Book Review: Fires of Jerusalem by Marilyn Brown (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Fires of Jerusalem
Author: Marilyn Brown
Enjoyment Rating: 5/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Electronic Copy
Books I've read this year: 47

I used to read a lot of biographies when I was a kid, and I frequently had the experience of getting really interested in a story the biographer was telling, only to have the chapter end and five years pass in that character's life, and never pick up the story again. In that sense, Fires of Jerusalem, a historical novel about the biblical prophet Jeremiah, feels more like a fictionalized biography than like historical fiction. The 240-page book tries to encompass the entirety of Jeremiah's life, with huge gaps from teenager to young man to great-grandfather, and it would have been a much more satisfying read if Brown had focused on a single time period and tried to create a story rather than hitting the highlights of Jeremiah's life.  

Book Review: No Angel by Theresa Sneed (Whitney Finalist)

Title: No Angel
Author: Theresa Sneed
Enjoyment Rating: 5/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Electronic copy
Books I've read this year: 44

When I was filling out my college applications, there were a couple of instances where I had to name my favorite book. I'm pretty sure that I said it was The Grapes of Wrath but in the interest of full disclosure, it wasn't really my favorite book. There was a book that I had read half a dozen times, a book that never failed to reduce me to tears every time I finished it (and honestly, I think that's why I read it-- I needed that cathartic release or something). It was called Star Child, and was written by Doug Stewart and Linda Higham Thompson, and like its companion book, Saturday's Warrior, it dealt a lot with how relationships formed in the preexistence were complicated on earth. I'm sure that if I read it now, I'd find it abhorrent (and I guess I'll find out since I found a copy online and just ordered it), but at the time, it helped me through my teen years in Connecticut when I thought I'd never find a Mormon boy to marry me.

If you take two parts Star Child and one part It's a Wonderful Life, you have Theresa Sneed's No Angel. The protagonist, Jonathan Stewart (which feels like an intentional allusion to IAWL) is a guardian angel, chosen by Celeste, a spirit on her way to earth. Jonathan doesn't want to be a guardian angel-- he's not good with people, hated his time on earth, and just wants to spend out his eternity living his neatly ordered little life. But Celeste picked him, so he goes along, kicking and screaming the whole way. I started reading this book reluctantly-- in general, I stay away from books that delve into some of the "it's impossible to know this" areas of Mormon theology, but the early chapters of No Angel were quite good-- quick moving and tight. I found myself grudgingly approving of it-- it felt like it could be more like Defending Your Life than Saturday's Warrior.  But the last third of the book takes a decidedly weird turn, and I wasn't quite sure what to do with it. If the book had been more about Jonathan's relationship (and not a romantic relationship, which I found icky) with Celeste and less about him trying to overcome guardian angel prison, I think I would have liked it better.

Book Review: Count Down to Love (Whitney Finalist)

Title: Count Down to Love
Author: Julie N. Ford
Enjoyment Rating: 5/10
Referral: Whitney Finalist
Source: Library Copy
Books I've read this year: 23

Count Down to Love starts with Kelly Grace Pickens, an aspiring Nashville country star, waiting to walk down the aisle for her wedding to her high school sweetheart. When he never shows up, Kelly Grace has to confront reality-- her fiance/manager has left her high and dry-- she's out of money and opportunities. So she decides to fill in as a last-minute replacement on a Bachelor-esque kind of show (her cousin is a producer). And once there, she (predictably) falls in love with that Bachelor.

Count Down to Love has all of the textbook things you'd expect in a modern romance-- there's the jilting, the spirited heroine finding her way, the inevitable spats between hero and heroine, the return of the jilter, misunderstandings, other women who get in the way, and, finally, a chance at love. The first few chapters were actually pretty well written, with clean and relatively tight (for a romance novel anyway) prose. But the book was riddled with tons of typos and misspelled words (Mason-Dickson line?), and if you've watched a few episodes of The Bachelor, you know exactly who the characters in the novel are and what their complications will be. It didn't surprise me in any way. I predict that Kelly and Dillon will last six months. Because we all know that despite the roses and the fantasy dates, the long-term survival rate of the relationships is in the toilet.

Book Review: Pretty Woman Spitting by Leanna Adams

Title: Pretty Woman Spitting: An American's Travels in China
Author: Leanna Adams
Enjoyment Rating: 5/10
Referral: Someone on RQ (the adoption board I'm addicted to) told me about it
Source: Kindle for iPad
Books I've read this year: 13

I've been through certain life experiences, whether they were living abroad in college, waiting for a missionary, giving birth. raising children, adoption, where I've thought, "Hey, maybe I should write a book about that." In Pretty Woman Spitting, Leanna Adams does just that. Several years ago, when Adams was in her mid-twenties and not quite sure what she wanted to do with her life, she decided to spend a year teaching English in Wuhu, China (about an hour from Nanjing, which is where we're going to get Rose). Adams does a great job capturing the cultural dissonance she feels when she arrives in China. I'll admit that I'm a little bit nervous about the trip (not as nervous as Eddie, though), and it's the things about Chinese culture like spitting and squatty potties and staring that have me packing my suitcase with kleenex, hand sanitizer, baseball caps, and sunglasses. But the book has no narrative arc (it's a year, she gets to the end of it), and there's a distracting amount of punctuation/grammatical problems. Adams is funny, and the book is entertaining, but there are other books out there that tell a similar story and actually have a story to tell that's more than a travelogue.

Title: Boomerang by Michael Lewis

Title: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
Author: Michael Lewis
Enjoyment Rating: 5/10
Referral: I bought this for Eddie for Christmas
Source: Hardback copy
Books I've read this year: 12

When I first started listening to the Planet Money podcast a few years ago, I thought it was pretty funny that I, someone who doesn't know much about money, other than how to spend it, was listening to a podcast about economics. But when I told people how great it was, I always said to them, "It's kind of like listening to a Michael Lewis book." I'd read Moneyball and The Big Short, and I related to those books in a similar way-- they were fun for even someone who isn't an economist, or who doesn't care a whit about baseball.

So it was a foregone conclusion that I would read Boomerang. And you know that aphorism about the student surpassing the master? I'm not sure if the people at Planet Money are students of Michael Lewis's (although I know he's mentioned frequently on the show) but I do think that, at least in this case, the Planet Money is out-Lewising Lewis.

In Boomerang, Lewis travels to five failing or precarious economies around the world (Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany-- the exception, and his home state of California). He writes a single chapter about his visit to each place-- getting banged by the bruisers in Iceland, hanging with the monks in Greece, etc... He paints some pretty stereotypical pictures of the people in these places, and he really doesn't delve all that deeply into the stories. I get the sense that he's rich and famous, and people will buy his books regardless of how good they are, so he's going on a junket around Europe and writing about it. I could do that. I expect Michael Lewis to do the kinds of things I can't do. Furthermore, the people at Planet Money have already done it-- they've already been to Iceland and Greece and Germany and done similar reporting. So the book was a bit of a disappointment to me as a reader. Ed, who doesn't listen to Planet Money, really enjoyed it.

Book Review: The Bridge by Kay Bratt

Title: The Bridge
Author: Kay Bratt
Enjoyment Rating: 5/10
Referral: I'm a fan of Kay Bratt's facebook page (based on her book Silent Tears) and saw that this book was on sale for $.99 or $1.99 or something
Source: Kindle for iPad
Books I've read this year: 5

I feel bad even counting this book as a book since it took me about half an hour to read-- it's definitely more novella than novel, and I wonder if that plays a part in my slightly lower rating. Bratt tells the story of an old woman living in Suzhou, China who frequently finds abandoned children on the "lucky" bridge near her home. One morning, she finds a young blind boy waiting on the bridge, and although she tries to leave him at the orphanage like all of the other children she has found, she finds herself too attached to him to leave him.

When I read Silent Tears, I remember Bratt making the point that she did not want to reveal the name or the location of the orphanage she volunteered in, but reading The Bridge and Chasing China made it seem very likely that the orphanage was somewhere in southern Jiangsu province or in Shanghai. It hit very close to home for me since my daughter is also living in Jiangsu province. Bratt's novels are engaging, dramatic, simple, and very heartfelt. If you'd like to read a fictionalized account of a finder, I think this is the first one I've come across, and Bratt does a nice job getting into the head of that finder. Sometimes I felt like I was being taught or preached to, but overall nice work.