Hunting Unicorns / Bella Pollen

I tracked this book down after enjoying the author’s more recent release, The Summer of the Bear. Maggie is a feisty American journalist/correspondent who is used to dodging bullets in the world’s hotspots. When she gets a rather soft assignment documenting the decay of the British landed gentry, she is out of her element and is not well-pleased, but seems surprised to find that her new subjects are bit trickier to interview than her normal revolutionaries and street protesters. Quite by accident she uncovers a skeleton in the closet of one of the more eccentric families, and decides to include it in an expose. To complicate matters there is a love affair between Maggie and Rory, the son of the landed family she is featuring in her story (the connection is not known to her-- so much for her skills as investigative reporter).

This was an enjoyable read, but didn’t hold me the way The Summer of the Bear did. It seemed like it was written as a screenplay for a madcap British comedy with the likes of Hugh Grant and lots and lots of “characters”. The narrative is told in Maggie and Daniel’s voices in alternate chapters, Daniel being Rory’s older brother who is hit by a bus and killed at the very beginning of the novel; he tells the story from his perspective, though I thought this narrative device was distracting, and not ultimately successful. This is a novel full of British eccentricity and culture clash. Would definitely make a good beach read this summer, but start with The Summer of the Bear first.

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And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

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The mysterious figure of Bertha Mason provides much of the tension in Jane Eyre , but what does the reader really know about her? Rochester provides some details of her past, but is his account reliable? Caribbean author Jean Rhys attempted to tell the story of Rochester's insane (and perhaps misunderstood) wife in her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea . It's a sort of prequel to Jane Eyre . I'm afraid Rochester doesn't come out looking good, though we always knew he had a bit of a wild side with his continental dalliances. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting backstory about Bertha's origins in Jamaica, her real name, the tragic circumstances of her upbringing, and how she was established at Thornfield Hall. Gosh, if Jane had only known all these details about Rochester, she might have taken St. John up on his offer of marriage. All in all, Wide Sargasso Sea is pretty credible, but I missed Charlotte Bronte's flowery language, and of course th...

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