It's Monday! What Are You Reading?: June 21, 2010

Hosted by Sheila at One Person's Journey Through a World of Books, It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is a weekly bookish meme whereby bloggers share their reading for the past week.

It was a slow reading week for me this week between work and getting my house ready for a cook-out on Sunday. I still managed to finish a book, though!

This week, I read:
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

This week, I reviewed (Click on the title to read my review):
Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

This week, I'm reading:
The English American by Alison Larkin

This week, I hope to begin reading:
The Essays: A Selection by Michel de Montaigne
The Riddle of Berlin by Cym Lowell

What are you reading this week? 

BBAW: My Nomination Post

I've seen a lot of posts over the last several months talking about Book Blogger Appreciation Week, so when I saw Jenners' post about how she's joining up, I was intrigued.

BBAW is one of those things that, I think, every book blogger needs to tackle at least once, much like Dewey's 24-Hour Read-a-Thon. Of course, having never experienced a BBAW myself, I can't really tell anyone why they should participate, other than I see a lot of people talking positively about it.

In looking through the posts on the BBAW site, I saw that bloggers are being asked to nominate themselves for awards this year, and link up to the post which condenses their five nomination entries.

Since I started my blog back in December, I decided to nominate myself for Best New Book Blog, a category which I'm sure will be full of awesome new bloggers. But, nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

So, here are my five posts for my entry, which I think best represent what I've done with my blog thus far:

1. A post most of you probably haven't read (From when my blog was a wee, itty-bitty tadpole) where I try to figure out which War and Peace character I loathed the least

2. A review of one of my favorite reads of 2010, complete with a Twilight rant, Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

3. My favorite read of all time: The Great Gatsby

4. How Eric Van Lustbader's Last Snow sort of helped me overcome James Patterson Syndrome

5. One of my longest reviews (It should be, it took me seven weeks to read the book!), Gone With the Wind

Review: Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

Title: Sarah's Key

Author: Tatiana de Rosnay

Pages: 293

Source: Library

Rating: 9/10

Challenges: Read 'n' Review Challenge

First Sentence: "The girl was the first to hear the loud pounding on the door."

Summary (From back of book):

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten-year-old girl, is taken with her parents by the French police as they go door-to-door arresting Jewish families in the middle of the night. Desperate to protect her younger brother, Sarah locks him in a bedroom cupboard -- their secret hiding place -- and promises to come back for him as soon as they are released

Sixty years later: Sarah's story intertwines with that of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist investigating the roundup. In her research, Julia stumbles onto a trail of secrets that link her to Sarah, and to questions about her own romantic future.

My Two Cents:

I have been *trying* to read this book for months, ever since I tossed it into my Amazon cart while shopping for the library. When it came in, I was reading another book, so it made the rounds of several people. Then, I read about 50 pages one Saturday morning and was hooked, but someone came in requesting the book. So, it's taken me until now to read it.

Until reading this book, I had no idea there were roundups in Paris during World War II. It makes sense, seeing as France was Nazi-occupied for part of the war. But, it was still a shock to learn that people really were taken from their homes by French police, sent to French camps, and then taken by train directly to Auschwitz and killed. Horrifying.

I liked Julia as a character well enough, but there were some times when I had wished she would have woken up sooner and changed her home situation. Some of the things she put up with just annoyed me, and kind of set me against her character.

Sarah, though, is one of the most memorable characters I've ever met in fiction. She begins the book as a regular 10-year-old girl, but the horrors that she sees and the things she's forced to come to terms with change her permanently. While there probably wasn't a child during the roundup who was in her exact situation, there likely were several children who had their innocence destroyed by their own countrymen.

This is an incredibly powerful book. I usually try to stagger my reading of books, switching back and forth between two books I'm reading, but I couldn't put this one down. I finished more than half the book in about an hour on a train ride. This is one book you'll never forget.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?: June 14, 2010

Hosted by Sheila at One Person's Journey Through a World of Books, It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is a weekly bookish meme whereby bloggers share their reading for the past week.

This week, I read:
Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
Don't Die, My Love by Lurlene McDaniel

This week, I reviewed (Click on the title to read my review):
 The Art of Devotion by Samantha Bruce-Benjamin
Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life and Everything in Between by Theresa Brown
She's So Dead to Us by Kieran Scott

This week, I'm reading:
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
The English American by Alison Larkin

This week, I hope to begin reading:
The Riddle of Berlin by Cym Lowell
The Essays: A Selection by Michel de Montaigne

What are you reading this week?

Review: She's So Dead to Us by Kieran Scott

Title: She's So Dead to Us

Author: Kieran Scott

Pages: 275

Source: Publisher

Rating: 4/10

Challenges: Read 'n' Review Challenge

First Sentence: "'Oh. My. God. You are never going to believe who I just saw driving through town in a Subaru.'"

Summary (From back of book):

Ally Ryan would rather be in Maryland. She would rather be anywhere, in fact, than Orchard Hill, site of her downfall. Well, not hers exactly, but when your father's hedge fund goes south and all your friends lose their trust funds, things don't look so sunny for you. So her mother moved them away to flee the shame. But now they're moving back. Back to the country club, new car every year, family came over on the Mayflower lifestyle that Ally has outgrown. But there are bright sides. Like gorgeous Jake Graydon. Ally and Jake instantly like each other, but it won't be easy for them to be together -- not if his friends (her former friends) have anything to say about it. Is Ally ready to get thrown back into the drama of the life she left behind?

My Two Cents:

This book just did not work for me. It wasn't the writing or anything, it's just that I can't stand to watch kids be so cruel to one another. And, sadly, the mean girl streak is big in the young adult literary world. It's just like reading one big celebrity reality show. I almost felt like the Kardashian sisters and Lindsey Lohan were going to pop up any second.

People in this book were just too mean and too shallow for me to be able to actually like them. Sure, Ally was all right, and I liked her well enough, but it was just too hard watching everyone else mercilessly bring Ally down time and time again simply because they could. I almost put the book down, hoping it would get better and that the mean girls would get their come-uppance. Nope. Didn't happen. Sure, there's buzz that this is going to be a trilogy or that there will at least be a sequel, so there's time for them to pay their dues, but I was just left unsatisfied.

Perhaps I'm projecting some of my more heinous junior high experiences on this book, but the mean girls were too mean and there was very little redeeming quality in anyone in this book for me to really like it. I know Scott is trying to show some of the seedy underbelly of high schools through this clique, but I think that this mean girl, privileged child with no consequences trend in young adult literature (Think Gossip Girl. *shudder*) isn't helping kids get through high school any more easily. It's just giving kids more ideas.

Review: Critical Care by Theresa Brown

Title: Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between

Author: Theresa Brown

Pages: 208

Source: Publisher

Rating: 6/10

Challenges: Read 'n' Review Challenge

First Sentence: "'You left teaching English for this?'"

Summary (From back of book):

Brown walks readers through the rigors of chemotherapy, reveals the odd things that can happen to people's bodies in hospitals, and throws in some humor with her chapter titled "Doctors Don't Do Poop." During her first year on the hospital floor, Brown is seriously injured, but her recovery allows her to take a new perspective on the health care system, giving her a better understanding of the challenges faced by her patients.

My Two Cents:

I'm not usually one to read memoirs, especially those by people in professions I really know nothing about, but I have several friends in nursing, so I decided to get a look at what they do every day.

Brown, a former English professor, decides to return to school and become a nurse, spending her first year on the medical oncology floor. Each chapter includes stories of actual happenings on her ward, showing the ins and outs of not only nursing, but cancer treatment. It's a really quick read, and I think those in the medical profession would enjoy this.

For me, though, it just didn't quite work as well as I thought it would. Brown's writing is OK; it's nothing stellar and it's not bad. But there really isn't much heart behind a lot of these tales. She talks about dealing with her first deaths on the ward, but doesn't really give us much in the way of how she dealt with those losses. She just kind of says, "It took me a long time to recover" and then moves on. I guess I would have liked to see a little more of that instead of all the stories of patients.

I liked this book well enough, but it just didn't impress me as anything particularly special. Perhaps those with more knowledge of nursing or medicine will find more interesting things in this book, though.

Review and blog tour: The Art of Devotion by Samantha Bruce-Benjamin

Title: The Art of Devotion

Author: Samantha Bruce-Benjamin

Pages: 378

Source: Publisher

Rating: 7/10

Challenges: Read 'n' Review Challenge

First Sentence: "For each of us, there is a moment: what we see at the last, before God closes our eyes forever; an entire existence distilled to one perfect memory."

Summary (From back of book):

The secluded beaches of a sun-drenched Mediterranean island are the perfect playground for young Sebastian and Adora. Emotionally adrift from their mother, Adora shelters her sensitive older brother from the cruelties of the world. Sophie does not question her children's intense need for one another until it's too late. Her beloved son's affections belong to Adora, and when he drowns in the sea, she has no one else to blame.

Still heartbroken years later, Adora fills her emptiness with Genevieve, the precocious young daughter of her husband's business associate and his jealous wife, Miranda. Thrilled to be invited into the beautiful and enigmatic Adora's world, the child idolizes her during their summers together. Yet, as the years progress, Genevieve begins to suspect their charmed existence is nothing more than a carefully crafted illusion. Soon, she too is ensnared in a web of lies.

My Two Cents:

Any book that begins with the final sentence from my all-time favorite novel, The Great Gatsby, gets an extra point in my book. And when that novel can take some of the same themes found in Gatsby and use them properly, it gets more points.

This book, Bruce-Benjamin's first novel, is told entirely from the memories of its characters. There is no present tense in the verbs, and some other reviewers have had problems with that fact. I think it works for this book, especially since so many of its characters are stuck in the past and can't see forward into the future. The "telling" from memory also works well for Bruce-Benjamin's writing style, which is easily readable and fluid.

I had a hard time determining which characters to like and dislike, which is definitely the author's intention. She only shows you what you need to see at any given moment, and your opinion of many of the characters changes pretty drastically throughout the course of the book. Sometimes, I like when authors do that, but other times I'm not so fond of it. The constant change in appearance and opinion of the characters works for this novel, though, as a lot of the focus is on artifice and perception.

I do have to say that Sebastian and Adora's relationship often creeped me out a little bit. They were far too close and dependent for brother and sister, especially as they got older. Maybe it's just because I've never had a sibling relationship that was that insanely close, but I just didn't understand it and I didn't understand why Sophie, their mother, didn't dissuade them from spending so much time together.

If you like books about family relationships, secrets and lies, this is the book for you.