The Light Between the Oceans

This is an emotionally difficult book to read.  I feel I need to say that first, because while this is beautifully written, it will leave you shaken.  It is not always easy to know what is right and what is wrong, and the characters in this story struggle mightily with this dilema.  "Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled up that you can't tell which is which until you've shot 'em both, and then it's too late."

Tom Sherbourne returns from World War I to Australia and takes up a post as a lighthouse keeper on a remote island of the coast.  He convinces his love Isabel to marry him, and together they live many happy years on the island.  After many miscarriages Isabel's spirits begin to wain when a boat washes up on shore with a dead man and a baby, very much alive.  Rather then report the accident, Tom and Isabel decide to raise the baby on their own.  Over time they convince themselves that they did the right thing.  On a journey to the main land sometime later they meet the true mother of the baby, mourning the loss of her husband, and still searching for the baby she feels must have survived.

Kirkus Reviews starred (July 15, 2012)

The miraculous arrival of a child in the life of a barren couple delivers profound love but also the seeds of destruction. Moral dilemmas don't come more exquisite than the one around which Australian novelist Stedman constructs her debut. Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia emotionally scarred after distinguished service in World War I, so the solitary work of a lighthouse keeper on remote Janus Rock is attractive. Unexpectedly, Tom finds a partner on the mainland, Isabel; they marry and hope to start a family. But Isabel suffers miscarriages then loses a premature baby. Two weeks after that last catastrophe, a dinghy washes ashore containing a man's body and a crying infant. Isabel wants to keep the child, which she sees as a gift from God; Tom wants to act correctly and tell the authorities. But Isabel's joy in the baby is so immense and the prospect of giving her up so destructive, that Tom gives way. Years later, on a rare visit to the mainland, the couple learns about Hannah Roennfeldt, who lost her husband and baby at sea. Now guilt eats away at Tom, and when the truth does emerge, he takes the blame, leading to more moral self-examination and a cliffhanging conclusion. A polished, cleverly constructed and very precisely calculated first novel.

The Tiger's Wife

In the interest of complete disclosure, it took me two attempts to finish this book, and I still did not love it.  I know that this is not the same opinion of many, but I just could not get into it.  Now with that being said, this book has given a great number of exceptional reviews from experts and lay persons alike.  The author, Tea Obreht, made the New York Time's list of "20 under 40" exceptional writers.  Most people love the interweaving of two stories, mythical and contemporary, but I just found it confusing.  With that, I will give you the review and summary of others, and give you chance to read it and make your own decision!  Feel free to comment below.

Booklist starred (February 15, 2011 (Vol. 107, No. 12))

Drawing on the former Yugoslavia’s fabled past and recent bloodshed, Belgrade-born Obreht portrays two besieged doctors. Natalia is on an ill-advised “good will” medical mission at an orphanage on what is suddenly the “other side,” now that war has broken out, when she learns that her grandfather, a distinguished doctor forced out of his practice by ethnic divides, has died far from home. She is beset by memories, particularly of her grandfather taking her to the zoo to see the tigers. We learn the source of his fascination in mesmerizing flashbacks, meeting the village butcher, the deaf-mute Muslim woman he married, and a tiger who escaped the city zoo after it was bombed by the Germans. Of equal mythic mystery is the story of the “deathless man.” Moments of breathtaking magic, wildness, and beauty are paired with chilling episodes in which superstition overrides reason; fear and hatred smother compassion; and inexplicable horror rules. Every word, every scene, every thought is blazingly alive in this many-faceted, spellbinding, and rending novel of death, succor, and remembrance.

Another double review!

Wow, where does the time go?  I apologize for another "double month" review this month.  I am planning on getting back on track after this.  I hope that everyone had a wonderful holiday break and has returned fresh and ready to read!  Here are the review for December and January.

The Paris Wife

History often neglects to tell the story of the "supporting players" in a persons life, but thankfully we have fiction to fill in the gaps.  Paula Mclain beautifully tells the tale of Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.  Maclain does and excellent job of blending fact and fiction, and it left me wanting to learn more of the "true" history of this amazing marriage.  This is an excellent read, and one that I would recommend for your next vacation!


From the Publisher: A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal,The Paris Wifecaptures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.  Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she meets Ernest Hemingway and her life changes forever. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group—the fabled “Lost Generation”—that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.  Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris, which hardly values traditional notions of family and monogamy. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will becomeThe Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold on to her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. Despite their extraordinary bond, they eventually find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriage—a deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything they’ve fought so hard for.  A heartbreaking portrayal of love and torn loyalty,The Paris Wifeis all the more poignant because we know that, in the end, Hemingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but Hadley.

The Art of Fielding

While using baseball as a plot devise, this isn't really a sports fiction book.  The story isn't driven by whether the team wins or losses the "big game," but rather it sets up the frame work for how the 5 main characters in this work of fiction interact.   A full summary can be found below.  I found this book to be interesting, bu perhaps not the best I have read.  The characters were not easy to relate to, and yet you found yourself caring for each of them in the hopes that all would be well in the end. 

From the Publisher: At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended. Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry's gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners' team captain and Henry's best friend, realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert's daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life. As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process they forge new bonds, and help one another find their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment--to oneself and to others. 

Strange Times

I have to start with an apology for not having made regular entries in the past two months.  Hurricane Sandy, and an early snowfall, have knocked me off my game a little, and sent us all scrambling.  With that being said, now that life is back to normal, I am going to combine my entries for October and November into one.  Here we go....

I chose this book as my October entry, because I thought that it's "creepy" factor lent itself to the Halloween season.  I had a hard time getting started with this book.  It took me a few chapters before I really started to get into it, and as the story progressed, it was a real page turner.  I do not want to give a lot of the plot away in this entry, as it will ruin the story for you, but lets just say that the "big twist" had my jaw dropping.  Also, true to the unsettling nature of this story, it does not end in a nice neat bow.  You are left hanging, and unnerved, and more then a little concerned about what the future holds for the characters in this novel.  If you love psychological suspense thrillers, this is the book for you!
From Booklist, May 2012
When Nick Dunne’s beautiful and clever wife, Amy, goes missing on their fifth wedding anniversary, the media descend on the Dunnes’ Missouri McMansion with all the fury of a Dateline episode. And Nick stumbles badly, for, as it turns out, he has plenty to hide, and under the pressure of police questioning and media scrutiny, he tells one lie after another. Juxtaposed with Nick’s first-person narration of events are excerpts from Amy’s diary, which completely contradict Nick’s story and depict a woman who is afraid of her husband, has recently found out she’s pregnant, and had been looking to buy a gun for protection. In addition, Amy is famous as the model for her parents’ long-running and beloved children’s series, Amazing Amy. But what looks like a straighforward case of a husband killing his wife to free himself from a bad marriage morphs into something entirely different in Flynn’s hands. As evidenced by her previous work (Sharp Objects, 2006, and Dark Places, 2009), she possesses a disturbing worldview, one considerably amped up by her twisted sense of humor. Both a compelling thriller and a searing portrait of marriage, this could well be Flynn’s breakout novel. It contains so many twists and turns that the outcome is impossible to predict.

As part of my job as the school librarian, I read a LOT of young adult fantasy.  This seems to be a genre that children love, and there is an ample supply of great stories.  Now, when it comes to adult fantasy, a good one can be hard to find.  I am not a huge reader of traditional "high fantasy" (i.e. Robert Jordan, Tolkien, etc.) as I find them laborious to read.  This book was recommended to me by a friend, and I will admit it is a lovely fantasy story.  To be completely honest, I have nothing I can compare it to.  The story is completely unique in nature, and as a debut novel for Erin Morgenstern, I am excited to see what she will write next.
From the Publisher:
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Cirque des Reves and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway - a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love - a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands. True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus performers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead. Written in rich, seductive prose, this spell-casting novel is a feast for the senses and the heart.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Welcome back to another great year of reading at The Peck School.  I read a lot of really wonderful books over the summer, some of which I will discuss on this blog this year!  If you look on the right side of this page, you will see a complete list of the books that I will highlight each month this school year.  I encourage you to read them, and offer your thoughts in the comment section below each entry.  You can also see posts from last year if you are looking for more great books to read!

I am going to start off the year with an amazing work of nonfiction.  The extraordinary thing about this book is, even though it delves deeply into medical ethics, biology, and cell culture, it reads like a novel.  Don't let the heavy scientific nature of this work scare you off.  Scientific writer Rebecca Skloot spent 10 years doing the research for this book.  While the scientific nature of the book is important, Skloot bring forth the very human side of the story of the "HeLa" cell culture line.  With this book, Henrietta Lacks is finally getting the recognition she deserves for her contribution to science and the great sacrifice she made.  See a full description below, and enjoy this wonderful book!

From the Publisher:

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells-taken without her knowledge-became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons-as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine, uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the "colored" ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta's small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia-a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo-to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family-past and present-is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family-especially Henrietta's daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother's cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn't her children afford health insurance? Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lackscaptures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

Mrs. Kennedy and Me

I love the glimpse that personal memoirs give into a person's life.  Of course when the glimpse includes a look at the life of the Kennedy White House, it is even more interesting.  Clint Hill was the Secret Service agent assigned to protect Jackie Kennedy during her time as First Lady.  His memoir begins with his assignment to her (a post that he is initially disappointed to receive) to a year after the assassination of JFK, when he leaves Mrs. Kennedy and the Secret Service.  While you might not recognize his name, you certainly know who he is: Mr. Hill is the Secret Service agent that you see jump onto the back of the car following the assassination in Dallas on the Zapruder film.  There is not doubt that Mr. Hill cared deeply for Mrs. Kennedy, and had a great deal of respect for her.  If you are looking for a book that deals in scandalous secrets, this is not it.  However, it is an intimate look at a very private woman, and her life. This would be a great book for summer reading, and I would encourage all to read this fascinating memoir.

From the Publisher: HE CALLED HER MRS. KENNEDY. SHE CALLED HIM MR. HILL. For four years, from the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in November 1960 until after the election of Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Clint Hill was the Secret Service agent assigned to guard the glamorous and intensely private Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. During those four years, he went from being a reluctant guardian to a fiercely loyal watchdog and, in many ways, her closest friend. Now, looking back fifty years, Clint Hill tells his story for the first time, offering a tender, enthralling, and tragic portrayal of how a Secret Service agent who started life in a North Dakota orphanage became the most trusted man in the life of the First Lady who captivated first the nation and then the world. When he was initially assigned to the new First Lady, Agent Hill envisioned tea parties and gray-haired matrons. But as soon as he met her, he was swept up in the whirlwind of her beauty, her grace, her intelligence, her coy humor, her magnificent composure, and her extraordinary spirit. From the start, the job was like no other, and Clint was by her side through the early days of JFK's presidency; the birth of sons John and Patrick and Patrick's sudden death; Kennedy-family holidays in Hyannis Port and Palm Beach; Jackie's trips to Europe, Asia, and South America; Jackie's intriguing meetings with men like Aristotle Onassis, Gianni Agnelli, and Andre Malraux; the dark days of the year that followed the assassination to the farewell party she threw for Clint when he left her protective detail after four years. All she wanted was the one thing he could not give her: a private life for her and her children. Filled with unforgettable details, startling revelations, and sparkling, intimate moments, this is the once-in-a-lifetime story of a man doing the most exciting job in the world, with a woman all the world loved, and the tragedy that ended it all too soon-- a tragedy that haunted him for fifty years.

By Fire, By Water

I had high hopes when I picked up this novel, which won the Independent Publishers Award for Historical Fiction.  It did not disappoint. Set in 15th century Spain, during the second inquisition, this sweeping novel brings together all of the major historical figures in Spain during this time.  Aragon's royal chancellor, Luis de Santángel's grandfather was a converso, one of the many Jews forced to convert to Christianity. The chancellor retains an interest in his Jewish heritage, a dangerous prospect given the "New Inquisition" that has recently come to Spain. When a close friend of his is killed by the inquisition, Santángel decides to take matters into his own hands.  I should warn that the descriptions of the torture used in this book are graphic in nature.  The tension is sustained from start to finish, and you find that you are truly hoping all the characters will find some type of peace in the end. The ending is a satisfying one, even if it isn't all together happy.  I think I happy ending however would have taken away from very authentic nature of this story.  See a full description of the story below.  Hopefully you will enjoy this book as much as I did.  Look for my last book review for the year in June, and a full list of my suggested summer reading!  Happy reading!


Publishers Weekly (March 15, 2010)
Kaplan, a screenwriter, sets his debut novel in 15-century Spain, amid the Inquisition, the attempt to unify the kingdoms of Spain under Christian rule, and the voyage of Christopher Columbus to what the seaman expects will be the Indies. The action centers on the historical figure of Luis de Santangel, chancellor to the king of Aragon and a converso, a Jewish convert to Christianity at a time when the Inquisition sought to repress "judaizing." Santangel is friend and financier of Columbus, surviving parent of young Gabriel, and more curious than is prudent about his Jewish heritage. While he learns about Judaism in clandestine meetings, a parallel story unfolds, centering on Judith Migdal, a beautiful Jewish woman who learns to become a silversmith in Granada, located in the last part of Spain under Muslim rule. Santangel's attraction to Judith grows, even as the Inquisition closes in and the prospect of another world to the West tantalizes. Kaplan has done remarkable homework on the period and crafted a convincing and complex figure in Santangel in what is a naturally cinematic narrative and a fine debut. (May) Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.