Wild by Cheryl Strayed ✔✔✔✔

One of the best memoirs I've read in a long time - ranks right up there with The Glass Castle.
Cheryl is a young woman of 22 when her mother dies from cancer at the age of 44, and it's a wrenching description of how the disease claimed her mother's life so quickly.  Four years later, Cheryl embarked on this journey - hiking over 1000 miles across the Pacific Coast Trail - and did it all alone.
The people she meets along the way, the problems she faces with snow and cold, running out of money, constant agony from her hiking boots, make for riveting reading. I found I couldn't put it down.

The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan ✔✔✔✔

Set in Paris in the late 1800s, this historical novel tells the story of two sisters, Antoinette and Marie, whose father has just died and left their mother, themselves, and their younger sister Charlotte with no money and three months due in rent. Marie is sent to the Paris Opera where she begins studies to become a ballet dancer, and later a model for Edgar Degas, while Antoinette falls in love with a disreputable criminal, a relationship which ends up with her in prison.

I didn't realize that these two sisters actually existed until I had finished the novel, and Marie is the girl in the painting "Little Dancer Aged Fourteen".  The book was recommended to me by the rug-hooker who shared my table at Trent, and I found it in our library.

It's a vivd portrayal of poverty, of class distinction, of prison life, convent life, brothels, bars etc. in Paris at this time.  Well - written and highly recommended.

Be sure to check www.CathyMarieBuchanan.com/art for a complete showing of the art works mentioned in this book, along with the quote describing each one.  Marie was so self-conscious about her appearance, while Degas may well have chosen her for that very reason!

Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin ✔✔✔

A historical novel about the real Alice behind Alice in Wonderland,  the man who created the story, their relationship, plus a vivid insight into life in Victorian times.  I really enjoyed the Victorian flavor to this story, which is both factual and fiction, but I found the relationship between Alice and Mr Dodgson, later Lewis Carroll, who was a math instructor at Oxford, where Alice's father was Dean, to be a bit unsettling.

The latter half of the book was not as interesting - about Alice's married life and her three sons. Neither did I feel there was a sense of resolution at the end - hence the 3 stars.

Our Daily Bread by Lauren B. Davis ✔✔

I can only give this book two checkmarks.  It's rare for me to even finish a book I don't really care for, and I'm not sure why I finished this one. I did scramble through the last 15% of it, that's for sure.

I read Davis' The Stubborn Season a few years back and thoroughly enjoyed it because it explored a mother-daughter relationship and was set in Toronto, so I had no qualms about downloading her second one, which I hadn't even heard about.  According to its cover, the book was named  "one of the very best books of 2011" by the Globe and Mail.  Oh well...

The story revolves around an extremely dysfunctional family up in the mountains and the attitudes of the people in the village nearby. But I found the drugs, abuse, incest of the Erskines gratuitously presented, and I didn't feel it was well-written.  At one point, because the sentences were so short and unevenly phrased, I thought maybe it was a young adult book, but the language ( at least one "fucking" per page) convinced me it was just not well-done. Maybe she was having trouble meeting a publisher's deadlines.

Too bad - I was looking forward to reading her latest, "The Empty Room"!

Stray Bullets by Robert Rotenberg ✔✔✔✔

This is the third of Rotenberg's novels, and the third that I've read and throughly enjoyed, mainly because they're all set in Toronto, along streets and in buildings and restaurants that I know.  For example, one scene is the Esso station on O'Connor Drive, where we occasionally stop for gas before arriving at our destination.  One of the defence lawyers meets her client in a restaurant on the Danforth.

Not only that, his novels - and they're crime novels - are fast-paced, characters are clearly drawn, and since the author is a lawyer, he's very familiar with the courts.

This story is about some shady characters who all converge on a Tim Horton's location in downtown Toronto, and a young boy who accidentally gets in the way of a bullet meant for someone else - all of this witnessed by an illegal immigrant who disappearsright after the shooting.

I read it in three days - Mike's been reading it for 6 months now!

The Golem and The Jinni by Helene Wecker ✔✔✔✔

I had read about this book, but I thought it might be a novel cashing in on the interest in vampires, but when I saw it for sale at Costco for 10 bucks, I bought it.  I really enjoyed reading it - the golem is a Jewish mythological figure, like a robot, and made of clay; the jinni ( or genie) is a Syrian figure, made of fire.  This golem, although made of clay, is brought to life as a woman, who finds herself in NYC in 1899 - the jinni has been trapped in a silver flask for hundreds of years, and is released by a tinsmith who has been given the flask for repairs. These two unlikely beings find one another and strike up a peculiar friendship, even while struggling to adapt to a human world.  The golem never sleeps and never eats: the jinni cannot stand to be near water.  There are other fascinating characters as well, including Shaalman, the villain of the piece, and the creator of the golem who comes to New York City to find his creation.

I was going to suggest this for Book Club next year, but it's too similar to Night Circus, which was my choice last year.

Up and Down by Terry Fallis ✔✔✔

This is the third of Terry Fallis' books. This time the story is about sending a private citizen on a space shuttle mission, one Canadian and one American. I had a good few chuckles over this one - the plot is very simple, the characters are predictable - but it all works somehow for a light read.