Natchez Burning

Oh my goodness.  I have been waiting forever for the next book by Greg Iles to come out and finally last week it arrived.  Greg Iles was in a horrific car accident in 2011, and had a long recovery, thus the long wait for his next book.  I have read in reviews that the book was originally going to be called The Bone Tree, but as the story evolved it became so long that the original book planned has now become a trilogy and Natchez Burning is the first book of the trilogy.  It is a tome of a book at 788 pages.  Don't let the size keep you from reading it.  It is an absolute can't-put-it-down read. 

Natchez Burning is the fourth book of Iles' that features Penn Cage as the main character.  The story, of course, takes place in Natchez, Mississippi.  Penn was a former prosecutor, and author who has become mayor of Natchez.  His father, Dr. Tom Cage, was a highly respected physician in town who was charged with the murder of his former African-American nurse, Viola Turner, who had worked for him in the 1960's.  During that time, Viola's younger brother had been stabbed by the KKK and then disappeared. Shortly after his disappearance, Viola moved to Chicago.  She had recently returned to Natchez and was dying of cancer.  After she died, her son accused Dr. Cage of giving her a lethal injection.  When Penn learned of the charges, he went to his father, and his father refused to discuss it or Viola with him. 

Penn began working to learn more about Viola and his father's relationship with her.  Meanwhile, Penn was also finding out more information from Henry, a reporter of a small town newspaper who had been working for years trying to gather information on the 1960's cases.   Penn's fiance ran the local newspaper in Natchez and began working with Henry to help with finding information that would clear Dr. Tom Cage.

As Penn worked to find the truth, the dark past of Natchez came to light, with murders, violence and disappearances from the 1960's Civil Rights movement, the Ku Klux Klan and a group more elite than the Klan, the Double Eagles, a group that was formed by the most powerful men in Natchez in the 1960's.  Even more interesting, as Penn dug deeper, he learned of possible connections to political assassinations of those times.

As I said, I could not put this book down.  It is riveting!  I have always been a huge fan of Greg Iles' works and this is the best so far!  I cannot wait for the next one in the trilogy, set (hopefully) to come out next year.  There was one sentence near the end of the book that gave me a clue of what is to come and it is fascinating!


Greg Iles was raised in Natchez and lives there now, which I think adds to the flavor of the book.  For anyone interested, here is a list from Wikipedia of his novels:

Novels

• Spandau Phoenix (1993) ISBN 0-525-93604-1
• Black Cross (1995) ISBN 0-525-93829-X
• Mortal Fear (1997) ISBN 0-525-93792-7
• The Quiet Game (1999) ISBN 0-525-93793-5
• 24 Hours (2000) ISBN 0-399-14624-5
• Dead Sleep (2001) ISBN 0-399-14735-7
• Sleep No More (2002) ISBN 0-399-14881-7
• The Footprints of God (2003) (also titled Dark Matter) ISBN 0-340-82274-0
• Blood Memory (2005) ISBN 0-7432-3470-7
• Turning Angel (2005) ISBN 0-7432-3471-5
• True Evil (2006) ISBN 0-7432-9249-9
• Third Degree (2007)
• The Devil's Punchbowl (2009) ISBN 978-0-7432-9251-1
• Natchez Burning (2014)
• The Bone Tree (2015)
• Unwritten Laws (2016)

The Fault in Our Stars

This is crazy.  I usually avoid Young Adult books altogether, and now The Fault in Our Stars by John

Green is the second one I have read in two months.  And the second one that I have really liked! My granddaughter had recommended this one to me months ago, and while visiting at her house a few weeks ago I borrowed it from her and read it (in one day...a quick read).

It is, at appearances, a rather simple book, but I found great wisdom and compassion in the story.  The book is narrated by Hazel Grace, who at age sixteen, had thyroid cancer and was being kept alive by an experimental drug.  Hazel Grace had withdrawn from school a couple of years earlier to deal with her illness and, at her parents urging, began to attend a support group for young cancer patients.  Of course, the hard part of that was that the group members would always be in various stages of life/death.  The good part was that Hazel Grace met other kids her age who good be good support.  It was there that she met Augustus who had lost a leg to cancer.  The connection/attraction was immediate between them.

At the essence of the story is Augustus' concern about how he will be remembered...he wanted his life to have meaning.  Hazel Grace's concern was how her death would hurt her parents.

Without giving away the rest of the story, be assured that it is a beautiful one.

**My granddaughter makes this reading-obsessed grandmother proud!**

The Goldfinch

I waited awhile to read The Goldfinch, although I had it on my TBR list since it came out.  I usually prefer to read softcover books, thus I wait until they come out in soft cover.  But when I saw The Goldfinch sitting on a bookshelf at my daughter's house, I jumped on the opportunity to borrow it!  The Goldfinch, written by Donna Tartt, is a huge book...784 pages.  I will admit that I felt a little bogged down during the middle part of the book, but in hindsight, I felt like most of that part of the book was essential to the entire story, so I don't think that it could have been shortened much.

The story is narrated by 13 year old Theo Decker who lived in New York City with his mother.  His father had left the family, so it was just the two of them struggling to get by.  One morning, Theo's mother had an appointment at Theo's school to discuss Theo, so she kept him out of school and they went to the Metropolitan Museum while waiting to attend the appointment.  While visiting the museum, Theo caught the eye of a young girl who was also there with an older gentleman.  Theo told his mother he wanted to go to the gift shop for a bit (hoping to meet the girl), so his mother went off to see more paintings.  A few minutes later a horrific explosion occurred in the Museum.  Theo was knocked unconscious and went he woke, he began to find his bearings.  He came across the older gentleman who had been with the young girl.  The man was gravely injured, but was able to talk to Theo a bit.  He gave Theo an old ring to keep safe.  Theo eventually made his way out of the Museum never having been discovered by the rescue workers.  However, before he left the Museum, without consciously thinking about it, he took an old Dutch masterpiece called The Goldfinch that had survived the explosion.

The rest of Theo's life centers around The Goldfinch painting and his attempts to keep it safe and to ultimately find a way to return it.  With his father gone, he went to live with a friend's family, until some time later when his father, wiht ulterior motives, came to take him to Las Vegas to live with him.  There Theo meet Boris, who Theo follows into much trouble.

After living in Las Vegas for some time, circumstances arrived that made it necessary for Theo to leave there, and so he made his way back to New York, and let the ring he had been given lead him to his new life.

Keeping The Goldfinch painting safe was the purpose of Theo's life, from age 13 through adulthood. It seemed to become what he had left of his mother to him.

I found the very end of the book to be the most well-written.  There was a lot of philosophical thinking at the end.

"What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?"

It's a good book.  I have to agree with a friend of mine who said that she couldn't stop reading it, yet couldn't really tell you what was so good about it! Another sign of a good book...I thought about it a lot after I had finished it.

The Goldfinch won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was also one of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2013.

The Son

The Son by Philipp Meyer was a book group choice.   It is an epic book, epic being the word most

often used in reviews of the book, and for good reason...it is epic.

The Son is the story of Eli McCullough and his family.  Eli was born in 1836.  When he was thirteen years old, Eli and his brother were taken captive by a band of Comanche Indians, who killed their mother and sister.  Eli learned the Comanche ways and became their adopted and beloved son.  But as the years passed, the tribe became smaller until almost gone, and Eli was forced to find himself in back in the white world.  Eli became a bigger than life character-his children could never live up to his expectations, especially his son, Peter. However, Eli's great-granddaughter did carry on his lust for success.


The book's story is told between the perspective of the three main characters: Eli, Peter and JA (Jean Ann) and covers the time periods from 1849 to about 2001.  Because the story jumps around, and there are so many minor characters, I found it necessary to refer to the McCullough's family tree presented in the beginning of the book many times to try to keep everyone straight.  That was a bit of a distraction, but eventually, I had it all figured out. I liked reading the story from the different perspectives and time periods.

A Couple of Ho-Hum Books

Two books that I have recently read that I didn't find all that great: Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter and Burnt Mountain by Anne Rivers Siddons.

Beautiful Ruins was read by one of my book groups.  None of us found it to be a great read.  Part of
what put us off was the connections to the characters with Richard Burton (the actor).  Just seemed a bit far-fetched.  There were a couple of interesting items in the book, such as figuring out who was really the father of one of the characters.  But then, even that turned out to be disappointing.

Burnt Mountain by Ms. Siddons turned out to be a big disappointment for me.  I am a fan of her books that I have read.  This book was not at all at the same level of writing (of course, just my opinion).  It actually started out pretty well with the main character,

Thayer, going to summer camp and falling in love.  Of course, summer ended and she never heard from her love again.  Several years later, Thayer met and married an older Irishman, a professor who taught Celtic literature.  When Thayer's beloved grandmother died, she left Thayer a charming home outside of Atlanta, near another summer camp.  And then the whole book took a deep dive and ended poorly. It felt as if the author was in a huge hurry to end the book and didn't take the time to go into what caused the events at the end.  Very confusing and disappointing.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs came out in 2011.  I had no interest in

reading it for several reasons; primarily because it is a Young Adult book, and secondly, because it sounded strange.  Well, now I have read it and both reasons seem to fall quite short.  It is a very well written Young Adult book and yes, it is strange, but in a wonderful, interesting way.  I simply loved the book! (**Hint: I loved it even more after I finished the book and read A Conversation with Ransom Riggs at the end of the book...don't miss it!)

Jacob had always grown up listening to and being fascinated by his grandfather's stories of when he (the grandfather) was growing up.  As Jacob grew older, however, he didn't believe the stories.  When Jacob was sixteen years old, his grandfather was killed in front of him.  Jacob became very traumatized and as time went on, his family became more concerned about him. Finally, the family agreed that Jacob could travel to Wales with his father to seek out the orphanage where his grandfather had been sent to live during WWII to escape the Nazis when they invaded Poland.

Jacob discovered the old abandoned orphanage upon his arrival, but soon realized that it was not abandoned.  The same children who lived there when Jacob's grandfather was there were still there, living in some kind of time loop.  The "peculiar children" as they were called each had different and special talents...confirming the stories that Jacob had heard as a child, but no longer believed.  As Jacob came to know the children, he learned more about his grandfather's secrets.

"It was true, of course, what my dad had said: I did worship my grandfather.  There were things about him that I needed to be true, and his being an adulterer was not one of them.  When I was a kid, Grandpa Portman's fantastic stories meant it was possible to live a magical life.  Even after I stopped believing them, there was still something magical about my grandfather.  To have endured all the horrors he did, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that the honorable and good and brave person I knew him to be-that was magical.  So I couldn't believe he was a liar and a cheater and a bad father.  Because if Grandpa Portman wasn't honorable and good, I wasn't sure anyone could be."

The story of this book is a very interesting concept...I found myself thoroughly enjoying it, and I am looking forward to reading the sequel.  The characters were well-developed and the story held my interest through-out.   It reminded me a bit of the Harry Potter series.

The Tattooed Girl

As you know if you read this blog much, I am a fan of Joyce Carol Oates, so when I came across The

Tattooed Girl at the used book store I grabbed it.  I had not heard of it, so thought I would try it.  It definitely is not one of my favorite of her books, but it was good and has some very interesting things to ponder and consider!

Joshua Seigl was a young mid-thirties author who was single and not in great health.  He decided that he needed to hire an assistant to help him begin to get some organization of all of his files and writings from the past many years.  He interviewed many males and was not satisfied with any of them.  Then one day in a bookstore, Joshua came across Alma, a young woman who had recently begun working there, but didn't seem to be working out.  Something about her interested him.  She had tattoos on her hands and arms, but what Joshua found fascinating was a tattoo (or was it a birthmark?) on her face.  He decided that he wanted Alma to be his assistant, even though he knew nothing about her, and she agreed to take on the job.

Alma appeared to be quite devoted to the job, but presented herself as a very simple, uneducated woman.  Unbeknownst to Joshua, Alma harbored deep hatred toward Jews.  She had a troubled past and was not really who she presented to be.  However, she appeared very loyal to Joshua.  As they worked together they began slowly to get to know each other and learned more about each other.  More importantly, they began to learn more about themselves.

It was an interesting book...made me think about some issues that were in the book.  It was worth reading, but I am not sure that I would wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone.