Finally! I finally finished. I don’t think it’s taken me this long to finish a book in ages. My normal daily minimum pages to read is 50. Hey. I have 2 kids a job and a life. It’s not easy to read more than that. With this book, I had to drop the minimum requirement to 25 pages, and even that was tough. Thinking back over the plot(s) it was pretty good, but Mr. Dickens has a way of drawing everything out to such proportions that the plot comes to a screeching halt. Actually, between pages 700 and 850, it picked up. But boy was it slim reward for reading that many pages beforehand.

Ok. Some semblance of the plot(s). A girl who is an orphan and knows nothing of her parents is taken under the guardianship of a man she doesn’t know, but who turns out to be a part of a VERY long-standing suit in Chancery. He has 2 other wards (a girl and a boy) and has taken the orphan girl to be a companion to the girl. Some folks, who are dangerous with such information, find out that this girl’s mother is a person of high rank and the girl is older than the woman’s marriage. Much drama then ensues.

This being Dickens, there is of course a moral. The evils of the Chancery court are horrendous and numerous. It ruins lives and needs to be eviscerated.

I’m not sorry I read it. But, I am not in a hurry to jump into another book that is heavy, like this. Please, God, don’t let War and Peace be the next book in my 12-book resolution.

The premise of this book intrigued me. The myth of the Odyssey from the perspective of Penelope. Hmmm. Better check it out. It was cute. A nice fast read. Not quite what I expected from Margaret Atwood. I guess I expected more high-brow lit stuff. Don’t get me wrong. There’s plenty of literary techniques at work here. Songs by the 12 maids as a chorus. Traditional Greek stuff.

It was very entertaining. Check it out.

The story of this review is kind of neat, so I’ll tell it before I actually review the book. I got a random comment on a review a couple of months ago that I wasn’t sure was serious. It appeared to be from a guy at HarperCollins publishers, so I emailed him. Sure enough, the author of a book I reviewed and liked last year was about to have a new book out, and he wanted to send me a review copy. Woo Hoo! I thought. A free book! He sent it. I read it. Here’s the review.

There is something about the way Elizabeth Noble writes. She can take the most melodramatic, soap-opera-script, drivel and make it worth reading. The best word I can find to describe the way her books make me feel is comfortable. Maybe cozy. It’s like a plush chair, a warm blanket, and cocoa in front of the fire.

Now that you know what it feels like, let me tell you the plot. And remember, she tells it much better than I do. Frederica (Freddie), Tamsin, Sarah, and Reagan formed an unbreakable bond in college. Now, 19 years later, they are still best friends, except that Sarah died 3 years before the opening of the story. In one morning, Freddie takes her son back to his boarding school, which always messes with her emotionally, her husband tells her he’s having an affair, and she finds out her father died. She spends the rest of the book dealing with these major issues. Of course, as the title suggests, she does it with the help of her friends.

S.E. Hinton is from around here, so I feel all community-helpful when I buy her books. I think this is her first adult novel. The rest are wonderful YA stuff.

The language was familiar. Lots of dialogue, minimal narration. But, I have to admit, it was wierd. I liked it, but it was wierd. You’re reading along and you think you’re just reading about a guy with a past in a mental hospital. Then suddenly, there’s a vampire! WTF?! Then, nearly as suddenly, he’s not a vampire anymore. Excuse me? I didn’t realize it was a treatable condition. Well, I guess the medical community hasn’t really nailed down the specifics of how the whole thing works, yet, so I guess she’s free to use creative license.

But, as it turns out at the end, it wasn’t really about the dude being a vampire at all. It was more about the friendship these two guys had for 10+ years.

It was almost like a treatise on toxic friendships. You know the kind. The one where everytime the person calls you cringe because you know when you hang up the phone in 3 hours, you’re going to be completely drained. Or the kind where your “friend” has a way of throwing in little comments to let you know you don’t meet quality control for basic humanness. Of course, this situation was slightly more extreme (blood sucking classifies as more extreme, right?) but it’s a metaphor.