Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Alice Wright is an Englishwoman in the 1930s. She feels
stifled and unhappy with her strict, conventional life. She is swept off her
feet by handsome American Bennett van Cleve, who is on a European tour with his
father. Alice and Bennett marry and return to his home in Kentucky. After a
whirlwind courtship, Alice is shocked to find that her marriage is loveless.
Bennett seems to care only about his father, a rich and selfish coal baron. She
hates living in the stuffy and stifling van Cleve family home.
Alice gets the chance to join the Kentucky Packhorse Library, a WPA project that brought books and other materials to isolated rural communities. Alice finds fulfillment in this project and develops deep and lasting friendships with the other librarians. She finds that she loves the Kentucky hill country and its tough but loving residents.
I rated The Giver of Stars four stars out of five for the strong female characters and interesting story. I took off one star for the lack of background and motivation of the male characters.
Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Since it’s a Stephen King book, you’d expect it to be full of supernatural horror, but you’d be wrong. There is a nice reference to the Overlook Hotel (of The Shining) but it’s there as a gimme to the fans, or Constant Readers as King has been known to call them (us). Otherwise, there isn’t one supernatural moment in the book. Mr. King can do a straight-up thriller as well as anybody, thank you.
After three tours in the sand, Billy is pretty sure that the only thing he’s good at is killing. His post-deployment profession is hired assassin. He got his Sniper badge in the Marines, oorah. He can put a man down at 1,200 yards or more, disappear like Houdini, and use one of his carefully-crafted identities to blend in with the rest of the world.
One of the most overused tropes in thriller-style fiction is “one last job.” Whether the “job” is a bank robbery, a grift, or a sniper attack, countless heroes and anti-heroes have said they’re coming clean after this one last time. King is up-front about the trope, even acknowledging it in the text.
“He’s thinking of all the movies he’s seen about robbers who are planning one last job. If noir is a genre, then “one last job” is a sub-genre. In those movies, the last job always goes bad.”
"You get along with people without buddying up to them. They smile when they see you coming. … Hoff tells me that a couple of food wagons stop at that building every day, and in nice weather people line up and sit outside on the benches to eat their lunches. You could be one of those people.”
Part of his cover story is that he is writing a book. So Billy, a man of a dozen identities, moves to Red Bluff in an unspecified Southern state to become a writer. He gets to know his neighbors at work and at home and feels terrible for lying to them about who he is. The assassination he’s contracted for happens seamlessly less than a third of the way through the novel. Billy does his Houdini act and this is starting to look like a short book.
Meanwhile, Billy discovers that he likes writing. Through the device of a book-within-the-book, we learn about Billy’s traumatic past. We follow him into the city streets of Fallujah, where he lost most of his unit in one raid. While he’s hiding out post-assassination, another person enters the story. This is what takes Billy Summers from a good book to a great book. Billy encounters a local woman in dire circumstances. The rest of the novel centers on exacting revenge for several betrayals.
I recommend Billy Summers to anyone who likes thrillers.
Rating / ⭐⭐⭐⭐ /
Considered to be a classic of science fiction and possibly
Bradbury’s finest work, Fahrenheit 451 presents a near-future dystopian
society. Books are illegal and must be burned. The protagonist is Guy Montag, a
“fireman,” who does not put out fires but starts them. He burns
books.
The novel serves as a cautionary tale on two levels. Obviously, book burning and book banning are shown to be bad for society. This is still meaningful as books continue to be banned in our society. Less obviously, the novel warns that anti-intellectualism threatens society. This is a common theme in dystopian fiction, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It is exemplified in Fahrenheit 451 by the “parlor walls,” wall-size interactive televisions which are chillingly like today’s huge TVs and mindless reality shows.
Montag’s supervisor, Captain Beatty, tells him
The opposite point of view comes from Professor Faber, whom Montag once met in a park.“And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That’s you, Montag, and that’s me.”
“I don’t talk things, sir,” said Faber. “I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I’m alive.”
Rated 4 stars out of 5. It loses a star because Montag is such an idiot. He does such stupid things after his “a-ha” moment. For example, he spouts poetry to his wife’s clueless friends when they’d rather be watching and interacting with the parlor walls. Then he’s surprised when one of them rats him out. I can’t cheer for such a dumb “hero.”
/ Rating ⭐⭐ /
Not recommended.
/ Rating ✰ (zero stars) /
I'd rate this book minus 10 if I could. It was painful to read, and I deleted it after a couple of chapters.
Blind Faith by Ben Elton tries way too hard to be an absurdist take on society. In this world, 100 years from now, faith in some kind of God is everything. People must demonstrate their faith at every waking moment. They must document their every “feel” on social media.
Girls have it the worst - they must film and post their Cherry Pop (yikes), the birth of their babies, and their mandatory breast enlargement surgery. And on and on.
