The "My mom was a failed writer and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" Club
What? I can't resist the snarky titles.
My final review of the day is for Carol Goodman's The Seduction of Water. I'm a big fan of her previous book, The Lake of Dead Languages, so it's only fitting that I see how she does in her sophomore outing.
The novel centers around Iris Greenfeder, the daughter of a Catskills hotel manager father and a writer mother who never published the final book in a planned trilogy of fantasy novels. Iris's mother Kay died when Iris was just a small child, killed in a fire at the Dreamland Hotel in Coney Island. However, the circumstances of her death were mysterious: Kay checked in to the hotel as another man's wife, and the body of that man was never recovered from the remains of the blaze. As is to be expected, Iris still suffers from the strain of not knowing what her mother was doing in that hotel, and why she never completed the book that would have cemented her reputation.
Many years later, Iris is living a mediocre existence, working a variety of odd teaching jobs to support herself, including teaching writing in English to recent immigrants and working with convicts at a nearby prison. Her love life isn't much better, as she coasts along with a rigid schedule of Wednesday/Friday/Sunday dates with her artist boyfriend. But all of that changes when Iris assigns a project about fairy tales to her classes, and she's inspired to find out the truth about what happened to her mother and reshape her own destiny.
While not quite up to the level of her previous work, The Seduction of Water is still a well-written and evocative book. The ending has a heavy-handed, swelling-violin-music feeling to it, but otherwise it's a solid effort. I got sucked into the story almost immediately and it moves along at a swift clip. It's good reading for summer - deep enough to be interesting, but not so intense that you can't overcome sunshine-induced ADD long enough to get into it. 4 stars from me.
My final review of the day is for Carol Goodman's The Seduction of Water. I'm a big fan of her previous book, The Lake of Dead Languages, so it's only fitting that I see how she does in her sophomore outing.
The novel centers around Iris Greenfeder, the daughter of a Catskills hotel manager father and a writer mother who never published the final book in a planned trilogy of fantasy novels. Iris's mother Kay died when Iris was just a small child, killed in a fire at the Dreamland Hotel in Coney Island. However, the circumstances of her death were mysterious: Kay checked in to the hotel as another man's wife, and the body of that man was never recovered from the remains of the blaze. As is to be expected, Iris still suffers from the strain of not knowing what her mother was doing in that hotel, and why she never completed the book that would have cemented her reputation.
Many years later, Iris is living a mediocre existence, working a variety of odd teaching jobs to support herself, including teaching writing in English to recent immigrants and working with convicts at a nearby prison. Her love life isn't much better, as she coasts along with a rigid schedule of Wednesday/Friday/Sunday dates with her artist boyfriend. But all of that changes when Iris assigns a project about fairy tales to her classes, and she's inspired to find out the truth about what happened to her mother and reshape her own destiny.
While not quite up to the level of her previous work, The Seduction of Water is still a well-written and evocative book. The ending has a heavy-handed, swelling-violin-music feeling to it, but otherwise it's a solid effort. I got sucked into the story almost immediately and it moves along at a swift clip. It's good reading for summer - deep enough to be interesting, but not so intense that you can't overcome sunshine-induced ADD long enough to get into it. 4 stars from me.
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