The Boleyn King

In this gripping and imaginative novel, Laurie Andersen imagines what would have happened if Anne Boleyn had given birth to the boy baby she miscarried, thereby changing the history of England as we know it?

We meet the young king - William to his friends - just as he is about to turn 18 and take full control of his realm. His father has been dead for several years and his mother is in failing health, but he has close companions in his older sister Elizabeth, friend Dominic Courtenay, and co-birthday celebrant Minuette, daughter of Queen Anne's favorite lady who was raised practically as a sister, and who now is Elizabeth's chief lady. The four of them are a lively, attractive, and intelligent group, with Minuette surprisingly at the center.

If you are a British history buff there is plenty for you here. There are battles, court intrigues, all the fun Tudor stuff. And the novel is a real page-turner. My only complaint is that it ends so abruptly - nothing was resolved to my satisfaction. Then I find out it's the first in a trilogy, and the second book is due out in about a month. I've already pre-ordered it from Barnes and Noble.

The Boleyn King

The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

You know I like my mystical realism and my time-travel novels. This is a fabulous one. I will say that it started a little slowly for me, but once I got into it I couldn't put it down.

Greta Wells is a 30-something woman living in NYC in 1985. Her twin brother has just died of AIDS and her long-time lover has left her for another woman, so she is understandably depressed. When her doctor suggests electric shock therapy, she figures it can't hurt and gives it a try. Little does she know how it will change her lives (yes, I said lives). Because the treatments send Greta back in time, to her previous lives - to 1918, and to 1941. In both lives she finds all of the same people from 1985 - her beloved twin Felix (now carefully hiding his true self); her lover Nathan (who is her husband in these previous lives); and her beloved Aunt Ruth (in whom Greta confides her time-travel). Greta is having the shock treatments in each of these lives, and after each treatment she moves on to the next life, in a normal sort of pattern. But then she figures out that while 1985 Greta is traveling, 1918 and 1941 Greta are traveling too, and all of them are interfering in each other's present day life.

I think it's interesting that the author, Andrew Sean Greer, picked the years he did: 1985, at the height of the AIDS "plague"; 1918, when WWI is just ending, and there is a massive flu epidemic; and 1941, when WWII is just starting for America. These were all kind of turning-points in American culture, and predate the shrinking cultural effects of the Internet and cell phones and Twitter. I also have to say that I was pleasantly surprised at how well a male author inhabited a female character. I will definitely look for other books by Greer.

The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

The Last Original Wife

I think Dorothea Benton Frank is one of today's best southern writers. She really captures the spirit of the South, and I always want to visit Charleston after I read one of her novels! Her latest is no exception.

Leslie Carter is the "last original wife" of the title - all of her husband's friends have married younger women, and she's stuck trying to make conversation with "the Barbies" every weekend at their posh Atlanta club. When Leslie and her husband Wes take a trip to Scotland with Harold and trophy-wife Courteney, Les has an accident and winds up in the hospital - and Wes goes off to play golf and leaves Courteney there to keep her company. Well, that's pretty much the last straw for Les. Once home she flies to her brother, Harlan, in Charleston. There she finds love, acceptance, and her old high school boyfriend... and the courage to stand up for the life she is entitled to.

DBF writes great characters, top among them Leslie, Harlan, and Leslie's best friend Danette. She's also a natural with southern dialect and expressions. But on top of that, her descriptions of Charleston are like the best tour book I ever read. I'm not kidding, we went to Charleston and Savannah one year over the holidays because of the way she described Charleston at Christmas in one of her books. I swear. And this is just a fun novel, and a really easy read. I just ate it up, y'all.

The Last Original Wife

Inferno

This is Dan Brown's fourth Robert Langdon novel. I liked it. I didn't read the last one, The Lost Symbol, but I liked Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code. This one is right up there as far as drawing you into the story and keeping you involved right until the end.

Langdon wakes up in a hospital in Florence, Italy, suffering a gunshot wound and unable to remember how he got there. When someone enters with the apparent intention of shooting him, Dr. Sienna Brooks helps him escape, and the adventure begins. It seems that some crazy person has planted a virus somewhere in Florence, and Robert must use his knowledge of Dante's Inferno to figure out the where/why/when. Sienna is helping him, and luckily she's brilliant and beautiful.

 Brown is certainly not what my writing professor would call a "good" writer, and this is certainly not great literature. But Brown's talent is in creating a story and a situation that immediately draws you in and doesn't let you go - I HAD to know what was going to happen next. And the fact that the reader gets a guided tour of Florence is pretty exciting too. The typical Brown switch-backs and flip-flops kept me guessing, but I thought the ending was just a little flat.

I would definitely recommend this book, but I have never and will never see a movie based on one of the Langdon books. The reason: the horrible miscasting of Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon. I mean, really, how could anyone who has read one of these novels ever have pictured Hanks in the role?

Inferno

And the Mountains Echoed

This is just a wonderful novel by Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner. It's a story of love, and family, and how we are all connected. We start in 1952 in a little village in Afghanistan, with brother and sister Abdullah and Pari. The siblings are as close as two people can be, but when they are cruelly separated, their lives take very different paths.

Hosseini uses Abdullah and Pari's story to interweave several other stories, all different, yet all connected. He takes us from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to Greece, and back again. We go from 1952 to 2012 to 1968 to 2003. Through it all we meet a group of people who are connected in ways they can't even imagine, and who show us the different ways we love, and the different ways there are to be a family.

I just gobbled this book up, it was just a fabulous story.

And the Mountains Echoed