Too Much!

Posted : 2 weeks, 1 day ago on 4 August 2008 04:26 (A review of Too Much Tuscan Sun: Confession of a Chianti Tour Guide)

Wow, what a waste of paper this is. This is the memoir of an English-Italian man who establishes a tour company in the Tuscan Hills. And how awful his clients are. This is not the cute cultural-misunderstandings book that one would hope for, it's just a book about of wishy-washy tour guide who seems to have more horrid customers than good ones. And even when he likes his clients the stories are rarely amusing, and the progression of the stories is so bad that I can't believe I read the whole thing. Of course I didn't have a lot of options as I was traveling through Tuscany at the time and this was the only book I had. The writing is so poor, even grammatically atrocious at times, that my husband couldn't even get through the first 3 chapters. And as the author actually grew up in Britain, and he had English speaking assistants to help him with this book, there is no excuse for it. Just another book whipped up to exploit the "Tuscan" craze going on at the time. Stay far away.

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Absorbed it whole

Posted : 2 weeks, 2 days ago on 3 August 2008 09:20 (A review of Hanna's Daughters (Ballantine Reader's Circle))

I've read other reviews of this book (on other sites) and was surprised to find how many people thought it was good but very tough to get through. They thought it was complicated. I had that reaction to another book by this author, but found this one to be just brilliant and read it really easily. It was more like absorbing it than reading. The book is about (as the title states), Hannah and her daughter, and her daughter's daughter and in placed in Sweden. Each woman is definitely a woman of her generation, but in startling ways that gives the reader a new perspective on history. I could really see the stories unfolding through each characters eyes, and found them all to be intriguing and women I would be proud to know. I hope others will let themselves be introduced to these women, and not be scared off by those other reviews.

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Tearing up in Public

Posted : 2 weeks, 5 days ago on 1 August 2008 10:25 (A review of How to Talk to a Widower)

This is my kind of book! A young widower is allowing himself to wallow in his own depression after the love of his life is killed in a plane crash. But unfortunately the outside world keeps getting in his way. And his family. The book takes you on a roller coaster ride, as you laugh through your tears, guffaw out loud, blush and invest yourself in these peoples lives. Although none of these things has happened to me yet, most of them will...such as losing someone you love, sitting by helplessly while someone screws up their life, watching a marriage crumble before you, be blindsided by someone's infidelity and/or watching your parents slip away. Although all these things happen to the main character within a year or two, they are all things we can identify with as something that has happened or will happen. But the author has created such a wonderful story about it all that I didn't want to put it down, by creating characters well filled out and brilliantly hilarious dialog. It was one of those books I couldn't stop reading, but got anxious towards the end of the book because I would no longer be able to slip in and out of this world and family that I had gotten so involved in.

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Poorly Structured, Brilliantly Peopled

Posted : 2 months, 2 weeks ago on 3 June 2008 07:19 (A review of The Yokota Officers Club: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle))

The Yokota Officer's Club is a book about one family moving around the world with the USAF and how it affects them. The main character is the oldest daughter and the book starts with her flying from college to her families newest posting in Okinawa. But there seems to be one of those family secrets that no one ever talks about, that starts us going to flashbacks of a previous posting on mainland Japan and why the family never discusses the Japanese maid they had for those four years and was practically family. The overall structure of the book is pretty poor, with sidelines that are dead ends and segments that jump around. But the author does have a gift for creating interesting characters, most of which are complicated and well fleshed out. And the bond between the mother and oldest daughter is wonderful to read. The locations and the time periods are brought to life marvelously and truly gives the reader a look into something most people know nothing about. There is something here that reminds me of the best parts of "The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood". Despite it's many flaws I enjoyed reading this book and miss the characters now that it is over.

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Martha Stuart Goes to Italy

Posted : 3 months ago on 21 May 2008 06:56 (A review of Under the Tuscan Sun)

I have to be honest, that I'm so jealous of the woman my teeth are turning green. But besides that I found the book quite tedious. I knew going in that this was nothing like the movie. But that could only be a good thing, as the movie was trite and mediocre. In the book (and therefor real life) she buys the house with her boyfriend, and they only use it as a summer house. However, the book could have been a lot better. It felt more like a series of Martha Stuart magazine articles. Two chapters are completely devoted to recipes for meals she's learned to cook using Italian ingredients. And the rest is mainly about how they renovated the house, and what curtains they put where. There are a few cute anecdotes about the people and nearby places, and those I enjoyed tremendously. But generally it was pretty annoying and a very over-rated book.

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I Never Promised You a Good Book

Posted : 3 months, 3 weeks ago on 24 April 2008 03:36 (A review of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (Signet))

It is the story of a young woman and her time in a mental institution in the early 60's. The writing is pretty simplistic, and although this has become a young adult book, the author's style is very old fashioned and unlikely to keep a young adults attention. Then, there are the scenes in which Deborah retreats into her fantasy world which reads like a bad science fiction novel, with unexplained names and words that has the reader skipping over them, not because it's too complicated, but just uninteresting. It might have been interesting and somewhat informative in it's day, but in this day and age most 12 years olds can discuss the difference between schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder (and probably tell you what meds they are personally on for their own problems). There are much better books out there since this was written on mental illnesses, so I'd recommend skipping this one.

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Interesting topic, poorly executed

Posted : 4 months, 1 week ago on 11 April 2008 09:51 (A review of The Sixteen Pleasures: A Novel)

Sixteen Pleasures is the story of one American woman, who like many others across the world, picked up and went to Florence after the devastating flood of 1966 to help save the masterpieces in so many of the museums and churches there. Our heroine is a book restorer, who will probably lose her job at home for going on this adventure, but decides that is all she has to lose. The title of the book comes from an erotic manuscript banned by a long ago pope that the nuns find amongst their library. But although she becomes obsessed with saving this book, and therefor the nunnery, the story is more about her love affair with a married Italian man, with long descriptive pieces about how she painstakingly rebinds the book. I found myself skipping the parts about her work even though I thought I would enjoy learning about it. The book went by quickly, but something was missing, and the plot was overly predictable and the foreshadowing outright blatant. I admit that I rarely think men write well from a woman's perspective, but the first half of the book rang true. However, when she gets more confident, that voice loses itself, and the author even goes back and forth from first person to omniscient narrator. Such an interesting topic, so sadly executed.

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Miracle of the Little Ships

Posted : 5 months, 1 week ago on 11 March 2008 09:04 (A review of The Little Ship)

The book is the fictional account of 5 young people and their leadup to WWII and the evacuation of Dunkirk. The characters are 2 English brothers, their younger female cousin, a Jewish teenage girl sent away from Austria at the beginning of the trouble that lives with the cousin, and a young german boy that attends school with the boys. And their fishing boat they use every summer. The story of the youngsters over the years before the war is pretty average, and at times tedious. The best bit is the last couple of chapters that describe the actual call-up of all sea-worthy ships by the British for some unknown reason. The reason being that the Germans have captured most of France in a week, and stranded the English and French soldiers at Dunkirk. And how those civilian ships end up picking up nearly 300,000 officers and returning them to England. Their is just too much coincidence in the book, even if one or two are realistic. Even for light reading, the book isn't quite worth it, as the middle part just drags. Too bad, as I think the idea was good.

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Thin on story, rich in characters

Posted : 8 months ago on 20 December 2007 08:35 (A review of Prodigal Summer)

Prodigal Summer revolves around three separate stories that occur in the same county in West Virginia...an old rigid widower, the new city bride of one of the local farmers and a recently divorced woman working for the park service alone up in the mountains. There is no big climax in the book, no secret plotline to time them all together, no action. But the drama is real, and the characters are all interesting and can be related to. The thing that really ties them all together is their relationship with the land and nature. Her writing is not heavy handed, nor the story overly dramatic. She creates an location that's a nice place to be, and was kinda sad to leave.

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Interesting but disjointed

Posted : 9 months, 1 week ago on 11 November 2007 08:51 (A review of Tilt: A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa)

In preparation for a trip to Tuscany next year I ordered "Tilt". It's a history of the tower we all know as the "Leaning Tower of Pisa". It was built as a bell tower to match the Duomo and Baptistry in the middle of Pisa. The ground underneath began to subside almost immediately after construction began. And thus begins the story of how it was built, and the various attempts to keep it from falling over. Although the history itself is interesting, I found the book to be a little disjointed...but then again history rarely takes a straight line. I'm afraid the book isn't interesting enough to be a good reason to read it, unless you are already interested in the subject.

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