Alternating chapters tell parallel stories of a woman who lived in Russia at the time of its revolution and her daughter in New York City in 1948. The mother was a friend of one of Tsar Nicholas's daughters and received from her a gift of a valuable tiara. The daughter finds the tiara after her mother's death, hidden in a wall. This is a good set-up for a mystery, as the daughter knows almost nothing of her mother's life before emigrating to the U.S. But the story doesn't live up to its potential. The writing is simplistic and seems to be aimed at teenage girls – lots of passionate romance that, in my opinion, gets in the way of the historical and family story. I can forgive the historical inaccuracies because the story needs them to move forward. But as one progresses in the book, more and more suspension of disbelief is needed. It's not a bad book, but it could have been much better with more sophisticated writing and less emphasis on the love stories.

I have been a fan of Ursula Hegi since I read Stones from the River 25 years ago. But I really struggled with her newest book. She has been known for developing interesting and relatable characters, and there are glimmers of that in this book but it somehow misses the mark. Perhaps that is due to the disjointed jumping from one time period to another and back again. Don't get me wrong -- it is a readable and some parts of it are very enjoyable, but it is just not up to my expectations of a Hegi work.

Erik Larson's new book, The Splendid and the Vile, looks at a year starting in 1941, when Winston Churchill became the British Prime Minister, and ending a year later. During that time, Britain suffered badly with the Blitzkrieg that hammered London and other cities, and reverses in the ground war in North Africa and Greece. The book centers on Churchill, but spreads out to include his family members, political friends and foes, ordinary Brits, and members of the German high command, all based on diaries or letters or other forms of contemporaneous records. The book is dense with characters, and at 500 pages it is not a fast or easy read, but it offers some new insights and a personal look at many issues of which the reader may not have been previously aware. Well-written and interesting subject matter.

Although mostly about Paris, this is really about the entire River Seine, from its source in Burgundy to its entry to the sea in Le Havre. But it is mostly about Paris, and how the city depends on the river for commerce, tourism, and romance. Written by a journalist who has lived in France for years, it has a journalistic style, but some portions actually read more like a novel than a travelogue. There are chapters on the bridges, the houseboats, the book sellers, the movies, pollution, floods, and more. Lots of stories about people who live on or make their living on the river. Entertaining and informative.

The book follows a man who was a flying ace in World War One, as well as family members and friends, from the end of the "Great War" into the Second World War. For most of them, the fundamental question in their lives is how to live their best life and be true to their moral beliefs. Peopled with complex and interesting characters, the reader feels privileged to get to know them, flaws and all. We sympathize with their losses and are happy when good things happen to them. Well-written and with descriptions of people and settings that give the reader a very good sense of what it was like to live in those places at those times.

The hype for this book would have one believe that it is a madcap caper ("witty", "riotous"). To the contrary, it is full of one-dimensional characters -- perhaps the most well-rounded is the cat who embodies the main character's dead husband -- who fail to prop up a plot full of irrelevant events and boring dialogue. At least it was a fast read, due in part to its failure to generate interest in the reader.

A 17-year-old boy has lived in an institution since infancy, having been born grossly deformed as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. No explanation is given of how he became well-educated, but he is able to analyze his life and those around him in a context that indicates great awareness of the world. When a girl comes to the institution who is dying of leukemia, their friendship becomes the first meaningful one of his life (with the exception of one of the nurses). As he sees her through her death, he finds so much of himself that he had thought was absent. An interesting commentary on post-Soviet life, the victims of Chernobyl, and human relationships.

This book is a fictionalized version of real events, and fills in characters and thoughts of persons aboard the ship Californian, which was stopped in ice a few miles from the Titanic and did not respond to distress signals. The characters are very human: the crew members of the Californian try to shift blame on each other for their inaction; the journalist uses whatever means he can to get the story. All in all, it is a story of the frailties and poor judgments that are regretted in hindsight but somehow inevitable.

An American TV journalist covering the Bosnian war in 1994 is waylaid by Serbian troops with his photographer and translator, with tragic results. The journalist survives but is haunted by the event and by the memory of the translator. Twelve years later he returns to Serbia, a free-lancer doing a documentary, and reconnects with the translator. He wants to know why a known war criminal has not been arrested and who is protecting him. The romance with the translator continues apace while he gets closer and closer to the war criminal. End of plot description, as I don't want to include a spoiler. The story is pretty good. The characters don't seem too realistic -- the journalist is pretty one-dimensional and does some pretty unbelievable things. Other characters are similarly without a great deal of depth. I was bothered by the shifting point of view; 95 of the time, things are seen and described from the journalist's point of view, but then there will be a paragraph or two in which someone else's thoughts are described or the plot is moved forward by someone else's actions of which the journalist is unaware. Overall, a good but not great book.

A young woman sets out to become part of the "upper crust" in New York City, not seeing (as the reader does) how shallow and careless those people are. The book is something of a take-off on Edith Wharton's novels, and does a pretty good job of telling its morality tale. The plot sags somewhat in the middle, but mostly it is quite readable and the characters are interesting if not edifying. I wish the ending hadn't wrapped things up quite so tidily, but I guess that's what morality tales are supposed to do. A very respectable debut novel, and I have the feeling the author can do even better with the next one.

This biography, which claims to be the "untold story", is fairly cynical about Jackie as she pursues the perfect husband. After that husband is killed, it becomes overly sympathetic and interprets everything in terms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Although she certainly fits the mold of that syndrome, it suddenly becomes the lens through which the author sees everything, including her choice of second husband. Not until she has been widowed again and has a "real" job does she start to actually recover and gain some control of her life. Interesting, with flaws. One wonders about the credibility of some statements (e.g., a quote that is not flattering to JFK, supposedly made in a conversation with her son -- how did the author find that?).

As a long-time lover of Gone With the Wind, I always look forward to books that relate to it, and I liked McCaig's take on the backstory of Rhett Butler, but this one falls short. It is odd in several respects: the main character doesn't figure into much of the story until about a third of the way through; the dialogue is choppy and it seems no one can finish a sentence or thought; it switches from third-person to first-person about two-thirds of the way through. I assume the errors in names (Beatrice Tarleton has a husband alternately called Jim and Hugh, and her daughter is sometimes Hetty and sometimes Betty) will be corrected before final publication. But the fundamental flaw is that the character doesn't comport with the Mammy of GWTW. There are similarities, but this one just doesn't have the sass and verve of the original, and in this book just isn't as interesting a character. An interesting read, but not a good addition to the GWTW story.

A young, ambitious woman lands her first post-college job as an analyst with a New York investment bank in 2007. She learns quickly that trust in anyone is a dangerous thing and that in order to succeed one must pretty much give up one's humanity (one must buy in before one can sell out). The irony, of course, is that the book ends just before the banking world implodes, so the reader knows some things about her future that the character does not. The book could use some good editing, but it is well-written enough to keep the reader's interest.

I have lived in a small town for 35 years and in all that time there has never been the amount of crime and violence as Acker's Gap, West Virginia, the small town in Bitter River, experiences within a few weeks. Leaving aside the need to suspend disbelief, though, this is a readable and fairly interesting crime procedural. The main characters are people one would like to know. Some of the peripheral characters (of whom there are too many) are a little one-dimensional, but the plot moves along in spite of that. And the solution to the primary "whodunit" is not at all obvious. Overall, a book worth reading if one enjoys crime/mystery novels.

The Plum Tree is a good effort on an important subject, but its defects cause it to fall short of its presumed goal, namely to depict life as an ordinary German during and after World War II. The circumstances were dramatic enough, and don’t require the additional melodrama provided by the author to tell the story (no examples given so as to avoid plot spoilers). The dialogue is stilted (a young man to his girlfriend: “When we’re together, we’ll only see each other, not the ugliness around us.” A concentration camp commander to an inmate: “There are men here who have been turned by the evil that surrounds them. Their hearts have been plowed open to reveal the rotten soil of their souls.”). There are annoying and distracting stylistic affectations, such as every “yes” and “no” in dialogue being written as “ja” or “nein” and italicized (to remind us that the characters are really speaking German, not English?). The characters are one-dimensional; the good ones are noble, the bad ones are evil, and there is no one in between. Historical facts are very significantly altered; Dachau was undoubtedly a horrible place, but it was NOT an extermination camp with gas chambers and ovens. A reader who wants to learn about the lives of German civilians during this time period would do much better to choose Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the River.