Category Archives: Book Review Blog

My book reviews and fun bookish news as a book blogger. All about other people’s books, and not my own. :-)

Harper Collins Canada March Madness 2012

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It’s time for March Madness for book nerds! Here’s how it works: Harper Collins Canada has posted 64 of its books on the HCC March Madness website and you vote for your favourites until one book takes the title. You can vote once per hour, and — here’s the best part, for book lovers everywhere — you get to enter once per day for the chance to win all 64 books in the tournament! Cast a vote, win 64 books — can’t beat that, eh?

The tournament just started, and there are still so many awesome books in play! Not sure how to vote? Let me make a few suggestions…

ROOM, EMMA DONOGHUE

Room is so powerful that it prompted me to begin this book blog in the first place. Seriously: check out my very first post Emma Donoghue’s Room lives up to the hype. It’s an emotional, gripping tale from the perspective of a five year old boy, Jack, who has known nothing but the tiny room in which his mother had been held prisoner. I particularly love the incongruity between the innocence of the narrator’s perspective and the horror his mother had to face every day. When the mother tells Jack that she wants to escape and Jack wonders why, my heart just ached for them. On one hand, I totally understand where the mother is coming from, yet on the other hand, the experience of freedom is as strange and frightening for Jack as the experience of captivity would be for us. Amazing book.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, HARPER LEE

To Kill a Mockingbird is probably my sister’s favourite books of all time, and so it has a special place in my heart. It’s definitely a classic — how can you resist this story about the young, feisty Scout and her strong, admirable father Atticus? It’s a tale about the fight for idealism in a world where injustice and discrimination are believed to be natural. How often do we watch the news and wish Atticus Finch is real, or that lawyers could be more like him? To Kill a Mockingbird is far from an idealistic story — the truths it reveals are downright harsh — yet it has become a beloved classic because its characters still believe in the potential of idealism. Atticus and Scout still believe that right can triumph over wrong, and that good has to triumph over evil. We cheer for them, we cheer for their belief, and we wish we could believe as they do.

DEATH ON THE NILE, AGATHA CHRISTIE

If you follow me on Twitter, or read my posts on last year’s HCC March Madness, you know what an Agatha Christie fan I am. I love Agatha Christie books so much that I even challenged Jason from Harper Collins Canada to a Christie Quiz: Challenge and Results. Christie is the Queen of Mystery, and for good reason — her books revolutionized the mystery genre, introducing ridiculously complex twists and turns while still adhering to the “fair play” principle.

Death on the Nile not only features my favourite detective of all time — Hercule Poirot — but it also has one of my favourite Christie plots of all time. A woman named Jackie loses her fiance Simon to her best friend Linnet. It’s a soap opera, until Poirot runs into the trio in Egypt three months later, on Simon and Linnet’s honeymoon, which Jackie has crashed. To escape Jackie, Simon and Linnet join a Nile river cruise that Poirot is on. Unfortunately for them, Jackie gets on the same ship, and in a fit of rage, shoots Simon in the leg, and has to be confined to her room with a nurse. The next morning, Linnet is found murdered, and the nurse swears Jackie was in her room the entire night. Who, then, killed Linnet?

It’s an English country house mystery transplanted onto a cruise ship, where everyone on board is a suspect, and only Poirot’s little grey cells can unravel the various psyches and motivations. The answer to whodunnit is nowhere near as important as the whys, and in true Christie fashion, Death on the Nile takes us into the minds of an entire cast of fascinating characters.

Only one could win when Jason and I duked it out, Christie style, last year. But anyone who reads Christie is a winner, in my book. If you haven’t read her yet, definitely, definitely, check out Death on the Nile or any of her other books. And definitely, vote for her in HCC March Madness!

DEAD SIMPLE, PETER JAMES

Peter James is one of the nicest authors I’ve met, a soft-spoken librarian type who happens to ride along with police officers and write about crime. I absolutely adored his Perfect People, and the latest Roy Grace mystery, Dead Man’s Grip, turned me off smoked salmon for weeks. Dead Simple is the first in the Roy Grace series, and begins with an interesting premise: four friends pull a stag night prank on the bridegroom by locking him in a coffin and leaving him for a couple of hours. Unfortunately, they are then killed by a van. Now bridegroom’s fiancee has asked Roy Grace for help to track him down. Honestly, locking someone in a coffin — even with air holes — is such a horrible, twisted, nightmarish prank to pull. What were these friends thinking? The Roy Grace books are fast-paced, thrilling stories, with James showing all perspectives.

DOOMSDAY KEY, JAMES ROLLINS

I love the Sigma Force novels! Think scientists with guns — kick ass nerds! Each of the Sigma Force characters is a specialist in some kind of science or technology field, and they are therefore assigned the weirdest mysteries that ordinary agents can’t understand. In Doomsday Key, a geneticist, a Vatican archaeologist, and a U.S. senator’s son are killed, each in a different continent. The deaths are connected by a Druidic pagan cross burned into the victims’ skin. If you like Michael Crichton, Dan Brown and Simon Toyne, you’ll love James Rollins. His books are always meticulously researched, so even the weirdest scientific twists have some basis in fact. It’s hard to put a James Rollins novel down — it’s just too exciting! — and it’s great feeling smarter after having read one.

HUNCHBACK ASSIGNMENTS, ARTHUR SLADE

I cannot gush about Arthur Slade’s Hunchback Assignments enough. It’s an innovative, endearing concept — a hunchback named Modo has the power to change his appearance for limited periods of time and is therefore trained to be a secret agent from a young age. He is in love with beautiful fellow agent Octavia, and too shy to show her how he really looks. I fell in love with this book when I read it. It has adventure (steam punk!), romance, and the all too relatable tragedy of feeling self-conscious about your physical appearance. I’ve recommended this for reluctant young readers — I think the adventure and excitement will get them to fall in love with reader. I also highly recommend it to book lovers everywhere. Amazing, amazing book, and the beginning of a wonderful series.

VOTE HERE!

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

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Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!

– Dr. Seuss, Happy Birthday to You!

Happy, happy birthday to you, dear Dr. Seuss! (born March 2, 1904, died September 24, 1991)

What’s your favourite Dr. Seuss book? I love the sense of adventure in Oh, the Places You’ll Go! and I give it often as a gift for graduation or special occasions. I just love how Dr. Seuss’s rhymes can make life seem like such an adventure. He can even make eating eggs and ham sound exciting!

Then of course, there’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Christmas happens to be my favourite holiday ever, yet I love this tale of the grouchy, mean Mr. Grinch. Not his fault his heart was two sizes too small, eh?

To celebrate Dr. Seuss’s birthday, Random House Canada created this awesome video of RHC authors reading Dr. Seuss’s One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. The video includes Erin Morgenstern (author of the magical Night Circus) and Ami McKay (author of the acclaimed Virgin Cure), but I must say, my favourite would have to be Kevin O’Leary. Seriously, watching a Dragon (one of the fiercest Dragons on Dragon’s Den to boot!) read Dr. Seuss just completely made my day. You can almost imagine Dr. Seuss coming up with a rhyme for that, eh?

Review | A Room Full of Bones, Elly Griffiths

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I’m always up for discovering a new mystery series, so when I heard of Elly Griffiths’ A Room Full of Bones, which features Ruth Galloway, a forensic archaeologist who solves mysteries, I was definitely interested. In Bones, a museum curator is found dead beside a coffin thought to contain the bones of medieval Bishop Augustine. I work in an art gallery, and I’ve always been fascinated by museums and artifacts, so I was excited to see how a forensic archaeologist would use her expertise to solve this mystery.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really see much mystery-solving from Ruth Galloway in this book. Bones is the first Galloway I’ve read but the fourth book in the series, and from this Eurocrime review, I see that Galloway is usually more involved in the actual case. However, I agree with the Eurocrime reviewer that the Galloway storyline in this book focused way too much on her personal life. It’s certainly realistic — as a single mother of a one year old, I can imagine that’ll take up most of her time. As well, I bet long-time fans of the series would be pleased to see so much character development. We learn not just about Galloway as a mother, but also about her complicated relationship with the baby’s father, D.I. Harry Nelson. To be honest, I really felt for Nelson’s wife Michele, and I did enjoy the scenes where she and Nelson struggle to make their relationship work. I also liked that, while Galloway clearly loves Nelson as the father of her baby, she doesn’t seem to be in love with him. I found that an interesting twist to the usual love triangle.

Despite the focus on Galloway’s personal life, there is a pretty interesting mystery in Bones. Galloway does discover a shocking fact about the bishop from the bones, and her expertise is eventually key to solving the curator’s death. I was disappointed that these pivotal elements appeared mostly in passing and I was somewhat disappointed at the way that mystery was resolved.

That being said, there are a couple of other mysteries in Bones — another character’s death and Nelson himself contracting a mysterious disease. These are both interesting puzzles, and I love the cast of secondary characters that we get to meet. The Smith family members are particularly quirky, and I like how the they reminded me a bit of Agatha Christie’s mysteries. We have all these complex characters, each potentially with his or her own motivations to commit a crime.

A blurb at the back of the novel calls Griffiths’ books “atmospheric,” and definitely, Bones contains an element of the gothic. I like that Griffiths never really confirms whether an incident is supernatural or whether it can be explained by science. For one plot twist in particular, Galloway’s friend Cathbad, a Druid, offers a supernatural explanation and drug-induced hallucinogenic solution, yet later on, someone else gives a more prosaic, perfectly rational explanation. This ambiguity adds to the atmosphere. While I found the potentially supernatural elements odd, I never really was sucked deep enough into the story to find them genuinely creepy. Even when someone received a snake that Cathbad says was a curse, I really just thought of it as a snake, despite Griffiths’ ambiguous treatment. That being said, I did have a horrible nightmare the first night I read this book. Perhaps my subconscious was more afraid than I realized.

A Room Full of Bones is a pretty good mystery. I was expecting a bit more of the historical mystery and I would have liked to see a bit more of the forensic archaeologist side of Ruth Galloway, but her personal life does make for an interesting story. I liked learning about the relationships between the characters, and I like how Griffiths made them seem real.