Book Review

Hello everyone. I hope I am doing this correctly. Not really used to the whole "Blog" thing. Anyway, if you are anything like me, you have very little idea what these books are about, and have no clue which one to vote for rather than the title itself. So I went through the web and found as much description as I could with my defunct brain and made up a short "Book Review". I hope this helps you, and if anyone finds any errors in it, or find the whole thing annoying, well, you should know that I used to play hockey so you don't want to fight me. Ho ho ho. Oh, by the way, I don't take any responsibility at all on the accuracy of these descriptions (I found them on the web, so you can see how solid my sources are, ha!). Cheerios!

ALIAS GRACE by Margaret Atwood

I think it is based on the true story from 1843? It’s about Grace Marks who was serving a life sentence for murder of her employer and his housekeeper. Some believed she was innocent and she claimed not to have any memory of the murders.

ANIL’S GHOST by Michael Ondaatje

The life of Anil Tissera, a native Sri Lankan who studied in the United States and became a forensic pathologist. She returns to Sri Lanka in the midst of its merciless civil war as part of a Human Rights Investigation by the UN, and discovers the skeleton of a recently burned victim in a government area. She sets out to identity the skeleton, nicknamed Sailor, and bring about justice the nameless victims of the war.

BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM by Kate Atkinson.

The book covers the experiences of Ruby Lennox from a middle-class English family. By interspersing flashbacks with the narrative of Ruby's own life, the book chronicles the lives of four generations of women from Ruby's great-grandmother Alice to Ruby's mother's failed dreams.

BIRTH HOUSE by AMY MCKAY

Dora Rare and Miss Babineau, two midwives, help the women of Scots Bay through infertility, difficult labour, breech births, unwanted pregnancies, and even unfulfilling marriages. But with the arrival of a medical doctor with modern birth methods, an uncertainty that erupts in a war of gossip, accusations, and recriminations after a woman dies.

BLACK SWAN GREEN by DAVID MITCHELL

Black Swan Green covers the year 1982 and the beginning of 1983, the stammering thirteen year old Jason Taylor recounting month by month his life in the English backwater of Black Swan Green in Worcestershire. It's a novel of adolescence and growing up, and along the way his family falls apart.

BLOODLETTING AND MIRACULOUS CURES by Vincent Lam

I am reading this right now. It’s about medical students and their lives (fiction). I think he is a doctor himself? He won the Giller a few years ago with this I think.

THE BOOKSELLER OF KABUL by Åsne Seierstad

A Norwegian journalist who covered the fall of the Taliban in November 2001, she found a seemingly sympathetic, educated, Afghan bookseller in Kabul and moved in with him and his family to write a book about them. The result is stunning and probably not at all what she originally had in mind.

THE BROOKLYN FOLLIES by Paul Auster

It sounds like a story about a 59 year old, retired and divorced man, feeling really depressed and wanting to kill himself. He moves to Brooklyn and the book describes the life there. He ends up loving it there and starts to feel better just in time for 9-11.

CHILDHOOD by Andre Alexis

It chronicles the childhood – or perhaps the loss of childhood – of Thomas MacMillan, who sets out to piece together the early years of his life. Raised in a Southern Ontario town in the ’50s and ’60s, Thomas is abandoned to the care of his eccentric Trinidadian grandmother. Then, at ten, his mother, Katarina, reclaims him, taking him to Ottawa and to the once-splendid Victorian home of Henry Wing, a gentle conjurer whose love of science and the imagination becomes an important legacy. But is he Thomas’s father? Moving and wryly humorous, Childhood tells the story of a man’s quest for what is lost, bringing him closer to the truth about himself.

CITY OF FALLING ANGELS by John Berendt

He wrote “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”, which I presume just about everyone knows. I tried to read this one a while ago and found that it was VERY different from that book. I thought it was a non-fiction description of a life in Venice.

CLARA CALLAN by Richard B. Wright

In the fall of 1934, Nora Callan sets off to New York to find work as an actress. Older sister Clara is left alone in the family home, mourning her father, missing her sister, and wondering who she is without the people who have left her behind. The book unfolds in a series of journal entries and letters.

COLD MOUNTAIN by Charles Frazier

Everyone knows this one, right? I’ve never read the book though, so if anyone has an input...

THE COLONY OF UNREQUITED DREAMS by Wayne Johnston

About Newfoundland that centres on the story of Joe Smallwood, the true-life controversial political figure who ushered the island through confederation with Canada and became its first premier. Narrated from Smallwood's perspective, it voices a deep longing on the part of the Newfoundlander to do something significant, “commensurate with the greatness of the land itself”.

COMPLICATED KINDNESS by Miriam Toews

Nomi Nickel is the narrator. Her mother and her sister have both left the family, separately and without warning at the start of Toews' account of the life of an angsty 16 year old girl growing up in a Mennonite community. Why her mother and her sister have left becomes more clear as the novel goes on, and the lifestyle of the Mennonite community is described and decried in a way that only a rebellious teenager could.

THE CURE FOR DEATH BY LIGHTNING by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

Takes place in the poor, isolated farming community of Turtle Valley, British Columbia, in the shadow of the Second World War. The fifteenth summer of Beth Weeks’s life is full of strange happenings: a classmate is mauled to death; children go missing on the nearby reserve; an unseen predator pursues Beth. She is surrounded by unusual characters, including Nora, the sensual half-Native girl whose friendship provides refuge; Filthy Billy, the hired hand with Tourette’s Syndrome; and Nora’s mother, who has a man’s voice and an extra little finger. Then there’s the darkness within her own family: her domineering, shell-shocked father has fits of madness, and her mother frequently talks to the dead. Beth, meanwhile, must wrestle with her newfound sexuality in a harsh world where nylons, perfume and affection have no place. Then, in a violent storm, she is struck by lightning in her arm, and nothing is quite the same again. She decides to explore the dangers of the bush.

DISGRACE by J.M. Coetzee

"Disgrace" is Coetzee's first book to deal explicitly with post-apartheid South Africa, and the picture it paints is a cheerless one that will comfort no one, no matter what race, nationality or viewpoint.

Eat, Pray, Love: bla bla bla by Elizabth Gilbert

Trina is not kidding. There is something like 37 groups on the wait list for this one. We won’t get it for a several years!