Book Review Archive 2

Heaven Better By Far by J. Oswald Sanders (***)

This book belonged to my dad and I read it a few months after he died because I wanted to know what dad was experiencing. I really wanted a real sense that dad was still real, if that makes any sense at all. I guess I wanted a peek into heaven. Anyways, the book is good, but it really didn't tell me anything that I didn't already know.


Bridge to Terabithia by Katharine Paterson (****)

This book came out again when the movie came out. I had read it as a child and remembered liking it, so I bought it and read it again. It is still good, but very sad. Arm yourself with Kleenex. I don't think I liked the movie near as much as the book.


Room of Marvels by James Bryan Smith (*****)

This book was given to us by a friend who has since passed away. This is a great book. I keep asking myself if this book is really true! It is listed as fiction, but the facts are straight from the author's life. The author is the friend of Rich Mullins, the Christian singer/songwriter, and the character of Wayne is clearly a portrayal of Rich Mullins. The author lives here in our hometown and I would love to meet him and ask him if it really happened. I believe the story is true and if it is, it is such a glorious story and fills me with such peace and joy and hope and makes me wish I could have such an experience! The main character (whom I believe is the author) is burnt out from tragedies that have filled his life. He goes away to a retreat and has a dream...


The Husband by Dean Koontz (***)

This is a fairly good story and the outcome is pretty unexpected. But, the thing that irked me about it is that at the end, after the climax, it cuts to four years later when everything is wrapped up all nice and neat. There is no description of how things got that way. That always annoys me. I like to walk the steps with the characters. Anyways, it is a story about an average man who gets a call that his wife has been kidnapped for a ransom that he doesn't have.


On Blue Falls Pond by Susan Crandall (***)

This is about a woman who returns to her hometown years after losing her husband and unborn child, and nearly her life, in a fire that remains unsolved. The mystery surrounding the fire is interesting, as are the family ties. It wasn't as good as I had hoped it would be, though.


Black Silk by Metsy Hingle (***)

When I used to deliver newspapers, I delivered to an apartment building. There was a ledge where people put things that they didn't want for other people to have, such as coupons, magazines, etc. This book was out there one day and I'd never heard of the author, so I grabbed it and decided to read it. The story itself was good, but there was too much sex in it. It's about a female detective who is investigating the death of a woman the night before she was to wed a rich, powerful man. There is a connection to her own sister's murder so she is obsessed with the search.


Rose Madder by Stephen King (****)

Very scary, the story of a woman who has run away from her abusive cop husband. It is disturbing to think what a cop can do and how he can escape detection and the access he has to information that the average person does not. A friend recommended this book to me and it was very good.


Gerald's Game by Stephen King (****)

It starts off a little alarming--a married couple having sex with the woman bound by her wrists to the bed posts. But, it also touches on a deep fear--what if something happens when you are in a compromising situation? What would you do if you were cuffed to a bed in the middle of nowhere alone and naked? What would you do if the situation escalated with a fierce animal entering the room or a frightful dream/hallucination (or is it real?) of someone else being in the shadows watching you?


Misery by Stephen King (****)

Okay, so it's been years since I read this book, but I liked it and since I was on Stephen King.... The movie is okay, but it doesn't do the book justice. There is more that happened to Paul Sheldon. Paul Sheldon, for anyone who has missed the book and the movie, is a popular novel writer. He has a car accident during a blizzard and is "rescued" by Annie Wilkes, his number one fan. She is unhinged, for lack of a better word. Paul Sheldon, injured in the accident, is at the mercy of this crazy, infatuated woman.


Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (***)

I had never read the book, but I loved the Disney movie as a child, so I decided I should read it. I thought it would be a nice blast from the past. I was a little disappointed. The book is good, but the Disney version is so ingrained in my head that I was disappointed to find things slightly different. When I was a kids, my mom had made me curtains with Disney's Alice in Wonderland on them, I had a Disney's Alice pillow doll, and the three movies we loved to watch after getting the Disney Channel were Robin Hood, Sword in the Stone, and Alice and Wonderland. I think the Disney version is wrapped up in too much of my childhood for me to be able to tolerate the original version. Sorry Mr. Carroll.


Shall We Tell the President? by Jeffrey Archer (**)

The reviews said that this book was the talk of Washington when it was released and that everyone was reading it. Then I guess everyone was bored! It's about another Kennedy being elected to be President and an uncovered assassination plot. I think the thing that bored me most was that there seemed to be too much detail. I am sure that must have been necessary when working with the FBI, but it became tedious to me.


The Wedding Album Series by Marian Wells (****)

This is the story of a young girl back in the prairie days who falls in love with a man and marries him only to find out that he is a Mormon and adds many more wives and children. She struggles between compliance and the desire to have a traditional marriage. It's been a while since I read these, but I remember that I liked them a lot.


Angels Fall by Nora Roberts (***)

Okay, my only real complaint about this novel is that there were too many sex scenes. I can accept (even if I don't like it) one sex scene in a book, but this book described about three between the same couple. Isn't one enough? Why do we need to hear it three times? The plot was pretty good even if the main character offended me a bit by criticizing macaroni and cheese from a box and hothouse tomatoes. She is a gourmet chef, but she is working in a greasy spoon diner, trying to convert it to a gourmet restaurant. I guess since she is single and lives above the diner and uses little gasoline, she can afford to cook gourmet, but for those of us with husbands, kids, high gas prices, etc., we can only afford boxed mac and cheese! But, I digress. She survived a brutal shooting spree and has been on the move. She lands in this small town and witnesses a murder. No one believes her because she had a mental breakdown and still shows some of the effects of that. Every man in town is a suspect, but the killer ended up being third on my suspicion list.


The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards (**)

I saw a TV movie based on this book advertised. I hadn't watched the movie, but when I ran across the audiobook, I decided to give it a try. The story spans about 25 years and you keep thinking that eventually there will be a point, but I never found one. It didn't seem to have much plot at all. It's about a doctor who delivers his wife's twins. The boy is healthy, but the girl has Down's Syndrome. In a moment, he makes a decision. He'd had a sister that had died at an early age and it had destroyed his family. He didn't want to go through that again and he didn't want to put his wife and new son through that either, so he hands the baby girl to his nurse and tells her to take the baby to a home in another city where they care for people with disabilities. The nurse ends up taking off and raising the child on her own. The doctor tells his wife that the baby died. For the next 25 years, the lie poisons all of them, ruining all their relationships. I was so angry at the doctor for what he was turning his family into. I was mad at the mom for some of the things she was doing. WARNING: THE NEXT LINES MAY CONTAIN A SPOILER! Then the couple get a divorce, so you think he is finally going to tell them because one of the reasons he has kept it a secret is because he is afraid he will lose his wife. Well, six years after the divorce, he finally decides to tell his ex-wife, but she is out of the country and then he dies of a heart attack! They find out a different way, but he never got to meet his daughter, she never got to meet him.


On the Street Where You Live by Mary Higgins Clark (**)

It's been a while since I read this one. It's about a woman who buys the house that her family had owned for generations and then remains are found in the back yard. I don't remember much about this, but I do have the impression that I wasn't all that impressed with Mary Higgins Clark.


Two Little Girls in Blue by Mary Higgins Clark (**)

To be fair, apparently I ended up listening to the abridged version, so maybe the full version would have been better, but I really didn't like this one much. Maybe part of it too was that I really didn't like the narrator. The idea of the story is good. It's about twin toddlers (age 3) that are kidnapped. When they put up the ransom and go to retrieve the children, only one is there and the suicide note of the captor says that he accidentally killed the other twin. But, the remaining twin keeps saying that her sister is alive and her mother believes they are communicating telepathically.


Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (**)

I read this book in a high school English class and I remembered liking it. I saw the movie years ago and liked it. But when I read it this time, I didn't like it. It seemed choppier than I remembered it. It seems very depressing. It's about a man who falls in love with his wife's cousin.


The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (****)

Now anyone who knows me, knows that my favorite movie is the Phantom of the Opera. The book is quite different from the story we have come to accept on screen and stage. I love the movie, but I love the book for different reasons. The book also clears up a couple of mysteries from the movie, like what it means when Madame Giry says, "Keep your hand at the level of your eyes." In the movie, you feel sorry for the Phantom and his disfiguration doesn't detract enough from the handsome actor to repulse you. The book is quite different. The Phantom is a horribly ugly man. He has traveled extensively and is very smart, but has done some evil things. It has given me an itch to know if this story is true. From what I gather, the French try to cover it up and I have heard that they don't take kindly to you asking about him if you visit the Paris Opera House. I would love to see an expose' of some kind on the Discovery Channel or something like that, proving or disproving the story. The author, Gaston Leroux, lived during this time period and he tells of his research and interviews and of actually finding remains in the underground tunnels below the Opera House. Whether this is said as part of the storytelling or if it is in fact, a fact, I don't know, but I would love to find out. It is categorized as fiction, which makes me wonder how they determine what is fiction or nonfiction.