Archive for March, 2011

CATCH ME WHEN I FALL by Patricia Westerhof

Whenever she doubts her role as “just a housewife,” Vicky recalls Oma, giving her the above advice. Oma had escaped to Canada from Holland in January 1945 with Vicky’s father and her other four children with nothing but the clothes they wore, the family Bible and a piece of paper giving the name of somebody to contact. Now, Vicky wants to make good by bringing her Alzheimer suffering father into her home.

March 16, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Canada, Family Matters, Short Stories

THE TRINITY SIX by Charles Cumming

Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and John Cairncross, who studied at Cambridge in the 1930s, were recruited by Moscow Center to act as Soviet agents. They eventually rose to positions of prominence in such organizations as the British Foreign Office and the Secret Intelligence Service (M16). Over the years, they passed “vast numbers of classified documents to their handlers.” Charles Cumming, in The Trinity Six, suggests the existence of a sixth man whose identity was never made public. What if this individual survived decades after the other five passed away and decided that the time has come to reveal what he knows?

March 15, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Thriller/Spy/Caper

LOVE YOU MORE by Lisa Gardner

In Lisa Gardner’s Love You More, Tessa Leoni has a great deal on her plate. She has been a Massachusetts state trooper for four years and has a beautiful six-year-old daughter, Sophie, whose father’s name Tessa does not even know. Leoni has an inner toughness that she will desperately need as she faces an uncertain future. Her husband of three years and Sophie’s stepfather, Brian Darby, has been shot to death, and the evidence points to Tessa as the perpetrator. Worse, Tessa’s little girl, Sophie, has disappeared. The detectives soon suspect that not only did Tessa gun down her husband in cold blood, but that she also killed and buried her daughter.

March 15, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: NE & New York, Sleuths Series

FROM THE LAND OF THE MOON by Milena Agus

These memories of her home island of Sardinia run like a litany through the mind of a love-sick woman on a visit to Milan in 1963. She is considering remaining on the mainland for ever, but the contrast between that sea of light and the fog-bound Northern city tells at least the reader why she cannot. It is actually one of relatively few physical descriptions of the island in this charming little novella by Milena Agus, which reads almost like a family memoir. But the book is filled with the spirit of Sardinian life, which seems to have preserved the old ways well beyond the end of the war, a combination of circumspection and joy.

March 14, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: Family Matters, italy, Translated, World Lit

THE HIDDEN REALITY by Brian Greene

Imagine: a spiral galaxy exactly like our own Milky Way, home to a 4.5 billion year-old yellow dwarf 26,400 light years away from the supermassive black hole powering the galactic center, orbited by an iron-aqueous planet, populated with intelligent, bi-pedal, opposable-thumb mammals identical to humans from their DNA on up; and imagine that on this Earth-like planet, there exists a person exactly similar in every respect – physical, mental, historical – to you, sitting as you are right now, hunched over a keyboard at work or curled up, at home, with your laptop on the couch, but instead of scrolling down through the rest of this review, your counterpart leaves MostlyFiction.com to check her status on Facebook, muttering: What a load of rubbish.

March 13, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: Non-fiction

INCENDIARY by Chris Cleave

Imagine that you’re a working class Cockney mother with a husband who detonates bombs and a young son who is four years and three months old. You stave off your anxieties about the uncertainty of your life through mindless sex encounters. Eventually, you meet a neighbor – a journalist named Jasper – and, while your husband and son are at a soccer game, you invite him to your flat. At the exact same time you are in the throes of sexual abandon, there’s a massive terrorist bomb attack at the London soccer stadium, vaporizing over one thousand people – your husband and son among them. How do you go on? How do you live with the remorse?

March 12, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, Literary, Unique Narrative, United Kingdom