Author Archives: seattlebookmama

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About seattlebookmama

Greetings! I am Donna Davis, a retired teacher living in my favorite city in the world. I've found that one of the greatest comforts in life is a good book. We can all use a little of that. Welcome, and enjoy! Donna Seattle Book Mama

The Grand Tour, by Adam O’Fallon Price*****

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thegrandtourDoctors tell us that laughter improves our health. Now and then, I go in search of laughter in my favorite medium, between the covers of a good book. Thank you to Net Galley and Doubleday Publishers for this DRC. Not only is The Grand Tour achingly funny, it’s also strong fiction. It is available to the public August 9, 2016, and you ought to read it.

Our story centers around two protagonists in equal measure. Richard Lazar is an author who has written one lukewarm release after another, drunken, cynical, and utterly thoughtless of anyone other than himself. He’s lost his family and his health can’t be far behind, a “smoking Yugo of a body” constantly drenched in alcoholic beverages. Suddenly and unexpectedly, his most recent novel has become a blockbuster. A tender, idealistic young man, a fan club of one named Vance, our second protagonist, quits his job at the Pizza Boy, desperate to get away from home and spend time with the writer he idolizes. He becomes Richard’s roadie, dragging him out of one bar after another, conveying him across the western USA to speaking engagements and book-signings.

His Portland book signing takes him to a fictitious bookstore, a thinly disguised version of Powell’s City of Books, one of my favorite places. Richard manages to disgrace himself there, and it won’t be the last time he does so.

The journey through Las Vegas is the most resonant and brilliantly described I have yet seen in literature; each your heart out, Hunter Thompson.

Often literature billed as dark humor turns out to be merely dark, and I was delighted to discover otherwise here. I laughed out loud in a number of places. At the same time, the author does a tidy job of developing both main characters in much greater depth than I had anticipated. Hoping for a romp, albeit a grim one, I wound up holding my sides at the same time I absorbed a fine novel. It is excellent surprises such as this one that keep me reading galleys by new writers. This one is smart and wickedly clever. Of particular satisfaction was the denouement involving Vance’s character.

All told, it’s a savagely funny read. It comes out today, and you should get it and read it.

I Will Send Rain, by Rae Meadows****

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Happy release day! I can’t wait to hear what you think of Meadows’ thunderous tale of redemption. It’s available today.

seattlebookmama's avatarSeattle Book Mama

iwillsendrainAnnie Bell could have chosen to marry a well-to-do member of the gentry in her home town, a man with fine china and a full time kitchen servant. Young and buoyant, she chooses love instead, and moves to Oklahoma with Samuel Bell to start a brand new life on the free land that’s been provided. What could go wrong when two young people are strong and dedicated to one another? Oh, it’s an old, old story in so many ways, but Meadows makes it brand new. Thanks to Net Galley and Henry Holt Publishers, I read it free and in advance in exchange for this honest review. It will be available to the public August 9, 2016.

When we join the Bells they are no longer newlyweds; a lot of water has gone under the bridge. They have Birdie, a teenager determined to find a way out of Mulehead, and…

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All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, by Bryn Greenwood****

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Happy release day! August 9 is a momentous day in the publishing world, with lots of new titles becoming available to the public. Don’t miss out!

seattlebookmama's avatarSeattle Book Mama

alltheuglyandwonAnd you thought Fifty Shades of Gray was controversial.  Just remember that you heard it here first: if this novel has legs and gets around, it’s going to create a lot of noise.  I could almost smell the book-burning bonfires as I read the last half. And lucky me, I read it free thanks to Net Galley and St. Martin’s Press, from whom I received a DRC in exchange for this honest review.

Wavy grows up in the North American heartland, smack dab in the middle of nowhere. When you consider it for a moment, that’s obviously the place for a meth lab to be. No sophisticated, well funded cops will sniff around and shut down your operation; there’s plenty of cheap land for the various vehicles and outbuildings such a business might require.

It’s not as if guests are welcome to drop in.

Guests don’t drop in, in fact…

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The Beauty of the End, by Debbie Howells***

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thebeautyoftheendI rate this novel 2.5 stars and round it upward.  Thank you to Kensington Books and Net Galley for allowing me to read this book free and in advance in exchange for an honest review.  Here it is.

Howells is a word smith, and I suspect that if she had adopted a simpler format, she might have had a more appealing result. In places her settings are resonant and well turned.  It’s character development and a badly disjointed plot that burden this story and prevent it from taking off.

This story is full of dead babies, but neither the horror nor the pathos ordinarily associated with such a thing can save it. It merely makes the misery worse.

Here are the broad contours. Noah Calaway is a former attorney living in the English countryside. His inheritance has provided him enough to get by on and he spends his time writing, or more often, not writing. His secret sorrow is the one that got away. When he learns that April, the woman he loved and that left him just before their wedding is lying in a coma and suspected of committing a terrible murder, he signs on to defend her and clear her name.

Most of the narrative is Noah’s, but from time to time another narrative, one distinguished by being written in italics, interrupts the flow, and we have no idea what the young woman speaking there has to do with any of Noah’s story. Ella is troubled and is seeing a psychologist, but the author goes to such pains to keep her link to Noah’s story a mystery that we might as well be reading two separate stories for most of the book.  Instead of wanting to know what the connection was, I found myself annoyed whenever Ella popped in to prevent me from getting to the end of Noah’s story.

Howells takes such pains to keep us in the dark that she doesn’t develop her characters. We see a few shattered glimpses of what may have motivated April, who has no role to play in the present, but both Noah and Ella remain two dimensional, their personalities left static by withholding too much information.  The result is that after some earnest effort to engage with the text, since that’s what I do, I eventually found I didn’t care what the connection between them was. I guessed it eventually, but there was none of the joy of discovery that usually accompanies that sort of revelation.

Staggered narratives are very trendy, and in the right hands they still can be magical. But here, it just doesn’t take. I was frustrated and wanted to abandon the novel, which seemed as if it might never end, but I forced myself to finish reading it because I had an obligation to the publisher.

That doesn’t have to happen to you.

A Time of Torment, by John Connolly*****

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ATimeofTormentI had never read anything by John Connolly before, but this eerie thriller has made a forever-fan of me. Thanks go to Net Galley and Atria books for the invitation to read and review.  Connolly cooks together a hair-raising thriller with a handful of horror, a smidge of fantasy and a dash of magical realism; the resulting brew is one that nobody else could possibly cook up. For those that write, reading this dark redemption tale is likely to produce both admiration and despair, because this novel is born of a talent that no creative writing workshop will ever be able to produce. You may write, and I may write, but nobody else will ever, ever be able to write like Connolly.

Our story is part of the Charlie Parker series, but I have not read any of the others and found I was able to hop into this story as a single read with no difficulty. Connolly provides just enough background to catch us up without dragging us through the book using promotional paragraphs some lesser authors might indulge in. I suspect not enough is repeated here to annoy his faithful readers.

Parker is a private detective that has been through a triple-death experience and come out the other end, but not unchanged. He’s hard enough to confront the ugliest nemesis, and it’s a good thing, because soon a trail of corpses will persuade him to leave his home in Maine for the dark place that is Plassey County, West Virginia.

The people of Plassey County have learned over the years—and centuries—to leave The Cut alone. Evil things are brewing there; it is there that the Dead King waits in an ancient building, and it is there that Oberon and Cassander struggle for dominance of this insular, cult-like community.  After all, “…the Cut looks after its own.”

This is a high voltage, hyperliterate read. Your middle-schoolers can’t read this, and it is so infused with violence that I’m not sure you’d want them to have it. But though I sometimes am put off from gory prose, I found that Connolly measured out these passages in small enough batches that my “ick” threshold, that little voice inside that tells me when a story isn’t fun anymore, wasn’t tripped. Spare but strong spots of irony and humor help lighten things up before they get dark, dark, dark again.

If I were to compare Connolly to any other writer, it would be James Lee Burke. The similarities that exist are a brilliant capacity to craft character, and the use of strongly resonant setting to reinforce character and move the story forward. The small but potent religious references are also similar. I highlighted the characters that were introduced throughout the course of this novel and found more than two dozen of them, and yet at the end of the book I still knew who each of them was without having to go back and reread. Connolly draws characters so real that by the time the book is done, the reader knows them as if they were family; yet thank goodness they aren’t.  This reviewer particularly enjoyed Parker’s assistants, Angel and Louis, as well as side characters Perry Lutter and Odell Watson.

Throughout the story, the pacing is swift and the plot absorbing. There is never a word that could be cut from the text and have the same result. If anything, the spare prose creates a sense of tension not only for that which is said, but also for that which is not.

This creepy tale was released this week, so you can have it to curl up with over the weekend if you’re quick about it. But before you commence, you’ll want to make sure that all the lights in your home are burning, and that all your doors and windows are locked.

Highly recommended.

Hot Flashes, by Barbara Raskin***

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hotflashes“Hot flashes are rolls of unreasonable, unseasonable heat that create a rush—a flush that floods the face from neck to hairline. A hot flash is itchy, prickly and provocative—like a sudden spike of fever that produces a mean and cranky irritability.”

Raskin’s novel about a group of middle-aged women that come together to mourn and bury a dear friend was a New York Times bestseller many years ago, hailed as a “landmark women’s novel” at the time it was first released. I was invited to read and review it by Open Road Integrated Media and Net Galley.  And on the one hand, I can see why it was considered ground-breaking in 1987, but on the other hand, some novels age more gracefully than others, and this one doesn’t. My three star rating applies to a niche audience of middle class Caucasian feminist women from the Boomer generation, but even for us, some of what is found here rings insensitive and tone deaf, because the world has moved on, but Rankin’s novel remains the same.

Suki has died, and her friends come to her home, because she has nobody else apart from her teenage son, David. Suki had a breakdown around the time Max divorced her;  Ivy League educated Caucasian women raised in the US during the 1950s grew up with the societal expectation that their own talents were secondary to those of their husbands, and so they placed their own careers—Suki and all of her friends are writers—on a back burner in order to be good wives, mothers, and hostesses. The whining, entitled tone with which the book starts out, giving an overview of a life lived with Caribbean vacations, expensive wardrobes, endless tennis matches and fancy parties is going to set a lot of readers’ teeth on edge. It did mine, and I would not have finished reading it if I didn’t have an obligation to the publisher.

But underneath it all, there’s a second reality, and that’s what perhaps makes this book worth bringing back: these women, the ones that “kept our slave names” once they are divorced so that the ex-husband can marry a pretty, young trophy bride and set his first wife out to pasture, often find themselves with no job skills, their diplomas from Radcliffe and Yale obsolete after sitting in a drawer for thirty years or so, and so they find themselves with no income. Many of them had become isolated during their years of housewifery, staying inside the home to keep it tidy and welcoming whenever they were not driving a carpool of children or running household errands; there is something diminishing in telling an intelligent woman that the right thing to do is to iron sheets and shut up. So there is a Virginia Woolf-ish quality to some of this novel, and it is there that it finds some redemption.

That said, you need to brace yourself for the rest. These women consider themselves progressive if not radical, having prided themselves on their dedication to fighting the US war against Vietnam, and some dabbled momentarily, it seems, in the Civil Rights movement also. They have one African-American friend that appears after the 80% mark to become the token Black buddy, and she gets to deliver a few very wise lines before fading back into the distance. One of the Caucasian women makes a remark about Suki having been “colorblind”, and this made me want to punch a wall. But readers born later than 1970 should understand that white supremacy as an underlying assumption of daily life was eerily prevalent in Caucasian households during the period when these women were young; at that time, pretending that all races were alike was well-intended though frustratingly ignorant.

Another aspect of the text that seems hugely off base today but that was common to most progressive literature of the 1980s is that every single person in this supposedly forward-looking atmosphere is straight. Don’t even think about gender identity issues; back then there was still a hugely prevalent assumption that women loved only men and men loved only women, and everyone was comfortable with the sex organs with which they were born.

And so a formerly progressive book now sounds really off kilter in many, many places.

For those that have been deeply immersed in women’s literature from all eras, including the eras of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Virginia Woolf, this book might be a worthwhile addition to your collection. But as general fiction, I cannot give it a solid recommendation.

This book will be released digitally August 9, 2016.

Only the Road/Solo el Camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry, by Margaret Randall, editor****

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Margaret Randall is an old-school feminist and socialist, and I recognized her name when this volume of Cuban poetry became available. Thank you to the author, Duke University, and Net Galley for permitting me to access the DRC, which I received free in exchange for this honest review.

onlytheroadMany people don’t know much about Cuba, the tiny island nation a mere 90 miles from the coast of Florida. The American media has distorted the Cuban Revolution for as long as I can remember. Before the revolution, which took place in 1959, Havana was like Bangkok, a place where little girls prostitute themselves so they won’t starve to death, where wealthy visitors can experience every pleasure, innocent or corrupt, known to humanity but where most citizens have little chance of even having their basic human needs met. Cuba’s alliance with the Soviet Union (USSR) helped the Cuban people defend themselves from US efforts to overthrow the revolutionary government, but the alliance also led to a period of Stalinist repression that darkened artists’ worlds for a period of time. Randall discusses all of this in her introduction. Following the period Cubans call the Rectification Period (reference mine), Stalinist practices were peeled away, and more freedom of expression created a more hospitable environment for artists, in addition to strengthening the revolution itself. In Cuba art is not privately sold as a general rule, and artists receive a salary for what they do, paid by the Cuban people.

Randall’s collection of poetry is encyclopedic, including a vast stylistic range representative of a range of generations, some little-known voices as well as a number of LGBTQ writers. Randall translates each poem and gives a comprehensive biographical note for each poet. If anything, I might have preferred a slightly more stripped down version, but what Randall has done is very scholarly she documents well.

Since this reviewer does not speak Spanish, I cannot evaluate the translations personally, but given that Randall’s background I would be astonished if it were not rock solid.

That said, I also found myself lamenting my lack of Spanish, because I know that the flow of sound is an important part of poetry, and even the best translator can’t rectify this. Those that speak Spanish will likely get more from the collection; both Spanish and English versions are included.

Those that love poetry and are interested in seeing the work of Cubans, and especially those that also speak Spanish, should get this excellent collection. It becomes available to the public October 14, 2016.

Wishful Seeing, by Janet Kellough****

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wishfulseeingThaddeus Lewis, the traveling preacher sleuth, is back on the road again. He’s headed to speak at a gathering of Methodist Episcopalians when he finds himself involved, once more, in a murder case. This cozy mystery is my second in an endearing series by Janet Kellough. I snapped up the DRC when I saw that Dundurn had made it available on Net Galley, so I read it free in exchange for an honest review. This title will be available to the public this Saturday, July 30.

A body has been found in Rice Lake, and there are witnesses that saw Major Howell and his wife Ellen, the woman in the blue dress, near the scene of the crime “in the right place at more or less the right time”.  In the Canada that existed back then, that was enough to put Mrs. Howell in jail; her husband would be there too, but he is nowhere to be found.

Lewis finds himself drawn toward her case. Is it because he saw bruises on her arm that suggested her spouse may have handled her ungently? Is it because she is lovely, and he wishes she were with him instead? Or is it because Lewis just can’t scratch that legal-eagle itch enough times to be rid of the urge?  Likely it’s some of each.

The main draw card here is setting. Kellough has done a good deal of research in laying out both the area around Toronto during its frontier period. The result is a historical mystery with a travelogue feel to it. Kellough takes us to a time and place nobody can visit anymore except through literature, and she does a great job of it. She includes a lot of interesting details about the history of the Canadian legal system that drew my attention, because it was very different from what those of us raised in the US have come to expect. I found this aspect of it fascinating.

I also really enjoyed the part played by the little dog, Digger. I wouldn’t care to see him start solving crimes, but I hope we see him again in a future installment.

The only weak part is—perhaps unfortunately—at the beginning. There is so much of Thaddeus’s inner narrative, so much soul searching and comparison of beliefs among the various Protestant denominations that if I had not read Kellough’s work before, I would have wondered if I had inadvertently stumbled across Christian fiction. In fact, my notes show that at one part I wondered anyway.

Yet in another way, if there has to be a slow part, let it be at the beginning. And it’s clear that Kellough is not attempting to put together a thriller that grabs the reader by the throat, but rather is treating us to a relaxing story that one may take to the hammock and flop down with.

Nevertheless, by the time all the groundwork has been laid, it is a hard book to put down.

So this is your beach read. Take it to the shore, to the mountains, to the river, or even your own back yard, but don’t cheat yourself by passing it by. You can have it this weekend, and those that enjoy both historical fiction and mystery wrapped up at once are in for a treat.

Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things, by Jenny Lawson****

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furiouslyhappyJenny Lawson is well known as The Blogess (the blogger that came up with Beyonce, the metal chicken). She won awards for her previous memoir, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened.  The only DRC I saw for this title was for readers in UK and Australia, so I waited till I could scoop it cheaply and bought it digitally. Those that read my reviews often know I almost never do this. For the $3 it cost on an Amazon Prime daily deal, it was worth it to me.

Lawson is one of a handful of authors that talks candidly and often very humorously about her own struggle with mental illness and autoimmune disorders. Her capacity to create imaginary scenarios totally out of left field is her greatest strength, second only to the ability—sometimes—to find a way to laugh at the nest of spiders that occasionally takes over her brain. And sometimes she is painfully candid. Try this one on:

 

“Sometimes being crazy is a demon. And sometimes the demon is me…And some of us just carry around our tiny demon as he wreaks havoc in our mind, tearing open old dusty trunks of bad memories and leaving the remnants spread everywhere. Wearing the skins of people we’ve hurt. Wearing the skins of people we’ve loved. And sometimes, when it’s worst, wearing our own skins.”

 

She rants about the well intentioned but ignorant advice she’s received from clueless amateurs. At various times she’s been told to shake it off, to stop eating gluten, and to let Jesus into her heart in order to experience a full and immediate cure.

Sure.

Her musings about flying, which her fame requires her to do a great deal of, though she is afraid both of flying and of leaving home, are brilliant. This reviewer crowed out loud from glee at Lawson’s suggestion that flight attendants be permitted “to whack one person per flight with a piñata stick for being the stupidest damn person on the plane.”

My favorite section is the one in which she details the horrors of remodeling in a way that makes me howl. And goodness knows we all need to do that.

Lawson inserts women’s reproductive anatomy into almost any sort of discussion, and whereas I applaud the feminist spirit that demands the word “vagina” no longer be treated like a dirty word, I confess it was a bit much for me. But then, I am probably older than you are; this may be a generational thing. And there may also be plenty of women from the Boomer generation that think her use of the word is great.

Now and then there’s an odd moment in which I stop reading and stare at the text. What? Did she proof read this, and did her editors? There are occasional remarks that strike me as racially insensitive. She spins a thread about the wild things in the out of doors, and cautions us that since bears don’t play, we should shoot one first and ask questions later. Assuming said bear is in one’s back yard or trying to fit through a window of one’s home, I can see the point, but it came out of left field and made me wonder. Really? Just shoot bears? And the thread further spins itself into a bison-and-Native-Americans discussion in which she assures us that it’s not great to have bison in one’s yard, but it would be awesome to keep a lot of Native Americans out there. My e-reader says, “?!?”

But then she drops and is off onto another stream-of-consciousness spiel before I can fully digest what’s been said. She does it a couple of other times also. And it occurs to me that she has perhaps the ultimate excuse, having said up front that she has known for most of her life that she is “not right” in the head, but I still wonder that her editors didn’t look at that and say, “Umm…Jenny? This part right here…?” There are no overt racial slams or this review would have a lot of empty stars, but there are small moments where I wonder if she understands how others may read what she’s said.

Many of her entries if not all of them are drawn from her blog, and it’s possible that if you’ve read her blog faithfully, you won’t want to pay for this book. As for me, I found it worth the three bucks to be able to get everything at once in a well organized format—known as a book—that I could read comfortably. I confess I would not have paid full jacket price for it now that I get most books free and also have less money to spend on them than when I was working, but for others it may well be worth it.

On the whole, this is a courageous and often eloquent, fall-down-funny memoir, and with the small reservations mentioned above, I recommend it to you.

The Goldfish Bowl, by Laurence Gough***

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thegoldfishbowlIt’s seldom that I find myself so ambivalent about a galley; I read this free thanks to Net Galley and Endeavor Press in exchange for an honest review.  The writing skill is probably closer to a five; the respect level for women, people of color, and anyone that isn’t oriented straight as a bullet’s path is closer to a one. So those that are constantly inveighing about how tired they are of trying to be PC, here. This is for you. For those of us that have moved along, I am not so sure. This book was released digitally in January, 2016 and is now for sale.

I spent a good portion of this book confused, because it is billed as a new release, yet it really reads like a novel from the 1980s might.  A little digging revealed that it was initially published in 1988, and this explains a good deal. Mainstream attitudes have come a long way since then, and so some re-released novels stand the test of time, whereas others should perhaps be consigned, as Trotsky put it, to “the dustbin of history”.

The story is set in Vancouver, British Columbia, and this is part of what made me want to read this mystery. I don’t see a lot of fiction set there, and I know the area, so I thought this would be fun. And setting is done well.

Then we have our sniper:

“The sniper sat in the orange plastic chair, hunched over a Lyman ‘All American’ turret press. His hands were large and strong. The thick blunt fingers, nails carefully painted with a glossy red polish, moved with precision and grace as he assembled the shiny brass cartridges, primers, powder and fat 500-grain copper-jacketed slugs.”

Our sniper, who must surely be a baddy if twisted enough to put on women’s clothing and makeup, is referred to as clown-faced and is always designated as “he”. In the 1980s that boat would float with most of book-buying North America. Now, not so much.

There is one victim after another, and the beginning is paced at breakneck speed, relaxing readers only to suddenly shock us repeatedly, so there’s a sort of emotional whiplash. There are two detectives in charge of the sniper shootings, and one is a woman. That’s unusual in the department, where women are routinely referred to in demeaning ways and where hard core porn kept in a file cabinet is just a thing the boys in blue do. None of this appears to be there to make a point about what women put up with, however; it seems to be injected for realism and urban grit. And though none of the cops is particularly brilliant, Parker, the female cop, is particularly incompetent, emptying an entire gun at close range without hitting the target even once.

Okay.

Bright spots come with particular scenes. The climax is brilliant, and I love the detail of the guard horse in front of the evidence room. The author is clearly talented, but every time I found myself engaging with the text and not thinking about anything that had offended me, something else would come to the forefront, popping up like a turd in the punch bowl. Those that visit psychiatrists are all ‘fruitcakes’, and at one point, “a huge black” stands in the doorway. At this point my temper flared and I tapped into my tablet, “Huge Black WHAT, motherfucker?”

Yes, I know. Amazon won’t print that quote. It’s worth editing to have it in my blog, because that’s exactly how I feel about it.

There are good moments with figurative language, but then once in awhile a glaring fact that nobody checked pops up. Do people in Vancouver genuinely believe that the West Coast goes from British Columbia, to Washington, to California? Didn’t think so. Someone needs to apologize to Oregon, which is larger than some European nations.  The denouement, social justice issues aside, was a mighty long reach.

If you are already a tried and true fan of Laurence Gough—and he is an established writer with over a dozen published novels—then you will probably enjoy this one too.

As for me, I’ll pass.