Set in 1962 Ireland, this is a marginally interesting period piece that recounts the bleak existence of a small town second-generation doctor and his adult spinster daughter who "keeps house for him."  Living under the rigidity of the Catholic Church and a cloud of grief since the death of the doctor's wife and the daughter's mother, the first three parts of the story drag on with detailed descriptions of mundane events that I suspect "real" lovers of literature find beautiful and enthralling.  I got all the way to part four and realized that only about two or three weeks of time had passed in the storyline. 
 
By Part Four, a few things happen.  We meet another character, whose life is also dismal.  A young teen, his father is an alcoholic and his mother the kind of run down and sad that comes from a lifetime of being dependent on alcoholics. The poverty and pain of the story continues on until the Time of The Child.  At this point, well into the last part of the book, the plot seemed to begin.
 
Now, I am not saying the book isn't well crafted or that it wasn't at times informative of an historical period in a place that is often ignored, but I am saying that it was boring and those things weren't enough to pull me along.
 
Not recommended.

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Having known nothing about Herbie Hancock other than the heavily electronic version of Rock It from my childhood, I was surprised by a lot of this memoir and I can image that for someone interested in jazz, jazz fusion, and the evolution of electronic music and particularly synthesizers, that this book would be fascinating.  I learned a lot about these topics, despite what might be surprised as a lack of general interest in them, which is one of the great things about reading in general.  Hancock's background in engineering, touring with Miles Davis, and general likeability made for good storytelling, even if it sometimes fell into the name-dropping trap that I often find so irritating in these types of memoirs. 

I will say that I found his lack of political engagement to be disappointing, especially considering the opportunities and relationships that he had connection to. The parts of the book where he wrote about his struggles with addition to crack cocaine were probably the most moving, but his repeated discussion of his Buddhist chanting practices reminded me of Tina Turner's memoirs (My Love Story and Happiness Becomes You) in terms of leaving me with a sense of superficiality.

I am definitely see what others love about this book, but I think I expect more emotionality from a memoir like this unless I have an independent interest in the historical topic.

Not recommended--unless you are a music or jazz lover, then I would recommend it for you.

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Yet another story about Americans traveling to Scotland for a vacation read in Virtual Voice.  I need a setting that excludes these from view, although having now read three of these, I have definitely learned my lesson.  The Voice here isn't as horrendous as Valentine's Day In Venice, but it still takes away from the story, which is saying a lot since the story was nothing compelling to start with.  Retired, disgruntled cop and his wife housesit in Scotland for a change of scene and get asked to help solve a blackmailing mystery for a neighbor.  Predictable and bland.
Not recommended

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Mindless romance between American ex-lovers traveling to Scotland.  Nothing offensive.  Not not cute.  But, the point of reading stories about a place I am going to visit is to learn something about the people or place and although these two journalists purport to be there to write a story about locals, that part of the story was never developed and really could have taken place in any one of hundreds of places around the world.  Overall a disappointment.
Do not recommend.

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I will preface this by saying that I am not a fan of horror, either in books or movies, but part of this project is that I read and finish every book and in this case, even though the bottom line is going to be a Not Recommended label, I have to say that I thought and talked about this book a remarkable amount for not recommending it to anyone. 

This book is about truly awful, abusive mothers with borderline personality disorders who torture and haunt their children, even after their death.  The lack of clarity about whether the haunting is real or a shared delusion as a result of the trauma these mothers inflicted on their children, step-children, and children-in-law, is truly horrifying and the book in general was, indeed, horrific. 

That said, the ending was so clever and the cleverness of the ending only adding to the horror of the story.  Although it is a full book, it had the pacing and feel more in line with that of a short story, including the way the ending of the story lands with the slow realization of what is happening having the feel of The Gift of the Magi or The Lottery. 

If you are a fan of horror, then this may very well be for you, but I can't really recommend it otherwise. I did give serious thought to a Not Not Recommendation, but ultimately decided that it really was just too disturbing for that.

Not recommended.

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In many ways this is a traditional masculine war novel. It is set in Leningrad during World War II, but I am not sure that I got the sense that the narrative was true to that era.  To be fair, I know very little about the Russian front in WWII, but there was something about significant pieces of the plot that seemed unlikely to be true and to a large extent it felt like another example of "historical fiction" that imports model progressive values into historical scenarios that I am not at all sure that people experienced at the time and that just feels like a erasure of actual historical experiences. 

​Here, it is a young woman posing as a boy and a Jewish boy pretending to be a soldier, both "hiding in plain sight," who just happen to come into contact again and again by people who step up to protect him that felt too much like a story about how many saviors there were in a time and place where we know that these types of heroes were few and far between.  The chances that they would come into contact with this many just ignores how unusual that probably would have been. And there were just so many little examples of this, like the way sex workers are treated with so much respect and compassion by the protagonist solider and his friend also felt so unlikely that I couldn't get into the story. There was something not just about the substance of these interactions, but the voice that just did not feel congruent with other writing from and about that era that I spent the entire book thinking about whether the book was researched and historical accurate and not about the actual story itself.  I found it distracting for this reason and just couldn't get into it. 

Not recommended.
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For a highly hyped book with rave reviews, I was shocked by how little I enjoyed this read.  I even went back and re-read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn thinking maybe I needed a more recent read of that book in order to appreciate it, but even after that, I was at a complete loss as to why this book is so popular.  The premise of the book is fine--the reimaging of the Huckleberry Finn story from the perspective of Jim.  But the execution of the story is confusing.  The plotting is problematic, the character development bland, and the writing style gimmicky. 

Just as a starting place, it is unclear whether this is supposed to be historical fiction or historical fantasy.  Most of the time, it seems like the author is genuinely trying to present an imagined history in which a slave could be exceptionally well educated entirely in secret and able to move between a facade of being uneducated in front of white people, but then seamlessly shifting to talking like an educated white person when no white people were around. While this seems like it might be an empowering retelling of history, I was just baffled because in other places the story was so far fetched, especially at the end, that it was more like historical fantasy.  And there was no way for me to see that ending as empowering, knowing the impact that outcome would have had in actual history for the slaves involved.

While this might just be my inability to suspend disbelief in order to enjoy a book and revel in an alternative narrative that could be seen as having a happy ending (and I will accept that this is perhaps a flaw in my reader skillset in general), this wasn't even what bothered me the most in this story.  What bothered me the very most was the portrayal of women and girls in this story.  Jim is supposed to be entirely driven by his adoration of his wife and daughter, but the Big Reveal at the end of the book  MAKES NO SENSE on the surface and was never explored in any depth.  SPOILER ALERT: In the telling of this story, he is actually Huck's biological father because he had a relationship with his mother, whom he grew up with, and which was always kept secret. Despite allusion to this by one random character earlier in the book, it is ignored until the very end and then never explained.  Was the wife that Jim was so committed to freeing aware he had a clandestine affair with his childhood friend, who was also his owner's wife? If his daughter was 9 and Huck was 13 and Huck remembers the fighting in the household when his mother died, was Jim in a relationship with both mother's at the same time? Obviously possible, but why is this never addressed? 

I have so many questions that are completely ignored because the sole purpose of women characters in this book is to be introduced in the context of their rapes.  Jim's reaction to Sammy's disclosure that she was being raped by her owner only makes sense in a modern context.  It is impossible for me to believe that Jim would have been shocked to hear that slave owners raped their slaves and his huge reaction to this revelation, resulting in reckless behavior that put at risk his ability to free his own wife and daughter, whom he was afraid were being raped, just didn't make sense. Could it have made sense?  Yes, it is possible, but it was never explored.  All the women were introduced in the context of their rapes (or sexual relationship with Jim, such as his wife and Huck's mother) and then written out of the story before anything of interest was said.

Do not recommend.
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Set in the 1700s, this historical fiction is set in the extremely remote St. Kilda on the island of Hirta in an isolated and rugged region of northwest Scotland.  The story takes place when a boat trip full of boy and a few men go hunting for a particularly coveted type of bird as part of an annual tradition.  They get stranded on what seems to be a small rock formation in the sea.  The dozen or so men and boys are hungry, cold, and homesick--left with virtually no resources whatsoever. 

As if the isolation, cold, and hunger weren't enough to endure, the fake preacher does serious harm as he tries to control the boys with fear mongering and shame, which is especially heartbreaking as the younger boys, who are maybe 9 or 10, are tormented by the separation from their homes and starting to lose hope of rescue.  His approach to imposing confession and attributing sin to the children is horrifying, especially when he insists on everyone shunning one of the children for seven days by not talking to him at all.  He also tells the youngest child that when they run out of birds to eat, they will start eating the youngest kids first.  The brutality of the story just keeps coming in waves, without the kind of breaks for meaning or connection that I would have wanted to see.

The story is reminiscent of Lord of The Flies in that it is a group of boys stranded on an island, but this is a significantly better book than that one. This is dark in a different way, as the adults do nothing to mitigate the stress for the children.

There is also a weird side story about one of the children whose mother has been secretly raising her as a boy because she was afraid to tell the child's father that she wasn't a boy when she was born. This fact becomes evidence while they are marooned and the whole way it is handled is just odd.  I have to think it isn't possible to know how that would have been handled in the 1770's, but the way the book portrays it just felt off.

Apparently loosely based on a true story, the ending is especially depressing.  I am pretty surprised it is classified as a children's book, too.

Do not recommend.

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A Holocaust novel, this book reminded me so much of the more well-known novel The Book Thief that I actually had to make sure that I wasn't misremembering that it was the same book--or at least the same author.  While The Book Thief was narrated by Death, The Little Liar was narrated by Truth.  The story is, of course, both incredibly depressing while also being a story of resilience for those who survived and it does a good job of highlighting the different ways the characters survived and what it cost them. I found the respect for the disparate impacts of trauma on different people to be relatively sophisticate and interesting. Some of the plot twists felt farfetched and the over-done theme of the non-Jews who, out of no where, stepped in to help was trite. The use of Truth as the narrator felt a bit gimmicky.  I had some sympathy for this, since it must be difficult to find a fresh way to engage with material this dark that will find an audience and yet I just found the narration scheme to be distracting.  I am likely in the minority in this respect, though, since I had a similar reaction to The Book Thief.  
 
Not recommended. 
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I understand that this nearly 1,000 page book is revered as brilliant and that the author has received the Nobel Prize for Literature for another novel.  I know that many intelligent people think the book is amazing. I, however, feel like it was pretty much lost on me.  I found it a slog, pedantic, male-centric, and frankly boring.  Yes, some of the historical pieces were mildly interesting, but I have decided that I do not find 18th century Poland particularly enthralling.  Sometimes, it felt like the descriptions would never end and that the plot was a very long ways away from the words I was reading.  Other times, some of the narrative would pull me in, particularly the portions that compared the Jewish protagonist's exploration of other communities. But, those parts were short lived and almost as soon as I realized I was engaged, the moment would be gone and I would return to feeling that this book was just too heady for me.


Do not recommend.

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