Synopsis:
When her marriage breaks apart after a spectacular midwife crisis, a mom discovers a natural talent for public relations.
Review:
A Thousand Pardons isn’t quite the fictional juggernaut its marketing copy made it out to be. It’s a mostly engaging character study that never quite pulled me in. It kept a certain level of distance from the reader, and that’s a technique that just doesn’t do it for me.
Many thanks to Random House for the review copy.
Synopsis:
A journalist details the multiple affairs that ended her marriage.
Review:
The story told in Vow is a train wreck. Wendy Plump and her husband pretty much destroyed their marriage with infidelity on both sides, ending finally when her husband had a baby with another woman. For all her candor, I never felt like Plump got to the heart of why she did what she did, or responded the way she did, or how she feels about the endeavor of marriage in general. I understand that you can’t boil someone’s life choices down to a set of pat answers, but at a certain point I just felt trapped inside a vortex of emotion and desire and need and couldn’t find a way to escape. That said, I appreciated her honesty and willingness to tell the truth even when it made her look bad.
Many thanks to Bloomsbury USA for the review copy.
Synopsis:
When a troubled young man moves into a dilapidated house with his childhood friend, the perfect life of the sexy next door neighbors entices him–and ensnares him.
Review:
The Neighbors is a creepy little thriller whose twists take the form of character revelation. I was never exactly surprised by the actual plot, but I kept turning the pages because of the complexity of the characters, their backstories, and their relationships.
Synopsis:
Subtitled “How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband ‘Master’.”
Review:
I didn’t think I wanted to read A Year of Biblical Womanhood because it seemed gimmicky and I assumed that the writer was going for snark. But I gradually became turned on to the beautiful, incisive, perceptive, and deeply Christian writings of author Rachel Held Evans and realized I had to make this my next read.
I want all of my friends to read this book so we can talk about how awesome it is. I double dog dare anyone to find fault with Held Evans’s commitment to orthodoxy and her belief in the inerrancy of Scripture. She doesn’t dismiss the hard sayings of Scripture nor does she assume that all Scripture is proscriptive. Instead she goes deep into Biblical exegesis, literary analysis, and theological research in order to find out what the Bible has to say to women.
Synopsis:
The wife of a fundamentalist pastor details her years of abuse at the hands of her hypocritical husband.
Review:
A friend of mine recommended Fleeing Fundamentalism after hearing that I’d been digging into books on polygamy. Honestly, these kinds of stories are the only kinds of memoirs I want to read–stories about women dealing with extreme personal situations. I definitely appreciated Carlene Cross’s insight into her particular situation, but as is generally the case I was disappointed in the theology-lite. Sadly, Cross came to reject all of Christianity because of the heinous abuses her husband meted out to her, and so she didn’t look to any Christian sources to combat the bad theology she was taught. She lumps all of Christianity in with the twisted version she was taught, and that makes me sad.
Synopsis:
Detective Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy has a spotless record of solves, but when he’s partnered with a street smart rookie on the murder of a family in a boom economy development turned recession slum outside of Dublin, the ghosts from his past threaten his ability to play by the straight and narrow.
Review:
I am a huge fan of Tana French and Broken Harbor definitely lived up to my expectations. First of all, her sense of mood and place is just brilliant. She sets the story squarely within the recession (similar to the recent Gone Girl), and uses the murder investigation to thoroughly examine how the economic roller coaster of the last five years affected some very ordinary people. In many ways it was hard to read about regular people trapped by their dreams.
But it’s Detective Kennedy who killed me in this one. As much as I love Cassie Maddox, I fell head over heels for Scorcher to the point where it physically hurt to watch him suffer. French gives him such exquisite depth and complexity that I didn’t want his story to end–especially the way that it does.
As a mystery, Broken Harbor doesn’t aim for the complexity of French’s other books, but that’s not a problem for me. Its relative simplicity ends up showing Scorcher’s talent as an investigator more than if he had followed a twisty rabbit hole of crazy. Instead, Scorcher has to dive deep into an emotional quagmire that matches his own.
And I have to mention Richie–oh, Richie! A rookie sent out on his first case with Scorcher, the two quickly discover their compatibility as partners. On the surface, this would seem like a good thing, but Scorcher has his reservations, and they don’t really make sense. The journey of their relationship is as satisfying as anything else in the story.
On a last note, I really wish I could get away with using some of the Irish phrasing that French gives her characters. But I’m afraid my Irish friends would be after taking the piss if I used the word “banjaxed” to describe my laptop after having a can of seltzer poured on it by my two-year-old. She’s only small, what does she know?
Synopsis:
Amina is a Bangladeshi woman who moves to Rochester to marry George, a man she met on the internet in the hopes of securing a green card and bringing her parents to America.
Review:
I had really enjoyed Nell Freudenberger’s Lucky Girls story collection when I read it years ago, but she fell off my radar as an author until I came across a description of The Newlyweds while aimlessly browsing for new fiction. I found the premise intriguing and I was curious to see if she could pull it off. While I enjoyed the read, I never felt like any of the characters truly leapt off the page. I still felt like there was so much I didn’t really know about Amina, and George I just didn’t get at all. I wanted to like it so much because her prose is lovely, but it didn’t quite come together for me.
Synopsis:
When his wife goes missing, an angry writer-turned-bar-owner struggles with feelings of guilt, as the circle of suspicion hones in on him.
Review:
Gone Girl is the kind of thriller I swoon for–a killer hook, messy interpersonal dynamics, and the kind of twists that feel inevitable and fresh at the same time. I was definitely drawn into the game in a big way, and was glad I didn’t know much about the book beyond the blurb. I am not sure it ever hit the level of anything by Superfast favorites Barbara Vine and Tana French, but it certainly kept me riveted.
Synopsis:
A present-day murder case in a fundamentalist Mormon enclave told alongside the story of Ann Eliza Young’s escape from Brigham Young’s polygamous harem.
Review:
I think the fact that I kept falling asleep while listening to The 19th Wife says it all–I was so primed to love this book, given my obsession with the FLDS, but I was just so disappointed with the execution. I finally gave up near the end when it devolved into a story-free lecture on stuff we’d already seen. I’m very bummed out about this.
Synopsis:
After fleeing the FLDS with her 8 children, Carolyn Jessop becomes involved in the events following the raid on the FLDS compound where 400 children were taken by CPS because underage girls were being forced into plural marriages with old men.
Review:
I am fascinated by closed communities, and Triumph taught me so much about the inner workings of the FLDS, a radical sect of Mormonism that puts plural marriage at the forefront of their theology. Even better, I learned so much about what really went on when the FBI raided that compound in Texas. The psychological complexity of the women and men who make up this powerful cult was just fascinating beyond belief. It was a good companion piece to Daughters of Zion, with much better writing.
