Abigail by Jill Eileen Smith

I was not sure about reading Biblical Fiction.  I have read a few and was quite disappointed.  That is not the case with Jill Eileen Smith’s The Wives of David series.  The first book, Michal, was fascinating.  The second book Abigail is just as fascinating.  Jill Eileen Smith does a wonderful job of keeping her fictional account of Abigail in line with the Biblical account.  One of my favorite parts of this series is how Smith deals with the multiple wife aspect.  I also found myself drawn into the story with more emotion.  At times when reading the Word I have a tendency not to think of the characters as emotional beings too.  They are.  Jill Eileen Smith portrays that very well.  The books are a rich portrail of one of the Bible’s most fascinating characters, David, and his wives.

I have really enjoyed The Wives of David series and cannot wait to read the next book.

About the Book:

What price must she pay for true love?

Her days marked by turmoil and faded dreams, Abigail has resigned herself to a life with a man she does not love. When her husband Nabal’s foolish pride angers David and his men, she boldly steps forward to save her family—and David, the would-be king, takes notice.

Circumstances offer Abigail a second chance at happiness with the handsome David, and she takes a leap of faith to join his wandering tribe. But her struggles are far from over. How can she share his love with the other women he insists on marrying?

Available February 2010 at your favorite bookseller from Revell, a division of Baker Publishing Group

Thank You Revell for my review copy.

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

Book Review: 'Replay' by Ken Grimwood

[I made a conscious decision to read more fantasy, so when I was in Taiwan, I picked up Ken Grimwood's Replay (on special, of course), which is a part of the "Fantasy Masterworks" series.  According to the blurb, Fantasy Masterworks is a library of some of the greatest, most original, and most influential fantasy ever written.  Replay won the World Fantasy Award in 1988.]

Have you ever looked back on your life and the decisions you have made and regretted them, or wondered how things would have turned out had you gone down a different path?  Well, in Replay, the central character Jeff Winston gets to put those thoughts into action.  You see, Winston is 43-year old man who dies and reawakens to find that he has travelled back in time to when he was 18 again, except his memory of the next 25 years remains in tact.  Sounds like a familiar premise, I know, but 17 Again this is not.

At first, I thought Replay may have been a sci-fi story as opposed to a fantasy, but there is no scientific element at all.  It doesn’t really matter why this is happening to Jeff – what matters is what he does with his second chance(s).

My main concern when I started reading Replay wass that it may be a one-trick pony; a gimmicky book based entirely around this one ‘life replay’.  But I could not have been more wrong.  Replay has a terrific, in-depth storyline that is full of twists and turns.  There is so much more to the tale than just that first replay.

What surprised me most of all was how realistic it all felt.  Put yourself in Jeff Winston’s position.  What would you do if you got a second chance at life?  Would you try to right the wrongs this time around?  Would you use your knowledge of the future to make tons of money or make the world a better place?  These were the decisions Jeff was faced with, and because Grimwood makes him a rational, thinking person, it allows you to relate to him.  At no time did I think – this is completely stupid, he should be doing something completely different!

Part of the realism comes from how Grimwood ties in real-life historical events.  Sports, films, music, economics, wars, political assassinations, pop culture – just about everything that surrounds our daily lives becomes a risk or an opportunity for Jeff.  And that’s what makes the book so intriguing.

Grimwood delivers the story with a clear, straightforward writing style, and I think that is what makes it so effective.  Jeff’s joy, jubilation, fears, regrets, pain and sense of loss are conveyed to the reader with brutal honesty and without manipulation.  We would all love to have the opportunity to relive parts of our lives, but at various points of the book I could not help but sympathise with what Jeff was going through.  It is both a gift and a curse.

As with the best sci-fi and fantasy books, Replay has a poignant (albeit common) message about life.  Through Jeff Winston’s replay of his life, we are given lessons about how we should approach our one and only chance.  For someone like me who just made a life-changing decision, the message couldn’t have been clearer or have come at a better time.

4.5 out of 5 stars!

[PS: Why has there never been a movie version of this book?  There have been many travel back in time stories, but few have captured the emotion as well as Replay has.  Any screenplay, however, would have to be updated to reference more modern times.]

[PPS: Apparently, Grimwood was writing a sequel to Replay when he died of a heart attack in 2003 at age 59.]

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

206 Bones

Finished the lasted book by Kathy Reichs today, 206 Bones.  The series Bones is based on her books, but I must say its much different that what I expected, since I expected to be a bit like the series, which it wasn’t, not even close. Starting that the characters in the book are much more French than American. But then, it’s like they say, it’s based on her books. So, I this was the first book I have read from her, and have no knowledge from her previous books, and if there are any continuous story line. But I did enjoy her latest release very much, and was quite happy about the fact that the book didn’t take ages to grab my interest. Although it did get a bit stale somewhere in the middle, and she uses many French terms that doesn’t always gets explained that got annoying and tended to get me disinterested. But other than that, she is a very good writer and it was a very interesting story and a very good twist, even though I figured out the ‘twist’ before the main character did.  I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who loves reading mystery/crime novels, and to anyone who has seen the series would like it as well.

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

'Gould's Book of Fish' by Richard Flanagan

‘Gould’s Book of Fish’ by Richard Flanagan (2001)

A Novel in 12 Fish

‘Gould’s Book of Fish’ is a novel about those convicts who were transported to Tasmania (then called Van Diemen’s Land) by the British government in the early 1800’s, those in charge of the prisons, and those aborigines who lived there. Over the course of 60 years, more than 165,000 prisoners were transported to Australia.

This book has a unique arrangement where each chapter is a fish painted by convict William Buelow Gould.  These fish/chapters are called ‘Kelpie’, ‘the sawtooth shark’, ‘the striped cowfish’, etc.

In the first chapter, there is a very humorous modern story about some Tasmanians preparing fake antique Shaker furniture to sell to the rich fat American tourists.  After this story, I settled in for a humorous ride, little realizing where I would be taken.  Many of the scenes in this novel are laugh riots, often resulting from the vicious idiocy of the overseers back in England and the flat-out insanity of the prison authorities on Van Diemen’s Land.   But humor is not Flanagan’s ultimate destination in this book.

One of the early chapters is devoted to the torture devices used on the convicts.  These devices are ingenious in their cruelty.  The elaborate descriptions of these made-up devices show the lengths to which the prison authorities would go to inflict pain on their convicts.

In one scene in the novel, the scientists back in England want some fresh specimens of skulls of the aborigines and request them of the prison authorities on Van Diemen’s Land.  The prison authorities order the convicts to get the skulls, so the convicts go out and murder and behead thirty six aborigines, ‘blackfellas’ as Gould calls them.  Then the prison Commandant boils the skulls in preparation for shipping them back to England.  Insufferable politically correct prig that I am, I failed to see the humor in these beheadings or the chopping off of arms and legs or the other acts of humiliation done to the aborigines that are portrayed in this novel. These acts were probably done in real life all too frequently.  It’s one thing to fool rich fat American tourists by selling them fake Shaker furniture.  It’s a completely different horrific thing to chop somebody’s arm or head off.

I began to feel very uneasy about this novel.  This novel was not turning out to be the rollicking, good time boisterous picaresque Australian novel it originally seemed to be.  Who can laugh at the matter-of-fact beheading of aborigines for the sake of  a scientific study in England?   At this point I was planning to write a review pretty much berating Flanagan for his callousness.

Only at about page 300 did I find out Richard Flanagan’s true purpose with this novel.  This is when Gould discovers that the prison authorities have been keeping a sanitized version of everything that has been going on in the prison.  This sanitized version of events contains none of the severe torture of the prisoners and none of the beheadings, chopping off of arms, legs, and heads, or other degradations the aborigines were subjected to.  In other words, the official history of the prison on Sarah Island was a complete book of lies.

So despite its appearance, ‘Gould’s Book of Fish’ is not a hilarious rollicking jaunt through Australian history.  It is deadly serious about the desperate, despicable attempts by those in charge to cover up and hide what really happened.  If these books of lies become a part of the culture, it is as though the past did not happen and the people who were there never existed.

Flanagan makes no concessions to the readers of this novel.  Even though Gould is one of the convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land, his writing is in very long and complicated sentences.  The novel is supposed to be written by Gould back in the early 1800’s and in those days sentences were longer.  At that time, writers wrote longer sentences connecting two or more thoughts together with the symbol ‘ & ‘.  This can be difficult for modern readers.  More than a few times I became impatient with the over-written, over-stuffed sentences in this book. Also, as I’ve indicated before, I was completely fooled as to the true nature of this novel for nearly 300 pages.  By framing the book as a humorous picaresque story, I think it was Flanagan’s intent to make the readers uneasy and uncomfortable with what happens, especially to the aborigines.

In preparation for writing this post, I googled Richard Flanagan on the net.  He has taken some courageous stands in Tasmania.

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

Tainted by Brooke Morgan

Title:  Tainted

Author:  Brooke Morgan

Paperback:  429 pages

Published:  2009

ISBN:  9780061853371

Challenges:  ARC Reading Challenge, New Author Challenge

… she worried whether Katy was normal and totally adjusted.  Did she laugh enough?  Was she too introspective?  To serious?

She’d obviously had fun digging the clams, so she was clearly capable of joy; she just didn’t jump up and down and let herself go wild very often.  Was that bad?…

How do you ever know as a mother?  There are landmines everywhere, waiting to blow up in your face.  Am I too strict?  Not strict enough?  Should I tell Henry, for example, that he really has to stop swearing in front of her or is that being overprotective and silly?  Will Katy be sitting in a shrink’soffice some day, blaming me fo everything wrong in her life?  Will she make the same mistakes I did?

-Tainted by Brook Morgan, pages 21-22

First off, I’d like to thank Trish of TLC Book Tours for inviting me to join the Tainted virtual book tour

Tainted by Brooke Morgan is about a young single mother, Holly Barrett, who has always been the wallflower and shy friend of the more gregarious Anna.  Holly got pregnant with Katy the first, and only, time she had sex and the father, Anna’s ex, ran as fast and far away as he could.  Two years after Katy’s birth, Holly’s parents died within days of each other, leaving Holly with a sense that the world is full of pain and she has virtually no control in it.  Henry, her 75-year-old grandfather, Anna, Katy and the Cape Cod house that had been her summer home growing up is her entire world.

Enter Jack Dane.  Tall, handsome and English, Jack is “faintworthy” and Holly is quickly swept away by his charm and he provides her with a sense of safety; he fast becomes a part of every aspect of her life.  He, too, has lost both of his parents.  By all appearances, Jack is Mr. Perfect.  But is he really this good? Or is he keeping dark and dangerous secrets?  Is he really Prince Charming? or a monster in disguise?

Tainted by Brooke Morgan is a slow cooker and an unassuming book.  I really like how Morgan has really captured the sensitivity and worries of the “dating” single mom, and that of worry-worry-worry that goes along with motherhood (sometimes I wonder if worry is the force that drives our engines as mothers!).  I also love Henry, Holly’s grandfather, who reminds me of a few grizzled souls whom I love dearly.  Not one to want to be called “Gramps” because it made him seem infantile and incapable, nor “Grandfather” because it made him seem ancient, he’s always went by just “Henry” but hasn’t lost the effect of his role as a grandparent by this choice. 

Confession time:  I haven’t finished this book yet, but I fell in love with it after the second or third chapter.  I’d have to say that Holly is my literary twin, and I can completely relate to her.  Jack is still Mr. Perfect where I’m at in the book but, to tell you the truth, he has a really Dexter-feel to him.  The dog didn’t like him, and I’m waiting for him to go on some murderous rampage.  Or bodies to turn up, at least.  He’s too nice, and people who are always nice are creepy and are hiding something.  It pulls me along and I hafta-HAFTA read the next page.. the next chapter… and before I know it, 50 pages have gone by.

Of course, since I haven’t finished it  yet, I’ll reserve rating it for now, but I’m definitely loving it

If you’d like to check out other reviews, here’s a list of fellow tour hosts:

I’m Booking It
All About {n}
Savvy Verse & Wit
Café of Dreams
Clever Girl Goes Blog
Dolce Bellezza
The Literate Housewife
Life in the Thumb
Bookworm With a View
Cozy Little House

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

Want to write a mystery?

I’ve recently read How to Write a Damn Good Mystery by James N Frey (ISBN: 9780312304461) and I must say it’s one of the best books I’ve read on writing. He lays out in clear steps how to construct a mystery. This process might seem too clinical for some writers, but I found the methodical approach appealing because it made the task seem doable. Until now, although I’ve written a number of novels, I’ve always found the task daunting and floundered in a sea of uncertainty, wondering where to begin and how to proceed once I have begun. As James Frey so aptly says, you end up writing loads of superfluous waffle until you find the right path, whereas if you know where you’re going from the beginning, this cuts out a lot of unnecessary work. The most important points I gleaned from this book were:

• Lists of the most important mythic characters found in mysteries. This isn’t what it sounds like. Mythic characters here stand for types, not actual characters. And from the dog-ears dogging this book, I would say most readers found this part the most valuable.

• A list of the various stages of a mystery. Frey equates these stages to a five-act play, whereas many other writing teachers speak about a three-act play, so this was interesting and different.

• What readers of mysteries expect of the writer and how to meet those expectations.

• What to avoid so that your reader will be satisfied with your book and will want to read more of your novels.

• To type out passages written by writers you admire. James Frey is not advocating plagiarism, but he does stress that to learn to write well, one needs to emulate the masters, so typing out their work helps new writers learn rhythm, pace, dialogue, setting, whatever it is you feel makes up a great piece of writing. In this way you can learn to write in many different voices and styles and eventually develop a style of your own.

All useful stuff, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

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

A truly great book

I am fond of reading and recently (over the past two or three years) have ventured into the world of Indian literature. Being an Indian, I am of course aware of the famous names from our part of the world: Satyajit Ray, Rabindranath Tagore, Amrtya Sen, Vikram Seth etc..but some of the female authors I have read recently have left a truly impactful impression on my mind.

I just finished reading a very famous, well written and absolutely fascinating novel by the Oriya author: Pratibha Ray. It’s an English translation of her work and I am sure it’s just as good as the original. The novel is titled: Yajnaseni. Reading it made me really proud of our mythology and jealous of the relation true devotees have with their God.. Here’s an excerpt from it:

A creature is bound by the triple thread of the three gunas: sattva, rajas and tamas. Tamas gives birth to attachment. From Rajas comes addiction and desire. Sattva produces purity. If Tamas and Rajas were shackles of iron, then Sattva was a chain of gold. Therefore, even though the desire to reach swarg through the Himalayas was sattvik, it seemed to me like chains of gold around my ankles. For, even this had been transformed into an attachment for me. If the desire for getting a kingdom was shackles of iron then wasn’t the desire to attain svarg a chain of gold? Who was free of attachment ? I ? My husbands ? Could a man who had attachment achieve svarg?Attachment blinds a person. But to proceed onwards, some attachment, some desire from results does exist within a person. Therefore, like a blind man, without considering what is right and what is wrong, he keeps walking on the path, just like us.

While walking on I mused: “What did I get in this birth? What did I lose ? Why did I come ? What task was accomplished through me? What ought to have been done by me. Food, sleep, sex, the pleasure of a kingdom, etc- I got everything in life. Still it seems that my life has remained unfulfilled. What is wanting ? Why have I borne so much sorrow, grief, pain, in life? I feel that with Yudhisthir as husband, any woman will have to suffer… … … . And while thinking thus, my feet slipped on the golden dust of the Himalayas.My five husbands, whom I had regarded even as my five senses all through life and who had been my companions in life after life, did not even look back. They kept walking straight ahead on the path to svarg. I was alone at death’s door!” … … … … … … … … Pride is an obstacle on the path to svarg. Can anyone be free of pride in this world ?

I was the royal queen of Hastina. Sacrificing father , sons, brother, friends – everyone, I had won the status of queen. How can it be that there will be no pride in my mind? There was enough scope for pride in that life. But even that life didnot seem fulfilled to me. Today I lie alone on the way to death. My arrogance has certainly been removed. But helplessnessis waiting to swallow me up. Helplessness is filling me with a sense of want. Today I am realizing that life is not just pride, and nor is it only full of helplessness. It is between these two that the stream of life keeps flowing. Both pride and helplessness have significant roles to play in life. Pride by itself blinds a person, while helplessness fills him with a sense of want.But if the pride and helplessness, instead of being petty, are noble, then life becomes fulfilled.Then manthinks “O Lord! I am but your creation, and that is the source of my pride. Then when he thinks that all his strength,all his support is He alone, his soul soars upwards and the doors of svarg open up to receive it

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