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I love Vonnegut.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield has some interesting plot twists, well written moments, interesting characters, and, IMHO, a really crappy ending. The daughter of an antique book dealer, who happens to be a twin, is commissioned to write the biography of a currently popular author who, among other things, also happens to be a twin. So summed up, it sounds a lot less interesting than it actually is—mainly because a summation can't include information about the tons of captivating secondary characters who really make the plot. And since saying anymore would reveal several surprise twists—I can appreciate a well-plotted twist even if I don't particularly like it—I'll concentrate on a few well written spots where the author got a wow-that's-cool reaction from me.

1) The subject of the biography, Miss Winter, is talking about her birth and remarks "In fact, when I was born I was no more than a subplot." (page 58) Wow! That's true for everyone, isn't it? Taking the analogy farther, most of our lives turn out to be subplots—maybe not to us individually but certainly in some cosmic sense.

2) Moving back a generation, Miss Winter talks about her mother's birth which resulted in the death of her mother and a thankfully short-lived emotional breakdown of her father. The author remarks that his reaction was extreme, especially since the couple had been married over ten years, "usually (long enough) to cure marital affection." (page 60) Anyone want to argue that? I doubt it, particularly in our society where psychologists define a successful marriage as one that lasts six years.

3) "When I left Yorkshire, November was going strong; by the time I returned it was in its dying days, about to tilt into December." (page 147) Pretty cool. A lot of writers try to get a verbal handle on November, but it seems to be an illusive month. Still, I applaud them for trying, all the time knowing that they'll have to work hard to beat Melville's "whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul." (Moby Dick)

4) Description's not my favorite part of writing/reading, but sometimes a sentence or two will grab me. Regarding the house where Miss Winter grew up: "For thirty years the pace of life indoors had been measured by the slow movement of the motes of dust caught in an occasional ray of weary sunlight. Now Hester's (the new governess) little feet paced out the minutes and the seconds, and with a vigorous swish of a duster, the motes were gone." (page 154) If I really liked description, I'd be reading Setterfield for how she does it. But Pat Conroy is the only writer whose description grabs me totally.

5) Setterfield herself may have put in words what led to my disappointment with The Thirteenth Tale. She warns the narrator: "Miss Lea, it doesn't do to get attached to these secondary characters. It's not their story. They come, they go and when they go they're gone for good. That's all there is to it." (pages 91-192) My bad. I got attached to her secondary characters.

6) "Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes—characters even—caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you." (pages 289-290) Which is why I'm having trouble getting into Fiasco and why I had trouble getting into The Thirteenth Tale, and why—now that someone has put the idea into words—why I write these reviews.

7) The narrator struggles out of a lethargy. "I made cocoa and put extra sugar in it; then the sweetness nauseated me. A book? Would that do it? In the library the shelves were lined with dead words. Nothing there could help me." (page 290) My response: (with true respect for eubonics or black English or whatever you care to call one African-American dialect) Sometimes, Miss Lea, it just be's that way.

Bottom line: Will I read Diane Setterfield's next book? Yes. Do I recommend The Thirteenth Tale to others? Dunno. I do know part of my good-bye to it will be having a cup of hot chocolate as I plough my way into Fiasco.

I'm always happy when I read the last page of a non-fiction book. I feel a sense of accomplishment that finishing a novel just doesn't produce. Maybe it's because I live a story while non-fiction is simply—for lack of a better word—homework.

Whatever.

The thing is I'm feeling smug right now because yesterday I put down Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco. It's completely read, all 451 pages. I can't say it told me anything I didn't already know—or at least suspect—about our "military adventure" in Iraq, but it provided specifics and people.

There were points of interest:

1) A quote from Wolfowitz clearly states how the Gulf War led to Osama bin Laden's dislike of Americanns. "… his big complaint is that we have American troops on the holy land of Saudi Arabia and that we're bombing Iraq. That was his big recruiting device, his big claim against us." (page 18) Of course, there's nothing new there—unless you want to compare that recruiting device of 1991 with the recruiting device we're giving him now. But most of us have done that, too.

2) Remember the approach to Bagdad? How the official Iraqi news was that their army was winning battle after battle? Americans were being taken prisoner? In light of that I find the following interesting. "'We believe he (Sahhaf, Baghdad Bob) believed what he was reporting,' Army Col. Steve Boltz, the deputy chief of intelligence for V Corps, later said. Saddam Hussein's Iraq ran on fear, and bearers of bad news tended to suffer for what they delivered. 'No one would want to tell him the truth, so they lied to him.' Iraqi officers so feared the consequences of conveying negative news up the chain of command that they 'fell into telling the high command that they were all okay,' Boltz concluded." (page 134) Now we can take the above down a notch or two, but might it remind you of another head of state? Maybe someday someone will do a study on the similarities in leadership between Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush. I'd be interested in what conclusions could be drawn.

3) Of course in any book studying our experiences in Iraq, the events at Abu Ghraib eventually have to be presented, analyzed and explained. Before doing so, however, Ricks does delve into history and what abuse can do. I particularly liked the following: "When a policeman abuses or tortures a suspect, it inevitably diminishes the officer's humanity, wrote French army Capt. Pierce-Henri Simon, who was a prisoner of the Germans during World War II and, a decade later, a critic of his country's behavior during the Algerian revolution. But when a soldier uses abuse or torture, Simon argued, it is worse because 'it is here that the honor of the nation becomes engaged.'" (page 272) IMHO what happened at Abu Ghraib dishonored us all, enough so that personally I would rather have seen another 9-11 than the American behavior at Abu Ghraib. But I doubt any neocons would agree.

4) In many ways our soldiers were not well trained for this mission, a theory the book makes clear, but moving beyond that I am convinced that sending an army into a country without knowledge of its culture and language is arrogant and stupid. Ricks describes a raid on an Iraqi home where soldiers "seized two compact discs with images of Saddam on them—not knowing that the titles on the discs, in Arabic, were The Crimes of Saddam." (page 275) Granted, we can't expect a soldier to know a language and culture completely, but we can train him/her to realize that assuming he/she does know it all can lead to trouble.

5) I will never like or respect President George W. Bush, the following being but one of many factors leading to my opinion. "'We got a huge coalition,' President Bush had insisted in March 2003. 'As a matter of fact, the coalition we've assembled today is larger than the one assembled in 1991 …'" (page 346) I think our president has a lot of trouble with "the truth, the whole truth, and etc." One of the things I learned from this book is that many nations in the coalition were purely window dressing, their signing on never included being part of battles. I don't recall Bush ever mentioning that. Does anyone?

So where the book say we are now? Actually it claims we're not in as horrible shape as one may think. On the plus side, Ricks sees and approves of changes the army has seen and made. Soldiers are taught some culture and a bit of language. Maybe now the picture of Saddam on a CD cover might not automatically condemn its owner. Clearly, Ricks believes, the army has realized it's fighting a different type of war and is attempting to adapt. On the negative side, he believes that many will never support the war until its promoters admit it was based on lies and erroneous information. And that, he assumes—undoubtably correctly—is not about to happen.

Mistress of the Art of Death by Arina Franklin is a murder mystery set in 12th century England. In the town of Cambridge, the bodies of four missing children are found. All have been killed in sadistic and seemingly ritualistic ways, and blame has been placed on the Jews. Henry II arranges for what today we'd call a pathologist to come and investigate the murders. Said pathologist turns out to be a woman, and the story becomes that of a woman in a man's profession trying to solve the case.

I had mixed reactions. When the story centered on whodunit, I enjoyed it and rooted for the Jewish people to be found innocent. When it dealt with Adelia working as a doctor, I was intrigued. When it dwindled into a romance, I plowed ahead and waited for the mystery to return. When sex played a bigger and bigger role, I wished the book had been written in a less sex-crazed time. When it started to involve creatures of the devil and took on a Stephen King like tone, I forced my way through the final fifty pages.

I'm glad I read it but doubt I'll search out others by the author.

I really, really liked Danielle Wood's Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls. It's a collection of short stories, each one relating to some aspect of a typical woman's experience, usually in the area of romance. And, amazingly, they all tie together in the end.

The stories themselves cover a range of emotions—some are sad, some funny, one even moves into surrealism. Ms Woods writes well, often with an economy of words that can precisely nail a character or type. "These women would be the type, Justine thought, to factor in the calories in the sugar-coating of their contraceptive pills." (page 75) Can't you just see them?

I strongly, unhesitatingly recommend.

The reply box has a quirk that erases with a single key strok all that one writes.

Maybe it is God's way of saying to me to quit writing a clean off this desk.

Shorthand then Patricia Cornwell's book starts off as bad as it can gets and then drops deeper into a pit of sludge. I don't CARE about motorcycle, leather wearing cops that lust for attractive pathologists who have a beautiful but slightly masculine lesbian niece and sexual tension with her long-time love interest Benton Welsey. I put it down.....TERRIBLE

Enyoyed Nevada Barr's ENDANGERED SPECIES about Cumberland Island and even actually met on the of people on whom a character is based, Lynette.
Cumberland Island is a good place to visit in person or by reading the pages of the book.

David Rosenfelt's FIRST DEGREE and BURY THE LEAD are both wonderfully entertaining mysteries. My husband liked both. Our only argument was how to pronounce "LEAD" Husband thought it was l-e-e-d because hands of victims kept getting cut off. I thought it should be pronounced "LEAD" as in the metal because I just wanted to pronounce it that way....Did, Do, Will.....

And that's all I have to say about that!

Respectfully Submitted,

Kathy Albers

Faye Kellerman writes books about the orthodox Jewish family, the Deckers. Her latest offering is THE BURNT HOUSE.

An commuter airplane crashes into an apartment building and one person listing in the paper as being on the plane is not found in the wreckage; however, another, a 20-year old dead body is found.

I would recommend this book for light reading and also to glimpse some of the observances of living an orthodox jewish life. Kellerman usually throws in a few life lessons from the rich Judism background from which is her heritage.

Two things bothered me. I didn't like to read of the entrapement methods (i.e. lying) that police use to get information that they need. Two murdered people twenty years apart having a common search and resolution was a bit too much of a stetch for even me.

Respectfully Submitted,

Kathy Albers

Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life, edited by Barnaby Conrad and Monte Schultz (son of Charles—Charlesovitch?)) is fun. It's a collection of essays addressing the writing life by many of today's writers of novels, short stories and screenplays. And there are many cartoons about Snoopy's hopes, fears, and rejections in his writing life. A perfect book for a dark and stormy night. Particularly in front of a lit fireplace. With cookies. And hot chocolate. Yum. Think I'll go read it again.

Stephen King listed Mark Childress' One Mississippi as one of the ten best books he read in 2006, so I read it. And liked it. I'm also happy Stephen King's list led me to it. A regular review would probably have mentioned that Childress had also written Crazy in Alabama, which didn't impress me at all.

One Mississippi, set in 1972, is a coming of age story that explores all sorts of issues—racism, integration, bullying, religion, homosexuality—and ends with a school shooting. All that's part of what King refers to as the "funniest novel I've read in ten years." OK. It's not totally false advertising. There are funny moments.

There were also moments that mean I'll definitely give the author another try.

1) Childress nails aspects of the high school experience. At one point the math teacher breaks down and cries. The narrator remarks, "You don't often see a non-substitute teacher break down and cry." (page 83) Yep. I remember how high school classes treat substitute teachers. It's never been pretty.

2) Childress nails aspects of the southern experience. The narrator and some friends devour three dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts. "We inhaled those doughnuts like the weightless sugar-drenched french fries they were." (page 279) They really are—which always makes me wonder how anything that melts in your mouth like they do can have any calories. There is no justice.

3) Alas, Childress does commit one I-can't-believe-he-did-that grammatical error, albeit a very common one these days. On the phone a character says, "… to his father and I …" (page 347.) Come on, folks. "Me" is not a four-letter word. There are times when it's correct, the object of a preposition being one of them. All right, I did give Childress the benefit of the doubt. The character was one who would use English so correctly that she'd use what was thought to be right, even if it wasn't. But then I have a time problem. The novel is set in 1972. I don't think "me" became a dirty word until sometime in the 1990s.

4) There's an interesting look to the future after the narrator's best friend, Tim, shoots up the school. A detective says, "Here's what I don't understand …. What if every kid who got picked on by some bully decided to do like Tim? What kind of a screwed-up world would it be?" (page 368) Sadly, we can answer his question.

5) One Mississippi was an interesting book to be reading these last few days. Tim writes the narrator a letter from jail and in it says, "I want the world to pay attention to me. Let's be realistic, this is the only way that will ever happen." (page 376) Sound familiar? Chills down the spine. A novelist's grasp of the human soul is often amazing.

6) And, finally, there's superstition and there's common sense. At one point the narrator says about his father, "Dad was not the kind of man who believed in ghosts, but he knew you don't hang around the graveyard when the funeral is over and the sun is going down." (page 384) A most sensible approach, IMHO.

I recommend.

One positive thing I can say about Crazy in Alabama is that the book was much, much, much, much better than the movie.

Kathy