The Return

Review: The Blue Guitar John Banville Vintage Books 2015 It’s pretty brazen of me to write any sort of review for an accomplished author, but I had to because some of the reviews for this book confuse me.   For me this author portrayed so many of the people I know right this minute, young and old.   They live the good life until it craters and then wonder how they ended up in the mess they find themselves.   Maybe the objections to the protagonist have something to do with looking into the mirror?   Others think another of his books has a better plot.   That may be the case for that other book, but is this book designed to have anything like the other?   It doesn’t seem that way to me.    Whatever the case may be I liked this book for a number of reasons, not the least of which is Banville’s writing itself.   I found it a joy to read and intend to re-read it in the near future.   Yes, Orme drifts into painterly type la...

Review: Eleanor Jason Gurley 2016 Crown Publishing This is one fine book!   And it was much more than I expected.   The book description doesn’t come close to the experience.   Maybe that’s why I going on so about this book.   It is an experience rather than a mere novel.    That is after you make it past the first twenty or thirty pages.    A slow start for me, but even that made sense after I traveled farther into this book.   The quote from an unknown author launches the book.   Don’t skip over it.   The characters are in a situation that many of us know either first hand or from being close to those who have been where this family has had to walk.   The author has woven this story into a surreal tale of other dimensions, times, and places without losing any of the credibility and pathos. Yes, I recommend this book.   It’s a read that you will not want to put down.   And after you finished yo...

Review: The Little Paris Bookshop Nina George, translated by Simon Pare Crown Publishers 2015 The end of this book was such a sad moment for me.   There’s a relationship that develops between the book and the reader that you just want to go on even though the story has been told and you know it done.   It’s all about love, loss, and healing.   It’s written for those that have learned what those words mean.   Maybe the last few pages revisits those themes within the reader one last time.   Yes, breathing does come easier now.     The bookshop Perdu operates from a barge sits on the Seine and is as unique as his approach to his customers. He can read the needs of his customers and points them to the books that would most help them and refuses to sell them ones he feels can harm them.   It is a case of “physician heal thyself” though, and through a series of events and some well-crafted characters he meets along the way, who in the...