TJ Klune

Fiction 2023 | 420pages

You know immediately, when you start reading this book, that it is not really about robots, even though three of our four main characters are robots.  It is about people ... our idiosyncrasies, quirks, feelings, emotions, insecurities, communication styles, strengths, skills ... all the characteristics someone might program into a particular robot.

We have Victor, our one human.  GIO is the robot who raised Vic from infancy. Rambo is the small vacuum robot, and the Nurse robot (Nurse Registered Automaton to Care, Heal, Educate, And Drill ... Nurse Ratched for short).  Rambo loves everything about life, and the Nurse is not only brilliant, but I love it when she turns on and off her empathy protocol ... "Engaging Empathy Protocol" she says!

The four of them live on their own, way out in the forest, having no contact with the outside world.  The relationships among them are loving, with lots of kidding and caring.  They each bring unique proclivities to the family they have formed.  Individually and as a family, Klune has created engaging and interesting distinctive characters with strong personalities.  They have lovely conversations and fun teases with sexual overtones.  They often make me laugh.

One day, Vic and Nurse Ratched and Rambo travel to one of the many Scrap Piles placed in the wilderness to see what they can salvage.  They find the remnants of a robot named HARP, who has been decommissioned and has no memory, nor a working battery pack.  They bring him home and attempt to get him operational again.  After weeks of work, they succeed, and HARP renames himself as HAP.  And now, there are five.

Everything is delightful up to this point.  Then a crisis occurs and GIO is kidnapped by other robots, and the rest go to look for him to bring him home.  Their journey begins as they travel towards the City of Electric Dreams, where they believe GIO is being held.  And the story starts a slow decline, in my opinion.  The journey is okay, but once they reach the City, there are way too many robots, too much chaos, too many robots with odd, sad, and destructive designations.  We lose the tight connection of the family in this electric maze (as I suspect our main characters also feel), and I become bored to tears.  My four-heart rating drops to three and then finally to two, as I force myself through the time in the City.  There are 200 pages in the middle of this book I would pull out and rewrite to maybe 30 pages.  Not surprisingly, the story reengages near the end, as the five characters become a family again (it's not as easy as it sounds!!) out in the wilderness.

I am disappointed in this TJ Klune, whom I enjoy, and am just hard-pressed to recommend it, unless you are way more interested in the machinations of robots than the workings of humans.

(My apologies to the friend who recommended this book to me.  Keep on recommending please!!)

January 2025

Michael Crichton & James Patterson

Fiction 2024 | 424 pages

Mauna Loa on the Big Island was about to erupt.  John MacGregor, the geologist  in charge of the Hawaii Volcano Observatory has a big job ahead of him; to keep the residents of Hilo and other Hawaiian towns safe.  With the current technology (it is April 2025 in our book) Mac knows the eruption will happen in 114 hours.  But he is unwilling to start a panic and, in his press conference, tells people it will erupt "within two weeks."

But soon General Rivers arrives on behalf of the military, and we learn that the eruption of Mauna Loa is not the only problem, nor the biggest one.  The horrendous problem is the extremely toxic waste buried deep in the mountain that will destroy the earth, not just the Big Island, if it is released.  And the glass containers holding the toxic chemicals are so old, they are cracking and covered with fissures.

Eruption is a great thriller!  No one is murdered or gets shot.  It is a thriller based on a potentially huge natural (and unnatural) disaster.  It is gripping, a cliff hanger, an edge-of-your-seat read.

There are many reviewers who did not like this book.  Mostly, they seem disappointed with Sherri, Michael Crichton's wife, who selected James Patterson to finish this thriller that Crichton started before he died.  They feel Patterson does not have the skills to live up to Crichton's scientific knowledge and, therefore, dumbed down what this book might have been.

I decided to stay out of that fray completely, since I know neither Crichton's nor Patterson's writing that well, though I have read both of them.  I decided just to take this book at face value, for what was ultimately published.  And I believe what is published is an engaging, thought-provoking masterpiece of a thriller. I recommend it.

January 2025

Alison Espach

Fiction 2024 | 363 pages

Phoebe arrives at a hotel, a mansion in Newport, Rhode, Island, in a long light green dress and without any luggage, leaving behind her home in St. Louis, a messy kitchen,  and her cat Harry, who just died.  She has booked a room in this gorgeous place.  But it turns out she is the only person in the entire hotel who is not a part of the week-long wedding of Lila and Gary.  Soon, she and the bride-to-be find themselves in the elevator together and this conversation takes place (abbreviated here):

Lila:  "So, are you in Gary's family?"

Phoebe: "No."

Lila:  "Are you in my family?"

Phoebe:  "You do not know who's in your own family?"

....

Lila:  "But if you're not here for the wedding, then what are you here for?"

Phoebe: "I am here to kill myself."

Thus begins an important and authentic friendship between Lila and Phoebe and thus begins an excellent writer with a fast-paced novel and some of the best dialogue I have ever read.

The Wedding People is simply delightful!  Interesting, playful, funny characters are trying to get their lives together.  We experience crazy relatives, an anxiety-prone bride, and convoluted feelings in relationships, new and old, that are sometimes deep, occasionally magical, intermittently real, and often quite unclear.

I suggest you read this with a cup of tea by your side and when the snow and cold make it unpleasant to be outside.  Enjoy!  And please post your reactions here.

December 2024

Gillian Linden

Fiction 2024 | 160 pages

For once, I am aligned with Goodreads.  Negative Space earned an unimpressive 3.29 average rating.  It may be the lowest I have ever seen.

While I like the author's style with language and her pace in this debut novel, it is BORING!  It is one week in the life of a part-time schoolteacher in New York, just as the pandemic restrictions were winding down.  The two major themes in the book revolve around the main character possibly seeing an inappropriate interaction between a teacher and a student (she believes they touched heads), and her young daughter Jane's coping with infected gums that require the extraction of some of her baby teeth.

Negative Space is a negative read.  It is not worth your time.  There is nothing there.

December 2024

Ken Smith

Nonfiction 2023 | 266 pages

Something was odd about the writing in this book, but it took me until I finished it and did some research to understand.  As you near the end of the book, Ken Smith has included verbatim many of his journal entries, and he, quite literally, cannot write.  Incomplete sentences, sentences without verbs or prepositions, incorrect punctuation.  I was not able to determine if English is his second language, or if he was uneducated or ... ?  And so, he hired a ghostwriter, Will Millard.  In the translation from Ken's diaries to Millard's writing, much was lost.   Millard does not have the passion or heart that Smith has.  I wish he'd hired Millard to write the book as a biography about Smith, and incorporated more of Ken Smith's fascinating, if frustrating, actually diary entries.

Now that I have presented my pretentious opinion on writing, as though I actually know what I'm talking about, let's get to the meat of Smith's life story.

This is actually a very interesting book! Ken Smith becomes a hermit, and lives in Canada and in the Scottish woods by himself for some 40 years.  No surprise, what he learns about flora, fauna, wood, lochs, weather, eating, and survival is astounding!  My favorite part is when he builds a cabin for himself, based upon the principles employed by Dick Proenneke in building his cabin at Twin Lakes in Lake Clark National Park.   I had the privilege of visiting Proenneke's cabin, so this chapter was so real and tangible to me.

You will learn a great deal about the immense challenges of living off the grid.  It takes considerable physical and emotional strength to keep one's cabin warm, to feed and clothe one's self, to be with the much desired peace and solitude, to have no access to services of any kind without a 7-mile walk in one direction, or longer.  And Smith is aware, present, and introspective in his simple life.

The Way of the Hermit is being made into a movie, which I do not to see.  I suspect it will move even further from the truth of Smith's utterly fascinating life.

Yes, read this book, for its content and passion, and do not worry about the writing.  Maybe you will love even that! (And, by the way, if you read the soft-cover, there are two sets of photographs.  The first set includes some spoilers, so I suggest you skip past these photos until you reach the end of the book.)

December 2024

Joanna Quinn

Novel 2022 | 576 pages

As I prepare to write this blog post, I keep having an image of a stately mature tree ... deciduous, maple I think.  Whalebone Theater Is like that tree to me. The major British characters, who relate as though they are two sisters and a brother, Cristabel, Flossie, and Dingby, play together, come of age together, find a beached whale together, reach to each other for emotional support in a family that abstains from it.  I adored the three of them together and their unyielding love, acceptance, and respect for one another.  They are solid as they weave together, like the trunk of my maple tree.  And that is the first half of the book.

Then the branches separate and differentiate and grow in their own ways, though all three are supporting Britain in the war effort of WWII.  It is here where the book loses its charm a bit for me .... when the trio separates and they become their own unique people in the world.

Though my concern about where Ms. Quinn took the plot is not enough of a problem to reduce my four-heart rating.  The writing in this debut novel is astounding ... beautiful, visual, clear, deep.  Her characters are real, profound, and eminently lovable.  As she carries them forward into the challenges of the War, we also learn something about agents, secrecy, and the Resistance.

This is an astounding debut novel.  How can one person have so much story within herself to tell?  It is broad and deep, spanning decades.

Thank you Josie for this recommendation. I do look forward to discussing in book club in January.

December 2024

Ann Patchett

Fiction 2023 | 464 pages

One friend liked this book ... found it sweet and interesting.  Another couldn't finish it because she was bored.  I was in the middle between these two opinions but have leaned into boredom.

This book has no plot. I did quite a bit of research into reviews to see if anyone identified a plot that I was missing.  Nope.  They all say this book is about love ... romantic love, maternal love, and familial love.  But no one tells us the plot.  The "plot," for what it is worth, is a mother telling the story of her youth to her three grown daughters when they are all in seclusion at the family farm near Traverse City, Michigan, picking cherries, during the Covid Pandemic.  Yep, boring.  Even if she did date someone one summer who would later become a famous actor.

I better get a four-heart book into my blog soon, so you all will have something juicy to read as the snow begins to fall.  I am optimistic about my next two books, including Whalebone Theater.

November 2024

Dennis Lehane

Fiction 2023 | 299 pages

Sharp action, short quick dialogue.  This mystery takes place in the context of the first school busing that occurred in Boston schools, in 1974. It is a fight about busing, which it seems neither black nor white families want.  It is a vivid description of racism at that time. It is a battle on the streets in protest.  And a few nights before busing was to begin, a young white woman, 17, a Southie named Jules, goes missing.  Not so coincidentally, a young black man falls under a subway car and is killed that same night.  We follow Jules' mom, the extremely self-sufficient and violent Mary Pat, as she attempts to discover if her daughter is dead or alive, and, if alive, where she is hiding.

That is a great story line!  Unfortunately, Lehane writes with extreme violence and racist language incorporated into his conflict scenes.   As I close the book for the last time, I am fighting the urge to keep my stomach under control, and I needed to go collect a soothing hug.  I cannot believe we chose this book for book club.  I think I will be absent for the conversation.

I would have liked a historical fiction novel about the beginnings of busing.  Regrettably, this is an ultra-violent gratuitous thriller.  I cannot recommend it at all.

November 2024

Matt Haig

Fiction 2024 / 324 pages

A small, long-ago act of kindness towards her colleague Christina leads to 72-year-old Grace being bequeathed a house in Iziba, Spain.  Puzzled as to why a virtual stranger would do such a thing, Grace decides to go visit the house.

Grace is filled with grief, being recently widowed and also losing her son Daniel in a bicycle accident.

This book is the story Grace writes in a very long e-mail to one of her former students who is struggling in life. Grace proceeds to tell this student how she, too, has been struggling through her life, and how this house changes her life. Once on Ibiza, she is drawn towards La Presencia, where she discovers and claims her psychic fantasy powers.

This book is 100 pages of unmitigated grief, followed by 225 pages of a story.  Now, I like fantasy and magical realism in a novel, but this was about 70% fantasy and 30% real story.  The story is like a skeleton on which Haig hangs the fantasy.  Someone on Goodreads said it read like a first draft and I can agree with that.  Just too much gravy and not enough meat.

I read the entire book and enjoyed it somewhat, but I hesitate to suggest you put this book on your nightstand.

November 2024