Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Synopsis: Boiling this one down to a few sentences is
near impossible. The narrative is five separate stories told in very different
styles with the idea of reincarnation being the skeleton connecting the characters
from different time periods. Again, there’s so much going on in terms of plot,
symbolism, and theme that nothing I write here would do it justice.
My thoughts: This would be a book I’d like to have
studied in a class because I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not smart enough
to fully get it all. It’s a study on how to tell a story – or how many ways you
can tell a story from letters to an interview, to spoken word narrative, to classic
mystery novel first-person limited POV, to film, through music. This book is a
challenge, and if you like challenging reads, I’d recommend this one.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Synopsis: This is the semi-autobiographical story of
a young Irish girl growing up poor in New York in the early 1900s. The part
that sticks with me is the scene where she and her brother must get vaccinated for
smallpox. It was mandatory (yes, people forget that vaccines being mandatory is
nothing new and this was the early 1900s when medicine had less idea of what
they were doing), and most poor people and immigrants thought the vaccine was really
a ruse to exterminate them. It was such a relevant scene even though it was
written like sixty years ago.
My thoughts: Having read Angela’s Ashes, I sort of
struggled to get into this one, as it felt like another version of the poor Irish
immigrant in New York story. That being said, it had a great, straightforward
voice, capturing the world through the eyes of a teen girl.
Stardust by Neil Gaiman
Synopsis: This is a semi-dark fairy tale about a teen
boy, Tristran Thorne, venturing into the land of Faerie to recover a fallen
star for the girl of his dreams. The star, once fallen, takes on a human form,
and is also being hunted by a witch, who needs to take the star’s life to prolong
her own.
My thoughts: I previously read American Gods by
Gaiman, and while this book and that fall loosely under the same general genre,
this one is not nearly as heavy or dark. This holds the fairy tale voice even
when things do get dark, and that made it a relatively quick read.
I’ve also read by Neil Gaiman: American Gods
Broken Harbor by Tana French
Synopsis: Dublin Murder Squad Detective Scorcher Kennedy
is assigned a case that appears to be a murder-suicide involving a father, mother
and two children. The catch being the murder takes place in the same area of
Ireland where Kennedy’s family vacationed when he was a child and where his own
mother died from suicide.
My thoughts: French has developed a series of
mysteries, always pulling a detective from a previous book to be the lead in
the next. Her other trope is that the new lead detective always is assigned a
case that brings back memories from their own past traumas. French has a great
style, but I am hoping that she can break away from the crutch of the main detective
character falling completely apart by a case with ties to their past. I mean,
how many times could that happen in one unit.
I’ve also read by Tana French: Into the Woods, The
Likeness, Faithful Place
Places in the Dark by Thomas H. Cook
Synopsis: Dora March arrives in Port Alma, Maine in
1937, and within a year, she has altered the lives of two brothers – leaving one
dead and the other on the verge of madness.
My thoughts: This is a concisely written story with a
nice twist at the end. I didn’t have high expectations for this one going in,
as it had sat in our pile of books for a couple years, but it proved to be one
of my favorites of the year.
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