Paging All Bookworms! discussion

What are you you reading this month? Did you like it? Let us know here!

Summer At Little Beach Street Bakery – Jenny Colgan – 3***
Book two in the Little Beach Street Bakery series, this is an enjoyable chick-lit romance with food. There’s the usual drama one expects from new-adult relationships, life choices, career moves, etc. Wonderful cast of supporting characters. It’s a fun, fast, light read. Perfect for a vacation read, or anytime you want something entertaining.
My full review HERE

The Prisoner Of Heaven – Carlos Ruiz Zafón – 3***
Book three in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series. Oh, I love Zafón’s writing! The book is very atmospheric; I can feel the chill of a wintery wind, smell the candlewax and dust, practically taste the delicacies offered at 7 Portes restaurant. There are twists and turns and changes in timeline that confuse, obfuscate, tease the reader and illuminate the plot.
My full review HERE

The Look-Alike by Erica Spindler
4 ★

10 years ago Sienna Scott stumbled upon a murder scene that has haunted her ever since. Her mother’s paranoid delusion disorder didn’t help her much because her mom always said that it was supposed to be Sienna who died. So save Sienna from her mom, her dad sent her to live with family in London. She has now returned to help her brother with her mom and the horror of that night returns. Phone calls and a white van make Sienna wonder if her mom was right and the killer has returned to fix the mistake.

Sienna Scott is a strong character who has a lot to overcome. Her mother’s illness has really affected her life. I can understand her fear of becoming like her mother and how she wonders if her mother could be right about Sienna being the intended victim. There are so many possible suspects throughout the book and I enjoyed trying to figure it out myself. The author does an amazing job putting doubt in the readers mind about each suspect. There are so many well places twists that I would think one person was guilty and then change my mind.
Sienna’s mother and her illness broke my heart. How anyone handles someone with this disorder is beyond me. Sienna has a really strong support system with her dad and brother, but there is only so much they can do for her. Going away was probably the best thing for her, but I think it had a devastating affect her dad and brother. Brad, Sienna’s brother, has to deal with her mom more once she’s gone and it ends up destroying things in his life.
This is the first book by Erica Spindler that I have read and I look forward to reading more. Her story telling is smooth, even with flash backs. There are no bumps in the road that will through off the reader. I loved how I was unable to pinpoint who the killer was. It kept my interest and intrigued me the whole time. The characters are great and very likable, even the one that ends up being the killer.
(Advanced reader copy courtesy of St. Martin’s Press and Goodreads Giveaways)

I’d Kill For That – Gayle Lynds, et al – 1*
This is a cooperative / team effort among thirteen women mystery writers, each one writing a different chapter. I would have abandoned it but it satisfied a couple of challenges. At least it was a fast read.
My full review HERE

The Game of Silence – Louise Erdrich – 4****
Book two in the Birchbark House series which is about an Ojibwa tribe’s life on their island in Lake Superior. Omakayas is the young girl who narrates this book, which chronicles a year on the island that is today known as Madeline Island. I love how Erdrich depicts these people and their way of life. Not everything is pleasant or easy, but there is room for joy and happiness, for children to explore and learn. I will continue reading this series.
My full review HERE

My first two of the month:

Kim Young-Ha, I Hear Your Voice [2012, tr. 2017] 259 pages

A postmodernist novel with some "magical realist" elements, this has a similar bleak feel to I Have the Right to Destroy Myself. The book is set mainly in Seoul, and deals with economically and social marginal characters, mostly runaway teenagers, who alternate between part-time minimum wage jobs and homelessness and prostitution. The central character is an orphan, Jae, born in a bus station restroom to a teenage mother, rescued by and then later abandoned by a low-paid working woman who becomes unemployed and addicted to meth, escapes from an orphanage and lives on the street or with small groups of other runaway teens, and ultimately becomes the charismatic leader of a teen motorcycle gang which is in conflict with the police. The first person (and as we ultimately learn, very unreliable) narrator for most of the book is his childhood friend Donggyu, the emotionally disturbed son of a policeman, who initially suffers from aphonia and later runs away himself. Near the end the narrative shifts to a novelist who is researching the story for the novel and we see some of the events from other perspectives, making it uncertain how much of the earlier narrative is true. Jae has (or believes he has) certain paranormal abilities.


Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night [1988, tr. 2002] 293 pages

The second novel I have read by Tokarczuk; like Primeval it is divided into short chapters which are about different characters, and could be regarded as essentially a "novel in stories". The first person narrator, who is never named, and her husband, referred to only as "R." (who plays almost no role in the book), have just moved into a house in Nowa Ruda, in Silesia but within sight of the Czech border. She meets her elderly neighbor, Martha, and presumably Martha is the source for many of the stories. The setting is in the present, as of when the novel was written, although many of the stories begin earlier (and one story in several parts is set at the time of the Reformation). The historical background is that at the end of World War II, Silesia, previously part of Germany, became part of Poland while parts of eastern Poland became part of the USSR; the German inhabitants of Nowa Ruda (previously called Neurode) were deported and replaced by Poles from farther east. The house that the narrator and R. occupy formerly belonged to a German couple called the Frosts, and one story is about them.

The story from the Reformation is a life of Saint Kummerniss, a not-yet canonized virgin martyr whose face is miraculously replaced by the face and beard of Jesus to save her from a forced marriage, written by a monk whose one desire is to become a woman; the monk later becomes connected with a bizarre sect called the Cutlers, whose main industry is making knives. (I assumed that this was all invented, but in fact there is a real legend of St. Kummerniss which is found in Grimm's Märchen and elsewhere, based on the "real" St. Wilgefordis. The Monk and the Cutlers are apparently made up by Tokarczuk.) There is another story where a husband and wife each have an affair with a young person named Agni; there is a suggestion (but not made explicitly) that the two Agnis are male and female versions of the same person.

The narrator has an interest in dreams, which she collects from the Internet, and many are included in the stories. While many of the stories in this book are similar to those in Primeval, this is less "magical realism" since the non-realistic elements can mostly be explained as dreams or legends, or are ambiguous, rather than being vouched for by the narrator. It is definitely not a realistic novel, though, so it will appeal mainly to readers who enjoy experimental modernist fiction.

The Perfect Ride – Gary Stevens – 2**
Gary Stevens is a Hall-of-Fame jockey and this is his autobiography. He openly and honestly relates his childhood, early training, and path to being one of the top jockeys in the world. I like horseracing and reading about the sport, but this book was frequently boring. I believe Stevens felt the thrill and excitement but he failed to convey that on the page.
My full review HERE

The Unsuitable by Molly Pohlig
3 ★

**Trigger warning: self-harm, cutting, suicide**

Iseult Wince is awkward and plain. Her dad is determined to marry her off, but Iseult keeps running them off. Her mother died in childbirth and Iseult believes that she lives in the scar on her neck, a scar that is a constant reminder of her part in her mother’s death. When her father finally finds her a suitor that will marry her, her mother becomes more vocal and violent and drives Iseult to do the unthinkable.

Iseult is probably the most interesting character that I have encountered in a while. She’s very shy and self-conscious and unable to function on most days. You can’t help but feel bad for her though. She was raised by her father who despised her and never had a female role model. It’s sad that Mrs. Pennington, her housemaid, didn’t try to teach her more. I do blame her father for that. I believe that Mrs. Pennington was afraid of him. His words toward Iseult angered me and I can see how she would fear him.
Jacob Vinke is the sweet gentleman who agrees to marry Iseult. Although his skin is silver due to a treatment for a skin condition, he is still kind and thoughtful. He has lived shunned by society like Iseult, but has handled it much better, possibly because he has both parents who have helped him. I really liked Jacob. I think he really liked Iseult and he treated her so well. He never talked down to her or made comments about her odd behavior.
The ending has a shocking twist and a sad outcome. It wasn’t rushed though. The scenes played out and explained many things.
The only issue I had with the book, and I hope it gets fixed before final printing, is the conversations between Iseult and her mother. The dialog was choppy with no punctuations. It really made it hard to read. I do like how the author changed the font during the conversations so the reader knew who was talking.
(Advanced Reader Copy courtesy of Net Galley)

Kim Young-ha, Diary of a Murderer [2013, tr. 2019] 200 pages

The journal of a retired serial killer with advanced Alzheimer's -- descriptions that come to mind are emotionally intense, bleak, noir, confusing, and extremely well-written, not to mention bizarre. In short, what one would expect from a novella by the author of I Have the Right to Destroy Myself and I Hear Your Voice. The title novella takes up about half this short book, and is followed by three stories, "The Origin of Life" about a man who meets his childhood girlfriend, with unfortunate results, "Missing Child" about the aftermath of a kidnapping, and "The Writer" about a novelist with writer's block. All are in a similar style. Kim's writings aren't especially profound or enlightening, but his strange, original plots and characters tend to make a long-lasting impression.

Ordinary Life – Elizabeth Berg – 4****
This is a collection of short stories exploring the role of women and their relationships in contemporary America. Berg writes wonderfully about these women. I understand their frustrations and share their hopes, empathize with their pain and disappointments, and celebrate their triumphs and joys. Their lives may be “ordinary” … the stories, and this collection, are NOT.
My full review HERE

Two more --

Bae Suah, Highway with Green Apples [1994, tr. 2014] 47 pages [Kindle]

Bae Suah is one of the best known contemporary women authors from South Korea; her book Recitations is the January reading for the group I am in on Goodreads. Highway with Green Apples is one of her first works, a short story which is available free as a "Kindle Single." The narrator and her friends are young women who are lonely and alienated, and looking for emotional support in various failed or failing relationships with boyfriends. The author is obviously a good writer but I am looking forward to reading something more substantial by her.


Choi In-hun, El Hombre Gris [2016, tr. 2016] 306 pages [in Spanish, Google Play ebook]

The Spanish translation of a Korean novel, the English translation of which is unavailable. Choi is best known as the author of The Square, which I read last month for a Goodreads group. El Hombre Gris is an experimental novel about a young man, Dok Jun, who was born in North Korea and moved South to Seoul during the Korean War; he is a college student, who aspires to be a novelist.

The book opens with a visit to Dok Jun from his friend, the political science major and activist Kim Hak. Both under the influence of alcohol, they have a long rambling conversation about politics and literature. The novel then flashes back to Dok Jun's childhood and adolescence up to the time he finishes military service and returns to school in Seoul. The novel continues to alternate between his life and long dialogues (really monologues) about politics and art. As the short epilog about the book explains, the structure of the novel is basically essays with no real connection to the plot. While I usually like novels which are experimental and focused more on ideas than plot, in this case the long rambling self-contradictory and repetitive monologues which sound more like set speeches (or perhaps more accurately student "bull sessions") than actual conversations or thoughts, just become very boring. I have to admit that this may be partly because I didn't really find much agreement with the author's or the characters' theories about literature, art, religion, history and politics; and perhaps I should also make allowance for the fact that I was reading it in a third language which is neither the author's or my own.

There were a few interesting points, including a unique "take" on vampire stories.

The ebook had a lot of typos and some formatting issues.

Bae Suah, Nowhere to Be Found [1998, tr. 2015] 109 pages [Kindle]

Another short work by Bae Suah with the same basic feel as Highway with Green Apples. The narrator (never named) is a young woman from an impoverished and dysfunctional family; the father is a former minor bureaucrat who is in prison for corruption, the mother an alcoholic, and the older brother uneducated and unemployed. She has very low self-esteem and seems incapable of having real feelings for other people or forming real relationships. The story goes back and forth in time, and is confused in her consciousness, with some obviously unique events seemingly taking place at more than one time and place, just as in the earlier story. Bae Suah seems to have a very unusual and personal style of writing, to judge by these two stories; the only analogy I cam think of is Anais Nin's Cities of the Interior>.

Tempting Evil (Prison Break Trilogy #2) by Allison Brennan
5 ★

After losing her husband and son in an act of violence, Joanna Sutton moves back to her family’s lodge in Centennial Valley, Montana. As an author she’s hoping the quiet will help her start writing again. Those plans get pushed aside though when an escaped convict who has fixated on her arrives at the lodge.

Jo has dealt with so much pain over the last 4 years that I felt bad that she now had to deal with someone like Aaron Doherty. Aaron is probably one of the creepiest killers so far in Allison Brennan’s books. His obsession with Jo is truly terrifying. Aaron’s back story is so sad and I would have felt bad for him if he hadn’t taken his obsessions with women as far as he did.
Sheriff Tyler McBride has moved to Montana with his son after his ex-wife’s death so that he can be closer to his brother. Tyler falls hard for Jo, but she is hesitant to start a relationship. I can totally understand her reasons, but after 4 years she really needs to move on. They would make a great couple.
The setting of this book is incredible. The descriptions of Centennial Valley, Montana were so vivid and alive. I felt like I was looking out a window. I’m not a big fan of the cold, but the thought of curling up with a good book at the lodge and waking up that beautiful scenery is appealing.
I really liked how this story played out. The end wasn’t rushed and the suspense was able to grow. I wasn’t sure from one chapter to the next what Aaron was going to do.
Overall it was a great book with a very intriguing storyline.

Olga Tokarczuk, Flights [2007, tr. 2017] 403 pages

Flights is really less a novel than a collection of very short essays and meditations, mainly about travel and the preservation of anatomical samples interspersed with short stories. The connections are always indirect but if one thinks about them they are there. The longest story is about a woman and child lost on an island, which reminded me of the film L'Avventura. Many of the essays are quite interesting and made me think about travel in a different way; they also reminded me of a book of contemporary essays I read a year or so ago. The book is very different from the two earlier novels-in-stories I read by Tokarczuk, but also cast some light on what she was trying to do in the earlier books. This doesn't really fit into any classification but was definitely worth reading. It won the Man Booker International Prize last year.

1 star
Friends with issues and wants each others lives. I stopped reading on page 227 and don't care about how it ends. I do see why some love or like it, drama, friends, romance, and secrets, just not my cup of tea to read about.

3 stars
Barbara Taylor Woodall gives you a peek into her life and of others on what it was like living in the Appalachian Mountains. Good book but at times lacks focus, tends to jump around and rush through stories. Pictures are scattered throughout the book which is a nice touch.
I could relate to the changing of the place you love and grew up. It hurts deep when people step in and take over that truly don't love it but want to use it up.

3 stars
I am going to keep this review short. This is a Sweet, Sad, heart pounding, travel adventure with a twist of a love story book. Not my usual type of book but I did enjoy this quick Christmas book. My only complaint is, I would have liked a little more background story on the main character Joy.

On a Snowy Night by Debbie Macomber
4 ★

Two stories for the price of one:

The Christmas Basket
10 years ago Noelle McDowell was jilted by Thomas Sutton, her high school sweetheart. Now she’s come home for Christmas and finds out that the both still have feeling for each other. The problem? Their moms don’t get along.

This was your typical Christmas romance story with some pretty funny scenes between the 2 moms. Their quarrel made the story enjoyable. Noelle and Thom’s relationship issues were settled quickly once they started to talk and the outcome was predictable. The story was fun though and I enjoyed it.

The Snow Bride
Jenna Campbell quits her job and flies to Alaska to meet and hopefully marry a man she met online. Her trip is sidelined by Reid Jamison when he refuses to take her to see Dalton Gray and takes her to his hometown of Snowbound instead.

This was my favorite of the 2 stories. Jenna and Reid are so perfect for each other right from the start. They have no issues expressing their dislike for each other and yet they are able to make the situation work out. Snowbound is a 1 woman town (Reid’s sister) and the men folk of the town are delightful characters that make you smile. They are a playful and happy bunch of old men. The reader knows who Jenna is going to end up with, but I loved how it all came about. Jenna’s mother is a handful, but has taught her daughter well. I truly enjoyed this light Christmas read.

Bae Suah, A Greater Music [2003, tr. 2016] 146 pages [Kindle]

The longest book I've read so far by Bae Suah; the structure seemed as though she wasn't quite adept yet at arranging a longer story. You do want to build up to a climax with more interesting material as you go along, but in this case the beginning is just too boring to really get into, and I almost gave up before I got through the first 40%. The early parts focus on the unnamed narrator's (never well-defined) relationship with her boyfriend(?) Joachim and his uninteresting family -- frankly, they didn't seem to even like each other very much, but that wasn't really a surprise given the failed relationships in the two other books I've read by Bae. Nothing really interested me, not even the somewhat obscurely written part near the beginning where she falls into the river through the ice and thinks she is going to die. About 40% in however, her memories turn to her childhood -- a very interesting account of how schools turn off the most intelligent students, so that they sometimes turn out to be the least well-educated by the end -- and then toward her homoerotic relationship (although there are no sex scenes, or even real love scenes) with M., which are far better done. The last 60% of the book was a relatively good novel.

One of the recurrent themes of the book is that the order of past, present, future is purely in the senses, and that there really is no present; thus the narrative moves from time to time and place to place without really establishing what is the present time of the novel; an interesting enough technique in itself, but somewhat disorienting here. The majority of the action takes place at two times in Berlin, the first time as an exchange student who is trying to learn German (M. is giving her private lessons) and the second time when she returns (from a trip back to Korea) to dog-sit for Joachim's dog Benny, which is the situation she is in at the beginning of the book. Her early days and a short intermediate period are set in Seoul. There were many interesting passages about music and literature, which were the basis of her relationship with M., but they weren't really well-integrated with the narrative.

Bae is often credited with continuing an earlier focus of Korean literature on working-class people which has been superceded recently with novels about the "middle class" and the rich (like most American novels); so I was very disappointed that this novel stereotypes the working-class Joachim (a metalworker) as anti-intellectual and concerned only with making money, while the upper-class M. (the narrator defends her against Joachim's claims that she is rich, but she doesn't work a normal job) is the sensitive, artistic/literary role model.

In short, if this had left out Joachim and just focused on the narrator and M. I would have rated it much more highly. Interestingly, the novel ends with a quotation from Peter Handke, whom I have just begun reading this week.

Bae Suah, Time in Gray [2013, tr. 2017] 119 pages [Kindle]

Another short work by Bae Suah, Time in Gray begins with an essay on past and future time, saying that we know the future (as wish) better than the past and connects the past (or past-ness) with shame and guilt; then has a rant by a vegetarian friend of the narrator about eating meat (as an example of guilt), before it proceeds to the real story (and we don't realize at first that it is the real story; it begins as if it is another example). The story is about a crush the narrator had in high school on a woman named Su-Mi. (The Afterword by the editor assumes the narrator is a man, but this is never stated; I assumed it was about two women, but it is actually totally ambiguous.) After giving a short description of the narrator's crush, it then has him (or her) meet Su-Mi twenty years later, also in the past tense, but the Afterword assures us (with a diagram) that it is actually in the wished-for future. The story seems fairly meaningless, but is much more experimental if we accept the explanation of the editor, which is undoubtedly correct -- I just don't like stories that only make sense if you read a commentary by someone other than the author. So for me this was a failure. It was also not formatted correctly for the Kindle, and it is only available in Kindle format.

Heart of a Samurai – Margi Preus – 4****
This young adult novel is marvelous work of historical fiction based on a real person. Manjiro leaves his village at age 14, only to be shipwrecked on a deserted island and then rescued by an American whaling ship. I really liked this book and how Preus explores prejudice and intolerance, as well as the gifts of curiosity, eagerness to learn and being open to new experiences.
My full review HERE

The Fact of a Body – Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich – 5*****
Wow. I was completely mesmerized by this memoir / true crime work. Marzano-Lesnevich puts me right into the narrative and I feel invested in both her story and that of convicted murderer, and pedophile, Ricky Langley.
My full review HERE

There’s Something About Christmas – Debbie Macomber – 2.5**
It’s a Debbie Macomber Christmas story – cue the music and the snowflakes, grab some hot chocolate and enjoy the holiday romance. It’s a fun, fast read, if totally predictable.
My full review HERE