October 14, 2002
I was on a little reading binge for awhile and managed to rally off two books. That’s good for me. I’ve never been much of a reader so please keep clapping. I’ll now proceed with this heart-wrenching, wonderful, and intelligent review.
The first book I read was part of the Oprah Winfrey club called, “Fall on Your Knees”. It takes place in the early nineteen hundreds in the Eastern part of Canada (Nova Scotia I think. I finished it so long ago I forget exactly). It’s about this kinda screwed up family and follows each members escapades and thoughts from chapter to chapter. The characters are wonderful and intriguing and vastly different from one another. It seems to me this is turning out to be a crappy review. There’s a ton that’s happens in the book and it’s so well-written but there’s not a real hook in the story, not a main plot. It really just follows these characters from birth to death or at least old age and is full of beautiful moments, extremely funny ones, and others that are not so great. You identify with each character differently because they are so different. You have one that is religious and a little bit uppity I suppose. One that is just the devil incarnate. One that is just a care-free soul and wants to experience the world I guess would be a good way to describe her. All the main characters are women except for the father but I found myself, as a male, still quite enthralled in their lifes and relating to their journeys. Not necessarily cause I’ve gone through the same stuff but because again it’s so well written. Crappy review I know but it’s a great book. Pick it up.
The next one is easier to review. It’s a book called “The Lovely Bones” and is told from a little girls point of view. The “hook” of this one I guess is that the narrator (the girl) is telling the story from heaven. Her heaven. She has been raped and murdered and in her afterlife from heaven follows up on her family and friends and witnesses and reflects on how they deal with her death and the pending investigation, etc. You also get an inside look on the killer, who is known to the reader from the very beginning (you’d think that’d make it boring and not quite as interesting but it’s not so much the mystery of who killed her for the reader, it’s will they catch him. It kinda makes it more intriguing by knowing the killer and with Suzie looking down on him and following up on his activities.) It’s quite a fantastic book but is a very different read from “Fall on Your Knees”.
I’d recommend both but for an easier read though still heavy I’d recommend “TLB” but they are both wonderful.
