About our Book Club

I am an avid reader who is part of a book club of 12 women who get together once a month at each others homes to discuss various books. We always have delicious food & wine and fabulous discussions! If you love to read then please take some time to peruse some of our book reviews, become a follower, add comments, suggestions or ratings and PLEASE share this blog with your friends too!

Feb 25, 2011

Room by Emma Donoghue

This month our book was, Room by Emma Donoghue.
I’m a little torn as to how much I should reveal about the book in this review because we all agreed that the best way to read this story is to just dive in blindly without too much background about the plot. Therefore, I will remain mysterious.

I think it’s important to point out that 98% of us couldn’t put the book down once we started it…we won’t go into details about the other 2% except to say that they eventually came around!
The reason for the hesitation from the 2% group is that this book’s story is a chilling combination of both unspeakable horror and precious innocence. One minute you have chills running down your spine and the next you are crying tears from heartbreak.
There is a part in the middle of the book, (once again, I won’t reveal a thing), where many of us had real heart palpitations!

We all agreed that this was one of the most unique stories we’ve read in a long time. This book has been #1 in the UK and Australia for awhile now and is up for many literary awards. It’s only recently come to the USA and has been on the LA Times Bestseller list for a few weeks now.

To say that we highly recommend this book is an understatement. Please go out and get Room as soon as possible and read it…you won’t regret it, but please be warned that it may be a few weeks before you will want to pick up another book. It sticks to your soul for a long while.

Feb 10, 2011

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

From the very first pages of this book, it felt like we were launched into a black & white Humphrey Bogart movie complete with smokey rooms and shady characters. The text contained words like, Hepcat, Ixnay and Brouhaha. It felt intriguing to be led down this path.

The main characters are Bucky Bleichert, Lee Blanchard and Kay Lake. They are involved in a strange love triangle that just continues to get stranger as the story goes on.
Bucky and Lee are cops in the late 1940s, a time where large sectors of law enforcement were corrupt. There were gangsters and Zoot Suiters and Thugs,(to use lingo from the book)!

We all felt like it took quite awhile of background story before we were able to begin reading about The Black Dahlia and the mystery surrounding her brutal murder. James Ellroy wrote L.A. Confidential which was a bestseller and was also turned into a movie, so the troubled and complex characters came as no surprise to us, but it made for some slow reading in parts of the book.
When we finally did get to the murder, several of our members felt that it was very graphic and had to take a moment to compose themselves before continuing on. Others were " TV Crime Drama Addicts" and were OK with the gory details.


A little more than halfway through the book, right when they really start getting into the police case of The Dahlia, we are introduced to several new and strange characters and things start to get really twisted and weird. Make no mistake, we were pretty much hooked at this point but it was still a hard pill to swallow at times.

The murder of The Black Dahlia really happened and remains an unsolved mystery, this book however has taken a true event and created a fictional book with a solved ending. 


At the end of the book, our consensus was that we enjoyed the book, but we were all left scratching our heads at the troubled lives of most of the characters in the story.