fiction

Book Review #23: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

June 12, 2011 by Merry 2 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve read fiction that has absorbed me to the point of ignoring everyone else. I love books that utterly pull you in so that all you ant to do is lie on your bed, or curl up on the sofa and read. Water for Elephants was so good that despite it being on my Kindle, I didn’t even knit while I read and I finished it in 24 hours, which is no mean feat if there are 4 children and a house to deal with too!

The story follows Jacob, a young Polish origin vet in America who experiences a huge life changing tragedy and runs away to the circus, quite by accident. (As you do!) The book is a snapshot of life in a travelling circus in 1930’s America, the brutality, the incestuous relationships within people, the partition between performer and worker and the camaraderie that lies along side all the darker elements of a group of people pressurised into being together all the time. Jacob experiences all of these things, fresh from the real world and able to see things with both the clarity and naivety of being a young man with ideals and ethics that have not yet been corrupted.

Water for Elephants is also a love story, a tangled tug of war and an exploration of numerous twisted characters and relationships. It is beautifully narrated by the 90 year old (or 93!) Jacob, sitting out the end of his life in a care home and alongside the story of his past, is a delicately drawn picture of how life can end for even the most vital of people, people who had a youth which seemed it could never end in solitude. The brief and touching friendship that develops in that part of the story is heartbreakingly and heartwarming.

I’m incredibly grateful to Cara at Freckles Family who invited me to her book group and recommended this to me. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Book #8 Learning By Heart

February 13, 2011 by Merry 3 Comments

Learning By Heart was another library pick, another one I was pleased to bring home and discover is written by someone, Elizabeth McGregor, who has consistently good reviews on Amazon.

This is the book that referred to glass blowers in Murano, is set half in Italy, has two time lines and is about love affairs and lost children across the years. It has also, just for the record, a family with four sisters and a younger brother, marriages in jeopardy and is in fact threaded with a theme of synchronicity, of people just happening to meet people and be in places at the right moment 😆 Oh, and it has a couple with a young son and infertility to go along with it. Oh yes, and it starts with a mourning parade on Good Friday. You have to laugh.

So, you know 😉

I was surprised by how much I was drawn in to this; although it is essentially a book with 2 female characters at the centre, they are relatively hard to know; the book captures both at a ‘moment’ in their life and both are a little adrift in a mess of life and emotions. The story is told more by the 3 men who love them, two husbands and a lover. The plot unravels more of their lives – infidelity, infertility, loss and grief, love and rejection – than it does of the women. It is quite refreshing in a way (and I recognised something of one of them too, which made it all the more compelling) and certainly a different take on a well established format. It was subtly done and all the people and places felt very real, even if it was just a snapshot of lives.

The book is, essentially, the story of Cora and Zeph, at turning points in their life. It follows Cora through her first move from home, the shocking reality of being a single young woman in London and then the change that a safe and ordinary marriage brings. Half of the book is the journal of a man who loved her and the descriptions of Sicily really made me want to pack up and go immediately. I’ve got a feeling Italy is telling me I need to visit. For Zepf, the book is about finding her courage when her marriage fails and finding out more about her mother and everything that was hidden from view in her life.

I’d give this 8/10. I’m not sure I would need to read it again, or own it, but I’ll certainly read more by the author and I don’t hesitate to recommend. A very enjoyable read.

Book #7 The Glassblower of Murano

February 10, 2011 by Merry 4 Comments

The synchronicity in book reading is amazing; co-incidence and books that you happen to pick up and which just hit the moment, or smash glaringly into the moment in the wrong way. Perhaps it happens all the time, perhaps it is ‘meant to be’ – perhaps I just notice when I’m extra sensitive.

The Glassblower of Murano is a story told across two time lines; it follows the story of a Venetian glass blower from the time when Venice was a principality and the glass blowers were virtual prisoners of the city, the prized possession of a city state run by “The Ten” who rule and police the city. Corradino is a talented glass blower who risks the wrath of the city to follow a dream and seek happiness. The story is told in tandem with that of his descendant, Leonora, who follows her heart to find work in Venice following the end of her marriage and finds out not only more than she expected about her famous ancestor, but also a whole new life.

It isn’t a plot with masses of surprises, in fact, a little like The Pull of the Moon, some of it is told from the very beginning, but the writing is elegant and enjoyable and the characters believable and easy to like. None of them are too perfect or too horrid, the nature of ‘The Ten’ fits well enough into the understanding of some governments now to make them a threatening shade and introduce a dimension of tension to the plot and the love affair that begins somehow fits comfortably into the main plot as to not take it over, while still managing to be difficult to gauge how it will end. It is a book with strength in how it is balanced and real colour and atmosphere in the prose and I found it a pleasure to read.

One of the elements I enjoyed was that, although the plot starts with a marriage break up and infertility as a theme, the main character, Leonora, has moved on. She’s still healing, but it isn’t one of the endless ‘hurt, moves to pastures new, meets a man, happy ending’ types of books. Sure, that is sort of what happens, but something in the way the character is drawn means that you aren’t forced to go through it with her – and that appeals to me, because I’ve got all of that type of stuff I can take! The chick lit element of the book occupies perhaps a quarter of it, the rest, historical, literary fiction, mystery, is all there and adds masses of meat to the bones of an already enticing story. I learned something new reading it too, about a place and a time and a people – and that ticks lots of boxes for me.

For the record, this isn’t a book for the most sensitive of my babyloss mother blog friends either. Infertility, child loss, birth and babies all feature. (Yes, I picked another book with all those in it!) But I’d give The Glassblower of Murano a resounding 9/10 – I’m sure I will read it again.

After that, I moved on to another that was recommended to me; I’ve put it on indefinite hold for now though, because it starts with someone in very raw grief over a miscarriage and… well, I’m not ready. I wanted to like it very much, but I was a bit unnerved by a character turning, in a blink of an eye, from likeable to hideous and had to stop. I suspect that says more about me than the book, but the speed of the change felt a little unreal. Still, the book gets good reviews and I’ll give it another go in a few months and report back 🙂 So that made three books with babies in it out of 3 in the last week!

And then I moved on to Learning By Heart which I picked up at the library and needs reading quickly! I think I’ll like this even if it does start with marriage break up, a little boy and a whole lot of loss. It also has a plot run on two time lines, is set in Italy and within the first 3 chapters, mentions the glass blowers of Murano.

Honestly, if you tried to do it on purpose, you couldn’t!

Book Review #6 The Pull of the Moon

February 5, 2011 by Merry 4 Comments

The Pull of The Moon is probably the perfect example of why a Kindle has been good for my reading habits; I really don’t think I would have come across this had it not been for having my Kindle and it isn’t a genre of novel I tend to go for either. One of the habits I’m getting into, especially in the ‘late at night, can’t sleep, can’t quite be bothered to read’ bits of time, is to comb through the best seller lists on there, the recommendations and the new books that have been released too. Quite often, there are temporary free books within those lists and I’ve taken to hoarding them when I see them; I’m not averse to spending a little if I see something on a big discount too and there are plenty that fall into that category if you keep an eye out. I do have a rule that new authors need at least 6 reviews and at least 4 starts though, to avoid buying stuff I don’t have much chance of enjoying. It would be easy to spend a LOT on a Kindle without thinking anything of it, so I’m being strict 😆

I’m still struggling to pigeon hole The Pull of the Moon. It is written by someone who also does historical murder mysteries, so I guess it lends itself to that, for one; it isn’t chick lit, though it does centre around a girl and a relationship, it is psychological thrillerÂ but it isn’t gut clenching stuff because it is narrated by the main character as a retrospective narrative. In fact, the anxiety is taken out of it by knowing from the start by knowing what happens to nearly all of the main protagonists. That doesn’t detract from the story though and there are a good number of plot layers, cleverly done and all intriguing; even with my nose on full alert for potential wail inducing plot lines, the final one wasn’t obvious enough to be a cliché.

Naturally, as all random books do, it had at least 3 spectacular babyloss mum triggers in it, so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anyone in that category unless forewarned is forearmed enough. I’m not really giving any plots away with that, as it isn’t what you’d expect – and it didn’t make me cry, so that was good 🙂

The end point of a review is probably “would I read it again”, would I look for more by the same author and in my case, would I actively recommend it to my friend Alison 😉 – and yes, it would get yes’s in all those cases – so a definite thumbs up.

As an aside – the little book plug-in on the side of the blog is great – I recommend that too 🙂

Book #5 Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan

January 31, 2011 by Merry 3 Comments

I picked this up in my library as part of a random assault on the shelves to find people I hadn’t read before. (So far, a rule of thumb seems to be ‘shelves fine, ignore stand on the way in, ignore all free standing round things, round things at end of shelves good, shelf on way out also good. On no account get anything where there are more than 6 things by the same author in one place. This may be another prejudice but I’m still in library rehab, so let me be).

I was quite pleased that coming home all 4 of the authors had 4 or 5 stars on Amazon and at least a couple available on Kindle and at the library, should I like them. However, given I only really want to read on my Kindle now and old fashioned books feel a bit last year (and I can’t knit while I read them!) this book took a little longer than it ought to have done. Amy Tan was further improved in theÂ worth reading standing stakes though, when I found a couple of her books on Helen’s shelves.

The length of time it took me to read Saving Fish From Drowning in no way reflects on how much I enjoyed it. It is another book though where I struggle to think exactly why. The story, narrated by a recently deceased friend and leader of the group, tells the story of a rather naive group of people who take a ‘cultural’ trip to China and Burma and their experiences as the trip teeters precariously around the edges of going very wrong. Perhaps that is a good sentence to sum up the book in fact; it teeters around the edges of exploring the characters, including the life of the narrator, dips its toe into the politics of the regimes in Burma and China, paddles along the edges of rebel causes and the unreality that perhaps builds up in the minds of the desperate and sprinkles flavoursome herbs of understanding about those countries too.

That’s not a bad thing. I’m not desperate to be preached at about the miseries of life elsewhere when I’m ready for bed and this book created an inclination to know more, while a more heavy handed approach might have made me shut the book and shut my mind because I don’t want to know about more awful things. There were some eloquent blendings of beliefs, some clever characters and all the people in the group and the wider world of the book felt real and knowable. I’ll definitely read more Amy Tan; I don’t know if I’d read this one again but I’d certainly add it to my list of ‘things I’m better for having read’.