Come, Thou Tortoise is a heart-warming book with really lovable characters. There was subtle humour with a quiet yet engaging plot. Audrey is brilliant, quaint, silly, admirable, and really just honest-to-goodness good. The book jacket blurb doesn’t do the novel justice and some things I quite disagree with (such as the term”IQ-challenged”). I picked up the book after all the great reviews I read.

A delightfully offbeat story that features an opinionated tortoise and an IQ-challenged narrator who find themselves in the middle of a life-changing mystery.

Audrey (a.k.a. Oddly) Flowers is living quietly in Oregon with Winnifred, her tortoise, when she finds out her dear father has been knocked into a coma back in Newfoundland. Despite her fear of flying, she goes to him, but not before she reluctantly dumps Winnifred with her unreliable friends. Poor Winnifred.

When Audrey disarms an Air Marshal en route to St. John’s we begin to realize there’s something, well, odd about her. And we soon know that Audrey’s quest to discover who her father really was – and reunite with Winnifred – will be an adventure like no other.

Somehow Come, Thou Tortoise is light, quirky, and funny while still being honest, gritty, and real. I don’t think adventure or mystery is quite the right word to describe this book. It is a character-driven story about family, truth, and love. Audrey’s life is turned upside down by the ‘comma’ her father is in and by her Uncle Thoby’s breakdown.

Featuring several flashbacks and retellings, we gain insight into Audrey’s childhood and the truth about her father and Uncle Thoby. She may be strange and have had an unconventional upbringing, but you can see that she was surrounded by love and good people who cared about her.

My favourite part is the tree in her bedroom that Uncle Thoby painted. He added little velcro bits so they could do the changing of the seasons with the various leaves, blossoms, and snowflakes. I also really like the way that Jessica Grant plays with words and makes you feel like part of the family too. I think The Globe and Mail’s review really nailed it on the head:

It might all sound a little madcap, and madcap narratives can be irritatingly self-conscious, shrieking, “Look how wacky I am!” from every page. Not here. Despite all the curiouser-and-curiouser behaviour, it all seems very familiar, and very “real.” Perhaps this is because the reader feels involved, spoken to like a member of the family, or of the community. From the “Northwest Shove” to the Gilbert & Sullivan in-jokes, the reader is included in the tribe.

Jessica Grant’s debut novel is calm and sprawling and very much Oddly. This intelligent, sweet, kind character truly wins you over within the first few pages. It really is a ‘delightfully offbeat story’, and the tortoise is an endearing narrator too!

• Review in Quill & Quire
• Review in The Globe and Mail
• Canada Also Reads contender (defended by Neil Smith)
• Winner of the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award 2010
• Nominee for the Evergreen Award 2010
• Finalist for the Canadian Library Association – Young Adult Canadian Book Award 2010
• Books in 140 Seconds (review/video)
• Review by Pickle Me This
• Review by Chris @ Book-a-Rama
• Review by the Keeping It Real Bookclub

I’ve been meaning to read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon for a few years because I’ve heard extraordinary things about it. It came out in 2003, was a #1 international bestseller, and received numerous book awards. The book is covered in review quotes of praise: dazzling, brilliant, original, addictive, inspiring, captivating, moving… etc.

Christopher is 15 and lives in Swindon with his father. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism. He is obsessed with maths, science and Sherlock Holmes but finds it hard to understand other people. When he discovers a dead dog on a neighbour’s lawn he decides to solve the mystery and write a detective thriller about it. As in all good detective stories, however, the more he unearths, the deeper the mystery gets – for both Christopher and the rest of his family.

From the publisher, Random House UK
[Note: Cover image shown is the Canadian/US paperback]

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I was really looking forward to reading Audrey Niffenegger’s latest book, Her Fearful Symmetry, and I’m happy to say it did not disappoint. I am a huge fan of The Time Traveller’s Wife (my review here) and really enjoy Niffenegger’s style and voice. Her Fearful Symmetry is a heart-wrenching, curious, odd, and compelling story; it had me reading past my (recommended) bedtime several nights in a row.

Her Fearful Symmetry had me crying from the beginning when Elspeth passes away (no spoilers). She leaves all her personal papers to her partner Robert, and the rest to her estranged-twin-sister’s twin girls. Julia and Valentina are shocked when they find out that their mom has a twin sister in London, England; they always knew she’d left her family there and there was “bad blood”, but this was a shock. Not only that, but their Aunt Elspeth had left her entire inheritance, flat (apartment) and all, to the twins. There is only one condition: they must live in her flat for a year before they can sell it. Excitedly, Julia and Valentina move from their home in Chicago to a small flat in London beside Highgate Cemetary. It is in this flat that we begin to learn more about the twins and their mysterious Aunt Elspeth.

To be honest, the book jacket has much more compelling copy:

Julia and Valentina Poole are normal American teenagers — normal, at least, for identical “mirror” twins who have no interest in college or jobs or possibly anything outside their cozy suburban home. But everything changes when they receive notice that an aunt whom they didn’t know existed has died and left them her amazing flat in a building by Highgate Cemetery in London. They feel that at last their own lives can begin … but they have no idea that they’ve been summoned into a tangle of fraying lives, from the OCD-suffering crossword setter who lives above them to their aunt’s mysterious and elusive lover who lives below them, and even to their aunt herself, who never got over her estrangement from the mother of the girls — her own twin — and who can’t even seem to quite leave her flat…

Without spoiling anything, I do want to say that I found the characters real, compelling, and unique. Each had their own voice and they grew and changed through the course of the story. So much changed within the characters own lives that I had trouble deciding if I still liked them, or trying to determine their motives as the chapters progressed. I love a good plot that moves, but Audrey Niffenegger never seems to forget that the plot affects the characters too. She unites the two ideas so seamlessly that neither the characters nor the plot ever feel empty.

I want to go home and read the book again! I feel like I read it too quickly because I am already missing the characters: Valentina’s ambitions, Julia’s stubbornness, Martin’s level-headedness (despite his OCD), and Robert’s ability to get tangled up in it all. I can’t wait to hear Audrey Niffenegger speak tonight at the Vancouver International Writer’s Festival.

{Full disclosure: I requested this book for review from Random House Canada; however, had I not received it, I still would have bought it upon release, read, and reviewed it here.}

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Audrey Niffenegger will be attending the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival 2009. I am going to see her “In Conversation” (event 7) tonight, October 20, 2009. She will also be participating in several other events, including “The Look of the Book” (event 34) all about design, binding, typography, and book arts. I am very disappointed that my class schedule conflicts with this event.

Check out all the fantastic events at VIWF 2009 on their website. There are tons of authors, both local and international, emerging and established. There is seriously something for everyone at VIWF!

When the first murmurings began about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society began (Literate Housewife, Hey Lady!, Diary of an Eccentric), I didn’t catch on soon enough. Then this summer, reviews began popping up all over (Savvy Verse & Wit, Maw Books, Becky’s Book Reviews, and the War Through the Generations Challenge) and I couldn’t ignore it! I had to read the book. I felt a little left out during Book Blogger Appreciation Week because I hadn’t read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, but fortunately I’d already jumped on The Hunger Games bandwagon!

Did The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society live up to the gushing reviews? Yes! I really enjoyed this book and can think of a handful of friends, family, and other readers to recommend it to. I loved Griffin & Sabine (which is also written in letters) and I love historical fiction (doubley- so if it takes place in England). I also have a strange fascination with the Second World War. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society wrapped all these interests up into a lovely package that is engaging, interesting, and heart-warming. My only criticism would be that the end of the story was a little predictable.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows follows the correspondences of Juliet, an author and journalist living in post-WWII London. When she receives a letter from Dawsey Adams on Guernsey, Juliet learns about Guernsey during the German Occupation and how the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society got started. She enters into a world that will have the reader begging to join.

{Full disclosure: I requested this book in paperback from Random House of Canada}

This is the fourth book (chronologically) in The Tudor Series by Philippa Gregory. The Queen’s Fool is the story of a young Jewish girl during her service in the court of Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. She and her father flee Spain where they were persecuted and her mother burned as a heretic.

When they arrive in England, Hannah poses as a boy and works in her father’s print shop. When an affluent man from court visits the print shop with John Dee in search of specific manuscripts, she is begged as a fool for Edward VI’s court. Hannah becomes a Holy Fool because she has visions called “the sight” and is often asked to skry for John Dee. When Edward is sick, Hannah is sent to Mary I’s court as a “gift” to spy. The rest of her time in court is a tangle of lies and plots in both her personal life and court.

While I really enjoyed reading about the fictitious Hannah Green (originally “Verde”) and her father and fiance Daniel, I felt a little cheated out of a Philippa Gregory Tudor novel. It felt like Gregory wanted to comment more on the time and get someone who could experience some of the country’s turmoil during the rein of Mary I.

Hannah The Fool was sent all over from Mary, to Elizabeth, to Mary, to fleeing the country, then she returned to Mary. It wasn’t hard to follow, but the story definitely revolved more around Hannah than the Tudor Court which disappointed me a little. Don’t get me wrong, it was a good story and Hannah is a compelling character, it just wasn’t what I was expecting. Let’s just say it was a pleasant surprise and certainly a different way to cover four different rulers of England.