The Houdini Girl

The Houdini Girl by Martyn Bedford

When his live-in girlfriend dies under suspicious circumstances, professional magician Fletcher (Red) Brandon is surprised to learn just how little he knew about Rosa and her life before he met her. His grief fuels his desire to truly understand Rosa if only posthumously, leading him into a world he never knew existed.

I really didn't know what to expect from The Houdini Girl. It's quite hard to go into any detail about the book and its plot without including any spoilers. Suffice it to say that The Houdini Girl was much more substantial than I expected it to be. Readers follow Red on his quest to understand the mystery behind her death, discovering as he does the secrets in Rosa's past and the world of which she was once a part.

The Houdini Girl is layered and well-researched. The characters are fullbodied and Red, even at his most unsympathetic, is entirely relateable.

Salem Falls

Salem Falls by Jodi Picoult

In Salem Falls, Picoult takes on the issue of statutory rape aeasoning her narrative with modern-day witch-hunting (hence Salem Falls).

The novel opens with protagonist Jack McBride newly released from prison after serving an eight-month sentence. With no where to go - no life to return to - McBride arbitrarily settles in the small town of Salem Falls, where he hopes to eek out a quiet existence. Just when things are starting to come together for McBride, it becomes known that he's a registered sex offender. The townspeople are up-in-arms. He's threatened, the house he lives in is vandalized, and he's beaten-up by masked thugs. He's then arrested for allegedly raping a teenage girl who lives in the town at which point the story gains momentum.

Salem Falls was a bit predictable (I'd guessed at the final twist fairly early on, but I've also read a lot of Picoult and know how she works), but readable nonetheless. I think I may have to stop reading Picoult though. Her books are compelling, but her worldview is much too bleak.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

The focus of this short novel is a conversation between a bearded Pakistani man and an American man he has just met, which takes place during the course of one evening in a Lahore café. In his mesmerizing monologue, Changez describes his life: education at Princeton, job at a high-powered finance firm in New York, the love of his life, and what brought him back to Pakistan.

A unique post-9/11 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a page-turner without resorting to plot devices. Well-written and thought-provoking, the novel is more subtle than its title suggests, dealing less with the political, religious, and sociological reasons behind Islamic fundamentalism than with the disillusionment of youth and issues of cultural identity.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Mohsin Hamid grew up in Lahore, Pakistan. His first novel, Moth Smoke, was a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist and New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

~ ~ ~

Starting this month I'm going a Book of the Month feature on one of our library blogs to highlight some of our holdings. My plan is to alternate between fiction and nonfiction every month. I think I'll have to be strict about that because otherwise I'd tend to choose fiction much more often than nonfiction.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is the first book I chose for this feature mostly because it was featured in Recent Acquisitions on the front page of the library website for the better part of December and that made the book gathering dust on Mt. TBR quite unbearable.

book clubbing in January

Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult was chosen as a filler when it took longer to set up our voting than we expected. Having read a number of Picoult's other books (Keeping Faith, Mercy, My Sister's Keeper, Nineteen Minutes, The Pact, Plain Truth, and The Tenth Circle), I was sure that Vanishing Acts would be good discussion fodder.

The issue at hand in Vanishing Acts is whether it is ever acceptable to kidnap a child.

One thing that we all agreed on is the Picoult tried to cram way too much stuff into this book. The novel could have easily been made into two and there wouldn't be so much to distract from the main story. (Honestly even though Fitz was a main character, he really didn't need to be in the story at all; then there was Ruthann...)

Since Picoult's general modus operandi is to take an issue and blur the lines so much that you really can no longer see it as a black-and-white issue it was interesting that that wasn't the case in this book (at least with the main issue, Andrew's antics in jail are a different matter entirely). As a reader, your support of Andrew and his decision never really wavers throughout the book.

What I found most interesting about my book club discussion is that most members who hadn't read Picoult before were interested in reading her other books, while most of the members who had read her before were ambivalent about reading her in the future.

Nineteen Minutes

I recently read Jodi Picoult's most recent novel, Nineteen Minutes.

Note: This blog post does not contain any spoilers, but it also doesn't include my full reaction to the book. If you'd like to read it all, check out my BookCrossing journal entry.

Picoult writes what I call issue fiction. At this point I've read quite a number of her books (Keeping Faith, Mercy, My Sister's Keeper, The Pact, Plain Truth, The Tenth Circle), but the first one I read (Plain Truth) remains my favorite though I'm not sure why (my first taste of her? the Amish angle? the twist? the quasi-happy ending, which I mention a little later in this paragraph, actually making sense in the story?). Some of her books (and this one in particular) are just so depressing reading them is almost unbearable at times. The disconnect is how she always manages to come up with a quasi-happy ending.

I wasn't in high school at the time of the Columbine shootings, but I was in my 2nd year of college and I remember being glued to the television set. This isn't an easy subject and I guess Picoult handled it well in Nineteen Minutes. The twist was a bit much, but I guess it is in keeping with her style. Yes, things are never black-and-white, but I think sometimes Picoult blurs things overly much to get her point across.

The Tenth Circle

The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult

Synopsis:
Trixie Stone is fourteen years old and in love for the first time. She's also the light of her father's life — a straight-A student; a freshman in high school who is pretty and popular; a girl who's always looked up to Daniel Stone as a hero. Until, that is, her world is turned upside down with a single act of violence...and suddenly everything Trixie has believed about her family — and herself — seems to be a lie.
The Tenth Circle looks at that delicate moment when a child learns that her parents don't know all of the answers and when being a good parent means letting go of your child. It asks whether you can reinvent yourself in the course of a lifetime or if your mistakes are carried forever — if life is, as in any good comic book, a struggle to control good and evil, or if good and evil control you.

I've read quite a few of Picoult's books -- Keeping Faith, Mercy, My Sister's Keeper, The Pact, Plain Truth -- and I have to say that The Tenth Circle is pretty typical of her work. There's a family filled with fairly well-drawn characters, there's stress and strain within that family, and there's an issue (I like to call Picoult's work "issue fiction").

What makes the book stand out from the other books in her oeuvre is the integration of the graphic novel into the story. The artwork by Dustin Weaver fits well into the novel, a segment at the beginning of each chapter, masquerading as a graphic novel that the father is working on during this tumultuous time in his life.

I liked Picoult's use of Dante and native culture in this book, but I wasn't terribly surprised by it because she's done something along those lines in some of her other books (most notably in Plain Truth and Mercy).

The quick and dirty review: One of her better books, but I wasn't blown away by it.