Review: Ride with the Devil

Ride with the Devil by Daniel Woodrell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


how I love a book that not only entertains, but also educates and enlightens. My knowledge of the Border Wars between Kansas and Missouri was limited to what I was taught in high school US history, that is, that Congress didn't want to settle the volatile issue of slavery in Kansas and Nebraska, so they passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and a few people from Missouri disagreed, kicked up a fuss because they were pro-slavery, and were then relocated away from the border. That's just sad, isn't it?



Woodrell takes on the incredibly violent confrontations between the Jawhawkers and the Border Ruffians from the side of the to show how the issue of states rights affected Southern homesteaders and immigrants that didn't own slaves. Jake Roedel, if first generation American born to German parents narrates his story of joining up with a group of Missouri irregulars. His motivation for joining goes beyond fighting against the Unionists who want Kansas to be a free state, he's also there because his best friend, near brother, and center of his world, Jack Bull Chiles has joined up after Chiles' father is killed by a band of Jayhawkers. Like any group that operates on the fringe, there are some men of varying degrees of quality and sanity in the unit they join. The fever to rebel reaches its peak when the group Roedel is with joins up with the (real) William Quantrill for what will be known as the Lawrence Massacre. Roedel takes an outsider's pov to that battle, which allows Woodrell to describe the atrocities that really happened without turning his flawed hero into an unredeamable villain.



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Review: Wild Spirit: The Story of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Wild Spirit: The Story of Percy Bysshe Shelley by Margaret Morley

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I'm giving this two stars ONLY if you look at it as very young adult fiction, even though it's not listed as YA at any library or online book store that I could find. As incredibly shallow telling of the life of a very deep and complicated man, this is more travel journal (without any description of the places traveled) than narrative. When it's not doing a "and then he went to..." thing, we get some of the most unlikely dialog between some of the most literate people to have ever walked the earth. Was Mary Shelley really such a clueless nag? Was Byron such a self centered....okay, yeah, that one might be accurate. There are no author notes to say which part of the story is based on fact, or where Morley got her facts, and there's so little historical detail in this book that it's a joke to call it "The Story of Percy Bysshe Shelley". More like, "A brief history of Shelley and the people he knew".



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Review: Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry: Stories

Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry: Stories by Christine Sneed

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A very good set of short stories with a terribly incorrect description here on Goodreads. The idea of "romantic love" enters into a couple of the stories, but for the most part these stories are about attachments and attractions and the holes that people try to fill with other people's lives. There's a single line in the story "You're So Different Now" that pretty much sums up the subject of all the stories: ".....knowing there are countless ways to be a part of someone else's life...", and with relationships based on lust ("Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry", a need to escape ("Portraits Fully Developed"), and adventure gone sadly wrong "Quality of Life"), this book covers a lot more than romantic love. A few of the stories lack intensity ("Alex Cross, Inc." especially), but the character development is so strong in all of them that you'll be left wondering what happened next, and what's a short story without that sense of hit-and-run?



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Review: The Lake Effect

The Lake Effect by Blake Sebring

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Told almost as a series of stores, this first novel from journalist Blake Sebring reminded me quite a bit of Charles Baxter's "The Feast of Love", in that the narrator takes the reader along with them on not only a physical journey but an emotional one as well. We go along as he reconnects with a group of friends of college while trying to discover if an idea proposed by one of them, that every person has a moment that they can identify when they became what they perceive to be an adult, turned out to be true. Some of their moments are big, some are small, but to a man (and woman) it turns out the theory was correct. The book is front loaded with setting (you can almost feel the weight of that snow in the book's title) and back loaded with dialog, the latter so much so that it would be an easy screenplay adaptation.



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Review: Enemy of God

Enemy of God by Bernard Cornwell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I'm still enjoying Cornwell's version of the Arthurian legend. Using a story teller as a narrator rarely works for me because it's an excuse for a lazy writer to do massive amounts of telling when the showing gets tough. But Cornwell is not a lazy writer and Dervel, the converted Christian scribe who used to be a Pagan warrior, is the perfect voice to shine a light on what "really" happened in those closing years of the 5th Century. There's no missing the point that Cornwell has decided that the Christians did no favors by spreading their religion through what would become England, but he also isn't afraid to make the heroes of what we know as The Round Table into very, very flawed humans.



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Review: The Water Seeker

The Water Seeker by Kimberly Willis Holt

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Without Will Patton narrating this, I'm not sure how much I would have enjoyed it. He does a fantastic job with the various characters and caricatures, even mastering the aging of the central character, Amos, from a young, nearly orphaned boy to a young man proving himself on the Oregon trail. As far as the story, it doesn't really take off until the second half, when Amos is rejoined with his father and starts the real coming of age portion of the book. There's a bit of a fantasy thread through out the story that doesn't add anything other than a bit of ambiance to scenes that would have been fine without them.



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Review: The Lieutenant

The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Great sense of time and place, but extremely predictable character development and almost no plot. The book is so shallow in the fiction department that I went on line to double check that it wasn't supposed to be young adult fiction. It's not. It's a good fast read if you're looking for a quick trip to the early days of England's settlement of Australia, but don't expect to be swept up in any of the lives of the characters.



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Review: An Object of Beauty: A Novel

An Object of Beauty: A Novel by Steve Martin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This book exceeds in some areas and falls very short in others, making it an average book that wasn't painful to read. Not much of an endorsement, eh? The setting and most of the plot is the business side of the art world. Galleries, collectors, auction houses and even the FBI art squad are all players in this book. There's a lot that goes on in that world beyond the press releases that tell the public that another record has been broken at a Sothoby's or Christie's auction of a Picasso or a Warhol. Collecting art isn't primarily about collecting beautiful things for the people who play at that level, it's money first, appreciation second, or maybe third behind bragging rights. Fascinating stuff, and seen through the eyes of a narrator who witnesses his friend's (and our protagonist's)journey through that world. I found it easiest to forget that there was supposed to be an actual person penning this story, because to think that they had access to everything that Lacey (the friend and protagonist) did and thought borders on fantasy. Sure, there's a bit of terrible self referencing at the end when the narrator talks about writing the book and I suppose we're to take that as his admission that he made a lot of stuff up, but that seems more as a justification from Mr. Martin that he realizes the narration is flawed, not actual story telling. As a tacked on ending, it too can be ignored. The other major weakness of the plot is the odd bit of intrigue that pops up almost at the end of the book. There is a hint of it earlier, but if it's so important that it causes major events to happen to our main character, maybe there should have been a little foreshadowing? As it reads in the book, it happened, it was forgotten, and then, oh yeah - it's a big deal. Or was it?



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Review: The Murder Book: An Illustrated History of the Detective Story

The Murder Book: An Illustrated History of the Detective Story by Tage La Cour

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


If I were to judge this book solely on the number of books it caused me to add to my 'to read' shelf or movies that were added to my Netflix queue, this would be a strong six stars. The book is arranged in chapters (that read like essays written by very doting fans, so there's a star loss there) covering some of the most famous authors, characters and sub genres of crime solving fiction. The illustrations range from plates from first editions to film stills, with captions every bit as informative as the text of the book itself. The translation isn't the best, however, with some sentences lacking clarifying punctuation and others lacking meaning altogether. The order of the chapters is muddled, starting with chronological history, then jumping into author and character studies, then back to chronology. And oh, the sexism in the chapters on women writers and detectives! Even for a book written in 1971, it's offensive. But with all that wrong, it's still a great resource book for any fan on mysteries, at least those published or filmed prior to the late 60s.



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Review: Sleep, Pale Sister

Sleep, Pale Sister by Joanne Harris

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


On the plus side, it's very gothic. Every main character is not only damaged, but intent on damaging the others. There's a perverted artist, a heart of stone prostitute, a lecherous user of women, and the misused, misunderstood, emotionally stunted young woman they all revolve around. That the story is told by each of those characters in a nearly consecutive format makes it all fit together a little too neatly. There's no mystery as to who will do what to whom next, by the middle of the book you know all will be explained as soon as it happens. This was one of Harris's first books, and wasn't even released world wide until her later novels became popular. It does read as a more amateur work - there's a lot of story, a lot of character, a lot of setting - all with the feeling that it could have been done better with a little less.



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