Wreake Valley Readers book group reviews 2007

Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce
This children’s story is about two brothers who are adapting to life in a new house after their mother has died. The younger brother finds a bag of money and believes it is a gift from God and his older brother convinces him not to tell their Dad or any adults. They only have a few weeks to spend the money before it becomes useless, as the pound is about to become the euro.

Book Groups Review
Millions was a delightful light read with an interesting plot and we enjoyed all the information on the different saints. The story was slightly superficial which made it a bit unsatisfying. We felt the innocence of child’s point of view was refreshing but in places the story lost this and had more of an adult perspective.

The Blind Assassin By Margaret Atwood
At the end of her life, Iris Griffen (the main character) takes up her pen to record the secret history of her family and the romantic melodrama of its decline between the two World Wars. It conjures a world of prosperity, misery, marriage and loneliness.

Book Groups Review
This was a very involved book which you will need time to read. The well drawn characters are gradually built up until you can visualise them clearly. There are lots of strands running through the book which the author manages to tie together with a very satisfying end.

Jupiter’s Travels By Ted Simon
This is the best known of Ted Simon’s books and was a bestseller in the 1980’s. This travel book tells you about his four-year journey around the world on a Triumph motorcycle.

Book Groups Review
This was an excellent travel book which takes you right back to the 1970’s. Ted Simon is able to meet people on their own level and gives you a real feel for the people and places he is writing about. There are two levels to the journey the physical and the inner. Ted is transformed by the journey and you notice the changes as you share his experiences throughout the book.
It was a unanimous decision that this is a great travel book and well worth a read.

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett
This book was written after Alan Bennett was told he only had a 50:50 chance of surviving cancer. It pulls together all the odds and end he wanted to write about before he died. The book is part biography and part diary

Book Groups Review
The descriptions of people and places give the reader a clear picture and a unique insight into Alan Bennett’s life and the world of celebrities. The circumstances that inspired Alan Bennett to write this book have allowed a usually very private person to share thoughts and stories he would not otherwise have done. It is quite a long hard book to read in one month and we would recommend reading it over a longer period of time.
This book split the group, some people really enjoying it and felt they could hear Alan Bennett talking to them as they read his diaries, others really didn’t enjoy it and thought it was long, depressing, and had lots of name dropping.
If you’re looking for an intellectual book that you can easily pick up and put down then read it and make up your own mind.

Driving Over Lemons By Chris Stewart
This is the true story about Chris and his family who sell everything they have in England and move to Spain. They buy an old farm house and some land to try and make a new life for themselves. The book tells the story of the move and how they adapt to a very different way of living.

Book Groups Review
Chris’ was very adaptable but his wife saved him from being too laid back. The tough way of life came through in the descriptions of how they lived rough for the first few years and survived several crises such as sheep on the mountain, flooding, the big black snake, loss of water guides and the bridge. Everyone enjoyed this book and would recommend it as a good holiday read.

We need to talk about Kevin By Lionel Shriver
This is a story inspired by the tragic shootings that have taken place in American schools. The book is about a couple and their ‘evil’ son who is very different from birth. He lacks emotion and as he grows up he seems to enjoy hurting and manipulating people. It is written in the form of letters from his mother to his father looking back at all the things she witnessed their son doing as he grew up.

Book Groups Review
The story is very different and some thought capitalising on horrific real events was distasteful. The characters are well developed and the author has a real eye for detail. The story was slow to start but those that persevered gradually got pulled in and wanted to keep reading to find out what had happened.

The World’s Wife By Carol Ann Duffy
This is a collection of poems all written from the point of view of famous men’s wives.

Book Groups Review
We liked the poet’s idea to write from the point of view of the wives of famous men, but we felt a whole book of poems was stretching the gag a bit far. A few of the poems were funny, others offered a different interpretation of a famous story, and a few we felt were trying to shock the reader. The famous characters chosen as subjects weren’t very contemporary, only a few were from the 20^th Century. This collection of poems makes you reconsider famous stories you know and might inspire you to look up and learn the stories of the characters you don’t.

I Robot By Isaac Asimov
This futuristic book written in the 1940’s and set in the 21^st Century. It is a series of stories about the development of robots and the problems encountered. The main character Susan Calvin is retiring after a long career in robotics and relays the stories in an interview about her life.

Book Groups Review
These enjoyable easy to read stories developed as you read them creating a chilling idea of a world ran by robots. The book was written in the 1940’s yet the ideas behind the technology (although we have not developed it yet as predicted) still seem current and the world created seems plausible as a possible future. Looking back at the discoveries and developments of the 1940’s/50’s we wondered if there was an underlying message that scientists were beginning to get above themselves and a warning that the more sophisticated things get the less able we’ll be to control them. The book had very few descriptions and limited vocabulary which spoilt it for some readers, but the ideas behind the stories created a really interesting discussion.

Charlotte Grey by Sebastian Faulks
This is a love story set in London and occupied France during the early 1940’s. Charlotte, a Scottish woman, falls in love with an airman when he goes missing in occupied France she gets a job as a British secret courier and goes to help the Resistance and look for him.

Book Groups Review
This was a well written book with rounded characters. It was interesting to learn about all the different groups in France during the war and you could tell the author had done a lot of research.
Very enjoyable to read but the story was a bit far fetched in places.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
This book investigates the beginnings of the universe and the development of our planet

Book Groups Review
This book made us think about the Universe, our World and life. It wasn’t what we had expected after reading one of his other books and it took a while to get into it but the more you read the more you wanted to keep reading. There are a lot of interesting and funny asides about the scientists he was consulting with and these quirky comments gave the book a human factor which made it much more interesting and readable.

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
This is a story about the life a Geisha in Japan before the Second World War.

Book Groups Review
This book gives an insight into the harsh and enchanting world of Geisha’s that existed in Japan before the Second World War. The characters are well drawn and the dresses and customers beautifully described. The pecking order and back stabbing world of Geisha’s was brought to life by the author and some readers were disappointed to discover it wasn’t a real life biography. The women in our group really enjoyed this book and the men really didn’t.