by Cally Taylor

***~~ (3/5)

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Book Synopsis:

Lucy Brown is about to marry a wonderful man. Dan is handsome, caring and funny. Lucy has never been happier, she is about to get everything she has ever wanted.

But, on the eve of her wedding, Lucy dies in an accident.

Lucy has a choice to make: she can go to heaven and be separated from her soul mate, or she could be with Dan forever…as a ghost.

Lucy will not leave Dan, and she makes her choice. But things are not quite so easy for Lucy. She has a task to complete before she can become a ghost. First, she has to find true love for a total stranger.

My Book Review:

I was really excited about reading this book after seeing that it received 10/10 reviews on chick lit websites, beating Bridget Jones’s 9/10. (I love Bridget!) However, although I enjoyed Heaven Can Wait, I didn’t love it like others did. To me, Briget Jones still leads the pack by miles.

I enjoyed the fantasy of the story: Cally Taylor’s vision of heaven, limbo, tasks and ghosts. I particularly liked Lucy’s housemates from ‘The House of Wannabe Ghosts’. Brian, the endearing smelly train-lover and Claire the petulant young goth.

You know when you read a synopsis or watch a movie trailer and it basically tells you the whole story? I wish I hadn’t read so much about this book before I actually read it. I removed the last sentence from the synopsis above, so that there will be a bit more surprise in the story for you. I think my biggest issue with this book is that that last quarter of the story is rather predictable. Its a case of the reader being a step ahead of the character.

I’m still waiting for another book to overtake my esteem for Bridget Jones but until then, if you enjoy this genre or need a fun, perk-me-up read, definitely give Heaven Can Wait a chance.

x Julie

Book Reviews

Reading Like Rabbits

p.s. I know I’m constantly raving about it, but if you haven’t read Briget Jones’s Diary, you’re missing out. She’s a menace to herself but she’s lovely.

Click here to read my review of Bridget Jones’s Diary.

by Alice Sebold

***½~ (3.5/5)

Fiction

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Book Synopsis:

Pennsylvania, 1973, fourteen year old Susie Salmon is brutally raped then killed. Susie tells her story as she watches her family from heaven. Susie’s killer was her neighbor, and still lives next door. Susie’s family is desperately trying to cope with their loss. But with no body found and her killer still on the loose, they cannot rest. They become isolated from each other, each member dealing with their grief in their own way.

As the years pass, Susie’s siblings and friends grow up, fall in love and experience things that Susie never got to experience herself. However, Susie is not quite finished with life yet…

My Book Review:

It’s taken me a while to add another book review because I started and gave up on 3 different books. I lost interest in 2 of them halfway through – which is extremely frustrating, having devoted so much time to reading them, then getting bored. The Lovely Bones was what I needed to get me back on track: being absorbed in a good story.

I loved the progression of this novel. It began with this creepy and disturbing event that made tingle and slightly freaked out. Then it became a story of observation and longing, about understandable human reactions. Susie’s family’s grief and search for her killer come to the fore. But then the story becomes about their lives in the years after her murder, seen through Susie’s eyes up in heaven as she follows them, she herself unable to let go of the people she loved and the woman she would never grow up to be.

This is not a typical, predictable story. I say this not to make you think that there will be major unexpected twists but to try and describe the subtlety and flow that Sebold infuses into the direction of her novel. It’s not a typical thriller about catching the killer. We definitely want to catch Susie’s killer – but do we always get what we want?

Thinking back on the feeling I got from this story, what I experienced was a fully formed impression of this family. Despite the loss and grief, we see healing and joy. I grew to appreciate the characters of the feisty alcoholic grandmother, the sensitive son and a mother who just cant seem to be.

It was only towards the very end that I lost my grasp on my suspension of disbelief for a while. And only for a while – until I accepted it and allowed myself as a reader to follow the path that was set (I am being cryptic so as not to spoil the story for you).

What is really interesting about this book is its take on ‘heaven’. Sebold’s heaven in this novel is different for everyone in it. Each person creates their own heaven. Susie was fourteen when she died, so her heaven included school buildings, a gazebo and playful dogs. But she was still lonely, inextricably connected to her life on earth, constantly watching. Susie would only be able to enter a freer, wider heaven when she let go of her own past and allowed her family to let go of her.

It’s strange that this novel is written from the perspective of a dead girl because the next novel which I am about to read is also from this perspective: Heaven Can Wait by Cally Tayor. It came highly recommended by chick lit clubs (10/10!), so I’m looking forward to reading it!

x Julie

Book Reviews

Reading Like Rabbits

by Audrey Niffenegger

**~~~ (2/5)

Fiction

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Book Cover Synopsis:

Julia and Valentina Poole are normal American teenagers – normal at least for identical ‘mirror’ twins who have no interest in college or jobs or possibly anything outside their cosy suburban home. But everything changes when they receive notice that an aunt whom they didn’t know existed has died and left them her flat in an apartment block overlooking Highgate Cemetary in London. They feel that at last their own lives can begin… but have no idea they have been summoned into a tangle of fraying lives, from the obsessive-compulsive crossword setter who lives below them, and even to their aunt herself, who never got over her estrangement from the twin’s mother – and who cant even seem to quite leave her flat…

What I thought of this book:

I just finished Her Fearful Symmetry, and I can’t decide if I liked it or hated it. I loved The Time Traveler’s Wife, and was ecstatic when I spied Audrey Niffenegger’s new book on the bookstore shelves. I didn’t buy it immediately, I was saving the promising experience of reading it for a later more deserving time.

The book starts off great. It’s all about 21 year old American twins who move to London to live in their recently deceased aunt’s apartment that she left to them in her will. It’s full of dark secrets of the past, present twin-ly tensions, and a spirit that cannot leave. It’s a ghost story, but don’t be fooled into thinking it will be scary. It’s not in the least. I’d say its ghostliness is surprisingly normal, until the plot takes some rather strange and not quite believable turns.

I’m glad I read this book, precisely because of the bewildered way it made me feel after I finished the last sentence and because of the side character Martin. Martin is an old man who lives on the top floor of the twin’s apartment building. Martin has OCD, and is so charming in his disabilities that you can’t not adore him as he struggles with his compulsions mingled with the distinct knowledge that they are just compulsions and he could simply get up and walk out of his flat – if he wanted to. With his counting, scrubbing, smoking and his love for his wife, I was with him all the way in his quiet inhibited journey. He really was a lovely old man.

The story seemed to swerve absurd directions in a way that left me thinking ‘This doesn’t any make sense, why on earth would he/she/they make that decision?’ There was not enough lead up to the major plot twist, not in a good surprising manner, but in a way that distanced me from the characters because I didn’t believe the decisions they were making had enough basis. I didn’t believe how their state of mind could end up at this point.

More surprisingly for me, the twists left me exclaiming both ‘I didn’t see that coming!’ and ironically ‘I saw that coming’ at the same time. I think the reader is just a little ahead of the pace of the book. Talking about pace, I did find the first half of the book slow, it’s very domestic and nothing much happens. Maybe this is the set up for the action of the second half, but nothing’s extreme enough to justify what happens. Moreover, all the little reveals along the way seem contrived and not quite believable either.

I feel rather harsh, but I get so passionate and riled up about stories, that I can’t help it. I want to be thrilled, enamored and to fall in love with a book, but this one left me frustrated.

All that said, I WAS absorbed in reading Her Fearful Symmetry, wanting to know what would happen next. It was both fantastical and domestic. I’d love to hear comments of other readers because this book left me mixed-up, with a kind of disappointment but also with a kind of hole that was caused by having travelled on this crazy journey with the characters.

Despite this gloomy review, do read Niffenegger’s first novel The Time Traveler’s Wife. That story is truly magical and moving.

x Julie

Book Reviews

- Reading Like Rabbits