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The Travelers Delaney Henderson A-Argus Better Book Publishers, LLC PO Box 914, Kernersville, NC 27285 ISBN: 987-09819075-7-4 $17.95 Reviewed By: Emily Decobert
Travel is a wonderful way to leave the ordinary and experience the unusual and unexpected. Each country is filled with knowledge, culture, and a life totally different from the daily grind of an American. However, we Americans are accustomed to our freedoms and beliefs and travellers can easily get lost in dangerous underworlds they don’t understand. Ann is on an exciting tour of the world and her next stop is Africa. She has lived the wild, free life, dumping and picking up new traveling companions and doing what she wanted. Now, though, she goes from the modern Western world to the mystic life of Africa. Africa isn’t Europe and in Morocco, life goes by a different set of rules. At first, it seems to be a place for liberation. She can meet up with people from all over the world, exploring the towns and easily smoking as much hashish as possible. She drifts from friend to friend and house to house like a vagabond, doing what she wants and only what she wants. What she doesn’t know is the free and easy drug life is a sucking vortex, ready to consume the unsuspecting American. While she is smoking all this hashish she meets the people of its seamy underworld, drug runners who need Americans to run the drugs into America and Canada. Bold from the ease with which she has smoked all these drugs, she decides to be a carrier. Her life soon becomes shadowy, having to move to out of the way places in the middle of the night to escape the police and hiding from possible capture. She is now in over her head yet not willing to drop out. This book opens up a new and interesting world. It’s not so much the country that captivates but the dangerous subculture of drugs and daring. To many Americans, the ideal of doing drugs in public and being recruited for drug smuggling is the plot of an adventure movie, but not real life. They have grown up safe and secure in the land of the free and feel immune to such strange insanity. This book describes in detail another part of life, where drugs, death, and danger reign. While the story is fiction, these characters are not real; the situations are real to life enough the reader is engrossed by this risk-taking lifestyle. The plot and setting of The Travelers work together to create a story that will thrill the most jaded palate and gives the reader excitement without the risk of living out life in an African jail.
The Magicians Lev Grossman Viking Books ISBN: 978-0-670-02055-3 $25.95 Reviewed by: Emily Decobert
The last Harry Potter book came out two years ago, we can only hope the Twilight series is finished, and the generation who became adults with Harry, Ron, Hermione need something else. That book has arrived in Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. This book is very advanced magic, but if you have passed from muggle to Hogwarts grad, read on. Quinton Coldwater is the normal, brilliant kid who is totally disillusioned at the vast age of seventeen. Life is dull and the only bright spots come from doing slight of hand magic tricks and pretending that the imaginary world of Fillory that exists in his favorite books is real. One day, he receives a mysterious envelope and by following the fly away contents finds Brakesbills College for Magic Pedagogy. This is a university not a middle/high school and the work is not entertaining but grueling and at times dangerous. However, Quinton not only survives but makes friends and falls in love with a young girl as gifted as himself. As many of us can confirm, transition from college to life is tough and Quinton and his crew are wasting away with sex and booze. It is then they learn that Fillory is real and they decided to go. Once there they find a dark, dangerous world where they will face pain and sacrifice. Grossman is a student of all the childhood stories of magic and he includes both hilarious and dark references to such greats as Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia. It is not necessary to have read these children’s books to love The Magicians, but casual remarks about Quiddich and prefects are not as funny without reading those others first. Also, the turning of dark to light is not as profound without the innocent reference. These childhood greats teach the ideals of nobility of character and the triumph of good over evil. The Magicians is written for us adults who know the pain of the real world and like our literature to contain the bite of reality. It is a through the looking glass experience where the tale we expect to be light and pure is warped. We lose ourselves in a plot that takes magic and merges it with darkness. The Magicians is funny, solemn, and at times heart-wrenching, but never dull. It starts its magic early and, with the reader hooked, takes him on a thrill ride.
Short Girls Bich Minh Nguyen Viking Publishers ISBN: 978-0-670-02081-2 $25.95 Reviewed by: Emily Decobert
‘You pick your friends and you pick your enemies, but your family you’re stuck with.’ I don’t remember who said that bit of wisdom or if he was famous, but it is a saying I’ve heard all my life. By the time most of us become adults we find that it is true. No matter where we wander, it’s very hard to dismiss those first eighteen years. That is the topic of this book, Short Girls. Van and Linny Long are a set of sisters who find themselves estranged from both each other and their Vietnamese heritage. Their parents emigrated from Vietnam but they were born and grew up in America, finding it difficult to relate to their parents from such a different culture. They also find it difficult to relate to each other. As small children they were close, but as they grew up conflicting identities emerged. Van was the studious one and the perfect daughter, always eager to please. She went to college, married well, and appeared to have a perfect life. Linny was the more social and most American, losing the ability to speak or understand Vietnamese and dropping out of college. The sisters come back together to celebrate their father finally becoming an American citizen, both interrupted from crises in their own life. Van’s husband has left her and Linny’s affaire with a married man is ending badly. Both are shaky and fragile and in need of each other now that they are so alone. Though the hardships they begin to realize how valuable their sister is. This story is a wonderful tale of immigrants’ children and the struggle to be both of the Old World and America. Both Van and Linny walk a sort of tight rope, trying to balance between honoring their ancestral culture and being modern as well. Neither is very successful at first. Van tries to remember her roots by using her law degree to help other immigrants. She tries to play the perfect Asian daughter and breaks when the façade crumbs. Linny tries to be totally a hip American, but she can not forget the past and finds solace in cooking. She is the daughter who can cook the Vietnamese recipes taught by her mother. Very like The Joy Luck Club, it is a tale of two women who are trying to be American while struggling against their mother’s memory and the expectations of their Vietnamese heritage. Scared: A Novel on the Edge of the World Tom Davis David Cook, 4050 Lee Vance View, Colorado Springs, CO 80918 ISBN: 978-1-5891-9102-0 $14.99 Reviewed By: Emily Decobert
When readers open a book they hope to be at least distracted. The worst books annoy but the best send readers into new realms. They laugh, weep, cry, and hate along with the characters and happily spend a sleepless night to live in this other life. Scared is one of those books; but this new life isn’t pretty. Tom Davis has created a gut-wrenching book that is both simply told but chocked full of the dark and light realities of life itself. This is the story of Stuart Daniels, haunted by everything he has seen in Africa as he goes about photographing for newspapers. As scarred as a post traumatic stress disorder victim, his life is skidding out of control. He’s last chance assignment is to go and take pictures for a series of stories about how AIDS has crushed the people of a small African nation. Once there, he is exposed to the naked, horrible truth. Yet, it takes a young girl and a national disaster to begin to change our hero. This book is amazing. The story itself is well-told and would make the book good in itself, but the storytelling is just the beginning. It is the reality and believability of the story; the knowing that this could be true, that makes the book so fantastic. From an armchair in Kentucky, the reader is transported to Africa with vivid details and forced to remember ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. Our writer, Tom Cook has lived that life. He is a college-educated preacher who has seen first hand the horrors of the world for orphans in Africa. Scared is a story based on the experiences he saw and still continues to see in the Africa crippled by AIDS. He knows children, quite like our main African character, staving to death as they try to care for other siblings. To try to stem the outpouring of suffering, Cook has created Children’s Hopechest, a charity organization to aid orphans in Eastern Europe and Africa. To find out more, go to www.HopeChest.com or www.ScaredtheBook.com. Read this book and sob, first for the tale and then for the reality. After you’re done, think what you can do to help the suffering. All it takes is one.
Hunter, A Novel Campbell Jefferys Arima Publishing, ASK House, Northgate Ave, Bury ST. Edmunds, Suffolk IP32 6BB ISBN: 978-1-84549-333-2 $22.00 Reviewed By: Emily Decobert
Where did all the Nazis go? The young died in the field and the top brass got theirs at Nuremberg, but hundreds of Nazis just vanished. Since science assures us people don’t just go up in smoke, we have to wonder how they escaped. Hunter by Campbell Jefferys gives us a shocking answer. Eric Messer is living the teenage hell. He has had to leave his friends to go to a new school where chasing him is a class sport. His dad is a real jerk and his mom is clueless to how miserable he is. To top it all off, he has to earn the money for a surfboard on his own. He begins doing yard work and soon meets two very interesting old people. Christian Baum has hired Eric to help in his war room, a room dedicated to the glory of the German army. If that isn’t strange enough, he is overly interested in another client of Eric’s, Peter Fischer. Fischer doesn’t hide his disgust for the Nazis, but is there something behind his overly strong objections? Baum thinks so and wants Eric to spy for him to figure out who Fischer really was in WWII. Who can Eric trust, Fischer or Baum? The story itself is interesting, but the telling is limp and rather colorless. Jefferys does well presenting the tale of the anguished teenager, but his connecting of Baum and Fischer leaves something to be desired. Jefferys does use past remembrances in the book to tell about Fischer’s war experience, but not to create a relationship between them in the past which would explain Baum’s obsession with Fischer. Baum’s vendetta seems to come out of the blue and leaves the reader wondering what he missed. It is good and could potentially have been great, but failed to reach the mark. However, this story is based on fact. After WWII, many countries sponsored intelligent Nazis, ones they felt would add to the brain trust of their country, in immigrating. Australia, where the action of this story takes place, was one of those countries and the government protected these Nazis. In 1987, the Menzies Inquiry was set up to hunt out these war criminals and bring them to justice. By 1992, 800 cases were still being considered, 27 of which could have went to trial. In the end, Australia chose to protect the old secrets and not turn the men over for trial. A Deadly Habit Andrea Sisco Five Star Publishing, 295 Kennedy Memorial Drive, Waterville, Maine 04901 ISBN: 978-1594147951 $25.95 Reviewed By: Emily Decobert
Andrea Sisco was a book reviewer before publishing her first novel, A Deadly Habit. We are sure she knows what does and doesn’t make a good story because with this book she manages to cook up an interesting and diverting plot. This story is about a woman, Penelope, who confesses to a priest who is an old acquaintance. What she has to say is she discovered the corpse of her husband dead in their house, but swears not to be the author of the crime. The problem is she broke into the house because they were estranged. Of course the police investigate, but she finds an ally in the priest confessor. The police, however, are sure she is guilty of the murder. She has no choice but to prove her innocence, helped by many people along the way How does she plan to do it? By breaking into her dead husband’s house, again! She opens the safe and finds a key. That key, she thinks, can open a locker somewhere. By doing this, she put herself in other problems and has to manage to get out of them. This novel is refreshing, like a cool spring breeze. Forget the dark atmosphere of the serial killer novel, or the heavy ambiance of the noir story like those by Dashiell Hammet. With this one we appreciate the bons mots and the light tone. Andrea Sisco has probably read a lot of thriller books because she delivers a great one in A Deadly Habit. It has an unusual plot and situations rarely encountered in other books of this genre. The heroine, a new kind in the world of thrillers, is funny and charming. The reader wonders what she going to do to clear her name in this bad situation. She seems sometimes awkward, but never foolish. She is so natural and convincing the reader understands and agrees with her actions and reactions as events unfold. The tone of the book is light, meaning that everybody can read it to have a good time. Gone is the horror of being plunged into the darkness of a serial killer soul or the cloak of an interminable investigation. It’s a simple plot, but the principal character is endearing to readers, so we tag along on this funny and also strange adventure. This is a refreshing read by an author full of promise. We look forward to what she’ll give us next. Mother of the Believers: A Novel of the Birth of Islam
Author: Kamran Pasha Washington Square Press, 1230 Avenue of the Americas ISBN: 978-1-4165-7991-5 $16.00 Reviewed by: Emily Decobert
Rating: four stars
For most of us, the beginnings of Islam is a great mystery. We understand that it is based on the teachings of Muhammad, but we know little of the man himself. This book is the story of his rise from a few believers to the great Muslim empire. It is told not by Muhammad himself but from the point of view of Aisha, his youngest and most beloved wife. She was the first child born into the community of believers, her father was Muhammad’s right-hand man, and she wed him at the tender age of nine and spent the rest of the Prophet’s life beside him. This book is a wonderful way to learn about the start of this religion, which at the time was radical to the people of Arabia. It is told in a easy to understand narrative of a first hand witness, so detailed readers see in their minds the vibrant world of Arabia in the early 600’s. Little girl Aisha quickly fills us in on what happened before she enters the scene and immediately takes a place in the unfolding drama. The story makes Muhammad into a real human, perhaps too real. To the modern reader, his revelations appear to be the nature illness of epilepsy and his seizures lead to revelations. The people of the time were convinced because he was illiterate but in his trances he composed beautiful poems on the word of Allah. However, many times the episodes were very convient. If he was opposed, he would have a spell and Allah would tell him he was right. Also, the messages tended to suit his wants. When he became jealous of his wives being seen by men, Allah told him to make them wear the veil and stay hidden. While a skeptic may raise an eyebrow at a few parts, the telling is solid and informative and the story entertains. Over five hundred pages, readers will enjoy each one and keep eagerly reading to find out what happens next.
A Night Drive John Brackenn PublishAmerica, Baltimore ISBN: 1-60703-896-X $24.95 Reviewed by: Emily Decobert Rating: 2 1/2 A Night Drive is not just a story or a novel. It’s a testimony about the Vietnam war, which we (the readers) make out what life was like through the author narration. John Brackeen knows what he is talking about, he served two tours of duty in Vietnam. This book is based on a operation in the Que Son Valley in 1967. A Night Drive is a dive into the horrors of the war. It is as though you are directly in the heart of the battle besides the privates, waiting for the enemy to come and shaking with fear that a bullet will hit you. A Night Drive is the fear of being seen by the adversary and caught by the violent, bloody opponents. This is the nightmare told with simple words, for more intensity. You will not find in this book a lot of details about the headquarters or about political matters; that is not the point. The author’s goal is to show you what it’s like IN the middle of an operation, as a soldier and as a human being. The Captain and the Lieutenant Colonel’s orders for the platoon, leads it into hot spots and a hell on Earth. On opposite side, the soldiers are obeying their own orders and moving in the mud, their ears whistling from the roars of the helicopters and their noses filled with the odor of the napalm. Nobody would want to go there, much less actually be there during that horrible time. Nevertheless, it was the actual life of people like you and me, praying to stay alive and to manage to get out this evil beast’s den. Only the end of the book gives one rest. Is he relieved ? At peace? No of course not, for who can forget the tremendous horror of the Vietnam war after being in it, as one of its component ? John Brackeen doesn’t complain at all in the story, he just explains the reality of this horrendous period. We don’t know if he has regrets for being in this war, but he went back to Vietnam in late 1968 after having been med-evaced on September 1967. Does that mean he has his own mission to do? He never tells us that, leaving us to wonder. Despite that, the principal character makes us understand that to be in a place such as that, respecting his superiors and his own soul, never ever forgetting that there is a life after the war.
American Anthem BJ Hoff Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, Oregon, 97402 ISBN: 978-0-7369-2646-1 $15.99 Reviewed By: Emily Decobert What is the American dream? To many of us it represents wealth and comfort, but in the 1870’s, it often meant simply having food for the children and a good roof over the whole family’s head. This book, American Anthem, is actually three books in one. The books tell about the lives of three immigrant families, how they lived, and how they finally meet up together and help each other achieve the American dream. Susanna Fallon is an Irish girl who is coming to America with a mission. Her much elder sister died in unusual circumstances as the wife of a wealthy Italian immigrant conductor. Her sister had desperately reached out to the younger Susanna, telling about the misery of her life under Michael Emmanuel’s roof. Filled with righteous anger, she accepts Emmanuel’s offer to come live with him and the motherless daughter her sister, Deidre, left behind. She arrives into what appears to be a loving home, grieving for her sister but unwilling to share details of Deidre’s death. Andrew Carmichael is a doctor from Scotland who practices in New York. Thought he could have treated only society’s elite, he chooses instead to tend to the poorest of New York’s poor, most of who were immigrants. When he is about his work, he finds another person in need. Bethany Cole is a talented female doctor in a time when ‘lady docs’ were not respected and Carmichael takes her on as partner, then begins to love her as well. Suddenly, an old secret is reveled and threatens to destroy all Carmichael has achieved. The Macgovern family are ready to leave Ireland in search of a new life in America. Parents Conn and Vangie are determined that their children Aidan, Nell Grace, twins James and John, and Emma will have the chances they never had living in poverty in Ireland. It is only at the last moment that an adult Aidan refuses to come and they are saddled with a street waif, Renny Magee, instead. They soon find that the streets of America are not paved with gold. They struggle to survive in a hovel on a few cents a day as Conn desperately searches for a job. It would take a chance encounter to change their situation. American Anthem gives a vivid portrayal of life in America in this time period, both luxurious and horrid. Michael Emmanual’s family lives in splendor outside the city due to his God-given gift of music, but they are compelled to help those without. It is in the storylines of Carmichael and the Macgovern’s that the reader experiences the horror of old New York. Off the fancy streets of the well-to-do, there was nothing but dirt, disease, and despair. Here immigrants suffered and died, shivering in shacks where parents had to watch their children to starve to death. This book shows how much the people of today own to their hardworking ancestors. With blood, sweat, and tears, these people built the American we live in today. It also reminds us that while much has changed, we still have poverty and suffering in our country and we must work as hard as our ancestors to better the country for the sake of us all.
Critical Mass Kathleen M. Henry IUniverse, 1663 Liberty Drive, Bloomington IN, 47403 ISBN: 978-0-595-52412-9 $10.95 Reviewed by: Emily Decobert In many denominations, women’s rights are repressed to the barbarism of the Middle Ages. Women are stripped of their equality, told they may not preach the word of God, aid in church offices, or even teach teenage boys because a woman may not teach a man. Were these acts committed in the public sector, women could sue and win for discrimination but in the church not only is this accepted but passed off as the Lord’s will. And women have had enough! So has Kathleen M. Henry. She is a child of the pre-Vatican II Catholicism, attending parochial school all through graduate school and is today a community-ordained priest. In this book she looks at the Church through the glasses of realism and the picture isn’t necessarily pretty. However, truth is stronger than the fiction of any faith. The format of the book takes the reader through the Catholic Mass, giving stories that while relate superficially to each part actually tears into the very fabric of the Mass and all it represents. In the stories, we are introduced to four Catholic women who are in a sense betrayed by the beliefs of the Church. The stories appear at first reading to randomly switch from one character’s story to another. This is the book’s greatest downfall and most interesting quirk. While reading, the reader can get lost trying to follow the plot. A lot of the time is spend struggling to remember if we have met this character and wondering how she fits into the lives of the other characters just read about. The confusion hinders the understanding of the important message. On the other hand, the unique format keeps readers on their toes. The frantic setup creates a stimulating read and in their hyped up state readers are more likely to pick up on subtle hints that in a lazy read might be lost. The asides at the bottom of the pages are pure gold. Occasionally, there are numbers in the text, directing the reader to the bottom of the page. Yes, it is easy to ignore, but there is great stuff lurking at the bottom. Instead of telling the reader a reference to another source text, the footnotes are a source of extra information about the background of the woman’s time in history or, even more important, insight into the character herself. It gives facts that could not be worked seamlessly into the story and presents the necessary information in a easy matter-of-fact way. This book is a great read if you are one to question the status quo. If you aren’t, read the book, and you might start to see things are not as they appear. |