This book, I think, is best appreciated when the reader comes to it, as I did, with no clue of what is happening. I think that the sense of disorientation that I felt for the first 300 or so pages of this book seemed to mirror the disorientation the main character experiences as he is transported to a distant planet for the purposing of ministering to the native alien population there. The company who funds the planetary exploration wants him there as a Christian missionary because the aliens, who grow and prepare all of the food for the humans, won't continue to do so unless they have a minister.
Throughout the book there is an eerie feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop...the native population seems much too eager to embrace Christianity and, given that the usual narrative with aliens is that they are monsters, there is an expectation that there will be some price to pay for the ease of the main character's mission.
The main character has left a wife back on earth and the only way for communication to be had is through written e-mail like messages, no pictures or videos can be transmitted. As the main character is experiencing success on the alien planet his wife, Bea, who became pregnant right before he left, is experiencing a number of tragedies on an earth that is rapidly deteriorating. Although the circumstances are strange, I really enjoyed the author's examination of two people who love each other growing apart due to an inability to communicate or empathize. I think it is similar to the way in which many once loving relationships fail.
I also was really interested in the examination of Christianity offered in this book. The main character arrives on the alien planet a true believer after having been converted from his drug addicted, thieving ways by Bea. But while he is on the planet he faces many questions about the sincerity of his faith and what, exactly, should be expected in return for his faith.

I feel like this book had hints of the novel Gone Girl in it, although it is not as successful. It is a story about two women who become friends, but with very different motives. Emma is looking for a break from her baby and housecleaning routines. Nina is looking to disrupt Emma's life in a more sinister manner, as retribution for something that occurred in the distant past.

Emma's portion of the story was not much different from many other books I have read about former career women becoming mired in motherhood and wondering "is this all there is".

Nina's portion is much more nuanced, but ultimately I found that she was not "off" enough to make her really interesting. And the long ago slight by Emma was not really explained enough to make her actions make sense.

I did enjoy Nina's mental processes as she was painting. I think that it offered a really interesting narrative of the creative process.

This version of the book is an early edition, so I'm not sure if it would change, but I found some of the "English-isms" to be very distracting because I didn't know what some them meant. I understand that the story takes place in England, but I'm not sure that these words added much for an American audience.

The first 100 pages of this book was a quite interesting love story between two young men living in early 1900s London. The protagonist grew up in a decrepit country estate with only his older sister for company. He goes to London with the intention of becoming a writer. He meets his lover as a roommate and soon they are inspiring each other and fumbling towards a relationship that is not acceptable in their time and place. Towards the ends of the first 100 pages the two men are planning to leave London for a trip through Italy and I was looking forward to seeing where this story led and how the romance developed.
However, after those first 100 pages, the book abruptly takes a left turn and -SPOILER---all of a sudden the book is about vampires. There is a non-vampire doctor who seeks to explore the rules of vampiredom, the older sister's quest to find her disappeared brother and a caste of lower class vampires versus upper class ones. I think part of the problem is that I have vampire fatigue from the large profile they have had in popular culture lately. But I also think that this book doesn't really bring anything new to the vampire canon. I had hints of Bram Stoker's Dracula and hints of Interview with a Vampire and nothing that felt really original.
I would mildly recommend this book for the first hundred pages, but the rest was just not interesting to me.

Prior to reading this book I had not heard of Countess Erzsebete Bathory, but when I mentioned the name to other people they had heard of this evil historical woman. This story alternates chapters between a modern and historical story. The historical story tells of how Countess Bathory, who lived in the 1600s in an area that is now Slovakia, tortured women she lured to the castle in order to bathe in their blood and the political factors that led to her not being publicly tried for those crimes. The modern story is a mystery that concerns a young woman named Daisy who becomes enmeshed in a mystery with her therapist, after her therapist's mother is kidnapped.
The shorty chapters and quick pace of the story made this book, which is around 500 pages move very quickly. I enjoyed the insights that the character of the therapist brings to the story, with her examination of the world through a Jungian lens. I learned some things I did not know about Jung.
On the negative side, the author's characterization of Daisy as a "Goth" felt like it was written by someone who didn't really know what the term meant and every time there was a tangent to explore Daisy's Gothness the story lagged.
I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in historical fiction as well as anyone who wants a Vampire story that involves evil vampires, not sparkly sexy ones.

I took this book away with me for a weekend by the water and it was perfect to read while laying in the sun. The book is entirely made up of correspondence between different family members and different sets of lovers during the two time periods surrounding World War I and World War II. For me, the fact that the whole story was made up of letters allowed me to be immediately invested in the story because I felt that I was in the character's heads and understanding their motivations. I really enjoyed the love story that developed between two of the characters, focusing as it did on the question of what the "right" choice is when it comes to love: to follow your heart, even if it means hurting someone, or if it is to remain faithful to those who you have made commitments to. As a fan of the post office and someone who fervently hopes that people will recognize the importance of letters, I hope that this book may inspire some readers to write love letters of their own. Another positive about this book was the very atmospheric descriptions of Isle of Skye in Scotland. The language the author used to describe the peat bogs, rolling hills and reliance on the sea was really wonderful.The only portions of the book that I was a bit disappointed with were some of the historical aspects. At times it seemed that certain historical facts or situations were raised when it was convenient to move the love story forward, but were not adequately explored to ground the story in a sense of reality.

I feel like I have read a hundred books similar to this. Do we really need another prep school book? There are some elements that make this book unique: the very detailed descriptions of the mechanics of training for and competing in crew; the career of the main character as an adult, which is a documentary filmmaker, adds some interesting elements; and the obstacle in the romantic relationship of the main character as an adult was one of the more gruesome elements I have read in a novel.
Aside from these unique features, however, I mostly found that the familiar tropes of prep school fiction were present. The poor kid who is really the smartest character in the book and is only able to come to the school because of some amazing talent he has. The wealthy student who can't survive under the weight of the pressure and expectation heaped upon him by his parents. The gruff teacher who rarely says it but cares fiercely for his students. The troubled female student who struggles with becoming a woman and leaving her childhood behind. I just felt like there wasn't enough new here for me.
It probably is important to note that I am not and have never been much of an athlete and so the long montages of training and competition for slots on the team and trying to win the big race just did not resonate for me. I think that for someone who had an experience where being on a sports team was an important part of their formative years this book may have more impact.

I have read lots of novels about people experiencing the Holocaust and WW II. However, this is the first novel I have read that addresses the emptiness that comes from having lived through that kind of pervasive fear and death and how a person can forge a life after.
The story is about two women, Lilly and her daughter Ruthie and how they deal with the physical and psychic losses that have occurred in their lives.
I really enjoyed the way that the author was able to inhabit the heads of many different characters in the novel and make their motivations understandable. I also liked the way in which certain key pieces of information about the mysteries of Lilly's life were doled out in a way that didn't seem contrived, but still held on to the tension of wondering how those mysteries would be resolved.
I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys novels about immigrants or about mothers and daughters or about anyone who is interested in learning about European refugees after World War II.

Because of the settings of author Dennis Lehane's other books, I anticipated that this story about prohibition era gangsters would center around Boston. The story did start there but then quickly moved south when the main character, Joe Coughlin, is sent to Tampa, Florida to take over the liquor business there.
Most of the other books I have read about prohibition era gangsters took place in cities, so it was really interesting to see how the usual gangster problems intermixed with issues of race, such as dealing with the KKK, and with the vibrant population of Cuban nationalists.
I really enjoyed following Joe Coughlin's story to see how his morals were shaped by the positions he found himself in and how these morals were shaped by the philanthropic leanings of a woman he meets named Graciela and how these morals clashed with the stricter religious leanings of Tampa's police chief.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in historical fiction of the prohibition era as well as anyone who is interested in considering how you arrive a definition of right and wrong.
As a side note, I read this in the summer, but as a native of upstate New York, I can imagine that if I had read Lehane's descriptions of the pre-air conditioning humidity in Tampa during a long, cold winter, this book would have been even more appreciated.

When I started thinking about how to review Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer I was sort of stumped because in many ways, it defies description. This is a love story about a woman whose husband goes into space. But it is also a story about unlikely childhood friends who develop a love based on the fact that they are the only one the other could imagine letting into their difficult lives. It is also the story of the differences between the expectations that mothers have of what will make their children happy and the reality of what does make them happy. And it is also a science fiction story about the first steps towards colonization of the moon and a social commentary on the false fronts that many people feel they need to put up to interact with society. And still I feel like I must be leaving out some important theme.
Although it took me a little while to become emotionally involved in this story of Sunny, a girl who is born bald, and Maxon, a boy who is a genius but has difficulty interacting with humans, once I got hooked into the story I felt both emotionally involved in the characters lives as well as intellectually engaged with some of the larger themes the author was seeking to bring into her story.
The only criticism I would have of this book is that the last couple of chapters feel a bit rushed. After the rest of the book has taken time to slowly create detailed portraits of the characters, the conclusion lacked some authenticity that made it seem a bit disconnected from the rest of the story.
I would recommend this book to people who like unconventional romances, people who are interested in issues surrounding the treatment and experience of Autism spectrum disorders and people who are interested in stories about the connections between mother's and daughters.