Novels Now

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Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books. -From Isola Pribby to Juliet, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society-
Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’ first novel will certainly ruin you ‘for enjoying bad books.’ Set on the island of Guernsey (in the Channel Islands) in the months following the Second World War, [...]

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Contemporary Fiction - Epistolary
2008 The Dial Press
Finished on 7/23/08
Rating: 4.75//5 (Fabulous!)
ARC - Release date of July 29th
“Here’s who will love this book—anyone who nods in profound agreement with the statement,’Reading keeps you from going gaga.’ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel [...]

I am but one, yet to this day countless others lead lives even more destitute and enslaved than mine ever was. Perhaps my story is the exception because I escaped, at great risk, polygamy’s conjugal chains; and that my husband is the Mormon Church’s Prophet and Leader, Brigham Young, and I am his 19th and [...]

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I slept with close to forty boys and men before I figured out doing so was not serving me well. [pg 1]
Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity by Kerry Cohen
Hyperion, 2008
Nonfiction (Memoir); 210 pgs
Kerry Cohen was nothing like me; or was she? While she was vying for men’s affections and slipping under the [...]

If you live long enough, everything happens.
And then some of it happens again. [pg xii]
The Servants by Michael Marshall Smith
Harper Collins, 2008 (ARE)
Fiction; 209 pgs
Mark is an 11 year old boy whose life is out of balance. His mother has remarried and they have moved from London to the seaside community of Brighton. [...]

At this moment, I suddenly want to change everything that is me, the observer part, and move from something else: the living-your-life part. When does that start exactly? And something else. I look into the mirror and someone else says: What are you doing here? You have no right to live. [...]

Something in my soul had been hurt by what surrounded me, but I was not physically hurt. [excerpt from Nightwalker]
Nightwalker by Jocelynn Drake
Harper, August 2008 (ARE)
Fantasy; 370 pgs
It has been too long since last read a fantasy novel about vampires. I was thrilled when I learned that I was selected to receive a copy [...]

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale
Pages: 304
Finished: July 26, 2008
First Published: Apr. 2008
Genre: true crime, nonfiction, history
Awards: Samuel Johnson Award for Nonfiction 2008
Rating: 4.5/5
First sentence:
This is the story of a murder committed in an English country house in 1860, perhaps the most [...]

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale
Summerscale has written a very interesting book about the history of detectives, real and fictional, as well as investigating a true murder that scandalized Victorian England in 1860. The subtitle is “A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victoria Detective.”
The murder was of three year old [...]

The Bleeding Dusk by Colleen Gleason
The Gardella Vampire Chronicles, Book 3
Pages: 346
First Published: Feb. 2008
Genre: paranormal romance, historical fiction
Rating: 3.5/5
First sentence:
The lair of the Queen of the Vampires was tucked away in the snowy mountain range of Muntii Fagaras.
Comments: As the third book in the series it is difficult to summarize the plot without spoilers [...]

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
I first heard of this big ole book when bookfool mentioned it, then kookiejar loved it. It’s big in size (531 pages) and ambition. Toltz covers a lot of material here, and I’ll try to summarize a bit.
Jasper Dean is writing his family’s colourful history in Australia, focusing [...]

The visions conjured from the old woman’s tale - the evocation of a Havana filled with music and life - had left her with an odd sensation of dislocation. She felt like one of those saints that can be in two places at the same time. -from The Island of Eternal Love, page 10-
And that [...]

Mr. Fooster Traveling on a Whim: A Visual Novel by Tom Corwin
Illustrated by Craig Frazier
Pages: 101
Finished: July 18, 2008
First Published: June, 2008
Genre: graphic novel, fantasy, magical realism
Rating: 4/5
First sentence:
Mr. Fooster has a long list of things he likes to do.
Comments: Rather than starting this review with a summary of the plot I will be starting [...]

“Listen,” he says to her sternly, “I will tell you a secret about your demons: they are never stronger than you.” -From The White Mary, page 337-
Marika Vecera is an talented journalist who has traveled to the most troubled parts of the world and risked her life to witness war, genocide, torture and famine. She [...]

The Seance by Iain Lawrence
Pages: 263
First Published: July 8, 2008
Genre: YA/juvenile, historical fiction, mystery
Rating: 3.5/5
First sentence:
At five minutes to midnight, a stranger arrived for the seance.
Comments: It is 1926 and Scooter King is his mother’s helper. Madam King is a spiritualist who holds fake seances and Scooter is the one who pulls all the [...]

Although I haven’t yet read Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize winning Interpreter of Maladies, after reading Unaccustomed Earth, I can understand why the committee was so impressed with her writing. Her stories of the Bengali immigrant experience were very well developed, and they had closure to them, something I’ve noticed is often times lacking in [...]