Novels Now

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Nemesis by Jo Nesbo
Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett
Harry Hole series, Book 4
Pages: 474
First Published: May 6, 2008 (1/6/09 in US)
Genre: crime, mystery
Rating: 5/5
First sentence:

I’m going to die.

Comments: This book is impossible to summarize. The story is incredibly intricate and several cases intertwine with each other. The back of my paperback copy [...]

Last year we had the privilege of receiving three Toon Books for my 8yo and I to review. These are Graphic Novels for emergent readers.
Available April 15, 2009 two more books in the series will hit the shelves.
Rating: 5/5

Benny and Penny in The Big No-No! by Geoffrey Hayes is a fun story of a brother [...]

Michael Lee West
291 pages
Renata DeChavannes is going through a rough time. Her mother and stepfather recently died in a plane crash, her director-boyfriend is in Ireland directing a film when the tabloids report of his alleged affair with a young starlet, and her difficult relationship with her father isn’t getting better any time soon.
The relationship [...]

Rebeca Seitz
311 pages
Joy Sinclair Lasky is one of four adopted daughters. She is the quiet list-maker of the bunch. Her sisters Meg, Kendra and Tandy have always been the standouts. Joy is the one who has everything planned out, in order and in control. When she and her husband, Scott, decide that they would like [...]

Here’s the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice by Maureen McCormick
Pages: 274
First Published: Oct. 14, 2008
Genre: autobiography/memoir, non-fiction
Rating: 3.5/5
First sentence:

This story begins in the fall of 2006 in Los Angeles.
Comments: In the prologue, Maureen McCormick starts with when she came out of the woodwork to appear in the reality show Celebrity Fit [...]

The Runaway Dolls by Ann M. Martin & Laura Godwin*
Illustrated by Brian Selznick
The Doll People, Book 3
Pages: 323
First Published: Oct. 7, 2008
Genre: children, fantasy
Rating: 4.5/5
First sentence:
Annabelle Doll didn’t see the mysterious package when it was delivered.
Comments: The Palmer’s are on a two week vacation and the dolls have the run of the house. Just before [...]

Set in a small dying former steel mill town in Pennsylvania, this is the story of two young men (20yrs old). Issac, who is called the smartest person in town except for maybe his sister and had been expected to go straight to college after high school. But his mother dies, his father is in a crippling accident at work and his sister leaves for an ivy league school 3 months after their mother’s death, leaving him to stay with his father. The other is Poe, the legendary high school football player who could have gotten a football scholarship to any college but had always been a bad apple and had [...]

Maybe I’m overstepping my boundaries, maybe I’m supposed to let my kids make their own mistakes—that’s what the self-proclaimed experts say—but I know about mistakes, about how indelible they can be. [pg 45]

Who By Fire by Diana Spechler
Harper Perennial, 2008
Fiction; 343 pgs
It is rare I read a book longing for more when I reach the [...]

This is what I’ve learned so far about Rhode Island chat rooms.Not everyone is from Rhode Island.
Correct spelling and complete sentences are signs of a newcomer.
And no matter what the supposed topic of the chat room, two-thirds of the conversations are always about sex. [excerpt from book]
Teaser by Jan Brogan
St. Martin’s Minatour, 2008
Crime Fiction (S/T); [...]

You just remember a few of the ripples, not the whole of the river. I don’t know any writers, but I think that’s what all stories are about, the ripples moving away down some vast river, and the words we find to describe those moments are in the river too, swirling together and then [...]

The Lost City of Z by David Grann
Pages: 299 (+extensive Notes, Bibliography & Index)
First Published: Feb. 24, 2009
Genre: Biography, Travel, Memoir
Rating: 4/5
First sentence:

Comments: This is a biography of early twentieth century explorer, Percy Fawcett. Fawcett was an accomplished explorer of the Amazon jungles and recipient of the Royal Geographical Association’s Gold Medal. He is most [...]

This is a beautiful book. Beautifully written with a beautiful story to tell. It is a tale of friendship and enemies, love and hate, two very different families and the children who fall in love. Almost like World War II version of Romeo and Juliet. The story is bittersweet, hence the title, and the characters of Henry, his father, and Keiko, the American-born Japanese girl are fully [...]

He tugged out the photograph, tugged with trembling hands, and set it down on the bar top. And he looked at it and saw that it had faded. All the once-bright colors were vanishing, leaving only a trace of themselves, tinged with green, with the bluish green of the sky…when evening was coming…the sky [...]

Cassie Johnson has been married for 15 years to Peck Johnson. After discovering she was pregnant at the end of her summer romance with Peck, Cassie is forced to give up her dreams of attending college, is disowned and cut off from her preacher father and her beloved mountain home, and she is left with [...]

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
Fiction
2009 Ballantine Books
Finished on 1/5/09
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)
ARC - Due out on January 27, 2009
Publisher’s Blurb
In 1986, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. The hotel has been boarded up for decades, but now a [...]

‘Math has proven the existence of God, because it is absolute and without contradiction; but the devil must exist as well, because we cannot prove it.’
Absolutely wonderful — I loved this book!!
Have you seen the movie 50 First Dates? It’s one of my favorite movies, and a very similar situation occurs in this book. [...]

Even before I emerged from my mother’s womb in 1953, people began warning my mother that the infant she carried was going to be huge.

I really enjoyed this debut novel — particularly the first 3/4 of it. Tiffany Baker has created a very extraordinary character in Truly Plaice. First called a ‘little giant’ by her teacher Miss Sparrow, Truly is the exact opposite of her very petite, pretty, and perfect sister Serena Jane. Teased and humiliated by her classmates and community, Truly actually copes fairly well with her large size. Her [...]

Kirk Curnutt
329 pages
What had being the parent of a murdered child taught her? Nothing-nothing except the inexhaustiblility of her own anger, anger at constantly being reminded of what she’d lived through, what she’d always be living through, and most of all anger at the presumption that she should be over it, that she should have [...]

When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
3rd Jackson Brodie mystery
Pages: 348
First Published: Sept, 2008
Genre: mystery, psychological suspense
Rating: 5/5
First sentence:
The heat rising up from the tarmac seemed to get trapped between the thick hedges that towered above their heads like battlements.
Comments: This is the story of three women, one who survived a brutal [...]