April books
Categories: uncategorized
Date: 30 April 2009 21:53:29
Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult is about Shay Bourne, a prisoner on death row for the brutal murder of Kurt Nealon and his step-daughter Elizabeth. Kurt's and his wife June had a daughter, she was pregnant when he was murdered, and this little girl has a heart problem which means she needs a heart transplant. Her father's murderer is insisting that when he dies his heart goes to her. Remarkably, his heart is a perfect match in all ways.
This book is highly improbable but quite a good read. The ethics surrounding transplantation and the death penalty are dealt with from an interesting perspective. Not one of her best, but not too bad.
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Wedding Season by Katie Fforde is a perfect summer read, light and fluffy and just not too taxing.
Sarah Stratford is a wedding planner, and she is able to organise everyone else's lives but her own. Along with her dress-designer and hairdresser friend they plan perfect wedding for complete drama queens. Of course everything ends up nicely with them all finding their own men and living happily ever after, as a chick-lit-beach-read should be!
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The Heart of the Dales by Gervase Phinn is SUCH a good read, although there was something rather strange about sailing down The Nile and being able to hear Yorkshire voices in my mind.
Gervase Phinn, Schools Inspector is at it again. Trawling around the Dales, visiting his schools and catching up with some old and new faces. He has a new boss who is rather a task-master and a 'little job' to undertake which happens to be organising a major conference. These books are well worth a read. Definitely the James Herriot of education!
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Point of Rescue by Sophie Hannah was a book I found a bit hard-going.
Sally is a woman who is bored with life and finds motherhood a difficult task. The year before this story is set she is meant to go on a work-trip, which was cancelled. However, she decides to go anyway and tells her husband that she is away on business. Whilst staying at a hotel she meets a man called Mark Bretherick and has an affair with him. One day she sees on TV that this man's daughter and wife have been murdered, the only problem is that the man who is called Mark Bretherick was not the man she spent the week with. This book is a murder-mystery with a twist and is quite a good read, eventually!
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Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married by Marian Keyes is a slightly irritating book. Lucy Sullivan (no surpises there) is a young woman who is told by a psychic that she will be getting married. Other than her traumatic relationships, dealing with depression and her father's alcoholism I can't really tell you what the story was about. A bit of a shame really as I usually like Marian Keyes books.
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Second Glance by Jodi Picoult is a bit of a departure from her usual courtroom dramas with themes focussing around legal/moral/ethical dilemmas. This story is essentially a ghost tale about a young man called Ross whose fiancee died and as a result he became a ghost hunter. He goes to visit his sister and his nephew after strange goings on at a Native-American burial site and he got more than he bargained for as his past comes back to haunt him.
The problem I had with this book is that I just didn't "get it". The story was convoluted and as it shifts back and forth in time, and sometimes transcends the dimension of time due to the ghost element, I just was confused. I was about 250 pages in before I realised that one of the major characters appears several different times over different periods of times, but he has different names. I just found it confused and didn't really enjoy it. From my perspective it certainly was not as good as some of her other books.
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For some reason I had two copies of The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve sitting on my shelf but I only decided to read it after reading Mrs C's review.
The book is about Kathryn, the wife of a pilot whose husband dies after his passenger plane drops out of the sky. Investigations are made after concerns that his behaviour may have contributed to the accident and even suicide as considered as a possibility. Throughout the investigation Kathryn makes discoveries about her husband and his life that horrify her and start her on a journey.
I really enjoyed this book and found the theme of grief well written and sensitively dealt with. The writing style was lovely, and I agree with Mrs C, there is definitely a good twist at the end!
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The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller is a curious and intriguing little book.
Pippa is a 50-something woman who is married to Herb, a man in his 80's. They move to a retirement community where Pippa is very much the youngest woman there. The story takes a swift jump back to her past and over each chapter you find out snippets of her 'past lives', the situations that made her the woman she is now. She has a disturbed childhood with a mother who was a speed junkie and for whom she had tremendous contempt and her travels enabled her to meet a strange bohemian bunch of people who taught her many things she probably didn't need to know so young.
Rather surprisingly I really liked this book. I was fascinated by this back-to-front view of a person's life and it has a rather good twist at the end. Oh, it also was one of Richard and Judy's bookclub reads.