Falling Home by Karen White

ISBN-13: 9780451231444
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: November 2010
464 pgs
Source: Publicist

After having read a few Karen White books, I have to confess that I have fallen in love with her writing style and how her stories always seem to warm and touches my heart. Needless to say, when the publicist contacted me and asked if I would like to review Karen White's Falling Home, I didn't even have to think about it.

As the title indicated, Falling Home is a coming home story. However, there are more to it than about just having the protagonist coming home; it is also a story about forgiveness and acceptance, and of finding oneself along the journey.

Cassie Madison often thinks of herself as a city girl despite that she was born and raised in Walton, Georgia until an incident had deeply humiliated her and she had vowed never to return. That humiliation was seeing the guy she liked had chosen to marry her younger sister, Harriet. Cassie left for New York and began her life thereafter. For a while she feels happy since she has a great career in advertising and a fiancé whom she thinks she loves until she received a telephone call from her estranged sister one day, informing her that their father is dying and they want her to come home.

Cassie does not want to admit this to anyone, but deep in her heart she is afraid of seeing Harriet and Joe again. Despite this, she knew she has to return to Walton anyhow. As much as she tries to forget her unhappy past, what she didn't expect is she has grown to love her nephews and nieces the more she stays in Walton, and how much the place still means to her after all these years. During the stay, Cassie will also find out the secret which Cassie's father had kept and how it will mean to her after discovering the truth eventually.

Falling Home is one of Karen White's older releases and I was so glad that her publisher decided to reissue the book after seeing that many readers had asked about it (I definitely hope that they will print her other older releases as well). While nothing much has changed to the story, Karen did a little revamp and added two new points of view (Harriet and her daughter, Maddie) instead of Cassie's. Reading about their perspectives has made me understand more about their emotions and their stand and I felt these have further enriched the story in my opinion. Although the story might not be new, what I really enjoyed reading this book is the characterisations and finding out how much Cassie has grown and a changed person after all the experiences she has been through. Speaking of characterisations, Karen has done a great job in portraying the feelings and emotions from the three point of views but I felt there also should be more emphasis from Joe's view. Karen must have her reason for keeping Joe in the background and though I totally respect her choice, but being a reader I would like to know more about his thoughts and how he felt about everything.

Nevertheless, Falling Home is an engaging read and one that made me think of the fact that no place is anywhere like home.

(Many thanks to Joy Strazza for sending this book to me for review.)

A Surprise Michael Crichton

It all started with The Barber of Seville...I was taking my class to a local university to see a Lyric Opera special one-hour performance of the show, and when I got on the bus I realized that there was nowhere to sit!  This meant leaving my students in the care of the other teachers and following the bus in my car.  By the time I found parking and entered the theater, it was dark, the performance had started, and I couldn't find my class.  I was not too pleased at the thought of sitting in the lobby for an hour waiting, until I remembered that I had passed a used book sale in the student commons.  Suddenly, an hour of boredom turned into a stolen hour of reading.  Huzzah!

The book that I chose was a beat-up paperback copy of Airframe by Michael Crichton.  I had been fairly certain that I read all of Crichton's books, so reading this novel was a surprise in more ways than one.  Airframe is the story of TransPacific flight 545.  One a flight from Hong Kong to the US, something happened that caused the plane to rapidly climb and descend, called porpoising.  The incident left 3 people dead, 56 injured, and the cabin in shambles.  It also left Norton Aviation, makers of the aircraft, with a lot of questions, a rabid journalist on their tail, and a company-saving deal with China in jeopardy.  Casey Singleton, part of the quality assurance team and the public face of the investigation into the accident, must navigate not just the waters of public opinion and outrage, but also something shady going on in her own company, as she rushes to find answers.

Like many of Crichton's books, Airframe is full of interesting scientific and technical jargon presented in a way that the average reader can understand.  I now know more about airplane construction and instrumentation that I certainly ever expected to.  I don't know how he does it, but in Airframe Crichton takes a story with very little actual action and makes it exciting.  Sure, there is the occasional union action or airplane ride to liven things up, but a lot of this book is basically people talking about aircraft or business deals, and I still couldn't put it down.

I also found myself in the rather strange position for a liberal American of feeling sorry for a large corporation.  You know an author is good if they can make a large non-human institution sympathetic.  Crichton's chosen protagonist, Casey Singleton, is very easy to  like, and the interesting cast of characters that surround her make the company feel more like a rather dysfunctional extended family than a workplace.  When the unscrupulous producer from a prime-time news show takes her limited knowledge of airplanes and tries to turn it into a story about the Norton "deathtrap", I actually felt angry on behalf of the makers of the airplane.  Now, I'll be the first to say I think that some media outlets have gone way too far to create stories out of nothing that distort the truth, but I'm not usually feeling that way in defense of a major corporation.  While I've become increasingly sure over the years I have read his books that Michael Crichton and I probably disagreed about every major political issue in the last few decades, somehow I am sucked into his world in spite of myself.

Hard Cache, by Charles B. Neff

 When retired police detective Magnus Torval travels to Washington state with his fiance, all that is on his mind is meeting up with friends and marrying the woman of his dreams.  That is, until he stumbled over a dead body while fishing in the wilderness.  After handing the body, and the case, over to the police in tiny Swiftwater, he tries to go about the business of getting married.  But the mystery surrounding the death of a Ukrainian antique dealer, the suspicion around his best friend, a prominent church leader, and the connection of both to a terrible event that happened when the two friends were Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, draw in not only Torval, but the murdered man's son, who is a local policeman, and a young Ukrainian woman who is visiting for the wedding.

This was a perfectly enjoyable, if somewhat awkwardly written, mystery.  The author is a college professor who has also written non-fiction texts, and it shows in his fiction writing.  The dialogue is just a little too clunky, the descriptive paragraphs are a little off-kilter.  That said, the story itself is engaging.  The characters are a unique group of people-you truly get a little bit of everything from this crowd.  I especially enjoyed the way the modern day mystery was tied into the Soviet/Afghan War.  The history of that region became of interest to me when I was following the oppression of women there under the Taliban, and has become increasingly important to me since we are fighting a war over there now.  This book, while fiction, gave me a little more insight than I had before about what it might have been like from the Soviet side of the story.  All in all, this was an enjoyable way to spend a few days.

(This was the first book I was asked to review by a publisher, and I got it for free.  I know there is probably some official FCC language I am supposed to use for that, but I can't find it, so FCC, if you are one of the 50 people who looks at this blog a day, I'm sorry!)

Wordless Wednesday

27 September 2007
From Taipei to Singapore
(Home Sweet Home)

Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport (via Singapore Airlines)

Giveaway Winner (Falling Home by Karen White)

Thanks to all who participated in my giveaway last week. Based on the draw result from Random.org, the winner is ...

Iliana

Congratulations, Iliana! I'll be emailing you shortly for your mailing information. I hope you will enjoy reading this book!

Teaser Tuesdays

TEASER TUESDAYS asks you to:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
• Please avoid spoilers!

We've been sheltering women at our house since before I could speak English. Tee-tee - Teresa Tomasio - director of the Helpline Crisis Referral Center by day, undercover shelter director by night, has a soft spot in her heart for women who need to get away but have nowhere to go. We run a safe house called Philoxenia - Greek for "love of strangers" - for battered women and their kids.

(Pg 18, For the Love of Strangers by Jacqueline Horsfall)

Random Thoughts

Today is the day where NaNoWriMo begins. And as indicated on their site, NaNo is about thirty days and nights of literary abandon (the goal is to write 50,000 words in the month of November!). I remember I first participated in NaNo in 2005, and then another in 2007 (or was it 2008?) and I had had so much fun doing them. Although I won't be doing so again this year (too many things going on at the moment), still I'd like to wish all my friends who are participating: Good luck and happy writing!

Apart from NaNo, today is also my husband's birthday! I gave him a dinner treat last Friday evening and we also had a simple celebration at home over the weekend - a Premium D24 eggless durian cake. Unfortunately I'm not able to post the picture here since we haven't downloaded them but I can show you the picture taken from the bakery. What can I say? It was scrumptious (even our 2-year-old daughter loved it)!

(Photo credit)

On the reading front, I'm still reading Falling Home by Karen White. I'm enjoying reading it and Karen White is one of my favourite authors. I think the reason for my slow progress is that there are too many things happening in my life lately. My eldest daughter will be graduating from her kindergarten class soon and their school will be having a graduation ceremony in another two weeks' time; and she was being informed by her teachers that she would act as an emcee so for the past week my husband and I became her audience as she go through her 'script' again and again, LOL. And then, there is our office relocation end of this month and I have to get all my things organised and packed before the move. Frankly speaking, I am so not ready for the move in spite that my new workplace is nearer to my house and it takes about half the journey time as compared to my current one. The reason? Because I will miss the bookstore (just a 5-minute walk away) and a few of my favourite eating outlets but most importantly, I will miss these staff who have now became my friends! *sniff*

Back to my reading, I will start reading For the Love of Strangers by Jacqueline Horsfall tomorrow. This is for the Green Books Campaign hosted by Eco-Libris and I want to get it done so that my post will be ready on November 10th (considering I'm a slow reader, ha). After this, I will be reading The Art of Disappearing by Ivy Pochoda which I bought last week. This is a story about a woman named Mel Snow and a magician she met and married two days later. Is their love real or just an illusion? I can't wait to find out what happens.

Well, I hope you all have a wonderful week ahead!