Book Review : Last Chance Beauty Queen
Written By: amodini
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Feb•
22•12
[amazon_link id=”0446576085″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]
[/amazon_link]Title : Last Chance Beauty Queen
Author : Hope Ramsay
Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
Genre : Romance
Source : NetGalley/Publisher ARC
Rating : 2.5/5
British Lord Hugh DeBracy comes to America to setup his textile machinery factory. He requires the assistance of Caroline Rocky Rhodes to persuade a land-owner in Last Chance, South Carolina, to sell his land to DeBracy. The land is owned by Elbert Rhodes, Caroline’s father. He has an eighteen hole miniature golf course on the land, each hole depicting a Bible related story. Golfing for God is not operational anymore, but Elbert, who “talks” to angels is rather partial to keeping it where it is. He is also very obstinate. Caroline has been drafted to help by her boss Senator Rupert Warren. When the Baron wishes to comes down to Last Chance, Caroline is forced to come with him, hoping that she can find a way out of this predicament. However her father will not agree to sell, the townspeople are up in arms about losing “Golfing for God” and Rocky has come at the time of the Annual Watermelon festival, of which she has unpleasant memories.
I requested this book from NetGalley because the premise for this book seemed quirky. “Golfing for God” and talking to angels ? Really ? I’d expected a witty, up close and personal small town tale, but this book read more like the typical Mills and Boons/Harlequin novel. Rocky is beautiful and curvy, and DeBracy is very handsome with a delectable British accent to boot. Rocky’s family is very influential in the town – her mom owns the local beauty parlor and her brother Stone is the sheriff. The family is also very strong-minded and Rocky is persuaded to participate in the Watermelon Festival in her Beauty Queen paraphernalia, much to her chagrin and DeBracy’s amusement. Both are attracted to each other., with the Lord’s heart racing whenever Rocky is around and Rocky’s “lady parts getting all hot and bothered” by Hugh’s presence.
While the author does well for this genre, building up the main and supporting characters very well, I thought the story a bit repetitive. After DeBracy and Rocky get to Last Chance, there are a series of events each of which lets the pair to get to know the other a bit better. The book went on in this manner for a while, and my attention flagged with each passing episode. While Rocky has a backstory and lots of family members to help build up her personality I only had Rocky’s perspective by which to judge DeBracy. Apart from being physically attractive I didn’t quite get why he was so appealing. I might be over this genre but I has expected a little more story and little less romance. So, I’ve got to say that this book didn’t work for me. If you’re a fan of Ramsay’s earlier work – this is part of a series with each book featuring one of Rocky’s siblings – this might suit you better.
Book Review : The Bungalow
Written By: amodini
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Feb•
17•12
[amazon_link id=”B005Q8254K” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]
[/amazon_link]Title : The Bungalow
Author : Sarah Jio
Genre : Romance
Publisher : Plume
Pages : 287
Source : Publisher ARC
Rating : 3.5/5
This is the story of Anne Calloway and her best friend Kitty. Anne is about to marry Gerard Godfrey, a childhood friend and her social equal, when she hears of Kitty going away to serve in the war. Anne, not in love with Gerard and headed for a marriage of convenience, decides to join Kitty and also enlists. Gerard while disappointed by her decision, assures her that he will be waiting for her return. At Bora Bora, and now a part of the nursing corps, Anne meets officer Westry and falls in love with him. They both find an old deserted bungalow on the island, and use it as a rendezvous. Meanwhile Kitty associates with the wrong type of men, and becomes distant, putting a strain on her friendship with Anne. When Anne is separated from Westry and misunderstandings develop between the two amid the chaos of war, she must go back home to Gerard. But will she ever truly be resigned to a life without Westry ?
“The Bungalow” is a romance novel set in wartime in 1942. It starts off with an elderly Anne, who waxes nostalgic to her grand-daughter Jennifer about the war and her long-lost love. Her thoughts of the past form the bulk of the book. Ms. Jio also weaves in smaller plots – one of Anne’s parents back home, and another of a murder mystery. The novel dwells on the familiar strains of female friendship where one friend is the quiet reserved one (Anne) and one a mischievous flirt (Kitty). The author develops the friendship well, and while I did like Anne’s character – she comes complete with backstory, familial obligations and ties, and motivations, I didn’t like Kitty’s as much – she seemed a trifle inconsistent. The author tells the story well, but the tone is a little placid and platitudinous; I never felt strongly for either Anne or Westry although they seemed nice enough.
This novel falls firmly in chick-lit territory with its over-arching theme of long-lost love. I read this book in one sitting and found it a light, entertaining read. I can quite imagine this book as a film, especially with the beautiful Tahitian backdrop. If you are a fan of this genre. I recommend picking it up.
Book Review : From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant
Written By: amodini
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Feb•
09•12
[amazon_link id=”0670023191″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]
[/amazon_link]Title : From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant
Author : Alex Gilvarry
Genre : Contemporary
Publisher : Viking
Source : Publisher ARC
Pages : 302
Rating : 4/5
This book is told to us memoir style, by Boyet R. Hernandez, fashion designer. Hailing from a family of doctors, Boy escapes to New York (because “one had to . . . home is where you hang yourself”), eager to get started on establishing his label (B)oy. Here he has his rebirth :
I love America, the golden bastard. It’s where I was born again: propelled through the duct of JFK International, out the rotating doors, push, push, dripping a post-U.S. Customs sweat down my back, and slithering out on my feet to a curb in Queens, breathe. Then into a yellow cab, thrown to the masses. Van Wyck, BQE, Brooklyn Bridge, Soho, West Side Highway, Riverside Drive – these are a few of my favorite things!
Boy soon gets the hang of things, meeting people in the business, getting used to the pace of life. Quite surprised that Battery Park isn’t shaped like an Alkaline Duracell, Boy nevertheless is much taken with the city. In hearing him describe his initial experience, one can build a mental image of him – enamored, euphoric, naïve and flippant; a women’s wear designer with an eye for detail and a knack for snark :
New York’s subway is a rubber band of sexual tension, stretched and twined around the boroughs, ready to snap. I frolicked in this salacious underground, where every motion had meaning – every leg crossed, every glance up from a paperback, every brush of a shoulder or rump was a kiss blown in my direction. The porcelain Chinese beauties on and off at Canal; the thoroughbred Eastern European models of Prince, castings a-go-go; the NYU coeds of Eight Street, plump and studious. Oh, and the sexpot hipsters of Fourteenth, right off the L, like cattle, their eyes drowned in eye shadow, looking as if they had never missed a party, nor would they.
New York is, as Boy discovers, a melting pot of races, cultures and languages. But it is expensive and money is tight. Offered a relatively large amount, Boy makes 2 suits for his neighbor Ahmed Qureshi. Qureshi, happy with the suits, offers to invest in Boy’s fashion line and Boy, strapped for capital accepts, albeit with a few niggling doubts about Ahmed’s ambiguous business and questionable contacts. When word gets out that Qureshi is wanted by the law, Boy fears for his own security. His worst fears come true when he is kidnapped and taken bound and handcuffed to a prison in No Man’s Land. Release now is a distant dream.
Here in No Man’s Land nothing is certain.
When will I meet my personal representative?
When will I meet with my lawyer?
When will I be released?
You see, uncertainty is their greatest weapon. Not the chains. Not the cuffs. Not the SMERF squad. Uncertainty.
It begins with the knock on the door in the middle of the night.
When I read the blurb for this book, I was surprised at the attempted conjoining of fashion and terrorism. And it was apparently funny. Well, funny it is. Gilvarry creates Boy with care, from the artfully placed acknowledgements section (by one B.R.H) to the slyly detailed footnotes, where we come to know of Boy’s penchant for mistakenly quoting authors and designers. The body of the book is in Boy’s voice, first person, written apparently while in prison, at the behest of his interrogator, and via it, Boy describes his life in New York in great detail. The inadvertent humor and satire is embedded in Boy’s manner and point-of-view, and in him we have our own gossipy guide to New York’s fashion world. Then Gilvarry skillfully changes tracks to give us Boy’s life-changing experience of No Man’s Land. Boy, a cheerful optimist, is driven to despair and worse. He professes his innocence, striking up restrained friendships with his guards, but to no avail. They do not believe him.
I’ve got to say that while the premise is a little hard-to-believe, Gilvarry gets my applause for writing through it with much skill. Boy is an endearing protagonist and everything he does, from the newcomer-ingenue-slip-ups to his thoughts of despair, has such an aura of honesty that it is hard to not be drawn in. I was. I hope you will be too. Recommended.
Wordless Wednesdays #1
Written By: amodini
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Feb•
08•12
Starting up a new Wordless Wednesday photo series this month. Here’s the first :
South Asian Challenge for 2012
Written By: amodini
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Feb•
06•12
I read S. Krishna’s Book Blog often, but this is the first time I’m taking the South Asian Challenge she hosts. I am of South-Asian descent so the literary landscape is kind of familiar. I do read South-Asian books once in a while – I recently read “The Artist of Disappearance” by Anita Desai which I liked, but I’m wary of going full-tilt at them, because the subjects handled tend to be a little melancholy. This year I will read 2 South-Asian books, and they are:
1. The Lilac House by Anita Nair
2. What the Body Remembers by Shauna Singh Baldwin
The first I’m already signed up to read via NetGalley, and the second I’ve been wanting to read for a long time now, simply because I’ve heard so many great things about it, and it comes highly recommended. Other South-Asian books I’ve liked are :
1. The White Tiger by Arvind Adiga
2. The Marriage Bureau for Rich People by Farhad Zama
3. The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall
4. Palace of Illusions by Chitra Divakaruni
5. Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa
6. The Mango Season by Amulya Malladi
7. Ladies Coupe by Anita Nair
8. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
Book Review : The Golden Scales
Written By: amodini
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Jan•
31•12
[amazon_link id=”1608197948″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]
[/amazon_link]Title : The Golden Scales
Author : Parker Bilal
Genre : Mystery
Pages : 416
Publisher : Bloomsbury
Source : NetGalley/Publisher ARC
Rating : 4/5
I decided to read this book because I quite like mysteries situated in different cultures (like Finding Nouf), the more detail of the culture and the people the better. In this book, Makana, a Sudanese policeman has been living in Cairo for the past 7 years. He lives on an awama, a houseboat on the river Nile, rented from his landlady Umm Ali. Makana is a solitary man, we learn, and has a painful past. Now he works as a private investigator and manages to earn enough to keep body and soul together, albeit frugally.
His solitary contemplation is broken one morning as he is summoned to meet powerful Egytian tycoon, Saad Hanafi. Influential Hanafi owns the Dreem Team, a soccer team, whose star player Adil Romario has gone missing. Amid unpleasant speculation in the media as to his sudden disappearance, Hanafi wants him found, and Makana is tasked with this undertaking. He accepts of course; Hanafi is powerful and the promised fee is generous.
At one of his regular eating joints, Makana also meets Liz Markham, a Britisher in search of her only child. Liz has lost her daughter 17 years ago and has been coming back to Egypt every year since for clues to her disappearance. When she is found dead one day, Makana is asked to meet two British detectives who’ve come to find her killers – Liz’s father has political clout. Makana begins to feel that Liz’s death is connected to his case, and as he begins to dig deeper, he uncovers festering enemity, decade-old betrayals and some surprising truths.
The Golden Scales is not just a mystery novel; it is much more. The book’s basic plot stems from the two mysterious disappearances, but the author develops this into a full-fledged almost literary novel touching upon subjects from personal upheaval to public politics to Islamic philosophy. Bilal builds up Makana’s character beautifully; we know Makana as he is now and we delve into his past. We understand why he is what he is, and the events that have shaped him. Makana is a strong protagonist, down but not out, bearing the courage to stand and press on for what is right. This book, as strongly built-up as it is, is quite unforgettable because of Makana.
Bilal also describes Egypt well – it’s people, it’s locales, it’s vernacular language, and the political influences that shape the region. As readers we are able to get a good virtual look-seee around.As Makana goes about investigating he meets all sorts of people – football stars, film producers, politicians, struggling actresses, land sharks, Russian gangsters – each person for himself, wanting, grasping. Each of the characters in the book is well depicted, from their back-stories and their connections to the missing people, to their own motivations for the crimes. I loved the fact that even while this was a mystery novel, I got a sense of the socio-political climate, the life of ordinary people, the quality of women’s lives and the ever-present corruption; the mystery didn’t exist in isolation, it stemmed from it’s society and it’s culture and the nature of it’s people.
This is an engrossing book, an atmospheric mystery and an engaging piece of fiction. I hope to read many more Makana mysteries. Highly recommended.
2012 NetGalley Reading Challenge
Written By: amodini
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Jan•
27•12
Yes, another Challenge for 2012 (I’ve already signed up for three)! I’m on a roll! This one is by Emily from Red House Books, yes the very same blogger who hosts the NetGalley Month Read-a-thons.
I’m picking the Green Star level which means I will read (and review) 11-20 NetGalley books. Besides the books I listed in my last Challenge post, some of which are NetGalley Reads, I will also now be reading the following via NetGalley :
1. The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker
2. A Lady Cyclists’s Guide to Kashgar by Suzanne Johnson
3. Accidents of Providence by Stacia Brown
4. The Thing about Thugs by Tabish Khair
5. Blue Monday by Nicci French
Book Review : Pure
Written By: amodini
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Jan•
22•12
[amazon_link id=”1455503061″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]
[/amazon_link]Title : Pure
Author : Julianna Baggott
Genre : Dystopian/Horror
Pages : 448
Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
Source : NetGalley Publisher ARC
Rating : 4/5
Pure is not your ordinary dystopian novel, it treads into the horror category. It is a story of a bleak future, one where the Detonations have maimed and deformed all life that remains. A selected few were chosen and taken to a safe Dome, and remained unaffected – they are the Pures – the one with whole limbs and whole faces. The rest are like Pressia, fused to whatever object they were near when the world exploded. Pressia has a doll’s head fused to one hand, Bradwell has live birds in his back, and others have glass, metal and a variety of other objects embedded in them. They live in a world with scarce resources, a dog-eat-dog world, struggling to survive from one day to the next. The only law there is is the OSR, a thuggish army given to unexplained raids and killing sprees. All young adults are required to turn themselves into the OSR at age 16.
If you don’t turn yourself in, they will take you. This isn’t just a whisper. That’s the truth. There are whispers that they will take you to the out lands where you’re untaught to read – if you’ve learned in the first place, like Pressia has. Her grandfather taught her letters and showed her the Message: We know you are here, our brothers and sisters . . .(No one speaks of the Message anymore. Here grandfather has hidden it away somewhere.) There are whispers that they then teach you how to kill by use of live targets. And there are whispers that either you will learn to kill or, if you’re too deformed by the Detonations, you’ll be used as a live target, and that will be the end of you.
Pressia turns 16, and goes renegade. She meets up with Bradwell who’s anti OSR. Then they meet Partridge Willux, a Pure who has left the Dome of his own free will, to look for his mother. He is unprepared for the devastation he sees, and for the hatred towards people like him, the privileged Pures. He can barely survive until he meets Pressia. When Pressia is taken by the OSR, both Bradwell and Partridge set out in her search.
I thought this book very interesting. The premise is a little over-used, but Bagggott invents a whole new theory to explain the dystopian horror. While the horror in unanticipated and disturbing, it is also richly imagined. Pressia, Bradwell and Partridge make convincing protagonists and are developed well; I read along engrossed in their struggle. The bad guys, cold and inhuman and oh-so-calculating gave me the shivers. Baggott paints a descriptive picture of the bleak world in which Pressia and Bradwell live. The different points of view, each the perspective of a different character, drive home the sometimes deranged thoughts, deprivation and danger of a world after the apocalypse.
Towards the end, the story got a little too involved with the technology, the automatons, and the theorizing, which to me weakened the effect of the book. But I still liked it because of the engaging characters, particularly Pressia.
