AHML Staff Choices

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Eat, Pray, Love is more than just a travelogue of Italy, India and Indonesia.  Author Elizabeth Gilbert takes the reader on an adventure of culinary delights for four months in Italy, relishing the world’s best pizza, gelato to die for, free-flowing vino, while learning to speak Italian with hunky young conversation partners.  In India, Gilbert lives for six months at the sacred ashram of her spiritual Guru, engaged in disciplined, grueling hours of meditation to seek divine enlightenment, peace and love.  In Bali, Indonesia, the author lives for another four months, seeking to learn the art of balancing pleasure and spirituality in her life.  She studies there with a merry medicine man, makes many good friends of International ex-patriots living in the small village where she resides, and even helps buy a house for a struggling Indonesian woman, her daughter and two little homeless orphans.

Elizabeth Gilbert, a thirty-something Connecticut native, is no ordinary travel writer.  Her journey of soul-searching and self-discovery was self-imposed after suffering serious depression as result of a messy divorce.  She tells her tale with great humor and touching candor, weaving a beautiful cultural and emotional tapestry.

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Samantha Morrow is thirty-three years old, trying to reclaim her life after her husband has declared that he is leaving her and their eleven year old son, Travis.  Sam realizes that she doesn’t know this person that she has become after years of marriage, having molded herself into what she thought was the perfect woman that her husband wanted her to be.  Now, as her life is unraveling, Samantha receives counsel from her eccentric mother and wacky best friend.  She covets the sage advice of Martha Stewart as her ideal role model.  She even calls Martha, and actually talks to her, to ask how she handled her own divorce! In a last act of desperation to get back at her husband, Sam goes on a spending spree at Tiffany’s to purchase the beautiful (and expensive) things that she never had that she thinks will make her life perfect again only to give them all to a homeless woman on the street.

 Sam’s life begins to turn around when she begins to take in boarders to help pay the mortgage.  A couple of them actually help and enrich her life in ways she never expected.  She makes a new male friend, King, who is a brilliant but untraditional man, who helps her find work and happiness.  In the end, Samantha emerges from her grief and pain a stronger woman who reclaims the talented, independent woman she used to be before her marriage. 

I listened to Open House on CD and the narrator, Becky Ann Baker, gave Samantha Morrow a very special and humorous personality.  It really enhanced an already very delightful novel.

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Anne Boleyn’s younger sister, Mary, was the mistress of Henry VIII long before Anne became his queen. Historical novelist Philippa Gregory uses the perspective of this “other Boleyn girl” to reveal the rivalries and ruthlessness embroiling 16^th century English court. The sisters and their brother George were raised with one goal: to advance the Howard family’s interests, properties, titles and riches.  The Seymour family was their bitter rival. Daughters were used as pawns, brokered out by their families for sexual favors or marriage, or both at the same time.  This was Mary Boleyn’s case, who was married at the age of 14 but had to abandon her husband when she became the King’s favorite. She bore Henry two children, including a son.  Her older sister Anne becomes her bitter rival to gain the King’s favor and replace Catherine of Aragon as queen, knowing that Henry is desperate for a legitimate son to be his heir to the throne. Anne’s desire to be queen drives her with ruthless intensity, alienating family and foes. Mary ultimately follows her own heart and abandons court life to live with a new husband and her children in the countryside, but love and duty bring her back to Anne time and again. We know the end of this story and what led to Anne’s demise amid accusations of adultery, incest, and witchcraft. But the author deftly holds her reader’s rapt attention throughout the book, capturing the escapades of Henry VII’s court set against the backdrop of political and religious clashes throughout Europe.

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The story takes place in Sterling, N.H., alternating between the present and past events that took place in lives of the central characters.  Peter Houghton is a junior at Sterling High School, enduring years of verbal and physical abuse at the hands of classmates ever since grade school.  His best friend in grade school was Josie Cormier who has since succumbed to peer pressure and now hangs out with the popular crowd that often instigates abuse of other students. The flashbacks reveal events in the lives of Peter and Josie that led up to Peter’s breakdown in which one final incident of bullying sends him over the edge and leads him to commit an act of violence that forever changes the lives of Sterling’s residents. Jodi Picoult has once again written another page-turner with incredible psychological and social insights into school bullying and violence.  She has the ability in her writing to enable the reader to see the problem through the eyes of everyone involved in the story, leaving many haunting questions yet to be answered and resolved.    

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Rebecca Davitch is a 53-year-old widow, mother, step-mother and grandmother.  She seems to be a very happy person, satisfied with her life as it is, when she suddenly she is caught offguard by the feeling that she has become someone she was never meant to be.  Amid many boisterous family gatherings, marriages, birthday celebrations and births, Rebecca attempts to retrieve the woman, life and goals she felt she had before she married Joe Davitch, divorced father of three little girls.  Thinking that the she needs to find that quiet, intelligent girl who dropped out of college to marry a man she had known only 3 months, she even attempts to revive a long-dead relationship with her old boyfriend.  This is a touching story of a woman’s search for herself and the ensuing realization that she had much to be grateful for and happy about.

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 This book is well worth the recent hype that it has received.  I was prepared not to like it at all, since the subject is a circus during the Depression.  Sounded depressing to me.  However, it is a very well written, poignant story, which would appeal to men and women alike.  It has something for everyone, especially if you’re an animal lover.  I found it very interesting that it was written by a woman in a man’s voice, which she accomplished very well.

Set during the Great Depression, Jacob Jankowski’s world had been turned upside down when he became orphaned and homeless at the very time that he was to graduate Veterinary school.  As luck would have it, he hopped on board a passing train which just happened to be the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth.  Before he knew it, he was put in charge of taking care of the circus animal menagerie.  Amid the strange and sadistic world of this second-rate, down on its luck circus, Jacob falls in love with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, who is married to the sick, twisted and cruel circus boss.  Jacob is determined to protect Marlena and Rosie, the lovable elephant, from her husband’s abusive behavior.

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In this series of Cozy Mysteries, protagonist Goldie Bear Schultz is a caterer and amateur sleuth whose husband is a cop. She becomes involved in murder cases where friends or relatives are accused of the murder. The stories take place in Aspen Meadows, Colorado, a fictitious small town in the Colorado Rockies. Everyone knows everyone else, especially Goldie because of her catering business. Goldie is surrounded by goofy friends, acquaintances and even roomers who live with her. It is the crazy personalities and lifestyles of the cast of characters that add to the humor of these mysteries. Goldie is the somewhat stable one, hard-working, but has a sense of humor and appreciates the humor in her life. The Goldie in the kitchen also adds humorous situations and makes the reader more involved in the book because of her excellent recipes that are added throughout. Goldie does her best thinking while cooking up delicious dishes for her clients, but is constantly interrupted to feed hungry friends, relatives or anyone that drops by to consult with her on the case at hand.

Davidson adheres to the standards and elements of the mystery genre. The reader, however, becomes emotionally involved in Goldie’s predicament and the other quirky characters in the book, so solving the case before she does becomes less important. Because of the humor in the dialogue and the personalities and lifestyles of the characters, the reader becomes empathetic to the main characters.

This was a fast, enjoyable read and I would recommend it to anyone who like cozy mysteries, humorous fiction, and good food.

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This is an excellent book well worth the national acclaim that it has received. It’s a bit slow at the get go, as the author sets the stage for the mystery. However, this is a novel rich with national and literary history, as well as intrigue and suspense – a real page-turner.

The mystery takes place in Boston in 1865, when the city and the country were still painfully recovering from the ravages of the Civil War. The members of the country’s first Dante society – poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and publisher J.T. Fields – are studiously translating Dante’s Inferno into the first English version when they become involved in finding the perpetrator of some gruesome murders that mirror Dante’s punishments in hell. The Dante scholars-turned-sleuths furiously work to finish their translation in order to determine the murderer’s motives and second-guess his next move. Matthew Pearl layers throughout the story a commentary of important issues of turn-of-the-century United States, such as the aftermath of the Civil War and slavery, racism, immigration, religious conservatism, rampant corruption and crime.

Matthew Pearl, a Harvard graduate himself, as well as a Yale Law school graduate, is also a Dante scholar. “He wrote a senior thesis on Dante’s first American translators, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the historical Dante Club. His thesis was so well received that it won the annual Dante Prize from the Dante Society of American and proved to be the seed of his future novel.” (NoveList)

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This was my first Michael Connelly mystery, and after reading The Overlook, I am tempted to go back for more. This is his latest novel, short and to the point, compared to other recent mysteries of his. I rather liked how concise and efficient his writing is, wasting no dialog or unnecessary scenes. LAPD detective Harry Bosch takes us through this police procedural mystery as a recurrent character in Connolly’s books, the wiley veteran detective who solves the case by relying on his instincts and looking past evidence that seems all too obvious. Terrorism enters into the plot, which gets the FBI involved in the case. And Harry, being the rogue cop that he is, keeps some secrets from the Feds because he feels they are hindering his murder investigation. It all makes for an entertaining and quick read.

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This book was very different than what I’ve been reading lately. I would label it as an “Underworld” Mystery, taking place in Chicago, written by a Chicago resident. Marcus Sakey was one of the featured authors at the “Love is Murder” Mystery convention last winter, so that is why I wanted to read it. He was highly praised as one of the hottest new mystery authors ever, whose work is comparable to Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman and Quentin Tarantino. The plot of the book revolves around two men who grew up as best friends in a poor Southside Irish neighborhood and who spent their youth knocking off liquors stores and pawn shops. They are reunited when one of them is released from Statesville prison early. Having done time for a robbery gone bad in which he shot the pawn shop owner, Evan wants payback from Danny, who split the scene of the crime. Danny has spent the last 12 years trying to straighten out his life, so he has to protect all that he has worked for from Evan’s prison-hardened hatred. As his first novel, Sackey does a great job of drawing you into the seedy underbelly of the small-time criminal world and creating a gripping drama of cat and mouse.