Aliverse

The Uncoupling

 

When the elliptical new drama teacher at Stellar Plains High School chooses for the school play “Lysistrata”— the comedy by Aristophanes in which women stop having sex with men in order to end a war — a strange spell seems to be cast over the school. Or, at least, over the women. One by one throughout the high school community, perfectly healthy, normal women and teenage girls turn away from their husbands and boyfriends in the bedroom for reasons they don’t really understand. As the women worry over their loss of passion, and the men become by turns, unhappy, offended, and, above all, confused, both sides are forced to look at their partners, their shared history, and their sexual selves in a new light.

~4 stars out of 5~

After a string of non-fiction junk books, I am relieved to be back in the fiction saddle, reviewing a story that took me to another place for a while and told me a good story. The Uncoupling, by Meg Wolitzer, is that book.  Its characters and setting seduced me, embraced me, and gently released me at the end. Sounds a little dirty, doesn’t it? That is how this book was. Compelling, enjoyable, and a little bit naughty.

The book begins in the way many other novels begin. It is set in an unremarkable town, with unremarkable people, doing unremarkable things. Every day life is mundane and pleasant with the occasional drama thrown in here and there.  Dory and Robby Lang are likable, easy-going folks who teach at the same high school and love their life and each other with passion and wonder. Their daughter Willa was an average student with the average amount of friends, neither sticking out as a student, nor falling through the cracks.

Everyone in the town of Stellar Plains, New Jersey had a pretty average life. People lived, died, loved, ate dinner, had sex; until suddenly, they didn’t.

At the beginning of the school year, a new drama teacher blew into everyone’s life with passion and force. Fran Heller was an odd sort of woman, who painted her normal suburban house a crazy coral and turquoise combination that had the neighbors staring. Her abrupt, forthright nature, made her a bit of a spectacle in Eleanor Roosevelt high school, Elro for short. But what really shocked people in the neighborhood and school was the play the new drama teacher chose for the year. Fran Heller had chosen to have the children perform Lysistrata, and Aristophanes comedy about a woman who leads the women of Greece in a sex strike, intended to end the Peloponnesian War. The play was sexy, funny, and poignant and she felt it was right for the school. More importantly, she felt it was important for the town.

While Fran was settling into her role as drama teacher and ‘cool adult’ to the children in the play, her son Eli was busy in his own way. After having shared dinner and an evening hanging out in Willa Lang’s bedroom, listening to teenaged, angsty music, Eli was falling for the quiet girl. Willa fell for him too, and before long, the two were an item at Elro, much to Dory’s surprise.

While Eli and Willa discovered the wonder of sex, quiet the opposite was happening in Dory and Robby’s bedroom. Things had, in fact, become quite chilly. One night, shortly after the school year began, Dory felt a chill come over her. One not climatic in nature, but more climactic. Quite suddenly, Dory was no longer interested in sex with her husband. Robby, the man she had loved and lusted after during their entire marriage, was no longer an object of Dory’s desire. At first she thought it was temporary, and so did Robby. So they both went on with life as anyone would do. Then the spell fell over the entire town.

Over the next several months, women fell away from their spouses and lovers. They drew away, into their own worlds, and away from the embrace of their loved ones. Teenaged boys were left frustrated and heartbroken when their young objects of affection and lust took off on their own.

Meg Wolitzer drew me into this world, and made me need to know what would happen next. I was drawn to the characters, caring about them and their well-being, as if they were my own loved ones. At the same time I was horrified. The idea of a complete sex drought left me feeling slightly uneasy and tense. Considering the possibility of a long, sexless future is scary. And it’s easy to imagine yourself as part of the story, as The Uncoupling draws you further in.

The closer we get to the performance of the high school play, the more things reach a frustrating peak. Couples argued, men reacted, ranging from anger to sadness to bewilderment.

I won’t spoil the specifics, but I don’t think it’s a huge spoiler to say the spell did eventually end. People and lives were irrevocably changed, but it ended and things got better in Stellar Plains.

In the end, The Uncoupling reminds you to shake things up once in a while. Don’t take things for granted, and don’t stagnate.

This is a great book to read before Valentine’s Day, in my opinion. It’s sort of the anti-Valentine. Not bitter, but a departure from the norm. It isn’t a romance novel, but there is romance and fire and love.

This book is a solid 4 out of 5.

The youngest of four daughters in an old, celebrated St. Louis family of prominent journalists and politicians on one side, debutante balls and equestrian trophies on the other, Jeanne Darst grew up hearing stories of past grandeur. And as a young girl, the message she internalized was clear: while things might be a bit tight for us right now, it’s only temporary. Soon her father would sell the Great American Novel and reclaim the family’s former glory.

4 out of 5 stars

Fiction Ruined My Family is more than a memoir, to me. It’s more than comedy or tragedy. I’m going to go so far as to say that Jeanne Darst is the female David Sedaris. Her story-telling is a bit different, true, but her voice is much the same. She’s charming and likeable, yet blunt and vulgar at times. Which meant, of course, that I loved this book!

As a writer who never seems to write, I could really appreciate Jeanne’s loving, yet frusrated, description of her writer father. His love of good books and ‘the story’ behind everything is something I could relate to. In fact, his willingness to work for his dream, regardless of cost, was something I admired. Yet, nothing more than a few articles ever really materialized for the man. 

Then Darst shows the true story of how the starving artist lifestyle affects a family. The romance of a creative existence dwindles with each painful retelling of poverty and, at times, despair.

Jeanne Darst’s parents both grew up comfortably. Her mother grew up well-off, and expected a similar lifestyle as an adult. The fact that her father’s writing career never flourished could not put a damper on her mother’s desire to live the lavish lifestyle, to which she seemed entitled.  When Darst’s father decided it was time to uproot the family from St. Louis and move them to a ‘farm’ that in reality ended up being more like a commune where artists went to languish.  Her father’s intention was to write his big break-out novel. Then the family would move back to St. Louis and go back to the life they’d always known.

Not only did they never return to St. Louis, but the lifestyle they once knew was never to return. When grandmother (Nonnie) died, Jeanne’s mother inherited some money to keep hersel and the girls afloat, but also seemed to inherit a new personality. One that apparently drank more, cried more, and smiled less. Broke and unsuccessful at his attemp to write a novel, Jeanne’s father took a job at CBS, but never really got his act together enough to write more.

As Jeanne Darst takes us on her life’s journey, she unabashedly shares her stories of partying, careless attempts at jobs, and increasingly, drinking like her mother.

As Jeanne herself wrote, “For a long time I was worried about becoming my father. Then I was worried about becoming my mother. Now I was worried about becoming myself.”

Darst navigates her life, eventually figuring out how to be herself and be successful at the same time. The wild ride to get there is definitely worth a read.

There were a few quirks that I found mildly distracting. Some sentences seemed to fragment in ways that weren’t intuitive to me. In places, the wording seemed either forced or awkward. And sometimes there’s a feel of ‘stream-of-consciousness’ that seems to come out of nowhere. None of those things take away from the overall goodness of the story, however.

I recommend this book. It’s worth a read and is good for a few laughs. Darst is funny and sympathetic and on her way up.

This book gets 4 out of 5 stars.

1994:
Jasper College is buzzing with the news that famed literature professor Richard Aldiss will be teaching a special night class called Unraveling a Literary Mystery—from his prison cell. Twelve years ago, Aldiss was convicted of the murders of two female grad students; they were killed with axe blows and their bodies decorated with the novels of notoriously reclusive author Paul Fallows. Even the most elite, obsessive Fallows scholars have never seen him. He is like a ghost.

Now, Aldiss entreats the students of his night class to solve the Fallows riddle once and for all. He introduces them to the Procedure, a game that supposedly lets one get inside the novels themselves, book which scholars believe are maps to the author’s true identity. Soon members of the night class will be invited to play along…

Present Day:
Alex Shipley, now a professor at Harvard, made her name as a member of Aldiss’s night class. She not only exposed the truth of Paul Fallows’s identity, but in the process uncovered information that acquitted Aldiss of the heinous 1982 crimes. But when a fellow night class alum is murdered—the body chopped up with an axe and surrounded by Fallows novels—can she use what she knows of Fallows and the Procedure to stop a killer before each of her former classmates is picked off, one by one?

5 stars out of 5

I requested this book from the publisher as a review copy about a month before it was due out. The title and cover just grabbed me. I barely even read the synopsis before I requested it. I just knew it was something I wanted to try out.

All I can say now is WOW! What an excellent book!

But let me back up a little. My first reaction to this novel was actually luke-warm. As I was reading the introduction where we get introduced to the weird relationship between Alex and Professor Aldiss, all I could think of is “how is this any different than Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter?” The similarities seemed glaring to me, and I was afraid this was going to end up being just an ‘ok’ book to add to my pile.

I was so wrong. True, there is a bit of ‘quid pro quo’ about the interaction between Alex and her old professor. The similarities end there, however. This book took me from one comfortable place on the sidelines of the story, to an uncomfortable position right in the thick of it. I mean, the story starts off being told to you, but then you are dragged along, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. The book is quietly brilliant, not coming across as overly full of itself, yet bringing intelligence and a dynamic world to the page.

As classmates of the ‘secret class’ Alex took back in college start dying off, you have to wonder if Aldiss did it. Alex, however, never wonders this. She is always positive of her professor’s innocence, and by the climax of the book you have to wonder why. I mean, everything seems to point to this man being at the root of things. He started them all on this weird ‘game’ where everyone acts out parts from a book. Now it seems some of them have taken it to an extreme.

If I had to pick out one aspect of the book that wasn’t completely stellar, I’d have to say that the reclusive author Paul Fallows ended up feeling like something of a dead-end to me. It worked fine in the grand scheme of things, so it didn’t throw the book off at all. I just felt like it was less important to me, the reader, than it was intended to be. I may be wrong, of course.

The twists in this book are better than any roller-coaster and I don’t want to spoil a single bit of it. Just know that the book is dark, it is captivating, and it is well-written. I feel like the writing was just spot on. It was interesting and captivating without being melodramatic or self-absorbed.

I certainly plan on reading Will Lavender’s book Obedience. With such a success as Dominance, how can I pass on his other work? With a second novel as wonderful as Dominance, I think it’s clear we can expect great things from Will Lavender.

I urge everyone I know, and all of my readers, to go get this book. It’s a thrill-ride not to be missed!

Creep - Jennifer Hillier

Dr. Sheila Tao is a professor of psychology. An expert in human behavior. And when she began an affair with sexy graduate student Ethan Wolfe, she knew she was playing with fire. Consumed by lust when they were together, riddled with guilt when they weren’t, she knows the three-month fling has to end. After all, she’s finally engaged to a loving investment banker who adores her, and she’s taking control of her life. But when she attempts to end the affair, Ethan Wolfe won’t let her walk away.

- from the Official Jennifer Hillier Author Site

But I’m a creep 
I’m a weirdo 
What the hell I’m doing here? 
I don’t belong here

This book is the reason you should give first-time authors a try. Jennifer Hillier hit a home-run with this one! I requested this book to review before it was released. (Speaking of which, tomorrow is the day! The release date for Creep is July 5th.) The cover looked cool, the title is one of my favorite Radiohead songs, and it sounded interesting. It sounded like it had some substance.

I admit, the first thing I thought as I started to read Creep was that I didn’t know if I could ever sympathize with the protagonist. She doesn’t come across as flawed in any way, at first, and I thought “no way can I get into this chick”. I like my protagonists to be realistic. But then I read on and the book delved deeper.

At first you meet Sheila Tao and she’s perfect. She’s beautiful, professional, and strong. She’s successful in her teaching career at the university. She’s talented and knowledgeable in psychology, and she has a happy, healthy relationship with her fiance. But as you read on, her affair with student/TA Ethan Wolfe comes to light. Their sexual exploits shine a light on one of Sheila’s largest flaws. Although she deeply loves her fiance, she is, and has been for years, a sex addict.

Although she sees a therapist and goes to meetings of Sex Addicts Anonymous, Sheila is anything but rehabilitated.

When she finally realizes that she must stop the affair if she wants to have a long-lasting and loving relationship with her fiance, things begin to go downhill.

Ethan doesn’t take well to being dumped. He begins to make threads to Sheila, threatening to release a sex-video he made of them if she doesn’t bend to his demands.  Sheila isn’t one to give in easily, though, and she stands up for her relationship and the love she has for the man she is about to marry. What follows is a level of creepiness I had not anticipated when I began to read the book.

Ethan stalks Sheila’s fiance, then kidnaps her and hides her away, meanwhile carrying on with life as if nothing were out of the ordinary.  He still lives with his girlfriend, works at the college, works on his degree, and volunteers at a soup kitchen. Yet when he gets away to where he has Sheila hostage, his true self starts to break through the cracks in his personality. She believes he is a psychopath, and is desperate to keep herself alive and find a way out of where she’s being held hostage.

Morris, Sheila’s fiance, gets strange phone message where Sheila appears to call off their marriage unexpectedly. Combined with her absence from work, Morris thinks something weird is going on and hires a private investigator. From that point, it’s a race against the clock to see if Morris and the P.I. can find Sheila before something bad happens to her.

I won’t spoil Jennifer Hillier’s first book, but let me say that the end has a nice twist on it. While I was starting to figure it out partway through the book, it was not obvious, to me, and it was a nice bit of extra flavor.

This book had me coming back for more. I couldn’t wait to see what happened with Sheila and kept wondering what new, scary crap Ethan was going to pull. And of course through the entire book I was rooting for Morris the concerned fiance. Anyone willing to go through that much trouble for the woman he loved deserved to win!

This is a great first book for Hillier. I am so happy to be able to give such a positive review. I eagerly await her future books. And I’m putting it out there for posterity…if she names her next book “Karma Police”, I’m buying ten copies.

So check out Creep. It’s a worthwhile summer thriller and a great start for Jennifer Hillier’s writing career.

Be sure to check out her official author page as well as her blog!

~ 4 out of 5 stars ~

Creep by Jennifer Hillier

Book Description From Amazon.com

A call in the dead of night summons Father Michael Jerome to a suburban Chicago hospital–a police officer has been shot. As department chaplain, Michael arrives to find that the officer will survive.

The same cannot be said for his assailant, who lays mortally wounded on a gurney, begging for absolution for some past sin. Offering last rites to the dying man, Michael hears his final confession and is shaken by the admission of a crime committed five years earlier.

A murder that shattered his family.

Struggling with the constraints of his faith, Michael moves cautiously as he tries to identify others involved in the vicious killing. But every secret he uncovers leads him further down a path where it becomes clear that someone is desperate for the past to stay buried.

Have you ever seen the movie Mercury Rising? I have. A zillion times. It’s one of my favorite movies. I’ve always meant to read the book “Simple Simon”. It was the inspiration for the movie. It says so in the credits or something…all I know is, I’ve seen the name for the book and kept meaning to look it up. So imagine my delight when I found the author in my Twitter feed! I don’t even remember how he ended up in there. But somehow Ryne Douglas Pearson popped up mentioning his books available for e-readers.

I should point out here that thanks to Twitter I have discovered that not only are authors generally awesome people, but they are totally down to earth too. I mean, they’re goofy and out there sometimes, but they are REAL. So far not a single author I’ve talked to has been the untouchable I thought they’d be. It’s fantastic!

So I asked Ryne which book he recommended for me to start with. I knew I’d eventually read “Simple Simon”, but I wanted to read something newer. I wanted to read something the author himself recommended. His response was to ask what kind of books I enjoy reading and is there a particular subject I prefer. Again, awesomeness! Thank you, Ryne, for taking the time to ask.  Ryne suggested “Confessions”, since it was suspenseful and kind of dark. Totally my bag.

I finished it in two days and I loved it!

How could I not love it? The main character is a conflicted priest who is trying to track down his sister’s murderer. How could that not capture your attention right away?

The pacing of the book is just perfect, in my opinion. There was never a time where I felt it dragged or there was a lull. I always wanted to get to the next page, read the next chapter, find out what was going to happen. The characters were ones you wanted to learn more about. They drew you into the story and made you want to know where they were going. Especially the main character, the priest I mentioned, Michael Jerome (Father Jerome to most people.)

Michael was so sympathetic because he behaved like a real human being. One of the things I loved the most about this book was Pearson’s ability to capture the absolute humanness of a priest. Any priest will tell you they are not infallible. They are human. They are very human, having the same desires, doubts, and concerns that everyone else has. They just have a calling that changes the way they can react to many of those desires or doubts. Father Jerome struggles with his ability to remain faithful. Starting with a chance meeting with a man who took part in his sister’s murder, and moving through the carefully woven tapestry of lies that led up to the cover-up, Michael is intensely human and real.

Throughout the book, Michael tries to solve his sister’s murder. Meanwhile he tries to remain strong for his father who must take care of an ailing wife. Alzheimer’s has destroyed all but the strongest of her memories. Once a loving, adoring mother, she is now paranoid, frightened, and can’t even recognize her only remaining child. When Michael does try to talk to her, she fearfully asks her husband who the stranger is. Then she proceeds to tell Michael about her wonderful, beautiful daughter.

This novel is well-paced, intriguing, and heart-wrenching. The characters will suck you in and make you want to know more. The turns this story takes makes it a page-turner from start to finish.

I can’t wait to read Ryne Douglas Pearson’s other novels. What makes them even more attractive to me is that they are easily, and affordably, available in for Kindle, Nook, and other e-pub formats.

Next up on the Ryne Douglas Pearson list is “Simple Simon”!

~4 out of 5 stars~

I won’t spoil the ending for you. For me, it was a nice surprise.

This review is going to be different than most of my reviews. I cannot honestly say I will be unbiased or objective. At this point, it is simply impossible for me.

So a month or so ago (roughly) I downloaded some books for my Kindle, as I’m wont to do these days. (and someday let me go off on the tangent of what it’s like to double-check my grammar/word-usage and find word snobs arguing about ‘wont’)

In the batch of books I’d downloaded, there was “Feed” by Mira Grant. First of all, it must have been discounted. Because I’d never heard of the book or the author (forgive me!), I would not have initially paid much. The idea of the book intrigued me, but I actually passed it up a few times before biting the bullet and getting it. After all, it’s a zombie book. I love zombie movies. Good ones, that is. I’m not a Return of the Living Dead chick. I prefer my Romero and 28 “somethings” Later movies. The idea of a zombie book being any good seemed unlikely to me. I’ll give “The Walking Dead” (Robert Kirkman) credit. Excellent graphic novel and seductive story-line! Otherwise, though, I’m not big on zombie books.

At least, I wasn’t. Until “Feed”.

by Mira Grant

Here I am, taking a look at my freebies or cheapies on my Kindle and I come across the title. “Feed“. *sigh* I’m still dubious. It’s supposed to be a contemporary zombie novel, full of technology and bloggers and Romero-esque fun. What author can possibly deliver on that promise? As it turns out, Mira Grant is that author.  (Before I go further, Mira Grant is the nom de plume for one Seanan McGuire.)

I finished “Feed” in two days. Luckily it was only a week before “Deadline”, the second novel in the trilogy, was to be released. The day after I finished “Feed” I pre-ordered “Deadline” for my Kindle.  I finished “Deadline” in three days.

These are two action-packed zombie novels with heart and intelligence. More importantly, they are well-written and have characters you fall in love with. You will care about them. You will root for them. You will cry for them. (seriously, not hyperbole)

The brother-sister team of George and Shaun Mason are dedicated to bringing accurate reporting of the news and live zombie action to their audience. As professional bloggers, they spend their time working with a small staff of Irwins (action-seeking thrill junkies who poke zombies with sticks), fictionals (self-explanatory…they tell stories and write poetry and stuff), and Newsies (news journalists who try to tell the truth and stay as objective as possible.) Buffy (Georgette Meissonier) is their head fictional and techie guru who keeps all the equipment working smoothly and gets the data where it needs to go. Shaun Mason is an unapologetic Irwin whose coffee-fueled zest for zombie poking and charismatic nature make him a ratings magnet and a fan-favorite on their site. Georgia Mason, though, is the serious-minded news-hound who anchors them all by bringing the unadulterated truth to their blogging audience every day.

After two miracle-cure viruses combine in an un-deadly fashion, Kellis-Amberlee (zombie virus) is unleashed on an unsuspecting world. Suddenly the dead begin to rise and only bloggers and fanatics seem to realize what is actually happening. By the time the CDC and government get involved, the infection has spread and everyone has to fight to keep the infected at bay. Years later, when society has resumed some degree of a normal life, the bloggers are who people turn to for news. They are the ones who told the truth during the Rising. They are the ones people turn to twenty-six years after the undead first began to shamble into their lives.

When George and Shaun get hired to cover the presidential hopeful Senator Peter Ryman, they are launched into a new sphere of responsibility and chaos. No longer ‘betas’ in the blogging world, they now get a much larger staff and it’s sink or swim as full-blown professionals. They go on the road with Buffy and the van, filming, recording, and reporting live on the campaign trail and their careers suddenly become a lot more life-threatening.

I won’t spoil the end for anyone, but I will say that I cried. By the end I didn’t know who could be trusted or who would live or die. This is, in my opinion, the hallmark of a truly great author. When you know that even your most beloved characters may not make it out alive, you are writing with all your heart. That’s what Mira Grant does. The book was fast-paced, adrenaline packed, and delivered on its promise of zombie-poking fun.

But wait, there’s more!

Check out my review of “Deadline”, the second book in the Newsflesh trilogy.

“Feed” gets a 5 out of 5

Go out and buy a copy, buy one for a friend, then download it for your e-reader.

My name is Holly.
This story is about me—
a writer who’s way behind
on her deadline.

But, honestly,
how can I concentrate on my work
when my fiftieth birthday’s
rushing at me like a freight train,

my hormones are making me feel
like a Szechuan flambé,
and my eighty-year-old mother’s
biting her nurses?

Not to mention the fact that my daughter’s
just begun applying to colleges
(none of which are within
a thousand-mile radius of home),

and lately my husband’s been
such an irritating, finger-pointing stinker
that I’ve found myself dreaming of ways
to spend his insurance money . . .

My name is Holly.
This book
tells my story—
a coming-of-middle-age story.

What a fun story to read! I received this book from the publisher (Harper Collins) as an advance review copy. When I requested it, I have to admit it was purely based on the name and the cover. I hadn’t looked into what it was about or anything like that. I hadn’t even looked into the other books the author, Sonya Sones, has written.

I thought the cover looked playful and summery and the name intrigued me. I had the vague idea that maybe it was a chick-lit type of mystery or something.

What I found instead was this delightful departure from the norm. The story is written in poetry format, making it a quick read and very easy on the eyes. Because of this, I managed to devour the book in about two days.

It’s a book that many married women can relate to, even if they don’t have a daughter going off to college. (Heck, my kids aren’t even in elementary school yet, but I felt completely in sync with the main character and her worries and problems.)

While there isn’t a whole lot of depth to the book, I found it refreshing and a nice change of pace from the books I usually read.

This is great beach or pool-side reading and I recommend it for a light change of pace. It’s still chick-lit, just not the kind I was expecting.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Father Gary Thomas was working as a parish priest in California when he was asked by his bishop to travel to Rome for training in the rite of exorcism. Though initially surprised, and slightly reluctant, he accepted this call, and enrolled in a new exorcism course at a Vatican-affiliated university, which taught him, among other things, how to distinguish between a genuine possession and mental illness. Eventually he would go on to participate in more than eighty exorcisms as an apprentice to a veteran Italian exorcist. His experiences profoundly changed the way he viewed the spiritual world, and as he moved from rational skeptic to practicing exorcist he came to understand the battle between good and evil in a whole new light. Journalist Matt Baglio had full access to Father Gary over the course of his training, and much of what he learned defies explanation.

The Rite provides fascinating vignettes from the lives of exorcists and people possessed by demons, including firsthand accounts of exorcists at work casting out demons, culminating in Father Gary’s own confrontations with the Devil. Baglio also traces the history of exorcism, revealing its rites and rituals, explaining what the Catholic Church really teaches about demonic possession, and delving into such related topics as the hierarchy of angels and demons, satanic cults, black masses, curses, and the various theories used by modern scientists and anthropologists who seek to quantify such phenomena.

The Rite, by Matt Baglio, was a surprise for me. I was expecting an overly dramatic assertion that people all over the place were possessed and that it was all due to witchcraft and satanic cults. What I found instead, as a pleasant surprise, was honest reporting and some questions left unanswered as far as why people become possessed. (If you believe in that sort of thing.)

I expected it to be a stretch to follow the daily goings-on of somebody who believed in this evil underworld happening right under our noses.  Rather than a chore, I found it easy to get into the swing of following Father Gary’s daily practice of visiting the older priest to get real-life experience with exorcism. It didn’t seem exotic or overly bizarre. Rather, it seemed to be more of a blessing for people who had come upon difficult times in their lives. They sought the assistance of the Roman Catholic Church, and Father Carmine was there to help them, despite the toll it took on him in the form of exhaustion and stress.

Did the book change my opinion on the reality or fallacy of exorcism? I honestly don’t know. I grew up Roman Catholic and I really never heard exorcism mentioned in the context of church or catechism. As a horror film devotee, of course I knew of the move The Exorcist and have seen all the recent ones too (The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Last Exorcism, etc.) Still, it never quite seemed real to me. I still don’t know if it does. My rational mind tries to come up with reasons for the bizarre things that happen during the Exorcism Ritual in The Rite.

In the end, I can only say that reading this book left the possibility open to me, however small it may be. For somebody who strongly believes in a scientific explanation for things and natural causes of weirdness, I think that’s a considerable feat.

Check out The Rite, by Matt Baglio. It’s worth the read and generally a change of pace for most folks. I enjoyed it and I think most others would too. If you’ve seen the movie, don’t expect the book to be even remotely similar. As far as I’m concerned, the only similarity is the name.

~~3.5 stars out of 5~~

‘Everything You Can Imagine is Real’

High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the loss of his mother. He is angry and he is alone, with only the books on his shelf for company.

But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness, and as he takes refuge in the myths and fairytales so beloved of his dead mother he finds that the real world and the fantasy world have begun to meld. The Crooked Man has come, with his mocking smile and his enigmatic words: ‘Welcome, your majesty. All hail the new king.’

And as war rages across Europe, David is violently propelled into a land that is both a construct of his imagination yet frighteningly real, a strange reflection of his own world composed of myths and stories, populated by wolves and worse-than-wolves, and ruled over by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a legendary book . . .

The Book of Lost Things.

What a wonderful change of pace! Do you remember being a child and getting immersed in a book about a strange land with strange people or creatures? Do you remember the feeling of losing time and the sense of what is around you? Do you remember the sense of excitement and adventure that these books inspired in you? If you do, read John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things. This book was truly a departure from the norm as far as my standard ‘grown-up’ type books go. But this is not simply a children’s novel. This is absolutely a book for adults too. It’s a book of enchantment, fear, excitement, and adventure. It takes you into the world of the unknown and imagination and doesn’t let go until you are hungry for more.

The only negative aspect of this book, for me, was the fact that I wanted more at the end and was only left with the back flap. Read this book. Give it as a gift to the dreamer you know. Sit down in a warm blanket, a winter storm brewing outside, making the world around you alien and uninviting. Snuggle up and let this book take you into David’s imagination and away from the reality of the world, just as it does for him.

So maybe I should give you something a little more concrete. This book is a grown-up novel about a young man who finds himself lost in a world of his imagination after his real-life world is torn apart by the death of his mother. David’s father remarries, adding a step-mother and then a new child into the mix, making David an afterthought.

When David thinks he hears his dead mother’s voice one night, he follows it into the garden and gets sucked into a strange world, cut off from his own. The adventure begins when he must find the king in this strange world in order to get back to his life in WWII England.

There was never a moment when reading this book that I wanted to put it down. That is a rare treat for me, and one I hope you will enjoy soon.

~ 5 out of 5 stars ~

Jane Austen

But what she encounters there is completely unexpected: perilous jealousies and further betrayals, a new friendship and a possible love. Yet all that must be put aside when the warring French invade unsuspecting Bath—and the streets run red with good English blood. Suddenly only the staunchly British Damned can defend the nation they love . . . with Jane Austen leading the charge at the battle’s forefront.

Novelist . . . gentlewoman . . . Damned, Fanged, and Dangerous to know.

Aspiring writer Jane Austen knows that respectable young ladies like herself are supposed to shun the Damned—the beautiful, fashionable, exquisitely seductive vampires who are all the rage in Georgian England in 1797. So when an innocent (she believes) flirtation results in her being turned—by an absolute cad of a bloodsucker—she acquiesces to her family’s wishes and departs for Bath to take the waters, the only known cure.

I need to apologize for taking so long to review this book. I had it for a long time but had other books I was trying to read/review at the same time. In the end, though, it was well worth the wait! I really enjoyed Jane and the Damned by Janet Mullany.

The first thing I noticed about the story was that it moved along nicely. It didn’t rush right into anything, but I didn’t find myself slogging through the beginning, as I often do with books. It was a nice change of pace after some slower books I’d been reading.

The second thing I noticed about the story was that I know very little about classic books. I thought Jane Austen was a book. I am almost too embarrassed to admit that, but I feel I should be honest about it. I realize, now, that I was thinking Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, but at the time I started reading this book, I was very confused. Once I got my people and places and books straight, though, it made it even more enjoyable. So the author of Pride and Prejudice became one of the Damned. That’s a twist I was not expecting.

Another thing I realized when reading this is that I know very little about European history. It’s pathetic, actually. So I spent some time with Google and Wikipedia and found out what I needed to know. This particular battle never happened. But if it had, apparently Jane Austen would have been right there in the thick of it…with her vampire friends.

This book was fun, light-hearted, and captivating. It was also a refreshing change from some of the teen-oriented vampire-lit that’s out there right now. I don’t mean to knock the success of those other books, it’s just not my ‘thing’. This book was more practical and less angst-ridden. Because of that I was able to immerse myself in the characters and the environment in a way I could not with other recent vampire books.

Being the kind of person who reads the end of a book first, I knew how it was going to end right away. But if I hadn’t read the end, I would have been surprised, and a little bummed out. Don’t let that dissuade you, though! It was a great way to end the book. Just don’t expect a tidy little happy ending wrapped in a bow.

All in all, I enjoyed the book. I’d recommend it as a slightly more grown-up alternative to the other vampire books out there right now.

I should also note, I’m not a big fan of romance novels, so it was nice to get a glimpse into Janet Mullany’s writing whereas I normally would not have noticed her stuff. Check her out. She’s funny, intelligent, and worth the read.

~4 out of 5 stars~