11.1.09

Water For Elephants

Water For Elephants

by Sara Gruen

My favourite read of my holiday break. Why? Great story, brilliant writing (nifty trick at the beginning and end - loved it), with a twist that you knew-but-didn't-know. Read it and you'll find out what I mean.

I would nominate this for my 'books to re-read every year or so' list.

More from Amazon.

Funny tidbit: I bought this book for my mom in law for Christmas. It was a total whim buy; surfing on Amazon and the title jumped out at me. Turns out my sister and colleague both had read it and adored it, and it ended up in my hands on my holiday road trip. It's a small world on the literary journey.

Those Who Save Us

Those Who Save Us

by Jenna Blum

My sister is my fiction broker and this made the 'must read' for the road trip. I'm glad I read it, but whew it was a heavy one. I found myself wanting a bit more closure in the end, but I guess that is the reality of the tale.

Check out more from Amazon.



10.1.09

The Secret Life of Bees

The Secret Life of Bees

by Sue Monk Kidd

My vacation fiction treat... the part that I loved:

pg 170 If the heat goes over 104 degrees in South Carolina, you have to go to bed. It is practically the law. Some people might see it as shiftless behaviour, but really, when we're lying down from the heat, we're giving our minds time to browse around for new ideas, wondering at the true aim of life, and generally letting things pop into our heads that need to. In the sixth grade there was a boy in my class who had a steel plate in his skull and was always complaining how test answers could never get through to him. Our teacher would say, "Give me a break."

In a way though, the boy was right. Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long. But that's just my opinion.


The review from Amazon.com:

In Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, 14-year-old Lily Owen, neglected by her father and isolated on their South Carolina peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart's answer to the family story that as a child, in unclear circumstances, Lily accidentally shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of Deborah is a strange image of a Black Madonna, with the words "Tiburon, South Carolina" scrawled on the back. The search for a mother, and the need to mother oneself, are crucial elements in this well-written coming-of-age story set in the early 1960s against a background of racial violence and unrest. When Lily's beloved nanny, Rosaleen, manages to insult a group of angry white men on her way to register to vote and has to skip town, Lily takes the opportunity to go with her, fleeing to the only place she can think of--Tiburon, South Carolina--determined to find out more about her dead mother. Although the plot threads are too neatly trimmed, The Secret Life of Bees is a carefully crafted novel with an inspired depiction of character. The legend of the Black Madonna and the brave, kind, peculiar women who perpetuate Lily's story dominate the second half of the book, placing Kidd's debut novel squarely in the honored tradition of the Southern Gothic. --Regina Marler

Gaping Void Goodness