Book Review: Just Like Mother by Anne Heltzel

 As a kid, I had always preferred teddy bears over dolls. Dolls looked creepy. And the cover photo of Just Like Mother reminded me of the serial killer doll, Chuckie.

So why did I pick up this book? Well, although Chuckie the movie freaked me out more than any other horror movie, I had this perverse curiosity to see if the doll in this book would go on a killing rampage.....and the verdict?

No, the dolls in the book were not killers though they were creepy enough on their own. They were life-like, and reacted like real babies. 

That said, the dolls were not the focus of the plot. Instead, the plot revolved around two cousins, Maeve and Andrea, who grew up together in a cult community.

Maeve escaped from the cult one night, and that was the last Maeve saw of Andrea. For twenty years, Maeve worked hard at establishing a life of her own, keeping everyone else at a safe distance.

And then, one day Andrea reappeared in Maeve's life. As the cousins reunited and Maeve spent more time in Andrea's home in a remote area, the childhood memories which she had buried were triggered. She had to confront her childhood terrors if she wanted to stay alive.

The plot wasn't bad, quite well-written. It just wasn't gripping enough. I could put the book down at will, and there were even days when I forgot to continue reading it. As a result, it took me weeks to finish this book instead of a day or two like some books which had even more pages than this.

Book Review: Ask For Andrea by Noelle W. Ihli

 This was a fun read. Ask for Andrea was written from three women's POV: Brecia, Meghan and Skye. Their POVs after they're dead. Murdered.

Yes, they're ghosts, and they're coming after James Carson, the serial killer who ended their lives. They're not your typical menacing, vengeful ghosts though. 

After Brecia was murdered, she haunted James with the intention to prevent him from killing other women. She was sometimes successful, sometimes not.

When she failed to help Meghan, she stopped following James out on his killing sprees. Instead, she stayed home with James' wife, April, and his two young daughters. 

Until one day when Skye, who was haunting her mother, followed the police to James' house and met Brecia. Then, they met Meghan, who had stayed by her remains, desperately wanting someone to find her. And that's when they joined forces to help the police catch James.

Unlike other horror genre, this book didn't attempt to frighten its readers. Instead, it devoted much of its time to fleshing out the three main characters. It had suspense interspersed with some heart-wrenching moments and comical relief.

I read that there is a short sequel to it, titled The River, to be published in January 2024 (should have been published now - it's already 3rd February 2024). If I could find it, I'll give it a read to see if it's as good as its prequel.

Book Review: Verity by Colleen Hoover

 I finally read Verity by Colleen Hoover, which was published two years before McFadden's The Wife Upstairs. The irony is, Verity was on New York Times Bestseller list for months and yet, I didn't feel inclined to read it until after I've read The Wife Upstairs, which wasn't even on a bestseller list! 

I'm not a fan of Hoover's work. I've read some of her books (It Ends With Us being one of them), and I haven't really liked or disliked them enough to write a review on them. 

But the reviews raved about Verity, and said The Wife Upstairs was just a fan fiction. Verity, apparently, was the first thriller Hoover ventured into. A personal Indie project, her website said. For a first attempt at writing thrillers, I must say it's really good. 

Now, how does it compare with The Wife Upstairs? What's similar?

1. The Characters.

Verity: Lowen was a struggling writer who could no longer afford to pay rent. She was commissioned to finish the remaining three novels out of a nine-novel series by Jeremy, the husband of Verity, a best-selling author who was semi-comatose after an accident. 

TWU: Sylvia was about to be turned out on the streets. She was hired by Adam Barnett, a best-selling author to be a companion to his wife Vicky, who was semi-paralyzed after an accident.

2. The Location.

Verity: Lowen had to stay in Verity & Jeremy's house to go through her notes and story outlines for the remaining three novels. The house and Verity creeped her out.

TWU: Sylvia had to stay in Adam and Vicky's house, a huge, gated mansion in a remote area. The house creeped Sylvia out.

3. The Plot.

Verity: Whilst going through the stacks of notes that Verity had in her office, Lowen discovered Verity's autobiography, which revealed horrifying and evil secrets.

TWU: Vicky pointed to a drawer and gestured with her hand that she wanted Sylvia to read her diary, which detailed a troubled marriage between her and Adam.

With the similarities out of the way, how do these two books really compare, writing-wise? In my personal opinion, I find Hoover's Verity to have a stronger voice. The autobiography was savage, for want of a better word. No doubt it had too many pages of explicit sexual act (think Fifty Shades of Grey), just like McFadden's TWU had too many pages of adoration for Adam, but the voice was strong and demanded your undivided attention.

Vicky in TWU had an easily dismissed voice, by comparison. I couldn't help thinking why she didn't just ditched Adam. 

Although there was extra-marital sex committed in the marital home in the marital bed, in TWU the protagonist had a conscience and decided to end the affair.

In Verity, Lowen had no such qualms. She even suggested that Jeremy placed Verity in a nursing home so that he could move on and have a life (with her, Lowen). Talk about a home-breaker! I had no sympathy for her, nor did I care about her being creeped out by Verity. 

And the ending? TWU had a more believable twist. Verity's twist left me in disbelief. Not disbelief in a good way, but disbelief as in, what evidence was there for me to believe that crap? I read and re-read, but no, it just didn't do it for me. That letter in the end wasn't a twist. The autobiography was the truth, the voice was real and authoritative. The letter was a feeble attempt to manipulate Jeremy into believing her innocence.

Read also: The Wife Upstairs

Book Review: The Wife Upstairs by Freida McFadden

 Before I start on a book, I checked out the reviews first. Just to see if a book is worth my time. All the reviews had the same thing to say: The Wife Upstairs is just a fan fiction, that it is similar to Verity by Colleen Hoover which was published two years earlier, and that even the dialogue is similar.

Well, I haven't read Verity by Colleen Hoover yet, but I shall do so after I'm done with this review.

This book gripped me right from the very first page. The narrator is Sylvia Johnson. She is about to become homeless and is desperate. She is offered a dream job by Adam Barnett, a New York best-selling author, to take care of his wife, Victoria, who is semi-paralyzed from a fall down a long spiral staircase.

The Barnetts live in a huge, gated mansion at the tip of Long Island, a remote and isolated area with power cuts during a storm. The house gave Sylvia the creeps, she felt she will be doomed if she stays there. Yet, she has no choice. It was either accept the job or be turned out on the streets.

The diary was a little lame at first, it went into great detail on how much Victoria loved Adam, and the wonderful sex they had together. The story only picked up after the second half of the book, when Victoria started writing about how Adam was an obsessive, jealous control freak which sent warning tingles down my spine.

I would have gotten the hell out of the house, homeless or not. But both Victoria and Sylvia were women blinded by handsome men. Instead of running away from Adam, they stayed on with him. Sylvia even comforted herself with the thought that Victoria hadn't mentioned that Adam was violent.

McFadden tried to make the reader wonder who the true villain was by putting out some red herrings, but I wasn't fooled one bit. That said, this book is still interesting enough for me to recommend it. 

And now I'm off to start on Verity.

Read also: Verity

Book Review: The Klone and I by Danielle Steel

 

The Klone and I is a story about a love triangle that develops between Stephanie and Peter, and his clone, Paul Klone. 

Peter is a bionic genius, and he sends his clone, Paul, to Stephanie to entertain and amuse her when he goes away on business trips. 

Mayhem ensued when Paul Klone arrives at Stephanie's doorstep. Paul is the very opposite of Peter. While Peter is a conservatively dressed businessman, Paul is loud and flashy. He likes tight-fitting neon leotards, thinks nothing of enacting a real fart in Charade and likes to do triple flips whilst making love (giggle).

It is one of those light, fluffy, entertaining books that serious-minded readers should give a miss.  There is nothing substantial here, it's just lots of fun rides, much like going to a theme park. I went away feeling entertained and amused, with my brain cells preserved and unused.

*Spoiler alert*

That said, I felt the ending was a little unexpected. The author had led me to believe that the protagonist was falling in love with the clone. Paul had more attention and pages given to him than Peter. You would be forgiven for forgetting that there is a Peter in the story. There was hardly any character development where Peter was concerned. He remained a familiar stranger till the end. Paul was the one who had all the character development. 

And with all that was going on, the ending felt a little rushed. Like as if the editor said, ok, you've reached your maximum number of words.

Book Review: Famous Five Series by Enid Blyton

Like most kids before the digital world took over, I grew up with Enid Blyton books. My mother thought the late Enid Blyton's books were sufficiently interesting despite having out-dated sets of rules by my time. She started me on the younger children's books like The Three Golliwogs, Amelia Jane, etc before progressing to the older children's books as I grew into a teen.

So, when I came across an article that said the Famous Five books are worth a small fortune now, I was naturally curious to read the books again. Just to see what the fuss is all about, to look at them with an adult's eye, so to speak.

What I found after reading the entire twenty-one books in a month was interesting. The series had inconsistencies. We were told, in the first book "Five on Treasure Island", that George lives in Kirrin Cottage, and that her mother had given Kirrin Island to George. It had belonged to her mother's side of family for decades if not centuries. We were not told, in the first book, what George's last name was, but we could safely conclude that George's mother's last name was Kirrin (Kirrin Cottage and Kirrin Island had belonged to the Kirrins since time memorial).

Before I proceed any further, it must be stated that Enid Blyton published one Famous Five book a year, which made the entire series a twenty-one-year effort.

Perhaps it was because of that very fact, and maybe Enid Blyton was getting on in years, about ten or so books down the line Enid Blyton suddenly mentioned that it was George's father who gave Kirrin Island to George, that Kirrin Island had belonged to her father's side of family. And, *drum roll*, George's father became a Mr Kirrin.

Move forward another eight or so books later, it went back to George's mother who gave Kirrin Island to George, that it had belonged to her mother's side of family from day one. However, George's father was still a Mr Kirrin, and Julian, Dick and Anne were now referred to as the Kirrins too.

What gives?? The man takes the family name of the wife after marriage and his brother (Julian, Dick and Anne's father) followed suit?? Or had Enid Blyton lost track of who the original Kirrin descendant was, considering the series took over two decades?

And is it because of these inconsistencies that the Famous Five series is worth a small fortune now? Like currency notes and coins which have defects?

Book Review: The Humans by Matt Haig

The Humans by Matt Haig takes a fun, irreverent look at the human species, our appearances and way of life.  The novel revolves around the narration of an alien species called the Vonnadorians, in the form of a report to his superiors.

The author did not tell the readers what the alien looked like, but from the alien's horrified reporting of humans, one can allude that Vonnadorians most likely resemble a round ball with huge eyes. "Their faces alone contain all manner of curiosities. A primitive external auditory organs known as ears, tiny eyes and unfathomably pointless eyebrows." It went on to describe the "primitivenesss" of having external limbs, and the unfathomableness of the law requiring the human species to wear odd things called clothes.

This description of humans resonated with me as I had, between 2008 and 2010, written another blog from the perspective of my cats. I had wondered what my cats thought of us changing our clothes all the time, our activities, our going-in and going-out of the house and coming home with bags of groceries or new household items. So, from my cats' point of view, we were constantly changing our skins, we sometimes hanged our skins on coat hooks, put them into a square looking contraption that washed and tumbled-dried our skins and we went out to hunt for food at fixed hours daily, but were only successful at weekends.

But I digressed. Back to the novel, the nameless alien was placed on earth to take the place of a brilliant mathematical professor, Andrew Martin. It was hinted that the said professor was abducted and killed by the Vonnadorians for a breakthrough mathematical discovery that would threaten the universe.

The narrator alien's job was to find out who Andrew Martin had revealed the mathematical evidence to, assassinate those who knew, and destroy the evidence.

 

Book Review: The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

 The Silent Patient opened with Alicia Berenson's diary. It began with "I don't know why I'm writing this. That's not true. Maybe I do know and just don't want to admit it to myself." And she went on to write about how much she loved her husband Gabriel so much so that she.....here she stopped and wrote "No I won't write about that. This is going to be a joyful record of ideas and images. No crazy thoughts allowed." 

With that, I was reeled in hook, line and sinker. With such an introduction, you knew there were going to be layers in the story, with plot twists.

At thirty-three years old, Alicia shot her husband five times when he came home one night after work and then went completey silent while her therapist, obssessed at finding out her motive, continued to work on her.

The story is told from the therapist's point of view and the silent Alicia's diary. At a certain point in the story, I started to wonder if one of the narration is reliable. Did Alicia kill her husband or did someone else do it? If so, why did she keep silent? Who was she protecting? Or who was she afraid of? Those were my questions as I kept reading. 

The answer wasn't what I expected, but it explained everything neatly. A well-written story, it kept me glued to the end.

Book Review: Tales From The Cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

The only reason I read the second installment of Before The Coffee Gets Cold is my curiosity about the resident ghost in the cafe.

In the seat that takes you back to the past is a woman in a white dress. She had gone to the past to meet her dead husband and failed to return to the present. If you try to forcefully remove her from the seat, she curses you. You can only occupy the seat when she leaves the seat to use the toilet once a day. Yes, this ghost uses the toilet!!

While I did find out the identity of the ghost, it was just a few short sentences. The author did not explain why she failed to return. The reader is left to assume that she lost track of time and her coffee went cold.

I will not go into detail what the theme of the book is about. You can check out my review of the first book here. 

The second book has the same flaws as the first book, excruciating repetitive details of clothes, appearances and re-introduction of characters, with permanent thought bubbles above their heads. 

The method would have worked better with a play than a novel. The actors could step up to the front of the stage and whisper their thoughts to the audience.

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Book Review: Before The Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Book Review: Before The Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

 If you could go back to the past, who would you want to meet? That is what a basement cafe in a back alley in Tokyo offers. A chance to go back to the past to meet someone for the last time.

Before you think "oh, another time-travel book", let me tell you this is not your regular time-travel piece. There are four rules in this time-travel cafe.

First, no matter what you do while you're in the past it will not change the present. Even if you warned the person who had died in a car accident to avoid a certain route, that person would still die by some other means. 

Second, you may only meet people who had been to the cafe. 

Third, there is only one seat in the cafe that takes you back to the past. You must remain seated in that seat the entire time you're back in the past. If your butt so much as leaves the chair by just 0.001 millimeter you would be wrenched back immediately to the present. And since you have only one chance to travel back to the past in your whole life, you wouldn't want to waste that chance.

Fourth, you are transported to the past when the coffee is poured and returned to the present when you finished the coffee. You must return to the present before the coffee gets cold, or you would turn into a ghost.

Now, with those premises, the book sounds like fun, right? That's what I thought. Unfortunately, the author failed to deliver. I skipped through more pages than I could count. 

Before The Coffee Gets Cold has four stories that are interconnected. If I have to liken the stories to food, then the plots are mere side dishes. 

The main dishes are long narratives of repetitive description of the cafe, undue emphasis on the clothes and appearance of the characters and what everyone is thinking. It is like everyone inside the cafe has a permanent thought bubble up there in the air.

Now, if those thoughts help move the story along, fine, I can accept that even if it leaves out all the mystery. But they don't. Not all of them, at any rate.

But the worst is that each story re-introduces the characters, the cafe and how things are done in great detail. I felt insulted. It was like as if the author thought his readers have Alzheimer's and needed reminding. Either that or his readers are exceptionally slow and dim.

The only thing I was curious about in the book was the identity of the resident ghost in the cafe, a woman dressed in white. And it was that curiosity that compelled me to read the second installment, Tales of the Cafe. 

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Book Review: Tales From The Cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Book Review: The It Girl by Ruth Ware

The It Girl is another whodunnit by Ruth Ware. Six Oxford University students became fast friends during their first term, and one of them is dead by the second term. Murdered. The story is told from two timelines, alternating between "before" and "after" the murder.

Unlike many of Ruth Ware's books which grips you from page one, The It Girl was a bit slow to build up. But once the pace picked up, it was hard to put down. I finished the book in two days.

Hannah, the protagonist, was hounded by the media over the murder of her best friend (it was her testament that put a suspect behind bars) but instead of taking a stand and telling them to buzz off, she went into hiding. 

A decade later, a reporter found her at her work place and convinced her to start recalling her memories of what she saw on the night of the murder.

As she dug deeper and deeper into the past, it began to look like one of her friends was the murderer. Or was it someone else? Ruth Ware is really good at the game of casting doubts on every character. :-)

Book Review: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jekins Reid

After the somber Midnight Library by Matt Haig I wanted something frivolous. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo seems to be as good as any. A Hollywood superstar had engaged an unknown reporter to write her authorized biography. How serious can a book about one's seven husbands be, right?

Wrong. A few pages in, and I realised my mistake. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is far from frivolous. Evelyn Hugo may be rich and successful but she could not be with the only person she was in love with. Not without losing everything she had worked for.

The narrative was rich in details without going overboard. Some people may find the LGBT scenes in the book uncomfortable, and if they do, they should just skip those parts. It didn't bother me as my principle has always been not to judge and to each their own. 

Throughout the book one question continued to raise its head, why did Evelyn Hugo choose an unknown reporter to tell her life story to? The answer wasn't what I had anticipated, I had imagined a variety of reasons but the author managed to surprise me. I like that. I've always liked unexpected explanations.

At the end of the book, I had one burning question: is this an unauthorized biography of Elizabeth Taylor? My mum was a fan of Elizabeth Taylor and I had heard all about Taylor's eight marriages to seven men. So I googled.

What I discovered was, the book was indeed inspired by Elizabeth Taylor's life. Reid, the author, said it was inspired by Elizabeth Taylor & Ava Gardner's life. Little wonder the book read like a fictionalised true story.

 

Book Review: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

In life, there are many choices, and within a choice, there are many other choices. It is like a tree with many branches within a branch, or a road with many forks within a fork. 

Once you have made a choice, do not look back with regret at the choices you hadn't made. Instead, make the best of it, without any expectations. For without expectations, you will have no disappointment. And without any disappointment or regret, you will have no depression. 

That is the lesson I took away from The Midnight Library. No expectation = no disappointment or regret = no depression.

In the book, Nora Seed was very depressed, she regretted all the choices she hadn't made as well as the ones she had made. Her life was not what she had expected it to be and she felt she could not do anything right, not even a simple thing like caring for her cat. She wanted to end her life.

In between life and death, she came upon a library. Within that library, the shelves of books went on forever. Each book contained a life that could have been hers had she made that choice. If she found a life that she liked, she could stay in that life. If she didn't like it, she would be transported back to the library to choose another life.

In that suspended state, Nora lived various different lives, trying them out to see if she would like to live one of them. And in doing that, she began to appreciate her original life. It is the book to go to if we ever need to be reminded to be content and happy with our choices and what we have.

Book Review: Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate

Before We Were Yours is not only a gripping book from page one, it is also one of those profound, thought-provoking books that made me check with Mr Google if the events mentioned were true the moment I finished it. The narrative was so detailed and complicated that it couldn't have been born out of an author's imagination. It was too real. And it turned out that my instinct was right. 

While the book is a fictional work, it was based on the notorious scandals that involved the Tennessee Children's Home Society operated by Georgia Tann. 

On the surface the Tennessee Children's Home Society is an orphanage, but in reality it was an organization that kidnapped children from their homes to be placed for adoption by wealthy and powerful families. Newborn babies were also stolen from their mothers in the hospitals. The mothers would be told their babies were dead. Blond and blue-eyed children were targeted as they were in demand. (Google up both Tennessee Children's Home Society and Geogia Tann to read more about the true events.)

The story in the book is told from two timelines, one as a flashback to 1939, from the viewpoint of Rill Foster who was snatched from her shanty boat home together with her four siblings when she was twelve years old. The other is in the present day, told from the point of view of Avery Stafford, the daughter of a prominent Senator who visited a nursing home and was mistaken for someone else by a resident there.

The two timelines merged towards the end of the book as Avery dug into the past of her family.

Although Avery Stafford was the central character, the voice of Rill Foster was more compelling, and the events more poignant. One has to be made of rock not to be moved by the events that Rill and her siblings had to go through. 

That said, it is a book with a satisfactory ending, not one that left you weeping buckets of tears (I hate those). 

Book Review: Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

 

Outlander was first published in 1991 but I only came to know of it recently when a friend recommended the book. It is the first in the Outlander book and TV series.

Outlander is a story about time-travel romance between Claire Randall and Jamie Fraser. Claire is a military nurse who served in the World War II. When the war ended in 1945 she reunited with her husband Frank. They had married shortly before war broke out, and were separated for six years. They decided to take a second honeymoon in a village in Scotland where they were married.

It was in that village, up on a hill, where Claire was suddenly transported back in time to 18th century Scotland. There, she met and married Jamie Fraser.

That is the first issue I have with the book. Call it what you want, bigamy is still bigamy regardless of the time period. You can't argue that two hundred years ago Claire wasn't married yet. That argument is not valid because Claire wasn't even born yet at that time. However, the married Claire from year 1945 was the same person who married a second man while still being married. 

My second objection is the relationship between Claire and Jamie. Jamie is a guy who would be arrested and jailed today for domestic violence. But in the book, it was "normal" for a husband to beat his wife, and then get turned on by the beating and raped her. That is one SICK man, to say it's a normal in the 18th century is just a very poor excuse to glamourize domestic violence. 

My third grouse is that Frank, the legal husband, was not given more story-time. He was a gentle, affectionate History professor. I much preferred his personality to that of Jamie Fraser. But because the book was told only from Claire's point of view, there was no mention of a possibly distraught Frank searching for Claire. I wish the author had done a multiple points of view, I would have loved to know what went on in Frank's mind as he searched fruitlessly for Claire, and how the villagers took the disappearance of her, especially Mrs Baird, the nosy proprietor of the bed and breakfast where Claire and Frank stayed at.

Book Review: The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Although The Help was published in 2009 I did not know about it until it was listed in New York Times Bestseller List for the month of June 2012. 

I love to check out the synopsis of each book that made it to the list and if the plot or content looked interesting, I'd download the e-book. The Help looked promising. (Obtaining books used to be slightly more irksome as it required a trip to the local bookstores and sometimes you went away disappointed as they didn't have the title that you wanted.)

Set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, The Help is about African-American maids working in middle-class white households. The story is narrated by three strong and courageous ladies: 

a) Aibileen, who takes care of Mae Mobley, a two-year-old daughter of Elizabeth Leefolt; 

b) Minny, who is always loosing her job due to her sassy mouth and who now works for Celia Foote, whom the society ladies referred to as 'white trash';

c) Eugenia 'Skeeter', daughter of a cotton plantation owner and journalist wannabe.

Skeeter had graduated and returned home to find that Constantine, the black maid who raised her, had disappeared. No one would tell her what had happened.

Meanwhile, she applied for an editor's job with publishers Harper and Roe. The senior editor, Elaine Stein, called her personally to tell her that her application was rejected, but she was encouraged to write a  book on a subject that was interesting and mattered to her.

Rallying the help of Aibileen and Minny, Skeeter started on her book about what it is like for black maids to work in white households. Secret trips were made to Aibileen's home where interviews with the maids were held. 

As the story unfolded, I was hooked and reeled in like a fish. The 'voices' of Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter were distinct from each other and believable. But most of all, it was the inhumane and racist treatment of the African American maids that got to me. I had never imagined that the whites in America were so racist in the early 1960s. I had to google to verify the facts.

'Blacks are dirty and have disease' was the constant thing you heard. They did not allow a black maid to use the toilets in the house, nor were they allowed to use the same cutleries or plates as their white employers. Everything was segregated. They had shops for the blacks and shops for the whites. As long as a black woman was not wearing a white uniform signifying that she's shopping for her white mistress, she was not allowed to enter the stores for the whites. In the story, when a black guy was caught buying petrol from a white petrol kiosk, he was beaten almost to death, never mind that he didn't know it was a white petrol kiosk.

It really made me wonder, why are people so uncomfortable with the colour black? And I don't mean only the Africans. Black cats are shunned, too. They are the least adopted, and the myth of their bringing bad luck to a household is propagated throughout the centuries.

Book Review: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

This is the first Haruki Murakami novel that I've ever read, and I would never have touched this book with a long pole if not for the fact that it was in the New York Times Bestseller list on 4th December 2011. Yes, I had downloaded that book into my Kindle since December last year, but was only able to start reading it early last month.

A 3-volume work that was written in Japanese, the books were combined into a huge single-volume monster when translated into English. A friend told me that I would be eighty by the time I finished the book. She was being caustic about the massive book,  of course, it would be many decades before I turn eighty, but I get what she meant. It took me more than a month to finish the 1000-page novel. But hang on....I've read 1000+ pages novels before in four days, one-eighth of the time it took me to finish '1Q84'. 'Under the Dome' by Stephen King comes to mind. So, what gives? Why did it take eight  times longer to finish the book?

'1Q84' was a long, tedious novel. If 'Under the Dome' was a home-made burger of 100% beef patty, then '1Q84' was a cheap mass-produced burger with lots of fillers added. Hundreds of prosaic pages that did not move the story along were filled for no other reason than to contribute to the wealth of the timber tycoons. I would not have bothered completing the novel except that I was curious to find out if the two protagonists, Aomame and Tengo,  would ever meet and if they had wandered into an alternate reality or living in a parallel universe.

The plot vacillates between Aomame and Tengo with Tokyo as the setting....a Tokyo with two moons and 'Little People' who emerged from the mouth of a dead goat. Little people that came out as two inches tall but shook themselves up to twenty-eight inches. They plucked thin threads from the air and made air chrysalises. 

Those little people, we were told, were intelligent and powerful with long arms. Intelligent....ok, the most intelligent words that came out of their mouths were, "Ho, ho.". As for powerful.....they can't directly harm the protagonists (read: limited powers), and they kept shifting their focus like a five-year-old with short attention span. 

Last, but not least, four whole months were dedicated to Aomame not doing anything except cook, eat, read, sleep and exercise. A more depressing book I have yet to come across. Each reading left me feeling dejected to the point of being suicidal. Die-hard fans of Haruki Murakami are probably going to slay me for this criticism, but I welcome their putting an end to my misery. '1Q84' is nothing more than a long, painful verbal diarrhea. 

Book Review: Micro by Michael Crichton & Richard Preston

Micro, a nano-technology thriller, was one-third written when Michael Crichton died. His agent looked for a co-writer to finish the novel based on Crichton's notes , files and two drawn maps. Richard Preston was eventually selected to complete the novel, based on his science background and bioterrorism work. The book was published in November 2011. 

Micro was set in the rainforest of Hawaii and features a villainous entrepreneur and Harvard graduate students shrunk to half an inch tall (though the scientists in the novel referred to them as dimensionally changed). Small insects like ants saw them as food. Added to that mix were micro-robots programmed to kill. Think Honey, I Shrunk The KIds and miniature Jurassic Park.

The plot opened with a private investigator being hired to check out the nanotechnology organization which resulted in three mysterious deaths in an office, one of them being the private investigator himself. The police was baffled, as the only clues were ultra-fine, sharp razor cuts all over their bodies. The doors and windows to the office were locked from within and there were no signs of struggles of any kind. They just plopped down dead. Period.

Besides the action-packed story, the novel also contained a lot of rich details on the flora and fauna, insect life and their anatomy and biotechnology. One of the characters, Rick Hutter, an ethnobotanist, reminded me of my late grandmother. He believed that you could fight venom with venom. My late grandmother would catch centipedes and pickled them in vinegar, or was it wine, I don't remember. I was just a young kid then. Each centipede that crawled in our garden was perceived as priceless treasure and would be carefully picked up with a pair of tweezer before being lowered into a jar of vinegar/wine. She said the venom of the centipede would counteract the venom of a snake bite.   

But I digress....anyway, this novel educates as well as entertains. I was hooked right from the beginning and finished the 424-pages book in one and a half days (read: no productive work was done during that period).

Book Review: 11.22.63 by Stephen King

This is Stephen King's first attempt at a time travel piece, even though the idea for 11.22.63 came to him in 1971. King said that "back then, the wound was still raw and it would require too much research and literary talent" that he didn't think he had. When he returned to the project later, King had to read a lot of historical documents and archives in preparation for the novel. He even found out how much drinks and food cost at that time.

11.22.63 centres on Jake Epping, a high school English teacher at Lisbon Falls, Maine, who travelled back in time to try to prevent the assassination of JKF. The time bubble was at the back pantry of a diner. And the time in the past was 9 September, 1958 at 11:58am, Lisbon Falls, Maine. 

In order to prevent the assassination, Jake would have to stay in the past for four years. And the past is obdurate. It refused to be changed, and would do anything to prevent Jake from changing it. 

The concept was fascinating but somehow, the plot did not hold me in its grip. There wasn't enough tension or action and it was one of the few Stephen King novels that I was able to put down to attend to other things. It wasn't a poorly written novel. But it wasn't one of his better ones either. 

That said, anybody who enjoys reading as a pastime should try to lay their hands on a copy. There's a lot of interesting trivial data, like how women in that era were different from today's women. 

Book Review: 1222 by Anne Holt

I've never read Anne Holt's work before even though she's a best-selling novelist. That's because she's a Norwegian author, and her novels are all written in Norwegian. So English readers like me are lucky when her eighth installment of The Hanne Wilhelmsen series was translated into English.

After having read Snow by Orhan Pamuk, which was also another translated work, Anne Holt's 1222 is a refreshing change. It draws you in. 

Although it's a crime thriller, it is not one of those action-packed novels that I like. Rather, it is reminiscent of Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes. It focuses more on solving the puzzle of the crime instead of the crime itself. That said, I do like Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes, too, so if there is going to be anymore English-translated work of Holt's, I'd be sure to read them.

1222 is the name of a hotel atop a mountain near a train station. The story begins with a snow blizzard that caused the train to derail. The survivors were rescued and taken to Finse 1222. Snowed in and unable to go home, people started to die. 

Amongst the survivors was a former police detective Hanne Wilhelmsen. Paralyzed from waist down due to a bullet that hit her 12th and 13th vertebrae, she tried to work out who the murderer was from a long list of suspects.

Even though I am more a fan of fast action novels, somehow the narration of 1222 managed to draw me into the story and it was one of those hard-to-put-down books. Imagine this....my nose was buried in my Kindle as hubby and I walked along Jalan Telawi in Bangsar.....