The Thirteenth Tale

What I Read: The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield. 408 pages. Anchor Canada, 2007.

Rating: 5/5!


Happy coincidence! I finished Diane Setterfield's stunning book, The Thirteenth Tale, this weekend, on Friday the thirteenth. How mysterious: the first of three verrry mysterrrious things to be found in this blog post.

The second mysterious thing is this: how, with less time to read and more pages to get read, did I manage to devour The Thirteenth Tale so must faster than Red China Blues, you may ask? Well, you should have seen me! And in fact if you're reading this you probably did. Quickly and at every opportune moment (and at a lot of very inopportune moments, as is my very bad habit), the pages slipped by and the weight of paper in my right hand became less and less. The story grabs you, makes you read on, constantly engaging your mind and making the clogs of your brain turn wildly, trying to solve the mystery of the novel.

That mystery is the third verrry mysterrrious thing. There is so much to uncover and piece together in this twisting novel of twins, bookstores, creaking old houses, and the foggy, melancholy Yorkshire moors. I could go on and on and on about this book: suffice it to say that I loved it, and felt completely at home in it. And I now have a fierce desire to book a ticket to England and go roaming about the moors with an old copy of Jane Eyre! Read this book and let's talk books and ghost stories!

Happy reading, and have a great day!

Erin

What I Read: The Body Farm by Patricia Cornwell

Genre: Mystery

Rating: 3.5/5

Hello All of you out there! Hope you are all doing well in this hot weather :) Some suggestions to help you may include eating frozen yogurt, drinking a nice smoothie or running to the nearest fountain you find and jumping in to cool off (Joking! or am I?)hehehe...

OK, so lets begin with the novel I am reviewing for this particular blog. The Body Farm was an "O.K. - Good" reading. I say this because i quite liked it yet it didn't satisfy my mystery hunger like Mary Higgins Clark or Agatha Christie Mystery novels usually do for me. Patricia Cornwell has always been on the top of my list for Mystery/Crime authors but i can for sure say that she has written more intricate and satisfying novels than this one. The Body Farm started off great and ended off great but i found the middle to be kind of slow and hard to get through. There was some of what I felt to be unnecessary events that took away from the main plot. If it was not for the great start off and the awesome finish I would not have recommended anyone to pick up this novel and read it. All in all I was not disappointed but I was also not fully satisfied.

The Novel follows Dr. Katie (Kay) Scarpetta who is a forensic pathologist for the FBI's Behavioural Science Unit. (Side Note: She is my favourite reoccurring character that Cornwell has written about in many of her novels). So this Dr Kay with the help of the FBI team set out to North Carolina to help solve the mystery of the brutal murder of eleven year old Emily Steiner. long with the main plot, other smaller plots are taking place in Dr. Scarpetta's personal life like her relationship with her niece Lucy who she treats like her own daughter and her relationship with her family and job in general.

One thing I loved about this book was the way Cornwell went into great detail to describe how a group of people like the FBI can profile a criminal and solve a mystery with very little evidence to go on. She describes what the term "The Body Farm" actually refers to and the feelings of the a woman (Dr. Scarpetta) who had seen so many dead bodies and so much violence in the world and is desperately trying to believe that there is still good people in this world and that not everyone is out to get everyone else. Overall, the novel had a surprisingly good ending just like its beginning and I am looking forward to reading other books about Dr. Kay Scarpetta in the near future and hopefully they will be as good as this book was if not better :)

One book I am stoked about is the third trilogy to Candace Camp's romance novels. I have already written two different blog reviews about the first two books and am waiting for the third on to come out so I can read it and do a review on it. I am quite sure it will be a dashing success just like the first two were for me. For now, I wish you all a great day and we will meet again in my upcoming blogs but for now,

Toodles,

Rasha

Red China Blues

What I Read: Red China Blues, by Jan Wong. 405 pages. Doubleday, 1996.
Rating: 3/5.

Well!

That took a lot longer than I expected. When your bus driver starts to comment that you're taking a long time to finish a book, you know you're reading too slowly. I've become the Red China Blues girl to my public transportation officials, since I've boarded four buses each day for the last few weeks with this book in my hand. But my bus route has become the only time I have free to read, other than the times when my sweetheart of a boyfriend lets me cuddle up with him and a book on a date. (Hi, Nick. Have I told you lately you're fantastic?) Obviously I am a super fun girlfriend: such are the consequences of dating a book geek, I'm afraid.

So this book took me a few eons to finish. And now the looming question: Was It Worth It? Hmm. Not so much. And yes, it was. Clear as mud, right? The book starts off with Jan Wong, a Globe and Mail journalist, recounting her move from Montreal to China in 1972 to work and study under the Maoist Cultural Revolution. She moves with high hopes and expectations of a country she sees as being as close to perfection as possible. In reality, people live in fear of speaking honestly about the hardship and frustrations they face. Jan takes a long time to see behind the veil of Maoist rhetoric and idealism, even turning in a fellow student at Beijing University for unpatriotically wanting help to get out of China. This section should be interesting, and at times it is, but for the most part it drags, and I constantly wanted to shake her and shout "Looook! Your letters are read, you can't date who you want to, they keep pulling you out of class to work in factories, and everybody speaks in Maoist slogans instead of actually communicating. Do you see a problem here???" Eventually she does indeed see a problem, thank goodness, right about the point where I almost gave up on the book.

And then it gets goooooooood! She goes into reporting (actual reporting, as opposed to her initial attempt to get pro-Communism propaganda printed in the New York Times), and the book becomes suddenly fascinating. The twists and turns of Chinese history that Jan was witness to are well worth the read, and the tragedy of her account of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 is overwhelming. She writes beautifully and powerfully here, and her testimony will break your heart.

So, no, at first the book is not worth your time, and then suddenly yes, it is. After witnessing the tragedy of Tiananmen Square, she determines to examine more about the dark underside of China. She covers topics like the brutality of Chinese executions (the sentence even for copyright infringement is the death penalty), the failure of the justice system (police stole one of her car for their own use and rammed her replacement car while she was 8 months pregnant), and the tragedy of the booming trade in women (trafficking, incidentally, is only punished with 5 years, the same sentence for stealing two cows).

I won't be hanging on to this book, but I'm glad I read it. I could have just read a history textbook and saved myself the frustration of her being a naive ninny for the first half, but there is so much here that only a firsthand, personal account could touch on, and no history text could convey the emotion that makes sections of the book come alive.

Hopefully my next book doesn't take so long: I have four started in various cities right now, so we'll see which one gets done first. Thanks for your patience, and have a great and glorious day!

Happy reading,

Erin