As I was reading this book, I was at first thinking 'there is no way this could actually happen in the 21st century'. But as I continued to read, I realized how many parallels there were to things that actually are happening, and I changed my mind. And that makes the book pretty chilling and extremely thought-provoking. The author did an excellent job of imagining what else would have followed from the original premise both in the U.S. and in the rest of the world (the U.S. is a pariah in the world and is not a world power). The alternate history is a background setting for a mystery/thriller with several twists (none of which I saw coming) and it works on that level also. I highly recommend it.

This author can really write, in that the book is full of wonderful individual sentences. I liked the premise, I loved the beginning, and I was delighted by the ending. I am giving this four stars rather than five, though, because for me it bogged down a little bit in the middle.

To say I "enjoyed' this book does a disservice to its subject matter, but it was thoroughly engrossing, and horrifying, from start to finish. Ruth Wariner presents us with a memoir that takes us from her young childhood into her teenage years, at all times presenting her story as her younger self perceived it it at the time. We see her slowly come to realize what is obvious to the reader from page 1 - there is something deeply wrong with the patriarchal society in which the women have no rights, and in which the husbands and fathers take little or no responsibility for the economic support of their numerous wives, and many, many children. This is a thoroughly fascinating, though exceedingly unsettling, glimpse into a world that most of us know very little about.

This is an extremely entertaining and smart book about a young woman from Miami, the daughter of Cuban immigrants, who is the first person in her family to go to college and also the first person from her public high school to apply to and be accepted at the fictional Ivy League college in upstate New York. At her university we see that she struggles with being something of a fish out of water - she does not always understand the rules and mores, while the university administration and the other students make incorrect assumptions about her. But in addition, she also no longer really fits in at home with her family, where they have no comprehension of her new life. The book was quite an eye-opener for me, as it brought up issues I had never thought about, and it is also just a good read.

I highly recommend this. It was hard to put down. North Korea is so strange and horrible that I actually think it's pretty difficult for a book about it not to be interesting and this was no exception to that. Aside from the fascinating (and horrific) details about the cult of personality that has been built up around the leaders of the country (and which has basically destroyed the country) the idea of a dictator abducting two prominent movie figures from another country in order to force them to make movies in his country sounds so ridiculous that you wouldn't believe it, except that it actually happened. And anyone who has not already read other books about what life is like for average citizens in North Korea will find this astonishing.

I really liked this book. I am a fan of speculative fiction, and technically I guess you would say it falls into that genre. But as others have pointed out, it is not easily categorized – it's also a love story: it's also a fish out of water story; it's also something of a mystery. It's very easy to read – it has a clean, direct, simple prose style which I very much appreciate. That is not to say however, that the ideas or the atmosphere are simple. It as has a sense of foreboding throughout, both from the increasingly disturbing reports coming from earth and even more so from the native population of Oasis. In addition, the earth colony on Oasis is decidedly odd also. This was a great read, which has lingered in my thoughts ever since I finished it.

It's hard to review any Louise Penny mystery without reviewing the whole series. One could read her latest book as a stand-alone mystery, but I think it suffers if you do because there is so much in it that refers to people and events from previous books and so much of the plot is dependent on events for which the groundwork was laid many books ago. So, to discuss this book as part of the series: If you love Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache series, you will love this one. One of the major plot threads that has been simmering in the background for many of the previous books is finally resolved here, in what I found to be a satisfying, if not particularly believable way. But the book also contains the same flaws that have always prevented me, at least, from loving her books. For me, the village of Three Pines and its inhabitants are a little bit precious and annoyingly melodramatic. And I thought the actual murder mystery part of the plot was somewhat thin, with a motive that I did not find credible (and I generally feel that the motives for the murders in her books are not credible). But in this book solving the murder kept seeming like kind of an afterthought in the midst of what was really the major story relating to corruption in the Quebec government and police department, and even with my less than total devotion to this series, that part of the plot made this a page turner.

I became delighted with this book about 20 pages in when I realized that Hildy Good, the main character, is a classic unreliable narrator. She seems to have a pretty accurate take on those around her, but is utterly deluded about herself. The story is witty, insightful, and surprisingly complex, with a mix of great characters and several different but overlapping story arcs that tie together by the end, touching on real estate, New England small towns, infidelity, psychiatry, autism, late-in-life romance, and alcoholism.

I was very disappointed with this book. The topic of cons and con men to me is inherently fascinating, yet I found the book very difficult to get through. The author focused immediately, in minute detail, on someone I had never heard of, and then continued to make him the focus of most of the book without ever really making him interesting to me. She clearly had done a great deal of research, and clearly knew her topic very well, but just did not seem to know how to make the story flow in the way that good non-fiction should. The book didn't really get interesting until the last quarter when the focus switched to a major sting operation executed by law enforcers in the city of Denver. At that point the book turned into a page-turner, but it felt like a long slog to get to that part.

I loved this book. It's witty, intelligent, insightful, and a page-turner. The transformations the various characters had gone through and were continuing to go through were believable, and so were the characters themselves. And though there were a lot of happy endings, not everything was tied up with a neat little bow at the end (just like real life). I highly recommend this book.

I love this author. He has the rare gift of being satirical but warm at the same time, with underlying humor that never veers over into parody. His characters feel real. This is perhaps his best book yet, and also his most ambitious. All of his imaginings of the various ways people would react to the dilemma for some and tragedy for others of being the leftovers seemed exactly right, ranging from general hopelessness to outrage to new fanatical cults to resignation. I also liked that he did not try to explain the event, and did not treat it as a religious phenomenon. It was just something that happened with no warning and so – now what? I cannot recommend this book more highly.

If you are looking for another Eat, Pray, Love, this book is not it. For me, that was a major plus. While it seems to be billed as another “travel to find myself” book, I found that where it was its most interesting was the look it gave us at modern Bhutanese life (and it dragged a little when the author focused on her own relationships with other westerners because I didn’t care about that). But I learned a lot about Bhutan, and the author seems to have begun her contacts with Bhutan and the Bhutanese people right at the point where Bhutan is in a transition period between keeping itself almost completely isolated from the modern world, and allowing the modern world in. And it seems pretty clear that the modern world is going to rapidly run roughshod over their old way of life. I found that aspect to be fascinating, and it left me with a lot of food for thought – it seems pretty poignant that their old ways will disappear, but why shouldn’t they have all of the benefits of modern technology and communication that we have? But does that make people happier? But even if it doesn’t, would it have been acceptable for their government to continue to keep them isolated? I finished it several days ago, and I still find myself thinking about it.

Wow! This was definitely not what I expected, but definitely fascinating, and not like any other parenting memoir I have ever seen. From the way the book started I was expecting self-deprecating humor; what I got instead was a story of what the author refers to as Chinese-style parenting that was so harsh and restrictive that to me it bordered on child abuse. I kept wondering - does the author realize what she sounds like? By the end it's pretty clear that for the most part at least, she does, since we end up hearing about where her techniques failed as well as where they succeeded. I was undecided about how to rate this, until I realized that any possible downgrading of it by me would have been a critique of her parenting choices, as opposed to a critique of the book itself. The book is well-written, unusual, easy to read style-wise, and boy! does it pack a punch! It would provoke some extremely lively book group discussions.

I loved this book. It has a mystery running through it – who has sent the ‘Order 4’ e-mail to the main character, Ki-Yong? - but more than that it is a fascinating look at life in South Korea and the changes that have taken place there over the last 20 years, as well as the views held by South Koreans and North Koreans about each other and the rest of the world, plus a close look at one unhappy Korean family. The writing style is very straightforward, and not ornate, but the overall effect of the book is haunting.

'Stash' was extremely entertaining, fast-paced, and well-written. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I love the way the viewpoint shifts back and forth among numerous different characters, and as events spin out of control we see many of them through the eyes of more than one person, which for me is a very satisfying literary device. I also liked having the plotline concerning the problems caused by the sale and purchase of illegal drugs in suburbia juxtaposed against the moral questions raised by the marketing of a legal, but possibly dangerous drug. Readers should take note also of the chapter headings, which are charming and unusual for a modern novel.

Arcadia Falls is a haunting mystery set during winter months at a remote boarding school in upstate New York. The author does a wonderful job with the sense of place and climate – you can feel the isolation and the oppressiveness of the cold, foggy weather and short days and the danger of the snowy terrain, all of which add to the sense of desperation and fear felt by the main character. I thought that the depiction of the students and their interests was a little bit unrealistic, but the mystery itself was enjoyably complex, with a very satisfying denouement.

This book has a great opening phrase - "Mum starved herself for suffrage" are the first five words - giving me high hopes for the book, but it did not fulfill them. Overall, I found it slow and hard to finish. I did not mind the structure, which jumps around in time among several different generations of the same family, but I never could see any point to the various sections as interconnected pieces. Individual sections are entertaining, and the author writes well, with kind of clean, spare prose that I usually really like, but unfortunately there was nothing compelling about the build-up of sections as I moved from one to the next. I just could not see what it all added up to.