Archives for September 2011

Nobody cures a bad reading slump like Mary Kay Andrews.

I was having one of those weeks. The kind where every book I opened was completely uninspiring. It was depressing. Then I got the happy email from the library informing me that Summer Rental was waiting for me. I knew things were gonna get better.

Mary Kay Andrews is no John Steinbeck. That’s not meant as an insult. She’s a fun Southern writer. There is no shame in that. Summer Rental is about a group of friends who rent a ramshackle beach house for a summer vacation. Normally I shy away from books about ‘female friends reuniting…blah, blah, blah”. It’s a very tired fiction formula. But this book (mostly) avoids the cliches. The friends each have interesting life circumstances that don’t feel contrived. There is a mystery roomate and a cute landlord. Seriously, what else could you need?

I think I have mentioned how much I love The Pioneer Woman. I stumbled onto her blog while googling “Best chocolate cake”. Not only did she have the best chocolate cake recipe, she had so much more. She shared so unapologetically about almost every aspect of her life that I felt like we were close friends even though we never met. She also got me in trouble. The Pioneer Woman (Ree Drummond) refers to her children as ‘punks’. Obviously she loves her kids so ‘punks’ is not an insult, it’s a term of endearment. I copied this habit of hers to disastrous consequences. Lesson learned…hopefully.

Black Heels to Tractor Wheels is the story of Ree’s courtship and early marriage to Marlboro Man. It was originally published in chapter long installments on her website. She added some new material when she compiled the stories into this book. If you have never visited her website, you will still enjoy the book. Ree is hilarious and completely unassuming. She pokes lots of fun at herself which is my favorite hobby as you know.

This is hard for me to admit. This book was the suck. Anita Shreve is one of my favorite authors. In fact, her novel Fortune’s Rocks is on my top ten list. That’s a hard list to land on people.

But something has gone awry. It’s almost like this book was not even written by the same author. Rescue is about an EMT that meets a troubled woman following a car accident. They fall in love, marry and have a daughter. The woman is an alcoholic who eventually abandons them. The EMT raises his daughter alone. A near tragedy brings them all back together 15 years later. I can’t really apologize for the ‘spoilers’ in this review because you can pretty much anticipate the entire plot by the time you have read the first twenty pages. Had this nonsense been written by a first time author, I guess you could give them the benefit of the doubt and hope for better things in the future. But this was written by an accomplished veteran novelist. There simply is no excuse for this pile of drivel produced by someone who has proved she can do so much more.