future suggestion
The Third Annual R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril Challenge
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 | future suggestion | 1 Comment
I saw this posted on Alexandra Sokloff’s status on FB and I thought I’d mention it here. It might be a difficult challenge with The Host, but it could be done…especially by you fast readers (and that is not me, since I *just* finished the Sedaris book). I haven’t read the entire thing:
Suggestion: Whistling in the Dark by Lesley Kagen
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 | future suggestion | No Comments
“It was the summer on Vliet Street when we all started locking our doors…” Sally O’Malley made a promise to her daddy before he died. She swore she’d look after her sister, Troo. Keep her safe. But like her Granny always said-actions speak louder than words. Now, during the summer of 1959, the girls’ mother is hospitalized, their stepfather has abandoned them for a six pack, and their big sister, Nell, is too busy making out with her boyfriend to notice that Sally and Troo are on the Loose. And so is a murderer and molester. Highly imaginative Sally is pretty sure of two things. Who the killer is. And that she’s next on his list. Now she has no choice but to protect herself and Troo as best she can, relying on her own courage and the kindness of her neighbors.
Suggestion: I, Mona Lisa by Jeanne Kalogridis
Monday, September 15th, 2008 | future suggestion | 1 Comment
“” My name is Lisa di Antonio Gherardini Giocondo, though to acquaintances, I am known simply as Madonna Lisa. My story begins not with my birth but a murder, committed the year before I was born… ” ”
Florence, April 1478: The handsome Giuliano de’ Medici is brutally assassinated in Florence’ s magnificent Duomo. The shock of the murder ripples throughout the great city, from the most renowned artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, to a wealthy wool merchant and his extraordinarily beautiful daughter, Madonna Lisa. More than a decade later, Florence falls under the dark spell of the preacher Savonarola, a fanatic who burns paintings and books as easily as he sends men to their deaths. Lisa, now grown into an alluring woman, captures the heart of Giuliano’ s nephew and namesake. But when Guiliano, her love, meets a tragic end, Lisa must gather all her courage and cunning to untangle a sinister web of illicit love, treachery, and dangerous secrets that threatens her life. Set against the drama of 15th Century Florence, “I, Mona Lisa” is painted in many layers of fact and fiction, with each intricately drawn twist told through the captivating voice of Mona Lisa herself.
Suggestion: The World According to Garp by John Irving
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 | future suggestion | 1 Comment
The “New York Times” bestseller
This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields–a feminist leader ahead of her times. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes–even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with “lunacy and sorrow”; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust. In more than thirty languages, in more than forty countries–with more than ten million copies in print–this novel provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its famous last line: “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”
Suggestion: Devil Bones by Kathy Reichs
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 | future suggestion | No Comments
Following her most successful book to date, Kathy Reichs — international number one bestselling author, forensic anthropologist, and producer of the Fox television hit Bones — returns to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Temperance Brennan encounters a deadly mix of voodoo, Santería, and devil worship in her quest to identify two young victims.
In a house under renovation, a plumber uncovers a cellar no one knew about, and makes a rather grisly discovery — a decapitated chicken, animal bones, and cauldrons containing beads, feathers, and other relics of religious ceremonies. In the center of the shrine, there is the skull of a teenage girl. Meanwhile, on a nearby lakeshore, the headless body of a teenage boy is found by a man walking his dog.
Nothing is clear — neither when the deaths occurred, nor where. Was the skull brought to the cellar or was the girl murdered there? Why is the boy’s body remarkably well preserved? Led by a preacher turned politician, citizen vigilantes blame devil worshippers and Wiccans. They begin a witch hunt, intent on seeking revenge.
Forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan — “five-five, feisty, and forty-plus” — is called in to investigate, and a complex and gripping tale unfolds in this, Kathy Reichs’s eleventh taut, always surprising, scientifically fascinating mystery.
With a popular series on Fox — now in its third season and in full syndication — Kathy Reichs has established herself as the dominant talent in forensic mystery writing. Devil Bones features Reichs’s signature blend of forensic descriptions that “chill to the bone” (Entertainment Weekly) and the surprising plot twists thathave made her books phenomenal bestsellers in the United States and around the world.
Suggestion: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
Friday, August 22nd, 2008 | future suggestion | No Comments
In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on fans, compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. Together, they endure the agony of foot-binding, and reflect upon their arranged marriages, shared loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their deep friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.
Suggestion: Sabriel by Garth Nix
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 | future suggestion | No Comments
Sent to a boarding school in Ancelstierre as a young child, Sabriel has had little experience with the random power of Free Magic or the Dead who refuse to stay dead in the Old Kingdom. But during her final semester, her father, the Abhorsen, goes missing, and Sabriel knows she must enter the Old Kingdom to find him. She soon finds companions in Mogget, a cat whose aloof manner barely conceals its malevolent spirit, and Touchstone, a young Charter Mage long imprisoned by magic, now free in body but still trapped by painful memories. As the three travel deep into the Old Kingdom, threats mount on all sides. And every step brings them closer to a battle that will pit them against the true forces of life and death–and bring Sabriel face-to-face with her own destiny.
Suggestion: Black Out by Lisa Unger
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 | future suggestion | No Comments
When my mother named me Ophelia, she thought she was being literary. She didn’t realize she was being tragic.
On the surface, Annie Powers’s life in a wealthy Floridian suburb is happy and idyllic. Her husband, Gray, loves her fiercely; together, they dote on their beautiful young daughter, Victory. But the bubble surrounding Annie is pricked when she senses that the demons of her past have resurfaced and, to her horror, are now creeping up on her. These are demons she can’t fully recall because of a highly dissociative state that allowed her to forget the tragic and violent episodes of her earlier life as Ophelia March and to start over, under the loving and protective eye of Gray, as Annie Powers. Disturbing events–the appearance of a familiar dark figure on the beach, the mysterious murder of her psychologist–trigger strange and confusing memories for Annie, who realizes she has to quickly piece them together before her past comes to claim her future and her daughter.
Suggestion: Second Glance by Jodi Picoult
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 | future suggestion | 1 Comment
“Sometimes I wonder….Can a ghost find you, if she wants to?”
An intricate tale of love, haunting memories, and renewal, Second Glance begins in current-day Vermont, where an old man puts a piece of land up for sale and unintentionally raises protest from the local Abenaki Indian tribe, who insist it’s a burial ground. When odd, supernatural events plague the town of Comtosook, a ghost hunter is hired by the developer to help convince the residents that there’s nothing spiritual about the property.
Enter Ross Wakeman, a suicidal drifter who has put himself in mortal danger time and again. He’s driven his car off a bridge into a lake. He’s been mugged in New York City and struck by lightning in a calm country field. Yet despite his best efforts, life clings to him and pulls him ever deeper into the empty existence he cannot bear since his fiancee’s death in a car crash eight years ago. Ross now lives only for the moment he might once again encounter the woman he loves. But in Comtosook, the only discovery Ross can lay claim to is that of Lia Beaumont, a skittish, mysterious woman who, like Ross, is on a search for something beyond the boundary separating life and death. Thus begins Jodi Picoult’s enthralling and ultimately astonishing story of love, fate, and a crime of passion.
Hailed by critics as a “master” storyteller (Washington Post), Picoult once again “pushes herself, and consequently the reader, to think about the unthinkable” “(Denver Post). Second Glance,” her eeriest and most engrossing work yet, delves into a virtually unknown chapter of American history — Vermont’s eugenics project of the 1920s and 30s — to provide a compelling study of the things that comeback to haunt us — literally and figuratively. Do we love across time, or in spite of it?