Tuesday Book Review on Wednesday

 

Four-star review of The Frequency by Amy Quick Parrish

 

This novella, or maybe a very long short story, has a good premise and characters you care about but after a big reveal just ends. There’s every indication that the story will continue, but it seems to be just getting started, that what we have here is a prelude to a more complete story. After her home and her hometown are wiped out by a monster storm and her parents are killed, Emily sets out to find her grandmother and uncovers a conspiracy. So, it’s intriguing and I enjoyed it, as long as it.

Tuesday Book Reviews

 

Four-star review of Maybe by Morris Gleitzman

 

This sixth book in this family of books (the author doesn’t want to call it a series) follows Felix’s eventual journey to Australia at the age of 14. His voice is still enthralling, but the characters of Anya and Gosling aren’t as well developed as Zelda and Gabriek were in the earlier books. Some the situations the kids got into seemed overdone. I didn’t feel tension from the ongoing threat of Zliv until the very end. Still, I read this short book in just three days (between everything else I was doing.) Each time I picked it up, I had a hard time putting it down. It comes back to Felix’s voice, the way he tells the story. Maybe it should be four-and-a-half stars.

Tuesday Book Review

Four-star review of First Encounter by Jasper Scott

 

This first novel in a new series from one of my favorite Sci-Fi authors has its high points and parts that were uncomfortable for me. Scott created several likeable and dislikeable characters aboard a colony ship from Earth. Their first encounter with alien life leads to unexpected consequences for the officers and colonists, as well as for Earth. How will Clayton and the others get out of the situation they find themselves in at the end? And will they ever successfully set up an Earth colony? Guess I’ll have to read on to find out.

 

Tuesday Book Review on Wednesday

 

Five-star review of Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

 Time travel as it's never been done before. I enjoyed Station Eleven, in fact it’s one of my favorite books, and this one from the same author is just as good. On the surface, this is a time travel story, speculative fiction at its best, but through the different narrators, time periods, and obvious links among them, Mandel tells a story of the meaning of time and existence. It stimulates the brain and the heart. Some characters stand out more than others, and one or two get lost in the shuffle but all the threads come together at the end. Still, I would have liked more. Despite the complexity of the text, it’s an easy, quick read. After my recommendation, my book club is reading the book for this month. Will it resonate as much with the diverse people in that group? We’ll see. Meanwhile, like Station Eleven, I plan to read it again and again.

Tuesday Book Reviews

 

4-star review of Cleopatra’s Dagger by Carole Lawrence

Elizabeth is a newspaperwoman in late 19^th Century New York City, although she comes from a wealthy family. She goes from covering society stories to being a crime reporter after witnessing a murder and then finding a body where ground is being prepared for installation of the title monument behind the Museum of Natural History, but that’s really the last we read about Cleopatra’s Dagger. The author did her research on conditions during the time of the story, and it shows. There are interesting characters that could be filled out even more. The writing is smooth making for a quick read. Most of the tension is left to the imagination of the reader, but I understand how hard it is to write dangerous situations for a protagonist.

 

Tuesday Book Reviews

Five-star review of My Evil Mother by Margaret Atwood

 

Actually a long short story, The Evil Mother is about a child’s belief and interpretation of what her mother has told her. Do we consider our mothers’ warnings as coming from a concerned parent or a witch? Do our mothers try to scare us into complying with their demands? If your answer to these questions was ever yes, you’ll be able to relate to the narrator. And when do we become our mothers?

Tuesday Book Review on Wednesday

 

Four-star review of Murder at the Mortuary by Lee Strauss

 This is the fifth in the Ginger Gold series about an heiress in 1920’s London. Intrepid Lady Gold is on her first official case with help from her pathology student friend Haley, who discovered the first body in the mortuary without an identification tag. With Chief Inspector Basil Reed trying to make a go again with his estranged wife, she can’t rely on him. There are enough suspects who could have removed the tags from the first and succeeding bodies. Throw in a connection to the Mafia and a horse-breeding farm, as well as several interesting characters, and there’s enough of a plot and plot twists for this not-so-cozy historical murder mystery. And through it all we see instances of Ginger’s generosity and also examples of the attitudes, fashion and ambience of the time period.