Book Review

This post is about the books I've read recently.  I've taken a break from the business-related books (lifestyle entrepreneur, self-help, how to find your dream job books) and am just reading for the fun of it.

The last book I finished was by Jodi Picoult, entitled My Sister's Keeper.   This was an intriguing book from the very beginning.  The story is about a girl who was basically engineered and implanted (through IVF) to be a perfect donor match for her older sister who has a rare form of leukemia.  The parents mean well, thinking they would only need to use the umbilical blood to put their daughter into remission, but eventually the older sister has a relapse and this daughter is required to give more and more of her body, culminating in the need for a kidney transplant.

The book begins from her point of view, but each chapter is written from the viewpoint of a different family member.  Every family member speaks with the exception of the leukemia patient.  It's obvious that everything that happens in this family's life revolves around her, so it's really about how this fact affects everyone else in the family.  Instead of sympathizing solely with the character you are reading about, you get a balanced look at how this trauma is affecting each member.

Ultimately, the ending is still surprising.  Altogether, this was a great read, and rooted (although it is fiction) in very real issues we are facing today.

I'm moving on to another book written by this author, but I'll have to tell you about that one later, as I've just started it.

I started and discarded a book called Money, A Memoir by Liz Perle.  It is a book about how women view and deal with money, and how this is different from how men feel about money.  I was really hoping it wasn't another book about a woman who let her husband take care of all of the finances until she suddenly finds herself divorced and in charge of her own future.  However, in this I was disappointed.  Hence, the discard.  

I don't know why this is true of a lot of women (which is what the book was trying to tell me, had I really wanted to know) but I'm tired of hearing the same sob story.  Just because you're not interested in paying bills does not mean you have to be clueless about finances and how much money your family does or doesn't have.  Wake up and quit whining.

Before that I read a whimsical story called World of Pies by Karen Stolz.  This was a book I found while cleaning out my son's bookshelves.  I have a bad habit of stopping at garage sales when I see books being sold, and then buying every children's book they have.  Usually this consists of a box or paper bag full of god-knows what.  I then deposit the entire collection on my son's bookshelves, waiting for the time when he's reading well enough to be interested.  So far, it's slow going.  So in the interest of giving him a little more space, I cleaned out his bookshelves of anything he would probably never be interested in reading.

This was clearly a book intended for a young woman.  It is the story of a small town girl living in Texas.  It begins when she is about 11 years old, learning to make pies from her mother.  It ends with her teaching her daughter this skill when her daughter is about seven.  The best part about the story is that it ended with a list of recipes for all of the food items mentioned in the story.  Some of them look good enough that I'm going to give them a try before passing the book on!

These kinds of books make me wonder how people get published.  I mean, the story isn't amazing, there is no real meat or moral.  It is purely the chronicling of an everyday life story.  The author is a decent storyteller, but not exceptional.  What part of this would get a publisher interested?  Is it really not that hard?