Part memoir, part writing guide, Bird by Bird is a delightful book filled with rib-tickling anecdotes about relationships, parenting, faith, taking risks, following your dreams, and just plain living. I picked it up with hope of getting tips on doing some serious writing, and came away with a notebook filled with thoughts and ideas and suggestions about writing, and lots more. As a person who has often needed to be nudged to get going on projects that posed a serious challenge, I felt that Lamott […]
Baldacci popcorn thriller … no nuances, just a fun ride
If you’re looking for a lightweight quick read to go with popcorn, Baldacci’s latest thriller fits the bill. If you’re looking for subtley, nuance, serious character development and plausible plot, look elsewhere. Baldacci brings us another episode of his dynamic duo Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, former Secret Service turned private investigators who just can’t keep themselves out of trouble but who somehow manage to solve global conspiracies by themselves while magically winning the unpublicized appreciation of the U.S. President at the end of the […]
A trip down the Yangtze …. with a corpse!
The final volume of the “Red Princess” trilogy, Dragon Bones had me captured from the get-go. The author introduces us to the mighty Yangtze River in China by portraying the voyage of a corpse as it is swept, crashing and smashing and sometimes floating its way through the Three Gorges and the massive dam of that name still under construction, until fetching up on the outskirts of a city, setting the stage for an investigation by our intrepid couple Detective Liu Hulan and her […]
A Thrilling Mystery Amid U.S.-China Relations
This second in the “Red Princess” trilogy is an exciting and well-plotted mystery wrapped around a continued powerful in-depth look at modern China’s political, economic and social contradictions. The story begins in the impoverished Chinese countryside which was for a while the touted model of the Cultural Revolution, until it was once again abandoned to its fate and to the cruel exploitation of foreign investors and local opportunists. Then we are back in Beijing, where our heroine Detective Liu Hulan is called upon to investigate […]