Having seen the Winterhalter portrait of Sisi, as the Empress of Austria and Hungary, it is impossible to ever forget her. Daisy Goodwin has captured the glamour and mystery of the woman and brought us her story during her first year fox hunting with the aristocracy in England. Bay Middleton served as her pilot, guiding her on the hunts and their relationship naturally became the subject of speculation. Goodwin has fleshed out that story in an historical novel that rings true in every way. The heiress Charlotte Baird did become Middleton's wife, but during this first season she formed a fascinating triangle with the married Empress. Each woman obviously attracted Middleton as he hunted for recognition and wealth. Charlotte hunted for meaning in her life and Sisi hunted for happiness. It was interesting to watch the author explore what the women must have thought of one another, what jealousy they must have felt and what hope they had for the future. Knowing how it all would end did not detract from the interest I felt in watching the characters work out their fates. One of the most famous women of the nineteenth century certainly made a marvelous heroine upon which to build this novel. If this is your first chance to meet Sisi or you are seeking more knowledge of her, this novel will more than satisfy you.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is receiving marvelous reviews and accolades from other authors. It is on numerous top ten lists. It deserves every good thing that can be said about it. It is an amazing tour de force. It should be required reading.
As the Olympics raises the question of why suicide bombers are threatening Sochia, this book answers the question. And then raises so many more.
Slowly and inexorably, Marra describes the lives of his multi generational characters in the present, the past And the future. When you think you grasp what makes a particular family unhappy, he adds another layer of love and betrayal that further complicates it. When you see where the fierce hatred between Ethnic Russians and Chechins arises, he gives you Russians who are also victims of the fighting. The issues are so modern - oil, wealth, power, organized crime, religious differences -while the Village seems like any Village in Tolstoy, who is present in the many references to his last novel,Hadji Murad. Everything is woven together so skillfully that nothing can be anticipated yet everything seems preordained in retrospect.
I can't say enough in praise of the skillful use of language. The descriptions of locations pile on the detail like rubble until I could walk into that room or city and find my way. And when he describes the thoughts and feelings of his characters I felt their pain. Masterful writing that is unique yet pays homage to great writers of other countries. One of the best books of any year.

J.D. Salinger said, "what I like best is a book that's at least funny once in awhile....What really knocks me out is a book that when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call (her) up on the phone whenever you felt like it." That is how this book appealed to me. Gretchen Rubin seems like someone I would enjoy getting to know even better. This is not a manual of self help. This is the start of a conversation. Ms. Rubin doesn't always succeed in following her own rules and some of her descriptions of failures made me laugh. An example was when she yelled at her daughter through the bathroom door demanding that the child control herself. If we sat down and conversed about some of her ideas I would sometimes have cheered her on, sometimes suggested she rethink them and sometimes joined her immediately in her experiment. I would have been happy to share her pleasure in her projects. I am grateful that she shared her year with us.
I hope that others enjoy her writing as much as I did.

Ivy Pochoda uses words as though she invented them for the sole purpose of telling us a story so riveting that our eyes can't leave the page. As perfect sentence follows perfect sentence, Red Hook becomes the readers only reality. The characters step out of the shadows and take on individual form. With them, we feel the sticky summer night, smell the fetid water of the river, see the skyline after dark. With them we experience the tension of not knowing what happened, and not knowing who is good and who is not.

Ms. Pochoda does a wonderful job of examining the ghosts who haunt us. Some of her characters accept that ghosts exist separate from us. Others realize they are part of us and our memories. Either way, they can drag us under or save us. I enjoyed the way she wove spiritualism through the book.

I believe this is a beautifully composed novel of suspense, a treasure for any reader to find.

In the 7th century BC, the leaders of Eastern Anatolia gave the people they conquered freedom of faith. In 1492, the Jews expelled from Spain were invited to come to Constantinople to live. The people of Turkey have embraced all different creeds. Ayse Kulen has taken one family to illustrate how individuals with the help and blessing of the Turkish government helped Jews escape from the Nazi's and death camps during WWII. The description of the individuals and the terrors they faced in Paris during the War are enthralling, and the suspense grows steadily like a train pulling away from a station until the very last moments of the novel. The bravery of the people involved is inspirational. The final question for all of us is whether or not we could put our lives at risk to save others as so many did during The Holocaust.

The last queen of Henry VIII, Katherine Parr, is such a relative unknown that we can read of her daily life, of her musings, her fears, her friendships, without that jarring note of thinking the author may be wrong about that. Elizabeth Fremantle has created a full, three dimensional figure and taken us with her on her terrifying ride as wife of Henry VIII. I knew that she would survive, but the author brought so much suspense to the telling that I began to fear that this time it would not end well for Katherine. The narration is believable and takes the reader into Katherine Parr's world in such a way that we actually feel we have visited there. I agree that until we have more Hilary Mantel to read, this author will more than deliver. I look forward to hearing more from her in the future.

I found this book to be disturbing in so many ways. The women in the book are portrayed as despicable in so many different ways, none of which I found to be humorous. I was reminded of the words of Dan Ackroyd to Jane Curtain on Saturday Night Live where he called her "Jane, you ignorant slut." The author had no better opinion of the men and I found their characters to be at least as unconvincing as the women. The humor did not rise to the level of sophistication of the usual SNL skit and the writing was cliched. The best advice I could give a reader is contained in the title. Lookaway, lookaway.

From the first page, I was drawn in by the lyrical writing of the author and mesmerized as the narrator, eight year old Raami, remembered the years when the Khmer Rouge destroyed individuals, towns and villages, and a whole country. The cruelties of the Organization, as the revolutionary soldiers were known, were constant, unpredictable and ultimately purposeless. Seeing the impact on one child, one family, was an emotional experience that I will never forget. This was one of the very best books I have had the good fortune to read this year.

The author has attempted to take the personal anecdotes and information she gained from relatives who lived in Germany during World War II and weave them together with the historical information regarding the Holocaust. She has described some of the most mundane tasks of daily life to show us that the ordinary German household was just like any French or English household, with the same fears, suffering and privation. These parts of the novel are not particularly engrossing. There was also something disturbing about portraying Germans as the victims of a war that was started by that Government. The questions regarding responsibility for so much suffering were not addressed. The author described the overwhelming horror of the camps where the Nazi's exterminated so many people. These sections are compelling, but the romance between her heroine Christine and Isaac does not seem significant enough against these descriptions of the Nazi's Final Solution. The personal lives of the fictional characters seemed insignificant against the actual deaths of the victims in the camps, giving the book an imbalance that I didn't like. I would like to see this author's next novel because I expect that she will do very well with the right material.