Book Review: In the Sea There Are Crocodiles by Fabio Geda

Thursday 1 September, 2011 By 6 Comments

Title: In the Sea There are Crocodiles: Based on the True Story of Enaiatollah Akbari
Author: Fabio Geda
Publisher: Doubleday
Publication Date: August 9, 2011
Hardcover: 224 pages
ISBN: 978-0385534734
Genre: Literary Fiction

From the Publisher:

When ten-year-old Enaiatollah Akbari’s small village in Afghanistan falls prey to Taliban rule in early 2000, his mother shepherds the boy across the border into Pakistan but has to leave him there all alone to fend for himself. Thus begins Enaiat’s remarkable and often punish­ing five-year ordeal, which takes him through Iran, Turkey, and Greece before he seeks political asylum in Italy at the age of fifteen.

Along the way, Enaiat endures the crippling physical and emotional agony of dangerous border crossings, trekking across bitterly cold mountain pathways for days on end or being stuffed into the false bottom of a truck. But not every­one is as resourceful, resilient, or lucky as Enaiat, and there are many heart-wrenching casualties along the way.

Based on Enaiat’s close collaboration with Italian novelist Fabio Geda and expertly rendered in English by an award- winning translator, this novel reconstructs the young boy’s memories, perfectly preserving the childlike perspective and rhythms of an intimate oral history.

Told with humor and humanity, In the Sea There Are Crocodiles brilliantly captures Enaiat’s moving and engaging voice and lends urgency to an epic story of hope and survival.

My Review:

In the Sea There Are Crocodiles by Fabio Geda captures the memories of events of young Enaiatollah Akbari, as he experienced them from the time he left his life in Afghanistan with his mother until he reached Italy, alone and in search of political asylum.  Knowing only of life under the Taliban, young Enaiat is taken to Pakistan by his mother, who subsequently leaves him there, a 10-year-old who must learn survival with only his mother’s guiding principles: do not use drugs or weapons, and do not steal.  Considered fiction because Geda has taken Enaiat’s words and crafted them into this story, the events and what was experienced by Enaiat are his true accounts.  Geda has written this novel with utmost respect for what was endured, the hardships, the atrocities, and the triumphs of Enaiat, and this respect is apparent in Geda’s style which is true to the mind of a young boy.  This story is told in as close to the direct voice of Enaiat as was possible, a poignant reminder of what human’s seek in life: a place that is safe and peaceful, a family that is nurturing and loving.  Readers will cry for this boy who seeks no pity from his plights, and then cheer as his perseverance brings him to a triumphant conclusion.  I highly recommend Geda’s In the Sea There Are Crocodiles to all readers for it is a gem.

About the Author and Translator:

Fabio Geda is an Italian novelist who writes for several Italian magazines and newspapers. This is his first book to be translated into English.

Howard Curtis is a London-based translator of Italian and French texts, for which he has won numerous awards.

I received a complimentary arc of In the Sea There Are Crocodiles by Fabio Geda from Doubleday to review. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned novel.

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Book Review: Shut Your Eyes Tight by John Verdon

Thursday 18 August, 2011 By 8 Comments

Title: Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2)
Author: John Verdon
Publisher: Crown
Publication Date: July 12, 2011
Hardcover: 528 pages
ISBN: 978-0307717894
Genre: Fiction, Thriller

From the Publisher:

 When he was the NYPD’s top homicide investigator, Dave Gurney was never comfortable with the label the press gave him: super detective. He was simply a man who, when faced with a puzzle, wanted to know. He was called to the investigative hunt by the presumptuous arrogance of murderers – by their smug belief that they could kill without leaving a trace. There was always a trace, Gurney believed.

Except what if one day there wasn’t?Dave Gurney, a few months past the Mellery case that pulled him out of retirement and then nearly killed him, is trying once again to adjust to his country house’s bucolic rhythms when he receives a call about a case so seductively bewildering that the thought of not looking into it seems unimaginable—even if his beloved wife, Madeleine, would rather he do anything but.The facts of what has occurred are horrible: a blushing bride, newly wed to an eminent psychiatrist and just minutes from hearing her congratulatory toast, is found decapitated, her head apparently severed by a machete. Though police investigators believe that a Mexican gardener killed the young woman in a fit of jealous fury, the victim’s mother—a chilly high-society beauty—is having none of it. Reluctantly drawn in, Dave is quickly buffeted by a series of revelations that transform the bizarrely monstrous into the monstrously bizarre.  Underneath it all may exist one of the darkest criminal schemes imaginable. And as Gurney begins deciphering its grotesque outlines, some of his most cherished assumptions about himself are challenged, causing him to stare into an abyss so deep that it threatens to swallow not just him but Madeleine, too.
Desperate to protect Madeleine and bring an end to the madness, Gurney ultimately discovers that the killer has left a trace after all. Unfortunately, the revelation may come too late to save his own life.With Shut Your Eyes Tight, John Verdon delivers on the promise of his internationally bestselling debut, Think of a Number, creating a portrait of evil let loose across generations that is as rife with moments of touching humanity as it is with spellbinding images of perversity.



My Review:

Shut Your Eyes Tight by John Verdon is a captivating thriller and the second book in the Detective Dave Gurney series, a series beginning with Verdon’s debut Think of a Number.  In Shut Your Eyes Tight, Gurney is once again called out of retirement to investigate a heinous beheading and readers will delight in the superior style that Verdon has adopted in this most compelling series of thrillers.  Verdon masterfully crafted this mystery thrill ride where Gurney finds evil far beyond his wildest expectations as he investigates the gruesome and bizarre death of a new bride in the middle of her wedding reception.  Verdon has cleverly crafted an exceptional thriller while exemplifying beautiful literary characteristics in his use of vivid descriptions and details of the characters, their lives, and their surroundings.   Shut Your Eyes Tight was a book that could have gone on forever and I would not complain, and I am glad to see he has continued in the tradition of excellence set out with the original Dave Gurney novel.  Without reservation I recommend Shut Your Eyes Tight to anyone looking for an exceptionally thought out thriller.

About the Author:

JOHN VERDON has held several executive positions with Manhattan advertising firms, but like his protagonist, he recently relocated with his wife to rural upstate New York. Shut Your Eyes Tight is his second novel.

For more reviews of the book, please follow the TLC Book Tour.

I received a complimentary ARC of Shut Your Eyes Tight by John Verdon from TLC Book Tours to be a part of this tour and offer my honest review of the book. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned book.

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Book Review: Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell

Friday 12 August, 2011 By 6 Comments

Title: Let’s Take the Long Way Home
Author: Gail Caldwell
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition
Publication Date: August 9, 2011
Paperback: 224 pages
ISBN: 978-0812979114
Genre:  Memoir

From the Publisher:

They met over their dogs. Gail Caldwell and Caroline Knapp (author of Drinking: A Love Story) became best friends, talking about everything from their love of books and their shared history of a struggle with alcohol to their relationships with men. Walking the woods of New England and rowing on the Charles River, these two private, self-reliant women created an attachment more profound than either of them could ever have foreseen. Then, several years into this remarkable connection, Knapp was diagnosed with cancer. With her signature exquisite prose, Caldwell mines the deepest levels of devotion, and courage in this gorgeous memoir about treasuring a best friend, and coming of age in midlife. Let’s Take the Long Way Home is a celebration of the profound transformations that come from intimate connection—and it affirms, once again, why Gail Caldwell is recognized as one of our bravest and most honest literary voices.

My Review:

Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell is a beautiful and heartbreaking memoir about the author’s friendship with fellow writer Caroline Knapp.  In what could only be described as a poignant and heartfelt account of life, loss, grief and healing, Caldwell tells of how she and Knapp became friends, how the common threads that brought them together closed a vast divide in their respective upbringings.  Readers will delight in the flowing and descriptive prose that Caldwell pens about and reflects upon the moments that built her friendship and how these moments, ones that may be difficult to recognize at the time because they are the ones we often take for granted, are truly the ones that matter.  While very sad at times, Let’s Take the Long Way Home offers a piece of Caldwell’s heart to her readers, lending her deepest thoughts, her best moments and those that were so painful.  This memoir shows how it is the way in which we cherish our moments that give us our strength, how these moments prepare us for those times when all seems lost, and how the bonds of friendship prevail even through death.  I highly recommend Let’s Take the Long Way Home to all readers and think discussion groups looking for an emotional memoir with strong lessons will enjoy this book.

About the Author:

Gail Caldwell is the former chief book critic for The Boston Globe, where she was a staff writer and critic for more than twenty years. In 2001, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. She is also the author of A Strong West Wind, a memoir of her native Texas. Caldwell lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

For more reviews of the book, please follow the TLC Book Tour.

I received a copy of Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell from TLC Book Tours to be a part of this tour and offer my honest review of the book. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned book.

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Book Review: Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz

Friday 5 August, 2011 By 5 Comments

Title: Northwest Corner
Author: John Burnham Schwartz
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: July 26, 2011
Hardcover: 304 pages
ISBN: 978-1400068456
Genre: Fiction

From the Publisher:

The New York Times Book Review called Reservation Road “a triumph,” and the novel was universally acclaimed. Now, in a brilliant literary performance by one of our most compelling and compassionate writers, John Burnham Schwartz reintroduces us to Reservation Road’s unforgettable characters in a superb new work of fiction that stands magnificently on its own. Northwest Corner is a riveting story about the complex, fierce, ultimately inspiring resilience of families in the face of life’s most difficult and unexpected challenges.

Twelve years after a tragic accident and a cover-up that led to prison time, Dwight Arno, now fifty, is a man who has started over without exactly moving on. Living alone in California, haunted yet keeping his head down, Dwight manages a sporting goods store and dates a woman to whom he hasn’t revealed the truth about his past. Then an unexpected arrival throws his carefully neutralized life into turmoil and exposes all that he’s hidden.

Sam, Dwight’s estranged college-age son, has shown up without warning, fleeing a devastating incident in his own life. In its way, Sam’s sense of guilt is as crushing as his father’s. As the two men are forced to confront their similar natures and their half-buried hopes for connection, they must also search for redemption and love. In turn, they dramatically transform the lives of the women around them: the ex-wives, mothers, and lovers they have turned to in their desperate attempts to somehow rewrite, outrun, or eradicate the past.

Told in the resonant voices of everyday people gripped in the emotional riptide of lived life, Northwest Corner is at once tough and heart-lifting, an urgent, powerful story about family bonds that can never be broken and the wayward roads that lead us back to those we love.

My Review:

Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz is a brilliantly crafted novel about families and their ability to survive in spite of adversity and challenges.  The characters are developed in masterful fashion as Schwartz employs multiple, alternating points of view to learn how Dwight Arno, a fifty-year-old man who just finished prison time after forever altering the lives of the Lerner family, and is beginning life anew with a girlfriend and new job.  A tale about secrets, truth, love, and redemption, Dwight, after facing his own mistakes now must deal with his estranged son’s own transgressions.  Readers are brought through the heartaches that still plague the Lerners, the sense of emptiness from their own loss, while also bearing witness to the psychological turmoil that the Arno family is striving to endure.  Schwartz, in a deliberate and beautiful style, captivates the reader’s attention with suspense and empathy for each of these flawed and damaged characters and while Northwest Corner follows on from Schwartz’s novel Reservation Road where his characters first come to life, his latest work is perfect as a stand alone novel.  With so many familial emotions and experiences in the Arno and Lerner families, there exists an abundance of topics for book discussion groups and I highly recommend Northwest Corner to all readers.

For more information about author John Burnham Schwartz or his books please visit his website at www.johnburnhamschwartz.com

For more reviews of the book, please follow the TLC Book Tour.

I received an arc of Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz from TLC Book Tours to be a part of this tour and offer my honest review of the book. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned book.

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Book Review: Close Your Eyes by Amanda Eyre Ward

Thursday 4 August, 2011 By 8 Comments

Title: Close Your Eyes
Author: Amanda Eyre Ward
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: July 26, 2011
Hardcover: 272 pages
ISBN: 978-0345494481
Genre: Fiction, Mystery

From the Publisher:

In Close Your Eyes, the author of the bestselling How to Be Lost spins another mesmerizing tale of buried family secrets.

For most of her life, Lauren Mahdian has been certain of two things: that her mother is dead, and that her father is a murderer.

Before the horrific tragedy, Lauren led a sheltered life in a wealthy corner of America, in a town outside Manhattan on the banks of Long Island Sound, a haven of luxurious homes, manicured lawns, and seemingly perfect families. Here Lauren and her older brother, Alex, thought they were safe.

But one morning, six-year-old Lauren and eight-year-old Alex awoke after a night spent in their tree house to discover their mother’s body and their beloved father arrested for the murder.

Years later, Lauren is surrounded by uncertainty. Her one constant is Alex, always her protector, still trying to understand the unraveling of his idyllic childhood. But Lauren feels even more alone when Alex reveals that he’s been in contact over the years with their imprisoned father—and that he believes he and his sister have yet to learn the full story of their mother’s death.

Then Alex disappears.

As Lauren is forced to peek under the floorboards of her carefully constructed memories, she comes to question the version of her history that she has clung to so fiercely. Lauren’s search for the truth about what happened on that fateful night so many years ago is a riveting tale that will keep readers feverishly turning pages.

My Review:

Close Your Eyes by Amanda Eyre Ward is an intense story of tragedy, clouded conviction, and the sense of loneliness it left for Lauren Mahdian whose father was convicted of murdering her mother when Lauren and her brother, Alex, were respectively six and eight years old.  Now in her twenties, Lauren begins to uncover secrets pertaining to her mother’s murder, gripping readers’ attention as the plot unfolds.  Ward develops each of her characters carefully and deliberately throughout the novel, providing readers with a sense of knowing, and appreciating the complexities of Lauren, her brother and their relationship.  Masterfully crafted prose brings the story to life, a story about guilt, love, trust and redemption as played out in Lauren’s quest for truth in her mother’s death.  Memorable for its emotion and beautiful prose, Close Your Eyes is a fictional drama that I strongly recommend and can imagine a lively discussion group conversation on this emotionally compelling tale.

For more information about Amanda Eyre Ward or her books please visit her website AmandaWard.com

For more reviews of the book, please follow the TLC Book Tour.

I received an arc of Close Your Eyes by Amanda Eyre Ward from TLC Book Tours to be a part of this tour and offer my honest review of the book. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned book.

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Book Review: The Homecoming of Samuel Lake by Jenny Wingfield

Tuesday 2 August, 2011 By 17 Comments

Title: The Homecoming of Samuel Lake
Author: Jenny Wingfield
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: July 12, 2011
Hardcover: 352 pages
ISBN: 978-0385344081
Genre: Fiction

From the Publisher:

Every first Sunday in June, members of the Moses clan gather for an annual reunion at “the old home place,” a sprawling hundred-acre farm in Arkansas. And every year, Samuel Lake, a vibrant and committed young preacher, brings his beloved wife, Willadee Moses, and their three children back for the festivities. The children embrace the reunion as a welcome escape from the prying eyes of their father’s congregation; for Willadee it’s a precious opportunity to spend time with her mother and father, Calla and John. But just as the reunion is getting under way, tragedy strikes, jolting the family to their core: John’s untimely death and, soon after, the loss of Samuel’s parish, which set the stage for a summer of crisis and profound change.

In the midst of it all, Samuel and Willadee’s outspoken eleven-year-old daughter, Swan, is a bright light. Her high spirits and fearlessness have alternately seduced and bedeviled three generations of the family. But it is Blade Ballenger, a traumatized eight-year-old neighbor, who soon captures Swan’s undivided attention. Full of righteous anger, and innocent of the peril facing her and those she loves, Swan makes it her mission to keep the boy safe from his terrifying father.

With characters who spring to life as vividly as if they were members of one’s own family, and with the clear-eyed wisdom that illuminates the most tragic—and triumphant—aspects of human nature, Jenny Wingfield emerges as one of the most vital, engaging storytellers writing today. In The Homecoming of Samuel Lake she has created a memorable and lasting work of fiction.

My Review:

The Homecoming of Samuel Lake is an extraordinary debut by author Jenny Wingfield who tells of one young preacher’s encounters with sin, forgiveness and their aftermath.  Set in 1950s Arkansas, what has become an annual event for the Moses clan, bringing together Samuel and his wife, Willadee, with many family members and friends including Willadee’s parents, Calla and John.  The tragic death of John rocks the family to its core and ultimately brings about transformations in the family that forever emblazon John’s life in their memories.  Wingfield masterfully crafts her characters with real flaws and traits so believable that readers will gain a sense of knowing her characters. I was particularly touched by the Moses’ 11-year-old daughter, Swan, whose friendship with Blade is both heartbreaking for the parental abuse that Blade must endure and heartwarming for the love, safety and compassion Blade finds in his new found friend.  Wingfield has shown her talent in this tale that contrasts good and evil, sin and redemption, animosity and compassion.  Book discussion groups will find this debut to be an excellent choice to branch out into discussions of many universal themes. I highly recommend The Homecoming of Samuel Lake to all readers.

About the Author:

Jenny Wingfield lives in Texas with her rescued dogs, cats, and horses. Her screenplay credits include The Man in the Moon and The Outsider. The Homecoming of Samuel Lake is her first novel.

For more reviews of the book, please follow the TLC Book Tour.

I received an arc of The Homecoming of Samuel Lake by Jenny Wingfield from TLC Book Tours to be a part of this tour and offer my honest review of the book. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned book.

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Book Review: Next To Love by Ellen Feldman

Tuesday 19 July, 2011 By 22 Comments


Title: Next to Love
Author: Ellen Feldman
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Publication Date: July 26, 2011
Hardcover: 304 pages
ISBN: 978-0812992717
Genre: Historical Fiction

From the Publisher:

“War . . . next to love, has most captured the world’s imagination.”—Eric Partridge, British lexicographer, 1914

A story of love, war, loss, and the scars they leave, Next to Love follows the lives of three young women and their men during the years of World War II and its aftermath, beginning with the men going off to war and ending a generation later, when their children are on the cusp of their own adulthood.

Set in a small town in Massachusetts, the novel follows three childhood friends, Babe, Millie, and Grace, whose lives are unmoored when their men are called to duty. And yet the changes that are thrust upon them move them in directions they never dreamed possible—while their husbands and boyfriends are enduring their own transformations. In the decades that follow, the three friends lose their innocence, struggle to raise their children, and find meaning and love in unexpected places. And as they change, so does America—from a country in which people know their place in the social hierarchy to a world in which feminism, the Civil Rights movement, and technological innovations present new possibilities—and uncertainties. And yet Babe, Millie, and Grace remain bonded by their past, even as their children grow up and away and a new society rises from the ashes of the war.

Beautifully crafted and unforgettable, Next to Love depicts the enduring power of love and friendship, and illuminates a transformational moment in American history.

My Review:

Next to Love by Ellen Feldman is a heartbreaking and emotional story from the time of WWII and its aftermath and the effects the war had on a group of three women who all saw their husbands off to war in 1941.  Beautifully crafted in rich, descriptive prose, Feldman literarily transports readers to meet Millie, Grace and Babe, in first person, in this fictional tale that is so well executed that it might just as well be real.  Through touching dialogue and realistic characters, Feldman tells of the emotional turmoil each woman must endure not only during the war, but following the war all the way through to the 1960s.  Feldman captures the time periods in exquisite detail, but more importantly, she writes about these extraordinarily strong women who go through a lot together over the years and shows how their relationships evolve as their feelings and emotions change.  This story was one that I could not put entirely away after completing the book as I felt I needed to share some of the emotions with others.  For this reason, I strongly recommend Next to Love to book discussion groups for it is such a beautifully touching and emotional journey that needs to be shared among readers.

About the Author:

Ellen Feldman, a 2009 Guggenheim fellow, is the author of Scottsboro, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank, and Lucy. She lives in New York City.

To learn more about author Ellen Feldman, please visit her website.

For more reviews of the book, please follow the TLC Book Tour.

I received a copy of Next to Love by Ellen Feldman from TLC Book Tours to be a part of this tour and offer my honest review of the book. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned book.

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Book Review: Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl by Sandra Beasley

Tuesday 12 July, 2011 By 8 Comments

Title: Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl:Tales from an Allergic Life
Author: Sandra Beasley
Publisher: Crown
Publication Date: July 12, 2011
Hardcover: 240 pages
ISBN: 978-0307588111
Genre: Memoir


A snippet from the Publisher:
Like twelve million other Americans, Sandra Beasley suffers from food allergies. Her allergies—severe and lifelong—include dairy, egg, soy, beef, shrimp, pine nuts, cucumbers, cantaloupe, honeydew, mango, macadamias, pistachios, cashews, swordfish, and mustard. Add to that mold, dust, grass and tree pollen, cigarette smoke, dogs, rabbits, horses, and wool, and it’s no wonder Sandra felt she had to live her life as “Allergy Girl.” When butter is deadly and eggs can make your throat swell shut, cupcakes and other treats of childhood are out of the question—and so Sandra’s mother used to warn guests against a toxic, frosting-tinged kiss with “Don’t kill the birthday girl!”

My Review:

Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life by Sandra Beasley is a poignant memoir of one person’s struggles and challenges growing up with and continuing to live with severe allergies.  A very serious issue to say the least, Beasley does not make light of her list of potentially fatal allergies yet finds a wit to her writing style that not only helps readers understand what basic daily living is like in a world of severe allergies, but provides readers with a bit of her own sense of humour.  Beasley takes her memoir out of the typical mold of sharing her life experiences and does something that, as a reader, I truly value; she educates.  Severe allergies are not particularly familiar to me and although I know about the heightened awareness of them, I have never heard first-hand, from anyone I know, how everyday activities that most take for granted can create dilemmas or hazards for those afflicted.  Beasley shares by anecdotes and using also fact-based explanations her life experiences; experiences that truly are difficult to understand for those not afflicted, but thanks to Beasley’s memoir, readers seeking a greater appreciation for severe allergies and the obstacles these allergies place along life’s path for some will find Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl to deliver.  I encourage all readers to read Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl as I think it provides a well-written account of one woman’s struggles with an affliction generally not understood by most.

To learn more about author Sandra Beasley, please visit her website.

I received a complimentary arc of Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl by Sandra Beasley from Crown Publishers. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned novel.

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Book Review: The Long Journey Home by Margaret Robison

Thursday 30 June, 2011 By 4 Comments


Title: The Long Journey Home
Author: Margaret Robison
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Publication Date: May 17, 2011
Hardcover: 400 pages
ISBN: 978-1400068692
Genre: Memoir

From the Publisher:

First introduced to the world in her sons’ now-classic memoirs—Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors and John Elder Robison’s Look Me in the Eye—Margaret Robison now tells her own haunting and lyrical story. A poet and teacher by profession, Robison describes her Southern Gothic childhood, her marriage to a handsome, brilliant man who became a split-personality alcoholic and abusive husband, the challenges she faced raising two children while having psychotic breakdowns of her own, and her struggle to regain her sanity.

Robison grew up in southern Georgia, where the façade of 1950s propriety masked all sorts of demons, including alcoholism, misogyny, repressed homosexuality, and suicide. She met her husband, John Robison, in college, and together they moved up north, where John embarked upon a successful academic career and Margaret brought up the children and worked on her art and poetry. Yet her husband’s alcoholism and her collapse into psychosis, and the eventual disintegration of their marriage, took a tremendous toll on their family: Her older son, John Elder, moved out of the house when he was a teenager, and her younger son, Chris (who later renamed himself Augusten), never completed high school. When Margaret met Dr. Rodolph Turcotte, the therapist who was treating her husband, she felt understood for the first time and quickly fell under his idiosyncratic and, eventually, harmful influence.

Robison writes movingly and honestly about her mental illness, her shortcomings as a parent, her difficult marriage, her traumatic relationship with Dr. Turcotte, and her two now-famous children, Augusten Burroughs and John Elder Robison, who have each written bestselling memoirs about their family. She also writes inspiringly about her hard-earned journey to sanity and clarity. An astonishing and enduring story, The Long Journey Home is a remarkable and ultimately uplifting account of a complicated, afflicted twentieth-century family.

My Review:

The Long Journey Home by Margaret Robison is a personal memoir that takes readers into the difficult figurative places Robison experienced throughout her life.  Readers see a perseverant woman with a lifetime’s worth of celebratory successes and likewise heartbreaking failures.  Her journey includes difficult times struggling with mental illness, experiences with outpouring compassion, spirituality and ultimately, redemption.  Through her chronological telling of events that influenced her decisions and emotional well-being, readers learn of struggles with alcoholism, suicide, her self-reflection on her parenting mistakes and challenges from her marital discontent.  Though I did not feel this memoir was one of the better crafted of those I have read in recent months, Robison portrays honesty in her writing that makes this memoir raw, unembellished and poignantly descriptive of the life experiences that brought her to where she is today.  I recommend The Long Journey Home to readers seeking a good memoir that depicts plenty of life struggles and ultimately the overcoming of these hurdles and personal growth that accompanies learning to accept those hurdles that cannot be overcome.

About the Author:

Margaret Robison is an artist and the author of four books of poetry. She lives in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts.

For more information about Margaret Robison please visit her website.

For more reviews of the book, please follow the TLC book tour.

I received an arc of The Long Journey Home by Margaret Robison from TLC Book Tours to be a part of this tour and offer my honest review of the book. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned book.

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Book Review: The Russian Affair by Michael Wallner

Monday 27 June, 2011 By 1 Comment


Title: The Russian Affair
Author: Michael Wallner
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Publication Date: April 12, 2011
Hardcover: 400 pages
ISBN: 978-0385532396
Genre: Fiction

A Book Synopsis:

Russian Affair is about twenty-nine-year-old Anna Viktorovna. She lives in Moscow with her son and father. Her husband is a junior officer in the Red Army, living seven time zones away. As much as she’s trying to stay strong through the difficulties of corruption and the police state, she meets a powerful Soviet official, Alexey Bulgyakov. As she gradually falls in love with a married man almost twice his age, she is told by the KGB colonel forces to spy on Alexey. But Anna isn’t the only character playing a double game.
For a more detailed description, please check out the Publisher’s site.

My Review:

The Russian Affair by Michael Wallner is an intriguing tale of a Russian woman’s life in the USSR, her life mixed with suspense and mystery surrounding her relationships within and outside of her family.  In the midst of Anna’s home struggles including unmet medical needs of her son, Petya, and her husband Leonid’s frequent absence to serve the Russian army, Wallner takes readers, along with Anna, on a journey into the secret side of Russian society, including into dealings within the KGB.  This is not a typical fast-paced suspense thriller as one might expect from a novel about spies, KGB, and the USSR.  Rather, Wallner cleverly crafts a deliberately slower story that cultivates a suspenseful backdrop while exploring the more realistic and delicate side of family relationships.  While some may find this slower pace to take away from the mystery and suspense, I found the combination of relationships and suspense to make for a better storyline.  I would recommend The Russian Affair to readers looking for an espionage/suspense story that does not conform to the usual mold.

About the Author:

Michael Wallner is the author of the international sensation April in Paris. He lives in Germany, where he is an actor and screenwriter, and divides his time between Berlin and the Black Forest.

I received a complimentary copy of The Russian Affair by Michael Wallner from Doubleday to offer my honest review of the book. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned book.

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