Posts for 'Fiction' Category

I like Marilyn Randall’s books, I had read her first two and they were delightful. Writing a book for a young child is actually much more difficult than one might imagine. For Faithful Friends was her first foray into the young child genre (review here)

And it really demonstrated her great ability. I have reviewed many books aimed at children but Marilyn is the first author that I have really enjoyed that did not just write the text, but did the illustrations as well.

She followed up For Faithful Friends with Best Of Best Friends (review here), once again she had a winner on her hands. Inside Out is her third excursion, and she just goes from strength to strength. Although the characters are very different from the ‘friends’ series she has maintained a wonderful consistency in the style of both the prose.

Read the complete story

The book sold over 40 million copies, becoming the most widely read fiction books of all time. But the book and its author have intimated that there is far more truth found in its pages than fiction. What claims does the Da Vinci Code make, why was it written, and do any of its claims affect the truth of Christianity? Who was Mary Magdaline? Was she married to Jesus? What are the Nag Hamadi documents, and do they really contradict the Bible? Why did Dan Brown write the book, and how does the “truth” that he offers compare with actual historical, archeological and Biblical scholarship? Does the Bible really contain errors? Did the church suppress the truth in favor of Christianity? How can we be sure that scripture was inspired, and how do we know our Scriptures are from God?

I recently read a book that was a little different from the books I usually read. It was a Christian fiction book by Jacquelin Thomas. It's called "Jezebel."

The main character is Jessie Belle Holt Deveraux. She is from a small town in Georgia. She has big dreams for herself. She is a preacher's daughter and sets her eyes on a pastor.

They get married and move away. You quickly learn Jessie Belle has some evil ways. She will do anything to get what she wants. She always wants more than what she has. That leads to problems.

Thomas does a good job building the central characters. Despite her faults, Jessie Belle is a strong character. I wish her husband was a little stronger and was able to see things that were right in front of him.

Jessie Belle's downward spiral was very harsh. But did she deserve it? I don't think so. I think she eventually learned her lesson.

I really enjoyed reading this book. I think it is a very good summer read.

©2008 First Coast News. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, rewritten, or redistributed.

Coming of age in the 1960s, I heard the word “fascist” all the time. College presidents were fascists, Vietnam War supporters were fascists, policemen who tangled with protesters were fascists, on and on. To some, the word smacked of Hitler and genocide. To others, it meant the oppression of the masses by the privileged few. But one point was crystal clear: the word belonged to those on the political left. It was their verbal weapon, and they used it every chance they got.

Forty years have passed and not much has changed, complains Jonah Goldberg, a conservative columnist and contributing editor for National Review. Leftists still drop the “f word” to taint their opponents, be they global warming skeptics or members of the Moral Majority. The sad result, Goldberg says, is that Americans have come to equate fascism with right-wing political movements in the United States when, in fact, the reverse is true. To his mind, it is liberalism, not conservatism, that embraces what he claims is the fascist ideal of perfecting society through a powerful state run by omniscient leaders. And it is liberals, not conservatives, who see government coercion as the key to getting things done.

Read the complete story

In his 2005 film, “Grizzly Man,” Werner Herzog reconstructed the final years of Timothy Treadwell, an animal advocate who went into the Alaskan backcountry to live among the bears he loved, and — in an unanticipated form of bonding — was eventually devoured by one of his subjects. Herzog was fundamentally dismissive of Treadwell’s project, finding “no kinship, no understanding, no mercy ... only the overwhelming indifference of nature.” He believed Treadwell’s death was pointless. Those of us who have ever loved a pet may feel otherwise. Animals — wild or domestic — are sentient creatures and have much to teach us about our own emotional lives.

Read the complete story

It’s not that hard to understand why Khaled Hosseini’s first novel, “The Kite Runner” (2003), became such a huge best seller, based largely on word of mouth and its popularity among book clubs and reading groups. The novel read like a kind of modern-day variation on Conrad’s “Lord Jim,” in which the hero spends his life atoning for an act of cowardice and betrayal committed in his youth. It not only gave readers an intimate look at Afghanistan and the difficulties of life there, but it also showed off its author’s accessible and very old-fashioned storytelling talents: his taste for melodramatic plotlines; sharply drawn, black-and-white characters; and elemental boldfaced emotions.
Skip to next paragraph

"A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini

Whereas “The Kite Runner” focused on fathers and sons, and friendships between men, his latest novel, “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” focuses on mothers and daughters, and friendships between women. Whereas “Kite Runner” got off to a gripping start and stumbled into contrivance and sentimentality in its second half, “Splendid Suns” starts off programmatically and gains speed and emotional power as it slowly unfurls.$OME$

Like its predecessor, the new novel features a very villainous villain and an almost saintly best friend who commits an act of enormous self-sacrifice to aid the hero/heroine. Like its predecessor, it attempts to show the fallout that Afghanistan’s violent history has had on a handful of individuals, ending in death at the hands of the Taliban for one character, and the promise of a new life for another. And like its predecessor, it features some embarrassingly hokey scenes that feel as if they were lifted from a B movie, and some genuinely heart-wrenching scenes that help redeem the overall story.

Mr. Hosseini, who was born in Kabul and moved to the United States in 1980, writes in straight-ahead, utilitarian prose and creates characters who have the simplicity and primary-colored emotions of people in a fairy tale or fable. The sympathy he conjures for them stems less from their personalities (the hero of “Kite Runner” was an unlikable coward who failed to come to the aid of his best friend) than from the circumstances in which they find themselves: contending with unhappy families, abusive marriages, oppressive governments and repressive cultural mores.

Video
More Video »
In the case of “Splendid Suns,” Mr. Hosseini quickly makes it clear that he intends to deal with the plight of women in Afghanistan, and in the opening pages the mother of one of the novel’s two heroines talks portentously about “our lot in life,” the lot of poor, uneducated “women like us” who have to endure the hardships of life, the slights of men, the disdain of society.

This heavy-handed opening quickly gives way to even more soap-opera-ish events: after her mother commits suicide, the teenage Mariam — the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man, who is ashamed of her existence — is quickly married off to a much older shoemaker named Rasheed, a piggy brute of a man who says it embarrasses him “to see a man who’s lost control of his wife.”

Rasheed forces Mariam to wear a burqa and treats her with ill-disguised contempt, subjecting her to scorn, ridicule, insults, even “walking past her like she was nothing but a house cat.” Mariam lives in fear of “his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies and sometimes not.”

The life of the novel’s other heroine, Laila, who becomes Rasheed’s second wife, takes an even sharper trajectory toward ruin. Though she is the cherished daughter of an intellectual, who encourages her to pursue an education, Laila finds her life literally shattered when a rocket — lobbed by one of the warlord factions fighting for control of Kabul, after the Soviet Union’s departure — lands on her house and kills her parents.

Her beloved boyfriend, Tariq, has already left Kabul with his family — they have become refugees in Pakistan — and she suddenly finds that she is an orphan with no resources or friends. When she discovers that she is pregnant with Tariq’s child and learns that Tariq has supposedly died from injuries sustained in a rocket attack near the Pakistan border, she agrees to marry Rasheed, convinced that she and her baby will never survive alone on the streets of Kabul.

 Dan Skelton's, "Out of Innocence" will stay within your mind for a very long time. With raw power and imagery Skelton drags the reader in and doesn't let go until the bittersweet end.Ten-year-old Chris Curry and his siblings have to deal with more horror and grim circumstance than any child ever should. Their mother, Audie Curry, is a pathetic excuse for a person and could hardly be called anyone's mother save for the fact that she bore the children, each to a different father. With every new man in her life comes a new set of rules for existence, none of them what anyone could call a normal childhood. With every new man also comes a new "home" for a while, and then a new time of leaving that home until eventually the five of them end up living in the car more than any place else. What happens in between is a nomadic scramble to stay alive. Day by day, minute by minute, meal by meal.Through it all Chris is the voice of reason; he is an old soul likely sent to take care of this bunch of younger ones. One night, he takes the ultimate step in saving them all. Things change drastically, yet for the better, after that, at least for some of them. New people enter their lives and for some it means a new lease on life, while others fall willingly through the cracks.Dan Skelton takes the lives of four children and their mama and exposes every dirty little secret. Here is where he weaves magic in his words. The lowest depths of humanity are seen through his characters, and also, the very basics of strength, and love. Some moments will rip readers raw, cut to the bone, and leave you wanting to cry. Others will make you laugh out loud, read faster with excitement, and finally close the book with closure and a sense of having learned something about the human existence, like it or not.This book is a must read, but for adults only. It will touch you and you may just never be the same.

 What could creatures in outer space really know about us here on Earth? If they took their information from the various radio waves and television satellite signals bouncing around in the atmosphere, their opinions of us would be rather misconstrued. In Robin Reed’s novel, “Xanthan Gumm,” this is exactly what has happened, leaving one alien very confused that all of Earth is not really a movie set.Earth is a forbidden planet but that doesn’t really stop visitors from “out there.” Xanth has decided that he desperately wants to become a movie star, joining the ranks of E.T. and Chewbacca. Hoping to find the ruler of Earth, Steven Spielberg, Xanth attempts to find Hollywood. Unfortunately, the gravity in Chicago pulls him out of the sky first. Meeting a reporter for a tabloid, Xanth is greeted as an alien in a nonchalant way. Apparently the reporter has met other aliens and isn’t all that interested in Xanth’s story. Then Xanth meets Al, a homeless man with a passion for the bottle.Al isn’t convinced that Xanth is an alien until a demonstration is given. After that, the two become friends and a mutual learning experience is gained through discovering that some of society’s ideas of aliens are actually true if not a little off. It turns out that Vulcans do exist, the creatures in the Aliens movies are really the most mild mannered things in the galaxy, and those large headed extraterrestrials we always seem to describe when relaying an encounter of the third kind are really big pranksters with very nasally laughs.

Read the complete story

 Do we really know the people in our hometowns? What could they be hiding, just under the surface? In Dan Skelton’s novel, “The Human Element,” what’s under the surface is something truly scary.Everyone in the small town of Medalia seems to idolize a young football hero, Trex Stegal. He’s a fantastic player, on and off the field. The girls all want to be near him, the guys all want to be his friend. Trex has the respect of the adults in town, from the coach to the local cops. But there is something just barely hidden under his skin, something in the depths of his eyes that hints at an untamed beast. When three college students are murdered, the case goes unsolved for the guilty party is the person who would be last expected. Bit by bit though, we begin to see the boiling persona Trex keeps somewhat under control.Disturbing events of sex and violence demonstrate the truth, but only to the reader. The other characters in the book have only an inkling that Trex can be a monster. You don’t want him as an enemy, for revenge is deviously planned and played out. This all American boy is really anything but. Murder, incest, attempted rape, tortuous blackmail, vicious violence on the football field in front of hundreds of fans, all wrapped up in a tight package called, “The Human Element.”Dan Skelton captures the reader’s attention and writes his work so fluidly it’s a wonder the words don’t pour off the page. His descriptive talent will have you gasping in shock, devouring the words in the heat of passion, and appalled at the detailed depictions of lust, violence, and insanity. Can he get any better? I can’t wait to find out.

The short story is an art form that very few perfect. Poe and O. Henry come to mind. I recently was introduced to a new author along those very lines…Anthony Waugh. His collection, “Issi’s (and other) Tales,” is an example of awesome writing ability.Twelve little stories, or rather, eleven short and one longer one, fill the pages with a very interesting variety of topics. All of them though, demonstrate an amazing knowledge of the human beast. Portraying that knowledge in such a way that each character comes to life before the reader’s eyes, Waugh shows the world his gift.Recreating Judea and the days of Jesus and his followers is a bold step, but so well done in the first story that you will be enticed to continue on to the next tale. Each story does the same, tempting and enthralling into the next chapter. Often, I was left open mouthed from an O. Henry twist, so much so that I could not wait to see what could come next… A story of raw human strength erupted by anger, another, about straying from a marriage, and my favorite, a look into the dementia of an elderly woman, lost in her mind and trying desperately to remember life.Each story is complete and the plot unique. Anthony Waugh uses words as a paintbrush to depict a picture of some of the darker sides of life. Absolutely well done!