Mommathon

I have started to fall behind on my book reviews and I need to catch up before I get so far behind that it’s too much work to get caught up.

This weekend I finished The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne. I was not impressed. The main character, Bruno, is supposed to be nine years old, but he acts like a 6-year old and the author made his character way too naive. I didn’t like the ending either. Instead of continuing to tell the story, it was as if the author ran out of time and just decided to summarize the last twenty pages of the story into a few paragraphs. There is a movie of the book and it’s in my Netflix queue…hopefully it is better.

I recently joined a book club and we read The Passion Dream Book by Whitney Otto. I had a very hard time getting into this book. It started off in the times of Michelangelo for a chapter and then skipped to the 1920’s in America for the rest of the book…that part of the book I enjoyed. It follows Romy (a young woman who gets kicked out of her house for loving Augustine, a black man) to New York and through Europe as she explores the world of art and photography. At the end of the book I really felt like I had kind of been following Romy and Augustine’s lives for the last 40 years or so. By the way, the part of the book with Michelangelo in it does eventually tie in with the more modern part of the story.

I really liked The Birth House by Amy McKay. It takes place during and around World War I in a small village on the coast of Nova Scotia. Dora is the only girl in a family of many boys and learns how to be a midwife from the only midwife that area has known for years. At just about the time she is learning her midwifing skills, a doctor brings a women’s birthing center with all of its medical miracles to the area. The town is divided and both Dora and the women of the town have to decide what to do.

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck- I didn’t realize how old this book was until I looked at the copyright date nor did I realize that it had won a Pulitzer. This story follows Wang Lung as he starts as a poor farmer who needs a wife. He buys a wife who is a servant at the House of Hwang. Years and years go by, their land multiplies as does their family. There are many, many pitfalls along the way though, including death, war and temptations that Wang knows he shouldn’t give into.