Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more. Although as you'll see, I'm not strict about the only-three-sentences rule.
Think about using it yourselves!
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Now and Then by Lisa Henry
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: A rock star walks into a bar.
Then
Owen Bannister loves his best friend Zach Baldwin like a brother. When Zach auditions for a reality TV show looking for Australia’s next musical superstar, Owen is afraid he’ll lose him forever. But in the end, it isn’t Zach’s talent that tears them apart—it’s a single reckless moment in the spotlight, one that shatters their friendship and sent their lives spinning in very different directions.
Now
They say you can never go back, but when Zach walks into Owen’s pub, they might just have a second chance at getting it right—if only they can forgive each other for what happened between them ten years ago when they were teenagers.
My Review: Lovely little shortie, take you about an hour to read, about second chances with first loves. I'm pretty sure there was actually sex in there somewhere but Author Henry took it out so she could give it away (free here) without making a Federal crime out of it. What made it so fun to read was that "lost first love" trope between 25-year-olds!
Do it, try it, don't miss a chance to be misty-eyed over a long-delayed HEA.
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Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Volume 1 of the Ottoman Quartet
A powerful, beautifully written saga set during the fall of one of history’s greatest empires.
Altan’s “Ottoman Quartet” spans the fifty years between the final decades of the 19th century and the post-WWI rise of Atatürk as both unchallenged leader and visionary reformer of the new Turkey.The four books in the quartet tell the gripping stories of an unforgettable cast of characters, among them: an Ottoman army officer, the Sultan’s personal doctor, a scion of the royal house whose Western education brings him into conflict with his family’s legacy, and a beguiling Turkish aristocrat who, while fond of her emancipated life in Paris, finds herself drawn to a conservative Muslim spiritual leader.
Intrigue, betrayal, love, war, progress, and tradition provide a colorful backdrop against which the lives of these characters play out. All the while, the society that spawned them is transforming and the Sublime Empire disintegrating.
Here is a Turkish saga reminiscent of War and Peace, written in lively, contemporary prose that traces not only the social currents of the time but also the erotic and emotional lives of its characters. The female characters in Altan’s gripping saga will upend prejudices about Turkey, the Middle East, and Muslim nations.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: This early-20th Century-set Turkish soap opera is just about as much fun as there is to have reading. There are women with agency, there are men with Yearnings, there are Grand Historical Changes! It is just as juicy as you could wish, it is volume one of four...written by a novelist imprisoned for his liberal politics, therefore without any serious distractions...and it will appeal to any historical-fiction lover as well as those whose taste for magical realism (ghosts! Plenty o' ghosts!) is on the restrained side.
I'm suggesting reading it pretty strongly, right? Get it here: Non-affiliate Amazon link.
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Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness by Lucy Foulkes
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: A compelling and incisive book that questions the overuse of mental health terms to describe universal human emotions.
Public awareness of mental illness has been transformed in recent years, but our understanding of how to define it has yet to catch up. Too often, psychiatric disorders are confused with the inherent stresses and challenges of human experience. A narrative has taken hold that a mental health crisis has been building among young people. In this profoundly sensitive and constructive book, psychologist Lucy Foulkes argues that the crisis is one of ignorance as much as illness. Have we raised a 'snowflake' generation? Or are today's young people subjected to greater stress, exacerbated by social media, than ever before? Foulkes shows that both perspectives are useful but limited. The real question in need of answering is: how should we distinguish between 'normal' suffering and actual illness?
Drawing on her extensive knowledge of the scientific and clinical literature, Foulkes explains what is known about mental health problems—how they arise, why they so often appear during adolescence, the various tools we have to cope with them—but also what remains unclear: distinguishing between normality and disorder is essential if we are to provide the appropriate help, but no clear line between the two exists in nature. Providing necessary clarity and nuance, Losing Our Minds argues that the widespread misunderstanding of this aspect of mental illness might be contributing to its apparent prevalence.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: The author identifies and discusses, in clear and un-jargonized even-handed ways, the many poles of our society's increased awareness of mental health issues. Has the openness resulted in more frank and open acknowledgment of the central issue, or has it resulted in armchair psychologists diagnosing themselves and others with serious problems and then browbeating physicians into prescribing expensive medications for them? That answer is "yes" and that should tell you whether this is the book for you.
Highly recommended for anyone who's said, "that orange guy's a narcissist," and felt smugly superior about it. Like me. Get it here: Non-affiliate Amazon link.
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Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night: A Novel by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (tr. Philip Roughton)
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: From the “Icelandic Dickens (Irish Examiner),” a writer who “shares the elemental grandeur of Cormac McCarthy” (Times Literary Supplement), comes this profound and playful masterwork of literature—winner of the Icelandic Literature Prize and longlisted for France’s Prix Medicis Étrangere—that ponders the beauty and mystery of life and our deepest existential questions.
In small places, life becomes bigger.
Sometimes distance from the world’s tumult can open our hearts and our dreams. In a village of four hundred souls, the infinite light of an Icelandic summer makes its inhabitants want to explore, and the eternal night of winter lights up the magic of the stars.
The village becomes a microcosm of the age-old conflict between human desire and destiny, between the limits of reality and the wings of the imagination. With humor, poetry, and a tenderness for human weaknesses, Jon Kalman Stefánsson explores the question of why we live at all.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE U.S. PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Beautiful, sad, resonant but complicated sentences:
[We're not going to tell you about the whole village; we won't be going from house to house. You would find that intolerable. But we'll definitely be telling you about the lust that binds together days and nights, about a happy lorry driver, about Elisabet's dark velvet dress and the man who arrived by bus; about Puriour, who is tall and full of esoteric desires, about a man who couldn't count the fish and a woman who breathed shyly; about a lonely farmer and a 4,000-year-old mummy. We're going to tell of everyday events, but also of those that are beyond our understanding —possibly because there are no explanations for them. People disappear, dreams change lives, folk nearly two hundred years old apparently decide to make their presence known instead of lying quietly in their place.]
There are two things I think you should know before reading the book: 1) it's almost 20 years old, so it deals with the world of the Aughties not today; 2) it is highly episodic, in fact it's a collection of linked short stories in my opinion not a novel. That seems to cause severe digital retraction from buy buttons, though, so pretend I didn't speak.
In a small place, Life is magnified because we are social animals; the issue is, what to do with that finer-grained view of Others this grants us...judge, blame? forgive, accept? deny, ignore?...and those variable and varying answers are this book. The Greek-chorus-ness of the village (see above), like that used with less success (in my opinion) in the well-received Lanny, gave me a sense of place that kept me reading past the author's clearly articulated disdain for Americans.
I think this delight should be on your TBR pile anyway. Get it here: non-affiliate Amazon link.
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The Pasha of Cuisine by Saygın Ersin (tr. Mark Wyers)
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: For readers of Ken Follett's Kingsbridge series and Richard C. Morais's The Hundred-Foot Journey, a sweeping tale of love and the magic of food set during the Ottoman Empire.
A Pasha of Cuisine is a rare talent in Ottoman lore. Only two, maybe three are born with such a gift every few centuries. A natural master of gastronomy, he is the sovereign genius who reigns over aromas and flavors and can use them to influence the hearts and minds, even the health, of those who taste his creations. In this fabulous novel, one such chef devises a plot bring down the Ottoman Empire—should he need to—in order to rescue the love of his life from the sultan’s harem.
Himself a survivor of the bloodiest massacre ever recorded within the Imperial Palace after the passing of the last sultan, he is spirited away through the palace kitchens, where his potential was recognized. Across the empire, he is apprenticed one by one to the best chefs in all culinary disciplines and trained in related arts, such as the magic of spices, medicine, and the influence of the stars. It is during his journeys that he finds happiness with the beautiful, fiery dancing girl Kamer, and the two make plans to marry. Before they can elope, Kamer is sold into the Imperial Harem, and the young chef must find his way back into the Imperial Kitchens and transform his gift into an unbeatable weapon.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: First, read this:
“There's no such thing as forgetting. No matter how hard you try, you only think you've forgotten, and over time the things you think you have forgotten emerge again under another guise and tear into your soul. Understand this: whoever says they have forgotten have merely condemned themselves to an endless repetition of the same event until the end of their lives.”
Extraordinarily beautiful sentences dot the landscape of this read with unseemly, almost brazen, promises of Delights...and they come just seldom enough to make the promises feel like a tease. But there's a lush, vigorous urgency to this story of the rare person born with the gustatory equivalent of perfect pitch. If Like Water for Chocolate or The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake left you with a hankerin' for more magically delicious food fiction, run get this book.
NOT, however, if you're dieting, or if you're already hungry. You'll come to regret that five pounds later. Get it here: non-affiliate Amazon link.
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Rating: I've always said 3* of five, but...welllllll...nope, still 3* of five
The Publisher Says: "It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon."
This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness.
But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture. Abby and Red and their four grown children have accumulated not only tender moments, laughter, and celebrations, but also jealousies, disappointments, and carefully guarded secrets. from Red's father and mother, newly-arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red's grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, here are four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their anchor.
My Review: I guess y'all already know how you feel about Anne Tyler...I read A Spool of Blue Thread when it came out and, well...yeah. But as the years have galumphed along, I've remembered the Whitshank family with exasperated fondness, with occasional flashes of sympathy, and the odd moment of revelation.
I've rated books a lot more highly than this one that have had less impact on me than this one has, and continues to have. It's just so sure it's Literature, and it really isn't. It is, however, a Thumping Good Read. So go buy you one for your Kindle: non-affiliate Amazon link
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This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!
As she says:
People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.
So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.
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Savage Mountain by John Quick: Pearl Ruled at 5%
The Publisher Says: Ami and her friends just want to do a little white-water rafting in the Smoky Mountains. When her jealous boyfriend decides to try and make their amateur guide look foolish, they end up stranded along the banks of the Pigeon River. While searching for help, they run across a group of men growing for the cartels—men who have no intention of letting them escape with their lives.
My Review: First, read this:
Her suit was pink and, at first glance, seemed perfectly decent until one noticed the shirt top was too small, allowing the bulge of her belly to be visible to anyone who chose—or even those who didn't choose—to look. At least the girl was not grossly overweight, only slightly, so the vision was not nearly as scarring as it could have been.
I get a load of nasty heaped on me when I don't like something a woman says...then there are men who *really* deserve it, like this guy. He's writing a woman's PoV and using stereotypically anti-woman body-shaming "bitchery" to...entertain. Not to criticize her choices or to critique the words used. To make the story "fun" and "funny" like the 1939 movie The Women. Just a big no from me. This claptrap deserves that outraged anger!
I officially tapped out, though, when Jay says to Ami:
"If he's already asleep, we bite the bullet and either back out as gracefully as we can or get our asses killed on the river tomorrow."This last from Ami.
"Deal."
They're talking about a deeply stupid, dangerous decision made in a group. So not only does this young woman let others make bad decisions that she accepts as applying to her as well, but she's a fat-shaming ageist jerk.
Not a damn chance is this story going to get enough better to rise above these deficits.
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Red Clocks by Leni Zumas: Pearl Ruled at The Wife
The Publisher Says: Five women. One question. What is a woman for?
In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers alongside age-old questions surrounding motherhood, identity, and freedom.
Ro, a single high-school teacher, is trying to have a baby on her own, while also writing a biography of Eivør, a little-known 19th-century female polar explorer. Susan is a frustrated mother of two, trapped in a crumbling marriage. Mattie is the adopted daughter of doting parents and one of Ro's best students, who finds herself pregnant with nowhere to turn. And Gin is the gifted, forest-dwelling homeopath, or "mender," who brings all their fates together when she's arrested and put on trial in a frenzied modern-day witch hunt.
My Review: First, read this:
"There were twelve, by the way," he says. "I know you have stuff to do, I'm not saying you don't, but could you maybe wash the toilet once in a while? Twelve hairs."
It's not me, it's you, Book. Vaginal discharge, uninterested male fertility specialist, inexperienced boy abusing a girl's vagina, another whiny husband....
I loathe vaginas. I disassociated myself from their functions a long time ago because they aren't to my taste (!) at all. I am not interested in reading about their mal/functioning. But there is nothing more important in today's political landscape than protecting people's rights, and that includes women's inalienable bodily autonomy. I want to keep supporting those stories and their tellers.
Then I get the litany of "men are clueless/malevolent/indifferent" delivered in a cloud of vaginal discharge and I am out.
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Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill: PEARL RULED at (p35)
The Publisher Says: The New York Times bestseller: a prize-winning, critically acclaimed memoir on life and aging —“An honest joy to read” (Alice Munro).
Hailed as “a virtuoso exercise” (Sunday Telegraph), this book reflects candidly, sometimes with great humor, on the condition of being old. Charming readers, writers, and critics alike, the memoir won the Costa Award for Biography and made Athill, now ninety-one, a surprising literary star.
Diana Athill is one of the great editors in British publishing. For more than five decades she edited the likes of V. S. Naipaul and Jean Rhys, for whom she was a confidante and caretaker. As a writer, Athill has made her reputation for the frankness and precisely expressed wisdom of her memoirs. Now in her ninety-first year, "entirely untamed about both old and new conventions" (Literary Review) and freed from any of the inhibitions that even she may have once had, Athill reflects candidly, and sometimes with great humor, on the condition of being old—the losses and occasionally the gains that age brings, the wisdom and fortitude required to face death. Distinguished by "remarkable intelligence...[and the] easy elegance of her prose" (Daily Telegraph), this short, well-crafted book, hailed as "a virtuoso exercise" (Sunday Telegraph) presents an inspiring work for those hoping to flourish in their later years.
My Review: While I grant you that Editor Athill did amazing work in a long, fascinating career, I find that I'm not hugely compelled to follow her in her slow trudge to the grave.
I do want to finish the read one day but I rather stalled out at 25%:
Surely the part of life which is within our range, the mere fact of life, is mysterious and exciting enough in itself? And surely the urgent practical necessity of trying to order it so that its cruelties are minimized and its beauties are allowed their fullest possibly play is compelling enough without being seen as a duty laid on us by a god?
Somehow that just...summed it up. Need I go on, reading her ringing changes on this central theme she's developed so very thoroughly?
But she does make her points in lovely, precise, needlepointable words.
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Kohinoor: The Story of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond by William Dalrymple & Anita Anand: PEARL RULED at 18%
The Publisher Says: The Kohinoor is the world's most famous diamond, but it has always had a fog of mystery around it. Now, using previously untranslated sources, William Dalrymple and Anita Anand blow away the legends to reveal its true history – stranger, and more violent, than any fiction. Moving from the Mughal court to Nadir Shah's Persia, from Maharaja Ranjit Singh's durbar in Punjab to Queen Victoria's palace, this thrilling tale is full of drama and intrigue.
My Review: Fascinating details exhaustively footnoted about a spectacularly sparkly booty item ravished from the Mughals by the British. Dalrymple's The Anarchy is very much the big brother of this manageably sized story in tone and tenor. But when a man's dress decisions are characterized as "effete" and his artistic enthusiasms presented within a context of judgment, I lose the desire to keep slugging through the well-sourced and quite interesting, in the abstract, history of the superlative item of Imperial History's ill-got gains.
Others without my very 21st-century woke perspective will not share my eyerolling impatience.
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