I've reviewed many books for BookBrowse and this one is by far my favorite. There are two story lines - one takes place in 1900 and the other in 2000, both over the course of just three weeks. The 1900's storyline involves a gay engineer from Maine as he tries to construct a railroad bridge in Africa while his workers are being attacked by lions. The modern storyline is about a woman with Asperger's researching medicinal plants eaten by gorillas in Rwanda. Both stories are fascinating and the author has clearly done a lot of research. Beautiful descriptions of Africa and rich, well-developed characters. This is a book to buy, not just borrow from the library.

If you enjoyed Ms. Groff's first book, "The Monsters of Templeton", you're bound to enjoy this second excellent effort. And, if you haven't read her first novel, I recommend them both. The world she creates is filled with wonderful characters and a great story.

While the writing was excellent and the story fascinating and complicated, I wanted more characterization. I felt the story wasn't as powerful because, the events of the story overshadowed the actual people experiencing them.

This book was just gripping. I put aside some other books just to read this one and finished it easily over the course of two evenings. The real strength of the novel is in the rich personality of the main character. The "mystery" itself is not very compelling, but watching the brilliant main character deal with the loss of her own "self" is riveting. Explores a subject that has been underaddressed in modern literature. Several areas of the book would be very interesting book group discussion topics: female friendships, marriage and what makes a person him or her
"self"?

I selected this book based on my enjoyment of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. The concept of this book seemed to hold the same promise for humorous crime solving. Given the large publicity campaign cited on the back of the book, I can't believe the publisher didn't spend a little more time working with the author on the actual text. The author fails to follow one of the first rules of writing which is to "show, not tell." In her telling of this tale she manages to make being a mother sound boring (and the three-year-old sound like a total brat) and then she makes being a spy sound boring. When she tries to deal with events in the past and in the present in the same paragraph - it is very confusing and a light book of this type really should not require re-reading to sort out when something occurred. Finally, the main character's husband actually says, "Lucy, come to California, move into my house, and marry me. If you don't, I think I might die." Every smart woman who would laugh if a man said this to her should avoid this book.

Glynis Ridley did an excellent job with researching the time period and the history of botany, so if those topics interest you then this would be a good book for you. But if you are looking for a biography of a woman adventurer breaking out of the roles prescribed for women at the time, this book doesn't really deliver because so little is known about Jeanne Baret. The book is well written and so held my attention even though botany is not a a particular interest of mine.

While I disliked the author and her "Chinese parenting" techniques - I found myself ultimately sympathetic to what she was trying to do for her daughters. Some of the points made are simplistic (e.g. I am not sure that the children's book "The Five Chinese Brothers" is the best example the author could have cited on Chinese child-rearing techniques). I read many passages to my daughter as examples of how lucky she is to have sane, rational parent. While I would not recommend this book to a friend, book groups could have lots of interesting discussion about the benefits of pushing your children as the author does and it was an easy, engaging read.

Once you start reading this fun, informative, compelling story you won’t want to stop. The protagonist is a North Korean spy who has been living quietly with his wife and daughter in South Korea for many years when he receives a message ordering him to return to North Korea in 24 hours. The rest of the book chronicles the next 24 hours in the life of the spy, his wife and his daughter. The excellent characterization takes this book beyond being just a spy thriller and gives the reader insight into life in modern South Korea.

This book is very short - almost a novella. The plot is very intriguing ,the characters are interesting and I admired the author's writing style, but I wanted to see more happen between the characters before the ending arrived. As it was the ending felt abrupt and not wholly believable because it seemed to come too fast. I wanted to spend more time alone in the main characters head to see how she came to the feelings she had at the end of the book.

Ms. Grenville book has some lovely imagery and great writing and the historical theme is very interesting, but overall it seems that not enough time is spent on any of the elements of the story. I was left wishing for a deeper examination of the characters and events. Recommend reading English Passengers by Matthew Kneale, a book with a similar subject but deeper exploration of story and characters.

I selected this book hoping to learn more about Sierra Leone while reading an engaging story, but I found the writing to be "flabby" as another reviewer accurately described it and the story to not be as compelling or tightly plotted as I would have liked. Overall, I can't recommend this one.

You have to be ready for the non-linear structure of this book. I enjoyed some parts of this book very much and found myself reading them aloud to my family while other parts I just wanted to skip over. This book is like being inside the author's head and hearing his entire thought process - some fascinating, some weird, and some disturbing. If you're ready to try something different give this a try. Recommended for people who enjoy Haruki Murakami and Edward Abbey.

The first two parts of “Cutting for Stone” are fabulous. The characters come off the page and are entirely real. The reader is right there with them in the hospital in Ethiopia and their stories are fascinating. Unfortunately the second two parts do not live up to the promise of the first two. In the second two parts, the pace of the story speeds up and something is lost. The characters of the young people, Marion, Shiva and Genet are never as meticulously realized as those of their elders. The plot relies on too many highly unlikely coincidences and the story that was so very real for the first half of the book becomes difficult to believe. I look forward to his next book in hopes that it lives up to the promise of the first parts of this one. Recommended for readers who enjoyed “Half of A Yellow Sun,” “Sea of Poppies,” or “Sacred Games.”

While the author of this book has a great, breezy writing style there are too many different storylines for this short book. Her relationship with Hallie isn't developed well enough to make the conflict over Hallie quitting music or her "betrayal" very moving. I was also unclear about the need for the introduction of a second talented student that heard voices while playing the violin. The storyline of the protagonist's love life is a little more compelling, but still doesn't resolve itself in a satisfying way. Overall, I can't recommend this book.