Starvation Lake

RATS! If I lent you Starvation Lake, I need it back, next week is Book Club, and I remember nothing! The author is coming too... Join us Friday August 28th at 7:30 at the Vernon Hills Barns and Noble. Especially if I lent you my book...

This is where I leave you

I haven't put up This Is Where I Leave you by Jonathan Tropper yet? WHAT? I am failure as a blogger (among the many things I am a failure at). Seriously, I think this book has been out for two weeks now, and I have hand sold it a ton, but I haven't reviewed it? I'm sorry. Read it. Check it out from the library, borrow a copy, wait a year and buy it in paperback, whatever you need to do, but read it. A fall away Jewish family loses their patriarch and they find out that in his will he has asked his four children and his wife to sit shiva. The narrator is a man who has just found out that his wife is sleeping with a jerky radio personality and lost his job. His older brother runs the family sports store, his sister is married with three little kids and a distant husband, and his younger brother coasts through life on his charm. During the week the siblings fall back into their childhood roles, and hilarity ensues. Funny, sweet, heart warming and well written, I recommend it for anyone who has a weird family. So everyone.

Spooner

Pete Dexter is an odd man. Even if I hadn't met him in New York at BEA, having read Spooner, his latest, I would like him for his oddness (I'm not sure that's a word). Spooner is a strange, slightly slow child in a family of exceptional children being raised by his ever put out mother and kind hearted step father. This book is laugh out funny at times, flat out interesting for the rest. It's a 500 paged book I didn't want to end. Someone pointed out to me that I am often reading strange funny books, and I'll tell you why, they interest me. I like authors who can capture the oddities of life, and create characters I haven't seen before but find believable. Spooner is interesting, funny and sweet, his step father is kind and loving despite the difficulties of raising a strange young man. Read it. And tell me why she is only ever called Spooners wife or Mrs. Spooner and how Philip didn't fall out of that row boat.