The Witch of Portobello - Paulo Coelho (Book Review)

I have been wanting to read a Paulo Coelho novel for some time. For one reason or the other I keep missing the opportunity to do so. All of his books look to be very interesting and I am absolutely open to hearing from anyone who has a favorite that I should give a try to. Perhaps that is why I am left with somewhat a mix sensation when it comes to The Witch Of Portobello. The prose and format of the novel are wonderful and strangely enough, it is the characters that I found so dislikable.

"...I did. A new witch hunt is starting to gain ground. This time the weapon isn't the red-hot iron, but irony and repression..."

The Witch of Portobello was born a Romanian orphan of dubious descent. She was adopted by a well to do Beirut couple to be the daughter nature had denied them. They named her Sherine Khalil but the world would come to know her as Athena. As a child, Athena soon finds that she can see and feel the world around her differently than other children. She was prone to vague premonitions that seemed to come true. Her parents keep this secret and as she grows up they send her to an elite school, hoping the education will shape her. She becomes very spiritual and comes to believe that God wants her to have a child and become a mother, to replace the mother that had abandoned her. She convinces her boyfriend to marry against his and her families wishes. But that soon dissolves and at a young age she finds herself a divorced mother. What she was not prepared for was how this decision would impact her relationship with her church.

"...I like to imagine that, when she left the church, Athena met Jesus. Weeping and confused, she would have thrown herself into his arms, asking him to explain why she was being excluded just because of a piece of paper she'd signed, something of no importance on the spiritual plane, and which was of interest only to registry offices and the tax man.
And looking at Athena, Jesus might have replied: "My child, I've been excluded too. It's a very long time since they've allowed me in there..."

It is this exclusion that leads Athena on a quest. This exclusion from the church she holds so dear. A quest to fulfill her life and spirit. She finds that she reaches another level of consciousness when she dances. She begins to teach this dance to others but they do not feel all she feels. Yet she is still not satisfied. She searches for other spiritual people and learns from them. One thing she learns is that it is the blank spaces in her life that haunt her and the largest of these is the mother who abandoned her. What she finds is that she comes from a line of mystical women. Gypsies who have lived in Romania for centuries.

"...On the other hand, they think that by giving us some tricksy name, like "travelers" or "Roma," they can put right the many wrongs they've done us in the past.
Why can't they just call us gypsies and put an end to all the stories that make us look as if we were cursed in the eyes of the world..."

Here, by her mother's side, Athena is taught to tap into the spiritual awakening within her and it is this new spirituality that she brings home. A spirituality that is infectious and threatening to the religions that are entrenched in her town. Of her followers she asks a great deal and nothing at the same time. They find her vagueness wise.

"...Simply being in her presence seemed to justify my very existence. Was that what she wanted to hear? Fine, I'd tell her over supper. I'd be capable of doing almost anything, even leaving the woman I was living with, but I drew the line, of course, at giving away my books..."

Athena and the established powers come to a head in violence and the threat of losing her child from neglect. In finale, Athena is no more.

The Witch of Portobello is a powerful novel of the growth and individuality of one person's spiritual ascension. For Athena, after her church cast her out, she found that in a Mother Earth religion of her own making. For many this may be a novel of a woman's right to choose her own life and the direction it takes. Shedding away the conventional and the bonds that society would have her labeled to be. I can see that.
But for me I found the character of Athena, not to be strong and independent but instead, selfish and petulant. Several times through the course of the book, when challenges arose and things did not go easily her way; Athena reacted in a violent and angry manner. Often cursing those who would teach her and guide her along the way. Too often, she was less the spiritual Witch of Portobello and instead the spoiled little rich orphan child she had been raised to be. Those who told the tale along side of her made constant excuses for her behavior and blamed the world around her.
There was the consistent abandonment of her child as she went off on her quest, or worse dragging him along as she searched only for her own needs.

The Witch of Portobello is incredibly well written and I enjoyed the chapters being broken up and narrated by different characters in the book. The tone and tenor of the story being changed from chapter to chapter dependent upon the point of the view of the character telling it.
I just found them so dislikable in their selfishness and blindness. There is so little growth in them. The opportunities for each of them to have found a special place for themselves on a spiritual plane was spoiled by their inability to see beyond themselves.
I would still like to read Paulo Coelho. I found his writing and prose to be very enjoyable. Hopefully there is a character of his that will be to my liking.

In The Tall Grass by Stephen King and Joe Hill - Book Review

In the Tall Grass by father and son duo; Stephen King and Joe Hill is old school horror. The kind of short story that is a visceral slash to the jungular. There is no wasting time and words on explaining all the reasons you should be scared, they just do it.

"...If we had shadows, they'd be getting long and we might use them to move in the same direction, at least, he thought, but they had no shadows. Not in the tall grass. He looked at his watch and wasn't surprised to see it had stopped even though it was a self-winder. The grass had stopped it. He felt sure of it. Some malignant vibe in the grass; some paranormal Fringe shit..."

Brother and sister, Becky and Cal are traveling across the country to leave Becky with her uncle and aunt. Pregnant and soon to be a single mother, Becky is moving in with her aunt and uncle to have the baby and then decide what to do after that. Cal, her devoted brother, is helping her. As they pass a field of tall grass they hear the cries of a child. They pull over and listen to the screams of the lost child and the maddenning screams of its mother to quiet down. Becky and Cal step out of their vehicle to go in search of the child. And it is here, when they step into the field of tall grass that all goes wrong.
The mother and child, are hiding in the grass from the child's father. The father; Ross Humbolt, knows the secrets of the grass. Becky and Cal search for the child but distance and time change in the tall grass and soon they too are lost. Becky is found by Ross Humbolt soon after the cries of the child and mother have gone silent.

"...There was blood splashed on the grass beyond the swatches he was holding open and Becky wanted to stop but her feet carried her forward and he even stepped aside a little like in one of those other old movies where the suave guy says After you doll and they enter the swanky nightclub where the jazz combo's playing only this was no swanky nightclub this was a beaten-down swatch of grass where the woman Natalie Humbolt if that was her name was lying all twisted with her eyes bulging and her dress pushed up to show great big divots in her thighs and Becky guessed she knew now why Ross Humbolt of Poughkeepsie had such red lips and one of Natalie's arms was torn off at the shoulder and lying ten feet beyond her in crushed grass already springing back up and there were more great big red divots in the arm and the read was still wet because...because..."

There is a stone in the tall grass. A great stone that has been there for a long time. This stone tells the secrets of the tall grass and it is only this stone that lets you survive. Only what will you do to survive in the tall grass.

This is not some story about choices. There is no morality tale here. This is horror, rated R Twilight Zone, with the curtains drawn back and Rod Serling a lot darker that sixties television would ever let him be.

A great short tale.

The Poisoned Island - Lyoyd Shepherd (Book Review)

The Poisoned Island by Lloyd Shepherd is a tense atmospheric Victorian Murder mystery. It is well written and deftly plotted. The characters are suited to their time and setting. Shepherd plays the air of English superiority heavily in the interaction with the islanders, even with the crew who are obviously uneducated and working class.
The sailing vessel the Solander has arrived in London after a voyage to the island of Tahiti in June of 1812. Aboard it brings home a treasure of botanical oddities. Plants unknown to the British but their rarity is immeasurable in value. The highest minds want to study them but the voyage was funded by Sir Joseph Banks and he has his own plans for the bounty the ship has brought. Banks does not just have the desires of science in mind, no he has something else in mind altogether.
It is not only the plants that come ashore from the Solander, but murder as well. As one by one a group of sailors die.
   "You have no thoughts yourself?"
   "None at all. The man's neck was bruised, I am told, confirming the analysis of strangulation. But he had a confoundedly happy grin on his face, which struck Horton as most odd. He seems to have died happy, in any case."
   Graham, ruefully, looks at his fork.
   "We should all like to die happy," he says.
   "Indeed. But what does an illiterate sailor with grim lodgings and a fat old mistress have to be happy about?"
   "I sometimes think an ordinary life would be more desirable than the one I lead."
It is something else the Solander has brought back from Tahiti than  just exotic plants. It is a leaf when brewed becomes a powerful opiate. It is up to Constable Horton to unravel the mystery and the murderer before the danger reaches him or his family.
The Poisoned Island is a well crafted mystery that at times may be slow but still moves along at a good pace.

White Fire by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child - A Book Review

I fell in love with the Agent Pendergast novels from the very beginning when I was introduced to him in The Relic. Not the B movie but the novel. In subsequent novels I found the writing of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child to be intriguing and thrilling. They are smart novels. Books that challenge your intellect as well as thrill you with mysteries very often based on fact. I had the pleasure of meeting Douglas Preston at a book signing at the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale a few years back. I had an entire bag of books and he not only took the time to sign each one but held a conversation with me as well. He actually looked at me when he spoke and not past me. Something many other lesser known authors could learn when greeting their public.
So perhaps I am a little prejudice when it comes to a Preston and Child novel. Even more so when it involves Special Agent Pendergast of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and his protégé Corrie Swanson. And while I can say that White Fire, the thirteenth installment in the Pendergast series is not the best, it is on its own a really good story. It also has the added benefit of having a "lost" Sherlock Holmes story that you will come away convinced was actually written by Arthur Conan Doyle in its pages.
The novel begins with a meeting between Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde, as Wilde recounts to Doyle a story he had heard in a small mining town in the state of Colorado as he was touring America. A story so horrific that it may be the premise of The Hound of The Baskervilles. A story that Doyle would later write truer to its truth and have rejected, becoming the lost tale of Sherlock Holmes.
Then in the modern day, young Corrie Swanson travels to the ultra exclusive resort town of Roaring Fork, Colorado to investigate the bones of dead miners killed over one hundred and fifty years before by a crazed grizzly bear. What she finds is even worse and the basis for Wilde's tale to Conan Doyle. Swanson is jailed for her discoveries and it is up to Pendergast to come to her aid. As he saves his protégé from the political influences of the town, an arsonist takes hold and burns down the homes of the affluent. With the living bodies of the homeowners setting the blaze.
It is up to Pendergast and Swanson to stop the arsonist. Solve the murders. Solve the killings of one hundred and fifty years before and find the lost story of Sherlock Holmes that holds the key to the other mysteries.
Preston and Child do another wonderful job of mixing myth and fact. Of murder and mayhem. With just enough drama to keep it light as the darkness and blood pool all around

Savor Me Slowly - Gena Showalter (Book Review)

Savor Me Slowly is book #3 of the Alien Huntress series but the first one I picked up. After reading this one I am very interested to start the series at the beginning get the entire background to what led up to this novel. The simplest way to describe this novel is to think; MIB meets Anita Blake and their love child is the killer cyborg Mishka (Le'Ace) of Savor Me Slowly.
The novel begins with Jaxon Tremain hanging from a rack, having been tortured for days by an alien race intent on gathering information about the Schon. Jaxon is part of A.I.R.; Alien Investigation and Removal for New Chicago. Enter an assassin known as Mishka (Le'Ace). Jaxon believes, as do the aliens who have him captured that she is there to continue the torture. Instead she rescues Jaxon and takes him to a hideaway where she is ordered to find out what he knows.
It is Mishka's mission to find out about the Schon herself. The Schon are an alien race who have taken on the appearance of incredibly attractive human beings. In doing so, they are infecting the humans with a disease that drives them to violent madness. As well as all the infected becoming pregnant with the alien seed.
What they find out together is more evil and deadly than what they thought they were facing alone.
In Mishka (Le'Ace), Gena Showalter has created a complex character. Part human, part alien and part machine. She has been engineered and genetically mutated as a child. Trained to be the perfect killing machine. Kept in line by a chip inserted in her body that brings excruciating pain.

"...Men could do any dark deed, and it was for the good of mankind. Yet with the slightest hint of a woman's malevolence, no matter the reason, she was utterly wicked. Eve with the apple. Pandora with her box..."

As with the Vampire hunting Anita Blake series there is a lot of violence and sex to go around. Only it is not with vampires or werewolves but with aliens from another world. The storyline is crisp and fast paced and the violence and sex are just another extension of the strong storytelling.
A good read!

Little Black Book of Stories - A.S. Byatt (Book Review)

The Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt is a collection of short stories in which the characters and settings are slightly twisted. Tales of wonder and the bizarre that masquerade as reality for the rest of the world. There are five tales in all and range from the amazing to the tragic.

"...The two little girls looked at each other, and took each other's hand. Speechlessly and instinctively they crouched down behind a fallen tree-trunk, and trembled, as the thing came into view..."

In The Thing in the Forest, during the war years young children in England are sent away from the cities to the relative safety of rural areas. Safe from falling bombs but not from forgotten creatures that still roam the deep forests. Three young girls enter the forest and only two come out.

"...He thought, I belong to a religion which worships the form of a dead or dying man..."

In Body Art, a young doctor meets a truly starving artist decorating the halls of the hospital he works in. Learning of her painful and harsh past he offers her refuge and in one week alters their lives forever.

"...She quickly lost this transient lifelike-ness, and became waxy and peaked. Ines, who had been the younger woman, became the old woman in an instant..."

In A Stone Woman, Ines buries her mother and then falls gravely ill. After the surgery to make her well she realizes that she is beginning to change. That what had been flesh and blood is changing to stone and crystals. As she begins to become something out of legend.

"...Every year they wrote melodrama. They clearly needed to write melodrama. He had given up telling them that Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy. In ways both sublime and ridiculous it clearly was, precisely, that..."

In Raw Material, a writer teaching Creative Writing to an evening class happens upon one student who simply writes the truth. Vignettes of what passes in her life. Encouraged by this he shares with the whole class only to have the work harshly criticized. It is only later, when a dark and violent moment becomes reality that the class finds the truth worth writing about.

"...Mrs. Bright watched James with approval, as he came to the end of the hair dressing. The pinning up of the fat coil, the precise insertion of thick steel hairpins. And finally, the attachment of the crisp pink ribbon. A sweet colour, fresh. A lovely colour, she said, as she always said.
"Yes," said James.
"You are a real kind man," said Deanna Bright. The person in the chair plucked at the ribbon..."

The final tale, The Pink Ribbon is the story of James, an elderly man who in his final years is caretaker to his wife. Who's dementia is incurable. One late night, James opens his door to a distress young woman and in saving this young woman, knows that it is up to him to save another.

The Little Black Book of Stories is very hard to put into a category. It is not horror or fantasy but each of these tales places its characters in situations that go beyond the norm. They are in some true sense morality tales. But to whom. The characters? The reader? Or perhaps the world around all of us. There are lessons in each of the stories. The ability to forget and pretend that darkness does not exist in The Thing in the Forest as the two oldest girls leave the forest without a word as the child that was with them is gone forever. In Body Art, the life of a newborn hangs in the balance between two completely different people who neither is ready to care for it. A Stone Woman who changing is handled with the stoic and hard heart that is already changed inside of her. Is Raw Material an indictment on today's reading world that wants the fantastic and violent over the everyday truths they live in?
A.S. Byatt brings all of these to light with the lyrical prose she is already so well known for.

The Homecoming by Carsten Stroud (A Book Review)

The Homecoming by Carsten Stroud is the second novel in a series that started with Niceville two years ago. My initial review of Niceville was very positive with the regret that I felt Stroud had tried to do too much with the book. Was it a mystery? A crime novel? A ghost story? Or somehow with great ambition, Stroud tried to make it all three. He did well but I felt he left much unsaid. In The Homecoming, Carsten Stroud continues the tale and begins to fill in what was missing in Niceville.

...And only last night, right here where he was standing, right on these steps, Kate had opened these same black doors onto a thing that had no explanation, no framework, no reason to exist that fit into any of the outer world's reality. It was utterly strange, and it was hostile--hate filled, hungry, mindless--something out of a nightmare world, something alien and terrifying and inexplicable.
The both saw it, Nick and Kate.
And they both saw the woman--the image of the woman--who had stepped out of that old mirror in a haze of green light and confronted the thing in the doorway. They had recognized her from an old picture. It was a woman named Glynis Ruelle, who had died in 1939. This had actually happened last night...

Nick and Kate Kavanaugh, having so recently survived the events that resulted in finding the missing child Rainey Teague. Rainey who somehow stared into an antique mirror and then disappeared only to be found later buried in a sealed crypt. A crypt that hadn't been opened in over a hundred years. Now Nick and Kate have sheltered Kate's sister and her two children as well from an abusive husband and father. A husband, Byron Dietz who had just been stopped in possession of stolen bank money. A robbery that had killed several of Nick's fellow officers.
There are millions of dollars missing. Cops dead. FBI questioning everyone. A plane crashing into a murder of crows. And beneath it all. A small boy possessed of ghosts. Ghosts who want to live again.

..."Are you coming with me?" Anora asked.
Talitha shook her head.
"No, Missus. I wish I might. I can't."
"Yes you can. I forgive you. It's not too late for you. You can go to the pastor at Plaquemine and confess. To a judge. You can...atone."
"Missus, I believe I done that already. For what I done to you, Mister London has killed me."
"Killed you?"
"Yessum. Mister London has killed me with a rope down in the box maze and now I am hung in the juniper willow with a note I never wrote pinned to my dress. Mister London, he don't collect I never got my letters, but Second Samuel knows."
She paused for a moment, as if listening.
"They calling for me now, Missus. My run is done. I am bound for unconsecrated ground, because I am a whore and a murderess. I only come to take you to the mirror. Remember me to Second Samuel, if you can. He was a fine daddy to me, and I am sorry I was such a bad daughter..."

And did I mentioned there was also a mob enforcer bent on finding the missing robbery money for himself?
As with Niceville, Stroud packs The Homecoming with a cast of characters and dialogue not seen much these days. In fact you may have to go back to William Diehl's Sharky's Machine for wit like you will find here.
A terrific read and setting up the third book which I hope is soon to come.

The Secret Lives of Married Women by Elissa Wald - a book reveiw

The Secret Lives of Married Women by Elissa Wald left a lot to be desired in a novel that was a Hard Case Crime Novel or by the cover, a book of erotica. There were surprisingly very little of either.
There was no great mystery to solve and very little in the way of erotic moments in the book. Two whole stories and one good sex scene between them both? What there is in The Secret Lives of Married Women are two very confused married women.
The first story is about Leda, a young married woman who is pregnant and buying her first home with her Russian husband Stas. She finds a handyman who is helping her with her remodel, but seems to be taking a much more avid interest in her. Leda complains to her husband and soon the handyman goes missing. Leda must come to terms with her suspicion that somehow her husband may be involved in the murder of the handyman. More so, come to terms with her own feelings about it. The fact that she loved the thought that her husband may have killed for her. That this thought brought passion and danger to desire for her husband.
The second story is about Leda's sister Lil, a high powered attorney who has little to no time for her husband or family life. Lil approaches everything in her life in a cold and calculating manner and the result of her attitude has begun to wear on her marriage. She takes a case for a well known real estate developer who is caught breaking the law. But what is surprising here is not the developer but his assistant. Nan. A young woman who up until this current job, had lived her life before as a submissive in a sex club. It is in her interviews with Nan that finds in herself, a longing for desire that she had left behind.
Both stories are well written and character driven. They do seem poorly marketed. The Secret Lives of Married Women would have been better served not being advertised as some mystery noir with erotic overtones. For in that regard, it does fail miserably. Had it been marketing differently it might have been better appreciated for the characters and fine writing that it does have.