All posts tagged: fiction

November Book

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We’re back again, as we are at the beginning of every month, to announce our book for this month! This is one we’re really looking forward to since it’s been high on our to-be-read list since its release early last year. Nominated as Best Book of the Year by several publications, critically (and publicly) acclaimed, and written by a legendary author, who wouldn’t be excited for our November pick; Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth ? Spanning the course of 50 years, Commonwealth shows us how one affair affects the lives of the four parents and six children in the Cousins and Keating families as they’re forced to become one blended, bi-coastal family. Spending summers in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a bond based on shared disillusionment and the strange but genuine affection that grows between them. But once they’ve grown, these children are ultimately forced to look at their story a different way when it becomes the plot of a best-selling novel authored by Franny Keating’s partner.   This is Patchett’s seventh novel, but her …

Bum Bum!

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Ok so I totally agree with Katie – this is like an SVU episode. Which I love. Except that there is no Stabler. This book has no Stabler. So you can stop reading here. Just kidding – this book is not going rewire your whole literary life but it is fun, it is creepy, and it is a great autumn evening read. Brian Freeman hits the ground running from the first scene.  Probably the thing that he does, that I love the most, is that he keeps the story moving. There is very little dead time with the mystery and he manages to do that without making the scenario super convoluted. I mean its a crazy pants story but it isn’t muddled with characters or asides or distractors. Part of the downfall of the pace of the story is that not too many characters are well flushed out. Frankie – I thought she had to be a secret crazy psycho because she had so little of anything going on with her.  She had a weird …

SVU: The Night Bird

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I’m all about the right read for the right time, and October begs a good, spooky, mystery. The Night Bird was just that. It read like a double episode of Law & Order SVU: the brooding investigator with a haunted past and a strong female professional being victimized by a series of targeted killings of young, innocent women. The premise is that the “Night Bird” killer is kidnapping, hypnotizing, and conditioning women into reliving their forgotten phobias when they hear Joni Mitchell’s “The Night Bird.” And he’s doing this to women who at some point have been patients of Dr. Francesca Stein; a psychiatrist who specializes in hypno-therapies to rid people of debilitating phobias. It was pretty easy to see some of the connections early on (phobias, hypnosis, the Joni Mitchell song), and SPOILER I also saw it coming that Frankie’s husband was cheating on her with her sister and that the death of Frankie’s father was less than innocent. But this made me think the larger mystery would also be easy to solve, and then …

A Perfect October Read

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There’s something about fall that makes you want to read a book that gives you a bit of a chill, isn’t there? A good thriller or crime drama, something with a bit of suspense. Of course, that’s why our October theme is what it is, and why we chose The Night Bird. I absolutely FLEW through this book – finished it almost as soon as we announced it as our October read. It was engaging, entertaining, and I was completely engrossed in the story. I know others have mentioned that the character development was perhaps a bit lacking, but I didn’t need it in this case (unusual, because that is usually the number one thing that makes or breaks a book for me). I enjoyed the story, and I enjoyed the way it unfolded. I loved that it kept me guessing, and that all these little clues sprinkled throughout the book gave you a chance to make some educated guesses. On that note, I have something that is maybe a bit embarrassing to admit: I didn’t guess …

Detective Easton vs. Memory

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The Night Bird grabbed me from the first scene. A girl who’s perfectly fine one second, and then crawling out of her skin the next, and discovering she’s not the only one this is happening to? I was hooked. Psychological thrillers — heck, thrillers of any kind — can be hard for me to definitively rate. While they’re one of my favorite genres when I’m looking for a quick read, they either have me flying through the pages looking for answers, or they don’t. (Stephen King might be the exception, because man, he can WRITE. But I digress.) The two things this book has going for it are the plot and characterization. I immediately liked Frost Easton. His character seemed warm, kind, sympathetic, and just quirky enough. (Shack might have been my favorite character of them all!) He made me feel that if anyone could solve this case, it was him. Through numerous plot twists and some gruesome scenes (reader beware), I was never bored. In fact, I barely put it down, finishing it in …

October Book

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Happy Fall, everyone! As I write this the Midwest is sweating under 90 degree heat, even though leaves are starting to fall. Let’s hope while you’re reading this it’s more fall-like out there, and hopefully a more perfect setting for our spooky October book: The Night Bird by Brian Freeman. A Chicago native, Brian Freeman worked in Marketing and Public Relations before becoming an author. He made his debut with the crime thriller Immoral in 2005. Since then he’s written over a dozen thrillers following the stories of different investigators; Jonathan Stride, Cab Bolton, and Frost Easton. And the first (so far only) of the Frost Easton series is The Night Bird. As Freeman describes it: “Frost Easton is a Homicide Inspector in the dramatic locale of San Francisco. He’s young, with a sexy shock of swept-back brown hair, a neat beard, and laser-like blue eyes.  He’s unattached, except for his cat, Shack, who patrols the city with him. Think Justin Timberlake with a gun, and you’ve got Frost.” It seems like a bit of a stretch. …

The Perfect Diary

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I read Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian in three sittings and probably three hours. It is a FAST read. Fast enough that when I reached the end I thought I couldn’t possibly be finished. Not that the ending wasn’t satisfying, because it was. But there was something that felt incomplete to me. I liked how it ended, but I wanted more. In fact, I felt that way about the book overall. I wanted a little something more than what I got. I frequently felt like I was missing something. Sometimes it was details that seemed to be eluding me. Sometimes it felt like I was making huge leaps in time without anything in between. At the end of the book I was pleased, but also felt like so many areas were left open. All the plot points weren’t tied up in a neat little bow. And then…. And then I thought about the title again. The Absolutely True DIARY of a Part-Time Indian. And then I thought about who was writing this diary …

The Underdog

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I really didn’t know what to expect with this book. As someone who judges books by their covers, I’ll say that the cover art set my expectations fairly low. But I was intrigued by the mixture of novel and illustrations. At exactly 230 pages I FLEW through this book. Between the pacing, illustrations, quick-read story, and short chapters, I think I read it in under 48 hours. I loved Junior, the main character. He was the epitome of underdog. And his outlook on things, beautiful. Despite all the shit, he ended up hopeful. The luxury that it might be, it was nice to read a book for a change that left you feeling hopeful. Sometimes I feel like a lot of the fiction out there is the dark and scary type. And with the state of the world as it is I don’t feel like I need to spend all of my reading time further depressed. I can’t say I’d recommend this book to my peers (30 somethings) as a must read…  it’s not tremendously …

September Book

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September marks a change in pace. New weather (so glad fall is almost here!), and a new school year. So we’re changing it up, too. This month we’ve picked something that’s been on many schools’ required reading lists (and taken off many) since it’s publication in 2007: The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Written by Sherman Alexie and illustrated by Ellen Forney, this young adult novel follows the story of Arnold Spirit Jr., a unique protagonist. He’s a 14-year-old amateur cartoonist living on the Spokane Indian Reservation who goes by “Junior.” The story begins when he makes the controversial decision to venture off the reservation to go to an all-white high school in a border town. The son of two alcoholics, a victim of bullying, and the epitome of awkward; Junior’s story is endearing, brave, funny, and a coming of age story for the ages. This is the first YA novel by Alexie, who’s had careers in stand-up comedy, screenwriting, film production, songwriting, and other fiction genres. The Absolute True Diary of a …

Real and Raw

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Brit Bennett can certainly craft a story. I was sucked in to Oceanside almost immediately and then spent the next few days reading while tears pricked the back of my eyes. It wasn’t that the book was sad, per se, though elements of it were heartbreaking for sure. It was more that each person’s story felt so real and so raw. I felt for Nadia, Aubrey, Robert, and Luke… even when they were making decisions that were frustrating or awful. I think the narrative voice Bennett used had a great deal to do with it. As a reader, I knew enough about the characters to understand their motivation, even when their literary counterparts couldn’t. {SPOILER ALERT} Even during Nadia and Luke’s affair, an act I generally have absolutely no sympathy for, I could see how it happened. While I wasn’t rooting for them, I wasn’t as angry with them either. I also thought that having an abortion be the driving force of the story was an interesting choice. Mostly because as much as the book …