A Lack of Depth in "First Comes Love", by Emily Giffin - Book Review

Having been a dedicated Emily Giffin reader since her first book, Something Borrowed, I anxiously awaited the arrival of her new one, First Comes Love. Despite reading it in only a few days, I was sorely disappointed in this one.

First Comes Love follows the Garland family after the loss of their eldest son, Daniel. This is not a giveaway since you learn about his death in the first chapter. The book primarily focuses on his two younger sisters, Josie and Meredith, and how they sort through their lives after he’s gone. While the book starts with a flashback to his death, the story is set fifteen years afterwards.

The problems with this book are numerous. First, neither Josie nor Meredith is particularly likable. Josie is a former theater actor turned high maintenance lawyer who hates her job and her life, for the most part, even though it is one to be envied. And this is not a case of deep seated clinical depression gone untreated. She’s just dissatisfied and ventures out to determine why.

Josie is a self-centered elementary school teacher wallowing over failed relationships and the fact that she is fast approaching forty with no baby of her own. So, taking matters into her own hands, she begins investigating insemination despite sorely lacking maturity to be a mother.

While Giffin usually excels at character development and ferreting out the good in her otherwise flawed characters, in this book, the development feels hurried and shallow. Even as she tries to have Josie and Meredith become more self-aware and less rigid respectively, she does so with such quick strokes it isn’t believable.

Also, though many of Giffin’s books have some things left unresolved at the end, in this one, it feels as though she just got tired of writing. She tries to wrap up major life issues for the characters with a few short chapters and it simply doesn’t ring true. If her intent was to leave it open for a sequel, she failed to present an Act I worthy of warranting an Act II.

To me, the book felt as though Giffin was under the gun to get something out. She may have accomplished her goal but she gave us a book that falls well short of the standard we have come to expect. 

Published: 2016
Publisher: Ballantine Books

Elizabeth's rating: 2 stars 

Escaping the Past in “Transformations”, by James Foley Smathers – Book Review

My friend’s dad, who is very large in stature and personality, gave me Transformations with the instruction to ‘read it.’ Out of respect and a sense of obligation, I did as told with little expectation. This is the first book for James Smathers, a retired marine and Vietnam veteran, and I was pleasantly surprised. I read it in two days.

The story tracks two main characters, Helen Warner and Jackson Andrews, who have a chance encounter in the Bahamas after their respective marriages fall apart.

Transformations
By Mr James Foley Smathers

The manner in which those marriages fall apart is fairly pedestrian. The ensuing levels of revenge in which the jilted lovers engage is not. Knowing that Smathers is happily married for decades makes one wonder where he came up with his ideas but, hey, that is what fiction is all about, right?

Smathers’ dialogue is a bit stilted with run-ons and hazy transitions which sometimes requires back tracking in order to figure out which character is actually speaking. And his attempt to replicate the local Bahamian accent is overwrought and feels more like a nod to southern slaves in the 19th century, although you do get the point. There are also some punctuation errors which are typical in a self-published book. 

Those things aside, the story telling is sound and the book moves along at a fast clip. Smathers demonstrates vast knowledge on the Bahamas, marlin fishing, addiction recovery, small aircraft flight and maintenance, and bearer bonds. Whether those insights are personal or based on research, they add texture to a classic story line of love lost and new love found.

Fun summer vacation read.

Published: 2016
Publisher: Self Published, James Foley Smathers

Elizabeth’s rating: 3 stars

Who Are the Good Guys in “The Director”, by David Ignatius - Book Review

Taking a page from Sara’s post asking authors of children’s books to stop underestimating their audience…Dear writers of political suspense novels: please stop slighting women. These novels have a wider audience than the dudes they’re targeted to. Spies, politics, and suspense are subjects a lot of women love as well. And with a generation of pretty sharp young women entering the work force and reading adult fiction, you may be pushing this audience away, as well as portraying women in a subservient light with men.

The Director: A Novel
By David Ignatius

How does this relate to The Director?  We’ll get to that. In the meantime, I’ll start with how much I did enjoy this cyber-espionage thriller. I tend to gravitate to rather heavy subjects and need to remind myself to pick up some intellectual candy every once in a while. This fit the bill perfectly. David Ignatius is a well-respected, experienced journalist with the Washington Post. He’s written several political thrillers; one made into the film, Body of Lies. He’s a skilled writer and digs deep into his subjects.

The Director takes on the thorny and very prevalent subject of cybersecurity and highly proficient hackers. The story begins with a new CIA Director, Graham Weber. Weber is an anomaly in the intelligence community - an outsider from the business world and outspoken about government abiding by its laws. His idealist philosophy immediately comes into conflict with safeguarding the nation his very first day on the job. Weber struggles with maintaining his own beliefs and morals, how far to bend them for the good of the country, and staying alive. But he has a mole within the CIA, and he has to catch him red-handed. Who does he trust in the den of spies, hackers, and politicians? As the story unfolds, we’re taken to secret hideouts, shell companies, embassies, safe houses, and the White House. 

All of this equates to a well-constructed plot and a very fun read. Here’s where my issue is, which is not exclusive to Ignatius (see my post on Leaving Berlin). The leading female character, Dr. Ariel Weiss, is beautiful, sexy, and wicked smart. She’s a cyber expert with the CIA and knows how to work the system. She essentially has to play double agent, spying within her own agency, while balancing the politics and secrets amongst the hackers, the CIA Director, and Director of National Intelligence. But for all her education and training as a secret agent, she’s amazingly vulnerable. And quite frankly, some of the scenes including Weiss are wholly ridiculous. Perhaps, geared to a male audience, Ignatius believes this is what they want to read. Or perhaps he’s simply playing into the male fantasy of women who are smart and sexy, yet still cannot fully succeed without a man’s helping hand. Well, maybe it’s still true.  

Despite this annoyance, I do recommend The Director. It’s incredibly interesting to read about international cyber warfare, along with our own country’s political cover. Ignatius bases his subjects on a certain amount of fact. Which leaves the reader to wonder how much of it is reality. Regardless, engage your suspension of disbelieve, and give it a shot.

Published: 2014
Publisher: W.W. Norton

Vickie’s rating: 3 stars 

Debut Novel, “The Girls”, by Emma Cline - Book Review

I’ll begin with a line from The Girls, when thirty-something year old main character Evie is thinking about a teenager in love she’s met and from whom she feels a familiar hunger: “Poor Sasha. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get.”

The Girls is a new release from Emma Cline - her first novel. And it’s quite impressive. The story is loosely based on the Manson Family cult of the late 1960’s in California. It revolves around Evie Boyd, a 14-year old only child to divorced parents. Of some wealth and education, Evie is not particularly impressed with school, the other girls, nor with her mother’s boyfriends. She drifts into a friendship with Suzanne, who is wild, unencumbered, and has little care in the world. Suzanne is part of a “family” of sorts - a group of mostly teen girls, let by the enigmatic Russell. They live in poverty and filth, steal their food, and beg for anything else they need. They’re high most of the time - booze, pot, or any drug they can get their hands on. Capitalism is bad. Sharing and love is all that matters. And Evie is free to come and go as she pleases, but regardless of the environment, she prefers to be with Suzanne.

The Girls: A Novel
By Emma Cline

There is something about Suzanne that makes Evie feel as if she matters. She is self conscious, invisible, wanting, desperate for meaningful connection. With Suzanne, Evie becomes someone of significance - sweet Evie. So eager to please and belong. Finally, there is someone that truly knows her. Where they’ve come from and where they’re going doesn’t matter. And even as they lure her deeper into their deviant orbit, she feels it’s generally harmless, buying more and more into their distorted sense of justice.

The book is told from Evie as an adult, revealing the series of events in flashbacks to 1969. It movingly calls out the insecurities and insubstantial role many girls and women have borne. “I knew just by being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe in yourself.” But Cline does not at all present a feminist tome; simply a version of coming of age that crosses cultures, and doesn’t ignore the common threads we have, often continuing into adulthood.

Cline’s sensitivity and expression of girls and women is remarkable, considering she is a mere 25-years old. She provides a rare prescience along with a powerful writing style that had me paying attention to every word.

Published: 2016
Publisher: Random House

Vickie’s rating: 4 stars 

Intensely Intimate With “Thirteen Ways of Looking”, by Colum McCann - Book Review

Colum McCann is truly a master of his craft. This is my first read of McCann’s library of work, but his evocative nature begs further discovery. In the midst of writing Thirteen Ways of Looking, McCann himself was attacked while trying to help a woman who had been assaulted, after which he suffered a broken cheekbone and teeth. He writes in the book’s Author’s Note, “Sometimes it seems to me that we are writing our lives in advance, but at other times we can only look back. In the end, though, every word we write is autobiographical, perhaps most especially when we attempt to avoid the autobiographical”. When you read the book, you’ll understand how poignant this statement is.

Thirteen Ways of Looking includes a novella and three short stories. The title is based upon the poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, by Wallace Stevens, of which McCann includes a stanza of the poem at the beginning of each section of the novella. The stories are quite different from one another, but the unifying theme is a strong sense of yearning and loneliness, vividly told.

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Terrifying Truth in "A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy", by Sue Klebold - Book Review

This book is not a cautionary tale, it is a horror story. Not just because of the tragedy that unfolded at Columbine High School that fated day in 1999, but because of what was going on inside the Klebolds house up until then: NOTHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY. 

The pressing question in everyone’s mind when they think about the parents of Dylan Klebold is: How did they not know? The simple answer is: They didn’t.

In her gut wrenching new book, Sue Klebold will convince even the biggest of skeptics that neither she nor her husband, both actively involved parents in each of their sons’ lives, had a clue of what was going on inside their child’s mind and outside of their home. 

Klebold wrote this book as a warning. 

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Dystopian Love Story: “The Girl With All the Gifts”, by M. R. Carey - Book Review

The Girl With All the Gifts was an audio book for me, and frankly, it was made great by the narration of Finty Williams. This science fiction novel is not completely mired down in it’s “sci-fi-ness” (a plus for me). While certainly not of the world as we know it, writer M. R. Carey’s characters seem realistic enough.

The book begins with Melanie - a delicate child living in a cell. She’s chained to a chair, eats once a week, participates in school with other children, and is extraordinarily intelligent. We find out rather quickly that Melanie and the other 20 or so students are “hungries” - not quite living and not quite dead. So yes, I unwittingly read a zombie book.

The story begins far into the future - a dystopian England where all advanced technology has been destroyed, and healthy humans live within an enclosed environment or protected military outpost. There is a constant fear of attack from any measure of creature outside the walls, whether gangs of scavengers or hungries.  Melanie is there it seems, as an experiment - kept under complete control for both social and medical research for the heartless Dr. Caldwell to find a cure. When the base where Melanie is housed is attacked and overrun, somehow Dr. Caldwell, the angry commanding sergeant, a rather witless soldier, a nurturing teacher, and Melanie manage to escape. The ensuing journey is a long game of cat and mouse - running from the hungries and trying not to kill each other.

Even with all of this, the book is more of care and nurturing between Melanie and her teacher, Ms. Justineau. Melanie has never known parents or even had physical contact of any kind. Ms. Justineau sees in Melanie a curious, sweet, and intelligent child that simply needs love. And though they must both learn to control their impulses - in Melanie’s case quite deadly - they find common ground.

The characters were well crafted enough that I forgot about the flimsy plot.  It did, however, end rather abruptly, and left me wanting for a more pleasant conclusion. I’m no zombie expert, but overall I’d say The Girl With All the Gifts did well for the genre.

Published: 2014
Publisher: Orbit

Vickie’s rating: 3 stars 

"In a Dark, Dark Wood", by Ruth Ware - Book Review

This is a modern day whodunit that reads much like an Agatha Christie mystery except with current technologies like cell reception and texting capability. Five women and one man gather for a ‘hen’ party, the British equivalent of an American bachelorette party, to celebrate the nuptials of Clare. Surprised by the invite since she hasn’t spoken to Clare (her ex-best friend) in years, curiosity gets the best of main character Lenora (also known as Lee, Leo or Nora), who decides to tag along to the fete with Nina (her current best friend). At final count, there is Nora, Clare, Nina, Melanie (who experiences an acute case of separation anxiety from her new born), Flo (the overly eager new best friend of Clare) and Tom (the gratuitous gay male friend).

In a Dark, Dark Wood
By Ruth Ware

The setting is the perfect thriller locale: a house deep in a ‘dark, dark wood’ belonging to Flo’s aunt who is elsewhere. The house is big and austere and almost becomes a character in the story. With huge windows facing out, the occupants can only see a short distance into the woods but seem utterly exposed to anything or anyone outside that glass. The entire time the group is in the house, as a reader, you feel on edge about exactly what IS out there.  

The story is peppered with the right amount of red herrings, plot twists, and eerie occurrences. Author, Ruth Ware adeptly works her mystery writer magic that keeps you repeatedly changing your mind about which characters are villains and which are just unlucky bystanders roped into something wicked.

No thriller would be complete without a death, and this book has one. Interestingly though, the actual death is anti-climactic compared to the journey to it and the aftermath. Ware creates tension in the story from start to finish.

While I did figure out the final plot twist just a bit before it was revealed, that discovery took nothing away from the build up of the mystery. “In a Dark, Dark Wood” will have you double-checking that your doors are locked if you’re reading it at night. It is a solid mystery with the right amount of chill.

Published: 2015
Publisher: Gallery/Scout Press

Elizabeth's rating: 4 stars

"The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls", by Anton DiSclafani - Book Review

It's not easy transitioning into adulthood, and certainly not for a 15-year old southern society young lady in 1930. The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls introduces us to Theodora "Thea" Atwell, narrator of this coming of age novel. Thea has lived an idyllic, autonomous childhood with her parents and twin brother in rural Florida until she becomes the center of a scandal and is sent off to boarding school. 

Thea is angry with her parents for sending her away, but she takes on the challenge of this new, foreign environment with poise. At times she is a youthful spirit, and at others she is wise beyond her years. She must learn to navigate the social strata of wealthy southern girls in this North Carolina landscape. She is a quick study and soon discovers who her allies and adversaries are. She is most at ease when in the riding ring as she expertly commands her steed, evoking the confidence of her youthful roaming at home in Florida.

Thea is a combination of innocence and shame, and author Anton DiSclafani artfully combines these traits into an authentic character. The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls is a well-written book that gives nothing away. It is filled with suggestion, and gives credit to the reader to reach the correct conclusions.

Published: 2013
Publisher: Riverhead Books

Vickie's rating: 3 stars

Having Fun with "Troublemaker", by Leah Remini - Book Review

Fully understanding the wrath that Scientology brings down on those who speak out against the “church”, Leah Remini comes out swinging in her new book, TroubleMaker, which chronicles her life in the church as well as her departure.

She admits right up front to being a liar, a cheater and a home wrecker. She even airs her family’s dirty laundry in an effort to cut the Church of Scientology off at the pass. In her words, she did it “to save them some money” by not having to undertake a smear campaign to discredit her.

Where Going Clear by Lawrence Wright should be the assigned text for anyone who wants a true look inside the history of L. Ron Hubbard and his “religion”, TroubleMaker is the salacious gossip side of the story. Remini does a fabulous job of describing in detailing the tenets of Scientology, how it works, and what happens when you step out of line in the eyes of the leadership.

She also dishes on what we want to hear about most: Tom Cruise, the most famous Scientologist, his star studded wedding, and, to a lesser degree, other A-listers who are members.

Remini writes like she acts. She’s noisy, a bit crass, and somewhat defensive and insecure. But she is more prophetic in print that I’ve ever considered her to be on screen. While she has very specific personal reasons for striking out at the church, the book isn’t just a rag session.  It digs pretty deep into the soul of Scientology and how it casts a net over its members that can be virtually impossible to escape. The sheer fact that she didn’t leave sooner evidences the vice-like grip the church exercises on its members.

TroubleMaker is a survivor’s story sprinkled with humor and the type of glimpses inside the life of a show biz star that we all relish reading. It is a page-turner if not a work of literary genius. She is brave for telling her story and while I used to actively not like her (probably in large part due to her Scientology beliefs), I came away from the book not only liking her but rooting for her.   

Published: 2015
Publisher:  Ballantine Books

Elizabeth's rating: 3.5 stars