Monday, May 9, 2011

In the Courts of the Sun / Brian D'Amato

From Booklist


According to the ancient Maya, December 21, 2012, could be the day the world ends. In this ambitious novel, a modern-day descendant of the Maya, Jed DeLanda, goes back in time to save mankind. Well, he doesn’t go back physically; that’s not possible in D’Amato’s world, but it is possible to send back the consciousness of a person and to place it inside the mind of someone living in the past. The plan was to put Jed’s mind inside the body of a Mayan king in the year 664 CE, but, instead, he winds up inside the head of a man about to be killed by ritual sacrifice. Can Jed keep his host alive long enough to save the world? This is the sort of novel that Robert Silverberg might write (and, in fact, it feels a bit like Silverberg’s classic Up the Line)—a richly detailed, intellectually stimulating adventure through time. Unfortunately, it takes too long for the adventure to begin. While it’s fine to describe the future world in which Jed lives and even to establish his credentials for being chosen as humanity’s savior, we shouldn’t be made to wait 200-odd pages before Jed is flung back into the past. Still, he is an engaging narrator, telling his story in an easy, often humorous style.
--David Pitt

Crime and Punishment / Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Product Description


Much more than just a tale of homicide, Crime and Punishment is a stunning philosophical novel about the nature of guilt and redemption. An impoverished ex-student, Raskolnikov, kills an old pawnbroker and her sister. But money alone is not his motive—and eventually Raskolnikov is compelled to face the forces both inside and out that have led him to murder. His struggle with himself and those around him symbolizes the battle of the individual against society, radicalism against tradition, and ultimately the will of man against the mysteries of divine providence. Compelling, rewarding, and richly layered, Crime and Punishment has invited analysis and controversy for nearly a century and a half. It was a sensation in its day, and its themes, methods and characterisation have left an indelible stamp on world literature.

Middlesex / Jeffrey Eugenides

From Publishers Weekly

As the Age of the Genome begins to dawn, we will, perhaps, expect our fictional protagonists to know as much about the chemical details of their ancestry as Victorian heroes knew about their estates. If so, Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides) is ahead of the game. His beautifully written novel begins: "Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce's study, 'Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites.' " The "me" of that sentence, "Cal" Stephanides, narrates his story of sexual shifts with exemplary tact, beginning with his immigrant grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty. Eugenides spends the book's first half recreating, with a fine-grained density, the Detroit of the 1920s and '30s where the immigrants settled: Ford car factories and the tiny, incipient sect of Black Muslims. Then comes Cal's story, which is necessarily interwoven with his parents' upward social trajectory. Milton, his father, takes an insurance windfall and parlays it into a fast-food hotdog empire. Meanwhile, Tessie, his wife, gives birth to a son and then a daughter-or at least, what seems to be a female baby. Genetics meets medical incompetence meets history. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about this book is Eugenides's ability to feel his way into the girl, Callie, and the man, Cal. It's difficult to imagine any serious male writer of earlier eras so effortlessly transcending the stereotypes of gender. This is one determinedly literary novel that should also appeal to a large, general audience.

Can You Keep a Secret? / Sophie Kinsella

From Booklist


The author of the Shopaholic trilogy offers up a delightful new novel, filled with her trademark wit and humor. When her plane en route from Glasgow to London experiences horrible turbulence, Emma Corrigan is convinced she is going to die. She babbles all of her most intimate thoughts and secrets to the handsome American man sitting next to her. But the plane lands safely, and Emma bids him an awkward good-bye. When she enters the office on Monday and learns the CEO of the company, Jack Harper, is in for a visit, Emma is horrified to learn Jack is actually the man in whom she confided on the flight. He knows everything, including that she hates her job and that she is not quite sure she loves her boyfriend. But Jack does not fire her on the spot; instead, he quietly replaces the office coffeemaker she hates and gives her advice about her personal life, which she finds infuriating. So why can't she stop thinking about him? Kinsella has another irresistible hit on her hands.
--Kristine Huntley

Shopaholic & Sister / Sophie Kinsella

From Booklist


Becky Bloomwood, shopaholic extraordinaire, is back. She and her new husband, Luke Brandon, have been on a whirlwind ten-month honeymoon that's taken them all around the world, but both are itching to get back to London. When they do return, Becky is disturbed to discover that her best friend has a new good buddy, and Becky's parents are acting strangely. It turns out that they've just learned that her dad fathered a child a few years before he met her mother. Becky is thrilled to learn she has a half-sister, until she meets Jess. Jess is nothing like Becky: her clothes aren't fashionable, she prefers dank caves to shoe stores, and she is incredibly frugal. After an awkward weekend together, the sisters part company on bad terms. To make matters worse, Becky's gotten herself into a pickle with a purchase that could put a strain on her marriage. Like the previous installments, Shopaholic & Sister is hilarious fun for Prada and Gucci aficionados.
--Kristine Huntley

Shopaholic Ties the Knot / Sophie Kinsella

From Booklist


Another entertaining entry in Kinsella's unabashedly fluffy Shopaholic series. Life could not get any better for Becky Bloomwood, the irresistibly daft heroine of Confessions of a Shopaholic (2001) and Shopaholic Takes Manhattan (2002). She has managed to parlay her personal and professional passions into a dream job as a personal shopper at Barney's, and she and her wildly successful boyfriend live a life of relative peace and prosperity in Manhattan's West Village. Well, at least they would if Becky could manage to curb her extravagant spending habits a bit. When Luke finally pops the question, a euphoric Becky manages to entangle herself in another rather sticky predicament. Becky's cozy mum back in England has planned a homespun wedding for her only daughter on the same day for which Luke's frosty society mother has booked the Plaza in New York. Two weddings on the same day, what's a committed consumer to do? Chock-full of the charming antics and asides that made the first two installments hilarious best-sellers.
--Margaret Flanagan

The Taste of Innocence / Stephanie Laurens

From Booklist


The Earl of Meredith has decided it is finally time to marry. Charlie has even found the perfect candidate for his future wife: Sarah Conningham. Now he has to find some way to convince her to go along with his plan. Although she has secretly been infatuated with Charlie for years, Sarah refuses to marry for anything less than love. So, she gives Charlie two weeks to prove that they belong together. Charlie intends to simply seduce Sarah, but much to his surprise, he finds himself falling in love with her instead! Laurens expertly spices up the passion-rich plot with danger and intrigue, making the fourteenth in her best-selling Cynster series sinfully sexy and deliciously irresistible.

Moonlight Mile / Dennis Lehane

From Publishers Weekly


An old case takes on new dimensions in Lehane's sixth crime novel to feature Boston PIs Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, last seen in 1999's Prayers for Rain. Twelve years earlier, in 1998's Gone, Baby, Gone, Patrick and Angie investigated the kidnapping of four-year-old Amanda McCready. The case drove a temporary wedge between the pair after Patrick returned Amanda to her mother's neglectful care. Now Patrick and Angie are married, the parents of four-year-old Gabriella, and barely making ends meet with Patrick's PI gigs while Angie finishes graduate school. But when Amanda's aunt comes to Patrick and tells him that Amanda, now a 16-year-old honor student, is once again missing, he vows to find the girl, even if it means confronting the consequences of choices he made that have haunted him for years. While Lehane addresses much of the moral ambiguity from Gone, this entry lacks some of the gritty rawness of the early Kenzie and Gennaro books.

Night World No. 1: Secret Vampire; Daughters of Darkness; Spellbinder / L.J. Smith

Product Description


In Secret Vampire, Poppy thought the summer would last forever. Then she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Now Poppy's only hope for survival is James, her friend and secret love. A vampire in the Night World, James can make Poppy immortal. But first they both must risk everything to go against the laws of Night World.

Fugitives from Night World, three vampire sisters leave their isolated home to live among humans in Daughters of Darkness. Their brother, Ash, is sent to bring the girls back, but he falls in love with their beautiful friend.

Two witch cousins fight over their high school crush. It's a battle between black magic and white magic in Spellbinder.

Three Stations / Martin Cruz Smith

From Publishers Weekly


Smith's seventh Arkady Renko novel (after Stalin's Ghost) falls short of his usual high standard. The Russian police detective, now a senior investigator, is seriously considering quitting the force because his boss, state prosecutor Zurin, refuses to assign him any cases. Renko seizes the chance to buck Zurin by finding the truth behind the death of a prostitute found in a workers' trailer parked in Moscow's seedy Three Stations (aka Komsomol Square). While the young woman, who Renko guesses is 18 or 19, apparently took a fatal drug overdose, he believes she was murdered. A subplot centering on a mother whose infant is stolen on a train detracts from rather than enhances the main investigation. This disappointing entry does only a superficial job of bringing the reader inside today's Russia. Hopefully, Smith and Renko will return to form next time.