WSJs Best-Selling Books -week ended April 22nd

Fiction:


1. Fifty Shades of Grey - EL James
2. Fifty Shades Darker        "
3. Fifty Shades Freed          "
4. Catching Fire           -  Suzanne Collins
5. Mockingjay                     "
6. The Hunger Games         "
7. The Innocent                David Baldacci
8. The Witness                 Nora Roberts
9. The Lucky One -          Nicolas Sparks
10 Calico Joe                  John Grisham

Some Mistakes You Can't Survive.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards

 Before the birth of their twins, Dr. David Henry and his wife Norah are a normal, happy couple.  That all changes in a instant when Dr. David while delivering his own twins decides to keep the son born healthy and to put the little girl born with Down's Syndrome in an institution.  The snow has blanketed the city in silence and only his nurse, Caroline, and himself are at the clinic.  The shape of the baby girl's eyes tells him the story.  He remembers his sister with eyes shaped just like the baby's and how his mother had to deal with her dying at an early age. He quickly passes the baby to the Nurse and decides to tell Norah that the little girl died.  He instructed Caroline to take the baby to an institution.
I his haste he never thought or the possible ramifications of his action - he never thought how he would live with the action of giving away a child and of telling his wife such a lie. He also had no way of knowing that Caroline would take the baby girl, Phoebe, and raise her as her own. 

The book starts off at a good pace as the story unfolds and the characters are introduced.  I found the story intriguing but the characters appeared flat and often too aloof.  The book fell short of expectations by the middle which lead to a disappointing and uneventful end.  The one redeeming outcome of the book is the constant question that plagues your own mind while reading it:  Would you be able to define a pivotal point in your life when you made a critical mistake and then be able to correct that error?  Or are there mistakces you can never correct? Mistakes you just simply take to the grave, leaving the survivors to pick up the pieces.
 

Alchemy and Antiquity

The Geographer's Library is a well-written, intriguing story that connects the crime of stolen objects in the 12th century to the murder  of a history professor in the current century.  I was hooked by the first several chapters but as the plot unfolds some things do not seem feasible.  The writing is beautiful, the history is fascinating, and the New England landscape descriptions are inviting but the pace of the novel is too slow.  This was not the page turner I was hoping for and the main character was a little too gullible at times.  The literary banter and the rich descriptive sentences make this an excellent read though even with the few negatives that I ran into.

A Book for all Senses

Dark and rich, Five Quarters of an Orange by Joanne Harris will engage all of your senses. A tragedy that took place during the German Occupation when Framboise was a child haunted her throughout her life and kept the past in the shadows of her mind.  Now she is 65 and returns to that small town in France, as a widow with the intention of buying back her mother's farm and hopefully making peace with the past.  As her inheritance, Framboise received a scrapbook of recipes from her mother.  It's a remarkable book, a combination of original recipes interlaced with raw, overwhelming emotion offering great insights into her mother's psyche.
Ex: Below a recipe for mulled cider she writes:
      "I can remember what it was like. To be in the light, to be whole...Theres no sweetness in suffering, whatever people might think. It eats away everything in the end."
This is a book about relationships and the conflicts that arise especially between a mother and her daughter.  The sense that you can never protect your children completely is an underlying emotion revealed throughout the recipe scrapbook and that fact can leave you frozen at times.

The Inferno Lives On

 The Dante Club refers to a group of Harvard Professors - Henry W Longfellow, Dr. Oliver W Holmes and James Russell Lowell who meet regularly to complete America's first translation of Dante's Divine Comedy.  Their attempts to keep their work quiet until finished changes when a series of gruesome murders in 1865 Boston/Cambridge convinces them that someone is molding the killings after Dante's masterpiece.  This literary group then becomes investigators because of their knowledge of the literary community and the book's details.  It is a bit of a stretch to imagine these figures as detectives but Pearl pulls it off with a combination of great storytelling and beautifully written prose.  It's obvious that he loves the poets that he has as characters in the book.  The story is well written, very entertaining and will keep you on end until all is revealed.