The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The Girl on the Train has been compared by many as being similar to Gone Girl. I read Gone Girl over two years ago, and I still remember it as being a tightly-crafted novel. The memory is probably fresher because I saw the movie. (I liked Ben Affleck more in Argo.)
But what makes the novels similar? They are both told by more than one voice, more than one Point of View. Usually we can trust the voice of the narrator, but in both of these we have an unreliable narrator or two or three. We have liars and alcoholics prone to blackout. In both we have some pathetic characters. (Can they get a life?)
I liked The Girl on the Train more because there was more positive character development at least in the case of Rachel, the girl on the train. I found the character development of Amy in Gone Girl to be creepy. Not someone I would want to be in the same room with.
I gave Gone Girl four stars because in spite of the well-crafted story, the ending was unsatisfying. I have to give Girl on the Train five stars for closure.
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The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a selection for one of my book clubs. It was really slow starting, and I wondered if I would finish reading it in time for the discussion next week. But it improved as I got to know Joe, his autistic brother Jeremy, and Carl Iverson, the subject of Joe's biography assignment for his college English class. Carl is in a nursing home dying of pancreatic cancer, 30 years after he was convicted of murdering a teenaged girl. Carl has one friend, Virgil, from his time in Viet Nam, who is sure Carl is innocent. Joe's visits with Carl to get his story, bring out things in Joe's life that he wished he could forget, and help him to make a connection with Carl. As Joe gets deeper into Carl's history, he finds himself trying to solve the mystery, and determine if Carl was the monster portrayed at his trial.
With the help of his housemate and his autistic brother, they are able to solve parts of the puzzle which leads Joe further into a dangerous adventure. The last half of the book is a thriller, a real page-turner. I'm glad I didn't give up on it.
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Passing Through Perfect by Bette Lee Crosby
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the second book I have read by Bette Lee Crosby. I enjoyed The Twelfth Child, and the author contacted me to read her latest book Passing through Perfect. She provided an ebook download for me to read and provide a review. I told her I was stacked up reading two other books, but once I read the first two pages, I moved the other books down in my stack. I was hooked.
The author warned me that the story was told by a young black man in Alabama during the Jim-Crow era, and I supposed that she wanted to know if his voice rang true. I didn't tell her that I grew up in Virginia in the Jim-Crow era, a time when public accommodations were restricted to "Whites Only," and as a little girl riding my tricycle around the block, I was told I didn't belong on that street.
But on to the story of Benjamin Church and the love of his life, Delia. I guess I loved them both. For me to be hooked on a story there has to be at least one character I cared about. This novel gave me many. But there were antagonists on both sides of the racial divide. Delia's father was a preacher, graduate of Howard University, one of the foremost HBCU's in the USA. Rev. Finch could not accept Delia's relationship with Benjamin, a sharecropper. And when he learned that Delia was pregnant, he disowned her.
Benjamin and Delia made the best of their hard life on the farm, with Benjamin's Daddy, and their son Isaac. Life in Grinder's Corner wasn't so bad because they had friends on neighboring farms, and everybody was struggling poor. It was only when they went to the larger town that they had to deal with the signs that said, "No Colored," and Delia realized she wanted a better life for their son Isaac.
The story was a page-turner. The only thing that didn't ring true for me was the broken English spoken by Delia. I expected the dialect from Benjamin as he had been educated in a one-room school with sparse resources, and his parents had not graduated from high school. Delia on the other hand was the only child of well-educated parents, and she herself attended a private school. When I think of my own late parents who graduated from Morris Brown College in 1924, I remember their love of good diction, and love of books. I would expect the same for Delia.
But I really liked the book, and will be looking for more from this author.
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