Category: Book Review

Balancing Acts by Zoe Fishman

Published on by Sheila (Book Journey)31 Comments

The first thing that drew me to this book was the cover.  I mean, look at it.  I will wait…….  The colors are eye-catching – bright and delicious… it reminds me of Skittles!  🙂

The second draw to this book was the back cover synopsis….. books about women friendships have always been a draw for me.  I know how important my friendships are to me and just love to read about others.

After that – cover love (yeah Skittles!) and synopsis (women friendships!) the rest was left up to what was between these two draws…. the story itself.

And I entered into the world of Charlie, who owns the Yoga store and I like her instantly.  As I am introduced in pretty much a rapid fire manner to the other characters I got a bit entangled in the who’s who….

Balancing Act is exactly what is taking place as these women evaluate their lives and build school acquaintances into important friendships.   Zoe Fisherman has a way with words and how she initially introduced each woman individually with their own chapter was refreshing.  Zoe has a way with words and I found the story line to be engaging.  While the book wasnt as deep as I had hoped, I was left with a good feeling as the last page was turned.

Yoga anyone?

My Amazon Review


Zoe grew up in Mobile, Alabama. As a wee one, she would walk home from school and talk to herself as she verbally mapped out Barbie and Ken’s upcoming altercation(s) with Skipper. She loved homework and cleaning. She was wild!

Later, she attended Boston University, where she spent her time destroying her teeth with Swedish Fish and explaining to her peers that people actually did wear shoes in Alabama.

After college, she arrived in New York with nary a clue and an inflated sense of self-importance. Her first apartment was dubbed ‘Wild Kingdom’ because of her mouse, roach and pigeon roommates. She took a job in book publishing and, despite a brief foray into the world of web writing – touting luxury goods out of a beige office with bad carpeting in Chelsea and writing horoscopes based on planet formations from Iceland (best job ever, by the way) – never looked back.

Today, Zoe is the Foreign Rights Director and an agent for The Nancy Yost Literary Agency. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, whom she met on the subway after four plus years of trying to get up the nerve to say hello to him. Balancing Acts is her first novel.

I received my review copy of this book from Harper Collins

**Note – there was some light language in the book

The Bride Collector by Ted Dekker

Published on by Sheila (Book Journey)26 Comments

FBI Special agent Brad Raines is facing his toughest case yet. A Denver serial killer has killed four beautiful young women, leaving a bridal veil at each crime scene, and he’s picking up his pace. Unable to crack the case, Raines appeals for help from a most unusual source: residents of the Center for Wellness and Intelligence, a private psychiatric institution for mentally ill individuals whose are extraordinarily gifted.

It’s there that he meets Paradise, a young woman who witnessed her father murder her family and barely escaped his hand. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Paradise may also have an extrasensory gift: the ability to experience the final moments of a person’s life when she touches the dead body.

In a desperate attempt to find the killer, Raines enlists Paradise’s help. In an effort to win her trust, he befriends this strange young woman and begins to see in her qualities that most ‘sane people’ sorely lack. Gradually, he starts to question whether sanity resides outside the hospital walls…or inside.

As the Bride Collector picks up the pace-and volume-of his gruesome crucifixions, the case becomes even more personal to Raines when his friend and colleague, a beautiful young forensic psychologist, becomes the Bride Collector’s next target.

The FBI believes that the killer plans to murder seven women. Can Paradise help before it’s too late?


I have read Ted Decker’s books for years and then it seems like the last few years while I have been a faithful “purchaser” they have remained on my shelves unread.  Why, you may ask?  Well, I have no profound reason other than lack of time, commitment to other books, and that think called life that sometimes gets in the way….  😉

SO….. I was thrilled to be a part of this tour for Ted’s new book, The Bride Collector.  My hope was this book would  remind me of all the things I appreciate about Ted’s writing and cause other Decker books to come flying off my book shelves in rapid formation.

On to the verdict….

The Bride Collector starts with me, starring in the role of “Reader”, going down a path of information gathering.  We begin with collecting  background info on the who, the what, and the where’s, in the book.  Don’t despair!  This is good detective work!  Besides, you want to enjoy this beginning pace of the book…. because…… much like a rollercoaster slowly… click… clacking… it’s… way… to… the…  top….

It doesn’t stay that way for long and suddenly you are rushing downward, hands in the air (and quite possibly screaming) as you plunge into the pages of this storyline…. page by page, flying through the mind of a serial killer who is taking the lives of beautiful women believing it is his calling to find the Bride of God.  A bridal veil is all that is left on the crime scenes leaving a very frustrated FBI as they work hard to put a stop to the madness.

Special Agent Brad Raines, is doing everything he can to track down this killer and put a stop to the terror.  He even goes as far as to seek help from the mental patients in a home that Brad feels may have at one time been associated with this man they call the Bride Collector.


“But wait, Sheila…. Isn’t this book a Christian Fiction read?  It seems so dark….”

It is a Christian Fiction read and that actually makes it all the more intriguing to me.  I have always had an enjoyment for  the mystery/suspense genre and Ted Dekker is known for this style.  While their is murder in the book, it is not gory or graphic.  Ted does have a message in every book and  how he gets to that message is amazing in itself.

The Bride Collector had plenty of the twists and turns along the way that I enjoy in his books.  Having read and enjoyed this one,  I am now looking at his other works that are waiting patiently on my shelf….

Ted Dekker (born October 24, 1962) is a New York Times best-selling author of more than twenty novels. He is best known for stories which could be broadly described as suspense thrillers with major twists and unforgettable characters, though he has also made a name for himself among fantasy fans.

Dekker was born to missionaries who lived among the head hunter tribes of Indonesia. Because his parents’ work often included extended periods of time away from their children, Dekker describes his early life in a culture to which he was a stranger as both fascinating and lonely. It is this unique upbringing that forced him to rely on his own imagination to create a world in which he belonged.

Early in his career he wrote a number of spiritual thrillers and his novels were lumped in with ‘Christian Fiction’ a surprisingly large category. His later novels are a mix of mainstream novels such as Adam, Thr3e, Skin, Obsessed and BoneMan’s Daughters, and Fantasy thrillers that metaphorically explore faith. Best known among these is his Circle Series: Green, Black, Red, White and The Paradise Books: Showdown, Saint, and Sinner.

I received my review copy from Hachette Book Group


Women In Leadership Month

Published on by Sheila (Book Journey)10 Comments

I was recently given the opportunity to read and reaview Dawn McCoys book, Leadership Building Blocks.  I am a person who loves to always be sharpening skills and learning new ways to improve on what I am doing.  I really enjoyed Dawn’s book and took notes on parts of the book that I have been applying to my work environment as well as to teams I have the pleasure of working with.

Thank you Dawn for a book now sits in my office along with other books on leadership and skills I hold with great value.

Celebrate Women in Leadership Series
 with Dawn McCoy

During the month of March 2010, Dawn McCoy, author of Leadership Building Blocks will highlight great women in leadership during Women’s History Month.

Sheila: Thank you for allowing me to be a guest blogger today at Book Journey. Today, in the Celebrate Women in Leadership series, I want to highlight Anne Frank.

Annelies Marie better known as “Anne” Frank is one the most renowned Jewish victims of the Holocaust. She is not remembered for her death but more for the exceptional quality of her writing in her diary, The Diary of Anne Frank that has become one of the world’s most widely read books.

She was born in Frankfurt, Germany and lived most of her life near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. She gained international fame posthumously following the publication of her diary which documents her experiences hiding during the World Ward II German occupation of the Netherlands. In later years, her diary would be translated into fifty-five languages and would sell more than twenty million copies.

Anne and her family were trapped in Amsterdam due to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands around 1940. As persecutions of the Jewish population increased in July 1942, her family went into hiding in the hidden rooms of her father Otto Frank‘s office building. After two years, the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps. Seven months after her arrest, Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

What I most admire about Anne Frank and her writings is that she was simultaneously candid and courageous. Not only did she provide us with the context of historical events but also an understanding of Europe during the Nazi occupation and subsequent Holocaust that impacted thousands.

Here are some of Frank’s most poignant excerpts:

On life: “Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year old school girl. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I feel like writing.”

On self-fulfillment: Happiness….that’s something you can’t achieve by taking the easy way out. Earning happiness means doing good and working, not speculating and being lazy.”

On legacy: “I shall not remain insignificant I shall work in the world for mankind. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living, even after my death.”

On balance: “Beauty remains, even in misfortune. If you just look for it, you discover more and more happiness and regain your balance.”

TOUR GIVEAWAY: Blog visitors who leave comments  OR radio callers with questions for Dawn are eligible to win an autographed copy of Leadership Building Block and a copy of the Effective Community Engagement CD.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dawn McCoy is author of Leadership Building Blocks: An Insider’s Guide to Success. As one of the youngest elected African-American elected to the Sacramento City Unified School Board, McCoy shares seven leadership fundamentals in her book. Inspiring readers to be top in their field, Dawn shares her insights based upon twenty years serving as a nonprofit and government executive.

A motivational speaker, coach, and founder of Flourish Leadership Group, a leadership development and communications firm, Dawn is dedicated to transforming ordinary people into extraordinary leaders. In recent years, she has worked with organizations to develop their vision and create phenomenal results. Dawn has worked with hundreds of individuals to help them capture their spirit of leadership and truly become the effective leaders they were meant to be.

Visit Dawn online at FlourishLeadership.com.

Read an excerpt online and visit the tour schedule at http://bit.ly/LeadershipBuildingBlocks.

The Kingdom Assignment by Denny and Leesa Bellesi

Published on by Sheila (Book Journey)22 Comments

Rev. Denny Bellesi preached an ordinary stewardship sermon to his congregation at the Coast Hills Community Church in Aliso Viejo, Calif. But he followed the sermon with an extraordinary call to action: he handed 100 members of the congregation $100 each. Bellesi told these volunteers that the money was not theirs, but God’s, and that they needed to “invest” it in some way that would build God’s kingdom. In February, the volunteers reported back to a standing-room-only church (and, via a Dateline NBC segment, to millions of viewers), describing how the money had been spent to transform lives, build churches, feed the hungry and comfort the sick. More than anything, this book hammers home the message that the volunteers saw their $100 bills being multiplied into thousands as total strangers offered more money to help them undertake their charity projects. As in the film Pay It Forward (which is what gave Bellesi the idea in the first place), one good turn generated another and another. The book, a collaboration with his wife, Leesa, is not elegantly written, but then it doesn’t need to be; the story itself is front and center here. These invigorating real-life stories offer excellent examples of Christian faith in action, as church members were forced to leave their comfort zones and search for ways to bless others in the community.

I can’t say enough about this book.  The first time I read it I was so inspired by the trust and, no that isn’t the right word, the FAITH, Denny Bellesi put in to his congregations hands.  He gave it all to God and the result is this book of amazing testimonies.

I would not look at this book as a “look at me, look what I did” style of read.  For me, this book was a fine example of faith and what God can do.  The stories that fill these pages are of what happened as the result of this faith – and even in some cases, lack there of.  What really touches me heart is how many went out with the $100 and by sharing with others their Kingdom Assignment, how many wanted in… wanted to be a part of something bigger.  This book is the result of a Kingdom movement that has always effected me like someone pushing an ON button.  I feel charged up and get a little teary eyed when I imagine the possibilities of what could happen, what would happen, if each of us looked at the world this way.

This book has crossed my path several times now in my life.   Many years ago while researching information on the movie Pay It Forward I came across this book.  I ordered it, read it – and loved it.  LOVED IT.  Raved about it and passed my copy on to a friend at work to read.

Flash forward several years and it is 2005 and my Pastor had read about this on line and does this at out church.  I seriously got chills as he handed out envelopes with $50 in them to go out and build the Kingdom.  I came home so excited to look at the book, but couldn’t find my copy.  When I remembered that I had loaned it out I called the co-worker (who no longer worked with me) only to find out that she has passed it on to someone else.

*Sigh*

I ordered two copies that day, one for me, and one for my Pastor.  He loved it,  and after I read the book again I loaned out my copy to someone who also was excited to read it.

Flash Forward again. I read The Power Of Half recently and the book reminded me of The Kingdom Assignment.  I go through my books looking for my copy ad then remember – oh yeah, I loaned it out.  But to who?  I don’t remember… and so – I order two books again.  Why two?  We will get to that.

Both The Power of Half and The Kingdom assignment get my heart pumping a little faster with the possibilities.   I wanted to review this book now, because I love this book and because I have an idea brewing….. an idea that I will reveal on April 1st.

I purchased my copies through third parties through Amazon

Girlfriends (From Campfires to Crows Feet) by monica sheehan

Published on by Sheila (Book Journey)27 Comments

Who returns your calls faster than a speeding bullet? Who will leap to your side in a single bound? Your mother…your dog…your hairdresser? No! It’s your girlfriend! Artist Monica Sheehan knows this and created Girlfriends: From Campfires To Crow’s Feet as the perfect tribute to the women in every female’s life. Through this collection of pithy anecdotes and too-funny illustrations, Sheehan reminds women young and old that: Girlfriend’s share their M&M’s, magazine’s and Xanax; Girlfriends know the best things in life are “flea.”; Girlfriends lie to your mother for you.

♦          ♦          ♦         ♦          ♦           ♦

This was such a fun read! I bought this book to share with those friends in my life that fall into this category. These are the friends I can call up at 2 am to cry if I need to, stay up at all night eating junk food and watching chick flicks, they go on ridiculously long bike rides with me, go to haunted hay rides, dress up in formal wear and go to mansions for sleep overs…..  and – AND when I say I want to go to New York in May to go to the book expo but hate driving in the cities to get to the airport….. they look at me without skipping a beat and say, “we’ll drive you.”

This book reminded me of those friendships and is one I hope to share around a campfire this year and read out loud as we laugh and remember those times – all the while creating new memories.

I highly recommend this read to share with the girlfriend (s) in your life!


I bought this book at bookcloseouts.com

The Power Of Half by Kevin Salwen and Hannah Salwen

Published on by Sheila (Book Journey)19 Comments


It all started when 14-year old Hannah Salwen, idealistic but troubled by a growing sense of injustice in the world, had a eureka moment when a homeless man in her neighborhood was juxtaposed against a glistening Mercedes coupe. “You know, Dad,” she said, pointing, “If that man had a less nice car, that man there could have a meal.”

This glaring disparity led the Salwen family of four, caught up like so many other Americans in this age of consumption and waste, to follow Hannah’s urge to do something, to finally just do something. And so they embarked on an incredible journey together from which there would be no turning back. They decided to sell their Atlanta mansion, downsize to a house half its size, and give half of their profits to a worthy charity. At first it was an outlandish scheme. “What, are you crazy? No way!” Then it was a challenge. “We are TOTALLY doing this.” Each week they met over dinner to discuss their plan. It would transport them across the globe and well out of their comfort zone. Along the way they would inspire so many others wrestling with the same questions: Do I give enough? How much is enough? How can I make an impact in the world? In the end the Salwens’ journey would bring them closer as a family, as they discovered, together, that half could be so much more.

Ξ      Ξ     Ξ     Ξ     Ξ     Ξ     Ξ     Ξ     Ξ

This is a story that makes you think of all the excess we have around us. The Salwen’s made a decision to work together to downsize their home and their lives and in doing so – they gave much to others.

You may read this book and about the Salwen’s life and think, “well, they had a lot to begin with.  A great home, vehicles, not really wanting for anything….”  I will admit as I started this story that is what I was thinking… yet as I read on I came to realize that what this book is really about is not so much about the Salwen family – as is it about the changes we can make in our own lives big or small that can help others.  The Salwens story is an example of what one family can do.

I love how this was not a one persons vision – but an effort that not only brought great joy to those with less, but also brought the Salwen’s closer as a family.  While there are some parts of this books that felt a little to “look what I did”, I felt overall the book gives a good message of how we can all make  changes.

This book was an inspiration and in light of reading this I plan to offer a challenge starting April 1 where I encourage each of us to think about something we can give up (or cut back on) for a month and instead put that money that we would be spending (on that cup of coffee, ice cream, movie nights, out to dinners…) and put it away to be given to a cause dear to your heart at the end of April.

More details to come.


For every book sold  $1 will be donated to Rebuilding Together, serving American’s low-income home-owners.  In addition, the Salwen family is investing in the Hunger Project.


I received my review copy from FSB Associates

This book reminded me a little of a book I read quite a while ago and RAVED about.  It was called the Kingdom Assignment and it will be part of what I am planning for April 1.




Feddie Girl by Nona David

Published on by Sheila (Book Journey)13 Comments


Carlotta Ikedi (A.k.a Feddie Girl) has never liked school. Not in California. Not in Oklahoma. When her exasperated parents ship her off to boarding school–in West Africa–Carlotta faces a life, culture, and existence unlike anything she’s ever known.

School rules and regulations, rising bell, lights-out, manual labor, inspections, dining time, prefects, punishments, mean bunkmates, and visiting days–it’s all here. But author Nona David takes Carlotta’s story a step further when her adventure’s lead to unfortunate incidents that threaten to drive her American family into the clutches of infidelity and organized crime.

Boarding school doesn’t get any better than this…

For those who have experienced the boarding school life, the adventures of Feddie Girl will bring those memories crashing back… For anyone else, get ready to see the world as Feddie Girl.

◊     ◊     ◊     ◊    ◊     ◊     ◊     ◊     ◊     ◊

I am hearing wonderful things about this book which has sat on my TBR shelf way too long.  With time commitments pressing in on me I called in a little help from a friend of mine to assist in reviewing a few books.  Camryn is the daughter of my good friend Heidi, and Camryn, like her mother – loves to read.

Camryn, at ten years old, excels in her class in reading and writing.   She truly has a way with words and I am hoping one of these days she will let me help her get started with a little blogging world of her own.  🙂 So, I would like to now welcome Camryn, and her wonderful raving review of Feddie Girl.

I personally enjoyed Feddie Girl by Nona David.  This book was full of twists, turns, and unexpected moments!

The story is about a teenager going to a private all-girls school in Nigeria.  She meets new people and discovers that this boarding school is quite strict, including chores and a lot of homework.

As the story continues, she learns that life is not a fairy tale and it takes work to keep it going steady.  When something totally horrible happens, she is determined to make the person that caused it suffer.

I would recommend this book to anyone that enjoys suspense and stories of hardships that make people see things in a new way.

Nona David currently lives with her husband in Cincinatti, Ohio.  She has a passions for foreign cultures and zeal to visit new places, learn new languages, and experience new things.  Her background, friends, and experiences in Nigeria, West AFrica is the major influence of her debut novel, Feddie Girl.

Nona loves to read and believes every reading experience should be fun and exciting. Her target audience is mainly females between the ages of 13-55; and anyone who simply enjoys reading quality fiction.

With FEDDIE GIRL, Nona wants to offer readers a different kind of reading experience by introducing them to foreign adventures and cultures. FEDDIE GIRL offers a unique and toe-curling story that is exciting, witty, adventurous, and humor-filled. FEDDIE GIRL is a sizzle, a keep-sake, an info pack, and a memory nudge that will transport readers into the foreign cultures of Nigeria and keep them turning the pages and yearning for more.


SOLD OUT!!! And The Feddie Gist Continues…

For those of you who couldn’t grab copies before it sold out, you may still be able to get the emergency copies kept on reserve by the Publisher for situations such as these. (Price $19.99; Only at the publisher’s website. Not available anywhere else! https://bernardbooks.com)

Personally, I think the book sounds fantastic!  Thank you to Camryn for taking the time to read and love this book!

UPDATE:  The wonderful bloggers at My Book Buds have a copy of this book available to the first person who emails them (within the US) with their address.  Email is:   info(at)mybookbuds.com

This book was offered for review by Bernard Books


Here Burns My Candle by Liz Curtis Higgs w/ Giveaway!

Published on by Sheila (Book Journey)60 Comments

A mother who cannot face her future.
A daughter who cannot escape her past.

Lady Elisabeth Kerr is a keeper of secrets. A Highlander by birth and a Lowlander by marriage, she turns to the auld ways, desperate to conceal a generations-old scandal that taints her family’s name.

Her husband, Lord Donald, has secrets of his own, well hidden from the household, yet whispered among the town gossips. Elisabeth cannot–must

His mother, the dowager Lady Marjory, hides gold beneath her floor and guilt inside her heart. Though her two abiding passions are maintaining her place in society and coddling her grown sons, Marjory’s many regrets, buried in Greyfriars Churchyard, continue to plague her.

One by one the Kerr family secrets begin to surface, even as bonny Prince Charlie and his rebel army ride into Edinburgh in September 1745, intent on capturing the crown. not–discover the truth, or all will be ruined.

There is nothing like the feeling of reading a book that makes you feel like you dropped into the pages to explore the world it proved for yourself.  That is the best way I can describe the feeling of this book.

I do enjoy historical fiction and this read and this one hit home with me.   I found that Liz Curtis Higgs has taken a page out of Francine Rivers book and wrote  in the likes on Naomi and Ruth out of the Bible, making the story come to light in new ways. The Scottish setting was interesting, yet some of the language distracted me from the read.

While many characters are not appealing to me because it is too many story lines to keep track of, I appreciated that the book mainly focuses on two of the characters, Elizabeth and Marjory.  While the book was a little long, I did enjoy it and was glad to welcome back author Liz Curtis Higgs to my reading room.


LIZ CURTIS HIGGS is the author of twenty-seven books with three million copies in print, including: her best-selling historical novels, Thorn in My Heart, Fair Is the Rose, Christy Award-winner Whence Came a Prince, and Grace in Thine Eyes, a Christy Award finalist; My Heart’s in the Lowlands: Ten Days in Bonny Scotland, an armchair travel guide to Galloway; and her contemporary novels, Mixed Signals, a Rita Award finalist, and Bookends, a Christy Award finalist. Visit the author’s extensive website at www.lizcurtishiggs.com

AND – there is a giveaway!  To enter this giveaway leave a comment here telling me what book by Liz Curtis Higgs would you be interested in reading (besides this one) or what other book have you read by her.

For additional entries:

Be a subscriber of this blog and let me know in a separate comment here for 2 extra entries (subscribe in upper right sidebar)

Tweet or blog about this giveaway and let me know in a separate comment for another entry

Giveaway will end on April 6 – USA and Canada only please

My review copy came from Waterbrook Multnomah


The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

Published on by Sheila (Book Journey)43 Comments


Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe, devoted to his profession and the painting hobby he loves, has a solitary but ordered life. When renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient, Marlow finds that order destroyed. Desperate to understand the secret that torments the genius, he embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism.

Kostova’s masterful new novel travels from American cities to the coast of Normandy, from the late 19th century to the late 20th, from young love to last love. THE SWAN THIEVES is a story of obsession, history’s losses, and the power of art to preserve human hope.


The Swan Thieves is a 17 CD set audio.  Beautifully titled, elegantly covered, I was drawn to the sound and the look of this audio much as an artist is drawn to an art gallery.

The story of Robert Oliver, a man not handsome, but has a presence, a way that he carries himself that reeks of self-assurance and that is a powerful tool of attraction as you will find out within this work of words.  As I began to listen, I was quickly brought into the heart of the story, this man, Robert, known for his talents and his teachings has done the unthinkable.  Robert in a rage, has attacked a painting.  A painting? And now, it is up to psychiatric doctor, Andrew Marlow, to attempt to see beyond the surface of anger and get to the canvas of the man who was, and is, Robert.

The reading of this audio is top-notch.  The gentle almost rhythmic voice of Treat Williams is fitting for the role of a patient person such as Dr. Marlow.  Anne Heche, who us the voice of Robert’s ex-wife Kate, is perfectly cautious yet strong, and Erin Cottrell who is Mary, Roberts one time lover and mistress, is the voice of young, prideful, and the self assured student to the great teacher.

There are other voices as well, Sarah Zimmerman and John Rafter Lee, who are the voices from the letters of the past… spoken in engaging strong accents that add to the timelessness of their story they tell through the writings.  I found myself engaged in their story as it seemed unbeknown to the present day characters that history truly was repeating itself in small ways within Dr. Marlow and Mary.

Honestly, as engaging as this reading was, I am not sure if I had read the book if I would have made it all the way through.  While extremely detailed, the audio is long and drawn out.  Towards the end I have to admit I started to skim the last few CDs chapters  of the accented voices and cling to the story of Marlow, Mary, and Robert.  I think the book would have  buried me in all of the words, and while I truly enjoyed the story, I think it could have been just as wonderful if not even more so if some of the great details had been taken out.

I have not read Elizabeth Kostova’s Historian.  I would like too.  However, I do hear that it is also long and that may require me to search out this book as well in audio format.

My Amazon Rating

I received my audio for review from Hachette Book Group

The 13th Hour by Richard Doetsch

Published on by Sheila (Book Journey)27 Comments

At the start of Doetsch’s tricky thriller, an innocent man, Nicholas Quinn, is in police custody, suspected of murdering his wife, Julia, at their house in upscale Byram Hills, N.Y. Then a stranger gives Nick a watchlike device that allows him to change the past by sending him back, one hour at a time, for half a day. When Nick goes back in time, he discovers single events are the result of a complex web of causes. Saving his wife means untangling a plot that includes a robbery committed by corrupt cops, a horrendous plane crash and a mysterious family secret. Julia’s fate seems to be inevitable, one way or another, and Nick’s tampering brings death to friends and allies along the way. At times Doetsch (The Thieves of Faith) oversells Nick’s anguish with breathless prose, and no character emerges as more than a cardboard cutout, but readers will enjoy the clever razzle-dazzle of a story whose parts fit together like clockwork.

∞         ∞          ∞         ∞         ∞         ∞

I wish I could remember the blog I first seen this book on.  I know I left a comment about how thrilling the book looked and I apologize for not remembering where I first picked up on this book.  When I first layed hands on my copy and opened it up to the authors note, I knew I was in for a treat:

YOU ARE NOT MISTAKEN as you turn the next page and find Chapter 12.

The chapters of this book are in reverse order and are to be read that way for reasons that will become evident upon your journey.

Pretty sweet right?  I love an unusual book and Richard Doetsch comes through in flying colors!

As the book opens we are brought into the wonderful relationship of Nick and his wife Julia.  Still madly in love after many years, even despite their morning quarrel it is clear they are very much still in love.  In a matter of pages…. their love is snubbed out by an unknown killer who takes Julia’s life and Nick is soon in custody for her murder.

As the above synopsis describes, Nick is offered a chance to go back in time to change the past and save Julia.  Who wouldn’t jump at a chance like this? What follows in a whirlwind read as Nick goes back only one hour at a time, the first leap to right before he is arrested (but still after the murder) and then with each leap back he goes to an hour previous to the one he just completed.

In a style of writing I found fascinating much to the likes of the popular shows LOST and Flash Forward, I found myself engrossed in a read that gave Nick only an hour at a time to make changes to the future that he soon discovers not only can alter the outcome of Julia’s brutal murder, but can also change how things go down affecting other lives as well – and not necessarily for the better.

With each backwards turn of the clock, Nick tries to improve what he is doing, leaving clues behind to help others help him and perfect the task at hand before he and Julia run out of time.

Towards the end of the read so many characters had been introduced I had a bit of a struggle keeping them all straight, and the flashbacks of going back and repeating mistakes he made the previous hour to change the outcome towards the end became a bit tedious….. as a reader, I became frustrated.  Yet as I thought about the book, I found the frustration brilliant as  if I was frustrated with the repeat of activities, and the tweaking of details, how must Nick feel having to do this time and again only to be snapped backward to do it again, but earlier and hopefully – better.

And what is in the box?  The box everyone is after – the secrets of a family handed down generation after generation…..  more valuable than the original paintings that line their walls or the diamonds in the safe…..

And because of this unusual style of book, I know it will be one that will stick with me for many years to come and not blend into my mind in a mix of copycat books that are all pretty much centered around the same theme, and the same outcome.

A+ for a brilliant read Mr. Doetsch.

My Amazon Rating

I received my copy from our local Library