Scott and Sue Family

I finished my first 2009 Reading Challenge which is:  Numbers Challenge runs 1 Jan-1 Aug 2009: 5 books whose titles have a number in them

Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices, Jodi Picoult-This was my second Picoult novel and I like her.  This one is told by five people which is why it’s a “Novel in Five Voices”.  One of the interesting things is that one character tells the story backwards so you find out the outcome of the events in the novel at the beginning and then see the events unfold through the other character’s eyes.  This was confusing at first and about a third of the way through I had to go back and re-read the first couple chapters so that I had it all straight in my mind.  But I liked seeing how each voice perceived the events in their own way.  The themes of the book include child abuse, forgiveness, and the different facets of love.  It also includes whales, apples, and a cross-country road trip.  This book does have a language alert and a couple of tastefully written love scenes.

Thousand Pieces of Gold, Ruthanne Lum McCunn-This books isn’t great literature but a fast read and an interesting one, at that.  It focuses on a Chinese girl sold by her father to a bandit, who then sells her to a brothel, which then sells her to a broker smuggling women into America illegally.  She is auctioned to a saloonkeeper in Idaho and then lost in a card game.  Her desire to escape slavery and make a life for herself in the American West is absorbing.  I realized that what I’ve read of Chinese in the West has been almost completely about men who came here to build the railroad or the mines, and there weren’t many women.  This woman’s story of her survival opened some new insights to me about life in the West.  It’s a novel but based on a real woman’s life in Idaho.  Her photographs in the book were fun to see and her life is inspiring.

A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini-This book was gripping and relentless.  These Afghan women endured war and brutality for years and yet still seemed to retain a portion of humanity.  There were many plot twists that I did not see coming and some hit me like a ton of bricks.  It was fascinating to read about events in the headlines from the “other” point of view and see how the Afghan people suffered under each regime and yet kept trying to survive.  This is a must-read.

Five Quarters of the Orange, Joanne Harris-This book had an interesting narrative style.  Framboise, the main character and story-teller, is a widow who has moved back to her childhood home and is trying to come to grips with events that happened during the German Occupation.  So the story moves back and forth between the present and the war as she slowly reveals the events of that time.  But the events are intertwined with the consequences of those events in the present and the past and present weave together.  She foreshadows some things so the reader has an idea of what happened but it’s very unclear until the end.  The story also includes lots of recipes and food allusions.  Interesting story of how daughters come to understand their mothers as they grow older.

Standing on the Promises, Book 1: One More River to Cross, Margaret Blair Young and Darius Aidan Gray-This book had some interesting characters and stories and I had fun reading it, but it’s not on the level of the Gerald Lund historical novels.  I got a little tired of the entire narrative being in the vernacular and found it a little affected.  The research was sound and I always appreciate good research.  I’ll read the rest of the series, but I think it’s a one-time read for me.