More Fishy Reviews – part 3

Here are links to four reviews I’ve recently written for TheFish.com on popular new book releases. Click on the titles for the full reviews.

Painting by Numbers Takes on New Meaning in The Rembrandt Affair

When Daniel Silva‘s thick, new novel arrived on my doorstep, I wondered how long it would take me to plod through 500 hardbound pages about a lost Rembrandt portrait that he painted of one of his lovers, Hendrickje Stoffels. Thankfully the painting was just a jumping off point into a plot that was full of history, intrigue, and color. I stopped noticing the page numbers after the first third of the book.

The Rembrandt Affair is Silva’s latest chapter in the life of Gabriel Allon, a former Israeli government/covert ops agent. Gabriel has operated with the cover of being an art restorer, a trade in which he is actually highly trained and very proficient. Though recently retired from the spook business in a remote location in England, he is drawn back into active service when his former handlers come to him about the case of the missing Rembrandt, a masterpiece that had left a stream of blood in its brush strokes.

Take This Passage for Perfect Summer Reading

Every summer a book lover wants to find a novel that will be a perfect partner on vacation. It should be long enough to last throughout the cruise or the visit to the in-laws, and thick enough to rival a telephone book. The story should be memorable and meaningful, even hard to lend out when you are finished with it to your best friend. This summer Justin Cronin has delivered on all of the above with his epic novel, The Passage.

It is easy to compare Cronin’s book to Stephen King‘s epic novel in this genre, The Stand. Whether or not it was intended, the books share the same imagery, the same moral fight between good and evil, and to some extent the final method of resolution. Yet The Passage is far from being a knockoff and is being celebrated by none other than Stephen King himself who promoted Cronin’s novel in his column in Entertainment Weekly.

Needed Restraint Missing from Stevens’ Still Missing

Annie O’Sullivan is a realtor in a fictional town on Canada’s Vancouver Island. She is abducted one evening while hosting an open house at one of her listed properties. From the outset the reader knows she physically survives the crime as the novel is a retelling of the kidnapping by Annie to her therapist. What the reader doesn’t know are the details, the reasons, how she got away (or was rescued), and the final outcome.

There were times that I wanted to put it down. Stevens goes into gory details about the abuse Annie experiences during her kidnapping. Having read a real life biography of a woman who was rescued from human trafficking (The Slave Across the Street by Theresa Flores), I know that stories can be told in a way that emphasize the life-altering repercussions of abuse long after the cruelty is over, without having to go into such graphic detail. The repeated rape scenes in Still Missing could have been treated in a much more delicate manner.

Finding a Mentor, and More

Mentor: A Memoir is the account that Tom Grimes recently published about the life-long relationship that developed between himself and author Frank Conroy.

Mentor also serves as a revealing window into the life of a writer, including the ups and downs of the creative process, surviving defeats as well as the dreams that come true, and the interworking of editors, publishers, and literary politics. Though this is not necessarily a book on the topic of writing, it has more than enough gems of wisdom, as well as being beautifully written itself, to inspire those who are inclined to put their life and their imaginations down in words.