Book Review - Home Front

Home Front by Kristin Hannah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It doesn't matter if you are the staunchest patriot who will back any movement of the military or the most liberal anti-war protestor; regardless of your feelings about the actions of the U.S. in the middle east, Home Front remains a touching, heartbreaking, triumphant journey of modern war and how it affects the families left behind to maintain the Home Front.

Jolene and Tammy, like many other women today, are the soldiers in their families, and when their National Guard unit is called up for active duty in the middle eastern conflict, they are forced to leave behind husbands who are confused about how to function in their lives without their wives, and children who desperately need their mothers. Their journey is poignant and raw, their emotions brought forward into sharp focus and their road through war difficult and humbling and extraordinary.

But going off to war is only the beginning. While her husband, an attorney, fights for the defense of a soldier with PTSD charged with murdering his wife, Jolene returns home a completely different woman who is having a hard time fitting back into the empty place she left behind at home. Her edges are sharper, her emotions have changed, and her reactions to her children completely different from what "Mommy" used to do; her youngest opines that "Mommy doesn't love us anymore" in one heartbreaking scene.

This book brought a lot of emotions to the surface for me. My family has been touched greatly by the war in the middle east, with the loss of my cousin, Tommy Gilbert. But you don't have to be a soldier or have one in your family to relate to the themes of this book. Everyone knows what it's like to feel emotionally betrayed, or to be lost emotionally when you don't think your spouse understands you, or how it can hurt when you can't be everywhere you want to be and do everything you want or need to do in your life.

This wasn't a fast or easy or fun read for me, but it was a worthwhile and touching read. I cried. I hugged it, hard. And I came to love Jolene and Tammy and their families. I think you will, too.

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Book Review - Whiteout

Whiteout by Ken Follett
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Disappointing and fairly predictable suspense romp about a stolen virus that could possibly kill most everyone if it were released.

Despite the dire possibilities, I just didn't care.

There were too many secondary characters, too few moments of real action, and too much "Oh my god It's snowing, we need a plow!" Maybe living in Canada has jaded me, but I really think most people in the US and Great Britain panic awfully quickly over snow. It just doesn't scare me any more. Not that I like it much, but I've seen the worst of it, and seeing people make so much of so little of it... eh, it makes me think they're kinda wussies.

Which you're not supposed to think about the "bad guys" in a suspense book. Probably.

I couldn't even muster up a feel-good moment when the good guys fought back. The reason this book took me a while to read was because I was reading it before bed. And falling asleep in five minutes. So, if you're looking for something to help you nod off into slumber, this is probably good.



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Book Review - A Vintage Affair

A Vintage Affair by Isabel Wolff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Phoebe has started a new chapter in her life. Rocked by the death of her best friend, alone after breaking off her engagement, her family in pieces after her father's betrayal of her mother, she has left her job at an auction house working with vintage textiles and has opened a shop of her own, selling beautiful clothing from an earlier era while trying to put the pieces of her world back in order. She has always known that the right dress can be magic, but soon she is finding herself and her shop as the catalyzing force in the intersecting lives of the patrons of the shop and those she buys her clothing from.

This is a fun book. If you like vintage fashion, it's extremely fun. If you can relate to the way that one tragedy can seem to set off a domino effect in your life that you are helpless to stop, you'll really understand Phoebe and be ready to root for her as she moves on in her life.

While some of the characters can drift a little bit into the sterotypical, on the whole this book is light, bright, and as frothy as the "cupcake dresses" that Phoebe hangs in oversized frames on the walls of her shop. It's a happy, life-affirming book, and is a great springtime read out in the warm afternoon sun.

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Book Review - The Baby Planner

The Baby Planner by Josie Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've had this book on my shelf for a while, but I was reluctant to read it until now. Now, of course, that I'm "paper pregnant" and far enough along in the adoption process to feel confident, reading about babies, and the struggle to become a mom is easier for me.

Katie has been married for several years to a man who is putting off the decision to become parents. He has his career to focus on, and a child from a previous relationship that he never sees, and she has a career, and the economy is unstable - for every wish she has, he has an excuse why now is not the right time, despite the fact that Katie's biological clock is ticking relentlessly onward.

As her quiet desperation builds, Katie discovers that her department at work - and thus her job - has been eliminated. When her sister announces that she is pregnant, it seems at first that Katie has no further to fall, but the dream nursery binder that she prepares for her expecting sister catches the eye of another new mother at a baby store, and suddenly Katie finds herself thrust into a new career - Baby Planner - where she does all the research and much of the shopping for stressed out moms-to-be. If she can't plan for her own child, this seems like the next best thing.

Except that being around all the baby "stuff" and all the pregnant ladies and all the eventual babies that arrive does nothing more but increase her own need to have a child to call her own.

I related to Katie big-time. One of Josie Brown's biggest strengths as a writer is that her characters are so very real - from their flaws to their crowning glories, they are authentic, with easily relatable emotions and paths in life that you can see your friends or yourself taking. They aren't perfect - who among us is, after all? - but they are perfectly human, and that's what I loved about this book.

I found myself reading well into the wee hours, because I just couldn't desert Katie when things were going wrong for her, and I wanted to be there to see it when things took a turn for the better. My heart raced with her when her new business exploded on the internet, and I had a few laugh-out-loud moments at some of the crazy occurances that went along with trying to organize a whole bunch of mothers and babies and husbands and other siblings that came along with the territory.

I shouldn't have been so scared of this book. Any woman who has experienced infertility, child loss, or any other stumbling block on the way to motherhood will understand Katie and be able to relate to her struggles. Even when she is sabotaging herself.

Full of fun dialogue, a fascinating cast of characters and more than a few surprise twists and turns, The Baby Planner is an excellent read and I recommend it highly.

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Book Review - Come Home

Come Home by Lisa Scottoline
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Do you ever stop being a mother once a child is claimed as your own, even a stepchild?

That is the question that pediatrician Jill Farrow must answer when he inebriated ex-stepdaughter shows up on her doorstep one night, with a story that not only is her father dead, but he has been murdered. Will she put her current family at risk to try to save her former stepdaughter, even if it means risking her relationship with her current fiancee, the mental health of her biological daughter and her own safety?

With no help from her other ex-stepdaughter, Jill sets out on a mission to solve the mystery of her ex-husband's death, in the wake of the vanishing of her troubled ex-stepdaughter. Likening herself to the Dr. Watson of Sherlock Holmes fan, the intrepid doctor takes on thugs and inside-traders alike in this fascinating mystery romp.

There was a time or two I had an issue with suspending my disbelief, mostly regarding the tie-ups of the plot in the second to the last chapter, but overall I found this to be a very readable and approachable book that kept me up late into the night. The author even fooled me a time or two with plot twists, and trust me - that's not easy to do! I'm always pleasantly surprised when a writer can put one over on me, just when I think I've read every twist out there.

If you're a mystery fan, you'll find this a particularly enjoyable read, with some heart-pounding suspense mixed in with the heart-rending drama of a mother doing everything she can to protect and care for the ducklings she has claimed as her own flock.

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Book Review - Mockingjay

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(re-read 2011, originally read 2010)

I was trying to figure out when I started re-reading this trilogy why I gave the last book four stars. I had forgotten, while re-reading the first two, my small problems with the third.

First of all, the plotlines are much longer and more convoluted than the previous two books, which had very specific and clear story arcs. It is often one of the things that draws me to YA fiction; while subplots are there, and often beautifully placed, the main story has a clear, strong, and traditional arc. I liked that in the first two books, but it gets a little cloudier in the last.

This book is longer than the first two, which is fine, but some of the writing almost becomes excessive in places. It's not that I don't love long fiction - I'm a lifetime Stephen King fan after all - but here I find Collins drifts into familiar King territory, with some scenes that seem gratuitous, some violence that seems excessively graphic, and some incidents that seem there only to make you gasp or cringe.

With all that said, this is still an excellent book with a wonderful wrap-up to the story of Katniss Everdeen, the girl who was on fire, who now must battle her most significant fight; after two arenas, she is now thrown into a full-out war between the Capitol and the rebels and the districts which had been forced for 75 years to send their children to near-certain death in the Hunger Games take up arms and risk their lives for a better future, free of a greedy and self-centered ruling class that seem to tromp on the working man.

Gee, that doesn't sound timely for our world at all, does it?

There are definitely some parallels to the issues at play in our world today in this trilogy, taken to an extreme beyond what I would expect people to tolerate... but then again, forty years ago no one would have expected that they would tolerate full body scans at airports or needing a passport to travel between the US and Canada. The wrap-up in Mockingjay does tie up some story lines neatly, though many in ways that no fan of the series would have prefered, while others are left to the imagination. But what peace Katniss is able to find for herself is clearly spelled out, in a hopeful closing that manages to warm the heart without being cloying or overstepping where the character should have been taken.

Over all, the whole series is a very enjoyable, action-packed and entertaining read, and Mockingjay is no exception.

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Book Review - Catching Fire

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


(technically this is another re-read, first finished in 2010)

When you get to the middle of serial fiction - most especially trilogies, but it can happen in other types of series as well - you sometimes reach a point where you feel like the book you're trying to get into is only there to knit together two disparate storylines with no cohesive plot of it's own.

I'm happy to report, that this is most definitely NOT the case with Catching Fire, book two of the Hunger Games saga by Suzanne Collins. Katniss Everdeen, the intrepid heroine of the first novel in the series is doing her best to adjust to life in the Victor's Village back home in District 12. She has all the money she could want, a huge house to share with her mother and her sister Prim, and the freedom to do as she pleases with her days.

What she pleases, most usually, is heading out to hunt in the woods. But life in District 12 has moved on without Katniss, and her hunting partner Gale is now spending his own days working in the mines to help support his own family. Things have been awkward with Peeta since their return, and Haymitch is little help balancing out the lonely days. A little lost, a little forlorn, it almost seems like Katniss is feeling a little sorry for herself, until the announcement of the Quarter Quell - the 75th annual Hunger Games, where Katniss thought she would be a mentor for one of the children of her district. Instead, she discovers that the mystery of who is headed back into the arena hits more chillingly close to home.

Catching Fire isn't short on action, and it isn't short on the threesome dilemma of Katniss, Gale and Peeta that began in the first novel. While the characters and the history carry through, the plot arc is complete in it's own right, a refreshing change from a lot of books of this type. While some of the urgency that the first book had as we all know that Katniss is now the protagonist of the entire series and not just someone to fall for in one book (in fantasy fiction it's hard to say - your protagonist often dies suddenly and is replaced in a sequel by a different person. Not like Darren in Bewitched, I mean a whole other character - it's just usually best not to get too attached in fantasy fic) it's easy to open your heart to her a little more, especially as she struggles with her relationships and shows a bit more of her humanity.

Catching Fire is a solid book, with plenty of intrigue and suspense, and an excellent follow-up to the first in the series, bringing it in as one of my top ten YA reads of all time.



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