I have officially been finished with my 2007 Spring Semester at the University of Nebraska at Kearney for twelve days. In that time I have completed the readings of four novels. Let me further explain:
*The first book I finished is "The Memory Keeper's Daughter" by Kim Edwards. I started reading it a week or so after my 20th birthday in February. Having started reading it during a semester in which I had two separate English classes I had very little time to enjoy this book in between my British literature novels and my Poetry compilations. However, it added a very nice get-away from my boring homework on nights that I found myself wide awake and full of reading strength.
I don't wish to give away all the details of any of the books that I have read this summer, but I will give insight to some intriguing story lines. In "The Memory Keeper's Daughter" we meet a man and a woman who are newly married and become pregnant and this all starts around the '50s. The woman ends up having twins that are delivered by her doctor husband (lucky I would say.) The first born was a boy they name Paul and the second a girl. They were not expecting twins and when she was born the doctor-slash-dad noticed the regular hints of Downs syndrome in the facial features of the little baby girl and passes the baby off to the attending nurse to take her to an institution to save the mother from trying to raise a "touched" child.
Problems and the lie the father is holding from his wife escalate and soon they fall apart. The nurse decides to keep the little girl, Pheobe, to raise as her own - going through their own struggles. It's a very touching book but I, personally, became almost angry at parts trying to get the characters to do what I wanted them to do in my head. But with no such avail. It is a very good book and I do recommend it to anyone that likes a good, touching story from time to time.
*The second book that I finished was one that I finished the day after I completed "The Memory Keeper's Daughter." It's called "Yours Until Dawn" by Teresa Medeiros. You might not have heard the name. Most likely it's because you are not familiar with romance novels. Let me define quickly that there are two kinds of romance novels. There are the smut-romance novels and the love-romance novels. This was border-line. It was a beauty-and-the-beast story, which is my favorite kind of story/fairy-tale/Disney movie. It's a sweet endearing love story with a little of the "smut" mixed in, but it's not overly exaggerated as it is in full-blown smut-romance novels.
It's a good read if you have the time. It's definitely an easy-read, but it is long. Three hundred and seventy-three pages long. I still haven't figured how you can make a romance novel drag on that long.
In any case, there are two main characters, Samantha and Gabriel. He's blind and he has a nasty scar on his face; both resulting from a war. She is a new nurse at his mansion - by the way, he's a rich'n. She grins and bares his hatefulness and obnoxious behavior and they both end up falling for each other. Of course, there is a great twist at the end of the novel that I wasn't even expecting!
I wouldn't recommend this book to just anybody. I guess you have to have the stomach for lovey-dovey romance novels.
*"House of Leaves" written by Mark Z. Danielewski was the third book I finished - the same night I finished "Yours Until Dawn," in fact. I started it almost two years ago when I received the book as a gift from my parents. I had asked for it because it seemed rather interesting. On further inspection, i.e. reading it, I found it to be quite dull and yet still too over-done in parts.
It's a very confusing book. In fact, it's a piece of artwork rather than a book. I don't mean the story was that good, I mean very plainly that the pages are white with scattered and mix-matched fonts, alignments, and written-gibberish. I've never seen anything like that that was purposefully made that way. It was a headache to get through; trying to save your place as you locate and read a three-page footnote. I tell you, it was getting ridiculous. But I finished it, thank you.
Listen carefully, unless you're extremely curious as to what this book is really like DON'T read it. Please, save yourself. It's not worth opening. I was horribly disappointed. All the reviews I read on it were very good, even the bad reviews were good! But the book was awful. And now I feel like Simon Cowell. Just don't read it.
*And finally the fourth book of the twelve days: "Lilith's Dream" by Whitely Strieber. It was a novel, yes. A rather disappointing novel it turned out to be. I hate reading the backs of books before I read them but I bought this one off a bargain-book shelf and it was fairly new - 2002 - and it looked very promising. This author I guess specializes in writing about vampires. I can say truthfully that I enjoy a good vampire movie or book every once in a while. This one, however, was pushing the threshold of my liking a little too much for comfort. Because it was a modern-day vampire story it jumped around a lot and there was a lot to do with government and CIA and New York. Not a big fan.
And surely, you can't ever have a vampire novel without a couple strange "love"-scenes scattered throughout the book whenever the author backs himself into a tight corner. The finally he breaks free of his writer's block long enough to throw in a chase scene or a decent dialog between a human woman, a half-vampire man, and their 1/16th-vampire son. Don't worry the whole book is not that weird or confusing.
I would actually recommend this book. It's lengthy but good. It's written well, apart from that over-done vampire-on-vampire action that really doesn't make any book any better.
Out of those four "The Memory Keeper's Daughter" was my favorite. I am currently out of new reading material. I just stayed up until five in the morning finishing half of "Lilith's Dream" and I guess I'm not even tired. I'm basically running on all adrenaline and I will eventually crash, and it will be bad.
Well, those were my four book reviews. I hope you enjoyed them. After I finish another book I'll get back to with another review.
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