I don’t remember how I stumbled across this title but I’m so glad that I did.  I did however, follow a familiar yet weird pattern that I do sometimes, in which I put off reading a book even though the summary sounds very interesting.  I had had the book for 18 days when I finally picked it up thinking I’d better read it now, there’s a hold on it and I can’t renew it.  There was even a moment near the beginning that I almost put the book down because I thought “that’s strange - what is going on?  Do I really want to read this?”.  After all that build up, you’re probably thinking that book must have been fabulous!  And you’re right, it was.  Go read it.

Kaya McLaren’s novel On the Divinty of Second Chances is about a family that is falling apart.  Anna and Phil have been married for 30 years but Anna has taken to sleeping outside.  Anna’s a stay-at-home mom who raised her 3 kids and is wondering, in light of her husband’s recent retirement, when does she get to retire? And she’s worried about her kids, Olive, who’s boyfriend doesn’t seem right for her, Jade, who has always marched to the beat of her own drum, and Forrest, who ran away when he was a teenager and hasn’t been seen since. 

I don’t want to give much more away in terms of plot, because the discovery of subsequent details is part and partial of the enjoyment of the story.  However, here’s a few teasers: Someone learns to play the bagpipes (and the teacher’s advice/comments are quite funny), someone picks back up her tap shoes to rejoin the Thunderellas, Lightening Bob (park ranger) has been struck by lighting 5 times on July 5 and Grace isn’t just an imarginary childhood friend.  While I shed some tears as I read the story, it does have a positive and hopeful end.  Seriously, why haven’t you read this yet?

Age Group:
16 and up

Story:
The book alternates between stories of Art’s father (Vladek) about life in Poland before and during World War II, with the contemporary life of Art, Vladek, and their loved ones in the Rego Park neighbourhood of New York City. It is told in graphic form where Jews are depicted as mice, the Germans are portrayed as cats, and the Poles are depicted as pigs.

Awards:
Has won 9 awards, including the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Special Awards and Citations, the 1992 Eisner Award, and the 1992 Harvey Award.

My Thoughts:
Telling the holocaust in graphic form is not something easily achieved, yet Art Spiegelman makes it look easy. A truly masterful piece!

Borrow Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale from your local VPL Library!

Top Three Similar Reads:

1. Night, by Elie Wiesel
2. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, by Marjane Satrapi
3. Blankets, by Craig Thompson

Have you read Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale yet? If so, what did you think?

There is only one thing to do when summer strikes.  When sitting in your office all day gives you gooseflesh all over and reduces you to a tooth-chattering fool.  When you can sit in the arctic air mass that is the modern industrial AC, watching your breath form clouds while the sunshine shimmers up off the pavement.

And that one thing is to read a Norwegian murder mystery set at Christmas during the coldest winter Oslo has seen in a decade.  Better yet, read said mystery on your lunch and breaks, sitting on the steamy concrete at the staff entrance to the library, simultaneously absorbing as much warmth as you can before you venture back indoors and relishing the imaginary world of blue-black ice and air so cold it cracks.

Oh, and that Norwegian murder mystery? It better be The Redeemer by Jo Nesbø.

First things first.  Yes, Nesbø’s detective is named Harry Hole.  There.  I have told you.  Have one good snicker to get it out of your system.  Now get over it.

There is an assassin in Oslo.  And for all his caution, his forethought and his care, he has killed the wrong man.  Harry and his team find themselves chasing a ghost - a man no one can identify - but a ghost intent on getting his mark at all costs.  It doesn’t help things that the murdered man was a member of the Salvation Army, which is enjoying a resurgence in popularity in Norway for their expansive charity work.  Or that as soon as Harry figures out something about this mysterious assassin, the assassin has moved on.  You can feel the tension as the investigative team moves inch by inch closer to the hit man on the tightrope they share.

This is the first book to which I have awarded five stars on Goodreads in a long time.  The story is to so tightly wound, so expertly woven - it is a fabric of narrative, rich in colour and detail, incredibly complex, but with no loose strands or holes.

There are five Nesbø mysteries at VPL.  Read one while you are waiting for your hold on the new Stieg Larsson book to come through!

Summer has arrived and I have to read at least a few beach reads.  And what could be more appropriate for a fun summer read than the latest Janet Evanovich book to feature Stephanie Plum?  I don’t want to spoil Sizzling Sixteen for long time fans of the series, but suffice it to say Stephanie has car problems, is still torn between Morelli and Ranger and lots of secondary characters take part.  In fact, we get to see a little more of office manager Connie this time because Vinnie, Stephanie’s cousin and boss, is kidnapped and it is up to Stephanie, Connie and Lula to get him back since his wife has decided to throw him out after he’d been caught in a compromising position. 

For fans who have also read the in-between Plum series, you may want to add yourself to the hold list for the fall release of Wicked Appetite.  This is the first book in a new series that features Diesel from the in-between books.  I don’t think Stephanie will make an appearance since the author’s website lists it as an Unmentionable Diesel and Tucker novel but I can’t wait regardless!

I also read Summer House by Nancy Thayer.  Charlotte Wheelwright quit her banker job 3 years ago and started an organic gardening business on her grandmother Nona’s land on Nantucket Island.  Her family thought it was just another faze and were pleased that a family member moved in to live with Nona, but when Charlotte made a profit of $4000 dollars in the last year, the rest of the family starts getting concerned that she may be trying to position herself to inherit a larger portion of the estate when Nona passes.  It is tradition that every summer, the whole family comes back to Nantucket for the Family Meeting and for the rest of the summer, family members come and go from Nantucket so we get to see the extended family and how they interact and cope with a number of family issues.

The book follows Charlotte, Charlotte’s mother Helen and Nona over the course of the summer.  Nona’s story is fleshed out with back flashes to when she met her husband back in World War II.  Nona’s story contains a secret that has unexpected repercussions for her family.  Helen is dealing with a strain in her marriage and Charlotte is attracted to two men and is trying to come to grips with her actions from 3 years that essentially caused her to quit her job in the family bank.  I really liked this book.  It had the feel of a beach read but wasn’t just frothy, the family relationships seemed realistic and recognizable.

Age Group:

16 and up

Story:

Believing he can commit the perfect crime, Roderick Raskolnikov robs and murders and elderly pawnbroker.  He eventually finds himself not only engaged in a battle of wits with inspector Porfiry, a policeman who is determined to wring a confession from him, but also an internal battle with his consciousness that slowly begins to destroy him.

Awards:

None But it has stood the test of time.

My Thoughts:

There are very few books that I will read twice, but Crime and Punishment is one of them.  Dostoyevsky does a brilliant job at allowing the reader to enter the brain of a mentally ill criminal. 

Borrow Crime and Punishment from your local VPL Library!

Top Three Similar Reads:

1. The Trial, by Franz Kafka
2. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
3. The Stranger, by Albert Camus 

Have you read Crime and Punishment yet? If so, what did you think?

Back in late June, my fellow library blogger Joanna wrote about Linda Castillo’s debut thriller Sworn to Silence in her “What’ll it be…” column.  My partner was so impressed with her review that she decided to take the book on vacation with us, where she promptly devoured it, ignoring the rest of us while sitting on the beach to read every single word with single-minded resolve.  When she was done, she told me I had to read it.  So I did!

I am going to second Joanna’s recommendation that you all read Sworn to Silence by Linda Castillo.  I am also going to second her opinion that it can be a little long on the gore and violence.  It reads more like “Criminal Minds” than “Little House on the Prairie.”  If you want to read a murder mystery that is more “Little House on the Prairie” and also features the American Amish community, I will recommend Jodi Picoult’s Plain Truth.

Plain Truth tells the story of a successful attorney who is called back to the simpler roots of her family when she is asked to defend a relative - a young, unmarried Amish woman - who is alleged to have murdered her newborn child.  Picoult writes convincingly of the tense intersection of the Amish and English communities.

For those who like the Castillo, the second book in the series, Pray for Silence, is in the catalogue waiting for you to place a hold on it!

It was a mystery-ful weekend at my place!  In addition to the Castillo, I also read another Swedish mystery by Arnaldur Indridason - Hypothermia.  What could be better than a murder mystery that you don’t even know whether or not there is a murder?!  I am glad that I got started on the Northern European mystery writers.   I am just getting started on a new book, this one by a Norwegian.  I can’t say anymore, because then I wouldn’t have anything to write about next week.  Stay tuned!

Finally, I also finished 206 Bones by Kathy Reichs, another solid addition to the Temperance Brennan series.  I must admit that after my encounter with a Brennan audiobook, I had a hard time reading the book without hearing the stilted French and southern accent in my head.  Thankfully, it was a great story, and I was able to get over it!  For Reichs fans, the new title - Spider Bones - is also on order and awaiting your addition to the holds list.

I read the first book to feature 13 year-old Alcatraz Smedry, Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians, a couple of years ago.  At this point, I don’t remember the details clearly, but when I recently saw that there were two more books in the series, I wanted to read them immediately.  I read both book 2, Alcatraz versus the Scrivener’s Bones and book 3, Alcatraz versus the Knights of Crystallia, last week and can’t wait for the fourth, Alcatraz versus the Shattered Lens, which will be published this December.

So these books are published as fantasy novels under the name of Brandon Sanderson, but this is just a ploy to get the books past the evil librarians.  Because this series is actually an autobiography written by Alcatraz Smedry himself.  Those who live in the Free Kingdoms (e.g. Nalhalla) know this to be true, but citizens of the Hushlands (aka North America), might not believe Alcatraz since they have been in the grips of the evil librarians their whole lives. 

Alcatraz grew up in foster care and has gone through a series of foster parents because accidents always happen around him and he breaks things.  He receives a bag of sand from his father on his birthday which is stolen from him.  His grandfather Smedry turns up and Alcatraz learns that his family, the Smedrys, are part of a group fighting against the evil librarians.  All the Smedrys have a special talent, some more powerful than others.  Grandpa Smedry’s talent is to arrive late to everything.  This means he tends to miss appointments, but on the plus side, he’s late to meet bullets etc and has been late meeting death for years!  It turns out that Alcatraz has a powerful talent, the talent to break things.

I realize that I’m a librarian, but I really like this series. The premise is original (see, I’m an evil librarian perpetuating the myth that this is fantasy and not a autobiography!) and the adventures are fun.  Alcatraz has a distinct and unique narrative, which I really enjoyed and I found myself quite amused by all sorts of details.  One example is that to discredit the Smedrys, who are traditionally named after their ancestors, the evil librarians got the prisons in the Hushlands named after Smedrys so that Hushlanders will have negative association with those names (Alzatraz, his grandpa Leavenworth, his cousin Sing Sing just to name a few).  Evil Librarian that I am, I’ll hand these books out to anyone looking for a fun fantasy adventure!

Age Group:
Adult

Story:
Christopher John Francis Boone is an autistic boy who relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. At the age of fifteen his carefully constructed world falls apart when he finds his neighbour’s dog impaled on a garden fork. This incident sets Christopher on a quest, inspired by his favourite character Sherlock Holmes, to find out who is responsible for the gruesome crime.

Awards:
Is the winner of the 2003 Whitbred Book of the Year, and the 2004 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for “Best First Book”

My Thoughts:
Written through the eyes of an autistic boy this novel is easy to read and extremely powerful.

Borrow The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time from your local VPL Library!

Top Three Similar Reads:

1. Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Foer
2. Me & Emma, by Elizabeth Flock
3. How The Light Gets In, by M.J. Hyland

Have you read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time yet? If so, what did you think?

Ahhhhhh, vacation!  Last week, I spent all my time meandering around rural Quebec and the Adirondacks, absorbing the sun, floating in the water (be it pool, lake or that which has been brewed into beer!) and … Reading. For. Fun.  And what a lovely time it was!

My reading menu ranged widely - from a teen historical novel about baseball to a collection of essays on the nature of happiness - but the detective novel I selected proved a particularly delectable morsel!

Belshazzar’s Daughter is a many-layered debut.  The novel is Barbara Nadel’s debut.  It is also the debut of a spectacularly compelling detective - Çetin Ikmen, chain-smoker, brandy-drinker, rumpled, ugly, tiny father to eight and another on the way courtesy of his orthodox Muslim wife Fatma. 

One unfortunate day in the decrepit Jewish quarter of Balat in Istanbul, the body of an elderly man is found brutalized and long dead.  On the wall above his head, painted in what appears to be his own blood, is a two-metre swastika.  The Istanbul police, anxious to keep the incriminating racial details from the prying eyes of the nosy public and possible copy-cats, bring in their secret weapon, Inspector Çetin Ikmen.  Immediately Ikmen must navigate the murky intersection of truth-seeking and politics as the Israeli consul puts pressure on his boss to finger an Istanbul businessman of German origin with a documented Nazi past.

Ikmen, however, prefers a method he calls biography-building - an investigative method that should be old hat to any reader of modern mysteries or watcher of modern cop dramas.  Research the victim, find the killer.  Except in Ikmen’s case, he extends his bio-building to persons other than the victim himself.  A number of fascinating characters keep popping up in and around the investigation.  There’s Robert Cornelius - the young Englishman who would be just in the wrong place at the wrong time if he didn’t keep turning up.  There’s Reinhold Smits - the aforementioned businessman who might have more to hide than just a Nazi past.  There’s Maria Gulcu - a Turkish name cannot hide the truth of what she thinks she is.  Does any single one of them have everything it takes to murder poor Leonid Meyer so horrifically?  Motive, opportunity, the physical capability?  Does any one person possess it all?

Will Ikmen find his truth?  Or will he lose it all at the bottom of a brandy bottle?

Fans of series will be delighted to find out that Ikmen does indeed inherit a shelf of mysteries all his own.  I have half of them on my desk to take home and the other half on hold!