*THE SWAN THIEVES* by Elizabeth Kostova

Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe has a perfectly ordered life—solitary, perhaps, but full of devotion to his profession and the painting hobby he loves. This order is destroyed when renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient. In response, Marlowe finds himself going beyond his own legal and ethical boundaries to understand the secret that torments this genius, a journey that will lead him into the lives of the women closest to Robert Oliver and toward a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism.Ranging from American museums to the coast of Normandy, from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth, from young love to last love, THE SWAN THIEVES is a story of obsession, the losses of history, and the power of art to preserve human hope.

***Rate this 3/5. I so wanted to love this book but I could not. I compared it to her first book, The Historian, and it came up very short. This book went on and on, back and forth in time, between the psychiatrist, the wife, the other woman, and a mysterious 18th century couple and in the end, nothing was really resolved. This was 561 pages and rather a boring read.

*THE WHITE QUEEN* by Phillippa Gregory

Philippa Gregory, "the queen of royal fiction" (USA Today) Presents the first of a new series set amid the deadly feuds of England known as the Wars of the Roses.
Brother turns on brother to win the ultimate prize, the throne of England, in this dazzling account of the wars of the Plantagenets. They are the claimants and kings who ruled England before the Tudors, and now Philippa Gregory brings them to life through the dramatic and intimate stories of the secret players: the indomitable women, starting with Elizabeth Woodville, the White Queen.
The White Queen tells the story of a woman of extraordinary beauty and ambition who, catching the eye of the newly crowned boy king, marries him in secret and ascends to royalty. While Elizabeth rises to the demands of her exalted position and fights for the success of her family, her two sons become central figures in a mystery that has confounded historians for centuries: the missing princes in the Tower of London...


*****5/5 I have loved all of the books by this author on the Tudors but now she is headed in a new direction with the Plantagenets, who were before them. I really admired the White Queen, Elizabeth, and loved the telling of her story. I now look forward to further books on this family!

*NOAH'S COMPASS* by Anne Tyler

Like Tyler's previous protagonists, Liam Pennywell is a man of unexceptional talents, plain demeanor, modest means and curtailed ambition. At age 60, he's been fired from his teaching job at a “second-rate private boys' school” in Baltimore, a job below his academic training and original expectations. An unsentimental, noncontemplative survivor of two failed marriages and the emotionally detached father of three grown daughters, Liam is jolted into alarm after he's attacked in his apartment and loses all memory of the experience. His search to recover those lost hours leads him into an uneasy exploration of his disappointing life and into an unlikely new relationship with Eunice, a socially inept walking fashion disaster who is half his age. She is also spontaneous and enthusiastic, and Liam longs to cast off his inertia and embrace the “joyous recklessness” that he feels in her company. Tyler's gift is to make the reader empathize with this flawed but decent man, and to marvel at how this determinedly low-key, plainspoken novelist achieves miracles of insight and understanding.


****Rate this as a 4/5. I love Anne's books, but I could not even force any empathy for her main character, Liam. I feel he led a life where everyone treated him as a doormat. He meets Eunice, who actually makes him realize how much he has missed. I was so hoping that he would take advantage of her being his 'rememberer, as it were, but did he? No.....he continued on with his solitary aloneness with no thought of every changing it.

*THE ICE MAN: Confessions Of A Mafia Contract Killer* by Philip Carlo

Carlo (The Night Stalker) has written another captivating true-crime book. This one tells the spine-chilling story of Richard Kuklinski, a.k.a. "the Ice Man" because he liked to freeze his victims to throw off forensic investigators. Born into an abusive family, Kuklinski claimed to have killed for the first time at age 14. After a run-in with the Gambino family, he became a hit man for the mob, managing to live the double life of a professional assassin and devoted family man. The author spent over 200 hours interviewing the incarcerated Kuklinski and his family. If one is to believe Kuklinski, he killed upward of 200 individuals, including Jimmy Hoffa, Carmine Galante, and Roy DeMeo. It was only through the diligent work of New Jersey police officer Pat Kane, who spent six years building a case against Kuklinski, that the killing spree ended. This work is written like a novel; readers will become so engrossed in the details that they'll forget that this is a true story. Highly recommended for readers of true crime; perhaps the finished version of this book will provide the update that Kuklinski died on March 5, 2006, at age 70 of natural causes.

*****Rate this 5/5 I truly enjoyed this rather interesting account of Richard Kuklinski's life. His life began as a tragedy that no child could emotionally survive without damage, and he didn't, nor did his brother. It is a fascinating study of the mind of a psychopath and I am glad that I read it. HBO presented a special on this man a couple of years ago, and therein began my quest to find further information.

*PUSH* A Novel by Sapphire

An electrifying first novel that shocks by its language, its circumstances, and its brutal honesty, Push recounts a young black street-girl's horrendous and redemptive journey through a Harlem inferno. For Precious Jones, 16 and pregnant with her father's child, miraculous hope appears and the world begins to open up for her when a courageous, determined teacher bullies, cajoles, and inspires her to learn to read, to define her own feelings and set them down in a diary

***Rate this a 3/5. This is a shocking and sad novel in that it is not fiction, but a true story. It is culture shock to anyone in white suburbs without a realization that this lifestyle exists. Sad and tragic, but a story that needed to be told.

*APPETITE FOR LIFE: The Biography of Julia Child by Noel Riley Fitch

Julia McWilliams was always adventurously hunting for food to fill her 6'2" frame. When, in her late 20s, the Smith College-educated Californian took a wartime job with the OSS that sent her to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and China, she began cultivating a taste for authentic eatables as an alternative to service fare. Almost resigned to spinsterhood, she met and married Cambridge, Mass.-born government official Paul Child, who was on Asian duty, and accompanied him to his USIA posts in France and Germany. A gastronomical epiphany that occurred in Rouen, at the bistro where the couple once lunched, led her to attend the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Parisand the rest is history. In 1961, Child published the three-pound bestseller Mastering the Art of French Cooking when she was 49, and a few years later she was a TV superstar conducting gustatory symphonies with whisks and pans and patter. Her life is told warmly and compellingly by Fitch, author of several books on literary and culinary Paris, who nicely captures Child's exuberant mannerisms and plummy voice that fans know so well. Her graphic diary-letters, extracted at length by Fitch, register the couple's experiences together and the emotions they shared.


****Rate this book 4/5. I have to admit that after I saw the movie "Julie & Julia" I became very interested in the life of Julia Child. This was a very good book about a fabulous woman. She was ahead of her time as far as I am concerned: an appetite for life as big as her appetite for food. I loved her marriage to Paul Child being remembered as one in which they both respected and loved each other deeply, and were indeed, true partners. I doubt many of us have the love and consideration for each other that these two did, and total opposites nonetheless. Fascinating woman, Ms. Julia Child. Your life was rich and full and you enjoyed every minute of it.