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Mary Lins' Profile
Customer Reviews: 199
New Reviewer Rank: 1,457
Classic Reviewer Rank: 2,114
Helpful Votes:
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Reviews Written by
Mary Lins (Houston, TX USA)
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An Amazing Trek, December 7, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Mary Gooch is middle-aged, morbidly obese, depressed and, let's face it, name-challenged. She is the protagonist in Lori Lansens' new novel "The Wife's Tale" and she will tug at your heartstrings.
So Mary is a mess, and she knows it but she can't seem to do anything about it. Here it is, her 25th wedding anniversary and she's thinking back over the years before during and after she married Jimmy Gooch. But where exactly IS "Gooch"? He always comes home, but tonight he hasn't.
It's a testament to Lansens' great writing that we are instantly swept into Mary's life as we, too, become concerned for Gooch's whereabouts. I won't tell you what happens...but this is a story about Mary's amazing trek to find Gooch (and herself in the process). I agonized when Mary faced adversity, and I was full of joy at her successes. Lansens mercilessly throws travail after travail at our Mary Gooch, and at times we wonder what we will accept as "victory" for her. It's a roller-coaster ride worth every page turn.
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Insight Into a Time and Place Long Gone, December 3, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Gail Godwin writes with elegance, her stories are always interesting and her characters all too "human". Her latest novel "Unfinished Desires" takes us back in time to the 1950s to an all-girl convent school in North Carolina, called Mount St. Gabriel. This is a time and a culture long gone but Godwin draws from her own experiences to draw a vivid portrait of the time and place.
The story revolves around a group of girls who enter the ninth grade in 1951. One thing about 14 year old girls, then and now, is that they can be awful; cliquish, mean, hysterical, bratty. Of course, Godwin's 1951 girls are extremely articulate with huge vocabularies (maybe that was true back then?) To listen to a group of 14 year old girls today would make you weep is despair for the English language.
There is a lot of foreshadowing from the character of Mother Suzanne Ravenel about 1952 being a "toxic year" that was so horrendous it sent her into exile for a while. Mother Ravenel narrates part of the story, and other parts are told from the perspectives of several of the young girls. Tildy, the "Queen Bee" of the ninth grade girls, is a mean-spirited and self-important, brat...and her mother, Cordelia is even worse. They drive the action that climaxes Mother Ravenel's bad year. By having the different points of view expressed, Godwin deftly illustrates how easily misunderstood other people's experiences, feelings and motives can be.
Godwin takes her time weaving the various stories, past and present, while finely drawing each character. Mount St. Gabriel's provides a picturesque cocoon for these young women but not everyone breaks out into butterflies
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Lit: A Memoir
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by Mary Karr
Edition: Hardcover |
| Price: $14.97 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Another Great One!, November 11, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Mary Karr's latest memoir, "Lit" is yet ANOTHER riveting description of her life when she was in her 20s and 30s struggling with alcohol addiction. You might not think a 50-something could have so many memoirs in her (three so far!) but she does. As much of a page turner as "The Liar's Club" was, Karr once again bares all for our consumption and never once offers excuses or equivocations about her own actions or reactions. She is humble and self-deprecating and clearly the author of her own story.
Karr's trademark dry humor is here as well! I was happy to become reacquainted with her mother and sister and their continuing story. It was also interesting to learn about the esoteric world of poets and publishing...a small sub-culture to be sure.
I'm looking forward to Ms. Karr's next memoir! I hope it will be devoid of tragedy, but I know it will be interesting, well written and witty!
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The Lacuna: A Novel
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by Barbara Kingsolver
Edition: Hardcover |
| Price: $13.00 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
History Repeats, November 2, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Barbara Kingsolver's "Pigs in Heaven" endures as one of my all-time favorite novels, I re-read it every few years and I rejoice in its wonderfulness all over again. So I jumped at the chance to review Kingsolver's newest novel "The Lacuna" which is a bildungsroman novel following the strange life of Harrison Shepherd. Only child of a wayward divorced mom, Harry is "half Mexican and half gringo" an ever-foreign identity that serves him both as an advantage and disadvantage during his life.
Shepherd's story is told via diary and journal entries, letters, clippings and the narration of Violet Brown, Shepherd's faithful secretary. This format works extremely well to propel the story. The first half of the novel is set primarily in Mexico during the 1930s and this historical backdrop of the time was vivid and interesting...I confess that I went to the internet several times to learn more about the Bonus Army, Trotsky and to look at the art work of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. The second half (and my favorite half) is set in the US in during the 1940s where Shepherd lands after his flight from Mexico. It is in this second half that the story comes together. Shepherd writes bestselling novels about Mexican history (Cortes, the Maya the Aztecs) and by setting his novels in a foreign country and the distant past, Shepherd can veil his anti-Stalin, anti-war, anti-nuke leanings. In this half of the novel, with the back-drop of the Red Scare and "anticommunism", Kingsolver is able to likewise veil her own political point of view about present-day US politics; the "Socialism Scare", erosion of Constitutional rights, an unreliable press and hyperbole of extremists on all sides isn't new to American politics. We have seen this all before.
Kingsolver can always be counted on to create compelling characters that the reader comes to care deeply about and Harrison Shepherd and Violet Brown are two such characters.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Pitch-perfect Dialog, October 19, 2009
I don't usually feel the urge to add my "two cent review" to the list when I agree with the majority of other reviewers on how good (or bad) a book is, but Nick Hornby's latest "Juliet, Naked" was so funny, insightful, comic-tragic, and entertaining that I had to join the throngs who are loving it so.
What is notably spectacular about this novel is the dialog. Every single conversation between every single character is a treasure-trove of humor, satire and even farce. With dialog this rich, the screenplay should write itself! So, surely there will be a movie!
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89 of 105 people found the following review helpful:
Too Much of the Same, October 5, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Some John Irving books I have loved and immediately devoured, and others I haven't been able to get past page 50 on...so as much as I look forward to a new Irving novel, I'm never sure which type it will be. With "Last Night in Twisted River" I took a deep breath and dove in...and I made it half-way before I started skimming; it's just too much of the same old thing.
The main characters are father and son, Dominic and Danny Baciagalupo, who begin in a logging camp (Dominic is the cook) and flee to Boston when "something bad happens". If you've read John Irving before, you know that the "something bads" that he details (and I mean DETAILS) are never run-of-the-mill accidents or incidents. His plot lines are full of freak-of-nature occurrences and amazing coincidences. Irving actually self-parodies in this novel regularly, as he described Danny's burgeoning writing career. As an example he (as the omniscient narrator) states: "...in any novel written with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences." Again making fun of himself he writes: "...extreme details were mere indulgences the more mature writer would one day outgrow." Ha.
Present here, as with all Irving novels, you have several thoroughly researched and detailed accounts of setting and industry, such as the descriptions of the logging process in the 1950s, the workings of a logging camp, pizza making....
Also ever-present are some familiar Irving symbols such as the severed limbs, bears, older women sexually initiating boys too young, abortion, freak accidents, shallow women characters.
As in many of Irving's novels, there are clear autobiographical comparisons between Irving himself and the character of Danny, such as Exeter Academy, avoiding conscription to Vietnam due to marriage and child, and Danny having Kurt Vonnegut as a mentor as Irving himself did. Best not to read TOO much as autobiographical, though, since Danny's novels are also deceptive in that way.
Die hard Irving fans will not be disappointed, but I was looking for a little something different.
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
"What's Gone Wrong For Us?", October 5, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
"What's gone wrong for us?" That's the seminal question in Nancy Mauro's debut novel "New World Monkeys". It's the story of Lily and Duncan, partners in a marriage of five years that is decaying as surely as a rotten tooth. The couple has embarked on an ambiguous summer; she is to stay at her ancestral summer house in upstate New York, he plans to join her on weekends from his ad agency job in NYC. Just outside the rural town, they hit, or are hit by, a wild boar. A pivotal moment occurs; Duncan hesitates, Lily acts. Unforeseeable, and frankly unbelievable, complications ensue.
What Mauro gets right is the declining marriage. She ably fleshes out a relationship that is more grievance than love and illustrates poignantly the "absence of harmony" between them. We wince at, but acknowledge, the familiarity of the petty cruelties that married people often perpetrate upon each other.
Mauro, who herself works in an ad agency, probably also "gets right" the surreal nature of ad campaigns, though I confess skepticism here. Yes, I do believe that much of advertising in inherently misogynistic, but the ad campaign that Duncan puts together for a brand of women's jeans is over-the-top abhorrent.
What doesn't ring true to me at all is Lily's befriending of a pervert and subsequent foray into becoming a peeping Tom herself, or the Rambo-esque character of Skinner, the late boar's owner. Also puzzling was the sub-plot of a century-old murder. Why would BOTH Duncan and Lily become jointly and insanely enraptured so much as to agree to illogical and self-destructive actions? Yet the novel held my interest as I was much intrigued by what Lily and Duncan would do next...and at last.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Marriage as a Mountain, August 31, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Set in Kenya in the 1970s, Anita Shreve's latest novel, "A Change in Altitude", tells the story of Margaret, a young American bride, as she navigates the newness of Africa with her dashing doctor husband, Patrick. A difficult hike up Mount Kenya is planned with two other couples, newly acquainted to Margaret and Patrick. Of this excursion Shreve masterfully builds disquiet, simmering unease, that finally culminates in real suspense and horror. What reader can't identify and sympathize with naive Margaret, so ill-prepared for the climb, so unaware of the weight of unintended consequences? This reader was positively enthralled.
Shreve weaves the history and culture of Kenya with the fragile and now damaged new marriage of Margaret and Patrick. We follow the events of the year after the climb. Will re-climbing Mount Kenya save them? You will want to read and find out!
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
I Wasn't Ready For It To End!, August 18, 2009
Richard Russo's new novel "The Old Cape Magic" is a real treat. I found myself devouring it so fast that I tried to slow down...but couldn't keep away. It's the story of several marriages; some dissolving, some starting, and one just so dysfunctional it's fascinating. That one belongs to our protagonist, Jack Griffin's parents who are haughty, nomadic, B-list college professors, and so deliciously horrible that they border on unbelievable. But my, my, they are fun to look down upon, even as they look down upon everyone else!
Marriage is the over-arching theme here, and Russo does a superb job of showing us (as if we didn't already know) that no one knows for sure what goes on inside a marriage, sometimes even the participants are in the dark; relationships are fragile and time changes almost everything. Yet this is by no means a depressing novel! Far from it, Russo's trademark wit is in full force, and his wonderful way with the language is why I wanted to savor the book, not rush through. But I've learned from years of loving Russo novels (all of them are genius) that I devour them the first time and then savor them on second and third reading.
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Beautiful Writing, August 3, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Hyatt Bass's first novel, "Embers" is so beautifully written that I wish the story had been better. When the novel opens on this dysfunctional family saga, we know that their summer house is gone and the son/brother is dead. The rest of the book tells that story, but all the characters, save the dead Thomas, are unsympathetic. This is a story of when bad things happen to irritating people.
The father, Joe, is a narcissistic actor; mother, Laura fills the put-upon martyr role. Sanctimonious, grating and infantile Emily is the worst. She's engaged to "too nice" Clay. Thomas we know through flash backs and he is largely ephemeral. Everyone in this family (besides Clay) is determined to be as unhappy as possible and blame everyone else for their misery. But my goodness Hyatt Bass can write! Her prose is vivid, compelling, and it flows so well that you keep turning the pages. She does make the reader wonder what happened to this family, even if we don't particularly care about them.
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(Houston, TX USA)
