*THE KITE RUNNER8 by Khaled Hosseini

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975." So begins The Kite Runner, a poignant tale of two motherless boys growing up in Kabul, a city teetering on the brink of destruction at the dawn of the Soviet invasion.
Despite their class differences, Amir, the son of a wealthy businessman, and Hassan, his devoted sidekick and the son of Amir's household servant, play together, cause mischief together, and compete in the annual kite-fighting tournament -- Amir flying the kite, and Hassan running down the kites they fell. But one day, Amir betrays Hassan, and his betrayal grows increasingly devastating as their tale continues. Amir will spend much of his life coming to terms with his initial and subsequent acts of cowardice, and finally seek to make reparations.
Hosseini's depiction of the cruelty children suffer at the hands of their "friends" will break your heart. And his descriptions of Afghanistan both before and after the war will haunt readers long after they've read the last page. The Kite Runner is a stunning reminder that the dark hearts of adults are made, step-by-step, by the hatred they learn as children, and that all it takes for evil to triumph is for a good man to stand back and do nothing.

Rated: *****5/5
I fought reading this book for so long after having seen it on so many different book boards and bestseller lists. I thought that it was all about Afghanistan with it's social issues and problems. One day while at the library, I decided to pick it up and see what all the interest in it was. I am so happy that I did. This book made me cry, such a great and compassionate book on friendship, love and integrity. I have enriched my life by reading it.

*PEOPLE OF THE LIE* by Dr. Scott Peck

The author of this book, Dr. Scott Peck, is a psychiatrist turned author and lecturer. His name is a household word with the self-help crowd. In this book, Peck takes on the topic of 'evil'. It is a volume or group of case studies from the first chapters of the book with attached commentary. The presentations are consistently welll done.


Rated: *** 3/5 Recommended to me by another reading board about people who are born truly evil and are psychopaths. It describes how their inherent evil is missed by most of society, but is there if you care to really look for it. The author is also a religion teacher. Very interesting and factual book that puts a whole new light on psychopaths and evil people.

*THE MERMAID CHAIR* by Sue Monk Kidd

Originally having read The Secret Life of Bees by this author, I was not prepared to like this book at all since I didn't like Bees. I was, however, impressed by this story of a woman's trip home to visit her mother who never fully recovered from the father's death 33 years earlier. The mother having cut off her own finger with a meat cleaver prompts her friends' to call for the daughter to come home. Frantc with worry, and apprehensive at the thought of returning to the small island where she grew up in the shadow of her beloved father's death and her mother's fanatical Catholicism, Jessie, the main character, gets on the next plane leaving behind her psychiatrist husband, Hugh and their college-age daughter, Dee.

While on the tiny island where she grew up Jessie meets and is wildly attracted to Brother Thomas, a junior monk at the secluded Benedictine monastery. Brother Thomas is just as confused with taking his final vows as Jessie is confused about the state of her bland marriage.


Rated ****4/5 I loved this book. Totally unprepared to like it since I though her first book about bees was dull, and overrated.

*GENEVIEVE* by Eric Jerome Dicky

Bestseller Jerome Dicky offers more sex-drenched melodrama with an instantly engrossing sotry about a couple whose marriage is tested by secrets both familial and sexual. Beautiful, independent Genevieve Forbes and her husband, a medical research scientist are both by-products of broken families. Genevieve ran away after suffering intolerable abuse by her murderous father and cruel grandmother, and the husband's rural Texas childhood was marred by his mother's death and a virtually absent, errant father. The death of Genevieve's grandmother forces both to return to her backwoods Alabama hometown for a reunion that stirs up old grudges, reopens still painful wounds and sparks reckless familial infighting.


Rated: *** 3/5. This is probably the most sexual book I have ever read, but a good storyline was present nontheless.

*THE HISTORIAN* by Elizabeth Kostova

It would take a lot to kill a runaway bestseller like Kostova's debut. The Historian is a story about a centuries-long vampire hunt from a historian, Paul, as he slowly tells the sage of his covert research to his teenage daughter. Paul's tale is supposed to be a secret, painfully pried from him by his daughter for whose safety he fears, but Paul recites it in a nonchalant and impersonal way.

Rate **** 4/5, Wow, what a read, all 642 pages of it. It was a story about a girl who found a book in her father's library about the search for Count Dracula. This is a book very rich with history that takes one all over Europe and especially Bulgaria. It is not a light read, but I am glad that I read it. Excellent for a first novel.

* TIM * by Colleen McCullough

Since I loved the book, "The Thornbirds* by Colleen McCullough, I decided to read this as well. This story is set in Australia and is about a spinster, Mary Horton, who is in her 40's. Wealthy through her own hard efforts, solitary, plain and believing that she needs neither friends nor love, finding reward enough in her comfortable home, her garden, her Bentley, the beach cottage, her job and investments have brought her and in books read and music listened to in solitude. There is no hunger in her for what she has missed. That is until she sees Tim Melville, unskilled laborer, age 25, the son of Ron and Eame as the firstborn gift of their marriage. The face, the body, the grace of a Greek god, fair and flawless - but not the intellect to match it. Sharing what happens to Tim and Mary makes one realize it is we ourselves who set boundaries on what is possible. They show us horizons instead of boundaries.

****Rated 4/5. I loved this book. It is every mature woman's fantasty really. Mary and Tim have a very happy relationship over the years in spite of the age difference which is really not all that many years when you think about it.

*THE RIVER KING* by Alice Hoffman

There are two things any reader can count on when coming to Alice Hoffman: her prose and a remarkable empathy for those who live on the fringes of society. I adore her books and she has become my alltime favorite author.

Set in a tony private school located in a small New England town, the River King traces an intricate weave of intersecting lives over the course of a year. A tremendous storm hits the town and floods the grounds of The Haddan School. The school is never the same, it develops a musty odor, roses planted by Annie Howe, a villager who married the headmaster and later hanged herself. have an unusual effect on sensitive girls.

As with all Hoffman novels, there is magic and this one was no different. Hoffman spins her web of love and heartbreak and transcendence with a sure hand, and in the process creates characters so palpably human in all their petty flaws and small instances of heroism that one almost expects them to step out of the book and into the room.

***Rated a 3/5. Although this is not my favorite book by Alice, I will continue to read everything she writes and eagerly anticipate the next book.

* MIDWIVES * by Chris Bohjalian

On a violent, stormy winter night, a home birth goes disastrously wrong. The phone lines are down, the roads slick with ice and untravelable. The midwife, unable to get her patient to a hospital, works frantically to save both mother and child while her inexperienced assistant and the woman's terrified husband look on. The mother dies but the baby is saved thanks to an emergency C-section. And then the nightmare begins: the assistant suggests that maybe the woman wasn't really dead when the midwife operated. At some point within minutes of what the narrator's mother believed had been a stroke, after she concluded the cardiopulmonary resuscitation had failed to generate a pulse or a breath, the midwife screamed for the asst. and the husband to grab the sharpest knife in the house. In Midwives, the author chronicles the events leading up to the trial of Sibyl Danforth, a respected midwife in the small Vermont town of Reddington, on charges of manslaughter. The author takes the reader through the intricacies of childbirth and the law.

***Rated 3/5. Overall, I enjoyed this book, it being the first that I had read by this author. I found it amazing that the author is a man, he portrayed a woman's thoughts very well. Although as a nurse, I don't agree with homebirthing babies, it was an interesting concept the way it was portrayed. I found the shocking thoughts of the midwive at the end of the story very thought-provoking.

*GRANITE ISLANDS* by Sarah Stonich

Stonich's rich debut is a romance in the best sense of the word: it's a tale of love and adventure set in a remote time. From her hospital bed, a 99 year old Isobel Howard recalls her unexpected friendship with Cathryn Malley, a childless, Chicago born heiress who shunned her family, attended art school and married an Irishman with no pedigree. During the summer of 1936, the women find themselves alone in Cypress, a mining town on the edge of a glacier-fed lake in Minnesota. Isobel is the wife of a tailor, mother of 3 children and a milliner by trade whose husband, Victor, has taken their 2 boys away to an island he has purchased - an extravagance that has become a sore point in their marriage. Left behind with her quiet daughter, Louisa, Isobel revives her interest in hatmaking, and Cathryn helps her. During their shared days, Cathryn introduces Isobel to literature, art and a more cosmopolitan view of life, unlimately making Isobel an accomplice to the affair she is having with a local forest ranger. But there is a darker side to this idyll, and as the elderly Isobel reflects on the ensuing events, it is clear that this summer has exacted a heavy price. Sticklers for logic may question some turns of the story, and Stonich's prose, despite an eye for exquisite detail, occasionally succumbs to flights of lyrical fancy. But once past the unsteady opening chapters, the novel gains its footing and opens up into atmospherically rendered, carefully observed scenes. Stonich unfurls a complex, many-layered and suspenseful story; and like Susan Minot and Anita Shreve, she handles flashbacks and contemporary details with equal precision.

*****Rated 5/5. I loved this book! It tells the story of a woman's life over a period of 99 years. How she loves, how she accepts loss and despair. The whole story caught my interest from the very first page and never let go. Great first novel, believable characters, I can hardly believe that this is a first book and I anxiously anticipate her next novel.

*DANCING NAKED AT THE EDGE OF DAWN* by Kris Radish

Everything changes and the very foundation of her life comes into question when Meg witnesses her husband having sex with another woman on her bed in her suburban Chicago home. In order to find her way to a new life, Meg, along with three friends, recreates the journey to Mexico that her favorite aunt took as a young woman. Her aunt's influence is still visible in remote Mexican villages, and the journey becomes spiritual as well as geographical. As Meg finds out more details of her aunt's life, she wonders whey this wonderful woman's influence on her took hold before she went into crisis. When she returns to Chicago, she finds kindred spirits who have felt lost and oppressed but who now may be willing to let go and even dance naked.

**Rated 2/5. When I began this book I thought that I would like it, but having been through a breakup in a relationship myself, I found Meg's journey to be just too, too wonderful a transition from a long marriage through divorce and a new life. This women had money, a great job and no hassle from the husband. I think overall I prefer women that struggle, that overcome crisis and pain. This book book was a lot of fluff and nonsense to me.

*MY SISTER'S KEEPER* by Jodi Picoult

The difficult choices a family must make when a child is diagnosed with a serious disease are explored with pathos and understanding in Ms. Picoult's 11th novel. The author, who has taken on such controversial subjects as euthanasia (*Mercy*) teen suicide (*The Pact*) and sterilization laws (*Second Glance*) turns her gaze on genetic planning, the prospect of creating babies for health purposes and the ethical and moral fallout that results. Kate Fitzgerald has a rare form of leukemia. Her sister, Anna, was conceived to provide a donor match for procedures that become increasingly invasive. At 13, Anna hires a lawyer so that she can sue her parents for the right to make her own decisions about how her body is used.

****I rate this book as 4/5 mainly because the topic so bothered me. I find it deplorable that a mother could even think of conceiving and having a child for the sole purpose of providing for another child. The book was well-written and the end was heartbreaking.

* MY FRIEND LEONARD * by James Frey

I first read "A Million Little Pieces" by Mr. Frey and loved the character named Leonard that he met in rehab. I was anxious to read his second book and I am glad that I did.

Mr. Frey chornicles his journey out of the terrifying darkness of addiction and the friend he meets along the way.

*****Rated this book 5/5 because I literally loved it. In his first book, Mr. Frey had attitude and arrogance issues in the he felt that he could conquer addiction all on his own so I was hesitant to even contemplate reading this, his second book. This was great book in which Mr. Frey beautifully explained learning to deal with raw issues sober and to not rely on crutches to help you through the pain and problems in life. This book created so much emotion and feeling, that I would have to lay the book down to cry and then recompose myself before I could begin again. Someday, I will read this book again.