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I tried. I really did. I’ve said before that I hate like hell to give up on a book once I’ve started it. Finish it and hate, but not just quit. And I used to love Pete Dexter, which makes this case all the more irksome. Dexter wrote a column for my local paper, the Sacramento Bee, and his earlier books are clever and quirky and entertaining, as was his column. My memory being as pathetic as it is, I’m also left wondering if I loved Pete Dexter the way I loved Stephen King or–god forbid–V.C.Andrews–with the less discriminating palate of my youth. I think not. I think maybe this latest effort of Dexter’s just sucks a little. Or maybe a lot. For me, a lot.

Spooner, is described as a story about two men who are polar opposites, a man called Calmer Ottosson, and the strange and troubled boy that becomes his stepson, Warren Spooner. It has all the elements that would make it appealing to me: set in the South, dysfunctional family, eccentric characters, quirky author. By page 182 I can tell you that Calmer was well-named, Spooner was still bizarrely behaved in high school, and my pile of unread books was growing because I could not drag myself back to this one.

A couple of books that sort of resonate a common theme of complicated, and not always complementary female friendship:

Kate Christensen’s Trouble is loosely centered around the friendship of three women: Josie, Raquel, and peripherally, Indrani. Josie has almost spontaneously decided to leave her husband, and is seemingly bursting with the desire to experiment with new men. When she receives word that semi-has been rock star, Raquel is in the midst of a personal and public relations crisis, she takes advantage of her new personal freedom to fly to Mexico City and lend support. Their experience there takes “girls weekend” to a new level. The novel isn’t overly compelling, but the characters are interesting and it’s a good, elevated chick lit offering.

More complex (read, “difficult to follow”) is The Generosity of Women, by Courtney Eldridge. This is not a traditional novel, written in the now common style of showing the overlap of multiple characters’ lives by shifting perspective from chapter to chapter. Near as I can figure, the closest to a central figure is Bobbie, a gynecologist. Around her revolve her best friend, her daughter, and several patients, one previously employed by the best friend. Men make guest appearances. It’s an awkward assemblage, frankly, and I’m still not quite sure why I kept going back to it. But I did. So you’ll have to decide for yourself.

I’m always excited to discover a new great author, and a couple I’ve read just since posting this blog are back already with new offerings.

First, and, I think even better than her debut (Sharp Objects), is Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places. Flynn is chief TV critic at Entertainment Weekly, but anyone expecting light, commercial fluff from her novels will be shocked and surprised by the distinctly dark and distasteful characters that populate these psychological explorations of family dynamics and fallout. Sharp Objects featured a young woman who had a unique approach to self-mutilation. Dark Places focuses on Libby, who “was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in ‘The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas.’” Libby lived, but became a really screwed up kid, an even more skewed adult, and is now about to lose what little money she had from the incident to survive on, with no apparent plan to move forward as a productive adult. Enter, The Kill Club, a secret society offering to pay her to help investigate the murders and ply her for details that may exonerate her brother, who has been in prison for the crimes all these years, primarily because of her testimony. Crazy stuff. Great reading.

Second, and much more straightforward, is the latest from Chelsea Cain, Evil At Heart. This marks the return of Archie Sheridan, still locked up in the psych ward, his partner Henry Sobel, girl reporter Susan Ward, and blonde bombshell/escaped serial killer, Gretchen Lowell. It’s just good, old-fashioned thriller-fun. Love the characters. Read it in a day. Good stuff.

“On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty, too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.”

That’s an excerpt from Little Bee, an unique and poetic book by Chris Cleave. I love this book. I can’t say much about it because it’s important to let the story unfold on it’s own, but it begins with a young woman from Africa leaving a detention center in Britain to search out the only person she knows in the country she has risked so much to relocate to. How she knows this person, and what results from this desire to seek him out is an unusual and compelling story that will stay with you, and, I suspect, eventually find its way to film.

I had read a couple of short magazine reviews of The Help by Kathryn Stockett before I picked it up, both rather noncommittal, so I was curious but not expecting anything in particular. Like the reviewers before me, I was neither bowled over, nor disappointed. The Help is a look at the servants inside white (or should that be capitalized?) households in the South during the 1960’s, post-slavery, but certainly not post-slave-sensibility in many homes. It is a sensitive portrayal, but not particularly emotional, or thought-provoking, nor does it delve very deeply into the personal lives of the women it purports to tell the stories of. Instead it offers glimpses of them and of the woman who chooses to take on the controversial and socially devastating task of writing a book–the book within the book, as it were–about “the help.” The narrative jumps between a young white woman in her early twenties, an aspiring writer, affectionately known as Skeeter, who hopes that this backdoor chronicle will be her entree into the publishing world, and two of the maids who participate in the book. We learn bits and pieces about them from their current positions, and from the stories they choose to recount for the book, but there is a lack of depth and the novel is ultimately unsatisfying. A good read, but not a great one.

“It was standard-issue Abstinence Ed, in other words–shameless fear-mongering, backed up by half-truths and bogus examples and inflammatory rhetoric–nothing Ruth hadn’t been exposed to before, but this time, for some reason, it felt different. The way JoAnn presented this stuff, it came across as lived experience, and for a little while there–until she snapped out of her trance and saw with dismay how easily she’d been manipulated–even Ruth had fallen under her spell, wondering how she’d ever been so weak as to let herself be duped into thinking it might be pleasant or even necessary to allow herself to be touched or loved by another human being. Why would you, if all it was going to do was make you vulnerable to all those afflictions, all that regret?”

In this excerpt from Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher, Ruth, who has been the Sex Ed teacher at Stonewood High for years, is sitting in on a presentation by JoAnn, who represents the New Deal. After inadvertantly telling her class that “some people enjoy it” when asked a question about oral sex, Ruth has reached an unexpected and uncomfortable level of infamy in her small town, as has Sex Ed.

Although it begins with Ruth’s newfound notoriety, The Abstinence Teacher, like most of Perrotta’s work, quickly becomes about the broader theme of social misfits and skewed relationships. In Election, the story centered around the school, in Little Children, the playgrounds of suburbia, and in The Abstinence Teacher, the discomfort centers broadly around the topic of religious fundamentalism, still tucked safely in the suburbs. This one just didn’t work for me. I found it dull and pedestrian, with very little new to say on any of the subjects it seemed to attempt. And those subjects–fundamentalists, prayer at soccer games, sex ed in schools, recovering drug addicts, middle-aged divorcees trying to date–stop me if any of that sounds new or interesting to begin with! Not only that, but it lacked the humor and wit that Perrotta has made his trademark in the past.

My advice, abstain from The Abstinence Teacher, and rent Election this weekend…

Kyle Byrne is that guy. That guy you hope your daughter doesn’t go out with. That guy you feel sorry for and hire, even though you know he’ll bring you nothing but grief. That guy you sleep with even though he gets your name wrong and won’t ask for your number. That guy you stay friends with because you know he comes by his screwed up psyche honestly, but still let his calls go to voicemail. And Kyle knows he’s That Guy. Like many, even takes a certain amount of misplaced pride in it. He traces the problem back to not having a father. First an absent father, then a dead father. Now, suddenly, a ghost-father that keeps appearing at the most inconvenient times. Like his days weren’t screwed up enough. This is William Lasher’s Blood and Bone.

Kyle is just the sort of guy that I might have been friends with for the past twenty years. And there is a lot more to the story than his unresolved daddy issues–mobsters, cops and robbers, and layers more family secrets–but ultimately I found the book unsatisfying somehow. Too much or too little; hard to say. Not a bad read, but not a great read.

I was anxious to read Richard North Patterson’s latest novel, Eclipse, partly because he’s a semi-local author, and partly because I’ve liked his past work. I used to read a lot of legal thrillers–a la John Grisham–which has been Patterson’s primary genre in the past, but have leaned more toward straight-ahead cop stories and serial killer sagas as of late. Much to my disappointment–at least as far as I read–Eclipse is less legal thriller than political nightmare. The protagonist, Damon Pierce, is a lawyer, but also a writer, who embarks upon a mission to Africa in hopes of freeing the husband of a fellow writer who is being held as a political prisoner.

I balked initially over the subject matter, because, truthfully, politics–in any country–often bores the hell out of me, and I have a tough time following various government machinations. If that makes me sound like a cretin, so be it. I decided to forge ahead with the novel, though, because, politics or not, the subject matter was compelling and the author a prior good read. After it took me a week to read the first hundred pages, I did what I almost never–almost never–do: I quit. The narration was dry, the chacters lacked any real development, and I just didn’t care what was around the next corner (although, in this case, probably guys with automatic weapons). To paraphrase another popular author, I just wasn’t that into it. And I have a stack of other stuff waiting. A really big stack.

I’m baaack! As much as I hate to admit it, losing the per-post income from this blog a couple of months ago sapped my motivation for writing as regularly as I had been. The truth is, not many people are checking in regularly, so, from a financial standpoint, I agree with the rate change. Still…

My latest guilty pleasure author is Lisa Jackson. I have reviewed her books here before, and went on to scoop up more, always appreciating a paperback that you can still buy for less than ten bucks. The latest set, are Hot Blooded and Cold Blooded.

Hot Blooded takes place in New Orleans and introduces a radio psychologist who is being stalked by a serial killer with a very weird and specific agenda. Everyone–from her crosstown competition to her new next door neighbor–is suspect.

Cold Blooded actually picks up where Hot Blooded leaves off, with a series of similar, but apparently unrelated murders that had been going on at the same time as the ones already solved. Another stalking serial killer, another generous dose of steamy–if tasteful–sex, and Detectives Bentz and Montoya doing their best to make the streets of New Orleans safe again. It’s formulaic, but it’s a formula that works for me.

The book that follows–or can stand alone–is The Night Before, which moves the action to Savannah, Georgia (something I occasionally wish I could do). Jackson is thoughtful enough to include a letter to readers at the end of her books, letting us know what comes next.

Thanks for your support, and–please!–tell a friend!

I just finished An advance of Val McDermid’s A Darker Domain. I really enjoyed it, but in my review for Amazon, which I may or may not be too lazy to edit, I made a wrong assumption and missed a piece of information that I am now quite excited about (remembering it doesn’t take much–at least where books are concerned). I assumed, due to the witty banter and easy rapport between D.I. Pirie and D.S. Phil Parhatka–rapport being something of an understatement, it feels–that this was the latest in a series of detective novels. It isn’t. Although McDermid writes series (back to that in a minute), this is a stand-alone–at least so far. It’s a multi-layered, if unsettlingly coincidental story of a disappearing mineworker, a murdered heiress and her kidnaped son, and the mess that politics, power, and press can make of things when the poor police in Scotland are just trying to do their job. Mostly. Great atmospheric stuff. Begs to be adapted for PBS. Which brings me to my revelation: Val McDermid writes the series of books that became the BBC series “Wire in the Blood,” Doctor Tony Hill, and all that. How did I never look that up?? So if I didn’t have a non-existent book budget and a stack of ten unread tomes at home, I’d be off to buy up a stack of McDermid to bury myself in. She has a great Web site, if you’re inclined: valmcdermid.com