The Museum of Extraordinary Things is the new novel by Alice Hoffman. The novel is set in New York City in 1911. At the center of the book is Coralie, daughter of a cruel man who runs The Museum of Extraordinary Things in Coney Island. The museum is full of every kind of freak of nature he can find or create, including his own daughter, turning her into a human mermaid. When Coralie comes upon a young photographer one night…
The Glass Ocean by Lori Baker had the potential to be a fascinating story, but instead I found it tedious and almost impossible to get through. Baker tells the story of Leo Dell’Orro and Clotilde Girard who meet aboard the Narcissus, a boat on expedition in the 1840’s. Leo is hired to draw pictures of all the specimens collected from the ocean, and later, after Clotilde’s father mysteriously disappears, they get married and live in England where Leo finds work…
The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic by Emily Croy Barker is a very entertaining novel, if you can get past the silly title. Barker has written a Harry Potter type fairy tale for adults. Nora, the protagonist, gets lost hiking on a mountain and wanders into another realm full of wizards and magicians, both good and bad. Here she meets the magician Aruendiel, who begins to teach her real magic so she can survive, and try to make her…
The Other Story is a novel by Tatiana de Rosnay. It is the story of Nicholas Kolt, a French author who doesn’t handle his rise to fame well. When his one and only book becomes a bestseller, then an Oscar winning movie, he starts leading the high life and becomes addicted to following himself on Facebook, Twitter and all internet and social networking sites. The main character is so unlikable, that it is hard to care about anything in this…
Teatime for the Firefly is the debut novel by Shona Patel. It is set in the Assam Tea Gardens in India during the 1940’s, just before India’s independence. This is a wonderful novel that transported me to Assam the entire time. (It helps to drink a good cup of Assam tea while reading)! Patel’s parents were Assam tea planters, and although this is not their story, she drew on personal experience to evoke the rich atmosphere of colonial society and…
The Bone Season is the debut novel by Samantha Shannon, the first in a projected series of seven novels. Shannon imagines a whole new world, set in the not too distant future, where clairvoyants are considered unnaturals and held in prisons in London. Underground crime syndicates have formed with mime-lords who have all categories of clairvoyants working for them. In this world we meet Paige Mahoney, the heroine of The Bone Season. Shannon has created a new language full of…
Bertie Plays the Blues is a novel by Alexander McCall Smith, one of his 44 Scotland Street novels set in Edinburgh. I’m more familiar with The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, but with his usual charm and wit, this novel was a pure joy to read. It is amazing to me how McCall Smith can create so many wonderful characters and write about them over and over in a way that doesn’t get boring. The novel is funny and…
The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser started out very promising. I was drawn in right away by her writing style. However, I never really cared about any of the characters. The only one I cared about was the dog, and we never even learned his name. There were mysteries unfolding throughout the book that never got resolved, and I was left feeling hugely frustrated. De Kretser is a Sri Lankan author living in Australia. I loved her descriptions of…
The Radiance of Tomorrow is a novel by Ishmael Beah, author of A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. In this book, he writes of life in Sierra Leone after the civil war. A few village Elders, and others who have managed to survive the war, slowly return to what is left of their hometown of Imperi, to try to rebuild a life for themselves. They are met by obstacles every step of the way, the worst of…
And the Dark Sacred Night by Julia Glass, author of Three Junes, brings back characters we first met in her earlier books. Here we read about Kit Noonan, a father in his early 40’s at a crossroads in his life. Having just lost his job, and struggling with his marriage, his wife forces him to look for his unknown father, believing that you can never really know who you are if you dont know where you came from. This sets…