Pam's Book 44: Something Missing

When my friend Laurie recommended this book to me, it was with a caveat: Do not read the back of the book first! That said, if you are planning on reading this book, don't read my review. Seriously. This entire post is a spoiler.

Something Missing reminded me a lot of The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam, at least at first. Martin is a professional thief, except it takes a few pages before you figure that out. He has regular "clients" from whom he regularly steals items, mostly everyday, mundane items such as canned goods and laundry detergent. He spends months researching his clients before committing, and even then, he only takes what will not be missed (all pre-determined by careful research and investigation). The idea is that they will have no idea a theft is regularly taking place. It sounds improbable at first, that these people would have no idea of this thief lurking in their midst, yet Martin seems to have it all figured out. He follows a strict set of rules and guidelines that all but guarantee his clients will never detect him--until one day, all that changes. Martin, who becomes rather attached to his clients over the years, suddenly develops an altruistic streak.

The book is heartwarming, Martin appealing. You'd think the reader would be creeped out by the idea of a thief regularly entering her house without her knowledge, gaining all sorts of extremely personal knowledge (yes, he reads diaries and emails)--and yet, Martin is irresistible. I was rooting for him the whole time. He is sweet and innocent and undeniably naive. The book has a romance aspect to it, but I don't want to go into that at all in case anybody does want to read this. It's part mystery, part romance, part suspense, pure escapism. Matthew Dicks has this obnoxious way of interrupting climactic moments with flashbacks, which only adds to the suspense. It's annoying, yet without them we wouldn't understand Martin's character, we would not empathize with Martin, and empathizing with Martin is key to the enjoyment of the book. Good recommendation, Laurie!

Pam's Book 43: Faithful Place

I have to admit that since the beginning of the school year, this blog has been pushed to the back burner as life has been just a little busy. I haven't had a whole lot of time for reading, and when I do, I don't seem to have the time or energy to write about it. I read (and blogged about) Tana French's second book, The Likeness, a couple months ago. I loved it. Faithful Place, in typical Tana French style, stars a peripheral character from her previous book, so I already knew Frank Mackey a little and was happy to see him return.

When Frank was a young man, he and his girlfriend Rosie planned to run away together from Ireland to England, get married, and get cool jobs. Not many people escape the tenement Faithful Place, but they were going to do it. Only Rosie never showed, and Frank has been fighting pain and confusion in the 22 years since. Now, all this time later, Rosie's suitcase shows up, then a dead body that could possibly be Rosie's.

The perceptive reader can puzzle out what's happened before the end, but it's not a disappointment. This book is at least as much about familial and neighborhood relationships as it is about the mysterious disappearance of Rosie Daly. French is a genius at capturing atmosphere; in this case, working class urban Ireland. Frank got out of Faithful Place, stayed out for 22 years, but the values and morays learned as a child are buried deep, not gone. The language is spot on. (I had intended to include some quotations in this post, but I had to return the book to the library before I got a chance to write this.) I've been avoiding French's first book because I've heard the ending is less than satisfactory, but I guess I'll just have to suck it up and read it sooner rather than later...

Pam's Books 41-41: The Hunger Games and Catching Fire

It's been a long time since I've stayed up through the wee hours of the morning to finish reading a book that is entirely too absorbing to put down. I haven't bothered to post a picture of these books on here because Blythe just did. Blythe, in fact, is the reason I read these books. She's been urging me for weeks to take a look at them, and I finally got around to it last Monday night. And into Tuesday morning. I enjoyed them so much, in fact, that I bribed a student with (a minuscule amount of) extra credit to let me borrow the second book, which he had in his backpack.

I can see what Blythe was saying when she remarked how similar the two books are, while realizing that the subtle differences in the interaction really make the book. When I started the first book, I realized that Katniss had to survive, since The Hunger Games is the first book in a trilogy, but I wasn't entirely sure how that would happen. Peeta I never felt completely invested in until the second book. Now I can't wait to see what happens to everybody in the third book.

I love how these books are absorbing and adventurous, yet, if you care too look further into them, have something deeper to say about our society and its current and possible future state. That they are written for teenagers is immaterial. Or maybe it says something about how we should really view our teens... Here's hoping Holly finished Blythe's copy of Mockingjay this weekend so I can read it tomorrow!

Pam's Book 40: My Best Friend's Girl

First of all, you may have noticed that my posts skipped from 38 to 40. That's because I looked through my old posts last night and realized I had two #20 posts, so this is really 40. Anyway.
As I stated in my last post, I asked my friend Laurie for some light, well written reads. My Best Friend's Girl is the heaviest light read I've ever read, but I couldn't put it down. I picked it up this morning after I woke up and finished it about two minutes ago.
Kamryn receives a letter from her estranged best friend Adele saying that she's dying and asking Kamryn to come see her. It turns out that she wants Kamryn to adopt her little girl Tegan after her death. This is the story of Kamryn and Tegan's new life together, with a soupcon of love and reconciliation thrown in. It is also the story of Kamryn and Adele's friendship and what went wrong.
I kept thinking about my best friend Adina as I read this book, and our own story. I'm pretty sure that any woman who reads this book won't be able to help but draw parallels in her own life and her own friendships. Because, while this book is about Kamryn learning how to be a parent and about Kamryn learning to fall in love again and learning to love herself through loving Tegan, at its core it is about the friendship between two women.
This was a beautiful story and an easy read--everything Laurie promised.

Pam's Book 38: The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam

I asked my friend Laurie to recommend some good books that were light reading but well written. Life's pretty busy these days, and I'm not sure how many brain cells I have to spare for recreational literary analysis, but I can't imagine not indulging in a daily chapter or two. She came up with this series as well as another book that will be showing up on here shortly.

Charlie--the title character--is a writer by day, thief by night. Well, actually, he says that it's actually safer, for the most part, to break into places by day. So make that a thief by day, writer by night. Charlie is currently hanging out in Amsterdam, trying to fill in some plot holes in his the mystery novel he is currently writing. A stranger approaches him with a strange commission that Charlie can't bring himself not to explore, despite his initial inclination to turn the job down. He winds up getting himself into trouble when he does take on the job, sort of, and the stranger winds up dead (these events are obvious from the beginning, so don't think I'm going to ruin anything here). The Good Thief deals with Charlie's escapades in Amsterdam as he attempts to extricate himself from this predicament and come out ahead.

Charlie is a likable, entertaining character with a great sense of humor and decent turn of phrase. The solution surprised me, and the ending, while predictable, was exactly what it should have been. I just reserved the next book in the series from the library.

Pam's Book 37: The Vintage Caper

Reading Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence at a young age affected me deeply: it ingrained in me a deep desire to visit the South of France (a desire yet unfulfilled) and a deep appreciation for Mayle's writing. I have faithfully read every book of his since then: those chronicling his time in Provence as well as his fictional capers. When he's not writing about life in France, Mayle writes about absurd and lovable thieves and good guys who get in over their head (not that his thieves aren't good guys, too). The books are witty and entertaining, and I always find myself giggling out loud when I read them. Last weekend I found myself waiting for a plane to land, a plane that was running an hour late, stuck with nothing to read. I ventured into the only open store and found The Vintage Caper, Mayle's latest, which had somehow slipped my attention.
Once I read the book, I discovered why it had slipped my attention: it wasn't really worthy of anybody's attention. Don't get me wrong; reading it was certainly better than reading nothing (not a sentiment I've wasted on some other noteworthy bores of books), but only slightly. Since my only other option was to watch the plane's progress on my phone (about as entertaining and fruitful as watching paint dry), I slogged ahead.
Sprinkled throughout are a few gems that remind me why I enjoy Peter Mayle's writing:
"And then, clearly suspecting the poor German of trying to smuggle a potentially dangerous sense of humor onto the aircraft, ordered him to step aside and wait for the supervisor."
"'Monsieur is an old client of ours, and the girl is his daughter. He is teaching her how to have dinner with a man.' Only in France, Sam thought. Only in France."
Sam is a fairly typical Mayle hero: a morally ambiguous character you have to kind of like. Except, this time, I don't like him as much as I should. He is not as three dimensional as he should be. And the girl he ends up with, the girl you know from the very beginning he's going to end up with, is not as interesting as she should be.
Maybe there's a reason Mayle doesn't write books as often as he used to.

Pam's Book 36: The Likeness

My favorite mystery reading buddy Trish gave this to me in between trips this summer, along with the latest Elizabeth George. I read it on the plane trip to Atlanta. I read it in Atlanta. I read it on the plane to New York. I read it the six hours we were stuck on the tarmac in New York. I finished it midway over the Atlantic. Maybe read isn't such a good term; devoured would be better. Tana French wrote another book before this one, something about the woods. I'd heard it was a good book but had an unsatisfying ending; this one, apparently, had a better ending.

Cassie Maddox, police detective, former undercover detective, has been left somewhat of a mess as the result of a former case (I'm assuming it's the case I missed in the first book). She no longer investigates murder, instead dedicating her time and energy to domestic violence. Until she receives a panicked call from her boyfriend, a homicide detective. A dead body has been found; a dead body who could be Cassie's twin. Not only does she look exactly like Cassie, but she carries an ID bearing Cassie's former undercover name, Lexie Madison. They make the radical decision to claim the girl hadn't died and instead send Cassie back home as Lexie to further investigate her death.

There is no point at which this book is not suspenseful, since we know Cassie is not really Lexie, but we don't know if anybody else knows that, and then there's the fact that somebody was trying to kill Lexie, so now somebody's probably after Cassie, thinking it's Lexie... Lexie lives an insular life with four other students, three boys and a girl. They're a bunch of oddballs, but they're a tight bunch of oddballs, and it's miraculous Cassie can insert herself in at all. We know from the very beginning that some sort of disaster ensues, but we're not sure what. The reader is constantly second guessing everyone's moves and motives, working to discover what goes wrong and how. Somehow the ending manages to be surprising even though you can kind of see it coming, once the downward spiral begins. I just might have to read the first book, unsatisfying ending notwithstanding.

Pam's Book 35: The Messenger of Athens

I bought this book for 99p at a little independent bookstore in Warwick, England. I bought it because it was 99p and it was a mystery and I thought maybe it would be good. It was okay. I can't say it made me want to read anything else she's written. A woman is dead. A mysterious figure turns up on her backwoods Greek isle to investigate her death. He wants to know not only who killed her, but who is responsible for her death, which could be something different altogether. He looks at the woman's husband, her lover, the corrupt chief of police. He finds out both who killed her and who is responsible for her death. He metes out his own kind of justice. The whole thing is kind of weird. Zouroudi keeps herself at a kind of distance from her characters, never getting too involved. She doesn't seem to identify with her characters any more than I do. I'm glad I only paid 99p for this book.

Pam's Book 34: One Day

This book is about Dex and Em, Em and Dex. Dexter and Emma meet on the night of their college graduation. They spend the night and the next day together, developing a life-long friendship. One Day follows Dexter and Emma through the years, only revisiting them on the anniversary of the day they met, St. Swithin's day. On that one day each year we discover what Dexter and Emma have been up to the past 364 days, where they are in their lives, where they are in their relationships (to each other and to others).

At first I fell in love with this book because I identified not only with Emma, but with the relationship between Emma and Dexter. It reminded me of my relationship with Colin, my best guy friend. The further I delved into the book, though, the farther removed Emma's life and relationship with Dexter were from my own life and relationship with Colin. By then, though, I was hooked.

One Day is moving and funny and once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down again until I finished it. I have passed it onto my book buddy Trish. I'm sure she'll like it as much as I did. Goooood book!

Pam's Book 33: The End of Mr. Y

Ariel is a PhD student at an unnamed university in England, studying the works of metaphysical novelist Thomas Lumas. Weird things begin happening when her adviser disappears and she discovers Lumas's exceedingly rare novel: The End of Mr. Y. Mr. Y of the book-within-a-book is at a carnival and runs into a "doctor" who mixes up a potion that allows Mr. Y to enter the mind of a carnival illusionist. The doctor disappears overnight and Mr. Y chases after him in search of this potion. Over the years Mr. Y beggars himself trying to find the doctor. He finally succeeds and it ends up ruining his life. The page of the book that contains the recipe to the potion is missing. (SPOILER ALERT: If you plan on reading the book, you might not want to read the rest of this.) Ariel stumbles across the missing page and decides to concoct the potion and try it herself. In the meantime, Ariel is being chased by men purporting to be CIA. Ariel undergoes all sorts of adventure, both inside and outside the minds of others, all the time trying to avoid the men who are chasing her. She meets a man at some point and develops what is possibly the first healthy romantic relationship of her life. She meets a mouse-god. She finds her adviser.

This book was fascinating and kept me gripped from beginning to end. I ran across it at the airport bookstore in Stockholm; it came highly recommended by the clerk, as did the next book I'm going to blog about.

Pam's Book 32: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

I had high expectations for this book. It came highly recommended by NPR and other trusted literary sources. I hated it. A lot. A whole lot. The whole time I was reading it, I kept waiting to like it, to like something about it, but it never happened. It was like when I went to see that horror movie, The Ring, that was supposed to be so scary; I kept waiting to get scared, and then the credits rolled, with me still waiting.

If this book had been written by a South American author, it would be called magical realism. Young Rose suddenly develops an ability to taste the emotions of whoever makes her food. It begins, as the title suggests, with a lemon cake made by Rose's mother. The mother seems happy and bubbly but is secretly depressed. It gets to the point where Rose mostly eats highly processed foods made in big factories by machine. She also has a weird genius older brother who I think is supposed to be gay. Rose has a crush on her brother's best and only friend. Rose, because of her weird food thing and other hang-ups, never really makes a life for herself. Rose's older brother falls apart and begins disappearing.

There's never really much of a plot. Rose is annoying and pathetic. Her brother is also annoying and pathetic, both in their own special ways. I'm not really sure what the big hype about this book is.

Pam's Book 31: Gods in Alabama

"There are gods in Alabama. Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus. I left one back there myself, back in Possett. I kicked it under the kudzu and left it to the roaches."

So opens the novel. Arlene has made a deal with God in return for the mishap with the Alabama god: she will never lie, have sex outside of marriage, or return to her hometown. Like other Joshilyn Jackson heroines, Arlene has a messed up mother who has been replaced, or at least supplemented, by other strong women in her life. She works hard to keep her promises, so hard that it's destroying her from the inside out. In order to set things right in her life and the lives of others, Arlene ends up breaking all of her promises, which ends up being for the best. The book has all sorts of twists and turns that keeps it interesting. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Pam's Book 30: The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

I blogged earlier in the year about The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, the first Flavia de Luce mystery. This book finds the resiliant young Flavia recovered from her earlier adventures and misadventures, raring for another mystery to solve. Puppeteer Rupert Porson obliges her by getting himself murdered at one of his shows. Once again Flavia, amateur chemist and sleuth extraordinaire, sees it as her duty to outwit the police and find the murderer on her own. Which, of course, she does.

Flavia comes across a number of dubious characters, including her older sisters who mercilessly bully her, her sisters' swains, a former prisoner of war, the other woman, the pastor, and the pastor's wife. There's also, of course, the token madwoman. Actually, two of them. Flavia is wise beyond her years, occasionally annoyingly so, but endearing all the same. This is definitely a book worth reading.

Pam's Book 29: Bite Me: A Love Story

I blogged several months ago about the first book in this series, a tongue-in-cheek book in which Jody is turned into a vampire. In the second book her minion-turned-boyfriend Tommy is also turned into a vampire. Bite Me focuses on the adventures of Abby Normal, Tommy's minion. The book is hilarious. Teenager Abby's real name is Alison, but her Gothic nesferatu (vampire) obsession has led her to a darker moniker. The story, while funny, is secondary to the character study of Abby. There's nothing about her that is not laugh out loud hilarious. She won't let her boyfriend kiss her without slapping him afterward (so he doesn't think she's a slut). Her diction is affected in the manner of a Gothic novelist. I'm not doing justice to how funny she is, so you're going to have to trust me on this.

Abby, Jody, Tommy, Abby's boyfriend Steve, the Emperor, and the Animals (Tommy's onetime co-workers, the night shift at the Safeway) have to save the cities from vampire cats and various other dangers, while at the same time Abby is doing her best to get herself turned into a vampire. It's refreshing to read a book about vampires that doesn't take itself seriously.

Pam's Book 28: Death of a Cozy Writer

I enjoy reading "cozy" mysteries, so when I came across this, I figured it looked like a book for me. It's about a guy, Sir Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk, whose main talents are being a real jerk and churning out mystery stories that are basically plagiarized from golden age classics (Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, etc). He glories in tormenting his adult children, changing his will with each new whim. Sir Adrian is, of course, murdered, as are other characters. DCI St. Just is called to the scene to investigate. He uncovers secrets and skeletons in closets all over the place.

When I read this book nearly two months ago, I found it entertaining. However, this is the first chance I've had since then to sit down and post a blog about it, and I have to say it didn't make a big enough impression on me to say much about it after all this time has passed. I have another book by the same author, and I plan on reading it. Malliet writes a solid mystery, good escapist stuff, but nothing truly memorable.

Pam's Book 27: The Mermaid Chair

Like Erin, I read this book because it was written by the same author as The Secret Life of Bees, which I loved. This book I did not love; in fact, it made me angry. As Erin said, this is more of a romance than anything, but it's a romance about adultery. As rare as it may be these days, I don't find anything about adultery romantic. Jessie returns to her hometown, a tiny island off the coast of South Carolina, because her mother has cut off her finger. Throughout the book we, along with Jessie, are trying to figure out why her mother would do such a thing. Somehow that remains mostly secondary.

Brother Thomas, with whom Jessie cheats on her husband (I don't feel like I'm giving anything away here, as it happens very early on and is implied in the book's description) has a quality, though, that I can't help but admire: doubt. It's not easy for a monk to admit, even to himself, that he doubts in God. I found the following passages to be the most striking:

"'Sometimes I experience God like this Beautiful Nothing,' he said. 'And it seems then as though the whole point of life is just to rest in it. To contemplate it and love it and eventually disappear into it. And then other times it's just the opposite. God feels like a presence that engorges everything. I come out here, and it seems the divine is running rampant. That the marsh, the whole of Creation, is some dance God is doing, and we're meant to step into it, that's all.'"

Later he quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "Before and with God we live without God."

Somehow I feel doubting God, even as a monk, or believing outlandish, undoctrinal things about God, is far more honest than romanticizing or rationalizing honesty. So your dad died when you were a kid. And that somehow gives you license to cheat? I don't think so.

Pam's Book 26: Certain Girls

Certain Girls is the sequel to Weiner's Good in Bed, a book about an oversized, increasingly bitter and acerbic young woman, Cannie Shapiro. Now it's thirteen years later and Cannie is happily married to her former "diet doctor" Peter and the mother of thirteen-year-old Joy. Joy's premature birth resulted in hearing loss, and her hearing aids and low voice are the banes of her existence. Well, that and her mother, of course (she is in seventh grade after all). Cannie stresses that her daughter doesn't like her anymore; Joy stresses that her mother loves her just a little too much.

While the story revolves around Joy's bat mitzvah, it is more about the relationship between mother and daughter, and all the family history that has played a role in forming that relationship. I found that part of the book perfectly believable. I remember being thirteen and mortified that my parents existed at all. I teach fourteen-year-olds and see many of them still doing the same thing. At the end of the book, though, there's an event that brings mother and daughter closer together. I found the event contrived. It forced the natural, slow evolution of the relationship to accelerate simply because it was time for the book to end and the book apparently needed to end on a rainbows-and-puppy-dogs kind of note.

Pam's Book 25: The Year of Pleasures

I read this book quickly, in a matter of hours. I found it mildly interesting, a lot of it completely unbelievable. A woman, newly widowed, drives on back roads to Farmtown, Midwest, buys a house on impulse, collects stray young men (not in a sexual way), miraculously regains old friends she ditched thirty years ago but who still love her and treat her as if she never left, finds a man, unfinds a man. She was actually pretty annoying. I don't think it's just that her life was somewhat foreign to me; I've connected with characters far more removed from my life.

The best thing I can say about the book is that it took up several hours of an afternoon in which I had nothing else to do. I don't regret having filled those hours with this book, but I don't think I'm going to be picking up any others by her.

Pam's Book 24: Between, Georgia

I'm in Atlanta for a couple weeks, and I thought I packed enough books to get me through. Turns out I didn't, which shouldn't surprise me. There are never enough books to get me through. I took a trip to one of East Atlanta's used bookstores and looked through the staff recommendations. A different book by Joshilyn Jackson was recommended, but they didn't have a used copy (the store sells new books, too); there was only this.

At birth, Nonnie repulsed her teenage mother so much that one of the neighbors who helped give birth adopted Nonnie. Nonnie's adoptive mother is deaf and is slowly going blind, a process long completed by the time Nonnie reaches adulthood. The story takes place in the little town of Between, Georgia, yet, of course, the word "between" applies to much of Nonnie's life. She's between divorcing and not divorcing her husband, she lives her life between Athens and Between, she translates for deaf people and lives between that and the hearing world, she's between mother and aunt to her small abandoned cousin Fisher. By the end of the book, the betweens have mostly been resolved.

This was another light but well written summer read. I've passed the book onto my grandmother and plan to read more of Jackson's novels before the summer is over.

Pam's Book 23: Half Broke Horses

I've been putting off reading this book since Blythe blogged about it because she was so disappointed with it. Like Blythe, I read and enjoyed Jeannette Walls' Glass Castles, and I was worried that this wouldn't impress me either. And while I didn't enjoy it as much as I enjoyed her memoir, I did find myself sucked in by Half Broke Horses.

The book tells the story of Walls' maternal grandmother, Lily Casey. Sort of. It does tell her story, but by the end it's pretty obvious that it's only about Lily insomuch as it explains the bizarre behavior of Rosemary, Walls' mother. I never really connected with Lily. She's pretty self-centered and is kind of a bitch. Her favorite character in all literature is Scarlett O'Hara, and I think that says a lot (she happens to be one of my all-time least favorite characters in all of literature).

I didn't love this book, but I did like the insight it gave me into Rosemary and why she ended up becoming the woman she did. I would be extremely interested in reading a book by Walls' daughter down the road; I'd like to see how much of her mother and grandmother she ended up inheriting...