Working Girl Reviews Gives "Whispers" Golden Slipper Award!

My first professional review for WHispers in Autumn is in!

I was thrilled when I received Whispers in Autumn for review. I’ve read other M. Jean Pike novels and I’m particularly fond of her paranormal’s. This is the second in the Love On The Lake series and although the paranormal aspect was absent from the first (Shadow Lake), it’s back with this installment.

In this second novel we meet for the first time Emma’s friend, Dove. An expert in paranormal studies and a physic medium, Dove has just helped the Philadelphia Police Department solve a brutal murder and picked up a stalker along the way. This madman believes Dove is a witch and wants her dead. After receiving an invitation to Emma and Shane’s wedding, she decides a sabbatical is in order. She’ll go to the wedding and stay at Shadow Lake where she can enjoy the peace and quiet as well as hide out with the hope her stalker won’t be able to find her before the police find him.

Shadow Lake is everything Emma had told her it would be—peaceful, beautiful, and serene. Unfortunately the spirits haunting the park are not so at peace. They clamor for Dove’s attention, but she’s learned over the years to shut them out when necessary for the sake of her sanity. One thing she hadn’t counted on was meeting Dusty and the immediate passion she feels for him. Dusty is a man with a past; living with the grief of a heart wrenching tragedy he can’t let go of. Although he feels unworthy of loving a woman like Dove, he can’t resist the overwhelming physical and emotional effect she has on him.

Ms. Pike’s powerful characterizations, vivid imagery, and fast pace captures the reader from the first sentence and holds them until the last, making Whispers in Autumn a true winner. This is not a cookie cutter romance; Ms. Pike’s attention to detail and unique storytelling ability sets this one apart. The suspense is nail-biting in intensity at times. The love scenes are beautifully done without being too graphic and the spine tingling ghostly encounters are right on.

All the characters in Whispers in Autumn are vibrantly alive, with their own individual flaws. The main players are likable, even lovable—generating sympathy and a true desire from the reader for them to overcome the many obstacles to their happiness. I appropriately hated the villain, but still managed to feel a tiny drop of compassion for his madness.

This is a shorter novel and can be read in one sitting, which is good because you won’t want to stop reading once you start. But don’t let the shorter length fool you. Whispers in Autumn is chock full of romance, paranormal activity, and suspense. There’s something for everyone and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes contemporary romance, paranormal romance, and romantic suspense.

–Willow

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[Via http://mjeanpike.wordpress.com]

People of the Book - Geraldine Brooks

People of the Book is a lovely story. At its heart is an appreciation of a sacred Jewish text and the sacrifices different people with differing religious beliefs have been prepared to go to to keep it safe over the centuries. It is a fictionalised history tracing the turbulent journey of an actual document, the Sarajevo Haggadah.

The story is told in alternating chapters. Hanna, a rare book restorer from Australia is invited to Bosnia for a precious viewing of the Haggadah which has surfaced after many years. While examining it, a mystery of sorts presents itself. Where has it been? What do the small clues she finds reveal about it’s history. Hanna follows these clues around Europe and calls on her contemporaries and mentors to help her along the way. Hers is the contemporary voice of the story and is balanced nicely with the historical chapters which trace the life of the Haggadah through the centuries, countries and wars. These historical chapters are thoroughly researched and each chapter is beautiful in its own right – introducing us to life in a different time and place.

While the style of the alternating chapters worked well, I liked the present day character and story of Hanna less than the historical parts – she was a little brash and over patriotic at times for me!

This is a huge story – not so much in the number of pages but what it covers. The edition I read had an interview with Geraldine Brooks at the back where she acknowledged the huge task it was and that it took several years on and off to complete. I guess all authors give a lot of themselves when writing a book but I could sense that especially with this book.

Lovely. Read for the Aussie Author, Bibliophilic and Support Your Local Library challenges.

[Via http://giraffeelizabeth.wordpress.com]

Current reading: Tokyo Real

Iconic enough, kids?

This book, Tokyo Real by “Ryu” is something of a milestone for me! It’s the first Japanese book I have read completely, from beginning to end, in Japanese. This isn’t as much of an achievement as some might think, because it’s a “keitai shosetsu” (Mobile phone novel), I think, or at least it might as well be. Being a keitai shosetsu means that

• it’s in large font, double-spaced lines, with lots of very short lines for dialogue
• The kanji (japanese characters) are drawn from the limited set on a phone, and a lot of them I can read
• It’s only 190 pages long, with a blank page at the start of each chapter
• chapters are short

so, you know, not really such a big deal. But it’s in Japanese! Since it’s untranslated as far as I know, and a pretty crap book, I’m going to lay out the plot, because there’s not much else to the review really. This means there are spoilers below. If you really want to read a crappy Japanese mobile phone novel about sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, skip the next paragraph:

Aya is a schoolgirl who takes lots of ecstasy and parties a lot with her friend Yuko. She is raped after a trance party by 3 guys in a van and goes into a bit of a downward spiral that is arrested by a friendly yakuza chap called Naoya who is very rich and likes her very much (presumably because she’s a schoolgirl?). They fall in love but she can only have sex on ecstasy and he won’t let her use ecstasy because drugs are bad oh no! This means they don’t get to have sex (stupid man!) so he goes and hangs out with his favourite hostess (this is really not a relevant point in the story, it fills 3 sentences at at the very end). Aya starts using ecstasy during the day because she’s sad, and then she realises that she can have sex on ecstasy with men other than her lover, so she goes to her drug dealer and spends a lot of time having lots of sex with him, on ecstsasy, and becomes a junkie, and loses weight, and Naoya notices but doesn’t want to admit that his girlfriend’s a junkie loser so he ignores it. Anyway, Aya’s dealer gives her K and she has an overdose and her friend Yuko stumbles on her being a freak ,so she calls Naoya, who comes over to the dealers house, and Aya, in the middle of her k-hole dream, stabs him to death by mistake while she thinks she’s a god. Then she goes to prison (this takes a page) and when she comes out Yuko is there for her, so she decides to try living again.

That’s it. It’s a classic overwrought teenage-junkie story, but it has a sweet ending: Aya has been in prison till she is 22 years old, and this means she missed coming of age day and spent it instead in her cell thinking about her dead boyfriend. When she gets out, Yuko takes her to a hairdresser and then a photographers, and reveals that, because Aya was not there for her, Yuko too didn’t go to her coming of age day celebration – she wanted to wait. So on the last page they’re wearing their kimono and having their coming-of-age day photo taken, and Aya gets to say “thank you” just before the flash of the camera and that’s it.

It’s a perfect movie script, and in fact it was turned into a movie. Happy days!

So, my Japanese is definitely not good enough for me to comment on the writing style. I asked a friend, though, and she told me that the narrative style is very plain and direct, really just stating the facts without any poetic twists or style. However, the dialogue is written in a very naturalistic style, like young people speaking, which helps to give a certain atmosphere of trashiness to the novel. Unfortunately, this means that for me it’s the equivalent of a Japanese student of English, having done one 6 month intensive course and a bit of self-study, trying to read the dialogue from Trainspotting. Bad plan. Fortunately by the miracle of Japanese characters (kanji) I could get the general gist of the dialogue without having to understand the nuance of teenage slang. Whew!

My main complaint about the novel is that Aya’s slide into disgrace doesn’t seem to be related to her rape at all, which means that the rape scene could be construed as slightly gratuitous. Once she reveals to Naoya that it happened, and he says “you’re not dirty”, that’s it! It just kind of slides out of her pscyhe. But, even though it’s emotionally overwrought and sentimental, I really liked the ending. The final meeting between Aya and Yuko was quite moving. Maybe if I could actually read Japanese like a native it would have come off as trite and contrived (scratch that maybe). Incidentally, I worry about this with my Japanese in general – because my education is always going to be sub-standard compared to even a middle-school graduate, I’m going to be very vulnerable to sentimentalism, cheap imagery, etc. I don’t think this is true in English, even though I like Last of the Mohicans.

My next attempt at Japanese reading will be the Japanese Pathfinder. I don’t want to tell you why because it’ll jinx me. This is going to be a lot easier to read than Tokyo Real because:

• I don’t need to care about nuance
• I already know what it will say
• The language is like a formal document, say, a stats text, and I’ve studied that language before (plus it’s simple)
• I can use rikaichan to read kanji I don’t know as I go (My God, rikaichan is the most miraculous software ever invented).

Anyway, if you’re as crap at Japanese as me, I recommend this book. If you can actually read Japanese well, I strongly suggest reading something good.

[Via http://faustusnotes.wordpress.com]

Herbs Hanging from the Rafters

Henry Beston, author of The Outermost House, described Herbs and the Earth as “part garden book, part musing study of our relation to nature through the oldest group of plants known to gardeners.” Beston’s wonderful prose leads us through the history, lore and uses of herbs. He wrote this book from his study in his farmhouse in Maine. Beston called it his herb attic — book-lined, with bunches of dried herbs hanging from the rafters. This is clearly a book written by someone in love with his subject. Beston himself considered this book among his finest writing.

The Outermost House is the book that most people know Henry Beston for, and it remains in print to this day. In the 1920’s Beston spent a year alone in a small dune cottage along Cape Cod’s eastern shore. What came from his isolation with sand and sea was one of the greatest meditations on the land that we have. He hoped to “know this coast and share its mysterious and elemental life“, and he succeeded brilliantly.

[Via http://landlibrary.wordpress.com]

Dracula - Bram Stoker

I can’t actually write a review of Dracula, that’d be sacrilegious so I’m just going to tell you why I had to read it now and then ramble on about it a bit.

Last year I was very excited to win a competition on Twitter. The prize was Dracula The Un-Dead by Dacre Stoker. Yes, Dacre is a descendent of Bram, in fact, he’s a great nephew and this book is the sequel. It’s a bit silly to read the sequel without having read the original so when DD borrowed Dracula from the library I took the opportunity of reading it also.

I suspect I’ve read it before as some parts of it were rather familiar but the bulk of it wasn’t. I do recall reading a short story with some similarities fairly recently and it’d be nice to be able to remember the name of this story so I could tell you but I generally don’t pay much attention to the names of short stories. The similarity was in the location of the house and also in dealing with a dead person so they would stop haunting the family, it also felt very much like Dracula in the writing style.

There were several bits that really annoyed me about Dracula. The leading characters were all sweetness and light. Nothing was too hard for them and they were always absolutely perfectly behaved in thought, word and deed. I don’t mind the odd character like that but it’s impossible for everyone to be like that. I found the focus on the protection provided by the Cross to be rather annoying, I do understand that Christianity was the most prominent religion at the time of writing and that’s why that particular symbol was used but as a non-Christian I find it annoying…it also annoys me in Buffy. I did like Dracula’s castle, though.

Dracula in the book is rather different to modern perceptions of vampires. Just look at Buffy, for example. Vampires in Buffy can’t go out in daylight and can’t change their shape. Also, in Buffy, the vampires kill immediately with the first bite while Dracula takes his time to kill over several days, sucking a little blood at a time and stretching tension just so much without actually breaking it.

At this point I could do something really silly and mention George Hamilton in Love at First Bite, a movie screened in 1979 which really has very little similarity to Stoker’s Dracula but is fun and George Hamilton was very good looking (still is, to be honest). We were discussing this the other night over dinner and someone suggested that Bram Stoker had not done enough research, completely missing out Buffy, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and Twilight.

I’m going to stop at this point before I get myself into too much trouble.

[Via http://suzsspace.wordpress.com]

“The old wise man died; an entire library burned”

“The old wise man died; an entire library burned”; (Mar. 4, 2010)

            African author, Amadou Hampate Ba (1900-91) was born in eastern Mali and had said “In Africa, (verbal culture still strong), when an old wise man dies then an entire library burns with him”.  In one of his books he wrote: “Aissata told her son: “Learn to cover the material nudity of man before you cover by word his moral nudity”

            Author and poet Wole Soyinka received the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1986. Soyinka was born in western Nigeria from the tribe of Yoruba in 1934.  During Nigeria civil war, Soyinka was jailed for two years in secrecy (1968-69); he wrote in jail “This man has died”.  In his speech at Stockholm during the Nobel ceremony and titled “Let this past talk to this present” he lambasted the philosophers and thinkers of Europe’s 19th century (such as Voltaire and Hegel) for accepting the principle of slavery.  Wole said “All who have the passion for peace must make a choice: Either they include peace in this modern world, bring it to rational situations, and let peace participate in the spirit of human associations or force Blacks in Africa to kneel in abject conditions and deny them human dignity.  There is nothing more pressing than suppressing racism and apartheid; their structures have got to be dismantled.”

            Historian and Egyptology from Senegal, Cheikh Anata Diop (1923-86) published “Negro Nations and culture, 1954”.  He claimed that African civilization precedes Greek civilization that borrowed form and content via Egypt of Antiquity.  Colonial powers were ready to admit that the black skinned (from head to toe) and the frizzled hair Egyptians were no proof enough to claim that the civilization of Egypt of Antiquity was necessarily African. This awkward logic was necessary in order to colonize Africa as devoid of civilizations, rational people, and high spiritual capacity.  European Egyptology erudite went as far as proclaiming that it was “inadmissible” that Ancient Egypt in Africa was a Black civilization.  Diop book was published in several languages and the Blacks in the USA used it for renewal of their civilized roots.

Note: You may refer to my new category “Black culture/Creole” for short biographies and literary samples of Black leaders and intellectuals.

[Via http://adonis49.wordpress.com]

More trips to Ireland

I love Maeve Binchy!! Love her! But I am sad to say I do not love Circle of Friends.  I do not love the first 370 pages of this book that I painstakingly read for 2 weeks!!   I consider myself a fast reader and this 570 page novel is something I usually fly through, but this just took too long.  As a fan of herbooks, I figured I’d love this one as well but sadly I did not and I will now, put my foot in my mouth after disagreeing with Kelly’s review of Tara Road and her statements saying it took too long to get into the story. 

This novel is about a ‘circle of friends’ in 1950s Dublin, all from different backgrounds.  The books primary characters are Benny (short for Bernadette…from what I remember, it was so long ago) and her friend Eve, both girls that grew up in the outskirts of Dublin.  The girls attend UCD (University College Dublin for you non-Irish) in first year, and form bonds with the other characters in the book.  In this group, there are all the stereotypes, the handsome jock from the upper class family (Jack), the gorgeous blond who hides who she really is (Nan), the outcast (Eve), the ‘larger girl’ (Benny), the guy everyone likes (Aidan), etc.  The relationship of Benny and Jack is an unlikely one yet his love for her seems true throughout the book. But obviously something will rattle this circle there is something that will undoubtedly pull someone from the inner circle to the outer circle and perhaps out of the circle forever.  When I finally got the last 200 pages of this book (the good part), I knew immediately how Binchy would make this happen and it made me mad.

 It made me mad, that I had spent the past 2 weeks reading this book and the ending was going to be so anti-climatic and predictable.  Could the uncertainty I had for Benny and Jack be true?  I couldn’t possibly believe that Benny, a girl a little bigger than average, would actually end up with the Donnybrook Jock that all the girls pined after??  Could their relationship be torn apart by someone slimmer, more attractive, and much more desired, a gorgeous blond perhaps?  The answers to these questions maybe be obvious yet there are twists leading you to them.  Predictable twists.

Now do not get me wrong, I did enjoy this book, eventually.  As I lived in Dublin for a year and a half, I loved how I could picture where the characters are when they talked about the quays, or Saint Steven’s Green, or Dun Laoghaire, or Donnybrook!  The characters’ dialect made me feel like I was right back there.  But all that aside, I feel she spent too much time building up the stories of the characters lives and then rush to the ending.  The climax is nearly in the last 70 pages of the book (at least for me it seemed that way) and then just kind of ends, leaving you wanting more.  But I guess that raises the question, is the sign of a good author an ending where they leave you wanting more even though you couldn’t stand the first 350 pages of a book?? Or a book where you loved the first 350 pages and the ending just left you feeling, unfulfilled?   I’m going to have to watch this movie now and see if it leaves me with the same feeling, which I pray it won’t.  And hopefully Binchy’s next book will leave me feeling a little more full and help me remove the foot out of my mouth. 

-Anne

Next book: Friends Like These by Danny Wallace

[Via http://novelladies2010.wordpress.com]