Ovation Books © 2009, 259 pages
Michael Collins isn’t in the best place in life when Lotto opens: he’s been drinking too much, his wife is divorcing him, and his position at work is tenuous. But when he finds himself holding a winning lottery ticket–good for 23 million–he’s sure his luck has changed. It has–unfortunately for the worse. Winning the lottery isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be: a Google search will turn up lots of examples of big winners losing it all because they didn’t handle their money wisely. Mike’s story doesn’t read quite like these hard-luck cases. He stumbles into trouble even before he’s able to collect his winnings, one enormous lapse in judgment on his part leading to the manifold difficulties that subsequently plague him. We watch as Mike tries to cash in, harassed by his soon-to-be-ex among others, including armed thugs on two continents.
McDonald’s debut novel is a decent read. The writing is transparent,
the plot fun and well thought out. (It might translate well to film.)
But McDonald’s characters aren’t particularly fleshed out. Mike is a
mostly good guy, as we’re given to comprehend in the book’s first
chapter, and his character develops a bit over the course of the story.
But the bad guys he’s surrounded by–his wife, his lawyer–are painted
in wide strokes. Mike does encounter at minimum one person who’s not
motivated merely by greed, and his relationship with her takes off. But
the transition in that relationship from acquaintance to love interest
is, I think, too abrupt.
All in all, a pleasant light read. I look forward to seeing more from the author.
Original post by Debra Hamel
The Story Plant © 2008, 380 pages
Gwen Maulder is a scientist with the Food and Drug Administration whose off-the-clock investigation of a friend’s unexpected death leads her to uncover a nation-wide pattern of similar suspicious deaths. She also stumbles on a conspiracy involving prominent businessmen and elected officials, one whose roots lie in the arcane research conducted by a Princeton undergraduate in the mid-1970s. A handful of people wind up helping Gwen–an investigative reporter, a senator, a security specialist–and all of them wind up in danger of losing their lives at the hands of a secret cabal.
Jonathan Javitt’s resumé makes him particularly suited to write about national health concerns from the point of view of a Washington insider: he has, among other things, served as senior White House health adviser in the last three administrations. His debut novel offers up a decent story with enough scientific backgcircular to sell the plot. But the book never quite manages to thrill: sometimes the explanatory sections slow the narrative down, and the book can get a little preachy. Javitt’s dialogue can be clunky, and Gwen and her cronies never seem genuine enough to inspire emotional attachment. Javitt’s characters also seem far too eager to jump to conclusions, and are sometimes too rapid to comprehend the import of complicated data.
Still, Capitol Reflections is not a bad first effort. Javitt is currently working on a second Gwen Muldauer novel. With improved pacing and character development, it could be a book to watch for.
Original post by Debra Hamel
As part of all the restructuring at Random House, Susan Kamil, the editorial director of Dial Press, has been named
as editor-in-chief of Little Random.
Separately, a spokesman for the Knopf Publishing Group that assumed control of the Doubleday and Nan A. Talese imprints in the recent reorganization said that there had been layoffs Wednesday in the Doubleday imprint.
A spokesman for the Crown Publishing Group said there had also been an unspecified number of layoffs at the Broadway imprint.
Ms. Kamil, who has headed the Dial Press since 1993, recently shepherded the best-seller “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society” by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, and has worked with authors including Allegra Goodman and Elizabeth McCracken.
Ms. Kamil will continue in her role as editorial director at Dial while taking on the new editor-in-chief post at what is known colloquially as Little Random. She will report to Gina Centrello, who is president and publisher of the Random House Publishing Group. Under the reorganization announced by Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Random House, Ms. Centrello’s empire expanded to include Dial Press, Bantam Dell, and Spiegel & Grau, formerly a part of Doubleday.
Paul Bogaards of the Knopf Publishing Group said that they hope to have all the changes in place by the end of January.
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
Little, Brown © 2008, 754 pages
The publication of Breaking Dawn, the fourth book in Stephenie Meyer’s vampire saga, was met with a firestorm of protest in some quarters. Disgruntled readers, unhappy with the direction the story takes in book four, tried to organize a campaign against the book, urging others who were unhappy with the novel after reading it to return it. The strategy would effectively rob Meyer and her publisher of royalties that they had earned legitimately from the book’s sale. The response, a bit of childish foot-stamping, is ridiculous: readers aren’t guaranteed a plot that pleases them or their money back. And the protesters’ desire to punish Meyer–an author who had presumably pleased them over the course of the series’ first 1800-odd pages–is mean-spirited and distasteful.
The response is also difficult to understand. Breaking Dawn offers the most exciting plot of the tetralogy, and it ties the story together nicely. The book’s conclusion is both satisfying and sensible. And the book is at minimum as well-written as previous installments in the series: that is, if readers didn’t enjoy Meyer’s prose in the first place, they shouldn’t have made it as far as book four to complain about it.
In some ways, the relationships in the book evolve along old-fashioned lines. A soap opera’s worth of modern-day issues are addressed in the midst of a vampire’s coven, but in the end life is defended against darkness; love and the conventions of marriage triumph; and familial bonds are strengthened. It’s just that the family that forms in these pages is an untraditional one. This is all very vague, as summaries go, but I don’t want to give anything away. In short, I think Breaking Dawn is the best book in Meyer’s series. Don’t let the fringe lunatics dissuade you from giving it a shot.
Original post by Debra Hamel
