A Girl Walks Into a Bookstore...

Pages: 260 Original date of publication: 2011 My edition: 2011 (Harper) Why I decided to read: it’s a review copy How I acquired my copy: Amazon Vine program, January 2011 Set in (according to Amazon.com’s product description) 1912, The Uninvited Guests takes place over the course of one day at an old English estate. It’s Emerald Torrington’s birthday, and her stepfather (who she and her younger brother inexplicably hate) has gone off to seek funding for the failing estate. Meanwhile, a train accident happens “on a branch line,” and a group of survivors show up at the house to be held for the interim. I really did want to like this book, but I didn’t I love historical fiction, especially fiction set in the Edwardian period, but I felt as though the author didn’t give her reader a good sense of time. Aside from the odd mention of cars or clothes, this book could be set in any time—1912, 1962, or even 2012. In fact, there was a distinctly modern feel to the characters. There are a numbe...

Pages: 503 Original date of publication: 1999 My edition: 2005 (Dial) Why I decided to read: Amazon.com recommendation How I acquired my copy: Amazon.com, December 2009 Set in Buffalo, New York, in 1901, City of Light is told from the point of view of Louisa Barrett, a 36-year-old spinster and the headmistress of a prestigious girls’ school in town. She is extremely modern, almost to the point of yawning, and her progressive views on girls’ education and the position of women in society in general got to be wearying after a while. The novel starts with a sensational murder connected to the power plant that’s owned by Louisa’s best friend Tom. This novel was a little confusing. At some points it’s a murder mystery; at others, it’s social commentary; at others the novel focuses more on the technological and political issues of the day. It’s as though the author conducted tons and tons of research on her subject (by no means a bad thing) and she decided that she just ...

Pages: 137 Original date of publication: 1974 My edition: 2010 (Sourcebooks) Why I decided to read: it had been recommended to me a long time ago How I acquired my copy: review copy from the publisher I’m sorry this isn’t a real review: a revised version of this review appears here for the first part of the quartet, Sunrise in the West . But my feelings for the book after having read part II haven’t really changed, and there’s not much more I can say about a book I generally dislike. Dragon at Noonday is the second book in the quartet. All four books are included in one volume, but they can be read separately—as they should be, because this is one of those books that you have to read in baby steps., whether you love it or no. This book is still very slow-going, There are a lot of descriptive passages in this book, and a lot of historical details; but Pargeter’s prose style is very, very dense—I’d find myself reading a few pages, putting the book down, and picking i...

Disclaimer: I couldn't finish this book. I barely made it past page 100, where I knew I had to stop. I had such high hopes for this novel. I really enjoyed The Historian , so I thought I couldn’t go wrong with Kostova’s second book, a novel about Impressionism and psychology. I’m afraid she suffered a little bit from second-novel-itis this time, as she’s written a novel that left me scratching my head quite a bit. I loved the premise: psychology and art are two things that you don’t usually see thrown in together in a novel. It’s a different subject matter altogether from The Historian , but I was hopeful nonetheless. Oh, how it falls short of expectations. I found that I was struggling to work my way through this sleeper of a novel. And the fact that I just described this book as “work” should tell you a lot about what I thought. Novels should be pleasure, not work. First, the author gives a lot of detail. A lot. Excruciatingly, extraneously so. Need directions from Washington, D....

I probably shouldn’t even be writing this review, as I didn’t finish it. Well, I got through 350 pages before throwing in the towel, but only because I had nothing else to read with me at the time. I was intrigued by the premise, about a young Russian girl in China in the 1920s, and her relationship with a native Chinese. But from there, it quickly went downhill. First of all, the prose is pretty overwrought, littered with one-word, repetitive sentences that were very choppy. There were lots of writing clichés (of the “he could feel into her soul” variety”). The writing actually gave me a headache at some places. There were also problems with the plot and characters. I simply didn’t feel emotionally invested in any of these characters’ stories, particularly Lydia, who grated on my nerves (and if the author mentioned her flame-red hair one more time, I thought I was going to throw the book at the wall!). She didn’t ever seem to be her age, and I didn’t find her relationship with Chang t...

Well, here we go again. Another “sequel,” or Jane Austen spinoff. The Private Diary of Mr. Darcy is just that—Mr. Darcy’s story as told through his own eyes. The story covers pretty much the same time period as Pride and Prejudice , and is essentially a retelling of the famous novel—with none of Pride and Prejudice ’s wit or humor. She even steals lines directly from Austen! Slater creates nothing truly new with this novel, but at the same time she doesn’t even stick with what we know of the characters from Jane Austen’s novel (it’s often overlooked, but in Austen’s book, Mr. Bingley has about four sisters). It was hard for me to believe, too, that Darcy would be friends with Byron. Nor is there any kind of historical accuracy (in many places in the book, for example, Darcy refers to Caroline Bingley and Mr. and Mrs. Hurst by their first names, where in reality they would have been known as Miss Bingley, Mrs. Hurst, and Hurst). All the characters in this book are one-dimensional, and ...

A Reliable Wife is set in Wisconsin in 1907. Ralph Truitt is a local, wealthy businessman who advertised in a Chicago newspaper for “a reliable wife.” Catherine Land answered the advertisement, and sets in motion a plot to poison her husband. The novel is marred by heavy-handed prose that aims to be literary, but isn’t. A really depressing theme and plot does not make a novel great. Actually, I got really, really bored by the obsessive way in which Goolrick describes things. An entire chapter on waiting for a train? Really? A hallmark of a great novel is one in which the theme is subtle, but powerful, and makes you think about it long after you’ve read the book; in this one, Goolrick hits his reader on the head—over and—over—with his theme. Ralph Truitt’s obsession with sex becomes tiresome by page 30, and the plot is filled with some major gaps. Why would Ralph hire someone to find his son, but not have them check into his wife’s past, for example? Was it just me, or did the author p...

Description from Amazon: In fourteenth-century England, young Eleanor de Clare, favorite niece of King Edward II, is delighted with her marriage to Hugh le Despenser and her appointment to Queen Isabella’s household as a lady-in-waiting. It soon becomes apparent, however, that Eleanor’s beloved uncle is not the king the nobles of the land—or his queen—expected. Hugh’s unbridled ambition and his intimate relationship with Edward arouse widespread resentment, even as Eleanor remains fiercely loyal to her husband and to her king. But loyalty has its price… Moving from royal palaces to prison cells, from the battlefield to the bedroom, between hope and despair, treachery and fidelity, hatred and abiding love, The Traitor’s Wife is a tale of an extraordinary woman living in extraordinary times. A noblewoman pays the price for her loyalty to an unpopular king and her unfaithful husband...conveys emotions and relationships quite poignantly...ultimately, entertaining historical fiction. I real...

The Eight started out promisingly enough: it's been compared to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose , but in actuality The Eight comes nowhere near that fabulous book. As I read, I hoped that Katherine Neville was writing a parody of an action-thriller, but I guess not. Where to begin? Overly contrived plot with more holes than Swiss cheese; really, really bad writing style with an over-use of adjectives and past participles; too much historical inaccuracy; too much historical name-dropping, so much so that this novel read like an issue of US magazine (Catherine the Great, Napoleon, Robespierre, Voltaire, and many, many other historical figures are thrown in, sometimes gratuitously); too much foreshadowing, is in, “little did I know…”. The characters were extremely one-dimensional, and I absolutely loathed the heroine, Cat Velis. The book started off well enough, but I found myself rolling my eyes the further I read. I’m all for reading historical thrillers, if the plot is enough ...

I really struggled with what to write in this review. Actually, I struggled to come up with something positive to say, and came up with: the premise of the novel is promising--a thriller set around the sinking of the Lusitania and the Arabian revolts. While onboard the Lusitania, Dora Benley, a college junior and the daughter of a Pittsburgh tire magnate, encounters a mysterious man who demands that she return something she has apparently stolen. Later, the same man is found in the boiler room, tampering with a fuse. Later, Dora’s fiancée goes missing in the Arabian dessert. The premise is pretty much the only good thing about this novel. On the surface, the book desperately needs a good proofreader and copyeditor, for grammar and consistency respectively. But all the proofreading and copyediting in the world aren't going to help this book with its bigger flaws. The writing style is descriptive in some parts, but then you’ll have periods of jerky movements where you feel as though ...

I’ve finally discovered the answer to a question I’ve had for a long time: what exactly do housewives do all day long? Well, Julie Klam wrote a memoir. Yup, a bored housewife who was too lazy to go out and get a job even before she married has written a memoir about being absolutely “normal.” She grew up in a wealthy suburb, where she played hookey from school in order to go shopping with her mom. Later, she had trouble getting a job, so she chalks this up as “I was brought up to believe that women don’t work.” Please. Klam’s just l-a-z-y. Then, she dates an ex-con who steals $17,000 from her, and badgers her next boyfriend, Paul, with constant e-mails about wanting to get married. The rest of the memoir is a boring series of wedding details, baby details, and complaints about how horrible Klam’s life was now that she couldn’t afford to get her hair colored and that her size zero jeans didn’t fit. Poor Julie. Furthermore, she wants a job where she can afford to “go out to lunch and get...

It’s 1803, and the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian have wowed Europe with their daring exploits. Amy Balcourt is a twenty-year-old, adventurous English girl who, in joining the League of the Purple Gentian, wishes to become a spy herself. She, along with her cousin Jane and their escort Miss Gwen, go to France, where they meet Lord Richard Selwick, also known as the Purple Gentian. A case of confused identities ensues in a bad parody of good spy fiction. The Secret History of the Pink Carnation is, first and foremost, chick lit, with historical accuracy taking a backseat. For someone who was supposed to be so smart, she behaved like a twit sometimes—for example, thinking that another character (a well-known rake) is the Purple Gentian, she makes an assignation with him in a dark, secluded space. I thought it was also rather ridiculous that she really didn’t know who the Purple Gentian was until the last minute. The prose of this book is also laughable: when talking about her ...

Austenland is the story of Jane Hays, a thirty-two year old woman is is more than mildly obsessed with Jane Austen, especially the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. When her elderly great-aunt dies, she leaves Jane with an unusual and bizarre bequest: a three week vacation to live out of one of Austen’s novels, to step back into the year 1816 and have a romantic adventure of one’s own. It’s a cute, creative premise, but one that doesn’t hold up well in this book. First of all, the characters were all shallow stereotypes, completely cookie-cutter and unbelievable. It’s difficult for me to believe that Jane could be so delusional and NOT have a good therapist standing behind her. Jane is completely unlike any successful New York woman I know. In addition, her “romance” was completely unconvincing (“Mr. Nobly” needs some acting lessons, it would seem). And bizarre. The setting, both in New York and LA, is vaguely sketched and seems isolated from the outside. And yet, Jane never seems t...

Centered around a Da Vinci Code-esque mystery that features something akin to the Dead Sea Scrolls, The Secret Scroll begins when Josh Cohan, an archeological professor, makes an important discovery in the desert outside of Jerusalem. It turns out that the scrolls were written by Jesus Christ, who was, according to this book, a Gnostic. Josh is then led on this whole action-adventure, in which his faith is tested. There’s a lot of promise, but ultimately, the novel fails to deliver. When I began reading The Secret Scroll, I thought, "you have GOT to be kidding me." The people who agented, edited, copyedited, and published this book need to be fired. However, I don't think any editor could have saved this book; the flaws are much deeper than grammatical. There's hardly any plot here (or at least any plot that makes sense), and the book is riddled with trite clichés, writing geared toward a sixth grader, and oversimplification of archeological trivia which insults the i...