Review: White Horse by Alex Adams

I had a certain idea of what White Horse, by Alex Adams, was going to be like before I started reading it. I thought the blurb sounded interesting and it reminded me of daydreams I had when I was a teenager about a movie, the title of which I’ve long forgotten, of a man who was one of the very few left in the world after a catastrophe wipes out humanity. What would I do in those circumstances? Well, from the blurb, White Horse sounded like my childhood daydreams but after the first page I knew I’d never imagined anything like this.

Then it made me think of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a book I was not very fond of. Fortunately I saw differences almost right away. Whereas in The Road, the idea of hope was conveyed with contempt, I sensed hope was the backbone of White Horse; every page is imbued with it even as events make it seem there’s nothing worth fighting for.

This novel is so rich in detail and imagination that every page brought new surprises. Sometimes I found myself rereading a paragraph to decipher what the author meant and then it would hit me a paragraph or page later – ah hah! But it’s so cleverly written that if there had not been an ‘aha’ moment it wouldn’t have mattered. That’s the way this book is – it infuses the culture of a new world order around the reader so well that its meaning sinks in without realization.

The main character is likeable so I rooted for her on every page. She’s brave, focused and honest. Even at the most cringe-worthy moments, it was difficult to put down. The only issue I would have with this book is the cover. Something about it gave me the idea that White Horse leans towards the YA genre. Wrong! Not YA at all. And of course the blurb does start off saying ‘thirty-year-old Zoe leads an ordinary life…’ which should dispel any the notion that it’s YA. But the cover threw me off.

I will go so far as to predict that this book will become a huge best-seller. It certainly deserves to be.

Mailbox Monday, April 9, 2012

In April Mailbox Monday is being hosted by my friend Cindy at Cindy's Love of Books.



I've already started reading the book I received last week. Written by Paul French, it's called Midnight in Peking. The description of this book (from Mr. French's website) reads:

January, 1937: Peking is a heady mix of privilege and scandal, lavish cocktail bars and opium dens, warlords and corruption, rumours and superstition – and the clock is ticking down on all of it.

In the exclusive Legation Quarter, the foreign residents wait nervously for the axe to fall. Japanese troops have already occupied Manchuria and are poised to advance south. Word has it that Chiang Kai-shek and his shaky government, long since fled to Nanking, are ready to cut a deal with Tokyo and leave Peking to its fate.

Each day brings a racheting up of tension for Chinese and foreigners alike inside the ancient city walls. On one of those walls, not far from the nefarious Badlands, is a massive watchtower – haunted, so the locals believe, by fox spirits that prey upon innocent mortals.

Then one bitterly cold night, the body of an innocent mortal is dumped there. It belongs to Pamela Werner, the daughter of a former British consul to China, and when the details of her death become known, people find it hard to credit that any human could treat another in such a fashion. Even as the Japanese noose on the city tightens, the killing of Pamela transfixes Peking.

Seventy-five years after these events, Paul French finally gives the case the resolution it was denied at the time. Midnight in Peking is the unputdownable true story of a murder that will make you hold your loved ones close, and also a sweepingly evocative account of the end of an era.

Tuesday Teaser: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Tuesday Teasers is hosted by Should Be Reading. The rules are as follows:


Grab your current read and let the book fall open to a random page. Share two sentences from somewhere on that page and the title of the book that you’re getting the teaser from. Please avoid spoilers! Read the official Tuesday Teaser Rules.



My teaser is from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Wolf Hall won the Man Booker Prize in 2009. From page 131:

When the sweat comes back this summer, 1528, people say, as they did last year, that you won't get it if you don't think about it. But how can you not?

Mailbox Monday, April 2, 2012

In April Mailbox Monday is being hosted by my friend Cindy at Cindy's Love of Books.

Last week I received two books. The first is A Winter Kill by Vicki Delany. This book is part of a series called Rapid Reads and A Winter Kill is only 111 pages long. From the back:

Late one bitterly cold winter night, rookie constable Nicole Patterson comes across the body of a young woman lying in a snow-covered field on the outskirts of town. When the victim turns out to be a high school student with a less-than-sterling reputation, suspicion falls on her drunkard father. But Nicole soon discovers that all is not as it appears to be in her quiet little town. Though both underqualified and unauthorized, the young police officer is compelled to throw herself into the murder investigation.

The second book I received is The Watchers by Jon Steele.



The description of this book reads:

Lausanne, Switzerland. In the cathedral tower lives a strange boy with a limp who talks to the bells. In a luxury penthouse lives a high-class prostitute who's in mortal danger. And in a low-rent hotel lives a private investigator who has no idea how he got there. Jay Harper finds himself in Switzerland on the trail of a missing Olympic athlete. A hard drinker, he can barely remember how he got home last night, let alone why he accepted this job. When he meets the stunning but aloof Katherine in a hotel bar, he quickly realises that he's not the only one in town who's for hire. She's a high-class hooker who can't believe her luck. Which is about to change. For the worse. In the meantime, Marc Rochat spends his time in the belfry talking to the statues, his cat and the occasional ghost. His job is to watch over Lausanne at night and to wait for the angel his mother told him he'd one day have to save. When he sees Katherine, he thinks his moment has come. Which indeed it has. But not in a good way...

These are exactly the kind of books I enjoy - I'm really looking forward to reading them!

Tuesday Teaser: Headhunters by Jo Nesbo

Tuesday Teasers is hosted by Should Be Reading. The rules are as follows:


Grab your current read and let the book fall open to a random page. Share two sentences from somewhere on that page and the title of the book that you’re getting the teaser from. Please avoid spoilers! Read the official Tuesday Teaser Rules.




This week my teaser is from Headhunters by Jo Nesbo. From page 128:

I was on my way into the house when I remembered. The alarm. I definitely did not want security men from Tripolis swarming around here now, nor live camera surveillance of me with a half-dead Ove Kjikerud.

Frank Delaney on Book Bloggers and the state of Literary Criticism‏

The following is part of a Tribune interview with Frank Delaney (author of several books including one that I reviewed, Venetia Kelly's Travelling Show. You can read the complete interview on the Tribune's website.

Tribune: How strong is the pulse of literary fiction, criticism and serious examination of literature in the 21st century? Who are today's shining literary lights?

Frank Delaney: "Great question! People have been saying for generations, “Oh, the novel is dead.” Well, it ain't – nor is that wonderful American invention, creative nonfiction, nor is biography, nor is political writing. And as well as the books, the commentariat is alive and well.

In fact, there's an argument to be made that it's healthier than ever, because we now have this wonderful new creature, the Literary Blogger. I'm a massive fan of this gorgeous animal, with all its fur and feathers – for a number of reasons. My main complaint about the general direction of literary criticism over the last century has been – and Joyce is a case in point – that it tended, in its lofty tone and often impenetrable language (not to mention occasional vendetta behavior), to be antidemocratic, to keep certain areas of literature to itself, whereas my own passion is for as many people as possible to be reading as widely as possible.

The Literary Bloggers have no axes to grind, they're not protecting their reputations, they don't fear being sneered at by other critics, they're reading what they want to read, writing what they want to write, and they don't want to keep what they enjoy to themselves. They want to share. They want to expand the constituency of reading. They want to hail and applaud good writing. To my mind this is a very significant development – uneven, I grant, here and there, but, dammit, not as uneven as the generations of formal literary critics, and the blogging intention is so good and so worthy of loud vocal support that you can call it truly a new and, to my mind, incomparably welcome development in the world of reading and writing."

Review: Blue Monday by Nicci French

If I belonged to a mystery/thriller book club, Blue Monday would be an excellent choice for the club read. There are so many things going on in this book that would lead to good discussions. Is such and such character really who they claim to be? What is the main character’s real motivation? What is she hiding? There are so many questions and it would be fun to get other opinions, so I’ll be reading other reviews aside from mine. I can’t imagine however that I will read a bad review!

Blue Monday kept me awake until the wee hours on Sunday night and made me late for work (yes, I blame it on the book!) the next morning. Not because I slept in too late but because I picked it up again in the morning and just had to finish those last fifty pages!

The premise is an interesting one: a psychotherapist suspects one of her patients is involved in the disappearance of a young boy. What the therapist does with her suspicions leads the reader on an ever-deepening mystery about what exactly is going on. Meanwhile, the boy is still missing. There are lighter moments too in the form of a builder from the Ukraine. He conveys a humorously solemn feeling to the scenes he is in.

Blue Monday is a must-read for mystery and thriller fans and for those who haven’t tried that genre yet. This book has just the right amount of creepiness. It’s got what I call the ‘chill’ factor in spades: that feeling you get when you thought you knew what was going on but come to the slow realization that there was something else eerily creepy taking place right under your nose. This is an engrossing read and one I highly recommend.

Review: The Book Club Cookbook by Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp

I love cookbooks and obviously I love to read, so when the offer came to review The Book Club Cookbook, I jumped at it. What could be more fun than to have available some of the recipes from the most popular book club books? And if it’s your turn to host your book club, well, this book will make choosing a dish so much easier.

This book covers some of my favourite novels: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (Lisa See), The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows), and The Help (Kathryn Stockett) as well as some I have yet to read but are on the top of my towering TBR list: Cutting for Stone (Abraham Verghese) and Water for Elephants (Sara Gruen). Actually, the list of books on my own TBR list overlaps quite a bit with the books featured in this cookbook. Each novel’s recipe is preceded by a description of the source book and some are followed by an explanation of the food, thoughts from the author and/or a book club’s take on the book itself and why they chose a particular food for their club.

So far I’ve made two recipes (and I’m planning another for this weekend). Both are cookies – Chewy Oatmeal from the book Plainsong by Kent Haruf and Chocolate Chip Shortbread from Bee Season by Myla Goldberg. Both turned out great and were gobbled up by my family in no time. There aren't just cookies or sweets though – savory dishes are included as well. There is Zaytoon’s Chicken Shwarma from Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, Britta’s Crab Casserole from The Hours by Michael Cunningham, Greek Rice Pudding and Tzatziki from Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. There are drinks in here too: Glögg from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as well as soups and salads. An ambitious book club could have an entire meal with several courses if they didn’t mind mixing their books!

Another great thing about this book club cookbook is that the featured novels range from contemporary to classic, so that a club is bound to find something of interest. I would go further and say I could see using the cookbook itself for future club choice ideas. It would also make a great gift for an avid reader, book club member or not. I highly recommend it!

Tuesday Teaser:

Tuesday Teasers is hosted by Should Be Reading. The rules are as follows:


Grab your current read and let the book fall open to a random page. Share two sentences from somewhere on that page and the title of the book that you’re getting the teaser from. Please avoid spoilers! Read the official Tuesday Teaser Rules.



My teaser is from The Widow's War by Sally Gunning. From page 128:

Lyddie had the good fortune to run into no one along the King's road, but at the intersection with the landing road her luck turned. An old, wasted man limped toward her; once he got close she realized it was no old man at all but Nathan's brother, Silas Clarke, the so-called limp more a list from the usual cause.

Mailbox Monday, March 5, 2012

In March Mailbox Monday is being hosted by Diary of an Eccentric.



I received Robert Rotenberg's newest novel (to be published May 1st) called Stray Bullets. The description from Simon and Schuster's website reads:

In The Guilty Plea and Old City Hall, critically acclaimed author Robert Rotenberg created gripping page-turners that captured audiences in Canada and around the world. Rotenberg’s bestsellers do for Toronto what Ian Rankin has done for Edinburgh and Michael Connelly for Los Angeles.

In Stray Bullets, Rotenberg takes the reader to a snowy November evening. Outside a busy downtown doughnut shop, gunshots ring out and a young boy is critically hurt. Soon Detective Ari Greene is on scene. How many shots were fired? How many guns? How many witnesses?

With grieving parents and a city hungry for justice, the pressure is on to convict the man accused of this horrible crime. Against this tidal wave of indignation, defense counsel Nancy Parish finds herself defending her oldest and most difficult client.

But does anyone know the whole story?

Stray Bullets is Robert Rotenberg’s third intricate mystery set on the streets and in the courtrooms of Toronto.