I LOVE Barbara Kingsolver and this books sounds promising:
You had better write all this in your notebook, she said, the story of what happened to us in Mexico. So when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went.
Born in the US, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing mother, Salomé. From a coastal island jungle to the unpaved neighbourhoods of 1930s Mexico City, his fortunes never steady as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution. He aims for invisibility, observing his world and recording everything with a peculiar selfless irony in his notebooks. Life is whatever he learns from servants putting him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Making himself useful in the household of the muralist, his wife Frida Kahlo, and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot in with art and revolution. A violent upheaval sends him north to a nation newly caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. In Carolina, he remakes himself in America’s hopeful image. Under the watch of his peerless stenographer, Violet Brown, he finds an extraordinary use for his talents of observation. But political winds continue to push him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach – the lacuna – between truth and public presumption.
The Lacuna is a gripping story of identity, connection with our past, and the power of words to create or devastate. Crossing two decades, from the vibrant revolutionary murals of Mexico City to the halls of a Congress bent on eradicating the colour red, The Lacuna is as deep and rich as the New World itself. (Taken from borders.com)
I am going to buy it tonight.
Summary: This is the story of “Alice” who was kidnapped by Ray when she was ten years old. Alice is now fifteen. For five years she has been sexually, physically and emotionally abused and has become what she calls a “living dead girl”. Now Ray wants Alice to help her kidnap another young girl. Alice thinks this may be her only means of escape and agrees to help Ray.
Summary: (Taken from jodipicoult.com) When Charlotte and Sean O’Keefe’s daughter, Willow, is born with severe osteogenesis imperfecta, they are devastated – she will suffer hundreds of broken bones as she grows, a lifetime of pain. As the family struggles to make ends meet to cover Willow’s medical expenses, Charlotte thinks she has found an answer. If she files a wrongful birth lawsuit against her ob/gyn for not telling her in advance that her child would be born severely disabled, the monetary payouts might ensure a lifetime of care for Willow. But it means that Charlotte has to get up in a court of law and say in public that she would have terminated the pregnancy if she’d known about the disability in advance – words that her husband can’t abide, that Willow will hear, and that Charlotte cannot reconcile. And the ob/gyn she’s suing isn’t just her physician – it’s her best friend.
I am re-reading Wuthering Heights all because of this cover. I couldn’t resist it. And Heathcliff….. don’t even get me started on him.
If you haven’t read Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, then you need to do so immediately. This book is made for book lovers. I was reminded of Dickens’ Great Expectations time and time again, with all the memorable characters and the mysterious plot that keeps you on your toes. It is so beautifully written, case in point when Daniel visits the Cemetery of Forgotten books he is told, “Every book, every volume, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.” Or if that doesn’t convince you, how about this one? “Few things leave a deeper mark than the first book that finds its way into [your] heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a place in our memory to which, sooner or later- no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget- we will return.” Now that is beautiful writing that speaks to the reader in all of us.
This is one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful books I have ever read. The bookstore received some promotional cards with a note written by the author. She states: Telling the story of the magician and the elephant and Peter and Adele was a profound and powerful experience for me. It is my outrageous wish that you, as you read this tale, will find some of the comfort and hope and magic, some of the healing power, that I found in the writing of it. And believe me, you will. On several occasions, okay through most of the book, I found myself tearing up at the beauty within this book and its memorable characters. It leaves you asking, “What if? Why not? Could it be?”.
Okay, first things first. I HATE the cover of this book. In fact, I had put off reading this book for so long because I was embarrassed to be seen reading a book with such a teen romance-y looking cover. But you know what they say…. about judgments and books and their covers.
