The Perfect Place: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)This gripping and disturbing book is quite simply a study in perversity - not to be missed, and truly unforgettable!
Description from the book dust jacket:
Imagine that you are listening to someone tell you everything. Imagine that this person, a woman of a certain station - wellborn, monied, traveled, wearied with her labors to discover the aptest habitation for her troublesome health - may have killed someone, may have murdered someone, a schoolmate, long ago. Imagine that this woman is the kind of woman who would attach no particular importance to the business of killing someone. Imagine that she is the kind of woman who would attach no particular importance to whatever her commerce might have been with the life and death of another person. Imagine that the woman you are listening to would attach immensely more importance to the character of the light that reveals you to her than she would to the fact that it is a human being - you! - whom the light reveals to her. Imagine a person like this and you will have imagined the chillingly familiar central figure in Sheila Kohler's uniquely disturbing literary debut, a psychosexual striptease that accomplishes its exquisitely macabre theater sentence by icy sentence.


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At The Breakers: A Novel (Kentucky Voices) Review

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(More customer reviews)I did enjoy a lot of it. This book was definitely worth the time to read and I found myself picking it up again very easily each time. It's not complex but I don't think it falls into the chick-lit category either. Glad I read it but I don't feel a great need to recommend it to friends.
The main character is a forty-two year old woman who has 4 children, giving birth to the first child when she was 15 years old. That event is the defining moment in the book that sets everything else into motion. Married young to the father and giving birth to a second child, the marriage predictably falls apart and she moves on to other marraiges and other children continually making bad choices and struggling with the enormous task of raising four children on her own with minimal family support and trying to finish her own education. Part of me felt very sympathetic with the character and part of me kept thinking that she was making one bad decision after the next and largely causing her own continuing problems.
While an interesting a quick read, there are some very real problems with the book that keep it from being as good as it could have been.
1) the cast of characters is just too large -- even major characters seemed to be left too two-dimensional
2) there were some very unrealistic situations -- how many parents are going to really send their 14-year-old, pregnant daughter across the country with her equally young husband to live and have a baby with no financial support? They couldn't legally even sign the contract on their apartment, couldn't drive, would even have difficulty getting jobs due to child labor laws but none of this ever is addressed.
3) some events that appear to have deep meaning are never explained. There is an entire sequence where one of the daughters shows up unexpectedly for Christmas and a whole collection of Christmas gifts are retreived from Jo's (the main character) room for her including a painting. The painting mysteriously appears, is described as so significant in her life (even though we have never heard of it before), is given to the daughter who immediately grasps the emotional support being bestowed upon her throught the giving of the gift. After that the painting disappears never to be referenced again. This happens multiple times where things just show up and then the story-line is dropped.
The bottom line on this is that it's good, but not great. As the author continues to develop (and the quality of the editing improves) this author has a lot of potential to write really outstanding books -- this one just isn't quite there yet.


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"Soon or a little too lateeverything you never knewyou always wanted turns uphereat The Breakers" -- from the book In her new novel At The Breakers, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, author of the widely praised and beloved Come and Go, Molly Snow, presents Jo Sinclair, a longtime single mother of four children. Fleeing an abusive relationship after a shocking attack, Jo finds herself in Sea Cove, New Jersey, in front of The Breakers, a salty old hotel in the process of renovation. Impulsively, she negotiates a job painting the guest rooms and settles in with her youngest child, thirteen-year-old Nick. As each room is transformed under brush and roller, Jo finds a way to renovate herself, reclaiming a promising life derailed by pregnancy and a forced marriage at age fourteen. Jo's new life at the hotel features a memorable mix of locals and guests, among them Iris Zephyr, the hotel's ninety-two-year-old permanent boarder; Charlie, a noble mixed-breed dog; Marco, owner of a nearby gas station/liquor store, who may become Jo's next mistake; and enigmatic Wendy, her streetwise eighteen-year-old daughter, who signs on as housekeeper. Irrepressible Victor Mangold, Jo's former professor and a well-known poet some twenty years her senior, invites himself to Thanksgiving dinner and into her life, his passion awakening Jo's yearning for art and love. At The Breakers is a deeply felt and beautifully written novel about forgiveness and reconciliation. In Jo's words, she is "trying to find the right way to live" as a long-suffering woman who is put through the fire and emerges with a chance at a full, rich life for herself and her children, if only she has the faith to take it.

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Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neills Hotel Review

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(More customer reviews)The first Trevor book that made one realize that Trevor was more than merely a brilliant funny man. Which is not to say that the book isn't full of laughs--it is. But it's much else besides. Of all his books this is probably one of his richest in terms of character, moral insight, etc. At any rate, certainly a pivotal book for the most artful storyteller now working.

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What was the tragedy that turned O'Neill's hotel from a plush establishment into a dingy house of disrepute? Ivy Eckdorf is determined to find out. A professional photographer, she has come to Dublin convinced that a tragic and beautiful tale lies behind the facade of this crumbling hotel.

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Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad (Contemporary American Fiction) Review

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(More customer reviews)An uneven collection of seven short stories by the author of "The Bird Artist" and "The Museum Guard". Many of the stories feature one of Howard Norman's typically quirky, unmarried, 'male in his 20s or 30s' narrators. In his novels, these characters have the opportunity to grow on, and charm, the reader - this is less the case within the confines of the short story, so that often what remains with the reader is the eccentricity, without the charm.
I found the title story, in which the main protagonist never transcends his wilful eccentricity, to be the least successful among the seven included in this book. "Old Swimmers", with its alienated teenager and geriatric survivors of a torpedoed ferry, also failed to rise above the quirkiness of its characters. "Milk Train", in which an engineer considers his life while waiting for rescue in the aftermath of a train crash, seemed pointless, lacking in any kind of resolution.
However, I really enjoyed the remaining four stories: "Jenny Aloo", in which an Eskimo woman believes the spirit of her son has been trapped in a jukebox, "Laughing and Crying" (a young teenaged boy's confusion following his parents' divorce), "Whatever Lola Wants" (a man's special 50th birthday gift to his wife), and - the best in the book, in my opinion - "Catching Heat", in which a racing announcer describes his sadness at the loss of his girlfriend to a jockey.
As I said, a mixed bag. But the four best stories are really exceptional. Norman stays on my list of interesting writers to look out for.

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The White Hotel Review

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(More customer reviews)I could throw around superlatives and they would not have much impact. Too many reviews are written about mediocre books that one would think them, from the reviewers reaction, modern masterpieces. "Flawlessly-rendered scenes of incomparably lyrical, powerful, acute, seamless, ineffable, gorgeous, unassailable, tender, dynamic, lush, titillating, cerebral, divine, a libidinous, self-revelatory paean to the inexpressible in art and life that packs an emotional wallop!," or some such phrase.
Sometimes a person just has to come right out and say "This one grabbed me by the rear," and let it go at that. This is a book that really has to be experienced first-hand. My only word of advice is not to give up on the book too soon. It's absolutely unclear in the first 40 or 50 pages where Thomas is taking you and he doesn't present too promising a train ride at that stage. Settle in for the journey. Look out the window and watch as the landscape starts becoming more recognizable. The landmarks with which you thought you were earlier familiar, start revealing themselves in entirely new patterns. For this is a novel about revelation, more than anything else. Readers just have to trust that "all will be revealed" by novel's end, and it is, magnificently.
Thomas performs a near-miraculous feat in this novel. Reading The White Hotel is akin to looking through a an extremely high-powered telescope and what at first looks likes fuzzy, indiscreet blurs, become unbelievably colorful and complex nebulae and galaxies as the instrument's focus is adjusted. The book begins with a long poem, full of erotic imagery and near-incoherent description, that we are startled to learn is written by a woman. Following this is a prose version of the story that we learn is written by a young woman who is a semi-successful Opera-singer who comes to Sigmund Freud for analysis as she suffers from acute psychosomatic pains in her left breast and her womb. She will become the Frau Anna G. of Freud's famous case-study (Freud's "Wolfman" also appears as a peripheral character in the novel). Thomas lets us in on Freud's analysis, as well as his ambiguous feelings towards his patient. At several stages, Freud is ready to throw up his hands and tell her that he won't continue his treatment as he feels she is not forthcoming enough to make any real progress. He always relents, however, because he senses that "Lisa" (the Opera-singers real name) has enough redeeming attributes to warrant his time.
As the novel progresses, we learn more and more about Lisa's past and the seminal childhood incident (occurring when she is 3-years-old and vacationing with her parents in Odessa) that estranged her from her mother, and more particularly, from her father. This will be the central motif of the novel as well as Lisa's Cassandra-like ability to see the future through her dreams and her imaginative powers. If this begins to strike you as psychological clap-trap, rest assured it isn't. The novel at no point devolves into psycho-babble or pretentiousness. Everything in the novel, we come to learn, is there for a reason. There is absolutely nothing amateurish about the master-plan and the sublime architecture that Thomas erects (no Freudian pun intended). This is as carefully-constructed a novel as anything I've ever read.
I am certainly not going to spoil the read for anyone by giving away the novel's ending, but suffice it to say that it's as powerful as anything-written in the past 30 years, at minimum. The only drawback to this book is that I didn't give it enough of a chance on first-encounter. Hopefully, that won't be the case with those reading this review.

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By turns a dream of electrifying eroticism recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud, and a horrifying yet calmly unsensational narrative of the Holocaust, this PEN Silver Pen winner is now recognized as a modern classic that reconciles the nightmarish with the transcendent.

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The Lady Matador's Hotel: A Novel Review

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(More customer reviews)There are many stories about these six people and one hotel. Those lives and their stories intermingle in this all too short book. And, I felt as if I was a guest at Hotel Miraflor. But, I didn't need a room. I was awake every minute I was there.
We find ourselves experiencing the complete range of emotions as we peek in on these lives. Remember, this is Latin America. This is where we are watching things happen and suddenly realize it's our hand getting caught in the car door. (You don't have to be near a car or a door for that to happen.)
Of course, in this capital of Somecountry, Central America, we are exposed to that ubiquitous leftist/centrist/rightist trying to determine the in-power group. Within that struggle we have the also ever present 'elected' government versus the military leaders. Typically the group with the most weapons wins.
If it bothers you to read about hard living or hard dying, perhaps you should skip this book (though I hope you don't). The author has given us a visceral look at the history and present in the non-fiction world of that part of the world through the characters of The Lady Matador's Hotel.
This is the first book I've read by Garcia. She hooked me with the first few pages (yeah, there were several reasons for that) and played me like a fish on the line until the end. Pure and simple, the lady can write. She packed a four hundred page novel into half as many pages.
Her words paint pictures that I could see as I was reading. I was with the waitress, the colonel, the poet, the businessman, the lawyer and the matadora. You will enjoy being another guest at Hotel Miraflor. Check in.

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Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet Review

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(More customer reviews)I was excited to read this book because I knew it was set in Seattle during the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and that's a time period that has always interested me. I expected an interesting trip through history, but what I got was so, so much more than that.
Henry Lee is still mourning the death of his wife when he learns that the belongings of Japanese Americans hidden in the basement of Seattle's Panama Hotel for decades have been discovered. Henry is drawn to the basement, and what he's searching for there opens a door he thought he had closed forever. The story switches back and forth between 1986 and the 1940s, when a 12-year-old Henry attending an American school (he's "scholarshipping" as his father likes to say) meets another international student working in the school kitchen. Keiko is Japanese American, the enemy according to Henry's father, but the two become best friends before her family is imprisoned in one of the relocation camps.
This book does a phenomenal job exploring the history and attitudes of this time period, and Ford's portrayal of Seattle's ethnic neighborhoods is amazing. But really, the thing that pulled me into this novel the most was the richness of the relationships -- Henry and Keiko, Henry and his father, Henry's mother and his father, and Henry and his own son. HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET looks at the best and worst of human relationships, the way we regard others, the way we find ourselves reenacting our relationships with our parents with our own children, the choices we make along the way. Mostly, though, this book reminds us that there is always room -- and time -- for forgiveness and redemption.
I finished this book in tears, moved by the people who came to life so vividly in this story and sad that it had to end at all. HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET is a perfect, perfect choice for book clubs or for anyone craving a compelling story about human nature at its worst and at its best. An amazing, amazing book. It will be one of your favorites, I can almost promise.

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