The weather has been odd up here this year. Apart from being generally cooler, we’ve been getting a lot of those little showers and mini showers. It has seriously made scheduling my reading-on-the-beach sessions complicated.
Today I finished Jeffrey Archer’s False Impressions. Stupid me just realized this very minute that the little fingerprint graphic on the dustjacket is a picture of Van Gogh, not just a multicoloured fingerprint. Yeesh.
I admit that I’m an Archer fan. I enjoy his books. Deal with it. This book, involving financial fraud, stolen artwork, and hired assassins helped to make up for the fact that this year I didn’t plan ahead sufficiently to have a Jonathan Santlofer book up here with me. (Santlofer’s books are always art-related thriller-style novels.) For the past few years, I’ve included a volume of Jeffrey Archer’s A Prison Diary on my Hermitage reading list.
Anyway, like most of Archer’s novels, this was an engaging, quick, enjoyable read. Sure, I ‘called’ a few of the plot twists along the way (and even predicted – incorrectly – one that I think Archer should have used), but that didn’t really detract from my enjoyment.
I also finished Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson. The cover says, “Winner of a Newbery Honor,” but I’m not entirely certain if that means the author is a winner of a Newbery Honor or if this book, specifically, is. I’ll have to check. In any case, Feathers is a slim little novel set in an all-black neighbourhood in the 70s and Frannie, the narrator, takes us through a few days in which she tries to sort out relationships and emotions connecting her with her best friend Samantha whose father is a minister, Jesus Boy the new – and surprisingly white – boy in her class, Sean her deaf brother, and her mother who is pregnant. Despite this seemingly complicated summary, it’s really quite a simple book about complex ideas. A poem by Emily Dickinson, presented by the teacher before the first page, is the thread that ties it all together. Hope is the thing with feathers...”
(Wow. This is a very poorly articulated entry. Okay, several of them have been, lately, but this one is particularly bad!)
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