Tag Archives: 50BookPledge2012

Review | Lethal, Sandra Brown

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Lethal by Sandra Brown is a fun romantic thriller. Honor was enjoying a quiet day with her daughter Emily when both are taken hostage by suspected mass murderer Lee Coburn. Hardly the set up for romance, except it turns out that Lee has his own version of what happened the night of the murders. He also thinks Honor’s husband had been killed over a secret, and that that secret has now made Honor and Emily a target for The Bookkeeper, a mysterious, ruthless crime lord. Who can Honor trust, and will Coburn keep her and Emily safe? Lethal goes from plot twist to plot twist rapidly, and the chemistry between Honor and Coburn is great.

It was a bit difficult to see Coburn as a potential hero in the beginning — he was still bloodied up and injured from the evening of the murders, and he kept threatening Honor with Emily’s safety if she didn’t cooperate. So I’m glad Brown kept the sexual tension in these scenes to a minimum — we see hints of Honor and Coburn finding the other attractive, enough to set up the eventual romance, but the focus is on Honor’s fear and her concern for Emily.

Once Honor decides to trust Coburn, the story really takes off with a hunt for Eddie’s secret and to escape from The Bookkeeper. While I don’t usually like the kid characters in thrillers like this, I thought Emily was well done. Her innocence and charm help counterbalance Honor’s fear, and urge out Coburn’s softer, sweeter side. The mystery was well done — I had no idea what Eddie’s secret was, and with even Coburn in the dark, I had no idea how they could find out. I somewhat guessed the identity of The Bookkeeper before the big reveal, but that was probably more luck than anything (as in I had about three major suspects and one of them turned out to be right).

On a minor note, there’s a subplot that I loved, about the FBI agent Tom, his wife Janice and their special needs child Lanny. Tom is a desk jockey, somewhat out of his depth in a murder investigation (the manhunt for Coburn), yet hopeful that his more exciting role will impress his wife. In a touching scene, Tom suggests to Janice that they put Lanny in a facility.

…he spoke before she could. “That’s not a criticism of you. Your patience and endurance amaze me. Truly. But caring for him is killing you.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Am I? It’s shredding you, body and soul. I see evidence of it daily.”

“You can look into my soul?”

Her sarcasm was more effective than a flat-out rebuke would have been. [p.101]

In the midst of all the thrills and adrenaline over Honor and Coburn’s story, Brown gives us this quiet, fraught exchange between a long-married couple. It’s an intense scene, one that immediately made me care for both characters and want them to work things out. That scene ended even more sadly, with Tom going to bed and realizing his wife preferred playing word games on her phone with someone in Singapore to sleeping with him. The Tom and Janice story turned out to have a bit of a twist in the end, adding even more layers to their relationship. Personally not too happy with their part in the story, but I do like their characters.

I’m also not too thrilled with the way Lethal ended. It just felt gimmicky to me, and I wish Brown had opted for a more traditional ending. Still, I like the chemistry between Honor and Coburn, and I thought the mystery was fun and fast paced. Overall, Lethal is a fun, exciting, romantic read.

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Thank you to Hachette Book Group Canada for a finished copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review | Summerland, Elin Hilderbrand

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“That was the thing we realized: for visitors, Nantucket wasn’t just a place; it was also a fantasy of American summertime that kept people warm and happy all year long.” [p.238]

Elin Hilderbrand’s Summerland presents a different side of Nantucket — the real people, so to speak, who live there year-round, and have lives beyond the “fantasy of American summertime” that draw tourists in. The novel centres around a tragic car accident involving high school seniors just after graduation. Penny, a promising young singer, is the designated driver and killed on impact. Her twin brother Hobby is in a coma, her boyfriend Jake and her friend Demeter are both fine. People say they saw Penny, just before getting into the car, being visibly upset about something Demeter told her behind the dunes. Whatever she heard, it had upset her so much that she drove recklessly, seemingly with the intention of killing herself. The question of what Penny heard becomes the driving force of the narrative, as Hilderbrand delves into the various secrets of the town’s residents, and Penny’s circle of family and friends.

Summerland seemed like a great read for a lazy summer day — small town intrigue, colourful cast of characters, picturesque setting. There are certainly moments of real drama, and characters are given depth in various ways. I was especially touched for example when reading about Demeter’s alcoholism, which stemmed from her insecurity and weight issues. I was also sympathetic to Jake’s mother Ava’s desire to go back home to Australia, and less sympathetic to Jake’s father Jordan’s workaholic tendencies. The explanation of why the death of Ava and Jordan’s younger son in infancy has hit the couple so hard was especially poignant, and made me even more sympathetic to Ava. Other characters had their own form of drama, and their stories all intersected. As Hobby observes, everyone had secrets, everyone was fallible. Which of these secrets was enough to push Penny over the edge? And how does everyone deal with the guilt of thinking it might have been theirs?

Because of the length and the number of narrative voices, Summerland appears to be aiming for a sweeping summer epic, a lovely, lazy, intimate look at complex characters in a beautiful town. In a way, I found the book lacked focus — too many stories, too many details, I ended up getting bored and not caring. Yet in another way, the book also seemed too focused on the accident. That’s an odd thing for me to say, because I generally complain if books wander pointlessly, and I do appreciate a focal point to tie together a sprawling narrative like this.

However, the crux of the narrative — what secret it was that pushed Penny over the edge — just wasn’t strong enough to propel almost 400 pages of narrative. I was intrigued, and I wanted to find out what it was, but I didn’t really care. Would learning the big secret really impact of these characters’ lives? They all certainly seemed obsessed with the question, yet it didn’t feel particularly urgent to me. Or perhaps it’s just that I ended up not caring about the characters.

The problem with having such a huge cast of characters, with the story switching constantly between points of view, is that it becomes confusing. This is especially the case in the beginning, when we would get a new chapter, with the main character of that chapter introduced by his or her first name, and I had no idea who that character was. It did get a little easier as the story went on, but — and here’s the other problem with the novel — the story was just so long that I found it difficult to keep track.

I think the problem was compounded by the multiplicity of perspectives, which meant that certain events are rehashed over and over again from different points of view. It wasn’t as repetitive as it could have been — Hilderbrand is skilled at making each character’s story sound fresh — but all the shifting between flashbacks, as well as the persistent focus on the question of what Demeter said that made Penny go nuts with the car, became tiresome after a while. At various points, I just wanted to skip to the end and find out what the big secret was, without having to listen to all these characters emote about their pasts.

Hilderbrand also includes chapters from the collective point of view of Nantucket residents. In the narrative style of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides and Hannah Pittard’s The Fates Will Find Their Way, Nantucket becomes a bit of a character itself, and we see how the actions of our main characters are perceived by their community. This approach could work, though I personally think it works best if sustained, as Eugenides and Pittard did. Done well, that kind of language can transport you and pull you into the story. In this book, the Nantucket chapters were well written, but they also felt jarring. Because of how many narrative voices I was already trying to keep straight, hearing a collective narrative voice on top of those just added to the cacophony.

It’s not a bad novel, and I know other people have loved it. There are even scenes in it that I loved, and aspects of characters that I found especially interesting. Overall however, I just found the reading experience interminable.

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Thank you to Hachette Book Group Canada for a finished copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review | Gold, Chris Cleave

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There were two kinds of people when a light turned red. One kind accelerated, the other kind braked. [p. 63 of the ARC]

Chris Cleave’s Gold is about Zoe and Kate, the best and second best cyclists in the world, as they prepare for the final Olympics of their careers. Best friends and training partners, both are summed up neatly by the above quotation: Kate, a natural athlete with a husband and child, lives cautiously, while Zoe, a daredevil with a major chip on her shoulder and a bit of a death wish, blazes through red lights without bothering to check both sides of the road. Gold is a fast-paced, exciting sports novel. The cycling scenes are almost poetic, lyrical, and even though I have never been a cycling fan, I was completely caught up in the adrenaline rush. Take this excerpt for example:

Being chased down by another human being is a very intimate thing. She’d never been caught before. She heard each gasp of Jack’s lungs…

And then Jack said something to her. He didn’t have to shout, because he was so close now. He said, “Sorry, Zoe.”

He was sorry. She knew it was the only kind of apology that meant something. With both of them at 200 heartbeats per minute, with the peace of exhaustion coming over her, she understood the effort it took him to say that. She realized what it must have cost him. [pp. 108-109 of the ARC]

I am not an athlete, but wow, Mr. Cleave. The intimacy, the adrenaline, the human connection all in that passage — amazing. Gold is full of passages like that, capturing the spirit of a moment, the complexity of emotions I imagine top athletes must experience, the rush that I imagine compels them to keep competing, to keep training. Gold romanticizes sport — the novel infuses the physical struggles of training with the warm glow of competition. We want these women to win because we are caught up in the intensity of their love for the sport.

More than a sports novel, however, Gold is also a story about friendship. How can their friendship survive when they are forced to compete with each other for their final chance, ever, to participate in the Olympics? We also learn that the story of their friendship is even more complex than just a sports rivalry. From the first chapter, we see Kate’s insecurity over her marriage to Jack, and her concern that the more aggressive, vibrant Zoe might win him over. We also see that Kate and Jack’s daughter Sophie is seriously ill, and while Cleave veers into the maudlin at times when talking about Sophie’s condition, the child’s utter geekiness (she deals with her poor health by imagining her life in terms of Star Wars) keeps her absolutely endearing.

Zoe’s drive to win is extreme and selfish, but it also verges on desperate. Zoe’s competitive drive is deeply rooted in a childhood tragedy, and Cleave highlights her vulnerability. In a particularly poignant observation, Zoe says,

Happy people believed in someone. That was the difference between her and Kate, right there. Expecting company, people like Kate walked with a careful space beside them. Even in their worst moments they could imagine the possibility of someone. [p. 111 of the ARC]

In a way, I felt like I was supposed to root for Zoe. Even her coach (who trains both Zoe and Kate) has to admit he wants Zoe to win. While Kate wants to win, Zoe needs to win, and the coach admits he worries how Zoe will go on living if she ever loses. However, I found myself on Team Kate the entire time. Zoe annoyed me with her utter self-centredness, and even though Cleave does a good job keeping her angst understandable, I thought she went too far too often. Zoe may have the championship mentality, but her single mindedness compels her to do anything — manipulate, injure, wound — in the name of winning, and this disregard for the off-track lives of her rivals makes me less sympathetic to her situation. Perhaps it’s also because I could relate more with the softer spoken Kate, who may lack that single minded focus that makes athletes into champions, yet who also cares deeply about what is important to her — winning gold, yes, but also her husband and child.

At one point, when Zoe’s selfishness threatens the stability of Kate’s family’s comfortable lifestyle, I found myself actively hating Zoe. On one hand, I understood that Zoe’s actions, especially in that case, were spurred by deep, deep pain rather than just malice, but the extent of the damage she could cause was too much, and I hated her at that point. That, I think, is a testament to how deeply Gold gets into you: the characters are no longer just fictional constructs on a page; they feel like real people, and their actions feel like they have real consequences.

To Cleave’s credit, he keeps his characters complex. Even selfish, single-minded Zoe has her moments of kindness, even sweet, maternal Kate has her edge. Kate’s husband Jack is given texture by his love for Scotland. I especially love this scene where he sings The Proclaimers song “500 Miles” with Sophie:

It was a shout of defiance, was what the song was. It was the reason he and Kate and Sophie all knew she would get better. In his heart Jack was sure they could all win against this leukaemia just being sufficiently Scottish. [p. 113 of the ARC]

Isn’t that beautiful? Beautiful and heartbreakingly, tragically, futile. There’s the competition of cycling down a track, and there’s the daily struggle of facing your daughter’s leukaemia. In his author’s note, Chris Cleave writes, “Caring for sick children is the Olympics of parenting.” Indeed it is, and in a way, the stakes feel so much higher. This is me, speaking as a non-athlete and a non-mother. I can’t imagine pushing my body to its limits day in and day out for that elusive gold medal, but I don’t even want to imagine waking up day in and day out knowing my daughter is in pain and that she can die at any time.

I can imagine Jack, belting out songs at the top of his lungs in the desperate belief that this can keep Sophie alive. I can imagine Kate, pumping her legs beyond all endurance, because Sophie is cheering her on. I can see Sophie, in one of the most heartbreaking scenes of the book, cleaning vomit off her Star Wars Millennium Falcon ship, before her parents find out how sick she’d been that evening. I can even imagine Zoe, desperately needing to win gold, yet realizing the price she may have to pay to achieve it.

The romance of sport infuses Cleave’s Gold, but it is tempered by the harshness of life outside the track. Gold is a beautiful, gripping story, and, with the 2012 Olympics coming soon, a timely one. Gold takes us from the rush of competition to the reality of everyday life. Sometimes the twists seemed soap opera-like, but we are so invested in the characters that the narrative still works. Fantastic book, beautifully written.

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Thank you to Random House Canada for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.