Win The Stormchasers

On April 13, 2011, we posted a review of The Stormchasers: A Novel by Jenna Blum and concluded that it is Highly recommended.   It is also a 4.5 star-rated book at Amazon, and this rating has been earned after the submission of 55 customer ratings!   So we’re pleased to announce that, thanks to Kathleen, we can offer our readers three (3) copies of the trade paperback version of The Stormchasers, the version that is being released tomorrow.   Each book has a value of $15.00.

As always, we want to keep the rules simple for this book giveaway.   In order to enter this contest, just post a comment below – with your name and e-mail address – telling us why you’d like to win a copy of this particular book.   (In other words, what is it about the story that you find to be intriguing?)   If you prefer, you can send an e-mail message with your name and e-mail address to Josephsreviews@gmail.com .   This is open book, so feel free to refer to our earlier review or any reviews or information about the novel that you may find online.

As you may remember, the protagonist in The Stormchasers is a young woman whose strongest relationship in life is with her twin brother.   For a second entry, tell us who has been the most important person in your life and why?   Post your response below or in an e-mail message to us.

In order to be eligible to win a copy of The Stormchasers, you must live in the continental United States and be able to supply a residential (street) mailing address if and when you are contacted.   Books will not be shipped to P. O. boxes or to business-related addresses.   The three winners will be picked at random and you have until 12:00 Midnight PST on Friday, May 27, 2011 to submit your entry or entries.

So much for the complex contest rules.   Good luck and good reading!

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Coming Up Next…

A review of The Stormchasers: A Novel by Jenna Blum.

Teach Your Children

Night Road by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s Press; $27.99; 400 pages)

For a mother, life comes down to a series of choices.   To hold on…  To let go…  To forget…  To forgive…   Which road will you take?

In a compelling novel of love, loss, hope and understanding, author Kristin Hannah redefines the pluses and minuses – challenges, tenderness and empowerment – of motherhood.

Jude Farrady has everything.   She lives the ideal life; a loving husband, a custom-built home, friends that support and love her, and twins that have an extraordinarily close relationship.   Her life revolves around her twins, ensuring that they have everything they need to be happy and successful.

Lexi Baill has nothing.   The orphan of a drug addict, she has grown up living in multiple foster homes, without a family, abandoned and alone.   With a heart of gold she selflessly carries hope that someday things will turn out differently.

When Lexi befriends Jude’s daughter Mia on their first day of high school, their lives are forever changed.   Lexi brings out the best in the shy sister of the most popular boy in town.   The bond between the twins and Lexi encourages the Farraday’s to treat Lexi like one of their own.   Finally finding a permanent home with the aunt she never knew she had combined with the love she is shown from the Farraday’s, Lexi feels she has finally found the life she has always dreamed of.

Yet tragedy finds a way into the lives of even those with the most fortunate of circumstances.   The resulting loss forces everyone to reevaluate the future of their relationships and life beyond the boundaries of the predictable.

Author Hannah presents an endearing and engaging story that uncovers a path of unpredictable events…  Events that will leave you laughing, crying, wishing and hoping but above all feeling fully appreciative of the love, devotion and trials that come with the territory of being a mother.

Well recommended.

Kelly Monson

A review copy was received from the publisher.   Night Road was released on March 22, 2011.   “Longtime fans will love this rich, multilayered reading experience, and it’s an easy recommendation for book clubs.”   Library Journal

Two of Us

The Last Will of Moira Leahy: A Novel by Therese Walsh (Three Rivers Press; $15.00; 304 pages)

Therese Walsh’s first novel is a story of twins; a pair of near mystical sisters who call to mind the twins in Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger.   The twins share thoughts, a unique language and their lives until an accident with tragic consequences for the piano-playing prodigy Moira.   Maeve, the narrator, must then find the means to continue her life on her own.   She’s assisted on her journey by finding a magical keris sword, and this leads her to Europe, where she finds out special things about her life and her sister’s life.

Maeve blames herself for the accident involving Moira and the journey that she takes provides her with a new perspective and much-needed forgiveness.   This is a well-told and very entertaining read from Walsh, although the reader must be willing to suspend reality as parts border on magic and science fiction.   There’s also a tremendous amount of jumping around, jarring the reader’s patience with the lack of chronological order.  

Sticking with the story until the end will, however, reward the reader with a satisfying conclusion to this unique tale by a very promising writer.

Highly recommended.

Joseph Arellano

   “This tender tale of sisterhood, self-discovery, and forgiveness will captivate fans of contemporary women’s fiction.”   Library Journal

A review copy was provided by the publisher.

The Best Book of 2009

It really was not close, although Everything Matters!: A Novel by Ron Currie, Jr. is a very, very good runner-up.   Instead we have no choice but to choose Audrey Niffenegger’s follow-up to The Time Traveler’s Wife.   Yes, Her Fearful Symmetry is this site’s choice as the very best book published in 2009.

How good was it?   Well, we felt we needed to post three separate reviews to do the book justice.   Even then we likely fell short.   Our reviews were posted here on September 23, 2009 (6 days before the book’s release); September 28, 2009; and on November 7, 2009.   To revisit these reviews type the following search terms into the Search It! box on the right:  her fearful symmetry; take two…; what comes after.  

We can only hope that Ms. Niffenegger is now working on a third novel for release in 2011.   We will wait, anxiously – helplessly hoping.

Her Fearful Symmetry

Her Fearful Symmetry: A Novel by Audrey Niffenegger (Scribner, $26.99, 416 pages)

A simple ghost story, that’s what Her Fearful Symmetry is.   It’s the story of a woman, a twin, who dies and leaves her home and possessions in London to the twin daughters of her estranged sister.   The late Elspeth’s flat is located next to the dramatic Highgate Cemetery, which, itself, serves as a major character in this novel.   Based on this summary, a reader would not expect this to be a significant work.   The reader would be wrong, because this ghost story was written by Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler’s Wife), one of the best writers of our time.

Niffenegger creates a small, magical world where every thought, every word, every action of the main characters has significance.   Reading Symmetry is like watching a film shown in slow motion; her style is so arresting that it’s a challenge to look away.   What Sacramento’s Joan Didion is to non-fiction writing, Niffenegger is to the world of fiction.   Both are masters of icy realism, and it hardly matters what it is they write about.

Niffenegger may not convince you to believe in ghosts or time travel, but you will believe in her writing talents.   A perfect gift for a future novelist.   Highly recommended.

Joseph Arellano

A review copy was provided by the publisher.

Twin Charms

“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.”   – Caroline Gordon

The Last Will of Moira Leahy: A Novel by Therese Walsh (Broadway Books, 304 pages)

The Last Will of Moira Leahy is a book that takes its readers to a different world.   It is a novel of charm, mystery, of things that cannot easily be explained and of faith.   Faith in fate (often hard to come by, often rationed) and in the journey one is supposed to take in this life…   Faith that the right lesson will be learned at the end.

This is a story of twins, something much in vogue at the current time.   Therese Walsh’s story shares some of the mysticism of Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry.   It also paints twins as exotic creatures with shared language, thoughts and animal-like instincts.   Of course, the twins are not exactly alike.

The narrator Maeve Leahy, is the more cautious of the two – more cautious in love and in life.   She is a musician, a saxophone player, but she’s not the musical prodigy that her piano-playing twin Moira is.   It seems that Moira will lead the bigger life until a tragedy strikes.   Then Moira is frozen in place while Maeve is left to fend for – and find – herself.

After a period of depression, Maeve attends an auction where she spots a keris – an ancient and believed to be magical type of sword – similar to one she owned as a child.   Maeve finds that she has a need to discover more about the centuries old keris and this takes her on a journey to Rome, Italy.   It is on this journey that she learns more about herself, her twin, and life.   Life without fixed boundaries.   “Not everything in life can be measured or accounted for by the five known senses.”

First-time author Walsh has a smooth style with enough uniqueness that the reader desires to keep reading.   She stays ahead of the reader, too, as nothing predictable occurs.   I had just one small issue and that was the disconcerting movements  between present time and prior events.   It is not actually harmful in this case, but the baseline story is strong enough that it could well have been told chronologically.

This is one of those books where you delay getting to the last page, knowing the next book from this gifted author may not arrive for another year or two.   Nevertheless, this is a trip that is – without a doubt – well worth taking.

Highly recommended.

Joseph Arellano

A review copy was provided by the publisher.

Take Two…

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

Author Audrey Niffenegger has captured the essence of a prize-winning novel and potential blockbuster movie with this, her second effort.   The story revolves around 20-something twins Julia and Valentina whose mom is also a twin.   The girls are bequeathed an apartment in London overlooking Highgate Cemetery by mom’s twin, who dies of cancer.   The catch – they must live in the apartment for one year.

The book’s scenes are set in meticulous detail.   There is an elegant balance between the quirky and the mundane, whether it is the characters themselves, their clothes or the rooms they inhabit.   Elspeth’s apartment is a treasure trove of books and furniture, easily pictured by the reader.   The same holds true for visualizing Valentina’s creativity in fashioning the twins’ clothing.   The action goes from laboriously slow, when Martin painstakingly scrubs the floors of his flat, to breathtakingly fast when Valentina is racing around London trying desperately to become her own person.

Anyone lucky enough to read Symmetry will thoroughly enjoy vicariously traipsing around London and will definitely come to know their way around Highgate Cemetery.   The characters experience more than their share of emotional highs and lows.   Some are well beyond the usual range for ordinary people – read that non-twins.   If ever you’ve wondered what’s considered normal, this book will bring you into a whole new dimension that is entirely plausible.

Five stars – highly recommended.   The book far exceeded this reader’s expectations.

Ruta Arellano

A review copy was provided by the publisher.

Coming Up Next…

A guest – and second – review of Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler’s Wife).

What Comes After

Her Fearful Symmetry: A Novel by Audrey Niffenegger

If anyone else had written this story, I’d be tempted to say there’s not much to it.   Elspeth Noblin, knowing that she will soon die of cancer, leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces from the U.S., Julia and Valentina.   These are the daughters of Elspeth’s estranged sister.   Why does Elspeth desire to be united after death with the nieces she’s never seen?   What will they learn by living in Elspeth’s flat, wearing her clothes, surrounded by her former lover and friends?   Why is the flat in question located next to London’s Highgate Cemetery?   And why did Julia and Valentina’s mother separate herself from Elspeth?

All of these questions are answered in due time in Symmetry’s 416 pages.   But this is not a fast read.   It is a work of slow, intricate and fascinating pace written by Audrey Niffenegger.   Yes, she is the woman who wrote the mega-selling novel The Time Traveler’s Wife.   In her own real life Niffenegger is a guide at Highgate Cemetery in London, while also living in Chicago.   (She lives in the worlds she writes about.)

I will not say more about the plot except to say that there is a ghost involved – actually three of them, before the puzzle is solved.   The real pleasure here is in the telling…   Niffenegger shows once again that she’s at the top of her game, on top of her craft.   As she delicately tells her story, we wait almost breathlessly for the next short chapter, the next development, the next conversation, the next thought from one of her characters.

Some writers write big, building up large stages and filling up every space.   Niffenegger seems to write in between spaces, in the ghostly void between life and death, now and the past, hopes and regrets.   It may be natural, then, that she wrote about time travel in the context of an everlasting love story.   Now she writes of a family’s hopes, loves and disappointments; matters which cannot be limited by the boundaries of life and death.

If this is not an absolute masterpiece, it is likely to be as close to one as we’ll be privileged to see this year (and maybe the next).

Highly recommended.

Joseph Arellano

A review copy was provided by the publisher.