Review: City of Veils by Zoe Ferraris

Zoe Ferraris’s second novel, City of Veils, is a follow-up to her debut, Finding Nouf. A literary mystery set in Saudi Arabia, City of Veils is a different kind of suspense thriller. Among the cloaked town, hidden in the desert or behind a burqa, a killer has taken the life of a woman whose body washes onto the beach. Badly burned, beaten, and stabbed, the investigation into her murder involves more than one detective and citizen of Jeddah. Pushing the boundaries of expectations, both religious and legal, Ferraris’s characters delve into the mystery of the woman’s death with the hopes of bringing her killer to justice.

My favorite thing about this novel was the fact that it was set in Saudi Arabia. An unlikely place to serve as the backdrop for a thriller, my interest in Ferraris was piqued and I looked on her website and checked out some interviews to discover she once lived in the town of Jeddah, and has first-hand experience of the area and the people who live there. It gave her writing an authentic voice, and though it’s hard for me to imagine the rigid expectations women face in Saudi Arabia, I know from her background that what Ferraris writes under the guise of a fiction thriller, can and does occur outside the cover of a book.

Aside from the location and the language placing this novel in a foreign setting, Ferraris’s writing was natural and her plot was intriguing. I didn’t know going into it that this was a follow-up novel, but I didn’t feel disconnected, or as though I missed too much of the background story. Some of the past events were explained, so I understood why Nayir and Katya had a tortured history.

I enjoyed the murder-mystery and suspense value in City of Veils. It’s not your everyday sleuth adventure when a burning, grinding, sand-storm is rushing toward you. It’s not a generic persons-go-missing and turn up okay later. People die and the villains are punished, and through it all, Ferraris’s writing carries on from one perspective to the next, making each character determined and endearing.

4 stars

(I received this from the publisher for review)

Review: Worst Case by James Patterson

This is the third novel by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge involving NYPD Detective Michael Bennett. Bennett is a single father, with ten adopted children, an attractive live-in nanny, an abrasive humorous Irish priest for a grandfather, and a cat. He’s got his hands full, to say the least. So when a killer with a pseudo-enviornmental/societal message starts kidnapping the children of uber-wealthy men and women in New York, and FBI Special Agent-with-a-great-figure Emily Parker flies into town to assist, Bennett is fairly overwhelmed with all the drama. And that’s pretty much what this book, 355 pages with a size fourteen font and large margins, is all about. It took me less than eight hours to read over the course of two days.

Character-wise, this book was fairly formulaic: good cop with baggage; damaged attractive FBI agent single-mother; sympathetic but murderous villain always staying two steps ahead. We’ve all read and heard this storyline a million times before. And since the killer had kidnapped three people all before page 150, there was little time to become invested in the story before it was already over. Like many of Patterson’s books, this would be a good movie; but it left little for the reader to be committed to. Sure it was a semi-decent page turner, but part of that’s because the font was so big that it took half as long to read one page as most other books. I already knew Bennett was going to get the bad guy, but where I would normally be very interested to see how he would do it, I was drifting in and out of the storyline and not feeling as though I was missing much.

According to the blurb in the back of the book, Patterson has had more New York Times bestsellers than any other writer, ever. I’m sorry to all you die-hard-Pattersonians out there, but I’m not convinced his books are good enough to have the distinction of being in the Guinness Book of World Records. I’ve only read five of them, but I speculate that it may have something to do with the fact that many of his books are written with co-writers. You see, according to the back of the book, Patterson has written 64 novels, and 31 of them have had co-authors. Maybe I’m a traditionalist, but at some point quality over quantity needs to come into play. Patterson released five novels in 2009 and one manga. In 2008 he released seven novels, and in 2007 he released six. Where does the man find time to write his own books? I just don’t get it, and since what I’ve read hasn’t exactly blown me away, I simply do not understand the appeal.

Patterson’s first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number from 1976 won the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best First Novel. I think I would rather read that than any more of his co-authored multi-releases-per-year. That’s not to say that Worst Case is total garbage, but I’ve read far better escapism thrillers. For those of you that are Patterson fans I think you’ll enjoy Worst Case. For those of you that are not, I wouldn’t recommend giving Patterson another shot with this particular novel; though I have heard good things about the Alex Cross series, perhaps one of the other eight novels slated for 2010 release would be a better choice.

2 stars

(I received this book from the publisher for review)

Review: The Wife’s Tale by Lori Lansens

Her changing perception of time had altered the sum of her reflections. To the past she was no longer servant, and to the mirror comrade, not a conspirator. That elusive happiness she’d so often pondered? Maybe happiness was generally misunderstood, she thought. Maybe happiness was the absence of fear.
The Wife’s Tale – Lori Lansens

It’s a wonderful feeling to say that I knew from the second page of this book that it would be good. Not having read Lansen’s earlier novel, The Girls, I now feel envious of those who have, since talent like hers as shown in The Wife’s Tale makes me believe all her writing must be wonderful.

The Wife’s Tale is a novel about Mary Gooch and her life. Her constant battle with food and her body, her ever-present hunger, her ghosts from the past reminding her of better times. Times when she was happy, and carefree, and skinny. It’s about her secrets and her husband. Her husband of twenty-five years who she married when she was young and svelte and pregnant, before she gained the weight and lost the baby. Her husband who disappears the night before their anniversary, saying and doing nothing, just leaving. Leaving her with her secrets and hunger until the day she wakes and realizes she doesn’t need food. She wakes from her life and chooses to take a step in a new direction, to embark on a journey. To become someone other than the woman who only wears dark navy scrubs, the woman from Leaford who is incredibly obese. To be the woman who solves her own problems. In the journey she takes to find her husband, she finds herself: the Mary without the food.

This story was heartbreaking and sad, but also incredibly beautiful and lyrical and literary and uplifting. Lansen weaves Mary’s memories into the story which help us to understand her pain, weight issues are something to which most of us can relate. Brutally honest and blunt, occasionally fresh and funny, but always true and real from the perspective of an overweight women who feels helpless, this was a touching message of hope and the power of change and strength in us all.

I loved Mary Gooch. I loved her for being honest with me about who she was and the secrets she has. The chocolates, the binges, the tabloids,  the obsession. And I loved her for making a choice, for leaving Leaford, for going after her husband, and then changing direction on the way. For following her father’s old advice to “take a drink from the hose and push on.”

5 stars

(I received this book from the Hachette Book Group)

Review: The Boy Next Door by Irene Sabatini

I get out of the car. I have eyes. I must see what cannot be seen. What once was.
The Boy Next Door – Irene Sabatini

Breathe in. And out. Where do I begin with this review?

I received this book from Hachette Book Group; I’ll start there. It sat on my bookcase for a while before I was ready to pick it up; it was intimidating and large and serious looking and I knew I needed to be ready for it. I started it, and fifty pages in I stopped and restarted it, and I’m glad I did. Restarting it allowed me to settle in with the narrative voice, it let me be fully familiar with Lindiwe and the way she uses memories to fill in the past so I can understand what makes the present so profound. The Boy Next Door is epic. It spans decades. It follows Lindiwe from adolescence through her transformation into a woman. She is fourteen when the novel starts, and her seventeen year old neighbor has been arrested for lighting his stepmother on fire. That’s how the novel starts. But that’s not where it stays. It follows Lindiwe and her neighbor, Ian, through post-independant Zimbabwe; through race tensions and revolutionary riots; through love ,and loss, and danger.

Part One begins in the 1980s. Lindiwe is a young girl,  shy, surrounded by racism and a country in transformation. Ian seems worldly to her, having been released from prison and returned to Bulawayo. They form an unlikely friendship, secret from the world. They are pulled together by an inexplicable bond that lasts through war and riots and years apart.

Part Two, the early 90s, finds Lindiwe grown into a young woman, attending school, with a bright future. Her childhood crush develops into something mature and deep, but there is an overhanging sense of unease in Sabatini’s writing; as though we know this happiness between Ian and Lindiwe cannot possibly last and be peaceful for the next two-hundred pages.

Part Three, the mid 90s becomes quick and tense. Revolutionary turmoil abounds, people are killed and murdered, and violence surrounds our characters. The tension continues into the late 90s in Part Four. It peaks and I was left breathless waiting for the end. There is so much more I could write, but it would spoil the novel and you really need to read it and experience it first-hand to understand the magnificence this story.

Sabatini’s debut novel is intense and beautiful and artistic. She captures Bulawayo and other places in Zimbabwe and the places become characters in her writing: living breathing, forming new stories. The relationship she paints between Ian and Lindiwe is enormous and tragic and joyous all at the same time, it flows up and down with a life of its own, and we’re taken along in the rapids and cannot escape. We could hardly wish to.

This novel was a debut novel, and it was truly wonderful. I had tears in my eyes. I suspect we’ll all be hearing about Irene Sabatini in the future.

4 stars

The Sunday Salon: These Granite Islands

 Sarah Stonich’s debut novel These Granite Islands is one of those amazing books that can’t truly be described in words, because it’s more about how you feel when you read it. I read it about a year ago and picked it up again today to browse through it in preparation for her second novel (The Ice Chorus) which comes out next month. The story goes back and forth between 1999 and 1936 as Isobel Howard lies in a hospital bed, post-stroke, remembering her younger years, and how a friend’s secret affair changed their lives. The writing is haunting, and visual. The lake and the islands become pieces of the plot, characters in their own right. The story is lonely and mysterious and we are left waiting until the end to know how the details come together. 

For my first Sunday Salon post, I thought I’d put this up as a recommendation for a truly good read. It’s one of those books you get completely absorbed in and want to read overnight until you finish.

Hava a good Sunday!

Review: The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman

Some decisions you make and some seem to be made for you.
The Ice Queen – Alice Hoffman

So. First “review” of a book. And I use these quotes loosely. I’m not an expert at this, but hope to be someday so this first one, and probably the few that come after, will be short. Just my thoughts for now, no fancy-shmancy literary criticism going on just yet.

The Ice Queen is more than a story, it’s almost an internal extensive self-dialogue. A t a young age the narrator (unnamed and it took me the whole novel to realize that) wishes her mother dead and her wish comes true. Because of this she wanders through the rest of her life half asleep, always cold and alone. When she is struck by lightning her brother moves her to Florida where the real meat of the story starts. She makes a friend, finds a lover, and salvages a relationship with her brother. In essence, it’s a coming of age story about a lonely woman who finds life on the other side of death. Hoffman’s voice of this character cannot be compared, it’s complete and true and feels one hundred percent real. The novel is tense and suspenseful at times, making you feel like the other shoe is about to drop. But it’s lonely and sad at others. We feel the Florida humidity and taste the oranges. Of the two Hoffman novels I’ve read, the other being The Third Angel, it’s not my favorite. But it is something writers should check out as a fabulous example of how to write a solid, consistent voice of a character. And it’s also full of lovely little “this is how life is” lines that belong in a book of quotes.

If I were to give it a star rating, I’d say 3 out of 5.