Review - Stardust by Neil Gaiman

Stardust by Neil Gaiman
Publisher: Harper Perennial 2006
Paperback 250 pages



Romantic, sweet and highly imaginative, Stardust is that perfect blend of high fantasy, humor and charm with characters that draw you in and make you fall in love. After months of reading history and science books this was the ideal book to break my fast from fantasy fiction.

Tristan Thorn, a boy living in a rural English village that borders the land of Faerie, has lived an ordinary life, in an ordinary village until the day he decides to cross the boundary that separates his village from the magical land beyond to find a fallen star. He sets off upon this quest driven by the desire to win the hand of a beautiful girl from home, only to find a truer love in the adventure and life he finds outside his small town.

At only 250 pages, this story can be read in one very long sitting and is gripping enough that you won't want to put it down until it's last gripping chapter where all of the many side stories... the murderous brothers searching for their crown, the witch seeking to cut the heart from a star and the boy who only wants to go home to his love, are finally brought together into a sweetly satisfying ending.

Review - The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw

The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. 2009
Hardback 287 pages



In Ali Shaw's debut novel, The Girl with Glass Feet, we are led into a world that while it may exist in modern times, it is still is a land of magic and mystery, where the barrier between our reality and the land of faerie is blurred. Set on the fictional island of St. Hauda's Land, a young girl sets upon a quest to find the only person she believes can cure her of an affliction akin to a curse. Shortly after visiting the island on a holiday from the mainland, Ida finds that her feet are slowly turning to glass. And while it starts with just the tips of her toes she soon finds that it is creeping ever farther up her body. She returns to the island to seek out an eccentric character whom she believes has the magic and knowledge to save her. What she finds instead is that hers isn't the only secret that the island holds and that her story is only a small thread in this complex tapestry of tales of magic and love.

Review - A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias

A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias
Publisher: Scribner 2009
Hardback 371 pages



What constitutes the perfect marriage? Does it come from faithfulness or having an almost blind devotion to your significant other? Or maybe it comes only after years of living together, experiencing the challenges, sorrows and joy that life brings.

A Happy Marriage is an autobiographical novel, celebrating the love and marriage of Rafael Yglesias to his wife, Margaret Joskow, who died in 2004 of bladder cancer. Yglesias has chosen to express this not in a true memoir, but in a fictionalized novel of the turbulent relationship between Enrique Sabas and his wife Margaret. The novel alternates between the courtship and early marriage of Enrique and Margaret and scenes of Margaret's losing battle with cancer.

This novel is both a touching picture of a blossoming relationship and a painful tale of betrayal, forgiveness and redemption. If there is anything I learned from the story of these two people is that a perfect marriage is anything but. It is a journey fraught with tribulations and heartache, but also unexpected joy. And that sometimes we learn only too late the true meaning of what it is to love another.

Review - The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
Publisher: Pantheon Books 1997
Hardback 218 pages




I read this book twice in the matter of two days. I couldn't help myself. As I started to write the review for this book I found that nothing that I said, no words that I could write, could convey the meaning I had found within its pages.

At the very heart of this book, this is a story of love and guilt. Love bred of desire and shame, need and insecurity. The story starts with a love affair. 15 year old Michael Berg falls ill coming home from school one day and is helped by a single woman, 20 years his senior, Hanna. After a long illness, Michael returns to thank the woman and finds himself drawn to her strength and assuredness. His desire and hers, for reasons we never fully understand, draw them into an affair. As part of their daily ritual of love making, Hanna begins to make Michael read to her. As the affair continues, Hanna's erratic, domineering and sometimes violent behavior casts a shadow on his love for her. The affair ends abruptly one day when Hanna leaves town, with no warning and no clue as to where she went. Michael finds himself dead with guilt over her disappearance, blaming himself for her need to flee.

Fast forward ten years later. Michael is a law student, observing a trial of several women accused of war crimes during the second world war. Hanna is one of the defendants. As the trial progresses, Michael is haunted by the guilt of the past, and struggles to find what, if any, responsibility he bears for this woman he once loved. It is during the trial that Michael first comes to realize Hanna's startling secret (and a secret that was obvious to me at the start of this novel). This book is more about a young man's guilt however, it is also about a national guilt that was felt for generations after WWII. Michael's shame at loving Hanna is tied to the greater feelings of shame and guilt that the entire nation felt after the war. The novel also explores the generational differences in experiencing this guilt; from Michael and Hanna and from Michael and his father.

The last act of the book is after Hanna has been convicted and sentenced to life in jail for her crimes during the war. Here is where I will stop, because it is at this point where one must experience for oneself the way love and guilt resolves themselves in Michael's mind. This is a novel that I am sure that I will come to again and again in my life.

Review - Godmother by Carolyn Turgeon

Godmother by Carolyn Turgeon
Publisher: Three Rivers Press 2009
Paperback 273 pages



Everyone, at one point or another, needs a good fairytale. I'm not talking about a Disneyized washed out Brothers Grimm disaster either. I'm talking a fairytale for adults. One that brings magic into our lives, with just that slight element of something darker lurking under the surface.

In Carolyn Turgeon's Godmother we get the old tale of Cinderella with a twist. What if it wasn't Cinderella at the ball? What if the death of Cinderella's mother and father, instead of making her sing with mice, made her a suicide case waiting to happen? In this delightfully imagined tale we find Cinderella's fairy godmother in present day New York. After failing her duty to Cinderella she is cast out of the fairy realm and made to fend for herself. Working in a small bookstore, the godmother decides that the only way to redeem herself is to bring two people together; her boss, a shy bookstore owner, and a new acquaintance, who is still grieving for a lover that died years before.

The ending is unexpected, but wonderfully bittersweet. While the story can move fast at times, and too slowly in others, in the whole the creativity of the novel makes it worth the effort. Just don't forget your glass slippers!

Review - Love Story by Erich Segal

Love Story by Erich Segal
Publisher: HarperCollins 2005
Paperback 131 pages



I decided to read Love Story after a friend recommended this book to me. I have to say when I saw the "heft" of this little novel (130 pages!) I immediately thought that it would be nothing more than another 1970's novella of self-love and destructive lives. What I got, however, was a deeply moving tale of loss, love and forgiveness. I have never been one to enjoy love stories, especially those that featured love that seemed to defy all logic and reason. This little novella made me see how love at first sight might truly feel and that maybe there is room in this world for a different kind of love.

Then again, I may just be reflecting my own yearnings for a love that is as strong as Jenny and Oliver's. One that is able to withstand even the most abject horrors.