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The Best Recent Reader Reviews |
To write your own review, simply click on the "Reader Review" link from any book review or book excerpt page at BookBrowse. |
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The Serpent's Tale
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Ariana Franklin
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5/2/2008: I absolutely LOVED Ariana Franklin's first book in this series, "Mistress in the Art of Death," and couldn't wait to read "Serpent's Tale." Unfortunately, Franklin's second book is just kind of average. It dithers around a lot without moving the plot along much. There's nothing terribly surprising about the mystery. Many of the non-recurring characters are cardboard cutouts. Too many coincidences occur in the plot (something I've always considered to be sloppy writing). Some of it... |
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Bridge of Sighs
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Richard Russo
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5/1/2008: The book is 500+ pages so there's plenty to say and a lot of story lines, characters and techniques upon which to comment. It can't all be done here.
While the book is peopled with a large enough cast of characters, the topic du jour is small town America. If you grew up in one, it's likely you'll find people you know within the pages. You'll also find places you know there. And, you'll find attitudes there, too. In fact, you'll finish the book and feel like it was a pretty good book, and... |
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The Gospel According To Larry
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Janet Tashjian
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4/30/2008: The Gospel According to Larry is a trashy, poorly written novel. The author makes her first mistake by casting as her main character a maniacal seventeen-year-old who should have been tested for Down's Syndrome/ Asperger's/ Autism long ago. She makes him have an alter ego named Larry, who writes "sermons" on anti-consumerism and his "zen" (not) Thoreau-based way of life. In the book, where the impossible can happen, he attracts a following of sadsacks, which inludes Bono and his best... |
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Founding Brothers
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Joseph J. Ellis
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4/29/2008: Certainly a college level book (and therefore appropriate for an AP class). I read this for a basic college government class, and was totally surprised. Yes, the language is hard to understand at first, but I just used the dictionary and reread until I understood. I'm used to fast reading and had to slow way down for this one, but it was worth it! It is obvious the author spent a lot of time perusing first hand sources from the Revolutionary Era and really tried to bring to life the... |
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist
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Mohsin Hamid
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4/28/2008: The main character, Changez, was very likable and at the same time able to subtly point out the biases that American's have regarding the Mideastern culture and people. It has made me think hard about how my assumptions are not always backed up by facts. I am very glad I read this... |
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Sold
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Patricia McCormick
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4/27/2008: You would not think that something like what happened in Sold could happen or that it's going on in this world. I didn't want to believe that what happened in the book was true. I couldn't imagine being sold to be a "maid". This book taught me a lot about Nepal and what happens there and when I am older I will try to find a way to help because it is so devastating. I would defiantly recommend this... |
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Allah's Torch
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Tracy Dahlby
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4/25/2008: Allah's Torch makes for a pleasant, leisurely reading but is seriously undermined by the numerous, glaring factual errors (many of which concern Dahlby's interpretation of the history of Banda islands, for example: Benteng Revenge was not built by the Dutch, but rather the British; Run was never the most nutmeg-rich of the islands, quite on the contrary). Furthermore, the author insists on using a variety of terms in Indonesian language -and is lucky to get it right a few times.
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Loving Frank
by
Nancy Horan
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4/25/2008: From 1907 to 1914, Frank Lloyd Wright carried on a love affair with Mamah Borthwick Cheney. They were both married to others when the affair began and it caused a great scandal in Chicago as well as around the country. Having always been an admirer of Wright as an architect, I now know plenty about him as a person. He comes across as a hard man to be in love with. But for Mamah Cheney, a highly educated and extremely intelligent woman, he brought excitement, passion and a full life. She had... |
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The Ghost
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Robert Harris
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4/22/2008: I was stunned to see this book's rating. It is one of the best books I have read in months. The writing is deceptively simple and deft....similar to Graham Greene's style.
The "Ghost" is an English ghostwriter of "has-been" celebrity biographies. He takes on (for a very generous sum) this hurried assignment of an unfinished book about a recently retired English Prime Minister, a character closely modeled on Tony Blair. The rewrite and completion is difficult with elements of urgency,... |
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The Glass Castle
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Jeannette Walls
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4/20/2008: If you thought your family was dysfunctional or that you had a tough childhood, this book will make you think twice. The author presents her amazing childhood full of homelessness, neglect, near sexual abuse and disappointments in a way that allows the reader to make their own judgments about the adults in her life. I must say I disagree with a previous reviewer who said that she doesn't accurately represent the despair of a child of an alcoholic. She does. Every chapter in the book makes you... |
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Small Steps
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Louis Sachar
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4/16/2008: First of all I'd like to say that I don't even like reading that much. I think most books are really boring. But Louis Sachar books are insanely by far the best. Especially Small Steps. I read this book for a report. So since I knew I had to read a book I chose this one. And I liked it so much, (even though I don't like to read,) one night i read for two hours straight!!, I couldn't put it down literally. And it was the best part of the book too. When Armpit was gonna sell her letter... |
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The Echo Maker
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Richard Powers
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4/16/2008: This is my fourth Richard Powers book in as many weeks. When the Austin paper reviewed The Echo Maker prior to its release, I was intrigued and drawn to this author with an immediate urgency to read him. First I read the beautiful and opera-like The Time of our Singing and followed with the tender Galatea 2.2, two very different stories that demonstrate Powers' narrative alacrity. Now add to that The Gold Bug Variations, a monumental love story combining genetics and music, and... |
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Run
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Ann Patchett
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4/16/2008: The writing is intelligent, the pace like a good, healthy jog. I have two minds about this book. Was it deep tasty chocolate, or plastic fruit? I could not put it down--it IS somewhat like good TV and is obviously written with cinema in mind. I also did care about the characters very much because Patchett has a knack for writing about people's psychological bearing and emotional state. And there are lovely descriptions with imagery that made me float through the story with ease.
The plot... |
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Fieldwork
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Mischa Berlinski
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4/16/2008: I appreciated and enjoyed Berlinski's novel that infuses scholarly information on anthropology with a suspense story set in rural Thailand. It is written in a memoir form (although it is fiction). I did wonder why he used his real name rather than changing it. This distracted me at times--it made it difficult for me to separate the author from the narrator, which is important in any book that is not a memoir or autobiography. I do think it would have been helpful if he had changed his name. I... |
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Origin
by
Diana Abu-Jaber
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4/13/2008: There are two mysteries in “Origin,” one concerning the murder of infants, the other the “origin” of the main character. While the mysteries in the novel are compelling, the pace is slower than what you’d find in traditional mysteries. I also found one mystery rather predictable, with the tie-in to the second to be weak. Yet – I really liked the book! Abu-Jaber’s writing is rich with sumptuous descriptions and extremely strong characters. I highly recommend this book for readers who... |
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