The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

Oh man, oh man.  This book really creeps up on a person.  I had heard good things from friends and it won a 2015 GoodReads award for Best Thriller so I shouldn't have been surprised.  It was a little slow going at first and the only thing that kept me going is the fact that the library waiting list was 10 months long.  But it gets to a point where you can't put it down, so not all was lost.

Rachel is an alcoholic who suffers from blackouts.  She has been having a rough couple of years.  Her husband has left her for another woman and they had a baby she desperately wanted.  She's living with a roommate that hates her drinking.  And even though Rachel lost her job, she still takes the train into the city everyday so the roommate doesn't kick her out of the house.  She is obsessed with her ex and often makes drunken phone calls, shows up at their house, etc.  Her daily ritual on the train is to look at the houses in the old neighbourhood and make up fantasies about the couple living a few doors down from her old house.  Something bad happens and fantasy wife with the perfect marriage goes missing.  Rachel knows something about that night but her blackouts make her memory spotty and untrustworthy.  The cops don't take her seriously and all she wants is a drink, back together with her ex-husband, a baby, and another drink again.

So, I think the reason I found it slow going at the first was because I didn't find these characters very likeable.  I could empathize with what Rachel and Megan were going through but it takes almost the whole book to really understand who these people are.  Once you get there, it is totally worth it.

So I guess it was a good thing that I had to wait 10 months to check this one out of the library.

Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult

I really really really shouldn't be posting about a book I just finished. I really really shouldn't be spending my morning finishing a book. I really really should be going to the market to find food for the upcoming week. I really should be at work, working on my evil project that I'd love to be taken off of so that I can find a new project. I really should be working on my photos so I can get my last PEI trip uploaded. That trip was like a month a ago and I still don't have them up... and one of my friends is likely going to kill me because of it.... life is hard but you know what trumps all the angst written in this paragraph? Schlock by Jodi Picoult!


Oh how I love Jodi... let me count the ways... She is awesome at her little formula. Typical Jodi book has two mothers who are best friends and love each other like sisters but because of the big event of the book, that relationship is destroyed for ALL TIME. Also in this little formula are the children, usually of that age when they finally realize that their parents aren't perfect and start keeping secrets from them. The children are usually the "big event" plot point of the book and one is usually neglected over the needs of the other. The husbands are not usually as interesting except they are excellent fathers despite their typical not perfect characters. Actually, Jodi is very adapt at writing imperfect people which make them much more interesting to read. There might be some MarySue qualities going on here but they aren't annoying ones.

Handle With Care is a story about a family who has a child that was born with Osteogenesis Imperfecta. OI is a genetic defect that causes the bones to be extremely brittle and break very easily. They love their daughter Willow no matter how hard life is living with a child with a disability. Problem is, OI is very expensive. Insurance will only over so much, they are very much in debt, and they see the future where Willow will need more and more surgeries, special equipment, and one and on... The mother's gamble on a solution: file a wrongful birth lawsuit against the doctor. Wrongful birth argues that the doctor should have diagnosed the disability in the womb and offered abortion as an option. The big problem, the doctor is her best friend. Bing! Big Event Plot is born.

I know this is coming off as sarcastic but I really do like Picolts books. They are easy reads, usually about controversial subjects that are fun to discuss in a group, and there is something comforting about them. It has been over a year since I've read one but it felt like putting on that warm comfy sweater you keep in the back of the closet for cold winter nights. But in this case, a warm cosy book that you bring out on hot summer days to while away those days that feel too humid to move.

Anyway, iPod is charged and I have no more excuses to prevent the start of my day... too bad that didn't take longer.

Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood

Review by Red Bonney

Margaret Atwood is a Goddess of Canadian Literature. She should be revered so. Despite these frank and somewhat obsequious adulations, I am not employed in the Margaret Atwood fanclub (but I would if they’d hire me).

This book struck me almost immediately as a great novel. I picked it up at the bookstore because I have an addiction to buying books and the bookcover and title attracted my eye that particular day. For a long time, it sat on my shelf because that’s what happens to the majority of books I buy on impulse. When I finally got around to cracking the cover to read the thing, I couldn’t believe that it had been written when I was two(-ish). It is the mark of a readable (and re-readable) book that can be read in any era without immediately being reminded of ghastly orange plaid slacks. What I am trying to say is, the characters were like real people, the places are real places and the plot is as exciting and mundane as real life.

The story opens with the heroine, Joan Foster, a famous and easily identifiable personage, hiding in a small village in Italy. She has just completed a stunt wherein she left Canada and her husband believing that she had died in a boating accident. Naturally the reader is left to think up all kinds of nasty rumour and innuendo about this husband. Why did she leave him in so dramatic a method? What did he do to deserve such treatment? What sort of shenanigans did she get up to that she thought this was a good and proper solution to her problems?

None of these questions are answered until much further on in the book. Because next, we go on a history lesson of Joan’s childhood, as traumatic and disastrous as anyone can claim. Her parents, though they (eventually) live in the same house, were essentially estranged. And strange. Her mother was a controlling perfectionist and forever complaining about Joan to Joan; her father was somewhat detached from the world and his family; and neither parent did much to make life any easier for their only daughter.

The story winds along with snippets of ‘present day’ Joan added in, in which she is trying to write a novel in order to make some money to facilitate her new life as Someone Else, and eventually meets up with this present day (which is actually some time in the late sixties or early seventies I think). It was like reading three books at once: The Past life of Joan, where she is an overweight, awkward kid trying to fit herself into the world that seems to want nothing to do with her. The Present Joan, a fugitive on the run pretending to be her other persona in order to fix whatever went wrong. And the novel inside the novel. Joan’s novel was mirroring her own experiences. She had to find the correct ending to her own story in order to finish the book. But then, life happens and everything goes wrong. Again.

Such is life.

Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam

Stupid dog. I'm sitting on my mother's front porch watching a neighbour's dog tempt fate by running back and forth across the street, narrowly avoiding oncoming traffic and its owner who keeps yelling, "Buddy!" Apparently this is a common occurrence and I'm finding it way too stressful. More on that later.

So, I finished another book. Weird how I feel more productive the more books I read and this one was a Giller prize winner. Not one of my pulp or graphic novels I can get through in a day. That being said it wasn't a difficult read or boring or weird in a Canadian literature sort of way. Weird, eh?

This book is a compilation of short stories about the medical experience, told from the point of view of a half a dozen doctors, starting from pre-med and the pressure to get into med school to the frustrations of the job. Since the author is also a doctor, I was a little afraid that the characters would be portrayed more on the heroic or martyred end of the spectrum like you find on bad television medical melodrama. That wasn't the case. Some of the doctors are jerks and some not-so-much of a jerk, basically human.

The fun part was finding out stuff I had noticed before, thought was weird, and now have an explanation for it. As in, I've spotted doctors coming in the patient's room during their rounds and take a seat. Are they tired? Didn't get enough sleep the night before? Turns out this gives the patient a sense of time spent and it is taught early. Unfortunately, I just know that if I find myself in a hospital and the doc takes a seat at the edge of the bed or nearby chair, I'll get a little giggly and that will earn me an extra day's stay for a psych evaluation. And to be honest, that just sounds easier than trying to explain what is going on it my wacky head.

Another interesting point, they put a glossary of terms in the back of the book but there wasn't a time when I thought that I didn't understand something. Must be a sure sign that I've watched way too much tv.

Anyway, this was a good book. Glad I read it, even if things didn't roll where I would have wanted them to.

As for the dog, the poor thing has been captured after about an hour of playing chase in the neighbourhood; score another point for that dog's guardian angel. I was sure a couple squealed tire sounds was going to mean that it was a goner for sure.

My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

First book completed on my vacation read-a-thon. Well, perhaps it won’t be a read-a-thon considering I want to get out of the house a few times but I need to get some of these done. This is as good a time as any.

This is the second Picoult book I’ve read and all I can say is that the woman loves to make you cry. She must get some perverse pleasure out of it. Or perhaps, she is like Stephen King and feels that if you write about the things you fear the most, it will cause them not to happen, like losing a child.

In both Picoult books I’ve read, there is a death, and grief, and pain, and loss. All the feelings and emotions people go through and hope to never have to. Here, we watch a family struggle with the effects of leukemia. The oldest daughter, Kate, was diagnosed with cancer at the age of two and from that day on, it has become one mother’s personal battle to keep her child alive. One way to do that is to conceive a child that is a close genetic match for your sick child so that they can donate the cord blood cells. That works for a while but down the road, remission turns into relapse. Then blood is needed or bone marrow. Sometimes, that single-minded focus to keep one child alive makes other things fall to the side. Your oldest son turns into a juvenile delinquent. Your other daughter goes to a lawyer to petition the court for medical emancipation from her parents. She doesn’t want to donate her kidney to her sister or at least, she wants to be asked.

This book is filled with all the moral dilemmas and the what ifs and the what would you do questions. You can understand how a parent would want to do anything in their power to help their child, keep that child with them for one more day. But what of those that get hurt in the process? No easy answers. Picoult loves taking a subject like this and exploring the family dynamics that are affected by this predicament.

Ultimately, Picoult books are an interesting read. I’ve found some similarities in the two that I’ve read: courtroom scenes that come with shocking testimony confessions and lawyers with a slightly skewed sense of the world. Mothers that you sometimes don’t really like but you find yourself making allowances for. It makes you wonder what her relationship was like with her own mother.

The best thing about her books: they are great for book clubs. You will not have any problems coming up with things to talk about after reading them.