Review #17: The Liar, by Nora Roberts

My mom is an avid Nora Roberts fan. I used to be as well, but in recent years I've become less avid, but it's hard to resist a shiny new hardcover from the library, so when Mom finished up her copy of The Liar a week before it was due, I snagged it. 

The book opens with Shelby, a young widow with a three year old daughter, coming off the news of her husband's tragic death in a sailing accident. Richard was an investor of some sort - Shelby's not really sure; it was a whirlwind romance and he didn't like her to worry her pretty little head about such matters - but after his death, it comes out that Richard was broke. And now, so is Shelby. More than broke, actually; Richard left her with millions of dollars of debt.

Forced to sell the McMansion she hated anyway, as well as most of the furniture, which she also hated, Shelby packs up her little girl, her few belongings, and two hundred thousand dollars - as well as some fake IDs and a gun - she found in Richard's safe deposit box, and heads for home. Home is Rendezvous Ridge, where her family has lived for decades. Her dad is the town doctor, her mother and grandmother run the local day spa, and her brother is a police officer. 

Once home, a private investigator comes knocking, and once the dead bodies begin piling up, Shelby realizes Richard may not have been what he said he was. In fact, Richard may not have existed at all. Her friends and family rally around her, though, including her former BFF Emma Kate, with whom she had a falling out when she left town the first time, and Griffin, the town's Yankee contractor, who falls in love not only with Shelby but her little girl as well.

I'm sure by now you've figured out that Richard's not really dead, and the fact that it took Shelby about 350 pages to realize that when I figured it out after three kind of drove me nuts. And while I don't want to say that Shelby's recovery from the crippling debt was easy - it's never easy to sell your home and your dead husband's clothes, even if you hated the home and the husband - it was tied up pretty neatly, and felt even more unrealistic than the usual romance novel suspension of disbelief.

I also felt like I could see a lot of J.D. Robb coming through in this novel, and I've noticed that more and more in her last few books. It's nothing overly specific, more of the rhythm and certain turns of phrase. And it can't be easy taking off her J.D. Robb hat and putting on her Nora Roberts hat, but if I wanted to read J.D. Robb, I'd pick up J.D. Robb. Lord knows there are eleventy billion to choose from.

Years ago, my mom and I used to read Danielle Steele all the time. Zoya was my all time favorite. (I was fifteen - what can I say?) But as the years went on, my mom would read her latest and say, "It was okay, but I think she needed to buy another car, so she wrote another book." That's kind of how I feel about The Liar. It was okay, but I think maybe Roberts wanted a new car.

Review #16: The Cinderella Deal, by Jennifer Crusie

Normally, I like Jennifer Crusie. She can be counted on for some mad-cap adventures, a hot guy or two, and a girl who is kind of a mess but fiercely independent. She's chick lit, but she's usually pretty good chick lit. Perfect for an audio book. But The Cinderella Deal left me feeling pretty disenchanted.

 
Daisy Flattery is a free spirited unemployed artist, struggling to make ends meet and struggling to make her paintings speak. Her apartment is a riot of color, and she has an illegal cat. Linc Blaise is a no-nonsense professor, rigid in both his dress and his demeanor. His apartment, directly above Daisy's, is black and white and silver, all modern chrome and hard edges, and he hates Daisy's cat. When Linc needs a stand-in fiancee, he offers to pay Daisy's rent for the month so that she can pose as his girlfriend to him get a job at a nearby college. Daisy agrees, and Linc gets the job.

But when Linc arrives at the college with the cover story that he and Daisy "just didn't work out", the dean forces him back to get Daisy, and suddenly, he and Daisy are on their way to the altar. Linc and Daisy agree to make the marriage work for the school year, giving Daisy a chance to get out of town and concentrate on her art without having to worry about how to pay the bills, and freeing Linc up to work on his book. Of course, Daisy and Linc are meant to fall in love and discover their true feelings at the eleventh hour, and true to form, that's what happens. Daisy discovers she likes Linc's rules and rigidity and Linc discovers how much he wants the crazy artist with the wild hair. And they should live happily ever after.

Except, by the end of the book, by the time they discover their true love, I didn't really care. Daisy, who wasn't all that fiercely independent but was definitely a mess, had become a faded carbon copy of herself, weak and almost Stepford wife-ish. And Linc, never exactly a bastion of sexuality, felt boring and even more rigid than in the beginning of the novel. Clearly, these are two people who are destined only to have sex missionary style and only on Saturday nights. Which is fine if that's your deal, but I expect more from a romance novel. Plus, the whole subtext that Daisy needed a man to take care of her, to pay her bills, was just a little bit more than I could stomach. I need my romance novel heroines to be a little bit more independent.

I still like Crusie, but this one missed the mark big time.

Review #15: The Fixer-Upper, by Mary Kay Andrews

Mary Kay Andrews is one of those authors who I've read a couple of times and enjoyed in a breezy, beach book kind of way. I liked Savannah Blues and Savannah Breeze, but I'm left feeling a little ambivalent about The Fixer-Upper. Perhaps it's because I listened to it as an audio book and didn't much care for the reader, or perhaps it was just too long. Either way, it filled the gaps in my time during my commute and during my walks, but I have a few nits to pick with it.

Dempsey Killebrew is a young up and coming lobbyist in Washington, D.C., when her boss is suddenly thrust in to the limelight, accused of corruption and bribery. Dempsey is unceremoniously dumped in the aftermath, and, needing to get out of town, not to mention out of the papers, her father sends her down to one-stoplight Guthrie, Georgia, to the ancestral home that he just recently inherited. Dempsey is to clean the place up and get it ready to sell.

But when Dempsey arrives at Birdsong, she finds more than she bargained for. The grounds are overgrown and the house is in desperate need of not only a cleaning, but a total gutting, including new plumbing, new wiring, a new roof, and about five garbage trucks to haul old Uncle Norbert's fifty-year collection of National Geographic magazines away. She has a squatter in the form of Ella Kate Timmons, a distant cousin who moved in to take care of Uncle Norbert before he died, and who now refuses to leave. And if all that wasn't enough, the FBI is sniffing around, wanting to talk to her about those pesky credit card charges that trace back to hookers and "massages" for the Congressman her former boss was lobbying, and T. Carter Berryhill, handsome attorney and newspaper man, keeps wanting to take her out to dinner.

So here's where my nits come in. I've done home renovation. Maybe not to the extent that Dempsey is having to do it, but I'm here to tell you that there is no way on God's green earth that she's not only going to magically find a contractor who can do everything from plumbing to roofing to electrical work, but that that contractor will a) happily lend his tools to her, b) be available immediately, c) find a vintage farmhouse sink from the 20s at the town dump, d) build a fantastic kitchen island out of scrap wood from a dark and damp basement, and e) fix a slate roof in one day. And that T. Carter Berryhill is going to find her adorable in her dead uncle's overalls, peeling up green linoleum, which, of course, reveals gorgeous heart pine floors. And that she's going to figure out how to tile a kitchen counter (with salvaged tile from the basement, natch) when two weeks ago, the biggest thing her hands were doing was getting a manicure. And that the kitchen counter would only take an afternoon. Never once did Dempsey run in to any sort of snag. The hardware store always had what she needed, the local Realtor painted her house (for free), and her contractor was a dream. And the timeline for getting things repaired kind of blew my mind. Stripping the paint off of all your cupboard doors takes more than a couple of hours, especially when there are eighty years of paint on them. Can you tell that I felt like the home renovation stuff was a little bit unrealistic? And that's disappointing, because one of the things I loved best about Andrews' other stories were those exact things - the junking and renovation and searching for just the right faucet. 

There's also a weird extraneous storyline involving Ella Kate's reason for hating Dempsey's side of the family so much, and, believe it or not, it's because Ella Kate never forgave Dempsey's grandfather for stealing Dempsey's grandmother Olivia away from her when they were young girls together at Agnes Scott College, a marriage which led to Olivia's early demise. Apparently, Ella Kate and Olivia were lovers, and the entire story line felt forced and sort of added on at the end. 

Maybe I'm being too hard on Andrews. It's fiction, after all, and maybe I should just suspend a little bit of disbelief. Honestly, I think what irritated me the most about The Fixer-Upper was the narrator. Her voice for Ella Kate was perhaps the worst and most grating old lady voice I've ever heard, and sadly, Ella Kate talks a lot. I felt like I would have liked Ella Kate had I read the book, but her voice, as read by the narrator, turned me off from the character permanently. Luckily, the scenes with Dempsey's five year old twin half brothers were mercifully short, because I nearly turned off the book when they began whining. 

I'll give Andrews another shot down the road. I just don't think I'll listen to this narrator again.

Review #14: The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller

One of my biggest fears is surviving an end-of-the-world catastrophe. It was recently pointed out to me that I'm worrying needlessly, that in the event of a zombie apocalypse, it's unlikely I'd survive past the first wave. Probably that's an accurate statement. I don't do well without air conditioning or diet Coke. But if I did survive, I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if I got to live at the airport with Hig and Bangley. Mostly because while Bangley scares the ever-loving daylights out of me, I also know he could protect me, and Hig seems nice and is probably pretty good looking in an LL Bean/end of the world kind of way, plus he has a secret Coke stash, so even if there's no air conditioning, he could manage to feed my aspartame addiction. 

After a worldwide flu pandemic wipes out nearly everyone on the planet, Hig retreats to a small county airfield with only his dog Jasper and a salty older man named Bangley for company. Together they set up a sort of commune, if you can call a two-man operation a commune. Hig's only means of escape from the monotony of protecting their sanctuary from the roving bands of marauders - the few who survived - is The Beast, his 1956 Cessna, and so he flies off to patrol the perimeter of the airport, reporting back to Bangley any movements in the mountains and woods beyond their little enclave. Hig also regularly visits a family of Mennonites who live near by, careful to stay eight feet away from them because they carry the blood disease, something that came along as the flu spread throughout the world, and is slowly killing a majority of the survivors. 

Restless and struggling to find meaning in his existence, curious about what is on the other side of the mountain, and thoroughly unable to forget a radio transmission he heard three years prior from an airport that should have been shuttered six years before that, Hig makes the irreversible decision to fly past the point of no return. 

Twenty nine point three gallons. Not enough gas to get home. As simple as that. 

As simple as that we go over the edge.

Told in spare sentences, sometimes just fragments, Hig's story evokes memories of Cormac McCarthy and The Road, that stream of consciousness, no quotation marks, you're in someone's brain style. But unlike McCarthy, who is grim and stark and who often left me feeling depressed, Heller somehow managed to infuse what should be a very bleak story with something completely unexpected: hope. Hig is a warrior poet, and it shows in his thoughts, his actions, and his words. This is a man who has lost everything - his family, his wife, his child, his home, his dog - and yet he continues on, flying past the point of no return, awaiting his fate, ever hopeful.

Review #13: The Boy, by Lara Santoro

I finished The Boy about a month or so ago, and I've been sitting on my review because I'm not sure what to say. Emma Donoghue (Room) said she "read it one go" and that it was "brutally honest...about the price of motherhood". And while I haven't read Room, lots of Cannonballers have - she's quite a favorite around here - but her recommending this book as highly as she did honestly kind of puts me off reading it. 

Anna is a single mom, raising precocious eight year old Eva. Anna and Eva are living in Arizona while Eva's dad stays behind in England. It was definitely not an amicable divorce, and both Anna and her ex-husband have lots to say to poor Eva about the other parent. Eva tries, as most kids do in that situation, to play the neutral party, and she's really the only voice of reason in the whole novel. Although I must say that the housekeeper, with her constant trips to Sonic, imparts some wisdom as well.

In the opening scenes, Anna is at a party at her neighbor's house, sitting in the kitchen drinking wine, mostly hiding from the other guests. She meets a young man, so young that she questions whether he's legally allowed to be drinking the beer in his hand. His self-confidence and swagger both draws her in and repels her, and before she consciously realizes it, "the boy" has taken over her life. With Eva conveniently in England visiting her father, Anna and the boy fall in to bed, and suddenly his things are all over her house, and he's practically living there. Further complicating matters is that the boy is the son of her neighbor, and he and his father are definitely not on speaking terms. Of course, the romance, if it can be called that, ends badly just as Eva returns, and Anna is upside down about it. One evening, though, the boy finally crooks his finger to Anna, and Anna, drunk, gets in the car (with Eva) to see him. The car flips, and the next thing Anna knows, she's waking up in the hospital, and Eva is in a coma. Eva's father, understandably, wrests custody away from Anna, and Anna is left without Eva. 

And that's the story in a nutshell. There are some references to Anna having had postpartum depression shortly after Eva was born, and Eva's father is not portrayed as being especially sympathetic about it - or anything else in Anna's life - but nothing stood out that was The Reason for Anna's behavior. Anna just came across as an incredibly selfish person. So did Eva's father, for that matter, but everything in Anna's behavior was all about her, even when Eva was lying in the hospital. At no time did she seem to put Eva first, and even to the last page of the book, I never felt that Anna really understood what she had done wrong. I can't recall ever disliking a character more, except maybe for Amy in Gone Girl or the nut job teacher from Tampa. 

Santoro's prose and pacing is good, but the story just didn't do it for me. Maybe I just didn't get it. Or maybe the price of my motherhood is different from that of Anna's. Probably I should be glad of that. 

Review #12: The Peach Keeper, Sarah Addison Allen

I downloaded this from the local library the other day so I would have something to listen to while I walked in the evenings. (Even though it feels like it's 90 degrees already and it's only April. What am I going to do when it's August???) Anyway, I needed something sort of fluffy and chick lit-esque that I could sort of half listen to while I huffed and puffed my way through the soup that is known as Florida air and I thought this would fit the bill.

The Peach Keeper tells the interwoven story of two thirty-something women living in quaint Walls of Water, NC, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains. Willa Jackson is the former high school joker, running a coffee and organic clothing shop that caters mainly to hikers. Paxton Osgood is the cool, blonde ex-cheerleader, president of the Young Women's Society, spending her days deciding how best to distribute the family money. Rounding out the cast of characters are Colin Osgood, Paxton's twin brother, who has a thing for Willa, Paxton's parents, who are quintessential old money Southerners, Annie, Willa's young business partner who thinks that she can predict a person's personality based on their coffee habits, and Sebastian, the possibly gay dentist, with whom Paxton is in love. Making a few cameos in a story that felt like it was meant to run parallel to Paxton and Willa's but never really hit the mark are Agatha Osgood, Paxton's grandmother, and Georgie Jackson, Willa's grandmother, both of whom live in the same nursing home.

Paxton has recently spent a year restoring the Blue Ridge Madam, the town's grandest home, long abandoned by Willa's ancestors, in the hopes that it will be ready to host the anniversary gala of the Young Women's Society, a club that was started by Paxton's and Willa's grandmothers 75 years ago. But when a peach tree planted on the property is moved to make room for a live oak, a skeleton is discovered, and long-buried secrets threaten to spill out. Suddenly, Paxton and Willa find themselves tangled together and must unravel a seventy-five-year-old mystery. 

I wasn't in love with this book. It was adequate for what it was, and it kept me interested enough to keep walking, but the characters were pretty one-note. The mystery wasn't exactly a mystery; I put two and two together pretty quickly, and I was only really sort of half listening. t found the story and the subsequent happily-ever-after ending for everyone a little bit trite, and Allen tried to interject some southern ghostly happenings, but they never really took off. Actually, I think that's what bothered me the most. The ghostly sightings or bells ringing when nobody was there felt contrived and almost after the fact. There was potential for a really compelling story - a nearly century old mystery, the catty women in the Young Women's Society (which could have had quite a few delicious scenes, but only produced one sort of half-hearted argument), unrequited love, family drama - but it just never really took flight for me. I'll give it three stars, but to be honest, I finished it Saturday, and I'm having trouble remembering the details two days later.

Review #11: Feed, by M.T. Anderson

Earlier this week, I looked at Target's website to see if they carried shoe repair glue. I didn't want to make a trip if they didn't have it (they didn't, by the way), so I did a brief thirty-second search online rather than drive to the store and be seduced in to buying things I don't need. Now, each time I log on to the interwebs, I'm inundated by ads for shoe glue, shoe inserts, and cobblers. I rarely pay attention to those ads - after all, my music station has been trying to get me to buy Kate Hudson's yoga pants for months now and I've successfully avoided ordering them, mostly because I know my ass won't look the way hers does. Ever. No matter what pants I'm wearing.

But in the future, I may not be so successful. Feed takes our Facebook/Twitter/Instagram feed and puts it on crack, implanting it directly in to human brains, most often at birth. Virtual reality becomes actual reality. School has been turned over to advertisers. All babies are test-tube babies, made in the conceptionarium, created with Mom's eyes, Dad's nose, and your favorite celebrity's smile. People instant message with each other by thinking their thoughts and directing them in to another person's feed. Music isn't played over the speakers at bars; you just hook your feed up to it. (Imagine how weird that must be - the bar is silent, everyone nodding and dancing to some unheard beat, talking to each other without talking. People-watching at its finest.) And seventeen-year-old Titus never questions any of this until he meets Violet, a home-schooled teenaged girl who turns his head during a Spring Break trip to the moon.

Violet is unlike any girl Titus has ever met. She questions things, tries to beat the system by confusing the algorithms of the feed. She can write, and not only that, she does write, like with pen and paper, something that surprises Titus and embarrasses Violet. And the big difference: Violet didn't get her feed until she turned seven. When Titus and his friends, including Violet, are hit by a hacker while out at a club one night, their feeds are taken down and need to be reset. But because Violet didn't get her feed until later, her reset doesn't work as well, and as a result, Violet is dying. The feed is too central to her body and its functions; without it, she can't move, can't talk, can't survive. The help desk is no help, and anyone who has ever called an automated answering service will understand her frustration at not being able to talk to an actual human, only when we can't talk to a human, the only thing it affects is not being able to pay our phone bill. When Violet can't get a person on the phone, it's quite literally a matter of life and death. 

Anderson's writing is difficult to handle at times. Because the novel is written in the first person, it reads much like I imagine a half-stoned teenaged boy would speak, with lots of "likes" and "units" thrown in for good measure, kind of a Cher Horowitz version of the future. Much of the conversation between Titus and his friends is mind-numbingly inane, but it serves as a good counterpoint to Violet and her father. Violet's father, a professor, speaks in a "dead" language that sounds an awful lot like the English we all know and love. I was concerned about Violet's potential to succumb to Manic Pixie Dream Girl-itis, but Anderson infuses her with just enough imperfections to keep her grounded and real.

What I liked most about this book was that, at its heart, it's a simple boy-meets-girl story and Titus and Violet are both flawed heroes. It just happens to be set against a crazy futuristic backdrop, but Titus and Violet have the same issues that teenagers have today in 2015, that they had when I was a teenager, that they had when my parents were teenagers. The environment changes, but the emotions are still the same. It's good to know that when my daughter is melting down over what someone said on Instagram or whatever its iteration will be five years from now, I'll still be able to identify with her. And hopefully I'll be able to do it verbally, instead of over the Feed.

"Yuh," said Loga. "It's Riot Gear. It's retro. It's beat up to look like one of the big twentieth-century riots. It's been big since earlier this week."   ... When we went inside, Marty and Quendy were also wearing Riot Gear. "Hey," said Loga to Quendy, pointing. "Kent State collection, right? Great skirt!"

If you think Feed can't happen, you haven't been paying attention. Urban Outfitters is already making the sweatshirts.