Book Addicts Anonymous

On a burn ward, a man lies between living and dying, so disfigured that no one from his past life would even recognize him. His only comfort comes from imagining various inventive ways to end his misery. Then a woman named Marianne Engel walks into his hospital room, a wild-haired, schizophrenic sculptress on the lam from the psych ward upstairs, who insists that she knows him – that she has known him, in fact, for seven hundred years. She remembers vividly when they met, in another hospital ward at a convent in medieval Germany, when she was a nun and he was a wounded mercenary left to die. If he has forgotten this, he is not to worry: she will prove it to him.

And so Marianne Engel begins to tell him their story, carving away his disbelief and slowly drawing him into the orbit and power of a word he'd never uttered: love.


The opening of this novel was intense and graphic, neither of which put me off from reading it. I don't know how Mr Davidson managed to convey so explicitly an experience that he's never had, but he manages to pull it off in a truly believable way.

However, once the main character - whose name is never revealed - leaves the hospital and begins his life as a recovering burn victim out in the world the story, for me, took a plumet. The plot never really progressed as I would have expected it to. We merely jump back and forth in time, which isn't difficult to keep up with, just boring. It was a long drawn out story which lost me as a reader about 3/4 into the book.

I'm sure you're wondering how I managed to get through 3/4 of the book and not finish. By that point it started to feel like a chore to read. Nothing really happened. Marianne and the main character lived out their lives and she told him stories of their past. I could not bring myself to care about the characters so it was easy for me to ditch them.

This is the story of two women, both at a crossroads in their life with no-one to "talk" to. They meet and become firm friends as they cope with everything life throws at them, breast cancer for Kathleen and Joyce's husband's company fails, unbeknown to her, all she sees is the steady decline of his interest in her, which isn't as she fears because of his lack of interest, but due to him pouring his whole waking hours into trying to salvage what he can.
The women become firm friends, eventually helping each other to face their past hurts.
It is quite different from Red Tent, but still a well written book, maybe appealing to lovers of popular fiction.

http://www.anitadiamant.com/goodharbor.asp?page=books&book=goodharbor

This was another book in the "bundle" I bought, including "Flight of the Maidens", I remember now, the whole bundle was less than the individual Margaret Atwood book in it that I hadn't read.
This story follows the teenage years of Astrid, who has been raised solely by her mother. Then her Mother, Ingrid, a poet, murders her ex lover, Ingrid is found guilty, put in prison for life, and Astrid is left to the tender mercies of the USA foster system.
The story follows Astrid from 13-18 through her various foster homes, and what she does to cope with the homes, and how she finds out who she is, rather than being a pale shadow of her mother, the poet.

http://literati.net/Fitch/

This is one of those books I bought in a bundle from the Book People, link at the bottom of this. It was cheaper to buy the bundle of books, obtaining two I wanted, for the price of maybe 1 and 1/2 in the shops, and getting 7.
However saying that....this book was very entertaining. It follows three girls in the summer before they go up to university. The difference being these three girls have grown up during the second world war, and they haven't really had the chance to be "girls", they just had to get on with growing up. There are some very poignant moments in the book, and I would happily read another by this author.


http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth40

http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/catalog/book.htm?command=Search&db=main.txt&eqisbndata=070116963X

http://www.thebookpeople.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TopCategoriesDisplay?storeId=10001&catalogId=10001&langId=100