119. The Scarlet Pimpernel

By: Emmuska Orczy
Rated: 4 Stars
From: Library, Unabaridged Audio Book

Years ago the 1934 movie version of this book was on TV and I fell in love with both the story and the British actor Leslie Howard who did such a marvelous job of playing the Scarlet Pimpernel/ Sir Percy Blakeney as he seeks to help French aristocrats escape the guillotine during the French Revolution.

The style and writing is badly dated but the story is an excellent game of cat and mouse. Margaurite comes across as a stupid twit in the book but fares much better in the more modern movie versions where the character benefits from some badly needed updating.  Sir Percey however is wonderful as originally written.

The plot of the book is that , Blakeney adopts a masked identity as the Scarlet Pimpernel to remain anonymous as  he slips in and out of France to rescue people from their fate on the Guillotine. 

He's backed up by a league of 19 men who avow they are joining TSP in his endeavors for the thrill of the gamble, the sheer blood rushing ride of it all- that and the fact they are thumbing their nose at the French, which to British (and some of us Americans as well) is always fun!

The French, of course, detest this interference in their affairs and set out to trap and kill the Pimpernel at all costs. As part of his effort to deflect suspicion from himself, he plays the fool in every day life and he does it well. His own wife considers him a useless fop... and that's where the story really gets interesting.

His wife the expatriate Marguerite St. Just, now Lady Blakeney and the head of society in England is blackmailed by the evil Chauvelin, a revolutionary whohow has sworn to capture the Scarlett Pimpernell.  Margaurite puts him on the trail of the Pimpernel only to discover afterwards the identity of the Pimpernel herself.  Margaurite takes off to try to find her husband herself and warn him that his identity is known.

Will Chauvelin and the French Revolutionary Government find and kill the Pimpernel before she can find and save him?

118. If I Stay

By:  Gayle Foreman
Rated 5 Stars
From:  Library

This is a truly beautiful book.  It is so very well written that it really tears at your heart when you read it.  My son asked me why I would read a book if it made me cry but my daughter in law just patted me on the arm.  When I told her what it was about she teared up but said she didn't think she could read it.  Too big a wuss.  It is sad.  But so beautiful.  Oh, I already said that didn't I? {sigh}

Publisher Summary
In a single moment, everything changes. Seventeen year- old Mia has no memory of the accident; she can only recall riding along the snow-wet Oregon road with her family. Then, in a blink, she fi nds herself watching as her own damaged body is taken from the wreck...
A sophisticated, layered, and heart achingly beautiful story about the power of family and friends, the choices we all make — and the ultimate choice Mia commands.

116. Crashing Through

By:  Robert Kurson

Rated:  4.5

From:  Library

Recommended by Connie

I ordered this book after Connie listed it on Bookflurries and just finished.  It was very very interesting.  Not only was the guy inspirational but I found the details about how seeing is so much more complex than just using ones eyes.  Thank you so much for pointing me at this book.


PUBLISHER SUMMARY:
In his critically acclaimed bestseller Shadow Divers, Robert Kurson explored the depths of history, friendship, and compulsion. Now Kurson returns with another thrilling adventure–the stunning true story of one man’s heroic odyssey from blindness into sight.

Mike May spent his life crashing through. Blinded at age three, he defied expectations by breaking world records in downhill speed skiing, joining the CIA, and becoming a successful inventor, entrepreneur, and family man. He had never yearned for vision.

Then, in 1999, a chance encounter brought startling news: a revolutionary stem cell transplant surgery could restore May’s vision. It would allow him to drive, to read, to see his children’s faces. He began to contemplate an astonishing new world: Would music still sound the same? Would sex be different? Would he recognize himself in the mirror? Would his marriage survive? Would he still be Mike May?

The procedure was filled with risks, some of them deadly, others beyond May’s wildest dreams. Even if the surgery worked, history was against him. Fewer than twenty cases were known worldwide in which a person gained vision after a lifetime of blindness. Each of those people suffered desperate consequences we can scarcely imagine.

There were countless reasons for May to pass on vision. He could think of only a single reason to go forward. Whatever his decision, he knew it would change his life.

Beautifully written and thrillingly told, Crashing Through is a journey of suspense, daring, romance, and insight into the mysteries of vision and the brain. Robert Kurson gives us a fascinating account of one man’s choice to explore what it means to see–and to truly live.

115. Wings of Fire

BY:  Charles Todd
Rated 4.5 Stars
From:  Library

I am reading this series all out of order but I don't think it makes the slightest bit of difference since there is no back story running through any of them.  Each one is pretty much a total stand alone.  I love this series.  It is so well done and the period is probably my favorite one to read about in all of history.


PUBLISHERS DESCRIPTION:
Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge is dispatched to Cornwall to investigate three deaths?seemingly a double-suicide and an accident?that have occurred within weeks in the Trevelyan family. Still recovering from shell shock sustained while serving in France during WWI, Rutledge carries in his head the challenging voice of Hamish MacLeod, a Scottish soldier about whose battlefront death Rutledge experiences profound guilt. In the village of Borcombe, Rutledge learns that one of the apparent suicides, Olivia Marlowe, wrote as O.A. Manning, a poet whose work had uncannily captured both the misery of war and the passion and beauty of love. Olivia Marlowe and her devoted half-brother Nicholas Cheney died of poisoning within hours of each other. Another half-brother, Stephen FitzHugh, the only family member opposed to selling the family estate where Olivia and Nicholas lived, fell down the stairs to his death not long after the funeral. Searching for answers about the deaths and for an understanding of the poet, Rutledge finds himself on a decades-long trail of cleverly disguised murders. Todd's cast is sometimes hard to keep straight, but readers will find it hard to resist following Rutledge on this emotionally intense quest. Memorable characters, subtle plot twists, the evocative seaside setting and descriptions of architecture, the moors and the sea fully reward the attention this novel commands.

114. Saffron Dreams

By Shaila Abdullah
Rated 3 Stars
From:  Library

My main problem with this story is that I never developed a connection with Arissa the main character.  She came across to me as a rather emotionally shallow person.  Perhaps it was the authors writing style that bothered me but I felt like the whole book was skimming the surface of her life and her feelings.

I realize Arissa had multiple problems to deal with, a handicapped child, being a widow and single mother and being a muslim in America.  But the only thing in the whole book I felt like she truly connected with was her child and that her relationship with him was almost an obsession.  I thought she used her in-laws and was glad for them when they finally walked away from her.  I dunno, this book just didn't really click for me. 

LIBRARY SUMMARY:

Pakistani-born Arissa Illahi moves to New York City to be with her husband, who had taken a job at the World Trade Center's Windows on the World restaurant to allow time for completing his novel. He perishes when the towers collapse, and Arissa nearly crumples herself as she struggles with tremendous grief, a troublesome pregnancy, and the various trials she faces as a Muslim when others ignorantly associate her with the terrorists. Abdullah excels at examining the complexity of moving on after this historical event, especially from Arissa's unique perspective as a writer and artist struggling to rear a child with special needs. But this debut novel deals with more than just survival in the aftermath of 9/11, also examining the nature of motherhood by juxtaposing Arissa's supportive mother-in-law and less than maternal mother.

113. The Widow's Season

By Laura Brodie
Rated 4.5 Stars
From:  Library

I'm not going to say a single word about this book for fear of giving even the slightest spoiler other than to say I really liked it.

LIBRARY SUMMARY:

A mesmerizing debut novel about love, grief, and the ghosts who show up where we least expect them.

Sarah McConnell''s husband had been dead for three months when she saw him in the grocery store.

What does a woman do when she''s thirty-nine, childless, and completely alone for the first time in her life? Does it mean sheÂ's crazy to think she sees her late husband beside a display of pumpkins? Or is it just what people do, a natural response to grief that will fade in time? ThatÂ's what Sarah McConnell''s friends told her, that it was natural, would last a season, and then fade away.

But what if there was another answer? What if he was really there? They never found the body, after all. What if he is still here somehow, and about to walk back into her life?

114. The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

By: Allison Hoover Bartlet
Rated 5 Stars
From:  Library

Before I read this book I thought that I was a book collector.  Now I know better.  My little piddling number of books that are cluttering up 4 large bookcases and the stacks of books on various surfaces of my house are NOTHING when it comes to being a real Bibliomaniac.  I am very, very small potatoes.

This is a very interesting book and it certainly increased my knowledge of antique and rare books and the lengths that thieves will go to acquire them.  Not just for money but for the joy or perhaps the obsession just to collect them.   I had no idea of  the  threat to rare book dealers was as bad as was shown in this book. I know that rare books are sometimes worth a fortune, and that some other rare documents have quite a lot of value; the theft of such items doesn't surprise me. But what does surprise me is the lengths to which people will go to collect even less-valuable items.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much is about such a person--John Charles Gilkey. The author takes the reader on a journey through collectors' and book lovers' obsessions and follows the trail of Gilkey, a notorious book thief, across the country to the various individuals once targeted by the book obsessed man. One central figure is Ken Sanders, who takes on the role of book detective to hunt down Gilkey (previously unknown), and to retrieve the stolen items to return them to their rightful owners. Bartlett follows the trail, putting together the pieces, digging into the mind of the book obsessed and, ultimately, the mind of Gilkey, to put together a book as addictive as its key characters.

112. The Natural Laws of Good Luck

By:  Ellen Graf
Rated 1 Star, DNF
From:  Library

I am the type of person who finds a lot of things about life amusing.  Sometimes I am the only person in a room laughing.  So I was shocked when I discovered that contrary to the reviews I did not find one single things about this book funny.

For the most part, I really enjoy enjoy learning about other people lives and experiences, especially from other cultures. So, The Natural Laws of Good Luck sounded like a wonderful book, but sadly it was not a book for me.

This book came across to me as being about two people who were more alike than unalike, people who never thought a single thing through, never looked before they leaped even from the highest cliff and got a lot of perverse pleasure out of doing every thing the hardest way possible and being delighted with slip shod results.  I got so tired of them both blundering their way along and never leaning from their experiences that I finally just gave up in disgust.

PUBLISHER SUMMARY:
 
The quirky and funny story of a woman in upstate New York who marries a man from China whom she barely knows. They don’t share a language or a culture, but together they discover what matters most—a story of taking risks, culture clash, and the journey to real love.

111. Higher Authority

By:  Stephen White

Rated 4.5 Stars

From:  Library

Recommended by Stacey

Good Grief, this books certainly paints an unflattering picture of the LDS Church.  This is the third book with a religious theme I've read this month.  I need to move on.  But as a mystery it was excellent, as Stacey's recommendations usually are.  I'm getting really hung up on Stephen White.

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION:

Attorney Lauren Crowder recommends a Salt Lake City lawyer for her younger sister, who has accused her former boss, an impeccably Mormon woman with high political and church connections, of sexual harassment. Crowder assists a private investigator in gathering information on the potentially explosive case, but murder intervenes: someone kills the P.I. and the former boss. Crowder then calls upon boyfriend Alan Gregory (Private Practices, Viking, 1993) to outmaneuver the ubiquitous, corrupt tentacles of the Mormon church.

110. The Family

The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

By:  Jeff Sharlet
Rated 4 Stars
From:  Library


I heard about this book on the internet when it was recommended by a blogger who was writing about my Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor who is a member of this organization.  It's enough to make you want to throw up.


PRODUCT DESCRIPTION:
 

A journalist's penetrating look at the untold story of christian fundamentalism's most elite organization, a self-described invisible network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful

They are the Family—fundamentalism's avant-garde, waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. They consider themselves the new chosen—congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet in confidential cells, to pray and plan for a "leadership led by God," to be won not by force but through "quiet diplomacy." Their base is a leafy estate overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from inside its walls.
The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power—not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. Sharlet follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the far right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who spoke the language of establishment power, a "family" that thrives to this day. In public, they host Prayer Breakfasts; in private, they preach a gospel of "biblical capitalism," military might, and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin, and Mao as leadership models, the Family's current leader, Doug Coe, declares, "We work with power where we can, build new power where we can't."
Sharlet's discoveries dramatically challenge conventional wisdom about American fundamentalism, revealing its crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the cold war, and the no-holds-barred economics of globalization. The question Sharlet believes we must ask is not "What do fundamentalists want?" but "What have they already done?"
Part history, part investigative journalism, The Family is a compelling account of how fundamentalism came to be interwoven with American power, a story that stretches from the religious revivals that have shaken this nation from its beginning to fundamentalism's new frontiers. No other book about the right has exposed the Family or revealed its far-reaching impact on democracy, and no future reckoning of American fundamentalism will be able to ignore it.

109. The Fruit of her Hands

By: Michelle Cameron
Rated 4 Stars
From:  Jani



Beautifully written, absorbing novel set in the thirteenth century.  Highly recommended.

Product Description

Crafting a richly textured, absorbing novel based on the life of her ancestor, renowned thirteenth-century Jewish scholar Meir ben Baruch of Rothenberg, Michelle Cameron paints a page-turning and deeply personal portrait of Judaism in medieval France and Germany. Imagined through the eyes of Rabbi Meir's wife, Shira, this opulent drama reveals a devout but independent woman who struggles to preserve her religious traditions while remaining true to herself as she and her family witness the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe.

Raised by her widowed rabbi father and a Christian nursemaid in Normandy, Shira is a free-spirited, inquisitive girl whose love of learning shocks the community. But in Meir ben Baruch, a brilliant scholar, she finds her soul mate and a window on the world of Talmudic scholarship that fascinates her.

Married to Meir in Paris, Shira blossoms as a wife and mother, savoring the intellectual and social challenges that come with being the wife of a prominent scholar. After every copy of the Talmud in Paris is confiscated and burned, Shira and her family seek refuge in Germany. Yet even there they experience bloody pogroms and intensifying hatred. As Shira weathers heartbreak and works to find a middle ground between two warring religions, she shows her children and grandchildren how to embrace the joys of life, both secular and religious.

A multigenerational novel that captures a hitherto little-known part of history with deep emotion and riveting authenticity -- and includes an illuminating author's note and a Hebrew glossary -- The Fruit of Her Hands is a powerful novel about the enduring spirit of the Jewish people.

108. An Echo in the Bone

By Diana Gabaldon
Rated 3 1/2 Stars
From:  Library

This is what, the seventh book in the Outlander Series?

I had a hard time getting into this one.  I thought it was a little slow and a whole lot choppy. The story abruptly bounced back and forth between POV's, centuries and continents with out any lead in and often didn't leave me there long enough to start getting a feel for the story.  Some readers apparently can handle all this careening around but I am not one of them.

Also there were some story lines that left me thinking *why*? Why reintroduce a story line that really did not have anything to do with what was happening so far in the book.  If she is going to flesh out this storyline in a later book it seems to me that she ought to have left it for the next book and not further confused things.

Oh well . . .  this is just me and my take on thins.  My favorite parts were the William, Ian, and the Hunters.  Here is good fodder for a future book, maybe with a much older Jem and Amanda thrown to keep the time travel thing going.

But overall, after a slow start the book started picking up for me about half way through.  About 3/4 of the way through I finally figured out what Roger and Brianna were doing.  Up to then they had just sort of been there without adding anything to the story.  Obviously Diana was setting up for the next book.

My one actual criticism of the book and not just my opinion was the editing.  While this book was more tightly edited than some of hers have been someone was obviously not keeping count of how many scenes particular conversations were held.  Ian and William had the same conversation three times and Jenny and Clair the same one twice.  Publishers obviously don't spend much of their budgets on competent editorial support for their authors.