Finished 12-30-11, rating 3/5, classic fiction, 266 pages, pub. 1918

“I came to ask you something, Tony.  Grandmother wants to know if you can’t go to the term of school that begins next week over at the sod schoolhouse.  She says there’s a good teacher, and you’d learn a lot.”

Antonia stood up, lifting and dropping her shoulders as if they were stiff.  “I ain’t got time to learn.  I can work like mans now.  My mother can’t say no more how Ambrosch do all and nobody to help him.  I can work as much as him.  School is all right for little boys.  I help make this land one good farm.”

Chapter 17

Let me start by saying that we listened to the first half of this in the car on our holiday travels, but I could not make Jason listen to more.  He hated it.  He told me there was a good chance of him falling asleep while driving if we listened to more.  I had to agree that the audio wasn’t good.  The Bohemian accents were laughable to me and really ruined Antonia.  And it was fairly boring on the Nebraska farm.

Once home, I picked up the book and finished.  I am happy to report that it got better for me.  Jim, the narrator, who had crushed on Antonia since he was a boy on the farm moved to town with his grandparents and Antonia soon followed him, working at the house next door.  Their friendship had its ups and downs, but remained the dominant relationship in Jim’s life even decades later.

This is a great study of early Nebraska and the people who settled there, many foreigners who didn’t understand the land, the language, or the people. Foreigners like Antonia and her family.   Life working the land was hard and it could make people mean, but not Jim’s grandparents.  Jim went there to live with them after his mom and dad died back in Virginia and was blessed with a relatively easy life compared to some.

I thought this was alternately boring and interesting.  Just when something interesting would capture my interest it would be followed by pages of details that didn’t move the story along for me.  I think it’s a good study of one Nebraska farm girl’s life, but it may have been more compelling told from her point of view so that she was not just seen on the fringes of Jim’s life.

I would rate the first half/audio a 2 and the second half/paper a 3.5.  I read this for the states challenge and I do feel like I’ve been there.

This was from my personal library.

Finished 12-26-11, rating 2.75/5, romance, 186 pages, pub. 1977

Patty is a trick rider in the rodeo. She travels with her grandfather who helps her handle and train the six white horses Patty uses for her show.  The owner of the rodeo , Morgan Kincaid is overbearing and opinionated and clashes constantly with Patty.  The animosity is hiding a powerful attraction and Patty is the last to realize that not all fighting is bad. 

I rolled my eyes through the first half of the book, but once they arrived in Oklahoma and I learned a little more about the rodeo circuit and the history of Oklahoma I actually enjoyed the story.  Did you know that Oklahoma City is the only state capital with an oil well underneath?  Makes sense, but I didn’t know it.  So, it was melodramatic, but the small historical details made it tolerable.

Okay, this is the last of these small romances that I’ll be reading and complaining about, but I needed a romance and one from Oklahoma, and this one fit the bill.

I had this book in my personal library.

Finished audio 12-21-11, rating 3/5, romantic suspense, pub. 2009

Listened to the playaway narrated by Nick Podehl.  17 hours unabridged.

Lil and Cooper were best friends.  He spent his summers in South Dakota with grandparents and Lil was a local girl and the two of them managed to keep their friendship going through their early twenties.  At that point hormones and pride got in the way and they became distant.  A dozen years later Cooper has returned to South Dakota for good and Lil is there running her rescue habitat in the Black Hills.  It doesn’t take long for the two to reconnect, especially after a serial killer seems to have his eyes set on Lil.

I read Nora Roberts on occasion, in the almost 4 years I’ve had this blog this is the fourth Roberts’ book I’ve reviewed.  I usually like her stories but didn’t really care for this one.  There was no chemistry and the killer provided no mystery.  Lil was an okay character, but Chase wasn’t very charismatic.  They were kind of a boring couple.  It also could have been the 17 hours of listening that bored me.  I did like Lil’s rescue habitat.  I visited one we have in Ohio (post here) and think they are necessary places and labors of love, so that part of the story was interesting.

Finished 12-19-11, rating 4/5, fiction, 323 pages, pub.2011

Michael and Julia had a marriage that started with love and turned into indifference.  They had started out West Virginia poor, but ended up Washington DC millionaires.  When Michael died for four minutes his whole life turned on its head.  Now, he wanted a real relationship with Julia and she wasn’t sold on the idea, but that wasn’t Julia’s biggest problem.  Michael wanted to give away everything.  He wanted to make amends for the years of lying and neglect his power had caused.

The premise is fascinating.  I love books about marriages because each one is complex, unique.  This was no exception.  The chilliness in the marriage happened over time and it is only after a gradual reveal of their past that I totally got them as a couple. I thought the timing of the story and the way that it went from past to present was perfect.

In this story Michael wants to give everything away and Julia has fallen in love with all the amenities of the rich.  I get Julia not wanting to give up heated tiles or a jacuzzi, (who would once you had them?) but her repeated rejection of Michael got to be too much for me.  She was not a nice person and even when I read her backstory I never really got past the problem of her superficiality.  She made progress and grew as a person and the end of the book could have helped me feel better about her growth, but I think it was a cop out in that regard. The complexity of the book was lost in the sad, but pat, conclusion.

It may see that I didn’t like it and that’s not true.  It’s just that the distance I felt from Julia kept the whole story at arm’s length for me.  I loved Julia’s friend, Isabelle and was really invested in her story more than Julia’s.  Even with my complaints I still shed a tear, which I found surprising, so I must have been at least somewhat invested!   I think I’m in the minority for not loving this one.  A good read for fans of stories about complex relationships.

I checked this out of the library.

Finished audio 12-12-11, rating 4/5, pub. 2004

Unabridged audio.  6 hours.  Read by Dick Hill.

An orphan and a bastard, Jamie grew up tough enough to handle almost anything. He survived foreign prisons, smugglers, pirates, gunrunners, and shark attacks. But what he finds in the quote town of Hawkes Harbor, Delaware, was enough to drive him almost insane—and change his life forever.

This is a shortened overview from the paperback version of the book and it is bland enough to be true.  I wish I could include the one from the audio version because then you’d understand the few issues I had while listening to this one, but I can’t because I already returned it to the library.

Jamie was orphaned at 8, and on his own for a long while, having only his friend, Kell, to watch his back.  He was crude and always looking for the easy way, for the big payoff.  When Jamie ended up in Hawkes Harbor he found the shock of his life, and that’s saying a lot given all that Jamie had been through.  He ends up staying in Hawkes Hall, working for Grenville Hawke.  Until he gets sent to state hospital for the mentally ill.

The book is supposed to have a bit of mystery attached to it, I guess, since none of the descriptions really give Jamie’s shock away, so I won’t either.  I was surprised that by the end of the book I found it to be a rather charming story of an unlikely friendship.

I assumed that a book by SE Hinton would be teen friendly, but I was wrong.  This is definitely an adult book, with frank and bawdy sex talk and situations, but it does have the popular teen themes of the day.  I liked it quite a bit, but wouldn’t have read it if I’d known what happened to Jamie.  Are you curious yet?

I checked this audio out from the library.  Thanks for the recommendation, Jill.