Tag: Fiction

Quick Thoughts On: The Cutting Season, The Lotus Eaters & Heading Out to Wonderful

~ Jennifer @ The Relentless Reader ~ 23 Comments

The Cutting Season by Attica Locke
Publisher: Harper
Publication Date: September 2012
Categories: Mystery & Detective, History


Description:
In Black Water Rising, Attica Locke made one of the most stunning fiction debuts in recent memory. Now she returns with The Cutting Season, a riveting thriller that intertwines two murders separated by over a century.

Caren Gray manages Belle Vie, a sprawling antebellum plantation-turned-tourist attraction where the past and the present coexist uneasily. Outside the gates, an ambitious corporation has been snapping up sugar cane fields from struggling families, replacing local employees with illegal laborers. Tensions mount when the body of a female migrant worker is found in a shallow grave on the property, her throat cut clean.
The police zero in on a suspect but Caren fears they’re chasing the wrong leads. Putting herself at risk, she unearths startling new facts about the long-ago disappearance of a former slave that has unsettling ties to the modern-day crime. In pursuit of the truth about Belle Vie’s history—and her own—Caren discovers secrets about both cases that an increasingly desperate killer will do anything to keep hidden.
My Quick Thoughts:
  • An African American narrator. That is too rare in my reading life.
  • I love me some historical fiction, especially when it’s this good.
  • Ooooh, twists and turns that I didn’t see coming!
  • Social justice! 
  • Hmm, the ending. I’m not sure I could have done what Caren did. You’ll know what I mean when you get there. 
  • You WILL get there because you WILL read this book. 
  • A review with the author

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

Publisher: St.Martin’s Press
Publication Date: March 2010
Categories: Contemporary Women, Historical, War & Military

Description:
A unique and sweeping debut novel of an American female combat photographer in the Vietnam War, as she captures the wrenching chaos and finds herself torn between the love of two men. 

On a stifling day in 1975, the North Vietnamese army is poised to roll into Saigon. As the fall of the city begins, two lovers make their way through the streets to escape to a new life. Helen Adams, an American photojournalist, must take leave of a war she is addicted to and a devastated country she has come to love. Linh, the Vietnamese man who loves her, must grapple with his own conflicted loyalties of heart and homeland. As they race to leave, they play out a drama of devotion and betrayal that spins them back through twelve war-torn years, beginning in the splendor of Angkor Wat, with their mentor, larger-than-life war correspondent Sam Darrow, once Helen’s infuriating love and fiercest competitor, and Linh’s secret keeper, boss and truest friend.

Tatjana Soli paints a searing portrait of an American woman’s struggle and triumph in Vietnam, a stirring canvas contrasting the wrenching horror of war and the treacherous narcotic of obsession with the redemptive power of love. Readers will be transfixed by this stunning novel of passion, duty and ambition among the ruins of war.

My Quick Thoughts:
  • Reading about the war in Vietnam never gets old
  • Learning about war photographers, especially female photographers, was fascinating
  • Beautiful setting, complex characters
  • More historical fiction, my fave!
  • Violent and heartbreaking
  • About the author

Publisher:Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publication Date: June 2012
Categories: Historical-General

Description:
“Let me tell you something, son. 
When you’re young, and you head out to wonderful, everything is fresh and bright as a brand-new penny, 
but before you get to wonderful you’re going to have to pass through all right. And when you get to all right, stop and take a good, long look, because that may be as far as you’re ever going to go.”

It is the summer of 1948 when a handsome, charismatic stranger, Charlie Beale, recently back from the war in Europe, shows up in the town of Brownsburg, a sleepy village of a few hundred people, nestled in the Valley of Virginia. All he has with him are two suitcases: one contains his few possessions, including a fine set of butcher knives; the other is full of money. A lot of money.

Finding work at the local butcher shop, Charlie befriends the owner and his family, including the owner’s son, Sam, who he is soon treating as though he were his own flesh and blood. And it is through the shop that Charlie gradually meets all the townsfolk, including Boaty Glass, Brownsburg’s wealthiest citizen, and most significantly, Boaty’s beautiful teenage bride, Sylvan.

This last encounter sets in motion the events that give Goolrick’s powerful tale the stark, emotional impact that thrilled fans of his previous novel, A Reliable Wife. Charlie’s attraction to Sylvan Glass turns first to lust and then to a need to possess her, a need so basic it becomes an all-consuming passion that threatens to destroy everything and everyone in its path. 

Told through the eyes of Sam, now an old man looking back on the events that changed his world forever, Heading Out to Wonderful is a suspenseful masterpiece, a haunting, heart-stopping novel of obsession and love gone terribly wrong in a place where once upon a time such things could happen.

My Quick Thoughts:
  • Fabulous book!
  • Incredible foreshadowing..not the kind that hits you over the head, the kind that lets you know that something is going to happen
  • The ending, the ending, OMG the ENDING!
  • Run, don’t walk, to your local library and check out this book! Or you know, you could buy it. Steal it? I don’t care, just read it.
  • About the author
  • He has a memoir? I didn’t know that!!

Those are three books I can happily recommend. If I had to pick one out of the three? Heading Out to Wonderful.

Review: Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

~ Jennifer @ The Relentless Reader ~ 23 Comments

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
Publisher: Harper
Publication Date: November 2012
Categories: Political, Literary, Contemporary Women
Source: Harper via Edelweiss

Description:

Set in the present in the rural community of Feathertown, Tennessee, Flight Behavior is the story of Dellarobia Turnbow, a petite, razor-sharp young woman who nurtured worldly ambitions before becoming a mother and wife at seventeen. Now, after more than a decade of tending small children on a failing farm, suffering oppressive poverty, isolation, and her husband’s antagonistic family, she mitigates her boredom in an obsessive flirtation with a handsome younger man.

Headed to his secluded cabin to consummate their relationship, she instead walks into something on the mountainside she cannot explain or understand: a forested valley filled with silent red fire that appears to Dellarobia to be a miracle. Her discovery is both beautiful and terrible, and elicits divergent reactions from all sides. Religious fundamentalists claim it as a manifestation of God; climate scientists scrutinize it as an element of forthcoming disaster; politicians and environmentalists declaim its lessons; charlatans mine its opportunity; international media construct and deconstruct Dellarobia’s story; and townspeople cope with intrusion and bizarre alterations of custom.

After years lived entirely within the confines of one small house, Dellarobia finds her path suddenly opening out and ultimately leading into blunt and confrontational engagement with her family, her church, her town, her continent, and finally the world at large. Over the course of a single winter, her life will become the property of the planet and, perhaps for the first time, securely her own.

My Thoughts:

About the Author

Flight Behavior offers a fresh view of climate change and the surrounding issues. It’s easy to have grand ideas about how to fix it, but on the ground it’s complicated, confusing and sometimes frightening. 

“I think people are afraid to face up to a bad outcome. That’s just human. . . . If fight or flight is the choice, it’s way easier to fly.”

Though science is at the heart of this novel it is written in a lively and accessible way. 

The best part of this book is the main character Dellarobia. She is doing the best she can with what life has thrown at her. She reminded me of women I know. She reminded me of me. 

If I were you? I’d put this book on my wish list.