or concentrate before she found help.

Most of the essays are strong, but there are also some that fall flat. I wasn't a fan of "If Men Could Menstruate." Maybe it was funny when it was first written, but now it's become stale. "Men would brag about how long and how much." Har har har.

But as sobering as the book is, there are some truly inspirational passages. In particular, in "Far From the Opposite Shore," Steinem writes that when she ends her speeches, she challenges everyone in the audience to do "one outrageous thing in the name of simple justice" in the next twenty-four hours. These range from the ordinary, like talking to an elected official, to the extraordinary, like organizing a voter registration event, to the heroic, like leaving a violent partner. It's one act, but it takes thought and intent.

The book is certainly dated (it was first published in 1987 and contains essays that date back to the 1960s). But it's worth reading for that very reason. It shows how far we've come in a generation while raising questions about what we must do to keep advancing. The book is a call to action and it has a powerful, enduring message.

Bottom line

Well worth the read even if you're not a women's studies major.

Fine print

Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, by Gloria Steinem

Genre: Women's Studies

Photo from Goodreads

I borrowed this book from the library.

April 1865: The Month That Saved America

Synopsis
Winik's theory is that the foresight and actions of a few powerful men saved the United States from a longer and more damaging Civil War.

My thoughts
The historical "what if" game this book plays is both intriguing and infuriating.

Winik knows what he's talking about. He has a background in national security and foreign affairs, and he's witnessed the aftereffects of some of the most brutal 20th-century civil wars. Civil wars generally don't end as cleanly as ours did. Although we still grapple with the legacy of slavery in this country, the reunification was a success. There was no guerrilla warfare. This was a possibility I'd never considered before. Winik's strength is his ability to ratchet up the tension as he considers the options before each of the major players in the Civil War. Will Lee surrender? Will Grant offer good terms? Will the politicians in Washington honor those terms? Winik manages to draw out the suspense surrounding events that happened almost 150 years ago.

On shakier ground is Winik's argument that the Union's reaction to Lincoln's assassination was a miracle of near-biblical proportions. This portion of the book starts out strong, with a thrilling description of the night John Wilkes Booth barged in to the president's theater box and shot Lincoln. But there are too many ifs here. What if ... Vice President Andrew Johnson's would-be assassin hadn't gotten cold feet at the last moment? What if ... Lincoln's cabinet had refused to turn over power to the detested Johnson?

The book itself is well written and a solid read. Detailed biographies of everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Jefferson Davis take up a good chunk of the book's nearly 500 pages. It's discombobulating to be plopped in late-18th-century Monticello when you're under the impression that you should be at Appomattox in, well, April 1865. But it works because the historical context is critical to understanding why the Civil War ended the way it did and how the Union endured. Winik's succinct biography of Thomas Jefferson is probably the best I've read. It does a tremendous job reasoning the contradictions in his brilliant mind (for example, Jefferson recognized the cruelty and injustice of slavery ... yet he owned slaves [and fathered children with at least one of them, but that's a story for another book that I still haven't read yet]).

Winik also lets his subjects speak for themselves. He quotes liberally from speeches, letters, and other contemporary sources. Lincoln was an ingenious speechwriter. Never has a politician said so much with so few words (I'm thinking of the Gettysburg Address but also his second Inaugural).

Bottom line
Fascinating and informative. Definitely recommended.

Fine print
April 1865: The Month That Saved America, by Jay Winik
Genre: History
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed a battered copy of this book from my library; it's (understandably) been in circulation a lot.

The Fourth Queen

Synopsis
Helen Gloag leaves her small Scottish village for America, but her ship is captured by pirates and she ends up in the harem of the Moroccan emperor.

My thoughts
Debbie Taylor did a prodigious amount of research and it shows. She explains in the author's note that Helen Gloag was a real woman who did become a consort to the emperor of Morocco, but the story itself was a compilation of historical accounts of various similar kidnappings in the eighteenth century. (Apparently there were numerous fair-haired beauties who were captured at sea and taken to the emperor's harem.) Taylor invented her other main character, the dwarf Microphilus, who is the head of the emperor's household and who becomes smitten with Helen himself.

I couldn't help comparing this book to Empress Orchid, which I read a few months ago. Both feature a lot of scheming and focus on the jealousy and rivalries that sprout when you throw dozens of women together with only one man. I enjoyed The Fourth Queen more, simply because the narrative was a lot smoother. Somehow, Empress Orchid had to stop the action to explain court customs and international events, and The Fourth Queen did a better job integrating the explanations with the flow of the story. Some of this was because Helen was a complete outsider and everything was as new to her as it was to the reader, while Orchid was thrown into a new situation in her own world (but not a world a Western audience would implicitly understand). The Fourth Queen was also less concerned with politics and less prudish about sexual life of the harem. (Speaking of which, skinniness was considered a disadvantage in the Moroccan harem. That was a refreshing change.)

I enjoyed the fact that The Fourth Queen went beyond the typical fish-out-of-water struggles. Helen adjusts to life in the harem and gains the emperor's favor to become the titular fourth wife, but that's only the beginning of the story. The rest centers around a murder mystery, and then the plot thickens and there are two murder mysteries.

It's a wonderful premise, but one of Taylor's literary quirks drove me nuts. The chapters are written alternately from Helen's and Microphilus's views, which is a technique that I hate anyway because it leads to a lot of needless repetition as you see events from both characters' points of view. But Taylor makes it even more intolerable because Helen's chapters are written in the third person in the present tense and Microphilus's chapters are purportedly from his diaries and are written in the first person in the past tense. I just ... it made my head hurt, is all. (And now re-reading this review I see I've mixed past and present tenses, so I don't know what I'm complaining about really.)

The ending has a bit of choose-your-own-adventure flair to it. Helen and Microphilus each have a choice to make, but Taylor leaves you hanging. I didn't mind this; it left me free to end the story the way I wanted it to end.

Bottom line
It's an interesting piece of historical fiction about a place that doesn't generally get a lot of attention.

Fine print
The Fourth Queen, by Debbie Taylor
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Synopsis
A gossipy biography of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

My thoughts
I didn't know much about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's life beyond the Kennedy years. She was John F. Kennedy's reluctant political asset in The Making of the President and the brave, stoic widow in Death of a President. She lived through remarkable events and I wondered if she was just as remarkable as a woman. I flew through this book and came to the conclusion that she sort of was and sort of wasn't. She wasn't a driving force in any of the political decisions of her day, but up until that point only Eleanor Roosevelt had shown any sort of political drive. She did mastermind the enduring Camelot myth, and the public face she showed after JFK's assassination was truly remarkable.

But by the end of the book I'd formed an opinion I didn't see coming at the outset. I went in expecting to like Jackie and ended up feeling like I couldn't. She was the product of a different time and a different culture - a time when women were subservient and dependent and a culture of debutante balls and grand European tours. She did become her own woman with a successful career, but she was unquestionably a high-maintenance diva.

This is an unauthorized biography written years after Jackie O died, and Sarah Bradford did a breathtaking amount of research and used her own interviews with many, many people to illuminate her subject. Even so, Jackie remains an enigma. She was an intensely private person, so it's difficult to get a sense of what she really thought or felt, which leads to quite a bit of speculation (that Jackie "must have felt" this way or "could't possibly have thought" that way). In addition, I couldn't help feeling that a lot of the people who were interviewed had their own agendas. And sometimes the book was unnecessarily voyeuristic. There are entire passages devoted to JFK's extramarital sex life - exploits that Jackie probably never knew about that just seem thrown in here to increase the scandal factor.

Bottom line
A thorough warts-and-all biography with a lot of dirty laundry.

Fine print
America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, by Sarah Bradford
Genre: Biography
Photo from Goodreads.
I borrowed this book from the library.

To End All Wars

Synopsis
The First World War, with a focus on the pacifist movement in England.

My thoughts
Adam Hochschild explores World War I as not only the first total war but the first war with a sizable anti-war movement. This was the war that changed everything - the scale of warfare, the way war was conducted, and the way it was viewed back home.

I liked the organization of the book. Hochschild uses the Boer War to set the stage for World War I. That conflict involved some of the same people, from the military minds to the nascent pacifist movement. It's an effective way to introduce some of the major players and ideas. I particularly enjoyed the profiles of two women, Charlotte Despard and Emily Hobhouse, who courageously and selflessly spoke out against the war. Less sympathetic are the Pankhursts, who come across as opportunistic, manipulative, and fanatical.



I was struck repeatedly by how different things were a mere hundred years ago. Hochschild describes a battlefield where commanders couldn't tell what was going on right in front of them because they literally couldn't see what was happening through the haze of battle and lines of communication were unreliable (telephone wires were often casualties of the fighting). Contrast that to 2011, when the president of the United States monitored the raid on bin Laden's hideout halfway around the world in real time.



I can never get over the arrogance of the major powers. As in The Guns of August, To End All Wars depicts European powers that enthusiastically prepared for the outbreak of war yet did not recognize the significance of Franz Ferdinand's assassination when it happened. England, for example, was preoccupied by growing unrest in Ireland, so that scene in the first season of Downton Abbey where Carson mentions that the folks below stairs can think of nothing but the assassination of the Austrian archduke probably never happened in any English manor ever.

To End All Wars also underscores the horror of the senseless loss of life in World War I. The numbers are simply staggering, but even more appalling was the attitude of the military brass. They showed concern when their own losses were lower than expected because they estimated that meant that they'd killed fewer enemy troops. Hochshild does a good job describing the impossibilities of trench warfare, from the logistics of gaining ground to the struggle to stay clean, dry, and sane from day to day.

World War I was a hopeless, futile exercise and the terms of the armistice meant Europe was doomed to repeat it in only a few decades.


Bottom line
I'd recommend it, but not as an introduction to World War I.

Fine print
To End All Wars, by Adam Hochschild
Genre: history
Photo by Goodreads
I own this book

Big Book Challenge 2013

I'm trying something new. It's a Big Book Challenge over at Goodreads. The idea is to read books that are longer than 400 pages. I've set a goal of 10 books of 400+ pages for 2013. The folks doing this challenge are an eclectic bunch - you've got people who appreciate everything from thrillers to history to science fiction to literature.

Reading the boards at Goodreads is endlessly entertaining. That's where I picked up my favorite new term - "kitten squisher," used to describe any tome dense enough to crush your fluffy baby tabby.

Anna Karenina: Part II

I'm still plugging away at Anna Karenina. The movie is coming out on DVD tomorrow. At the rate I'm going, it will debut on network television before I'm finished reading.

Questions, once again, from Christine.

1. Kitty's health has deteriorated as a result of her heartbreak and so she travels to a health spa in Germany with her parents in hopes of reviving her health. It is here that Kitty befriends the young woman Varenka whose actions and beliefs Kitty admires tremendously. What is it about Varenka that has Kitty so enamored? At one point Kitty says she will never marry. Why do you think she says this?

Varenka represents everything Kitty isn't when they meet. She helps others while Kitty is dependent on others. Varenka helps Kitty see that you can help yourself by helping other people. Kitty starts to follow Varenka's example and, finally having a purpose in life, emerges from her depression. Varenka isn't married and instead devotes her life to others. I think Kitty feels she can live a full life without marriage based on Varenka's example.

2. Anna and Vronsky consummate their affair in this section. Do you think what they share is love? And if not, what do you think it is that they share? 

Anna and Vronsky don't think of love in the same way I do. In their culture and their time, marriage was more about partnership in a business sense than love in a romantic sense. Their world seems to be filled with superficial friendships and relationships. Marriage is not based on love. So I do think they love each other and their feelings are in many ways more true than any of the other relationships in the book.

3. Tolstoy writes to great length and detail about the steeplechase. Did you get the sense that these passages foreshadow events among the characters? If so, what?

Vronsky's horse, Frou Frou, is a magnificent horse and he is proud that she's his. But because of his mistake, she breaks her back during the steeplechase. Vronsky was overeager and overconfident and failed to take the race as seriously as he needed to. He's devastated, but I still don't think he'll change. This does not bode well for his relationship with Anna.

4. What are your overall impressions of the book after reading Part Two? Are you enjoying the story? Do you like Tolstoy's writing? 

The stakes have been raised significantly. The writing can be dense, but I am enjoying the story.

The Best American Travel Writing (2009)

Synopsis
A collection of 25 of the best pieces of American travel writing in 2009.

My thoughts
I love all forms of traveling, from armchair to actual. I have a bunch of these travel anthologies and I'd actually read a few of the pieces in this one before I decided to take it on a trip with me and read it cover to cover. It includes one of my all-time favorite travel pieces, Seth Stevenson's hilarious "The Mecca of the Mouse." Stevenson has been featured in other editions of the Best American Travel Writing series, but this piece remains my favorite.

2008 must have been a particularly strong year for travel writing because this book is chock full of absorbing writing. Strangely, there's a lot of water in this anthology, from a long-distance swimmer flailing around in frigid polar waters to a daughter wading through the river that her father fictionalized in Deliverance, from luxury transoceanic cruises to a maddening trip down the Mississippi River on a homemade raft. There are also excellent pieces on areas of the world that are off the normal tourist's radar - Sudan, Lebanon, Nigeria - and two other stand-out pieces deal with emerging tourist markets - ecotourism in Honduras and safaris in Rwanda. One of the things I love about this series is that the editors make a point of including a diverse array of pieces about all parts of the world from a variety of publications.

My favorites are the ones that make me laugh, and there are some real laugh-out-loud pieces in this collection. "The Mecca of the Mouse" is one, but Chuck Klosterman's "Who is America?" packs a lot of giggles into just a few pages. He asked students at the University of Leipzig to write an essay about which 20th-century American they found the most interesting. "I used to think Richard Nixon and Ryan Adams had nothing in common, but I now realize I was wrong - they both share an equal potential to be randomly fascinating to Germans," Klosterman writes.

Calvin Trillin, superb as always, contributes a piece on the unknown Texas BBQ joint that came out of nowhere to take the top spot in Texas Monthly's coveted rankings. Not being a huge fan of BBQ, I was indifferent when I first started reading, but Trillin hooked me three paragraphs in with his assessment of exactly how hard this shook the world of Texas BBQ: "I felt like a People subscriber who had picked up the 'Sexiest Man Alive' issue and discovered that the sexiest man alive was Sheldon Ludnick, an insurance adjuster from Terre Haute, Indiana."

There were a few misses, though. One writer managed to use the word "dissemble" a record number of times in his retelling of a trip to his old neighborhood in Rome. The piece on James Bond might have been interesting if I had more than a passing interest in James Bond. And I could have done without the piece on airline terminals entirely.

Bottom line
There's something for everyone here.

Fine print
The Best American Travel Writing 2009, edited by Simon Winchester
Genre: travel
Photo by Goodreads
I bought this book

Joe College

Synopsis
A humorous account of the exploits of an Ivy League student from a blue collar background in the '80s.

My thoughts
I read Tom Perrotta's Little People a couple years ago and really enjoyed it right up until the end, a large part of which felt too contrived to me. He's written quite a few critically acclaimed books, including Election and The Abstinence Teacher, but I decided to read Joe College. One of my old college buddies recommended this to me shortly after we graduated. I wish I'd read it then; it would have been a whole lot funnier and I would have been able to relate more. It was still a fun read, but it's disappointing if you read it as anything but quick vacation filler.

Perrotta is at his finest when he's describing the everyday inanities of college dorm life. (One of my favorite scenes involves kids trying kim chee for the first time.) He's less successful when he tries to make his characters deal with issues straight from a teen soap opera. Jonathan Tropper is much better at this; his characters live in something that resembles real life, but he ramps up the absurdity and isn't so damn earnest.

That said, the characters are nicely fleshed out and flawed. Danny, the main character, is a Yale student who finds that his New Jersey working class background makes him a novelty among his privileged peers. But he's also a callow jerk, which made me kind of hate him. I wanted to reach through the pages and throttle him. And that's part of the beauty of the book - Danny is a typical selfish teenager who has mistaken his insulated collegiate bubble for the real world.

Final thoughts
Pass on this one, although Perrotta's worth reading. Little Children was better and I'll read some of his more recent novels someday.

Fine print
Joe College, by Tom Perrotta
Genre: contemporary fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library

The Namesake

Synopsis
Gogol Ganguli, first generation Indian-American, struggles with his identity.

My thoughts
It's complicated enough being torn between two cultures, never mind being stuck with a nonsensical name that is from neither. But such is the life of Gogol Ganguli.

Gogol's very traditional parents do their best to stay connected to their Bengali roots while Gogol and his sister do their best to become American. Jhumpa Lahiri does an excellent job describing both sides. It's mostly Gogol's story, but his mother's side of the story is especially well rendered. What this book gets exactly right is its portrayal of a culture that most of its intended audience is not familiar with. Lahiri explains Bengali customs in a way that doesn't seem intrusive or overbearing.

Lahiri's writing is meticulous and her characters are beautifully drawn. The narration is almost photographic; Lahiri describes things that most people don't notice in their own lives. But this hypersensitivity adds an element of unreality. I couldn't tell you how many glasses are in my cupboard and how many are in my dishwasher right now. I'm not even sure what dishwasher detergent I have under the sink - and I just opened a new container yesterday. Lahiri goes on at length about these types of details and while it's beautifully done, it does clog the narrative and puts a barrier between the reader and the characters. This started to get to me around the time Gogol got a girlfriend. Which was about a third of the way into the book. This level of detail was one of the things I loved about Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, and I think it's better suited for shorter pieces.

And I don't know quite what to make of the ending. On the one hand, I don't think every book needs to have some sort of huge crisis to resolve and I like that there's no manufactured hullabaloo for Gogol to overcome; instead, he has a quiet epiphany and gets on with his life. But on the other hand, the book just kind of ... ends.

Bottom line
It is a wonderful, lyrical book that somehow wasn't for me.

Fine print
The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri
Genre: fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book