Santa's Twin by Dean Koontz

Rating: 4.0

What it's about:

A contemporary Christmas classic for children
of all ages -- including those who pretend to have grown up!

Charlotte and Emily are determined to save Santa from his mischievous twin -- Bob Claus -- who has not only stolen Santa's sleigh and stuffed his toy bag full of mud pies, cat poop, and broccoli, but has also threatened to turn Donner, Blitzen, and the others into reindeer soup!

How the brave but foolhardy sisters fly to the North Pole and rescue Santa from his "deeply troubled" twin is an utterly charming and unforgettable story sure to add sparkle to your holiday season.

Read it aloud, preferably to someone you love to hear laugh!

This perennial yuletide favorite was written by bestselling novelist Dean Koontz in 1996 at the request of his fans and has been pleasing readers every holiday season since. Winner of an Atlantic Monthly fiction competition while he was just a senior in college, Koontz today is a world-famous author whose books have been published in thirty-eight different languages and have sold more than three hundred million copies.

Lavishly illustrated with spectacular paintings by Phil Parks, this thoroughly modern masterpiece breathes new life and warmth into the world's most beloved legend.
-taken from Barnes&Noble.com

My thoughts:

This is a very cute Christmas poem along the lines of Twas the Night Before Christmas. The story is about Santa's evil twin stealing Christmas and trying to ruin it. Can two little girls rescue Santa before Christmas is lost? Is Santa's twin really evil or can he be cured of his nastiness?
The illustrations in Santa's Twin are fantastic! There is even a little game of finding the hidden snowman on every page. Dean Koontz does a very nice job straying from his usual genre, horror, and writing a truly charming Christmas tale for the whole family.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Rating: 4.5

What it's about:
In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The narrative of Woolf's last days before her suicide early in World War II counterpoints the fictional stories of Richard, a famous poet whose life has been shadowed by his talented and troubled mother, and his lifelong friend Clarissa, who strives to forge a balanced and rewarding life in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family.

My thoughts:
There is one sentence at the end of The Hours that expresses the theme of the novel. "There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone.....knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult." The Hours follows a day in the life of 3 women parallel to each other as they struggle. Virginia Woolf struggles to remain sane and writing, Laura Brown struggles to feel something and to make her husband a perfect birthday cake, and Clarissa Vaughn struggles to throw her friend Richard, dying of Aids, a party. The striving of these hours comes to climax bringing the stories of these women together. I love the subtleness of this novel. The writing is wonderful and fresh. The Hours has many layers and at the end I am satisfied.

M by John Sack

Rating: 3.5

What it's about:
Sack followed a company from the inanity of a barracks inspection at Fort Dix to the senseless killing of a 7-year-old girl in Vietnam. He has produced a gripping account, compassionate and rich, colorful and blackly humorous. -taken from back cover of book

My thoughts:
This book gives one a feel for military life. Sack followed M company from infantry training at Fort Dix, New Jersey all the way to Vietnam. He writes about the soldiers who make up M company and their thoughts and feelings about their situations. There's Mason who wants to become a Green Beret, Russo who lied to get into the army (he's only 16), gentle Morton who doesn't even want to hurt an ant and many other men. Sack writes about barracks inspections and haircuts to landing in Vietnam and M's first military operation. The writing is a little bland and boring in parts. The humor was dark and clever but too sparse. As a non-fiction novel, M
seems a little coarse but worth a read.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

Rating: 4.0

What it's about:

Lily is haunted by memories-of who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness.

In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu ("women's writing"). Some girls were paired with laotongs, "old sames," in emotional matches that lasted throughout their lives. They painted letters on fans, embroidered messages on handkerchiefs, and composed stories, thereby reaching out of their isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments.

With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed and they become "old sames" at the tender age of seven. As the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their lifelong friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a brilliantly realistic journey back to an era of Chinese history that is as deeply moving as it is sorrowful. With the period detail and deep resonance of Memoirs of a Geisha, this lyrical and emotionally charged novel delves into one of the most mysterious of human relationships: female friendship.

My thoughts:

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is filled with sorrow with a touch of happiness sprinkled in for good measure. In this novel, Lily is recounting to us her life story and the one thing that she cannot forgive herself for. This novel is about her friendship with Snow Flower and ultimately the regret that Lily feels for a misunderstanding that threatens the love they have for one another. Snow Flower and the secret fan is suffused with hopelessness, anguish and sorrow. We see famine, plague, rebellion, death, pain and much more. This is not the book to read if your looking for a heartwarming story! The friendship we watch blossom between Snow Flower and Lily is breathtaking though. The writing is beautiful and as long as you don't let the story depress you, it's an absorbing tale.

Etruscans by Morgan Llywelyn and Michael Scott

Rating: 5.0

What it's about:

In the early days of the Roman Empire, the noble Etruscan civilization in Italy is waning, Vesi, a young Etruscan noblewoman, is violated by a renegade supernatural being. Outcast then from Etruria, Vesi bears Horatrim, a child who carries inexplicable knowledge and grows to manhood in only six years. But a savage Roman attack leaves Vesi unresponsive and Horatrim homeless and vulnerable. He travels to Rome where his talents confound powerful businessman Propertius, who arranges to adopt Horatrim as a son, changing his name to Horatius.

And all the while his demon father is seeking him to kill him, for Horatius is a conduit through which the demon might be found and destroyed.

My thoughts:
Etruscans is a great result of the collaboration between Llywelyn and Scott. Vesi is raped by a demon. When her child Horatrim is born, he attains manhood in only 6 years! When Vesi is kidnapped and eventually possessed, Horatrim has to cross the river Styx and venture into the depths of the Netherworld to find her. But Horatrim's demon father is hunting for Horatrim. A demon's spawn is too dangerous to the demon to be allowed to live. This novel takes the reader from the Earthworld to the Otherworld to the Netherworld. We encounter humans, demons and gods. We see spirits beneficial, benign and also malicious.

The authors do a fantastic job of making the environments tangible. Whether it's the streets and palaces of Rome or the plains of the Netherworld, I was able to clearly visualize the environs. Etruscans is a fantasy not soon forgotten!

The Mask of Red Death by Harold Schechter

Rating: 5.0

What it's about:
Suspense, intrigue, atmosphere, and vivid historical detail combine into a thrilling ride through nineteenth-century New York City in The Mask of Red Death. Harold Schechter delivers both a wonderfully accurate portrait of a city in turmoil and an irresistibly appealing depiction of his amateur sleuth Edgar Allan Poe, mirroring the master's writing style with wit and acumen.

It is the sweltering summer of 1845, and the thriving metropolis has fallen victim to a creature of the most inhuman depravity. Found days apart, two girls have been brutally murdered, their throats slashed, viciously scalped, and-most shocking of all-missing their livers. Edgar Allan Poe, despite what the tenor of his own tales of terror might suggest about his constitution, is just as shaken and revolted by these horrendous crimes as the panic-stricken public. Suspicion of the scalper's identity immediately swirls around the most famous "redskin" in New York, Chief Wolf Bear, one of the human attractions at P.T. Barnum's American Museum. Certain that Chief Wolf Bear is innocent, Poe has deduced that the city is concealing a cannibal somewhere in its teeming masses, one with an ever-growing appetite for human prey.

Before he can investigate his theory further, Poe stumbles onto the scene of a third gruesome murder. Poe recently met William Wyatt when he agreed to look at a document for Wyatt to determine the authenticity of the purportedly famous handwriting on it. Now Poe finds Wyatt in a pool of blood, his scalp removed. How, Poe muses, are Wyatt and his document connected to the two slain girls?

As frenzied emotions over the murders reach a fevered pitch, Kit Carson makes an appearance. The famous scout has been tracking the "Liver Eater" since the man killed his wife months ago. Together, Carson and Poe make an odd sleuthing team, but their combined wits are formidable. The trail they uncover reveals a dark secret more powerful than anything they could have imagined- one that may reach the upper echelons of politics and privilege.

My thoughts:
Like the two previous Edgar Allan Poe mysteries, this third installment is fun and thrilling with an entertaining mystery at it's center. In The Mask of Red Death, Mr. Poe teams up with the renowned character of the west, Kit Carson, to solve a series of murders in the city of New York. Like the preceding Schechter mysteries, this novel is full of interesting and memorable characters.

The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin

Rating: 5.0

What it's about:
All the beautiful people live in the idyllic village of Stepford, Connecticut, an affluent suburban Eden populated with successful, satisfied hubbys and their beautiful, dutiful wives. For Joanna Eberhart, a recent arrival with her husband and two children, it all seems too perfect to be true -- from the sweet, accommodating Welcome Wagon lady to all those cheerful, friendly faces in the supermarket checkout lines. But just beneath the town's flawless surface, something is sordid and wrong -- something abominable with roots in the local Men's Association. And it may already be too late for Joanna to save herself from being devoured by Stepford's hideous perfection.

My thoughts:
At the heart of this novel is a mockery of conformity and a satire of "the oppressors and their desires". After Joanna and her family move to Stepford, she sees that something about the women isn't quite right. All they do is smile and clean their houses. They are pleasant but very distant. They are all the same. Except for two other women who are also recent arrivals in the too perfect town of Stepford. Those two other women eventually conform to the domesticity of the Stepford women. Joanna is left to wonder at the conversion her two friends go through. Did they conform by choice or is there something in the water that changes the women of this town or worse? Is it something the men are doing to their women to make them especially beautiful and diligent in their housework? The Stepford Wives is highly readable, witty and clever. To quote Peter Straub in the introduction of this book, "Like everything else he [Ira Levin] has written, this book resembles a bird in flight, a haiku, a Chinese calligrapher's brushstroke. With no wasted motion, it gets precisely where it wants to go."