Book Review - Aftertime

Aftertime by Sophie Littlefield
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had to wait a long, long time to read this book. I have been on the waiting list at the library since January! It's that popular, and I was wondering if it was going to be worth it.

It was.

This is a zombie book, so it's not Shakespeare, but it's well-written with deep, likeable characters and a fantastic, curiously fascinating twist on the world of the classic zombie. In this universe, drought, famine, and bio attacks have led to a near-wipeout of all of the earth's fauna and flora. In an attempt to rescue it's citizens from starvation, the US government has seeded it's land with a bio-engineered superfood seed. Unfortunately, it mutates, and those who eat the mutated version wind up ill, and after a brief period of euphoria, sink into a zombie-like state.

But they aren't really dead, as is evidenced by Cass, taken by the ill and then returned, seemingly cured. The only thing missing is her daughter, who she was ripped away from when she was taken, and Aftertime is the story of her journey to find Ruthie, her daughter, and rediscover her self.

I've seen this compared to work by Cormac McCarthy, and while the setting is somewhat reminiscent of The Road, I find that the similarities end there. Beyond the stark landscape and sense of despair, there isn't much in common - but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Because Aftertime, after all, is about hanging on to hope, and you need the rich lives of the characters to do that.

Worth a read for any post-apocolyptic or zombie fans! Yes, even if you have to wait. I'm not waiting any more - I have the rest of the ebooks in the series loaded onto my Kobo and waiting to go.

View all my reviews

Book Review - Save Me

Save Me by Lisa Scottoline
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When you volunteer to take care of other people's children at school, whether you're a room mom, a lunch mom, or chaperoning a field trip or dance, people trust you to look out for their kids as if they are your own. So when an explosion detonates the gas lines in the cafeteria kitchen, lunch mom Rose has to make a choice: get the three children in front of her out, or get to her daughter - alone in the handicapped bathroom next to the blaze - before the inferno is too great to get through.

You can't ignore children in front of you, but your own child is going to be your highest priority, so Rose makes the best compromise she can under the circumstances, and afterwards, when the fallout lands, she is devastated by the results.

She begins investigating the cause of the fire first to clear her own name as the "bad guy" in town, but discovers something that runs far deeper than mom to mom bullying, and goes back many years, to a death no one knew was a murder and a coverup conspiracy that reaches higher than she would have imagined.

This one kept me up late many nights, I had a hard time putting it down! Fabulous, action-packed, with relatable characters and a strong plotline.

View all my reviews

Book Review - The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb

The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb by Melanie Benjamin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm not sure what prompted me to pick up this book while browsing at the library. The cover design is cute, sure, and the title is enough to catch your eye, but while I do have a strong interest in the history of the circus/carnival world, I had never really thought much about Lavinia Warren, the wife of PT Barnum's infamous Tom Thumb, as she lived mostly outside of the world of the circus, as a part of more genteel society.

But even my tiny bit of knowledge of her life intrigued me. I never knew why exactly it was that she seemed seperate from much of the rest of Barnum's curiosities and exhibitions, but this book taught me the reason through the precise and ladylike voice of Ms. Warren herself, as imagined by the author in this fabulous fictional autobiography of the tiny woman who took the world by storm, dined with Vanderbilts and royalty, rode early trains and riverboats, ran with the Civil War at her back only to walk straight into Asia and the Middle East when those areas were barely on the radar of even adventurers of her era.

For a tiny woman, Lavinia Warren lived a huge, amazing life. Though it had it's moments of both tragedy and triumph, what I found the most interesting were the little details of her everyday life, as envisioned by the author in stunning detail. This book is rich with possibilities in a world that is real enough to touch. Fantastically written, joyously triumphant, and achingly, heartbreakingly authentic, this is a book for any fan of interesting figures in history.

View all my reviews

Book Review - The Peach Keeper

The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In the small, Carolina town of Walls of Water, the residents live surrounded by waterfalls, and secrets from an era gone by. When the women's guild begins to renovate an old mansion that once belonged to the founding family of the town to turn it into an inn, those secrets begin to unravel and some are finally brought out into the light of day.

This isn't a terribly philosphical novel. It's about friendships between women, and whether or not where we live defines who we are in our lives. It's about choosing your own identity, and protecting the people you love, but it's not terribly deep or life-changing. It is, however, interesting, and a fun summer read with some lovely characters that you'll want to be friends with once you've followed their journey through the book.

View all my reviews

Book Review - This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More

This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike. by Augusten Burroughs
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As I read this book, I kept coming across fabulous quotations and thinking over and over again "Oh! I should put that in my review! It's perfect!" until I finally came to the conclusion that what I really needed to do was quote the book in it's entirety, because it was that stunning and lovely and sharp-witted and everyone needed to read it.

Yes, much of this book is good, old-fashioned common sense. Unfortunately, we live in a world where good, old-fashioned common sense is increasingly a rare commodity. Burroughs talks to you like you're his friend, someone going through something tough, and he doesn't pull any punches when he's telling you to get over yourself and fix the problem you have, and he knows how, cause he's been there, so he'll tell you that, too.

Much of the advice in this book is about being mindful in your life, something that helped me overcome a series of overwhelming tragedies in my own life that occured between 2007-2008. It took me a while to figure out what to do, when I could have just read this book if it'd been on the market back then.

There are also an awful lot of places where you can't help but laugh. And one place that made me cry, because Burroughs talks honestly and openly about the deep striking tragedies and difficulties that have touched his own life.

Because I can't quote the whole thing, let me leave you with a bit that touched me particularly deeply:

"This is among the oldest, deepest, most primal truths: the facts of life may be, at times, unbearably painful. But the core, the bones of life are generous beyond all reason or belief. Those things that ought to kill us do not. This should be taken as encouragement to continue.

And when the Worst Thing That Could Possibly Happen is what happens, you would not believe that anywhere in your future exists one of your very happiest moments. What you would believe, and be quite certain of, is that any good days and certainly your best days were behind you now.

But believing something is true, even with all your heart, is unrelated to whether or not what you believe is true."


*Book received through Goodreads First Reads program

View all my reviews

Book Review - This Beautiful Life

This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A teenage boy goes to a party on a night his parents are otherwise engaged and perhaps not paying as much attention to him as they should. A younger girl, left even more to her own devices, falls for him, but he brushes her off as too young. To impress him, she creates a sex video of herself and emails it to the boy. The boy, confounded as to what to do next, emails the video to his best friend for advice.

What happens next changes the lives of not only the boy and the girl, but with the kind of rapid information sharing that happens in our world today, the other students at school, the parents and their colleagues, even the boy's little sister are all touched by what a few megabytes of data on the internet can do.

This is a tale straight out of modern life. The world moves at a different pace now than it did when we were children, even when we were teens in high school, and one mistake can alter not only your own future, but the futures of people all around you. Families have to struggle to readjust to a life lived as an open book, and workplaces have to consider what someone's online life looks like to their clients.

This was an interesting read, but in some ways drifted into Lifetime Movie world. I didn't find it extraordinary, but it was touching and intriguing, with characters that were fairly relatable.

View all my reviews

Book Review - Every Secret Thing

Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My rating for this is more accurately 3.5 stars, as it's better than most I would give a 3 star rating to, but not quite up where I'd offer a free 4 stars.

Seven years ago, a baby left in a pram outside of a house disappears. Two little girls, walking home from a party, found the baby and took her to "take care of her" in her "abandoned" state. After the death of the child, the girls were sent away to a juvenile facility until the age of eighteen. Recently, they have both come home, and another little girl has gone missing.

There are several interesting twists and turns in this novel, including one that really surprised me. In places, the story drags a little bit, and I found myself drifting away, a bit bored. The characters are fascinating, and it's a gripping case of "Is this person who I think they are, and did our system make them that way?" that will keep you turning the pages when the plot gets a bit slow.

Not stellar, but an interesting read.

View all my reviews