Archive for 'Jewish-faith'



REVIEW: Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian

Dear Mr. Bohjalian:

book review When I first got a copy of this and read the dust jacket, I thought “A story of the end of WWII. A book about a family’s flight through the horror that was the collapse of the thousand year Reich. I bet that’ll be uplifting.” And though I didn’t immediately put this in my “why did Jane send me this because I’m never gonna read it” pile of books, it lingered on the “I’ll get to it sometime. Maybe.” stack until something made me pull it out. Why? I really don’t know but once I got started, the pages flew.

I did worry that I would lose track of the various protagonists and characters. Because let’s face it, there are a lot. The Emmerich family - those five who start the journey and the brother fighting on the eastern front, the Scottish POW who got placed on their Prussian sugar beet farm as a laborer, the Jew who decided he wasn’t going to stay on the train to Auschwitz and who’s spent the past two years shifting like a chameleon based on which soldier’s papers he can find, the work …

REVIEW: The Queen’s Fool by Philippa Gregory

Dear Mrs. Gregory,

112_queensfool.jpgHaving read and loved “The Other Boleyn Girl,” I hurried out and bought “The Queen’s Fool” when it was first released three years ago. Then….life happened and despite the fact that it sat on a table right in front of me for that long, it’s taken me until now to pick it up and start reading it. And despite the fact that I had to take my cat to the vet and then my car died on me today and I had to spend a few hours getting towed, borrowing another car, then driving out to pick mine up when (thank God) it only turned out to be a minor problem, I managed to get all 500 pages of it read in only two days. I was glued to it. I devoured it. I once again wondered why I have only read two of your many books. I must remedy that.

A young woman caught in the rivalry between Queen Mary and her half sister, Elizabeth, must find her true destiny amid treason, poisonous rivalries, loss of faith, and unrequited love.

It is winter, 1553. Pursued by the Inquisition, Hannah …