Wow, this was all sorts of terrible, but I still had to finish the damn thing to find out if the OTP gets together because I really, really liked (half of) them. So I vaguely remember seeing trailers for this book when it was turned into a movie. Natalie Portman lives in a Wal-Mart, then gives birth in it. What I really remember is that she names her child “Americus”, and her last name is Nation, and that’s just mean. So I wasn’t expecting Pulitzer […]
Shanghai Girls (Shanghai Girls #1) by Lisa See
Shanghai Girls was very uneven, not terribly well-written, but just interesting enough that when it ended on a cliffhanger, I thought “Good, I want to read the sequel”. “We hug, but there are no tears. For every awful thing that’s been said and done, she is my sister. Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life. She is the only person left in the world who shares my memories of our childhood, our parents, our Shanghai, our struggles, our sorrows, […]
Fall of Giants (The Century Trilogy #1) by Ken Follett
This was a phenomenal book. I’m sad that my experience with Ken Follett novels for years was with his shorter novels, like The Third Twin and The Key to Rebecca, that I mainly read for the dirty bits (I think I read The Third Twin went I was 13–several times). I discovered him as a historical fiction writer last year when I read the two Pillars of Earth books, and knew I needed to find more like that. A few weeks ago, I started the first of the Century Trilogy, titled Fall […]
Nightwoods by Charles Frazier
This was good, very creepy and hard to put down. I tried reading Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain a year or two ago, and his habit of writing dialogue proceeded by a hyphen instead of using quotation marks made me so crazy I couldn’t get very far. I know that’s a stupid complaint, but books that have formatting that I’m not used to end up distracting me to the point of un-readability. Nightwoods has dialogue written the same way, but there’s so little of it that it’s hardly a […]