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1.Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel by: Lisa See February 21, 2006
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $14.00 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $11.20 You Save: $2.80 (20%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $2.65
Lisa See's novel, "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan," takes us into remote 19th-century China, where girls had their feet bound in a ritual of beauty that started at age 6 and took two full years to complete. From foot-binding onward, girls and women lived secluded in a second-story chamber of their household. At 80, the narrator, Lily, is the senior woman of a wealthy household, powerful enough that she can speak her mind about her life's treasures and errors. Born in 1823 in the Hunan province, Lily started off as "a second worthless girl" in a poor farming family. Because her feet were high in the arch and potentially breathtaking, she had the potential to marry well and elevate the status of her family. She could also enter a second formal match, to another woman, a lifetime best friend ... Read More

2.Water for Elephants: A Novel by: Sara Gruen April 09, 2007
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $13.95 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $8.37 You Save: $5.58 (40%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $2.43
I & my husband both, enjoyed this book -- about how it feels to get old, while giving the inside story of how circus life was in the early 1900's.Great characters, book made me feel like I was there....

3.The Emperor's Children (Vintage) by: Claire Messud June 26, 2007
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $14.95 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $10.17 You Save: $4.78 (32%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $0.01
The novel captures with perfect pitch the shallowness of American culture in the last blissful days before September 11. It's strength rests on terrifically drawn characters, flushed out in so many subtle and nuanced ways. I think Bootie may be my new hero. The irony is that he far more integrity and principles than his uncle, though because he's young and naive he hasn't yet learned to channel his energies in an appropriate way. Marina typifies everything that is self-serving and sheltered about her generation, and Danielle struck me as the most likable character. A word about the prose. The first chapter had a few stylistic elements that struck me as bit purple, but the writing smooths out thereafter.

4.The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel by: Diane Setterfield October 09, 2007
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $15.00 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $10.20 You Save: $4.80 (32%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $3.58
If I were to attempt a plot summary here, my guess is that many readers would be (not unjustifiably) put off by what seems to be a sensationalist, V.C. Andrews-ish, melodramatic series of coincidences, assumed identities, secret twins, incest, ghosts, and murder. I don't know if there's any way that a mere summary can do this book justice. Diane Setterfield's genius is that when you're reading "The Thirteenth Tale," you become so wholly engrossed with the characters and the stories they tell that improbable events - which would make you laugh scornfully in the hands of any other author - instead seem to make perfect sense. Each new lurid detail only pulls you deeper into the story, eliciting very real sympathy for the characters living out this tragedy. The framing device is rather straightforward ... Read More

5.Fire in the Blood (Vintage International) by: Irene Nemirovsky July 15, 2008
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $12.95 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $10.36 You Save: $2.59 (20%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $5.99
"Fire in the Blood" is a wonderful story of a small French community before World War II and the social struggles which they encounter. Overrun by minding their own business, the citizens of the backwater hamlet allow terrible moral digressions to go unpunished and genuine love to be overshadowed by prior commitments and counterintuitive traditions. The book is also incredibly easy to read, and can be completed in a sitting or two for the quick reader. The translation is beautiful yet simple - a quality so rarely found in translated foreign literature.

6.The Inheritance of Loss by: Kiran Desai August 29, 2006
Average Rating: >>More Details		Used Price: $2.10
This book deserves a fresh endorsement, which I wholeheartedly give. The one disgruntled reader below ("Ashok") is symptomatic of newly-disgruntled Indian rightwingers--precisely the target of books like this one and Roy's "The God of Small Things." In fact, it's no coincidence that many wonderfully written novels from India are by women: They more acutely perceive, I think, the bullying that passes for patriotism behind so much of the vitriol spewing (perhaps understandably) from newly resurgent nations. Being Indian myself, but not partaking of any nationalist persuasion, I can say that those who react most strongly to these remarkable new novels expose their insecurities. (By comparison Western bullying is by now too obvious to need much of a gloss. I'm simply focusing on Indian writing here.) Desai's novel ... Read More

7.The Gathering (Man Booker Prize) by: Anne Enright September 10, 2007
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $14.00 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $11.20 You Save: $2.80 (20%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $1.84
`The Gathering' happens because Liam Hegarty dies suddenly. Through the words of his beloved sister Veronica who collects his body and organizes the funeral, we learn the tale of the Hegarty family and a terrible secret from the distant past which she shares with Liam. Collecting her thoughts, feelings and memories hopping through three generations I suppose reflects an intrinsic quality, a certain originality in this novel, but it still did not satisfy me. The display of thoughts and situations that flow and scatter chasing each other in almost every page is often too disjointed for my liking. This probably conveys Veronica's pain and state of mind in an authentic way -facing the irreversible past and struggling with grief, seeking redemption- but I found that past and present interchanging swiftly, with juxtapositional ... Read More

8.On Chesil Beach by: Ian Mcewan June 10, 2008
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $13.95 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $11.16 You Save: $2.79 (20%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $3.06
This book would have made a good short story. The plot was too weak and too drawn out for a full length novel. I was disappointed in this book.

9.Loving Frank by: Nancy Horan August 07, 2007
Average Rating: >>More Details		Used Price: $31.05
I have enjoyed the book but felt it was somewhat of a slow read. Thoughful and reflective.

10.March by: Geraldine Brooks January 31, 2006
Average Rating: >>More Details		List Price: $15.00 Off The Bookshelf's Price: $10.20 You Save: $4.80 (32%) Prices subject to change. Used Price: $2.54
This is one of the most Pulizer-worthy novels I've read in a long while. The novel tells the previously untold story of the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (Signet Classics). In Little Women, the reader only gets to know Peter March through his letters sent home to his family from the Civil War. Of course, in the interest of sparing his family the details of war, his letters are more cheerful than his reality. Geraldine Brooks uses the novel March to tell of Mr. March's early life as a traveling salesman, of his first kiss with someone other than his future wife, of the meeting of his wife, of his connections to Emerson and Thoreau, of his strong abolitionist sentiments, of the war that changed him both physically and mentally, and of misunderstandings and wrongs that were never made right in his life. Brooks draws heavily from ... Read More

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