Tag Archives: library

The Associate by John Grisham (Doubleday, January 27, 2009), 384 pages

Kyle McAvoy, in his last year of law school at Yale, is confronted by men dressed in matching trench coats and sporting badges as he walks out of the gym. Starting at a diner and culminating in a nondescript late-night hotel room, McAvoy is confronted with a video from his past, evidence of a time he’d much rather forget. To keep it under wraps, McAvoy has no choice. From then on, he’s not merely a student; his life is not his own.

The Associate entails a huge New York City law firm, aerospace technology, the tension between the daily grind and doing something you love, surveillance and counter-surveillance, espionage, the FBI — it’s like Alias without the hot chick, the international settings, the romance, and the everything-tied-with-a-bow endings.

As far as I know, I’ve read all of Grisham’s books. I’ve enjoyed all of them, too. I wouldn’t call them high literature, but then, I don’t strive to read lit-ra-chure to the exclusion of all other books. As I recall, this book is cleaner than some of Grisham’s earlier works; not much language, and our protagonist only occasionally indulges in an alcoholic beverage.

I enjoyed reading The Associate. It’s a fast, fun story.

Grisham’s website.

Other reviews:
Shhh I’m Reading
Michele One L
Joyfully Retired
Books I Done Read
So Many Books, So Little Time
Thoughts of Joy

Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: A Novel by Alan Bradley (Delacorte Press, April 28, 2009), 384 pages

Flavia de Luce is our 11-year-old protagonist. (She reminds me some of Nancy Drew, although I’m not entirely sure if that’s just because she’s a young amateur sleuth.) She’s certainly precocious. Flavia is a chemist, the youngest of three daughters in the de Luce family. It’s the summer of 1950, we meet our cast of characters at the family estate of Buckshaw, in rural England. She discovers a stranger dead in the cucumber patch and takes solving the death on her own shoulders. Her mother died when Flavia was young. Her father is somewhat distant because of his war experience. Her two older sisters keep themselves occupied, one with any reflective surface and the other with a near infinite stack of books.

At times, Flavia is musing over chemical properties of a particular poison or antidote like a professional (or at least like an adult — at points I had to remind myself that she is not an adult), and at others she’s clearly a typical clueless-about-life tween. She makes good use of the public library in nearby Bishop’s Lacey and gets everywhere she needs to go on her bike, which she’s named Gladys.

Throughout the book, conversations on stamp collecting, classical music, and literature persist.

I’m intrigued by the young protagonist in a book written for adults. I’m guessing the main reason this isn’t labeled as a YA book is that the protagonist is too young. While not quite laugh-out-loud funny, it is an amusing read.

It’s a great book. I look forward to the rest of the series (the next installment — Tied Up with Strings — is due in 2010). I placed it alongside my favorite reads of the year, and found that I can’t place it at the top of that list but also that I can’t articulate why not.

Sweetness won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger Award in 2007.

Alan Bradley lives in British Columbia, Canada; he took early retirement in 1994 to write.

Other reviews:
Lesa’s Book Critiques
Arch Thinking
Medieval Bookworm
Thoughts of Joy
Tower of Books
Fyrefly’s Book Blog
A Bookworm’s World
On My Bookshelf
Both Eyes Book Blog
The Indextrious Reader
Shelf Love
Lost in Books
Bookopolis
book-a-rama
Bibliophile by the Sea
Stainless Steel Droppings

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