Book Review - Two Little GIrls: A Memoir of Adoption

Two Little Girls: A Memoir of Adoption by Theresa Reid
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Adoption books are special to me, as we're going through the process of adopting right now. Sometimes they're hard for me to read, which this one was, because I'm impatient with the process and want to bring my kids home. Sometimes they're beautiful love stories of families becoming what they are. Sometimes they make me angry, because I second-guess the choices that the parents make. This book was all of those and more, and it was a very well-written and lovely book.

Two Little Girls is the story of one couple who experience infertility after waiting until they are older to attempt to conceive. They are not particularly driven to be parents, but believe that it would enrich their lives, so they pursue international adoption to bring home their children. They wind up with a lovely family of two beautiful girls, but to get there, they take a long and very difficult road.

My husband and I considered international adoption. It is very expensive, something that wasn't a hurdle to the very well-off couple in this book. It is very time consuming and requires taking long periods of time away from work, sometimes on very short notice. This is also not a problem for this pair, but would have been impossible for us. Those are only two of the issues that made us *not* choose international adoption. The last was that we aren't super-concerned with many of the things that drives this couple. They want little children, toddler age or younger. They want a clean bill of health without special needs. They want children that look like them. They specifically want girls.

The times where I got angry with this couple usually involved their almost obsession with the way the children looked or whether or not they had special needs. To parents like us, who are looking for children with special needs and who could not care less if they looked like us physically, it's a little mind-boggling. We know - my husband and I - that there are absolutely no guarantees in life. None. You could bring home a perfectly healthy baby that could turn out to have leukemia in a few years, or who is profoundly autistic, or a whole bunch of other stuff. Refusing children with special needs bothers me, because you just never know. And basing it on looks? I'm not even going to get started on that one.

So yes, I got angry. But you know, through reading this book I came to be less angry and more compassionate about the whole situation. You can only handle what you can handle. There are kids out there whose biological parents put them up for adoption or surrender them to social services because they have special needs. This isn't an adoptive-parent-only issue. And there *are* some special needs that we have said we can't handle right now, mainly because of where we live, but if we were truly altruistic, wouldn't we address that in some way? So yes, I came to understand.

If you're in the process of adopting, and are curious about other methods of adoption and the hurdles they include, this would be a good choice for you. If you are considering eastern European adoption, this would be a great book for you, as it has a pretty clear overview of what visiting these orphanages and staying in these countries involves. Overall, it's a brutally honest memoir of one couple's story, the good and the bad, and is compelling and very involving.

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Book Review - Flashback

Flashback by Dan Simmons
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh....

Awful. So awful I couldn't finish it. Life is way too short for books you hate.

Are you looking for a book full of conservative propaganda? Do you want a book that tells you the world will fall apart if liberals are in power? Maybe you're particularly racist against middle-eastern or Japanese people? Yes? Then you'll love this book.

You could read the feelings of the author through this novel. Now, I don't mind bigoted characters. I don't even care whether or not characters are republican or democrat or independent or love Ross Perot. I really don't. But when a book reads like the author has an agenda he's trying to put across, when derogatory terms are used toward other cultures not just in dialogue but in the knit-together writing of the book, I can't take it.

I'm not a book burner. I'm really not. I don't want to get rid of books that oppose my own views. So read this, if that kind of thing floats your boat. It's great to live in a world where you can read whatever suits your fancy. But oh my word this was not the book for me. By any means.

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Book Review - Nan's Story

Nan's Story by Paige Farmer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sometimes you read a book where the main character reaches out and grabs your heart. You think, "This person could be my friend. This person could be me." The character is real in a way that some people in books are not. They are real in a way that makes you think of your neighbour or your grandparent or your teacher at school. That's who Nan was to me.

Nan is a product of an unstable home in a stable time in history. During the idyllic fifties, she is living in a home with an angry, critical mother and an unstable, alcoholic father as well as older brothers that seem to alternately bully and caretake her. Is it any wonder that she becomes her own worst enemy? Nan sabotages much in her life, partly from entropy. It seems easier for her to just go along with the world, with what others want, rather than take a stand for her own life. And so, slowly, her world begins to crumble around her. Mistake after mistake seems to create a compound effect, until she is a shell of herself, living in her mother and stepfather's home, sometimes almost nonfunctional, and ignoring her child, CJ, who needs a mother so desperately that he has turned to his grandmother for nearly all of his emotional wants.

The first couple of chapters of this book are a little shaky, but it's very clear that the author refined her craft as she wrote, as her style evolved through the book to become much more polished. She's a good storyteller with a tale that catches hold and won't let go - unfortunately it waits til past the halfway point to give that real catch. It's worth the wait, though, as eventually it reaches the "can't put it down" stage and at that point, you're really in for an interesting ride.

I found myself really caught up in Nan's emotional traumas and turmoils. I felt for her, which is unique - to have created a character that people relate to in such an intimate way is a gift. I'm kind of surprised that a big publishing house hasn't picked this up, but since it's really "novella" size - which isn't super popular right now - I guess I shouldn't be. A nice read, touching and emotional in all the right places.

*Book received through Goodreads First Reads program

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Book Review - Torch

Torch by Cheryl Strayed
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked up Torch from the library because I loved loved loved "Wild," Cheryl Strayed's memoir of her trek along the Pacific Coast Trail. I identified with her. I liked her style, I liked her writing, and I loved her story. When I found out that she'd published a work of fiction some seven years ago, I couldn't resist!

I might should have resisted.

It's not so much that this is a bad book, but this is a very thinly veiled memoir of what actually happened to Strayed, much of which you will already know if you've read "Wild" previously. So, I knew the story, but not all the details. I decided to persevere with the book anyway, because I had faith in Strayed's storytelling ability. I knew the book would be sad. I knew it would make me cry. I didn't know it would also make me angry. I actually threw the book across the room at one point and decided to stop reading it.

But I still persevered.

There was a moment at the end where I thought I was going to have to relive what, for me, was one of the saddest moments in "Wild," having to do with her mother's horse, Lady. When reading "Wild," this particular section affected me so much that my husband stopped what he was doing (in the middle of playing an MMORPG, and that, ladies and gentlemen, means he thought it was an emergency) to come to the bedroom and investigate why his wife was bawling like the world was ending.

But I still persevered.

And I kind of wish I hadn't. I really liked Strayed after Wild, and now I'm kind of ambivalent. I don't know how true these details were to her story, but it was pretty clear that much of it was ripped directly from her life. It made me alternately angry at people in her life and at her. It was heartbreaking in places, and in other places I just boggled at the choices people made. It seemed hyper-real, in the way that sometimes, when I tell people about the "year of hell" in our lives they can't believe that that would actually happen to a person. Sometimes, when too much happens, it seems like it has to be fiction. It has to be fake. And I'm well aware by my own experience that it's not always the case, but it still stretches that part of our brain that is desperately trying to suspend disbelief.

I think that Strayed's writing style of writing has certainly evolved since writing "Torch". She is much more eloquent in "Wild" and has learned the art of the narrative through trial and error, partly through writing "Torch" it seems.

This was an okay book. It isn't brilliant enough to make it one I'd recommend, because it also is a very provoking book, but it was definitely... okay.

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Book Review - Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas by James Patterson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm not sure how I feel about this book, really. I gave it four stars because it is beautifully and sensitively written, and because, all things being equal, this is a very good book. But I also hate this book. I hate it for ripping into my heart the way it did. I hate it for touching on the very very sensitive emotions inside of me that still can have me bursting into tears at the strangest moments.

Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas is a love story. It's a love story that is difficult for Katie, our protagonist, to read, because it is the love story of Matt, her boyfriend, and his wife Suzanne, and their beautiful child, Nicholas. Matt has given Katie a copy of Suzanne's diary to read and has disappeared, just when she was about to give him what she thought was some of the happiest news anyone has to share; Katie is pregnant. And now she is alone with the love story of Matt and Suzanne and unsure of how to deal with the emotions it brings up for her.

I suspected very early on that Suzanne was dead. Despite the wonderings about whether Matt had been cheating on her (very unlikely, how would he have stolen her diary to give to Katie if Suzanne were still alive and kicking?) or whether they were divorced now (again, how would he have the diary?) I knew. It was clear. So I was prepared for tragedy. But I was unprepared for the depths to which that tragedy would go, and how it would affect me.

If you have lost a spouse, or a child, someone who is irreplaceable in your life, this book may make you hate it as well, because it is written with such a poignant knowledge of what those emotions can do to a person. So I hate this book. And I still give it four stars, even though it has me doing the ugly cry right now at two thirty in the morning.

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Book Review - The After Wife

The After Wife by Gigi Levangie Grazer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was recommended to me by GoodReads. I was checking out what the site thought I should be reading based on my shelves and spied this cover among the others. It caught my eye. I'm a sucker for great cover art, and this one piqued my curiosity. I noted that it was about a widow, but I didn't read past the first few words in the description. I flipped tabs onto the library website, punched the title in and requested the book.

My husband, who works at the library system headquarters, brought it home the next day after a co-worker dropped it off at his desk. This is how most of my reading comes home, so everyone always knows what I'm reading, but that's neither here nor there. What I mean to be explaining is that I didn't know much of anything about this book before I plunged in. I thought it would be okay, but I didn't expect it to get to me the way it did.

Let me start off by saying that the start made me weep. And when I say weep, I mean the ugly cry. The one where your face is all red and you're starting to hiccup and the cat is prodding you to see if you're about to die, and you're looking for a paper towel to blow your nose in because you've used up all the kleenex. That kind of weeping. I was touched so incredibly deeply by not only the storyline, not only the loss of this widow, but about the relationship between the husband and wife before she became a widow.

Oh, it was so real. It was so me and my husband. It made me ache even at the thought of someone losing her partner in life so suddenly. I couldn't handle it.

But, really, though this book is about a widow, it's not about loss. It's about life. And talking to dead people.

See, I didn't see that coming either, how cool is that? I don't know if it's a spoiler or not because I still haven't read the back of the book, but I can't imagine that it is. It's what the bulk of the book is about. Because after being touched by death in a horribly immediate and intimate way, our heroine gains the remarkable ability to see and talk to the dead that inhabit our world along with us. And not just people, either. I'm talking horses that nudge her barista when she's trying to get a cuppa joe. I'm talking sweet little doggies in happy visions.

This is kind of cool. Once you make it past the part where it makes your heart feel like it's going to fall out of your chest, you start to smile. And even laugh a little. Because this shit is actually pretty funny. Can you imagine trying to get your career back on track after grieving the worst loss of your life, and at your first meeting, the room is full of dead people who want your attention? Oh, yeah it's black humour for sure, but if your sense of humour is wry and your appreciation of wit tends to the sharp side of things, you're going to love this book.

Much fun, and a quick read.

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Book Review - Autumn: Aftermath

Autumn: Aftermath by David Moody
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I used to hate serial fiction. I'd get all annoyed with getting hammered with "this happened previously" which authors do, understandably, to educate people new to their series. I love that David Moody doesn't do that. Each of his books, including this one, could stand on it's own easily enough without all that pointless exposition. They have complete story arcs. They have character development, as much as you expect in an after-the-zombies apocalyptic novel anyway.

But oh my god I was so happy to see some familiar faces in this book. If you've read others in this series, you know that uncomfortable feeling when they introduce new people; are the old ones dead? Oh my god. Are they going to find their bodies? Is this going to be the community center all over again?

Okay, so you have to have read the others in this series to get that, but I think you know where I'm going here. And Autumn: Aftermath set my mind to rest in many ways. As a final book, it did the series wonderful justice by letting us peek in on our favourite bands of survivors. If it didn't highlight everyone, it at least gave you an idea where they might have ended up or how their lives are going right now. No, it didn't tie things up with a happily ever after bow - it wouldn't be a David Moody book if it did that - but it did tell us where the world of Autumn was going, what the fate of the planet might be, and it was, of course, full of action, adventure, fear, adventure and zombies.

I love zombie books. If you do too, you'll like this series. And especially Autumn: Aftermath.

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Book Review - A Working Theory of Love

A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Neill has been chatting with his father. They talk about the old days, when Neill was a boy growing up in the south. They talk about Neill's mom and brother, about the neighbour down the road, and about his dad's medical practice.

The only catch is, Neill's dad killed himself in 1995, when Neill was still in college, before Neill was married and divorced, before he moved to California, before he took up permanent bachelorhood. Neill's dad now resides inside of a computer, an attempt at creating AI from the contents of the extensive journals that his father kept during his life. And it's Neill's job to talk to him.

I love the San Francisco of Neill's world. I relate to his conflicts with his own morality where it comes to this computerized version of his father. I really relate to his young, barely-out-of-her-teens girlfriend, because I was lost like her when I was her age. I made many of the same mistakes and had many similar problems. This book is engaging, vivid, and exquisitely real. It feels like glimpsing into the lives of someone you ran into at the coffee shop or chatted with at a dinner party.

Scott Hutchins has a gift for inner dialogue. Many writers can capture dialogue between characters well but become either overly philosophical or shallowly superficial when it comes to relating what's honestly going on inside a character's head. But here, you get a sense of Neill that is more than personal. I really felt as though I knew him, in an intimate and intense way. I rarely feel as close to a character as I did with Neill, and it made me wish the book would never end.

That said, the ending left me happy. It ended as it should, with a clear path to envision the road ahead, and enough of a wrap-up to leave a reader feeling satisfied without the triteness that comes along with the "happily ever after" epilogues that leave nothing to the reader's imagination.

This is an excellent book for those who like contemporary literary fiction, and I recommend it highly.

*Book received through Goodreads First Reads program

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Book Review - Cut, Crop & Die

Cut, Crop & Die by Joanna Campbell Slan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had a bit of a hard time getting into this, the second Kiki Lowenstein cozy mystery from Joanna Campbell Slan, filled with bits and bobs about scrapbooking - one of my own favourite hobbies - as well as curious twists and turns surrounding the death of a scrapper at a crop that Time In a Bottle (or TinaB for those in the know), the shop where Kiki is employed, was sponsoring.

The dead woman is one of Kiki's rivals, a scrapbooker who has recently won a prestigious scrapping contest, and apparently has stepped all over everyone in Kiki's life to get here. From her best friend and former cleaning woman Mert, who had once been fired and blacklisted by the woman, to her boss Dodie, who had kicked her out of the store and banned her from shopping there, to some of her most loyal customers (including one who was having an affair with the dead woman's husband), everyone seems to have had a motive for murder. So whodunit? Is it Kiki's new co-employee with a possibly shady past? Was Yvonne's husband looking to start his life over? Could it be the owner of a rival scrapbooking store, looking to generate a buzz?

It took about 90 pages in before I was invested enough to take more time with this book than it took to get through a couple pages at a time. And I was reading this on my eReader, which usually means I zip through a book like nobody's business, because my Kobo goes with me *everywhere*. But this time I found it a little hard to concentrate.

Whatever it was about the first Kiki book that drew me in and got me hooked immediately wasn't quite there for me with this one. Maybe the charm had worn off a little, or maybe I picked this one up too quickly after finishing the last and my head just wasn't ready for it yet, I don't know. Or, maybe, just maybe, it wasn't quite as captivating as the first. I still liked it, and it was still a fun read, though I was sad that there weren't as many new and different scrapbooking techniques and tips at the ends of the chapters. If I really wanted to know about tea and such I'd read a different sort of book. Still, it's fun to read about characters that seem like they could be your friends from your own little scrapbooking store in your home town, so I'll probably read the next soon enough. After all, it's already Kobo-loaded :)

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Book Review - Fear the Worst

Fear the Worst by Linwood Barclay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is an excellent example of the suspense genre. It is alternately exciting and moving, written with honesty and compassion and the knowledge of what it means to be a parent. It's a very good book.

What would you do if your daughter went missing? What if the people at the job she went to every day denied ever meeting her? What if your ex-wife's new boyfriend's son seemed suspiciously involved, lying to you and hiding in his bedroom on his computer for hours on end, refusing to talk about what he's doing?

Caught between an ex-wife that he still loves, a paranoid new girlfriend who sees conspiracy theories everywhere, and his daughter's friends who seem alternately helpful and annoying, all Tim wants is to bring his teenage daughter home. But the police are unhelpful, and the "security expert" that Bob - the ex-wife's boyfriend - hires seems even worse when it comes out that his expertise means he had a job as a night watchman. Tim's own investigations turn up twist after twist that seem impossible to put together.

This book shocked me with a few of the twists and turns, which is not easy to do, and kept me guessing to the end (well, except for the part where I figured out who the mastermind bad guy was in the first few chapters, LOL! But I read a lot of suspense, I'm hard to mislead). This book was a fun, fast read that kept me up late unable to put it down!

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