Now You See Her By James Patterson & Michael Ledwidge

The Book:

Nina Bloom is living a perfect life with her daughter Emma in New York and she would do anything to keep her life intact, even if it means lying to her loved ones about the past. But when an innocent man is accused of a crime he never committed, Nina chooses to enter the life she left back 18 years ago. Pregnant and wife of a successful and handsome cop in Key West, she had everything a girl would dream off.

But yet, she had to escape? Who was she running away from and why did she have to fake her death? Is it a wise step now to go back to Key West to rescue a man she knows is innocent?

The View:

My love for James Patterson always drives me to the author “P” bookshelf when I see any new title by him. I cannot deny the fact that I have had a few disappointments this year with some of his books, but I cannot give up on him. Luckily for me ‘Now you See Her’ was one of the better books.

It is no surprise that all of his books are fast paced, with short chapters, quick excitement and heart throbbing thrills. ‘Now you See Her’ is no exception. There were twists that were outright unexpected, I almost shuddered when the Jump Killer catches her during her staged escape. Only a master story-teller could have pulled off his entry and her escape after that. When he re-enters the story 18 years later, he appears even more vicious and I was just glad the story ended the way it did.

Nina is a delight from the very beginning. When the narration enters her past you just cannot put the book down; too much happens with her in too little a time and each event more exciting than the previous. She copes with all the trauma thrown at her with commendable ease and even manages to escape it. I liked the courage she showed when she chose to go back to Key West to save an innocent man. She surely added a lot of interest to the plot by her mere presence.

Rated a 4 on 5 as this book can alternate both as a cozy winter joy or a hot summer fun.

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Theme Thursdays [Happy] – 8Dec11

Theme Thursdays is a fun weekly event that will be open from one thursday to the next. Anyone can participate in it. The rules are simple:

• A theme will be posted each week (on Thursday’s)
• Select a conversation/snippet/sentence from the current book you are reading
• Mention the author and the title of the book along with your post
• It is important that the theme is conveyed in the sentence (you don’t necessarily need to have the word)
  Ex: If the theme is KISS; your sentence can have “They kissed so gently” or “Their lips touched each other” or “The smooch was so passionate”

This will give us a wonderful opportunity to explore and understand different writing styles and descriptive approaches adopted by authors.

This week’s theme is to symbolize the month of December and festivities..

HAPPY

My THURSDAY THEME for HAPPY is here. I am in between books at this moment, so will pick the snippet from the book I just finished.

Well, at least I was making someone happy.

[and one more snippet…]

After Little Haiti, Fabiana’s mother’s restaurant, the Rooster’s Perch , was a happy surprise.

Taken from “Now You See Her” by James Patterson & Michael Ledwidge

Leave a comment here with a link to your post. Do make sure to visit and comment on other Theme Thursdays.

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Swim Back to Me by Ann Packer

The Book:

Source for ‘The Book’ section : From Goodreads
From Ann Packer, author of the New York Times best-selling novels The Dive from Clausen’s Pier and Songs Without Words, a collection of burnished, emotionally searing stories, framed by two unforgettable linked narratives that express the transformation of a single family over the course of a lifetime.

A wife struggles to make sense of her husband’s sudden disappearance. A mother mourns her teenage son through the music collection he left behind. A woman shepherds her estranged parents through her brother’s wedding and reflects on the year her family collapsed. A young man comes to grips with the joy—and vulnerability—of fatherhood. And, in the masterly opening novella, two teenagers from very different families forge a sustaining friendship, only to discover the disruptive and unsettling power of sex.

Ann Packer is one of our most talented archivists of family life, with its hidden crevasses and unforeseeable perils, and in these stories she explores the moral predicaments that define our social and emotional lives, the frailty of ordinary grace, and the ways in which we are shattered and remade by loss. With Swim Back to Me, she delivers shimmering psychological precision, unfailing intelligence, and page-turning drama: her most enticing work yet.

The View:

Just like most of you, I prefer novels to short stories but I am exploring new things each day and “Swim Back to Me” was one of the many little experiments I have been putting myself through. This book in unique in that it is a collection of short stories with such diversified emotions, characters and plots.

I enjoyed all the stories but my favorites will have to be MOLTEN and FIRSTBORN. They both dealt and portrayed differently the love of a mother. In Molten, a mother grieves the death of her teenage son by relishing the songs that he once listened too. In Firstborn, a couple are expecting their first child and during one of the classes she reveals that she had a son already who died at five months. The rest of the story is about how she cherishes the moments of her first child but is still brimming with excitement for the birth of her next.

The rest of the stories had their own winning points and each of the characters stood out as prominent, well thought-off, independent yet complex personalities. Faced with dilemmas, anger, betrayal, grief, love and a whole lot other emotions; they all reacted just as you and I would but yet coped with it as the situation demanded. With as much realism in the plot as with the characters each of these stories are a class apart.

Rated a 4 on 5.  I will keep an eye for this author as Ann Packer has a unique style of writing that pays great attention to detail while continuing to focus on the overall picture.

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