101 - The Lion; Nelson DeMille

The earlier books of Nelson Demille were terrific: Plum Island, The Gold Coast, Night Fall, and Lion's Game were some of my favorite audio books. DeMille always has a first rate reader, and he injects laugh out loud humor into his suspense thrillers, when you least expect it.  Although I was disappointed with his last book: The Gate House, a follow up to The Gold Coast, I  still think DeMille is a good writer, and worthy of another try.

His latest book, The Lion, a follow-up to The Lion's Game, John Corey, a former NYPD homicide detective and special agent for the Anti-Terrorist Task Force agent, is back. His wife Kate Mayfield is an FBI Trainer and member of the Anti-Terrorist Task Force as well. In the earlier novel The Lion escaped with Corey in pursuit. Asad Khalil is seeking revenge for the US, 1986 bombing of Libya that killed Khalil's entire family. Although years have passed, Asad Khalil, A.K.A., The Lion, has not forgotten his mission. His targets this time, for starters are John and Kate. 

MY THOUGHTS - If you think you might enjoy an action packed suspense novel, with a lively dialogue and plenty of sarcasm, then this audio book might appeal to you. I liked this book, but I thought it had a lot of filler. This audio book could have been reduced from (14) discs to about (9 or 10) and still would have been effective.  The reader Scott Brick was very good. It is not necessary to read The Lion's Game first, in my opinion. RECOMMENDED 

4/5 Stars

Library Audio Book

Friday Finds

More unread books that I came across recently. Did you find any new ones for your list and mine?

Confessions of a Catnip Junkie; Allan  Goldstein

(quit the eye rolling....you cat lovers know you want to red this)

(amazon)
Doo Doo wasn’t trying to run away from home. Doc and Fern were great humans, cat people to the core. But Doo Doo has a feral streak, and a sudden impulse sends him into the wilds of the city’s Glen Canyon, and then far beyond. Now he is very lost, but not so lost that he doesn’t know what he wants more than anything. It’s the same thing we all want—love and home—but Doo Doo needs to get there on four paws. And having his new best friend, a subway cat named Rass, tagging along doesn’t make it any easier. Doo Doo’s 6,000 mile odyssey across America —by jet, bus, big rig, ferry, Caddy, Cessna and paw—takes a full year. The lost cat attracts lost souls. He helps a homeless drunk find a home, a minor league pitcher find his fastball, a small town newscaster find the big time, a goth girl find her peace, and a widowed Air Force pilot find the last runway. Doo Doo tells his story in his own voice, we see what he sees, feel what he feels. And he promises to take you so deep inside his soul you’ll feel yourself purr.

 Elizabeth Street; Laurie Fabiano

(amazon)

First novelist Fabiano is dead-on in her portrait of the Italian-American immigrant experience. This engrossing cross-generational saga centers on the experiences of Giovanna Costa, from the small Italian fishing village where she is born to the bustling streets of New York's Lower East Side where she struggles to raise her family and make a living as a midwife after the death of her first husband. In America, the resourceful Giovanna and her second husband eventually open a fruit and vegetable stand, attracting the unwanted attentions of the notorious “Black Hand” crime organization. When Giovanni refuses to meet their demands, her daughter is kidnapped and held for ransom. Basing this story—including the kidnapping—on her own family's immigrant experiences, Fabiano provides a wealth of period detail, infusing the compulsively readable narrative with an authentic sense of time, place, and community.

 Asta in the Wings; Jan Watson

(amazon)

Asta in the Wings is the moving and often darkly funny story of Asta Hewitt, a resourceful seven-year-old and intrepid narrator growing up in an isolated house in Bond Brook, Maine. Shut off from the outside world and restricted to the company of a delusional mother and a bookish older brother, Asta is content to be part of a "society of three" constructing dramatic and fanciful worlds of their own. When circumstances push her into a strange outside world — with all of its discontents — Asta must find a way to assimilate while remaining true to herself and her fractured family. Jan Elizabeth Watson's debut novel puts her among the most promising new writers in the realm of imaginative literary fiction.

100 - The Good Daughters; Joyce Maynard

The Good Daughters, by Joyce Maynard  is a simple story on the surface. It is the story of two families, the Planks and the Dickersons. On July 4, 1950, baby girls were born to each family in a rural New Hampshire hospital. For the Planks, baby Ruth was a fifth daughter. For the Dickersons. baby Dana was an only daughter, with a little boy, Ray at home. The two families could not have been more different. The Planks, Edwin and Connie, were a hard working, farming family. The ancestors had lived on, and farmed the land dating back to the 1700's. The Dickersons, George and Val,  were restless spirits who moved from place to place, NH, VT, PA etc. every few years. They appeared to have no visible source of income.

Even though the Dickersons moved away from New Hampshire, Mrs Plank insisted on staying in touch. Each March they took a trip to visit the Dickersons;  for the sake of the "birthday sisters", she would say. As the girls got older they seemed to have had little in common. In fact Ruth seemed more interested in seeing Dana's brother Ray when they would visit.

While Ruth was artistic and introspective:

 "THINGS WERE NEVER easy with my mother, but I adored my dad. My father alone, of all people in our family, seemed to appreciate me, even if he did not always understand what was going on in my head. Where my mother remained distant and dismissive, my father offered nothing but love........"

 Dana seemed to be the only one in her family with a solid grasp of reality:

"I think I always had an understanding of the seasons and recognized that all of them--winter as much as summer, fall as much as spring--were necessary to sustain the cycle of life. I might be the youngest, but I kept track of the bills. Where the others whistled in the dark, I considered how we might get by in the event of a worst-case scenario. From what I'd seen of the world, those were far more likely to take place than the paydays George kept expecting".

 One thing the two girls did seem to share was a sort of restlessness, a sense of being different, and never quite fitting in. The story of told in alternating chapters, by the "birthday sisters" from childhood well into their adult years. Even though the girls have long periods of separation, the reader stays close by their sides to share their sadness, brief periods of joy and their secrets.

MY THOUGHTS - I LOVED this book! It took me a long while to decide what to write about this novel without giving away any secrets.  This is a favorite type of novel for me: a coming of age story, and a story with characters I truly cared about.  It's about life, about people longing for love, dealing with loss, and a story about trying to find peace with oneself in a not so perfect world.  Joyce Maynard has an amazing way of  telling a heartfelt story; one that draws you in and doesn't let you go. Her previous book, Labor Day, was also excellent.  This is a book that you will want to read in one sitting. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

5/5 stars
Review Copy-Harper Collins
(8/24/2010)

Waiting on Wednesday; Trespass

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted by Jill @ Breaking the Spine, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.  What are you anxiously waiting for?

I've been thinking about this book lately:

Trespass; Rose Tremain

(October 18, 2010 - W.W. Norton Co.)

(amazon)... An electrifying novel about disputed territory, sibling love, and devastating revenge from the celebrated author of The Road Home and Restoration. In a silent valley in southern France stands an isolated stone farmhouse, the Mas Lunel. Aramon, the owner, is so haunted by his violent past that he's become incapable of all meaningful action, letting his hunting dogs starve and his land go to ruin. Meanwhile, his sister Audrun, alone in her modern bungalow within sight of the Mas Lunel, dreams of exacting retribution for the unspoken betrayals that have blighted her life. Into this closed world comes Anthony Verey, a wealthy but disillusioned antiques dealer from London. When he sets his sights on the Mas, a frightening and unstoppable series of consequences is set in motion.

Wordless Wednesday

Gorgeous view, but where would you put your book cases?

It's Tuesday ~ How the Heck Did I Miss These Books?

Has anyone read these (3) books I obviously missed until now?

 

Rules for Old Men in Waiting: Peter Pouncey

Begun in 1981, this slender, unpretentious, lyrical and deeply moving novel by the president emeritus of Amherst College was more than two decades in the making. The year is 1987, and octogenarian Robert MacIver is alone, in failing health and debilitated with grief over his wife's recent death, hiding out in the dead of winter in a remote, unheated Cape Cod house "older than the Republic." Shocked into confronting the seriousness of his plight when the timbers of the front porch collapse under his weight, he retreats back inside the house and realizes that he wants to live out his remaining days—however few in number—with dignity. Thus resolved, he formulates his Ten Commandments for Old Men Waiting, the seventh of which is "Work every morning." And so he decides to write a short story about an infantry company in "No Man's Land" in WWI, which will draw on the interviews he conducted with victims of poison gas that he used for his first book, the well-received oral history Voices Through the Smoke. Pouncey's novel thus becomes a story within a novel; and MacIver's story is elegantly juxtaposed with his memories from his own long life. Pouncey's first book is proof that sometimes greatness comes slowly and in small packages.

The End of Manners; Francesca Marciano

Maria Galante and Imo Glass are on assignment in Afghanistan: outgoing Imo to interview girls who have attempted suicide to avoid forced marriage to older men; and shy, perfectionist Maria to photograph them. But in a culture in which women shroud their faces and suicide is a grave taboo, to photograph these women puts everyone in danger. Before the assignment is over, Maria is forced to decide if it's more important to succeed at her work —and please Imo—or to follow her own moral compass. The End of Manners is a story of friendship and loyalty, of the transformative power of journeying outside oneself into the wider world.

Like Trees, Walking; Ravi Howard

The town of Mobile, Alabama, in the summer of 1981, when headlines were dominated by the Atlanta child killings, awakens to find a black youth hanging from a neighborhood tree. Sixteen-year-old Roy Deacon, son of the local black funeral director, offers the first-person narrative of his brother Paul's discovery of the body of a friend and classmate, and the town's struggle to reconcile the lynching with any notions that its black residents have of racial progress. Paul has managed to escape the expectations that he will go into the family business, seven generations long. The burden falls all the heavier on Roy, whose distaste doesn't outweigh his strong sense of duty. Looking back 22 years after the event, Roy wrestles with the memory of the lynching at a turning point in the life of the town and his family. Based on the true story of one of the last recorded lynchings in the U.S., Howard's debut novel offers a subtle and stirring look at the complexities of racial hatred and family obligations.

Mailbox Monday - August 2

Mailbox Monday is hosted by Chick Loves Lit. 

Thanks for hosting this popular post.

This week had more unexpected book surprises in store for me (well all but 2, that I bought).  Here is what arrive by mail:

• A Secret Kept; Tatiana de Rosnay (Amazon Vine)
• Our Kind of Traitor; John le Carre (Viking)
• Hollywood Savages;Kristin McCloy (S and S)
• The Tree; John Fowles (Shelf Awareness)
• Art of Devotion; Samantha Bruce-Benjamin (S and S)
• What a Difference a Dog Makes; Dana Jennings (Doubleday)

 

• Stranger of the Feast;  Jennifer Vanderbes (S and S)
• Of Bees and Mist; Setiawan (purchase)
• Misfortune; Wesley Stace (purchase)