Cage of Stars (Jacquelyn Mitchard)

As I think I've written before, I enjoy Jacquelyn Mitchard's sagas, although they all have certain themes, which I sometimes find a bit tiring. Cage of Stars is her "Mormon" book, and if the information in it was accurate (and I don't see why it wouldn't be) I learnt a good deal that I didn't know about the Church of Latter Day Saints (or LDS as it's referred to in Cage of Stars.)

Ronnie witnesses her sisters' murder, and struggles for the rest of the novel with her parent's decision to forgive the perpetrator. It's an interesting dilemma to consider, of course, one brought to life whenever you see those ridiculous quotes in newspapers to the effect of "I don't believe in capital punishment but if it were my child..."

I enjoyed Ronnie, her alienation from her family, and in some ways from the rest of the world, due to her religious beliefs. The happy ending was a little too pat and unrealistic, as Mitchard's sometimes are, but I enjoyed it at the time - Ronnie travelled her path and comes to her reward, in the end.

Chart Throb (Ben Elton)

I like Ben Elton's novels. Sure, they make their points very heavily, and all the characters exist to make us realise something, not to actually be people in their own right, but I like sitting down and discovering what Ben Elton think about, in Chart Throb's case, shows like Australian Idol.

Like all of Elton's novels, it's enormously scathing about our society, in an entertaining and over-the-top way, and you can overlook the cardboard characters. And, although I never particularly enjoyed shows like Australian Idol, I don't think I'll ever be able to watch them again without thinking of Elton's descriptions of the behind-the-scenes manipulation that I'm sure exists, although perhaps not quite so dramatically as Elton creates. Despite the rather awful ending, a fun book, although definitely a library-only read for me.

The Night Watch (Sarah Waters)

I enjoy Sarah Waters novels - they're always so dramatic. Lesbian affairs, murders, betrayal, deception, and so on. I expected The Night Watch to be similar - lesbians in the Blitz, bombings, a load of enjoyable drama. But The Night Watch is probably the most subtle and intricate of her novels, or so it seemed to me.

I'd read about its reverse chronological order, but even though I was prepared for it, I still had to flick backwards while reading to remind myself about how this situation turned out, or the later significance of that person. I'm not sure it really worked for me, and I'm not quite sure why she chose to write it that way. It did add an air of melancholy to the whole story, knowing where the characters end up while you're reading the beginnings of their stories,but I don't like having to flick backwards to work something out - that means a book isn't working for me.

The Night Watch does a wonderful job of invoking Blitz-era London, which is not a time I've read a great deal about, so I found that very interesting. The interplay of the characters, their lives going on amongst the war that surrounds them - it was a very touching story, although ultimately quite depressing. Definitely worth the read, despite the offputting way it's structured.

The Man of My Dreams (Curtis Sittenfield)

I quite enjoyed Sittenfield's Prep, enough to want to check out any future books by the author. The Man of My Dreams has certain similarities to Prep - a drifting story following the insecure Hannah through fifteen years of her emotional and love life. I liked bits of this book, but I'm not sure that I actually enjoyed the whole. I read it a few weeks ago, and my memory of it, and especially its very bland protagonist, has already faded alarmingly. I think if you enjoyed Prep, or were interested in Sittenfield's style, it's worth the read to see where she went next. The Man of My Dreams didn't require a great deal of concentration, and is an excellent book to read on holidays.

The Gilded Chamber (Rebecca Kohn)

The Gilded Chamber is a re-telling of the biblical story of Esther, a young Jewish girl who is brought into the harem of King Xerxes, eventually marries him, and is able to prevent him making an order for the execution of the Jewish people. It's full of lush descriptions of life in the harem - beauty treatments, endless banquets of food and wine, and gorgeous costumes. However, it's not really the sort of book you read for strong characters - while Kohn paints some gorgeous visual scenery, Esther and Xerxes move through it rather blankly. Fun, but fairly forgettable.

The Castlemaine Murders (Kerry Greenwood)

I listened to The Castlemaine Murders as an audiobook, and while it took me a little while to get used to the very English narrator (Phryne didn't really sound as I expected her to sound), it didn't detract from my enjoyment of yet another light hearted mystery from Greenwood. As usual, the mystery was not terribly mysterious, but Phryne was deliciously fabulous, and I love all the scenes in her household. When will I be rich enough to have a butler to mix me drinks?

Incantation (Alice Hoffman)

Incantation is another one of Alice Hoffman's books for young adults. Incantation is a fairly short book, telling the story of Estrella, who lives with her family in Spain in the 1500s. Estrella discovers that her family belong to a rather different church to her friend Catalina - they light candles on Friday nights, keep pigs as pets, and have special names for each other to use in the privacy of their home. When their secret is revealed, it has terrible consequences for the family.

Incantation is surprisingly graphic in its violence, and I was rather depressed by the time I closed the final cover. However, it's very well written, and I imagine a reasonably accurate portrayal of the persecution of Jews in Spain at the time - a gripping story.

End in Tears (Ruth Rendell)

End in Tears is Ruth Rendell's latest Inspector Wexford novel, and while I found the plot rather contrived, Rendell's skill with characterisation still makes this book very readable indeed. A teenage mother is found murdered, and shortly afterwards one of her friends disappears. Wexford spends the novel seeking the link between thes two girls, and dealing with his own family problems as his wife is furious with their daughter for deciding to have another child. As usual, it is the character of Wexford that carries the story - his frustration with the world he finds himself in, and his determination to find the answers.

Drowning Ruth (Christina Schwarz)

Drowning Ruth is billed as a psychological thriller, but I wasn't particularly enthralled by it. The story of Amanda, who takes care of her sister's child Ruth, after her sister drowns, with the help of Ruth's father, Carl. Amanda was present the night of her sister's death, and we gradually discover the truth of what happened that night as the story progresses. I finished the story, but found it rather dull - a very forgettable book.

One Good Turn (Kate Atkinson)

I was really looking forward reading to One Good Turn. I've enjoyed all of Kate Atkinson's other books, to varying degrees, and I loved Case Histories, which shares characters with One Good Turn. However, unfortunately I wasn't too enthralled.

I found One Good Turn to be enormously complicated. So many characters, so many plots (which all tied together in so many ways) - and I realise that's Atkinson's trademark, in a way. But I just wasn't able to keep track of it this time, or at least not in a way that kept me involved with the characters. I'll definitely re-read One Good Turn sometime in the future, and hope that I enjoy it more the second time.

The Basic Eight (Daniel Handler)

I've read The Basic Eight before, and remember really enjoying it. This time around, this satire of American teenagers, pop culture and high school didn't grab me as much, I think because I was reading it with the end twist in mind.

Basic plot outline - Flan and her seven friends (the titular basic eight) deal with their complex love lives, high school classes and creepy biology teachers. Flan, the narrator, makes it clear that the whole narrative is leading up to the tragedy that occurred on Halloween and its a very effective - creepy, engaging, and all that. Great the first time, not so fabulous for a re-read.

Pomegranate Soup (Marsha Mehran)

I read Pomegranate Soup on a plane, and this very mediocre attempt at magical realism was not improved by such uncomfortable surroundings. I don't think I can blame the plane, though - I would have disliked Pomegranate Soup wherever I read it.

I picked up Pomegranate Soup because of the cover, and took it home from the library because of the blurb. Three Iranian sisters move to a small Irish town and start up a cafe - it seemed a pleasantly light and quirky read to take on holiday.

Unfortunately, as Books Give Wings pointed out, Marsha Mehran has copied the plot of Joanne Harris' Chocolat almost exactly. Strangers come to a small town, are greeted with fear and suspicion, and win over townspeople with their magical cooking skills. Unfortunately, Mehran doesn't write nearly as well as Harris, and Pomegranate Soup suffers from her heavy-handed writing, scattering unnecessary metaphors and symbolism all over the place. The sisters are greeted with competely over-the-top hatred and fear by some - the main villian of the piece, Thomas McGuire, is laughable in his constant state of rage. Pieces of "magic" pop into the plot, but because Mehran hasn't drawn the reader into another world, they are ridiculously out of place. I found myself laughing at a scene I think was supposed to be a transformational and triumphant conclusion to the novel. A very disappointing read.

The Breakdown Lane (Jacquelyn Mitchard)

I quite enjoy Jacquelyn Mitchard's family dramas, and I thought The Breakdown Lane was good - traversing illness, parenting and infidelities, it does so without being cloying or overly cliched.

Julieanne's husband Leo goes off to find himself, and is uncontactable when she is diagnosed with MS. Her children sneak off on a road trip to bring their father home, but he arrives with more baggage than they bargained for. The novel is narrated alternately by Julieanne and her teenage son Gabe, which works fairly well - we get both perspectives of betrayal, and can see both occasionally overreacting. And yes, sometimes people in this novel are just too perfect, and everything turns out with a tinge of happily ever after. But it was a very enjoyable tale despite that.

The Constant Princess (Philippa Gregory)

I like Philippa Gregory's historical novels, especially this loose series of hers which has been revolving around Henry VIII and the powerful families of that time. The Constant Princess is the story of Katherine of Aragon, and we begin by meeting Catalina, Infanta of Spain, when she is a child, watching her parents fight battles and secure their kingdom.

I think Catalina's descriptions of her parents' court are the most beguiling and beautifully written parts of The Constant Princess - I longed to spend my days reclining in a scented bathhouse, and strolling through gardens wearing thin silk robes. Gregory imagines her in love with her first husband, Arthur, and this is a pleasurable little romance. Unfortunately, I think the story finishes a little abruptly - we do not see the birth of Mary, or Katherine's decline in power. I would have liked to see how Gregory portrayed these times in Katherine's life.

The Historian (Elizabeth Kostova)

I read a lot about The Historian on various book blogs, but was a bit unsure about it. I saw it described as the Da Vinci Code with vampires, which didn't really seem like my sort of thing, but I ended up giving it a try.

I can see why it's a little Da Vinci Code-ish - lots of history, lots of information, often narrated to you by various characters. People chasing each other around Europe frantically researching things in libraries. Kostova's characters, however, are much more like people than Brown's info-dumping mechanisms, and her writing is vastly superior. It's a tremendously exciting book - I was quite enthralled in their chase, despite the occasionally clumsy mechanism of letters telling much of the story.

Unfortunately, Kostova's characters suffer a little from the sheer scale of this book - a teenage girl, who is perhaps intended to be the "main" character, simply reads her father's letters to us, and barely becomes a person in her own right. I think that it's very difficult to combine the two though - if you're going to have a novel on an enormous scale and essentially educate your readers about a lot of Eastern European history, it's almost imposssible to create nuanced realistic characters at the same time. Regardless, The Historian is a very enjoyable read, but it's definitely an adventure story rather than a character study.

The Art of Detection (Laurie R King)

I obviously wasn't paying a great deal of attention when I picked this book up at the library, because I was expecting another installment in King's series of Sherlock Holmes novels. The Art of Detection is more properly described as a Kate Martinelli novel - another one of King's serial characters, a San Francisco detective - although it involves the discovery of an unpublished Conan Doyle story narrated by Sherlock Holmes, thereby loosely linking King's two popular mystery series.

I'm not sure if the linking together really worked. The short story is narrated out within the pages of this book, and I became quite distracted with it, which reduced my interest in the resolution of the "real" mystery that Kate was trying to solve. There were almost too many threads to this - Kate's family life, characters from previous Kate novels, the murder (or is it a murder?) that Kate's trying to solve, and then the story-within-a-story. At times, I thought it moved rather slowly.

However, King's skill draws everything together at the end - a satisfactorily tense resolution to Kate's case - and the murdered character whose life is revealed slowly through the book is quite fascinating. It's not one of King's best books - I'm really more a fan of her Sherlock novels - but still an enjoyable read, if you persevere through the occasional slow patches.

The Full Cupboard of Life (Alexander McCall Smith)

The Full Cupboard of Life is another lovely book in McCall Smith's series about private detective Precious Ramotswe. While these stories are technically mysteries, these really take a back seat to McCall Smith's beautifully simply writing, Botswana and Precious herself.

I found myself smiling often while reading this book - it evokes a sense of sweet contentment, and the ending is really beautiful. I loved it - I must read more of these, as I don't think I've read them all.

My Latest Grievance (Elinor Lipman)

I got My Latest Grievance from the library after reading about it on someone's blog, I think. Elinor Lipman is a wonderful storyteller, and I'm surprised that I haven't picked up anything of hers before. If I was to compare her to someone, it would be to Anne Tyler, I suppose - she tells deceptively simply stories, but ones that absorb you.

My Latest Grievance is the story of Frederica, who has lived all her life on a college campus with her parents, who are professors there. The unexpected apperance of her father's first wife gives Frederica a chance to exercise a bit of teenage rebellion, and ends up throwing the college into upheaval.

I really liked Frederica, who is a wonderful teenage character, and her overly concerned parents who psychoanalyse her at every turn. The college campus is a very well realised insular little world. My Latest Grievance is not a book I'll passionately re-read in the future, but, like Tyler's books, it is a very well-crafted story, and a pleasure to read.

Digging to America (Anne Tyler)

I like Anne Tyler's books. I think of them in the same category as Joanna Trollope and Mary Wesley - comfortable, quirky characters, stories that weave their way through a family's life. They're the sort of books I read when I want to feel cozy and contented. I don't spend days thinking about them after I've read them, but they burrow their way into my mind, and I find myself recalling scenes from them months later.

Digging to America is Tyler's latest, focussing on two children from Korea and the sometimes complex relationship between their two adoptive familes. Actually, the relationship between the families is the focus rather than the children themselves - we barely know the children by the book's end, but we know their parents and grandparents very intimately. That's what I love about these books - the drama all happens in the complex threads of people's relationships with each other, and I think that's enormously difficult to do. I admire writers who can entertain me with a story which might seem mundane if you were presented with a precis, but comes alive when you read it.

I don't think I'm explaining myself terribly well. If you like Tyler, I'm sure you'll enjoy Digging to America. If you've never read her before, I'd probably pick one of her novels to begin with; my favourite of her books so far has been Saint Maybe.

Prep (Curtis Sittenfield)

This is the second boarding school related book I've read this week - the first was the delightfully creepy A Great and Terrible Beauty, which is completely different to the neurotic, modern American world of Prep.

At first, I really empathised with Prep's heroine, the awkward, angsty outsider, Lee. She's a scholarship student at Ault, a boarding school filled with wealthy kids, and I think Sittenfield captures those neurotic, self-obsessed teenager years perfectly. I found, however, that my fondness for Lee waned as the novel progressed - while she travels through her years at school, she never seems to be touched by them, or changed by them. She stays, deliberately, on the periphery, and near the end does something which moves her even further away from many of her schoolmates. I found this frustrating; a character who, while she does learn and grow, does so after the story which we are being told.

Prep doesn't have a particular plot, as such. Characters drift in and out of the main narrative thread. Lee's obsession with popular basketballer Cross is a reoccuring theme, but mostly we walk through her school years with her, watching her classmates (Lee is always watching other people, which I relate to). Ault had become a very real place for me by the time I finished Prep, but it's not a place I'd particularly like to visit, and Lee isn't a character I'd really like to see again either. Despite this, Prep is a very enjoyable read, and very skilled as well - Sittenfield writes well, and as I said earlier, she does a great job of capturing those self-conscious teenage years.