No talking, only reveals! :bash:

Giz's reveal is:


She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb



Amazon.co.uk Review
"Mine is a story of craving; an unreliable account of lusts and troubles that began, somehow, in 1956 on the day our free television was delivered." So begins the story of Dolores Price, the unconventional heroine of Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone. Dolores is a class-A emotional basket case, and why shouldn't she be? She's suffered almost every abuse and familial travesty that exists: her father is a violent, philandering liar; her mother has the mental and emotional consistency of Jell-O; and the men in her life are among the most loathsome creatures ever to go by the name of man. But Dolores is no quitter; she battles her woes with a sense of self-indulgence and gluttony rivalled only by Henry VIII. Hers is a dysfunctional Wonder Years, where growing up in the golden era was anything but ideal. While most kids her age were dealing with the monumental importance of the latest Beatles single and how college turned an older sibling into a long-haired hippie, Dolores was grappling with such issues as divorce, rape and mental illness. Whether you're disgusted by her antics or moved by her pathetic ploys, you'll be drawn into Dolores's warped, hilarious, Mallomar-munching world

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

From the back cover:

Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow.

The improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years.

Amazon.com review:

Mark Haddon's bitterly funny debut novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is a murder mystery of sorts--one told by an autistic version of Adrian Mole. Fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone is mathematically gifted and socially hopeless, raised in a working-class home by parents who can barely cope with their child's quirks. He takes everything that he sees (or is told) at face value, and is unable to sort out the strange behavior of his elders and peers.

Late one night, Christopher comes across his neighbor's poodle, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork. Wellington's owner finds him cradling her dead dog in his arms, and has him arrested. After spending a night in jail, Christopher resolves--against the objection of his father and neighbors--to discover just who has murdered Wellington. He is encouraged by Siobhan, a social worker at his school, to write a book about his investigations, and the result--quirkily illustrated, with each chapter given its own prime number--is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Haddon's novel is a startling performance. This is the sort of book that could turn condescending, or exploitative, or overly sentimental, or grossly tasteless very easily, but Haddon navigates those dangers with a sureness of touch that is extremely rare among first-time novelists. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is original, clever, and genuinely moving: this one is a must-read. --Jack Illingworth, Amazon.ca

Breeze's Reveal:



Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer



From School Library Journal:
Adult/High School-Oskar Schell is not your average nine-year-old. A budding inventor, he spends his time imagining wonderful creations. He also collects random photographs for his scrapbook and sends letters to scientists. When his father dies in the World Trade Center collapse, Oskar shifts his boundless energy to a quest for answers. He finds a key hidden in his father's things that doesn't fit any lock in their New York City apartment; its container is labeled "Black." Using flawless kid logic, Oskar sets out to speak to everyone in New York City with the last name of Black. A retired journalist who keeps a card catalog with entries for everyone he's ever met is just one of the colorful characters the boy meets. As in Everything Is Illuminated (Houghton, 2002), Foer takes a dark subject and works in offbeat humor with puns and wordplay. But Extremely Loud pushes further with the inclusion of photographs, illustrations, and mild experiments in typography reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (Dell, 1973). The humor works as a deceptive, glitzy cover for a fairly serious tale about loss and recovery. For balance, Foer includes the subplot of Oskar's grandfather, who survived the World War II bombing of Dresden. Although this story is not quite as evocative as Oskar's, it does carry forward and connect firmly to the rest of the novel. The two stories finally intersect in a powerful conclusion that will make even the most jaded hearts fall.

Ri's reveal:

Taft
by Ann Patchett



John Nickel is a black ex-jazz musician who only wants to be a good father. But when his son is taken away from him, he's left with nothing but the Memphis bar he manages. Then he hires Fay, a young white waitress, who has a volatile brother named Carl in tow. Nickel finds himself consumed with the idea of Taft -- Fay and Carl's dead father -- and begins to reconstruct the life of a man he never met. But his sympathies for these lost souls soon take him down a twisting path into the lives of strangers.

Critical Praise:

“As resonant as a blues song. Expect miracles when you read Ann Patchett’s fiction.”
-- New York Times Book Review

“A moving emblem of fatherhood’s rarely explored passion.”
-- Los Angeles Times

“Patchett writes with remarkable conviction and attention to telling details.”
-- Jane Smiley, Mirabella

“Absorbing . . . strikingly original.”
-- Kirkus Reviews

Ann Patchett is one of my favorite authors!! I haven't read this one yet, but I have loved all of her other books! -Ri

Lizabeth's reveal:

The Photograph by Penelope Lively



From the Publisher
Booker Prize-winning novelist Penelope Lively's latest masterpiece opens with a snapshot: Kath, before her death, at an unknown gathering, holding hands with a man who is not her husband. The photograph is in an envelope marked "DON'T OPEN-DESTROY." But Kath's husband does not heed the warning, embarking on a journey of discovery that reveals a tight web of secrets—within marriages, between sisters, and at the heart of an affair. Kath, with her mesmerizing looks and casual ways, moves like a ghost through the memories of everyone who knew her-and a portrait emerges of a woman whose life cannot be understood without plumbing the emotional depths of the people she touched.
Propelled by the author's signature mastery of narrative and psychology, The Photograph is Lively at her very best, the dazzling climax to all she has written before.

Chronic's reveal




Book Description

Fred Landon is forty-two years old, out of a job, out of a marriage, and only tentatively in tune with his role as a father to his seventeen-year-old flower child daughter. But everything changes when one dayhe becomes aware of the mysterious Margaret. Then a long-shot job selling real estate seems to be his for the taking. Suddenly a lonely life becomes complicated with the demands of a new job, his ex-wife, his errant daughter and his passionate lover. Fred Landon has been jolted back to life -- but where will his life go now?


This is a good Canadian Author

Morsie's reveal

Torch by Cheryl Strayed



Be incredible! That's the advice Teresa Rae Wood gives the listeners of her popular local radio show, Modern Pioneers!, a kind of hippie Prairie Home Companion. Teresa has taken the advice to heart in her own life. As a teen mother and abused wife, she escaped with her two children to rural Minnesota, fell in love with a local carpenter, and raised good kids, Claire and Joshua. Then, at only 38, she receives the devastating news that she is gravely ill. In just a few weeks, she is gone.
The award-winning writer Cheryl Strayed creates from this shattering experience a novel that reviewers have called an unforgettable read and a hauntingly beautiful story that shimmers with a humane grace.
Infused with compassion and surprising humor, Torch takes a refreshingly unsentimental view of a family reeling from crisis. Claire drops out of college to devote herself to keeping her mother's memory alive back home. Joshua drifts out of high school and into trouble, keeping his grief silently private. Suddenly thrown into adulthood, they struggle to figure out how to connect in this new, unthinkable situation. Their one remaining ballast is Teresa's gentle common-law husband, Bruce. When Bruce announces news of his own plans, it comes as a shock not only to Claire and Joshua but also to the townspeople who have watched this unusual family grow and have come to love them.
My review

Geishabird's Reveal:



Dave Barry - Big Trouble

In the city of Coconut Grove, Florida, these things happen: A struggling adman named Eliot Arnold drives home from a meeting with the Client From Hell. His teenage son, Matt, fills a Squirtmaster 9000 for his turn at a high school game called Killer. Matt's intended victim, Jenny Herk, sits down in front of the TV with her mom for what she hopes will be a peaceful evening for once. Jenny's alcoholic and secretly embezzling stepfather, Arthur, emerges from the maid's room, angry at being rebuffed. Henry and Leonard, two hit men from New Jersey, pull up to the Herks' house for a real game of Killer, Arthur's embezzlement apparently not having been quite so secret to his employers after all. And a homeless man named Puggy settles down for the night in a treehouse just inside the Herks' yard.

In a few minutes, a chain of events that will change the lives of each and every one of them will begin, and will leave some of them wiser, some of them deader, and some of them definitely looking for a new line of work. With a wicked wit, razor-sharp observations, rich characters, and a plot with more twists than the Inland Waterway, Dave Barry makes his debut a complete and utter triumph.

Ace's reveal:

Jessica by Bryce Courtenay



Jessica is based on the inspiring story of a young girl's fight for justice against tremendous odds. Jessica is the pride of her father, as they work together on the struggling family farm. A murder is committed and only Jessica can save the killer from the lynch mob. Nine months later a baby is born...jessica is determined to guard the secret of the father's identity. Set in the harsh Australian bush against the outbreak of World War I, this novel is heatbreaking in its innocence, and shattering in its brutality.

My reveal is:


The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
Biographer Margaret Lea returns one night to her apartment above her father''s antiquarian bookshop. On her steps she finds a letter. It is a hand-written request from one of Britain’s most prolific and well-loved novelists. Vida Winter, gravely ill, wants to recount her life story before it is too late, and she wants Margaret to be the one to capture her history. The request takes Margaret by surprise–she doesn’t know the author, nor has she read any of Miss Winter’s dozens of novels.
Late one night, while pondering whether to accept the task of recording Miss Winter’s personal story, Margaret begins to read her father’s rare copy of Miss Winter’s Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation. She is spellbound by the stories and confused when she realizes the book only contains twelve stories. Where is the thirteenth tale? Intrigued, Margaret agrees to meet Miss Winter and act as her biographer.
As Vida Winter unfolds her story, she shares with Margaret the dark family secrets that she has long kept hidden as she remembers her days at Angelfield, the now burnt-out estate that was her childhood home. Margaret carefully records Miss Winter’s account and finds herself more and more deeply immersed in the strange and troubling story. In the end, both women have to confront their pasts and the weight of family secrets. As well as the ghosts that haunt them still.

ANTHERAS REVEAL





Black & White by Dani Shapiro (Advance Readers Edition, Pub. Date April 2007)

My Review:
Clara Dunne was a celebrity before she truly understood what the words meant. The subject of her mother’s controversial photos, Clara’s childhood was consumed by art and her role as her mother’s muse. At eighteen she escaped and made a new life for herself, away from the glare of New York; now however, her mother’s illness is pulling her back into a world she’s spent a lifetime trying to forget.

In Black & White Dani Shapiro explores difficult territory - the issue of rights - for both artist and muse. She then makes the issue more complex by adding family dynamics to the mix, in this case the artist is also the mother of her subject. She raises a challenging question: “can a mother protect her child and still honour her muse when the subject of her best work is her child.”

The quick answer to this question appears to be no for when we first meet Clara she still bears the deep scars from being her mother’s muse. Clara’s raw, unfettered anguish roils off the page, causing the reader to gasp as the emotion hits like a ton of bricks. Her pain is so real that readers are cast adrift to share her gaping wounds.

Whose rights take precidence – the artist’s need to create or the child’s to own their life? Clara feels she is living a shadow life, that she never really owned her existence. “And so Clara wandered the campus at Yale University, surrounded by real people, as she thought of them, living real lives. She herself had forfeited that right – or perhaps she’d never had it at all…Was there a place in the world for someone like her?” Clara perceived herself as only existing when seen through her mother’s lense, perhaps an understandable reaction given that she dissociates from herself during photo shoots. The fact that Clara believes she's forfeited the right to a life is perhaps the most chilling statement made in in this novel.

In Black & White there are no winners or losers. Shapiro does not take the easy way out, allowing readers to feel only sympathy for Clara. She insists that readers see all sides and manages her prose so deftly that within chapters readers are reluctantly driven to understand the urges that motivate Ruth. Within Ruth the artist continually wins out over the mother. She seems unable to refrain from capturing what her inner eye sees, even at the ultimate cost.

The ripple effects from Ruth’s decisions are far reaching. Clara and her sister Robin have carried their scars with them and the damage reaches their children as well. Robin was invisible to her mother and she has no emotional warmth for her own children. Clara has hidden her entire past from her daughter Sam, keeping her daughter away from Ruth and, by extension, an understanding of family history and Sam’s place in the world. The numbness in which she exists has kept her husband and child from feeling she is an active part of their family.

Within Black & White there are many competing claims of selfishness. Even though decisions are made to protect the individual, each character could make a valid claim that those decisions were made purely in another’s self interest. There are no black or white answers to the questions Shapiro raises, here there is only grey.

Shapiro only lightly touches on the most disturbing aspect of Ruth’s creativity, that the images of her naked child may be used by pedophiles. Given how far she already pushed her readers, she can be forgiven for not taking the last step and pushing them over the cliff.

momx3lovesbooks reveal:



"The Bonesetter's Daughter" by Amy Tan

The Bonesetter's Daughter dramatically chronicles the tortured, devoted relationship between LuLing Young and her daughter Ruth. A strong novel, filled with idiosyncratic, sympathetic characters, haunting images, historical complexity, significiant contemporary themes, and suspenseful mystery.

Rebecca's reveal is :

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields .
This fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, captured in Daisy's vivacious yet reflective voice, has been winning over readers since its publication in 1995, when it won the Pulitzer Prize. After a youth marked by sudden death and loss, Daisy escapes into conventionality as a middle-class wife and mother. Years later she becomes a successful garden columnist and experiences the kind of awakening that thousands of her contemporaries in mid-century yearned for but missed in alcoholism, marital infidelity and bridge clubs. The events of Daisy's life, however, are less compelling than her rich, vividly described inner life--from her memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death. Shields' sensuous prose and her deft characterizations make this, her sixth novel, her most successful yet.

DarkPunkAngel's reveal is:

The Dogs of Babel TBR



It's a terrific high concept: a woman falls from a backyard tree and dies; the only witness is the family dog, a Rhodesian Ridgeback. To find out what happened-accident? suicide?-her grieving husband tries to teach the dog to talk. Parkhurst's debut novel has been getting a lot of pre-pub attention, probably mostly for this concept, because the execution of this first novel is flawed. The tantalizing prospect of linguistics professor Paul Iverson attempting to teach Lorelei to talk is given short, and erratically plotted, shrift. Paul's narration oscillates between his present-day experiences and the backstory of his romance with Lexy Ransome, a mask maker. The two meet when Paul drops by Lexy's yard sale, buys a device for shaping hard-boiled eggs into squares, then returns with a bunch of square eggs ("And we stood there smiling, with the plate between us, the egg-cubes glowing palely in the growing dark"). This incident, a maxi-combo of cute and sentimental, defines much of the couple's love story (on their first date, Lexy whisks them off to DisneyWorld), marking much of this novel as a sentimental, manipulative romance not unlike James Patterson's Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas; some readers will adore it, while others will gag even as the pages darken toward tragedy. Few will relish the sketchy account of Paul's work with the dog, which goes nowhere until it veers, bizarrely and unbelievably, toward an underground group performing illegal surgical experiments on dogs. Parkhurst is a fluid stylist, and there are memorable moments here, as well as some terrific characters (particularly the enigmatic Lexy), but one gets the sense of an author trying to stuff every notion she's ever had into her first book, with less than splendid results.