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). 

Putrajaya Floral Fest 2022

Launched in 2007, Putrajaya Floral Fest is held annually except for the two years' Covid lockdown in 2020 and 2021. 

Anjung Floria, the venue, was awashed with colorful blooms when a friend and I visited yesterday. This year's theme is orchids, with many unique varieties which yours truly haven't seen before. Apart from orchids, there are chrysanthemums, diasies, sunflowers and roses. But the majority are orchids and chrysanthemums. Even the bees and butterflies visited.

A cultural dance took place while I was there

Each year that the event is held, there are three winners in the theme categories. This year's winning orchids are the Rothschild's Slipper Orchid, Cattleya Orchid and Rhyncholaedia Digbyana, in the following order. (I'm not an orchid expert, it was Mr Google who informed me what the species are.)

1st prize - Paphiopedilum Rothschilddianum (Rothschild's Slipper)

2nd prize - Cattleya Orchid

3rd prize - Rhyncholaelia Digbyana

Date: 29 August - 4 Septemter 2022

Hours:  From 9am to 10pm

Entrance Fees: 

RM15 (Malaysian adults)

RM5 (Malaysian child 7 to 12 years old & senior citizen above RM60 years old)

RM100 (non-Malaysian adult)

RM50 (non-Malaysian child 7 - 12 years old & senior citizen above 60 years old)

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: Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright & Bradley Hope

 

When Billion Dollar Whale was first published in 2018, it was hard to get a copy in Malaysia. It was not immediately available at local bookstores, neither could I find it online. If not for a relative in Australia who sent a copy to me, I would not have been able to read it. 

Wait....why am I reviewing a book that I read four years ago? That's because the law seems to have finally caught up with a few of the people involved in the financial fraud, and when I mentioned some details from the book to friends and acquaintances, I found to my surprise that many have yet to read the book. Neither were they aware of its existence.

Billion Dollar Whale is an account of Jho Low, a young Malaysian man who came from a relatively wealthy but obscure background to become one of Hollywood's high-flyers who mingled with the likes of Paris Hilton, Megan Fox and Leonardo DiCaprio, just to name a few. Well, perhaps "mingled" is a wrong word. He PAID millions in US dollars for them to hang around him at parties.

The book focused on how Jho Low siphoned US$4 billion out of Malaysian public funds. His flamboyance made the movie "Wall Street" looked like child's play. Unfortunately I do not remember enough of the details to write about them in depth (I read the book FOUR years ago!), but a couple of things stayed in my mind till today.

Jho Low used his time in Wharton to make friends with children from elite families. To appear like he's in their league, he rented yachts, luxury homes and cars and passed them off as belonging to his family. There was one luxury home he rented where he planted his family photos strategically around the house to further cement the lie. 

Another impression that lingered was that Jho Low might not like women very much. He might have surrounded himself with extremely beautiful women, but he did not seem to care for their company. 

For example, he would pose with them for the cameras, looking for all the world like he enjoyed their company but once the cameras were gone, he would sit alone or with other men, smoking or drinking. His interactions with them were more like a king with his subjects. It was as if he was telling the women that they might be highly paid sought-after celebrities, but they're nothing more than background setting to him. 

Putrajaya "Avatar" Garden

Well, for better or for worse I've revived my defunct blog under a different name, with a major cosmetic change. It is now streamlined to focus only on travels and book reviews.

It took some effort, I had so many places and books that I wanted to blog about, which one should I start with? One idea after another were tossed aside for later, until eventually I felt that it is more appropriate to share about the latest attraction at Putrajaya, the administrative capital of Malaysia.

Best of all, it is my adjacent neighbourhood, and is free from traffic jam. Most of the wide roads are relatively traffic-free, unlike downtown city.

Putrajaya is a beautiful place, each building has its own character, with one looking like an alien mothership. Even something as mundane as street lights are gorgeous. Each street has a different, intricately designed street lights. Even the traffic lights look like a tentacle of an alien. My favourite street lights are those that were designed to look like a vertical half of our traditional kites called "Wau". Until I take pictures of the street lights, below is what a Wau looks like.

Photo source: www.calendata.com

So is it any surprise that the latest garden lights look like something out of the Avatar movie like some say? 

The car park is on the right after this square

The blue lights do look a bit like out of Avatar

A great place to go on a date unless you prefer a more secluded garden, in which case either the Lake Gardens (aka Perdana Botanical Gardens ) or Titiwangsa Lake Garden would be a better fit.

This garden is at Taman Putra Perdana, Precinct 1, opposite Pulse Grande Hotel. Parking is available onsite and is free. The lights are turned on at 7.00pm.

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.