Sunday 25 September 2011

Diane Chamberlain: The midwife's confession

'I don't know how to tell you what I did.' The unfinished letter is the only clue Tara and Emerson have to the reason behind Noelle's suicide. Everything they knew about Noelle - her calling as a midwife, her passion for causes, her love for her family - described a woman who embraced life. But they didn't know everything. Because the unaddressed letter reveals a terrible secret...and a legacy of guilt that changes everything they thought they knew about the woman who delivered their children. A legacy that will irrevocably change their own lives - and the life of a desperate stranger - forever.

After a somewhat slow start the storyline became more and more fascinating and interesting. The characters have been well developed and it was easy to empathise with everybody involved. Once I got to page 200 I could not stop reading and despite feeling tiredness I finished the story late into the night...

Claudia Rossbacher: Steirerblut - Sandra Mohr 01

Als Abteilungsinspektorin Sandra Mohr vom LKA in Graz ausgerechnet in die steirische Krakau gerufen wird, um in einem rätselhaften Mordfall zu ermitteln, ist sie alles andere als begeistert. Schließlich hat sie ihrer Heimat nicht ohne Grund vor Jahren den Rücken gekehrt.

Leichte Lektüre. Guter Krimi. Allerdings war der Krimi dennoch etwas enttäuschend. Wir wissen zwar alle, dass Steirerblut kein Himbeersaft ist, aber dieses und andere Klischees wurden dann doch zu wenig ausgeführt. Und als Person war Sandra eigentlich auch unsympathisch, ein leichtes aber strohdummes Mädchen, und nicht die hartgesottene Kriminalistin, die sie aufgrund ihres Steirerblutes sein sollte.....

Thursday 15 September 2011

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Queen of dreams

Rakhi, a young artist and divorced mother living in Berkeley, California, is struggling to keep her footing, with her family and her world in alarming transition. Her mother is a dream-teller, born with the ability to share and interpret the dreams of others, to foresee and guide them through their fates. This gift fascinates Rakhi, but also isolates her from her mother's past in India and the dream world she inhabits, and she longs for something to bring them closer. Caught beneath the burden of her painful secret, Rakhi's solace comes in the discovery, after her mother's death, of her dream journals, which begin to open the long-closed doors to her past.

A good book with some key incidents and world history. Unfortunately, the second half of the book was slightly disappointing as it lacks the mysticism of other Divakaruni stories.