10th Anniversary

Ah James Patterson, will I never learn?

 

After a rocky start with his early books in the Women’s Murder Club series, I’ve come to really enjoy the books, so was looking forward to the tenth installment, 10^th Anniversary, with much anticipation.  Unfortunately, the book did not live up to my expectations.  It was, quite frankly, a mess!  All over the place, with not one decent storyline to follow from beginning to end.  Sigh.

 

Once again the four ladies who make up the Women’s Murder Club are back.  We have Lindsey Boxer, a detective with the SFPD’s homicide division, returning to work fresh from her honeymoon where she is handed the case of a young girl found bleeding near Lake Merced, who’s just given birth and claims she doesn’t remember a thing beyond getting into a car with two men.  Where is the baby?!?!?  Lindsey is hot on the trail.  – Wait a second, she’s homicide right?  There’s no murder, there’s no killer to catch, so why is she running around looking for a kidnapped/sold baby?  Oh, yeah, because she’s just gotten married and her baby clock is tick tocking away, and this is the only way Patterson can tie in Lindsey’s screeching biological clock with the job she does.  Um, okay….

 

Then we have intrepid reporter Cindy Thomas who stumbles across a story about women being drugged, raped, and waking up with no memory of the incident.  But other than this story serving to give us about 25 pages of splash and dash near the end of the book when Cindy is abducted by said rapist, this plotline pretty much fizzles out.  It’s especially disbelievable since although Cindy’s paper prints the story, there’s no police investigation whatsoever.  Yeah, right!

 

Next is lovable medical examiner Claire Washburn who plays an incredibly brief role, popping up only when Lindsey needs someone to dish baby with.  An incredible disappointment that Claire has so little ink time.

 

Finally, the only interesting plotline in the entire book, is struggling Assistant District Attorney Yuki Castellano’s murder trial of Dr. Candace Martin, accused of killing her husband.  Now this is some good ink, with suitable plot twists to keep a reader interested.  Frankly I would have preferred the focus of the book be on this trial and have the four women working together to uncover the truth, not going off in ten different, incoherent directions.

 

Overall, the book was disappointing and I can only hope book eleven has a better thought out, cohesive plot that engages all four beloved characters.

 

Till next time, happy reading.

L J

 

TBR = 8

WPL = 21

 

 

The Land of Painted Caves

In the sixth and final book of the Earth’s Children Series, Auel returns to her roots, offering a read rich in historic detail.  Set in prehistoric times, around 35,000 – 25,000 BCE, Auel writes about the daily lives of early man in a story that has spanned six books published over 3 decades.  Her novels are steeped with detail that can only come from a life-time of research, making Auel revered by archeologists and anthropologists the world over.

 

Ayla was first introduced in The Clan of the Cave Bear, published in 1980.  An orphan who lost her family in an earthquake, Ayla is found by a Clan of Neanderthals and raised by their medicine woman, Iza.  She learns the art of healing from her adopted mother, but is forever branded as an outcast because she was born to the Others.  Ayla is Cro-Magnon, or Modern Man, with all the inherent abilities this superior species possesses, namely the ability to speak, to learn new skills, and puzzle out and solve a problem.  As the novel closes, she is cast out of the Clan and bidden to find her own peoples.

 

The follow-up Valley of Horses finds Ayla living a solitary existence, hunting and fending for herself in the harsh land.  Quite by accident, she befriends a young horse, then a baby cave lion, who become her friends and helpers, and highlight the mental abilities modern man has over the Neanderthal, which is purportedly why Neanderthal died out and we descended from Cro-Magnon.  It is in this novel that Ayla meets Jondalar, the love of her life.

 

The subsequent novels detail their journey, adventures, perils, and the peoples they meet as Ayla and Jondalar leave her valley and make the return trip to Jondalar’s home among the Zelandonii, a large group of semi-nomadic cave dwellers settled in the region that is now modern France.

 

In The Land of Painted Caves, Auel brings Ayla’s story to a conclusion.  It is summer and time for the Zelandonii peoples Summer Meeting.  Ayla is continuing her studies with the zelandonia, the group of healers and spiritual leaders who have recognized her unique gifts with herbs and animals.  She is mated to Jondalar and has a young child and must balance home life with her training.  Orphaned at the age of five, and raised by a Clan of Neanderthals, Ayla has only ever wanted to find and be accepted by her own peoples.  She has finally found acceptance among Jondalar’s family, the Ninth Cave of the Zelandonii.  But the life of a zelandonia, a healer, is not an easy one and she must make many sacrifices that threaten her family’s happiness.

 

The relationship between Ayla and Jondalar is a secondary story thread, one that ties the books together.  What brings such richness to the novels is Auel’s minute descriptions of early man’s existence – the food they gathered, hunted and ate.  How they prepared it.  The clothing they wore, their ceremonies and burial methods, and most importantly in this novel, their cave art.  Much of this is conjecture, but more is based on archeological research from digs that have taken place in Europe and Africa.  The archeological discovery of early man, how and where he lived has greatly enriched Auel’s work, and she is a true historian, punctuating her fiction with fascinating factual data.

 

In The Land of Painted Caves, Ayla embarkes on a Donier Tour, visiting all of the region’s sacred sites, namely painted caves.  Auel visited these existing caves while researching her novels, and the detail provided in the book is a wonderful tribute to this period in history.

 

Anyone fascinated by early man and our human origins, as I am, will find these books steeped in historic fact and rich in detail.  Auel fleshes out the facts to create believable characters and situations you’ll remember long after closing the cover on the final page.

 

Till next time, happy reading.

L J

 

TBR = 8

WPL = 20

The post where L reveals a new TBR bookcase*

*and admits she really does have a problem. So this is how it all went down.  I arrived at work on Monday with an assortment of flyers that had been dropped off at my mailbox after I’d done my weekly grocery shopping, thus making the flyers irrelevant, but still fun to browse through.  Plus, I like to share with a co-worker who’s much more of a sale fiend than I am.  It also helps the day go by faster, because let’s face it, working in an academic library isn’t exactly a party.  I pass most of the ads on to my co-worker sight unseen anyway because flipping through adverts for things I have no interest in purchasing doesn’t exactly turn me on....  For some strange reason, though, the Tepperman’s ad caught my eye.  I couldn’t even tell you why, but there I was, turning its pages when I reached their Bargain Annex sales.  There, at a ridiculously low price, was a 5-shelf bookcase.  Perfect for my library.  The sale was limited quantity and first come first served.  I immediately called to see if they had any left.  They didn’t, but the saleswoman tipped me off to more sales the coming two weekends with different style bookcases.  I waited all week for Friday to arrive. Which it finally did, and as I was walking Lily in the morning, I stopped to pick up a copy of the week’s ads from the piles dropped at the curb a couple blocks from home.  When we got back to the house, Lily waited not so patiently for her food while I pulled out the Tepperman’s ad and flipped to the Bargain Annex page.  There it was, the same bookcase with doors that was featured last week, but no 5-shelf bookcase beside it.  Harumph.  I didn’t particularly want a quasi bookcase with doors for my library – I’m a traditionalist after all.

 

 

Lily finally got her food and I headed off to work to bitch and moan to above mentioned co-worker, talking myself around to checking out the great deal.  I mean, it was advertised for $40.  When would I ever see that price again?  And so what if it had doors?  I didn’t have to use it in the library.  I have so little furniture after moving from a one bedroom apartment to a three bedroom house, that I could use it anywhere:  the living room, the office.  Endless possibilities.  I had myself convinced to stop in after work and pick one up.

I got to Tepperman’s around 1:30 having used some banked vacation time to leave early that Friday.  I sailed right past the showroom salesman who commented that I had my Bargain Annex flyer ready.  “Yup and I know just what I want,” I exclaimed, thinking: so don’t try to distract me and put the hard sell on me.  Just give me my bookcase and no one gets hurt.

Just inside the Annex entrance was my bookcase with doors.  I paused to look it over.  Yup, it’s good quality for $40.  Definitely want one.  I made my way over to the saleswoman, Kari, and asked if they had any left.  We walked back to the bookcase so she could write down the stock number. “How much was it originally?”  The bargain hunter in me wanted to know.  Kari pulled back the sale sticker to reveal the original price: $169.75.  Holy crap!  I’d be paying like a quarter of the regular price.  Cha-ching!  I happened to mention I wasn’t keen on the doors, but for that price, I guess I couldn’t quibble.  “Oh,” said Kari, “I think you can leave them off.  There’s nothing special about the doors and it would look like just a regular bookcase without them.”  We opened the doors and checked them out.  Sure enough, other than the hinges that didn’t need to be installed, there was nothing structurally requiring me to have the doors on the bookcase.  Hello!

I walked out of Tepperman’s that day with not one, but two beautiful and cheap, but not cheaply made, bookcases. 

The next step was to get them home and assembled, which caused me much bruising and aching muscles, cause I mean six-foot high, five-shelf, Sauder bookcases are not light!  But assembled them I did, and now I have five, count’em, bookcases in my library.  I definitely have a problem.  And because the new bookcases are so huge, and the floor in my house is somewhat uneven at the wall and my carpet so thick, I had to move out my original TBR bookcase and replace it with one of the new ones, which fit better against that wall (snug up against the wall instead of sitting several inches out of it...my worst nightmare is waking up one night to a big crash as the bookcase and books comes tumbling down).  The pic at the top of this post shows you the new TBR bookcase in all its finely filled glory.

So, here are my TBR books, after bookcase removal.  The only spot for them, piled into my chair:

Just like my reading tastes, they are one big messy pile of mixed genres.

This is where the old TBR bookcase now sits, empty and forlorn, though I don’t imagine I will have much trouble filling it up:  

The other new bookcase, I’m currently using for my unread magazines, of which I have loads, oh, and my waiting to be read library books.  Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of it filled, but to give you an idea of the size of these beautiful suckers: 

See, it’s so huge I can’t fit it in the entire frame!   

And finally, what’s a library without a furry friend in it?  In this case, my sweet doggie, Lily: 

I think she’s as concerned as I am at the size of these new things, and how I will fill them.  Either that or she needs to piddle and I’ve been too busy assembling bookcases and re-organizing my library to notice.

Guess it’s time for walkies!

Till next time, happy reading. 

L :)

 

 

 

Pop Goes the Weasel

Ah good ole Patterson, the king of the stock character.

 

In the fifth installment of the Alex Cross books, Cross is on the trail of the Jane Doe murderer.  Indigent women in Southeast Washington (one of the poorest neighbourhoods) are turning up dead, and Chief of Police Pittman refuses to admit a serial killer may be in their midst.  Undaunted, Cross continues to follow his gut and track an insane killer, and his actions once again puts those closest to him in jeopardy.

 

One of the recurring storylines in these books has been Cross’ love affair with school principle Christine Johnson.  In Pop Goes the Weasel, Christine agrees to marry Cross, despite misgivings over his career choice and the dangers it involves, and the two, along with Cross’ family, take a trip to Bermuda where Christine is kidnapped, ostensibly by the very killer Cross is trying to catch back in Washington.

 

There are so many things wrong with this book, I don’t know where to begin.  Dead bodies pop up everywhere, though most never get discovered by the police.  The police work is incredibly shoddy, and Cross spends most of his time mooning over Christine and thinking about future career paths, then he does chasing the killer.  Much of the plot is contrived, and when Christine disappears, it’s so obviously a trumped up plot ploy to throw obstacles in Cross’ path, that it’s beyond believable.  Also, Cross and his family seem to be the only ones affected by Christine’s kidnapping – no family, friends or co-workers come out of the woodwork to lament her disappearance.  Months jump by from one chapter to the next in which Cross does nothing to find Christine nor solve the multiple deaths in Southeast.  I could go on, but you’re probably as tired of reading this as I was of the book by the end.

 

That being said, there were elements of the book that still kept me reading.  The killer’s character was quite well drawn, and the book had the usual James Patterson thrill rides, though often disrupted by his use of stock characters and banal plot twists.  And the ending I found maddening.  Once again, Cross fails to follow through and properly catch his man, so I expect the killer to pop up again in the next book or two.  I like characters that are flawed – makes them relatable, but really, Cross is turning out to be less flawed and more just plain inept with each subsequent book.  I can only hope the series improves with later books, because I’ve unfortunately committed myself to reading the lot of them.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L J

 

 

TBR = 8

WPL = 19

L Meets up With Windsor Book Club to Dish John Grisham

I am so excited about Windsor Book Club.  It’s new and they meet once a month at various coffee shops around Windsor.  I have been looking to join a book club, mostly because I can’t get enough of talking about books, but when I learned the inaugural meeting in May would be discussing James Patterson’s Alex Cross’ Trial I had to bow out.  I’m still back at book 5 in the Cross series, and didn’t want to ruin anything by reading ahead.  When I heard what June’s book selection was, it didn’t prove to be much better:  John Grisham’s The Confession.  I am not a Grisham fan.  Indeed, from the time I read The Pelican Brief, back in the early ‘90’s I vowed never to read him again.  I did not enjoy his style of writing and found him very repetitive.  But trouper that I am, and because I’m dying to meet this fantastic group of readers, I shelved my cynicism and put the book on hold at WPL.

 

Much to my surprise, I quite enjoyed The Confession, which is a lesson:  Never judge a book by its author or anything they previously wrote.  You never know when a book will enthrall.

 

In typical Grisham fashion, we have an underprivileged young black man on death row, awaiting execution in Texas for the killing of school mate and cheerleader Nicole Yarber.  For nine years, Donte Drumm’s hot shot lawyer Robbie Flak has exhausted all avenues in the justice system to exonerate his client.  Texas is unique in that a murder conviction can be garnered with merely a confession – no dead body is required.  Coerced into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit after hours of police questioning that was more like battering, Donte was sentenced to death. 

 

To make matters worse, Texas has a new governor that is determined to cull the prisoners on death row, and executions are occurring fast and furiously.  Drumm’s days are numbered, and his appeals are all but exhausted.  With mere days left before his execution, a serial rapist with multiple convictions visits a Lutheran minister in Topeka, Kansas and confesses he is the real killer.  A frantic battle ensues to save the life of Donte Drumm.

 

For the first two-thirds of the book, I was gripped in the story of Donte and his wrongful conviction.  I was convinced The Confession was Donte’s story, and how he narrowly cheated death by lethal injection.  But this is a Grisham novel, and so I should have known better.  The true protagonist of this story is the death penalty, and the risk of killing innocent lives because the American justice system is far from perfect and wrongful convictions do happen.

 

Although it didn’t have the happy ending I so very much wanted, still The Confession was a worthwhile read. 

 

The book club met up at the Old Town Sweet Shop in Olde Walkerville and amongst tea and espresso, we shared our views of the novel.  Opinions were fairly unanimous.  The group as a whole found the book predictable, and those who read Grisham religiously found The Confession to be typical – Grisham writes about causes, not so much people or inner conflict.  The Confession was likened to Grisham’s fact-based books, that detail specific trials and judicial procedure, and was declared to be very factual in regards to the South, racial attitudes and police procedure.  Although we thought the characters to be fairly stereotypical and rather cookie-cutter, we found the Lutheran minister’s actions heart-warming because he believed the real killer’s claims and did everything in his power to stop the execution, and also this character experienced the most growth in the novel.  But truly, the book was less about people and more about the ills of the American judicial system and the barbaric practice of the death penalty.  We attributed much of America’s judicial ills on the fact that judges are elected.  They are likely less concerned with truth and justice and more with keeping their voters happy so they’re re-elected.

 

All in all, a lively discussion ensued.  I met a great group of people and can’t wait for next month’s meeting!  If you’d like to learn more about the book club, feel free to contact me.

 

Till next time, happy reading.

L J

 

 

TBR = 8

WPL = 18

L Reads New CanLit for May

What defines gender?  What makes us male or female?  Kathleen Winter explores the nature vs nurture debate in her beautifully written novel, Annabel.

 

It is 1968 and a baby is born in Croyden Harbour, Labrador to first-time parents Treadway and Jacinta Blake.  Attending at the home birth, Thomasina Baikie notices something unusual about this little bundle of joy – it is a child born with both male and female genitalia, a hermaphrodite. 

 

Treadway decides the child will be called Wayne and raised as a son.  The doctors agree the penis is developed enough to allow this, and an operation is performed in Goose Bay.  Only three people and Wayne’s doctors know the truth, that little Wayne is a boy-girl child.  To everyone but Jacinta and Thomasina, he is Wayne.  Jacinta sees the daughter she could have had when she looks at her child, and this creates a barrier between mother and son.  Thomasina has lost her husband and daughter, Annabel, in a boating accident, and so she christens Wayne “Annabel” and calls him this in secret.

 

Although Wayne believes he is a boy, and is taught the life of a hunter/fisherman as all Labradorian boys are, he is fascinated by geometric shapes, music, and synchronized swimming.  He longs to be like Elizaveta Kirilovna and make beautiful patterns in the water.  He saves his money and orders a bright orange swimsuit from the Eaton’s catalogue, hiding it from his father, knowing instinctively this is something boys don’t wear.  He wants nothing to do with the boys in his class and their rough and tumble play; rather, he falls for sweet Wally Michelin, a budding opera singer, who shares his passion for music and daydreaming.

 

As he grows, Wayne continues to visit the hospital in Goose Bay, and is prescribed various pills, because although he is raised as a boy, his body is showing signs of the girl-child within.  The pills help his body form the masculine lines of a boys, they help his voice deepen and his shoulders to broaden, and although Wayne knows he is different from the other boys in his class, he doesn’t know why.  The truth of his birth is kept secret until one fateful trip to the hospital at the age of twelve reveals all, and Wayne begins to explore the other part of himself on a journey of self-discovery to find his true identity.

 

A truly remarkable and captivating novel, Annabel doesn’t disappoint from page one to the very end.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L J

 

TBR = 8

WPL = 17