Review: Wolf Mark

This book was sent to me by the publisher

From Goodreads:

Luke King knows a lot of things. Like four different ways to disarm an enemy before the attacker can take a breath. Like every detail of every book he’s ever read. And Luke knows enough—just enough—about what his father does as a black ops infiltrator to know which questions not to ask. Like why does his family move around so much?
Luke just hopes that this time his family is settled for a while. He’ll finally be able to have a normal life. He’ll be able to ask the girl he likes to take a ride with him on his motorcycle. He’ll hang out with his friends. He’ll be invisible—just as he wants.
But when his dad goes missing, Luke realizes that life will always be different for him. Suddenly he must avoid the kidnappers looking to use him as leverage against his father, while at the same time evading the attention of the school’s mysterious elite clique of Russian hipsters, who seem much too interested in Luke’s own personal secret. Faced with multiple challenges and his emerging paranormal identity, Luke must decide who to trust as he creates his own destiny.

My review: I am now a fan of TU a new imprint of Lee and Low Books. I have liked all three of the books they have sent me. I never thought I would like young adult books but boy, was I wrong. I think I am going to seek out the genre a bit more.

Wolf Mark is has sci-fi elements which I love. It also has a little romance thrown in but with a young adult feel to it. It brought back to memory of my own high school days.

The characters all of them are well developed. I found myself rooting for Lucas and he races to save his father. It is hard to find a book whose secondary characters are  as well developed as they are in this book. I could find myself empathizing even what I thought to be the bad guys (even though they weren't) and his best friend.

I also love the lore that was interposed in this book. I love mythology. And there was not short of it here. It explained in such a way that it was assessable to it target audience which is 12 and up. I myself learned quite a few things from this book. Such as what a grue is among other things.

I would recommend this book to any young adult who likes sci-fi and to any adult who likes sci-fi and young adult books.

Review: The Convert

This is a tale of Margret Marcus a Jewish girl growing up in the shadows of War World Two. While she hears about the horrors going on in Europe, her fascination  is with the Arabs. She gets upset at the formation of Israel and decides to convert to Islam. She has also spent time in mental wards.

Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi a man known for his staunch support of political Islam became her guardian when so moved to Pakistan. While in Pakistan Margret Marcus who became Maryam jamaleh upon her conversion to Islam, wrote a number of book supporting militant Islam and condemning the West. She was very influential in some circles in Lahore.

However it was not all smiles and writing in Pakistan. Before she had left the United States she had spent time in a mental hospital with Schizophrenia. She states in her letter that her decision to come to Islam is one of the sanest she has made in her life but one wonders. Then she ends up in a notorious madhouse in Lahore.

One gets the sense of reading this of how much of her thinking is muddled by her mental state and how much she really believes. Then again she was probably freer in Pakistan than she would have been in the US. In Pakistan she was able to marry and have kids and have her sister wife take care of her kids leaving her to write and so what ever else she wanted. while if she had stayed in the US she would probably ended up a ward of the state in a hospital somewhere.

Ever since 9/11 it has been a zero sum game for Islam and the West. If one wins the other loses. It was fascinating to trace back this ideology on the Muslim side to a specific political group and how they in a way took Maryam in and used her to showcase just how degraded the West really was.

Here was a perfect example of how when one followed the west your parents could kick you out, get rid of you or drop you off at the local state hospital while you traveled the world. While in Islam once you had a child you are responsible for it forever. That was the thinking anyway. It seemed it was to their own best advantage to use her to their political ends.

I found this book fascinating. The whole thing seemed unreal. Even the author admits all this was hard to imagine until she went to Lahore. First when she read the letters in New York public Libary it seemed that Maryam had finally found a place she could call home. That it was not rife with the strife that afflicted her with her parents in the US. However when the author went to Lahore she found something unsettling. From her old foster family saying that what she wrote home to her parents is not exactly what transpired in Pakistan. That she was guilty of a multitude of sins. When the author finally reached her for an interview she found a woman who acted complete different than what her letters portrayed. I felt that the author was being a little harsh in her judgment of Maryam. But who am I to say? I wasn’t there. Where the author gets to this point in the book I felt that it starts to fall apart. It as if the author let her emptions color what she wrote and we only get a nuanced version of the “real” Maryam. With sayings such as “I could not wait to leave the room” we are getting the author's emotions instead of what the story was supposed to be focused on.

The rest of the book is tightly written and a fascinating look at Maryam life as a political Islamist. Pick this book up if you want to know why someone would trade a middle class existence to a Life under a veil in poverty struck Pakistan.

Review:Signs Of Life

This book was sent to me by the publisher for review

Can you imagine going on vacation and being pregnat then getting a phone call saying that your husband has died? That is exactly what happened to Natalie Taylor.

Signs of life starts with Natalie vacationing in Miami with her family sand her husband. Then the phone call that drew them all back to Michigan where Natalie had to face the inevitable. In mere seconds her life as she knows it is over. She is now a widow and soon to be single mother. This memoir is based on the journals that she kept and details coming back to the living.

The memoir details raw grief. She writes so that you as a reader feels her grief at have so unfair an event happening. She worries that she wont be able to take care of her newborn baby without her husband. When the baby is born it is heim who starts the healing processes for her.

This is a book about coming to terms with the unthinkable and how to resolve it so that you can still see the beauty in life.It is a tale of family love of learning to survive without the one thing you always counted on.

Every day we see her make improvements and we feel like cheering for her. Then she slips back and we find ourselves cheering her on.

having never been married it is hard to fathom what she must have went through. Especially since his death was the result of a freak skateboarding accident. In just one moment her whole life changed.

The book talks of her going to a grief support group and having everyone being older than she is. How out of place she felt. She also goes to a support for single mothers and she felt out of place there also. It wasn’t just her husband that died but a whole way of living that died with her.

Review: Winter Ghosts

I received this from the publisher for review.

In keeping with one of my reading resolutions I ventured out into a new genre. This is my first foray into historical fiction. I have to say I liked it. This book made me more curious about the genre so I will check it out. If you have any recommendations leave them in the comments.
Freddie Waston walks into a bookshop to have a letter translated. While translating the letter the man tells the story of how the letter came to be. Which involved the mountains of France and Cather ghosts. The story was also a kind of a love story. Freddie goes to a celebration and meets a woman and she tells the story of how she and her community came to be entombed alive in the nearby caves. The woman turns out to be a ghost but the question remains. Can love at it most pure form bring closure to just about any event? For Freddie was also suffering from the death of his brother in World War 1. He had been in sanatoriums for mental breakdowns. But as he tells the story to the woman he finds a kind of redemption that allows him to move on.
It also brings to mind the need for people to know when wrong has been done. For it may be too late for justice but if people have knowledge of the wrongdoing then maybe the deaths would not have been completely in vain.It also highlights the cruelty of war. For Freddie had lost his brother and the woman had been entombed alive in a cave. It shows the aftermath of the war may be over but suffering remains. For the village where the cave is had lived under sadness for as long as anyone could remember. No one knew what the sadness was. This kind of unknowing could not allow the “winter ghosts” to rest in peace. The ghosts came back and chose Freddie to revel what had happened.
I have to admit I do not know much about the Cather's or the Mountains of France so I could go into this story believing whatever the story unfolded. I also was not sure what a historical Fiction entailed exactly. How much historical and how much fiction? I was pleased to see that there was a good blend of both. This book has made me even more curious about the Cathers..
Overall if you enjoy historical Fiction you will enjoy this book.

Review: Indefensible

This book was sent to me by the publisher for review.

This book is a Legal Thriller. I used to read these all the time when I was younger, and if there is one thing I like about them is that they are very plot driven. A blessing when you have hit a reading slump and need the plot to move along to keep your attention.

A women is killed and her ex-husband is the prime suspect. There are a lot of stories with this theme but this book manages to have a slightly  different take on it. For the first part of the book I was sure I knew who the killer was but then there is a nice plot twist thrown in that keeps the book interesting.

This is the second book in a series. I haven't read the first book “ Damaged”. While this book can be read as a stand a long there are references to earlier happenings which make the reader curious as to what exactly went on in the first book. The characters also have a history in the first book that may help the reader make sense of the relationships that are in the second book. For example in “Indefensible” we see two characters not liking each other and the description of why refers back to the second book.

The characters were well fleshed out. Everything that happened was believable.The author made you care what happened. The book was good at invoking emotion and pulling you into the story. Since the book was heavily plot driven there was not a lot of background and explaining how the characters would feel. That was accomplished through the characters actions.

Over all I liked this story. At times I wished I had read the first book first but that may just be my extreme need for order speaking. I did feel like I was missing some information however by not reading the first book. I would recommend reading “Damaged” then “Indefensible”

Review: 365 Thank Yous

This is a short and delightful book. The author is at a low point in his life. His small law firm is failing, his ex wife cant agree on a divorce among other things.He decides to start writing thank you notes.It is during this process that he realizes what all he has to be grateful for and his depression starts to dissipate. But first he had this insight:

“Then I heard a voice:Until you learn to be grateful for the things that you have, you wont receive the things that you want.”

From this he concocted the idea of the thank you notes.

While he was really in a predicament that would make most people feel despair and depression (living in a tiny apartment with almost no ac and cold during the winter, 40 pounds overweight etc.) he used this to go after his dreams.

Slowly over the course of the year his life gradually improves. It is by no means perfect but at the end of the project when some ask how is he, he can honestly list  good things that have been happening in his life.

This is one of those ideas that I had myself. When he was wrapped up in his despair it was impossible to see through the dark clouds at the happiness that lay beyond. By writing these thank you notes he was in a sense “forced” to see what he really had to be happy about.

This is a quick short and sweet read. Even though he was a lawyer and now a Judge his writing is written so it is easy to understand from anyone view. This will definitely be on my favorite books of 2011.

Pain Killers

Let me begin by saying this is a weird book. I generally enjoy wired book because books are supposed to take you into an alternate reality right?

This book however makes Kafka look tame by comparison. The premise is that A man in hired to go undercover to see if a prison guard is really a  Nazi Camp guard in hiding. It delves into the world of drug addicts and prostitution and other underbelly activities.  It takes twist and turns that no reader could have anticipated. It has dark undertones throughout the book. It also has a good psychological bent as it explores the dark side of human nature. It was entertaining to be able to see that whole spectrum without actually being in any harm. He also injects humor into his subject so you don't feel as if he is dragging you down. Some books after you have read them leave you feeling more depressed than you were before reading them. Not so with Pain Killers.

When I arrived at the end of the book I was like what?! huh? That is a good thing in my opinion. Not many books have that ability. A book that takes you on a ride has accomplished its purpose.

Outcasts United

This is a captivating story of a football (soccer) coach who is a woman and her charges who are refugee boys. Some are mere children and some are teenagers. They hail from all over the world from war torn regions of the globe. They all arrived here in America with their families in a predominantly white town outside of Atlanta Georgia.Many lacked even rudimentary skills English.

The coach Luma grew up in the Middle East and came to America for collage. After observing that the boys lacked a positive way to interact she decided to create a football team. She had a lot to deal with as the boys understandably had issues that they were grappling with.

Both preserved and friendships and close bonds were formed. The story goes beyond football. Luma also assisted in other matters also. If one of them did not have adequate food she would buy some. She had her own business and hired several of her charges mothers. She also set up a tutoring program to make sure all did well in school.

This is a perfect example of a woman making a tremendous difference in a group of lives. Not only her football players but also their families. In what could have turned out to be more gang members, because of her they have a real chance of being successful.

I felt that the author Warren St John captured this in his book beautifully. It was well written and illustrated how when a group comes together in a positive way good stuff can take place. It wasn't all roses in the book, the author presented a balanced portrait of the hardships many endured. For example, the lure of gangs. Without providing any spoilers let me just say this, sometimes the “glamour” of being a gang member won out over the hard work Luma demanded. All in all it is worth the read.