Category: Book Talk

A Book Review: The Storyteller

LaurenLeave a comment

You know what they say.

If you’ve read one Jodi Picoult book…

The Storyteller

You’ve read em all.

Oh, they don’t say that?

If you’ve never read anything by Jodi Picoult, I’ll just give you the gist of all her novels.  MORAL DILEMMA.  To her credit, she weaves these morally complicated plots like a pro and her writing is both interesting and captivating, but because they all share the same core theme, there’s a degree of predictability that can be a little annoying.

The Storyteller intertwines several different (but not so mutually exclusive) storylines together.  There’s the story of Sage, a 20-something baker, semi-recluse and sole survivor of a car crash that involved she and her mother.  Then there’s the story of Reiner Hartmann, a former Nazi, who now goes by Josef and enlists Sage to SPOILER ALERT “help him die.”  Also incorporated into the book, is the tale of Sage’s grandmother, a Holocaust survivor (and the plot thickens!) and periodic excerpts from a story she had written as a young girl.  Add in a love interest for Sage and you have yourself a recipe for a really chaotic novel.  And yet, it’s not.  Therein lies the appeal of Jodi Picoult.  Well for me, at least.

As the author of 18 novels, many of them bestsellers, Jodi Picoult obviously knows what she’s doing.  I just wish I didn’t also know what she was doing two chapters into the book 😛

A Book Review: Dearie

LaurenLeave a comment

Okay, the full title of the book is Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child, but that was just too many colons for one blog post title.

Julia

I just finished this one up on Tuesday, while sitting out on Joey’s deck and remarkable is right!  It’s interesting to me that Julia Child is such a huge name in the cooking world, yet before reading this book I knew next to nothing about her.  I didn’t know she grew up in California, didn’t know she was that tall, didn’t know she had a career with the secret intelligence agency before embarking on a career in cooking, didn’t know she didn’t begin that career until she was almost 40, didn’t know hard she worked and how much she did right up until her death just two days before her 92nd birthday.  Remarkable.

photo

While I’m not sure I loved the style of Dearie — it seemed like a lot facts and quotes and was a little dry for my taste — I totally fell in love with the character it depicted.  By the end, I felt like I had been friends with Julia Child.  And what a spunky and fun friend she was.  I don’t think anyone who knows anything about Julia Child can deny that she was one of a kind.  When I reached the end of the book, I was genuinely sad.  Sad that I was too young to know who she was when she was still living, sad that I never got to watch her shows, sad that the world will never see another like her.  But what a legacy she’s left behind.

P.S. Do not read this book while hungry 😛