Reviews

Bill Parrish and his wife are trying to come to terms with the death of their 11-year-old son, Nathaniel. Bill agrees to coach a Little League team and hopes to exorcise his grief by surrounding himself with boys and girls who were his son’s friends. A mysterious boy joins the team, however, and Bill is disturbed by his similarity to his child. Lucky is mute, doesn’t go to school as far as anyone can tell, and is evasive about where he lives and who his parents are. Bill and his wife Harper, are drawn to the boy, as well as repelled by him.

If you like manga, you’ve probably heard of the artistic group Clamp. If you’re new to graphic fiction, Clamp makes for an excellent introduction to Japanese comics, as their ability to cross genres provides something for every age group and taste.

Barbara Kingsolver wrote The Bean Trees during pregnant insomniac nights, inside a closet so she wouldn’t wake her sleeping husband. I know. When I was pregnant during sleepless nights I turned the AC on full blast and ate ice cream out of the container in bed while my husband tried to avoid hypothermia under three blankets and his parka.

Stones into Schools: Promoting peace with books, not bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, picks up where the author’s first book, the best-seller Three Cups of Tea, left off.

In this follow up to “Escape”, Jessop effectively answers the question, “If life is so bad for women in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) why don’t they leave?”

In this thankfully fictionalized look at the guts of a busy hospital we find Peter Brown working as an intern. He is in the witness protection program due to his past involvement with the mob. When a former acquaintance checks into the hospital Peter recounts his path from killer-for-hire to hard-working intern.

A “stunning tale about a suburban family facing the consequence of a few small, and seemingly mundane, acts” pretty well describes this story told by the mother of the family, Mary Beth Latham.

3 Days of the Condor is a classic 70’s film that had somehow escaped my attention until now. Although I’m not a big fan of Robert Redford, he is adequate in this part. Faye Dunaway is fine.

Having read Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and enjoyed it tremendously, I was looking forward to his next book. When I first started Abraham Lincoln I found it a little off-putting because Pride had followed Austin’s book and Abraham Lincoln was not based on a book about Abraham Lincoln. As I moved through the book, I found myself drawn into Abe’s life.

You may have heard Justin Cronin’s The Passage billed as the vampire novel to read this summer, but to classify this book as a mere vampire novel is to put it in a small, easily-defined box when the scope is much, much larger.