My Sister’s Kepper – Jodi Picoult

Review by Alison

Meet the Fitzgerald family. There is Brian – father/fire fighter, Sara – Mum/ex-lawyer and their children Kate, Jesse and Anna.
Kate was diagnosed with “APL … a subgroup of myeloid leukemia. The rate of survival … is twenty to thirty percent, if treatment starts immediately.” at 2 years of age.

5 years pass and the treatment is not enough as the cancer spreads.
Kate needs a bone marrow transfer or she will die.

Brian and Sara come to the decision to have another child to hope that it will be a match. They have Jesse and he is not a match. They try again and their third child, Anna, is a match.

For many years, Anna has been there for Kate as a loving sister and a donor. Every time Kate goes in for treatment, Anna is the one giving.

All this changes with the discovery that  Kate needs a kidney.

Anna has known all along her role in the family without being told. She is there for Kate. Her thinking starts to change when she looks into the risks of Kidney transplants and decides she cannot do it. Her mother Sara cannot see the issue and pushes Anna.

The only thing Anna feels she can do is sue her parents for the right to make her own medical decisions.

The movie was OK, the book has a different, more intense ending.

This is the only book I have read, that has made me cry. It is fast paced with the ups and downs of a roller-coaster ride. It really pushes the boundaries of medical and moral dilemmas.

To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee

Review by Alison

This is a novel I can come back to time and time again. A timeless classic, possibly the only book from school that I wanted to read again!

This novel is a snap shot in the life of Scout, an 8 year old girl living in Maycomb, Alabama in the 1930’s.
Scout and her brother Jem are inseparable play mates who are very inquisitive with very vivid imaginations. They both live with their father Atticus, who is a lawyer.
Things start to heat up in this sleepy town as topics such as racism, oppression and injustice raise their ugly heads in the courtroom.

Lee has done a fantastic job of writing events through a child’s eyes. It enables the reader to follow in simplicity and not get over burdened with the heaviness of pre-civil war America.
It is like taking a step back and stripping it down, seeing it, as it really is. Honest and innocent.

Great movie adaptation too!

Stephen King – Under The Dome

Review by Alison

This novel is set in a quiet town named Chester’s Mill in Maine. A place where everybody knows everyone and what they do. The kind of place you know your kids are safe and your biggest worry is the next bake sale.

That is, until a dome lands and isolates the whole town. There is no way in and no way out.

As the dome situation starts to sink in to the townspeople, after some horrific deaths and a couple of plane crashes, a few members of the community start to show their true colours. Big personalities, secret keeping psychopaths and an Iraq vet make for an interesting mix, with some going as far as murder to try and gain control.

Time is running out for the people of Chester’s Mill. How long can they last with dwindling supplies and townspeople turning against each other?

Take that van!

I am a massive King fan, I just can’t get enough of his amazing writing! This novel did not disappoint. It is a very big read at over 1,000 pages however, it is in those pages that King’s descriptive tale comes to life. Well worth reading for the ending surprise!

Love Junkie – Rachel Resnick

Review by Alison

” a memoir of love and sex addiction”.

Love Junkie was a crazy roller coaster ride with Rachel taking you to the lowest dip. Through the ups and downs are accounts of her insane relationships with her multiple lovers and her mother, who was also a “love junkie”  and an alcoholic, using men to try and heal wounds with Rachel as a young girl and her brother, a toddler, raising themselves.

Shit just got real.

Rachel is a “love junkie” for many years and many relationships. Finally as she grows she starts to think, “Why am I like this?” and decides to find out.

I was so proud of her at this point. I felt like I had just been through this traumatizing journey and there was light at the end of the tunnel.

I did feel frustrated at some points, as you I could see the same pattern emerging in all her relationships. I just wanted to yell at her, “Stop! Look behind you!”,  just as I would to the TV in a horror film. Still, It is the most eye-opening novel I have read.  I could not put it down.

One brave chick.

Xaviera! (Continuing adventures by the author of Happy Hooker) – Xaviera Hollander

Review by Alison

Yes, this book is about an ex prostitute. All been done before I hear you say? Well, this was one of the first of its kind. Published in 1973 it is jam packed with words like; groovy, dig, man, fuck and the occasional c-bomb.

Shocking and vulgar, the word groovy really is disgusting.

Xaviera was a call girl in her 20’s then progressed into New York’s leading Madam in her 30’s. She was then arrested for prostitution and forced to leave the US as she was not a citizen. This year was the same year she released her first book, The Happy Hooker.  Xaveria!  Is about the year following the release of her first book with some sexy stories on the side that she feels she could not fit into her first book.

It really felt like I was reading a diary of sorts, if diaries ever became about telling yourself repeatedly how great you are, how intelligent you are compared to media persons and how you think you are doing society a big favour by being here. I really had to force myself through some parts as it all got a bit monotonous. I felt like yelling, “OK so I know you think you are hot stuff and you love sex but, seriously? Is that it? Is this what your book sold on?”

I would only be recommending this read if you were looking for that special someone to really focus all your negative energy into. Fantastic for that, otherwise….don’t do it.

Who’s a sexy Nanna?

Insomnia – Stephen King

Review by Alison

As Ralph Robert’s wife is dying from a tumour, he turns to walking a lot. He sees Ed Deepneau a local researcher, married with a baby and one of the nicest guys Raplh knows, involved in an accident with a fertilizer truck. He swears the truck driver is transporting dead fetuses. He is then found to be beating his wife. Roberts is puzzled over Deepneau’s behaviour but that’s when his own problems start happening.

His wife passes away and 70 year old Roberts is sleeping less and less every night. He calls it “premature waking” And it’s getting worse. After some time, he starts to see auras around people and animals. He also starts seeing “life chords” coming from the top of people’s heads and little men in white coats he calls “the low men”. Roberts is sure the insomnia is a natural side effect from dealing with his wife’s death until he discovers his neighbour Louis is experiencing the same symptoms and visions. She too is a widow and they comfort each other and eventually become romantically involved but not before their life is torn apart through an epic battle of good and evil with things getting really weird, as only King can do.

If you have read The Dark Tower series, this book ties in nicely with many references. One of my favourite King novels, the man is a magical, descriptive writer and this bizarre novel does not disappoint.

What a mind.

I am Legend – Richard Matheson

Review by Alison

I Am Legend is a horror fiction novel from 1954 and is not to be confused with the Hollywood blockbuster I Am Legend from 2007. Sure the 2007 movie is loosely based off of it but, we all know books are able to go where most movies daren’t.

This novel was written in a time when Lassie took over the T.V and Frank Sinatra could be heard crooning on the airwaves which is why it’s a surprise to learn it was a hit and adapted into a film (The Last Man On Earth 1964) 10 years later. The people were calling out for some vampire/zombie/apocalyptic action to take them away!

Matheson heard the cry, and delivered.

The novel follows Robert Neville who believes he is the last man ALIVE on Earth. Sure there are other people around but they are generally the type of people that just try to take and take until nothing is left….not surprisingly, Robert decides to stay away from others and gets stuck into a daily routine for many years of research and killing.

Robert believes a bite from a vampire bat is the reason he is immune to the virus that has changed everyone. He got a little sick from it but pulled through and now spends a lot of his days using his experience to try and find a cure, using “the infected”  as lab rats.

Just as you get accustomed to Neville’s flashbacks and inner dialogue, he thinks he has seen a non infected woman. The story continues as he obsesses over her and the chance at a “normal” life.  Everything changes in Neville’s world.

A thoroughly convincing story, I Am Legend has all the explanations and a fantastic non Hollywood ending. I am impressed and cannot wait to read Matheson’s other literature.

Still, not a bad film.

DON QUIXOTE – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Review by Alison

First published in 1614 this classic is very different to a lot of novels at the time. Usually in this time period you would be thinking poems, sonnets or songs which makes this novel such a stand out.

Cervantes has created a character called Don Quixote who, finds himself travelling the countryside, as he is coming closer to his golden years, with his neighbour Sancho in search of adventure and his true love Dulcinea, who happens to be a lady from another village. Quixote describes her as,  “…a very good- looking farm girl, whom he had been quite taken with at one time…”

 Quixote’s reading of Knight Errantry tales and his somewhat senile mind have brought about these adventures of getting knighted (by a violent innkeeper) to fighting monks (which Quixote believed to be evil men in the way of finding his love).

Throughout, Sancho is there to say exactly what the you are going to be thinking –those aren’t giants; Dulcinea isn’t beautiful; none of this can be real–only to be rewarded with a threatened beating and a lecture from Quixote about how he is beset by enchanters, who frustrate his every move by replacing the facts of his world, at the last moment, with devil’s illusions that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to our own reality. It’s a single joke repeated across many pages, and yet it’s strong enough to bring a laugh every time.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Quixote even though at times the plot can be frustrating, it still has it’s charm, being over 400 years old and all, the best thing about the novel for me, was the humour, Quixote is so driven and there was much head shaking on my part.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter – Jeff Lindsay

Review by Alison

If you were a cop trying to solve a case involving a serial killer that stalks his prey, tortures them and then cuts them into little pieces and flings them into the bay, keeping a drop of blood of each victim as a trophy, you would want this person brought to justice or dead.

However, this novel is written the other way around, with the main character Dexter Morgan portrayed as the hero, the one doing the justice unto others. Yes, he is a serial killer but he is researched, knowledgeable and a slightly sadistic, funny guy that you like straight away.

Harry Morgan, his foster cop father, saw the darkness in Dexter when he adopted Dexter at a young age and helped him to control it and use it for “good”. Dexter follows “The Harry Code” which is, kill only those who deserve to die and never leave any evidence that can tie you to the crime. His foster sister Deborah is also a cop, just to make things a little more interesting.

Morgan feels alienated but works at fitting in. He has a girlfriend who is not interested in anything more than a platonic relationship and caring for her children, he works as a blood spatter analyst for Miami Metro Police and he keeps a social schedule. From the outside, Morgan is just an everyday normal, if not slightly boring, citizen but on the inside he is constantly ticking, trying to find his next victim for his dark passenger to play with.

The HBO version of Dexter is also really good, especially with this face!

Petite Anglaise – Catherine Sanderson

Review by Alison
http://petiteanglaise.com/
This is the blog that started it all.

Sanderson is a young British woman who has lived all of her working years in France. She has a young daughter (Tadpole) and a long time boyfriend (Mr Frog). One boring work office day she decides to give writing a blog a go and this book is written around what happened when she started. Her procrastination, frustration and everyday life are all explored with no holding back unlike the blog.

Interesting read, I finished it within a couple of days as it flowed quite nicely and I wanted to know what happened next. I would describe it as, “a light and fast read.”
The author can be witty and she is at her best when she writes about everyday experiences in Paris, but too often her obsession with self and her tendency to take herself way too seriously get in the way.