Novels Now

You are browsing the archives of 2009 March.

Drood by Dan Simmons
Pages: 775
First Published: Feb. 9, 2009
Genre: historical fiction, mystery
Rating: 5/5
First sentence:

My name is Wilkie Collins, and my guess, since I plan to delay the publication of this document for at least a century and a quarter beyond the date of my demise, is that you do not recognise my name.

Comments: Where to [...]

["]I remembered a story Johnny Leahy told right before our wedding. Fado,” Maire said, and winked at me. “Johnny was out fishing where Galway Bay meets the sea. They’d caught nothing, no fish, all day. When the sun sank beneath the waves, some boats turned back to shore, empty. But Johnny and his da [...]

Unpolished Gem: My Mother, My Grandmother, and Me by Alice Pung
Pages: 282
First Published: Jan. 27, 2009
Genre: memoir
Rating: 4/5
First sentence:
In 1980, my father, mother, grandmother, and Auntie Kieu arrived in Australia by plane.
Comments: A Chinese family escapes communism by moving to Cambodia, only to find some years later that the next generation must escape from the [...]

The mystery was good. We really are a part of the detectives investigation in this book and only get to know what they know, making this a real police procedural. The story moves along pretty quickly as the police follow one clue after another. There was lots of discussion about immigration in Iceland and the attitudes and prejudices that can happen. I think in some ways I can identify with the Icelanders; living on an island really isolates a place and on Prince Edward Island we deal with some of the same type of issues in terms of culture and ‘the Island way of [...]

Fade by Lisa McMann
Wake Trilogy, Book 2
Pages: 248
First Published: Feb. 10, 2009
Genre: YA, magical realism
Rating: 4.5/5
First sentence:
Janie sprints through the snowy yards from two streets away and slips quietly through the front door of her house.
Comments: Janie has found out that she is not the first to experience her ability to enter other people’s dreams. [...]

Wake by Lisa McMann
Wake Trilogy, Book 1
Pages: 210
First Published: Mar 4, 2008
Genre: YA, magical realism
Rating: 5/5
First sentence:
Janie Hannagan’s math book slips from her fingers.
Comments: Seventeen-year-old Janie gets sucked into other people’s dreams. It’s been happening since she was eight. Now that she is getting older things are getting worse. More and more students in high [...]

Lisa McMann
210 pages
Janie Hanagan has problems. Her mom is a drunk and it really seems that she couldn’t care less what Janie does.  She also has a secret. She gets sucked into other people’s dreams if they fall asleep near her.
Janie is determined to make a better life for herself. She works all the hours [...]

Daniel Suarez
448 pages
Daemon as it applies to Computer Science is defined by dictionary.com as:
A program or process that sits idly in the background until it is invoked to perform its task.
And that’s exactly what this Daemon does. It sits idly in the background until computer genius Matthew Sobol dies of brain cancer. Upon his death [...]

She Always Knew How: Mae West, A Personal Biography by Charlotte Chandler
Pages: 303
Finished: Mar. 11, 2009
First Published: Feb. 10, 2009
Genre: biography
Rating: 4/5
Reason for Reading: Received a review copy from Simon & Schuster Canada.
First sentence:
My first thought was, women need a Bill of Rights. “And then I thought, no, what women need is — a Bill [...]

Hearts. This is all about hearts, restless or yearning, broken or bleeding. - from Bleeding Heart Square, page 229 -
Andrew Taylor’s latest crime mystery is a literary whodunnit set in London in the early 1930’s. Lydia Langstone, leaves her abusive marriage and arrives to live with her father, Captain Ingleby-Lewis, at Number 7 Bleeding [...]

Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go by Dale E. Basye
Illustrations by Bob Dob
Heck, The First Circle of Heck
Pages: 288
First Published: July, 2008
Genre: children, fantasy
Rating: 3/5
First sentence:
As many believe, there is a place above and a place below.
Comments: Milton’s sister Marlo is a lot of trouble; a Goth girl always pulling off pranks and often dragging [...]

American Rust
By Philipp Meyer
Completed March 9, 2009
For some reason, the debut novel by Philipp Meyer, American Rust, did not resonate with me. It took me two weeks to complete, which is unusual for my reading pace, and I wanted to abandon it at many times. I stuck with it, but in the end, I wish [...]

Dandelion Fire by N.D. Wilson
100 Cupboards, Book 2
Pages: 466
First Published: Feb. 24, 2009
Genre: children’s fantasy
Rating: 4.5/5
First sentence:
Kansas is not easily impressed.
Comments: In the previous book Henry finds out a secret about himself and now with only two weeks left before his parents come to take him home from visiting his uncle and cousins, Henry decides [...]

Near mid-century when Edward was born, the full moon was years from being the brightest. That would happen - in terms of luminosity and size - in the last month of the century. As a child growing up, however, Edward found much splendor and mystery in the moon. It kept changing and following him [...]

Suzanne Collins
374 pages
In a future North America, now called Panem, Katniss Everdeen lives in District 12. There Katniss hunts to feed her family and to trade and sell for other necessities.
Once a year a lottery is held to choose two teens, one boy and one girl, between the ages of 12 and 18 [...]

The Vagrants by Yiyun Li
Pages: 337
First Published: Feb. 3, 2009
Genre: literary fiction, historical fiction
Rating: 4/5
First sentence:

The day started before sunrise, on March 21, 1979, when Teacher Gu woke up and found his wife sobbing quietly into her blanket.

Comments: This book is a story of ordinary Chinese citizens in 1979, China. A year in which people [...]

Although Janine understood almost none of the language, the expressions and gestures of the people at the table were so familiar that she felt she’d already heard this entire conversation and understood it perfectly, sitting among her aunts and uncles in her grandmother’s house many nights near the San Francisco Bay. - from The [...]