Posted in 2 paws on October 4, 2015

stern men

Synopsis

John Irving wishes. That he could be as mordantly funny as Elizabeth Gilbert, that is. With the publication of her first novel, Stern Men, Gilbert has been widely compared to New England’s unofficial novelist laureate. And the comparison is a natural; this writer gives us a tough, lovable heroine against an iconoclastic, rural backdrop. Ruth Thomas grows up on Fort Niles Island, off the coast of Maine, among lobstermen, lobster boats, and, well, lobsters. There’s just not much out there besides ocean. Abandoned by her mother, she lives sometimes with her dad and sometimes with her beautiful neighbor, Mrs. Pommeroy, and the seven idiot Pommeroy boys. Eventually she is plucked from obscurity by the wealthy Ellises—vacationers on Fort Niles for some hundred years—and sent, against her will, to a fancy boarding school in Delaware. (Sorting out her relationship with this highly manipulative family is one of the novel’s crooked joys.) Now she has returned, and is casting about for something to do.

What Ruth does (hang around with her eccentric island friends, fall in love, organize the lobstermen) makes for an engaging book that’s all the more charming for its rather lumpy, slow-paced plotting. Gilbert delivers a kind of delicious ethnography of lobster-fishing culture, if such a thing is possible, as well as a love story and a bildungsroman. But best of all, she possesses an ear for the ridiculous ways people communicate. One of Mrs. Pommeroy’s young sons, “in addition to having the local habit of not pronouncing r at the end of a word—could not say any word that started with r…. What’s more, for a long time everyone on Fort Niles Island imitated him. Over the whole spread of the island, you could hear the great strong fishermen complaining that they had to mend their wopes or fix their wigging or buy a new short-wave wadio.”

Review

This was not a great book. It was ok and parts were interesting, but not a book I would have picked up myself. The characters were shallow (at least I couldn’t find any depth) and there was way too much description that wasn’t needed. Some yes, but could have cut out a lot of the book and it might have been better.

I am a speed reader and this one was hard to get through. lots of foul language (which I suppose should be expected considering they are red necks but in the north east) and idiot characters. Some people said it was funny (in fact one lady in our book club thought parts were funny and I did see some humor but not much) but I wouldn’t call it funny.

Most of us did not like the book and some didn’t finish.  I’m giving it 2 paws.

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Posted in 2 paws, mystery, Review on August 24, 2015

cuneiform caper cover

Synopsis

When Reese Walker finds what she suspects is a very valuable and career changing artifact, she is beyond elated! She seeks approval to fund further research and find the answers she so desperately seeks regarding her find. However, just as she gets that funding her world gets turned upside down when the artifact is stolen. With very few leads to go on, she embarks on a journey that turns out to be so much more than she bargained for, both professionally and personally.

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Review

The author provided a copy to me and I’m not sure if there were any edits that happened after I received this book, so my thoughts are on what I received and possibly not the final version.

I think this story has some good bones but needs to be developed more. It is a shorter story but it seemed to jump around, the thief was obvious to me despite a red herring and the main character, Reese, is scattered and seems to have some deeper issues tied to her family. I would have thought that the tablet being stolen would be a huge focus but not so much.

There were many errors that I noted and as I mentioned above, not sure if they were caught in a final editing.  Things such as the day changing from Saturday to Tuesday in a short period of time, being picked up at a restaurant which she drove to but was able to drive to work the next morning, and a few other errors.

We give this 2 paws – the story has potential but not as written with the version I received.

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