Book #11: The President's Lady by Irving Stone

This book is a novelization of the love story and lives of President Andrew Jackson and his wife, Rachel Donelson Jackson. It was pretty fascinating to read about their lives and how they met--and it left me wanting to know for sure what actually happened. At the beginning of the book, Rachel Donelson is married to Lewis Robards, who is a jealous, angry, unstable and abusive man, and despite all of her efforts and attempts at reconciling with him (several times), he casts her out. In the middle of all of these goings-on, she meets Andrew Jackson and becomes friends with him (as he is a visitor staying with her family). After she leaves her husband, they fall in love, and eventually they hear Robards has filed for divorce (which is unheard of). In the end, they get married--but it turns out he didn't really get the divorce, so she'd been a bigamist for the first three years of their marriage. But they managed to survive it and loved each other solidly for their entire marriage--and weathered all of the negative things people could think and say about them in the early nineteenth century way.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, this book was most interesting for the first 100 pages. The last half of the book was way, way too long and boring. It's impossible to cover 40 years of marriage in a novel and keep the plot going, keep the readers interested. I really loved reading about how Rachel and Andrew met each other and fell in love, and how they overcame the odds with her ex-husband and her divorce. But the rest of the book was basically all Andrew going away for various things and Rachel missing him, and Andrew fighting over people saying that Rachel was an adulteress for getting a divorce. Over and over and over. If this was a real novel, and not a re-telling of history in fictional form, I would have said to chop it in half. As it was, Stone should have just focused on the first part of their relationship. It really dragged. I seriously skimmed the last 50 pages because I knew exactly what was going to happen... except the ending, when Rachel died before Andrew was inaugurated (which I vaguely remember now). I think that's probably why he included the whole long story--because it's so poignant that she died, probably from all the stresses of being dragged through the mud in Washington society and in the newspapers.

One other thing that really bugged me: I didn't feel like the conversation rang true enough to me. I hate it when I'm reading a conversation characters are having and it feels false and made-up. That sort of thing usually happens in romantic conversations, because so many authors do that badly. I also kind of felt that way about when we were getting a look into Rachel's thoughts as well--is that really a likely thing for her to think?

I don't think I would have read this book at all (I'd never heard of it), except that it's one of the books for the book club which I am wanting to be more involved in (I went once, in November, but haven't made it back since!). Mostly, I think this genre is an interesting one--it's a fictionalization of what really happened in history. This is something I wrote whole papers on in my English major days: what does this really say about what "really" happened? How do we know what is fiction and what is reality? That's what is frustrating to me about this book and this sort of historical fiction (or biographical fiction, as Irving Stone calls it in his preface): I want to know what is "fictionalized" and what isn't. Of course, the language and conversation can't be real, and we have no idea what exactly Rachel was thinking (outside of reading her letters) but the newspaper excerpts included are. Are all the events really as they happened?

Book #10: The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson

This is the second Mistborn book in the trilogy. For some reason it felt like it took me AGES to get through this book--I kept having to put it down and didn't have any long periods to read, which was annoying, because it was really good. Every time I stopped I wanted so badly to know what was coming. It was so exciting and seemed like SO MUCH was going on that I kept flipping to farther on in the book to cheat and try and find out what was going to happen. (I know, it's a terrible habit of mine. I am not patient enough to just power through it and find out what happens at the end!) That is something that stands out about Sanderson's fantasy (and probably all high fantasy) as opposed to more mainstream sci-fi novels (like Hunger Games, for example): they are so ambitious, and have such huge landscapes for the plot, and just get more and more overwhelming with everything that's going on in each successive novel. But it's not a bad thing--it just makes everything bigger and on a grander scale and more important as it goes along.

In the first Mistborn, Vin goes from being a street urchin kid to basically the most powerful Mistborn in the world, and being the main person to overthrow and kill the immortal Lord Ruler. In this book, Vin and her compadres are trying to keep the country together and to deal with the threats from the threatening armies who are marching towards Luthadel to try and take it by force. But on top of that, the "Deepness"--a threat that is, according to legend, going to destroy the world--seems like it is coming back, but they don't know what it is or how to stop it. Vin is trying to protect Elend from being killed, keep Luthadel from being massacred, and save the whole world from the Deepness by discovering the Well of Ascension. CAN SHE DO IT? This book focused a lot more on Vin and Elend and their relationship and the two of them working together to accomplish all their goals, whereas the first book was more about Kelsier and the whole crew's goal of overthrowing the Lord Ruler. I feel like I liked the feel of the first book better--it had kind of an Ocean's Eleven feel--but since Kelsier died in that book and the natural turn of events involved a lot of political maneuvering in this book, I guess it was inevitable. But I feel like I got to know Elend better in this book and I like him a lot more than I did in the last one--but he doesn't exactly feel real. He's a completely one-sided character: pure of heart and of mind, totally incorruptible no matter how much power he has or who he's with. I don't know.

This book had an AWESOME turn of events at the very end, changing what you thought about everything and perfectly setting up the third novel in the trilogy. I am really excited to read the third one, although I have a few other library books I need to work through first before I get to it.

Book #9: The Lake House by Kate Morton

I have loved all three books by Kate Morton that I've read so far. Morton has invented kind of her own genre, a mix between mystery and family history work, haha. She always tells the story of some people in modern times who have to uncover the story of what happened fifty or sixty years ago, using journals and talking to old people alive then, and intertwines it with the story of what actually happened back then written from their perspective. It's always so engrossing to get into one of her books--they're really hard to put down. Morton is very good at dropping little hints as the story goes along, in parts from the present and the past, to help you figure out what is happening or how the present investigators are doing at solving the mystery from the past.

This book is maybe the best one that she's done--although I found the ending to be a LITTLE too convenient and happy-ending-ish for everyone. In the 1930s, a little eleven-month-old boy went missing from his bed during a big family party at the Edevane family home. And he was never found and the family left the home forever to live in London. Seventy years later, Sadie Sparrow, a detective with the British police, comes to Cornwall to visit her grandpa on a somewhat forced leave of absence from work after a big problem with one of her recent cases. She stumbles across the huge abandoned house and hears about the unsolved mystery of the missing boy, and decides to delve into figuring out what happened there. Morton writes from the perspectives of all the family members at different ages, but most everything is set from 1933 and 2003, the year the boy disappeared and the year Sadie decides to solve the case. Of course, everything is figured out in the end, with a happy ending (but, like I said, a little too convenient for me).

The one thing I didn't like about this book was the disappearance of the eleven-month-old boy (although, not to spoil it or anything, it's not foul play or anything). Graham is eleven months old right now. I don't even like thinking about it.

Book #8: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

I feel like the title to this book is a little misleading. It makes it sound like this book is being marketed to middle-aged women for their book clubs, like The Secret Life of Bees or Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood or something. I had no idea that it was set in Africa or that the main character was a black woman. (This seems a little confusing to me--why does a white man feel at all comfortable writing from the perspective of a black African woman? Even if he was raised in Africa? I feel like that is such a minefield these days so it's surprising that that even happened. And that so few people seem to notice it in their reviews on Goodreads. But if I can forget about that, it's a really good read.) It was an awesome surprise to get into that, and I think that those aspects--the location and the main character, Mma Ramotswe--were the best parts of the book. The book is located in the Mystery section of the library, but it's not really a mystery book--it's more of a slice of Precious Ramotswe's life and the people she encounters while helping her clients. The individual mysteries are usually resolved within a chapter or so and are more to show how intelligent Mma Ramotswe is and how she hones in on how to solve each problem. And as you read it, you get a good sense of the country of Botswana and the people living in it (again, if the white male author is to be believed completely). I really liked learning about Botswana--not a place I've ever learned much about--and Mma Ramotswe makes it sound like it's heaven on earth, almost, even though it's apparently a very dusty, mosquito-y, desert-stricken place. It piqued my interest and makes me want to go visit it and see if it really is so amazing. And Mma Ramotswe is a very fun character--supremely self-confident and able to think on her feet in awkward or dangerous situations. I liked her and would read some more books about her.

There are a lot of books in this series--sixteen, according to Goodreads. I just can't invest that much energy into a series I don't feel all that passionate about. So I may read one or two more of these, but probably not much more than that.