The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

I enjoyed this book even though it creeped me out quite a bit. It's creepy in the way the true Grimm's Fairy Tales are creepy.

David is a 12 year old English boy during WWII who loses his mother to a debilitating illness--cancer, I think. She'd infused him with a love of books, telling him that they were alive and he takes great solace in them especially when his father eventually remarries.

Not only does his father remarry, the new little family relocates to Rose (the stepmother)'s home outside of London. Rose tries her best to be friends with the resentful David, who rebuffs her at every turn. Then, to add insult to injury, Rose has a baby and David feels even more isolated and alienated.

It's in that spirit that strange things begin to happen. He begins to have episodes where he passes out. Books "speak" to him. He begins to see a crooked man. After a particularly unpleasantly argument with Rose and his father, he runs out to the garden and a portal opens up into another world. He thinks he hears his mother calling to him and he feels compelled to go to her.

David enters an alternate world that is more nightmare than dream. There are all manners of evil creatures and weird beasts inhabiting the place as well as a few good guys sprinkled here and there. Worst of all is the crooked man, who has some really foul and evil plan for David.

So what happens to David? Read the book and find out! It's a great story!

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

As Harry Potter has gotten older, I've liked his character less and less. Maybe it's just me, but I think Rowling made a mistake by having her books become so dark. Harry became a whinier, more bitter sort of kid -- with good reason, I suppose -- and an almost thoroughly unlikeable sort of hero. He's moody, doubts his friends, and nurses this big rage against his mentor, Albus Dumbledore.

Dumbledore, who originally seemed to be a kindly caring teacher-man, was portrayed as a manipulative, calculating and power hungry old man who withheld important information from people and used them without feeling much guilt about it. I didn't like him in this book either.

A character I did enjoy wondering about, Severus Snape, made only brief appearances in the book and I was very disappointed about that. I'd wondered throughout the previous book whether he was a truly bad guy or a truly good guy in disguise. I found out but not until the end and he was so shockingly killed even before the secret came out I was totally turned off.

That brings me to the killings and the darkness of the book. So many of the deaths seemed designed just to shock. Voldemort is evil, soulless and remorseless. Let's kill some Weaseleys, house elves, and other popular characters just to make that point. That's what happened to Snape and so Harry had to find out after the fact that his old enemy was actually a sort of hero.

It all worked out in the end. Harry realized that Dumbledore wasn't so bad, just human, and that Snape also wasn't so bad, just human. The man had been in love with Harry's mother, how awful could he be?

I think I would have liked the books better if Rowling had kept to a lighter tone but that's just me.

On the other hand, the 19 years later afterward was just too smarmy for me.

I guess you just can't win.

The Medium by Noelle Sickels

I enjoy historical fiction and the fact that the main character is a medium, channelling the spirits of dead soldiers and sailors, added a level of fascination and interest. The only thing is, I think the book should have ended 100 pages sooner...with the death of the fiancee, Billy.

The book begins when Helen Schneider, the young medium in training, is just 13. Her grandmother is her mentor and the elder woman is also a medium, although not always a very honest one. Helen, though, has natural and true abilities. She is a strong medium.

In the years before the war, the author weaves in real events to add to the story. She's got the Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" radio program scare that sent people into the streets in a panic because they thought the Martians were landing! I'm surprised, though, that there was no mention of the Hindenburg.

Helen has always been in love with Billy Mackey. That was the other plot line in the book. Sometimes there'd be mention of Billy's younger brother Lloyd but it was just to show what a wild young man he was.

After the war begins, Helen is visited by soldier after soldier. She also has a visual materialization involving the deaths of many Jewish people. The Army gets wind of all this and warns her about using her power. That puts a damper on Helen's abilities.

Billy starts out working for a defense plant but as he and Helen decide to get married, he feels compelled to join the service.

Up until this point, my only complaint was that the characters seemed superficial. For instance, there is anti-German-American sentiment but the feelings of the family isn't explored much about that. Even Helen's grief about Billy seemed sort of detached to me. I felt that the story really ended at that point and yet it went on.

It wasn't a bad story. It was pretty entertaining. It just ran a little too long and the last hundred pages or so were too melodramatic (Helen is arrested as a posible spy by the army)for me. Try it, you might like it a lot better than I did.

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter was written by Carson McCullers when she was only 22 or 23 years old. What a perceptive person she was at such a young age!

The central character has to be John Singer, although he is not a major player in the story. All the other characters revolve around him, however, and without him there would be no coherence in the story. John Singer is deaf, isolated by that fact and by the fact that his only friend--another deaf man--is taken away to an insane asylum. Singer is desperately lonely and while he had his friend, Antonapoulous, with him, he'd sign and sign and sign and tell everything in his soul. It didn't matter that his friend didn't respond in kind.

Once his friend is taken away, Singer can't stand the loneliness of his apartment and so he rents a room in a boardhouse run by the Kelly family. Not long after that, he has four frequent visitors who proceed to talk and talk and talk to him and it doesn't matter that he doesn't respond often. Ironic, eh?

The first visitor is Jake Blount, an alcoholic rabble rouser. Blount tries to stir up the emotions of the people, frequently ranting about their rights and the oppressive nature of the bosses and so on. No one listens to him and many times, people laugh at him. However, he believes Singer understands him and so he visits.

Another visitor is young Mick Kelly, a tomboy sort of girl with music in her head and a desire to compose. She wanders around the town at night, restless, looking for radios playing music she wants to hear.

There is Dr. Copeland, a bitter black physician who is disappointed in his children and in his people.

Finally, there's the owner of the diner/bar that Singer frequents, Biff Brannon, a timid sort of man.

Each person believes that Singer belongs to him or her, their "special" friend. One time when they all show up at the same time, Singer mistakenly believes that they'll all enjoy a good time. Instead, everyone is uncomfortable and Singer doesn't understand it. He's a very kind mind and so if he doesn't always understand what his guest is going on about he keeps it to himself.

Singer has his own secret--a yearning for his old friend. He disappears a couple of times to go and visit his friend and doesn't share where he's gone. He also keeps his hands shoved deeply in his pockets, hiding them. And then he learns that Antonapolous has died of an illness and it sets off a shocking act of violence that stuns the small group of visitors.

The book was made into a movie starring Alan Arkin. I remember going to see it with my parents and some friends of theirs. All the deaf adults hated it. They felt that Antonoupolous portrayed deaf people as fools and Arkin's Singer was the "perfect" deaf person. No deaf person could read lips so well, they declared. No hearing person would hang around the deaf.

In one way, I disagree with that. I think, in Singer, each ot those people found a captive audience...someone who would listen but not have a capability of questioning or criticizing. This was a really good book!

Daniel Isn't Talking by Marti Leimbach

I am not surprised to read that Marti Leimbach has an autistic son. Anyone who could write characters as well as she either must have a lot of personal experience or is a genius. I liked the book a lot and it's a good one to read to learn about the impact autism has on family members, particularly the mother.

Melanie Marsh is an American married to a veddy proper Englishman named Stephen. His family is la-dee-dah and since Melanie is so much an individual, the first thing I wondered is how she and Stephen even got together in the first place. He turns out to be an insensitive idiot and his family is not much better, except for sister Cath.

When we first meet Melanie, she's the somewhat hysterical mother to two small but perfect (or so it seemed) children, Emily and Daniel. The thing is, Daniel's almost 3 and not talking. He's also withdrawn, seems deaf, doesn't interact with other people, doesn't play creatively...and Melanie's red flags are waving everywhere. Stephen thinks she's overreacting but it turns out she's not.

Daniel reminded me so much of our Little T in so many mannerisms and I just knew that Leimbach had to have some kind of personal experience with this.

A savior in the form of an offbeat Irish early education teacher named Andrew appears to work with Daniel and help bring him to the world.

By then the family is shattered and it's up to Melanie to keep what's left of them together. Good, informative read!

Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir by Marina Nemat

When I was a teenager, reading The Diary of Anne Frank and Exodus made me realize how blessed I was to be born in this country. I got the same feeling after reading Prisoner of Tehran and I think any teenager who read this would feel the same way. When you are sixteen years old, you are trying to break away from parents, traditions and rules to become your own person. In the United States, teens are free to speak their minds and write what they feeling. While I realize that schools can censor what the kids write, those kids aren't then placed on an arrest-to-be-tortured list.

Yet this is what happened to young Marina. When she was born, the shah was still in power and while there were abuses by the government there was also a lot more freedom and independence for women. Under the Ayatollah Kohmeini, all of that changed. Marina and several of her high school friends were arrested for "striking" against the school and for writing a protest newspaper. The strike involved a protest against teachers who chose to lecture on fundamentalist religion rather than on the topics they were supposed to teach (like calculus).

Marina was tortured in an attempt to force her to reveal the names of more friends involved in the protest. She suffered a great deal before being placed in a cell with some of her friends. Some survived; some did not. The ultimate horror--in my opinion anyway--was when Marina's interrogator fell in love with her. I recommend the book to anyone. Read it to find out what happens to Marina.

The Princes of Ireland by Edward Rutherfurd

After posting a poll about whether I should finish the book, I thought about the pros and ons of each side. TThe advice I got was very similar to what I was thinking. The first half of it had interested and engaged me--maybe I would get interested again. I don't like to spend $15 on a book and then not finish it. At the same time, though, I'd struggled through 100 pages and was hopelessly bored. I didn't think I'd want to pick up the book again, not later, not no how.

Since I did read almost all of the book I thought I would write about it anyway. Edwsard Rutherfurd's been called this age's James Michener. That's not necessarily a good thing as Michener's books can drag on and be excessively wordy. Another problem is when you want to cover centuries in a book, you lose a lot of the characterization.

Early on, I found Rutherford's characters interesting and engaging. I think he spent more time fleshing them out and it probably would have been better if his Dublin Saga had been split into 2 or 3 books to give equal time to everyone. The story starts in mythic Ireland, covering a tale I'd become somewhat familiar with: Deirdre escaping with the nephew of the king and incurring the king's wrath, the great cattle raid of Cú Chulainn. Rutherford moved smoothly from mythology to the arrival of St. Patrick and Catholicism with many characters carrying over from one age to the next. The sections about the Vikings and Brian Boru were also fascinating although by then new characters were introduced. I began to get bored during the Strongbow section and struggled at the end. I struggled for 100 pages and then tried skpping around. It didn't work.

By this time, the characters weren't so rich or interesting anymore. They just seemed like incarnations of people already introduced. I lost interest, did the poll, put the book down and moved on to something else. I'm glad I did!