The Book Worm's Library

About the Book: In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII’s court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king’s favor and ascend to the heights of political power England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph? In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array…

About the Book: The title character of this haunting historical novel is Carrie McGavock, whose farmhouse was commandeered as a Confederate field hospital before the tragic battle at Franklin, Tennessee, in November 1864. That day, 9,000 soldiers perished. This tragic event turned McGavock into “the widow of the South.” She spent the rest of her life mourning those lost, eventually reburying nearly 1,500 of them on her property. Robert Hicks’s first historical novel captures the life-altering force that war exerts even on noncombatants. Book Review:  ★★★★★★ This is a book that I found very surprising! Usually I avoid Civil War era books, and stories. I find that the subject is so much popular tripe, and the stories become cliche, and disappointing. However, this story proved to be an exception to the rule.  It is based on an unusual point of view — a woman, Carrie McGavock, whose home was commandeered as an army hospital, because it was at the site of one of the last battles of the war, the battle of Franklin, Tennessee. The story does more than break the saga of this war down to them against us, the North against the South.  Rather, this story takes a very…

About the Book: For Sabrina and Daphne Grimm, life has not been a fairy tale. After the mysterious disappearance of their parents, the sisters are sent to live with their grandmother–a woman they believed was dead! Granny Relda reveals that the girls have two famous ancestors, the Brothers Grimm, whose classic book of fairy tales is actually a collection of case files of magical mischief. Now the girls must take on the family responsibility of being fairy tale detectives. Book Review: ★★★★★★ What a fun read — for children and adults alike! I try to keep as wide a variety of types of books as possible for this blog, because I know that there are as many different tastes in books, and there are books themselves. And since I started, the area I have always been weak in is the books geared to younger generational audiences. And yet, I consider these more than just important. The world we live in is losing interest in reading. With the advent of television, the internet, video games, movies, videos — it is simply information overload — and the real importance of reading is being lost. And unfortunately — if it isn’t something that…

About the Book: “Towner Whitney, the self-confessed unreliable narrator of The Lace Reader, hails from a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace, and who have guarded a history of secrets going back generations, but the disappearance of two women brings Towner home to Salem and the truth about the death of her twin sister to light.” The Lace Reader is a tale that spirals into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths in which the reader quickly finds it’s nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction, but as Towner Whitney points out early on in the novel, “There are no accidents.” Book Review: ★★★★★★ This is a book that I have actually picked up, and started no less than ten times. And the strange part is I never got past the first three paragraphs, before putting it down, and moving on to something else. And the crazy part is, once I actually picked it up, and started to read it in earnest — I fell in love with the book! This book is all about perception. The duality of images, and how the actual image and the interpretation of those…

About the Book: You have never met a main character quite like Dr. Max Aue. This brilliant middle-class entrepreneur is deeply cultured, well read in philosophy and literature, a connoisseur of fine music. He is also a merciless assassin, a cold-blooded merchant of death, and a secret survivor of the Nazi genocide machine. Jonathan Littell’s epic, 992-page The Kindly Ones places Dr. Aue in front of us as a fictional but completely plausible creation of modern culture. This novel, written in French by an American author, won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award. Book Review: ★★★★★★ I love to read about World War II, and particularly about the Nazi’s and the Holocaust. So when I picked this book up, I was really looking forward to a great new story, in this area. Boy, what a disappointment. I can’t say if this was a result of just a poor story all the way around, or if it was a really bad translation, because I know this book had really good reviews in its native language of French. For starters the simple construction of the writing really gave me a hard time. There were paragraphs in this book that literally…

About the Book: Leaders of a mercurial clique of girls, Celia and Djuna reigned mercilessly over their three followers. One after­noon, they decided to walk home along a forbidden road. Djuna disappeared, and for twenty years Celia blocked out how it happened. The lie Celia told to conceal her misdeed became the accepted truth: everyone assumed Djuna had been abducted, though neither she nor her abductor was ever found. Celia’s unconscious avoidance of this has meant that while she and her longtime boyfriend, Huck, are professionally successful, they’ve been unable to move forward, their relationship falling into a rut that threatens to bury them both. Celia returns to her hometown to confess the truth, but her family and childhood friends don’t believe her. Huck wants to be supportive, but his love can’t blind him to all that contra­dicts Celia’s version of the past. Celia’s desperate search to understand what happened to Djuna has powerful consequences. A deeply resonant and emotionally charged story, The False Friend explores the adults that children become—leading us to question the truths that we accept or reject, as well as the lies to which we succumb. Book Review: ★★★★★★ I’m still not sure what to make…

About the Book: “A magnificent epic of love, war and Russia from the international bestselling author of TULLY and ROAD TO PARADISE Leningrad 1941: the white nights of summer illuminate a city of fallen grandeur whose palaces and avenues speak of a different age, when Leningrad was known as St Petersburg. Two sisters, Tatiana and Dasha, share the same bed, living in one room with their brother and parents. The routine of their hard impoverished life is shattered on 22 June 1941 when Hitler invades Russia. For the Metanov family, for Leningrad and particularly for Tatiana, life will never be the same again. On that fateful day, Tatiana meets a brash young man named Alexander. The family suffers as Hitler’s army advances on Leningrad, and the Russian winter closes in. With bombs falling and the city under siege, Tatiana and Alexander are drawn inexorably to each other, but theirs is a love that could tear Tatiana’s family apart, and at its heart lies a secret that could mean death to anyone who hears it. Confronted on the one hand by Hitler’s vast war machine, and on the other by a Soviet system determined to crush the human spirit, Tatiana and…