Save Me by Lisa Scottoline

I’ve always enjoyed Lisa Scottoline’s books.  There’s nothing I like more than a return to Rosato & Associates to see what scrapes the spunky lady lawyers are trying to escape.  What I’ve realized in reading Scottoline’s stand alone, Save Me, is that what I like about her works are the characters.  I can suspend disbelief with some of the plots in her series because I genuinely enjoy the characters and feel like I know them.  The lack of character development in Rose McKenna made it a difficult and unbelievable book to get through.

Rose McKenna is helping out at her daughter’s school as the “lunch mom” when an explosion rocks the lunch room and she suddenly has to decide whether to try to save her daughter (who’s locked herself in the bathroom) or save a few of her daughter’s classmates (whose teasing is the reason the daughter, Melly, is in the bathroom).  Although she ends up helping the classmates to the hallway and THEN rescuing Melly, she gets vilified by the parents and media when one of the students ends up seriously injured and in a coma.  Make sense?

Oh, there’s much more.  How about a conspiracy to blow up the lunchroom?  An accidental death that occurred years ago?  A corrupt senator?  Lisa Scottoline throws so much at the reader that what starts out as an interesting moral dilemma swiftly turns into a hodgepodge of overused plots.  And really, all that I could’ve endured if I had even a shred of empathy for Rose.  But it was hard to root for her when she constantly second guessed herself and her decisions.  Instead of questioning if she made the right decision during the lunchroom explosion she should have been questioning why she’d leave her daughter, who’d just suffered a severe trauma, overnight in the hospital.  She goes from being “supermom” in the first half of the book to being “amateur sleuth” in the second – a complete stretch of the imagination – even for me.

~ Linette

You Know When The Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon

Siobhan Fallon uses a series of linked stories to paint a picture of what families, both spouses and soldiers, endure during a deployment.  As an Army wife, these stories seemed all too familiar to me.  And in that respect, I enjoyed them very much.  The familiarity was rather comforting.  Having either gone through similar experiences or known someone who had, it was nice to know that I wasn’t alone. 

However, as much as I liked the stories for their engaging plots, my only complaint lies with the stories’ characters.  They were either stereotypical or exaggerated. From the “perfectly lipsticked” battalion commander’s wife to the paranoid, neurotic soldier who goes through some pretty extreme measures to check on his wife’s fidelity, none of them seemed fully developed. 

I can overlook that, though, and recommend this to Army spouses and civilians alike because from the first page, Fallon captures almost perfectly that sense of emptiness on a military post when a unit deploys and the men are gone:

“Babies still cry, telephones ring, Saturday morning cartoons screech, but without the men, there is a sense of muted silence, a sense of muted life.”

And she had me there.  Life goes on during a deployment, if a little slower than usual.

~ Linette

I "like" The Accidental Billionaires

I’m not usually one to “read” a book classified in either the computer section or the business section of a library’s collection, but The Accidental Billionaires is a rare exception.   Subtitled The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal, Ben Mezrich’s book reads like fiction, with colorful characters and a compelling plot that keeps readers engaged.

If one reads it in the wake of seeing The Social Network, the film which was inspired by this book, one might be surprised that for all the accolades Aaron Sorkin received for his adapted screenplay, Mezrich’s original prose is punchy and fluid as well.   The plot moves briskly, with real life characters coming to life and jumping from the page.   The pace and breezy wit which Mezrich brings to the subject kept me compulsively addicted to page turning, much as the Internet phenomenon has addicted millions of users.

Do I feel like I know Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg any better having ready it?  Naah.  Does it matter?  Not really.   The story it chronicles is the compelling and engaging, because, it, like Facebook, is remarkably addictive.  Whether you love it or loathe it, you can’t help but be compelled to keep reading it.

-Michael

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

Diana Bishop has spent the majority of her life renouncing her magical lineage and focusing on becoming a world renowned historian.  She is at Oxford working on her latest research project when she calls upon a manuscript, Ashmole 782, that she senses is magical but has no desire to further investigate.  However, that doesn’t stop vampires, daemons, and other witches from hounding her for answers.  How did she do it?  How was she able to call up a manuscript that has been bewitched for hundreds of years?  One vampire in particular wants the answers and Diana has to decide whether he’s friend or foe.

Ever since reading Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour, I’ve been fascinated with supernatural creatures, witches in particular.  Harkness creates a world in which there are four species:  humans, witches, vampires, and daemons.  And although the witches, vampires, and daemons all think their particular species is superior, all three have a collective disdain for humans (who are completely unaware that the others exist).  Harkness got me hooked with the first half of the book – Diana seems a formidable supernatural creature and all her untapped power is itself a mystery.  However, once she joins forces with Matthew, the vampire, she relinquishes her ability to make decisions on her own.  She insists that she’s strong or “brave” but her actions say otherwise. If she’s not sleeping or eating (or drinking tea!), she’s being carried around from room to room by Matthew.  In addition, Harkness spends an inordinate amount of time describing the mundane activities that occupy Diana’s day and that definitely slows down the plot.

A Discovery of Witches is the first book in a planned trilogy and if its intent is to set up the other two books by providing background and introducing characters without resolving any issues….it does the job remarkably well!  Despite my misgivings on Diana’s character, I will be looking forward to the next installment and hoping that she stops acting like Bella in Twilight (fainting, stumbling, staring deeply into a vampire’s eyes…) and instead becomes the powerful witch she seems destined to be.

~ Linette

Hot and Cold When Engulfed in Flames

I’ve never read a David Sedaris book, but I’ve always wanted to.  Truth be told, you could technically say I still haven’t, as I Iistened to  When You are Engulfed in Flames, an audio adaptation of his 2009 work read by the author.

Performers can make or break the reading of an audio book, but Sedaris reading his own work was undoubtedly a wise choice.  The inflection, tone, and an intensity he brings to the performance is no doubt indicative of his feelings about his subjects.

Sedaris’s work is a collection of essays; some are dramatically serious, some lighthearted.   All of them feature a sly, biting wit.  With Sedaris skewering his own habits and failings, such as obstinately refusing to give up a seat on an airplane, but also calling out others for bad behavior – such as a couple on a another flight cursing and carrying on or the behavior of the caregiver who cared for him and his siblings as children.

I found myself amused for the most part by his work.  Sometimes my attention strayed, such as when as he explored his own smoking cessation, but I felt myself snapping back to attention when he’d whip out an anecdote such as how he was arrested in Thailand for littering or his conversation with a Japanese merchant.   Sedaris doesn’t take himself too seriously, adding the occasional self-deprecating remark to lighten the mood.  His account of seeking to purchase a skeleton, and the subsequent display of it by his companion Hugh, is almost too bizarre to be true, but Sedaris’s made the episode nearly side-splitting.

Honestly, I don’t know if I would have made it through the book if I had only read it.   I’d like to think that I would have had the tenacity to stick with it, as most of the essays are relatively short, but at times I tired of the recording.   Ultimately, Sedaris’s wit was what carried the day and, undoubtedly, makes him a favorite for many readers.

- Michael

Did He Crack the Code Again?

Dan Brown's follow-up to his phenonmenal bestseller The Da Vinci Code is more of the same, which is probably exactly what audiences wanted.   The author was, admittedly, in sticky situation.  Like it or loathe it, Code was a phenomenal bestseller.   How could Brown live up to all the hype that was inevitably associated with his follow-up?  His answer seems to be to whip up a sequel whose pace and tone feels very much like its predecessor.  

Symbologist Robert Langdon is drawn into a mystery - this time in Washington D.C. - and runs into what are becoming Brown's stock characters - the possessed, oddly transformed villian and the intelligent, female partner.  With a story firmly set on American soil, this adventure is steeped in American history, with well-known locales such as the Smithsonian and the Capitol serving as more than story backdrop.   Brown's flashbacks uncharacteristically jar the pace of the narrative, but his characters are well drawn particularly Inoue Sato, the CIA's security chief, and it's always fun to imagine Tom Hanks delivering Langdon's dialogue (the actor having portrayed the character in the film adaptations of The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons).

The Lost Symbol is not a bad novel by any stretch, it just suffered under the weight of all the inevitable hype which accompanied its release.
-Michael

A Lion for Which You Can Roar with Approval

In so many ways, Andrew Jackson was the creator of the modern presidency, strengthing the executive branch and standing in defiance of the Congress on matters he thought weakened the Union. Jon Meacham's American Lion: Andrew Jackson in The White House creates the portrait of a strong-willed, principled man, who, through force of will, battled what he saw as corruption (The Bank of the United States) and the greatest threat to the nation - Southern secession. Meacham doesn't hesitate, however, to point out the legendary General's flaws - his attitudes toward slavery were those of a planter, not an emancipator, and his policies toward Native Americans led to Cherokee Trail of Tears.

This is a a great biography of Andrew Jackson, albeit a dense one and slow going. With the spectre of civil war looming for his nation, Jackson was, in many ways, forward thinking, but in others very much a creature of his own time.
-Michael