Posts Tagged Amy Boaz
Some Summer Reading Suggestions
Posted by Amy Steele in Books on July 1, 2011
Close Your Eyes by Amanda Eyre Ward
Devoured this mystery/thriller and story about self-discovery and an amazing brother-sister relationship. It’s a complete page turner. [longer review soon]
The Pursuit of Alice Thrift by Elinor Lipman
In this engaging story, Lipman delves into an honest and amusing portrayal that follows a late-bloomer in her journey toward self-confidence and contentment. Alice Thrift, an unhappy and socially backward surgical resident in Boston brings her head up and out of her shell through a series of odd events—a mistake in surgery, participation in a birth and the central focus of the book: her doomed relationship with an unsuitable salesman. Lipman creates genuinely warm and hilariously zany characters just like those you might pass in your daily life.
Feminista by Erica Kennedy
Erica Kennedy turned out a feverish bitch lit novel with an astounding eye for the often ridiculousness aspects of social-climbing, societal expectations and prosperity. The central figure 33-year-old Sydney Zamora is outspoken, hard-working and independent and rocks the combat boots. She’s also a bit pissed off at everything. She literally says whatever is on her mind with little editing. This lovely, sassy biracial Manhattan celebrity journalist earns a fantastic salary for glossy magazine Cachet and works very few hours per week. But is she truly happy? Why can’t women have both great careers and great personal lives? Will powerful female executives with families ever NOT be asked how they manage to “balance” it all? Will single women over 30 ever stop being asked if they have plans to “settle down?” Will society stop looking at single women over 35 as anomalies or freaks? In FEMINISTA, Kennedy manages to delve into such multi-faceted issues with adept style, wit and an innate knowledge of what motivates and infuriates today’s women.
BEAT by Amy Boaz
As Beat opens, an American and her 7-year-old daughter explore the Louvre. Days pass and the duo wander the streets of Paris from café to museum to bistro to park. Once it has been established that this is not a vacation for Frances and her daughter Cathy but an escape from the New York suburbs, the reader starts to wonder why this mother moves from one seedy hotel to another with one eye over her shoulder during this excursion. Through flashbacks that piece together a fiery romance, author Amy Boaz methodically reveals the reasons. Through dazzling, smart, dynamic writing, Boaz spins an enigmatic, unique story about dissatisfaction, passionate love, and the value of individual character. Boaz writes vividly and thoughtfully. Beautifully written, Beat often read likes poetry.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake stands out from other novels with its delightful and richly woven central character Rose. In tasting any homemade food, she has the innate and unusual ability to discover the feelings and secrets of the person who prepared it. When she’s nine, her mom serves her lemon cake and it’s quite upsetting for the young girl. But soon she grows into her special gift. She finds ways to embrace it or avoid it. Rose’s gift and its impact on her life– both positive and negative– slowly unfolds in a quiet yet riveting fashion that overflows with emotion. Rose’s special gift changes her relationships with her mother, father, unusual brother [who also has a strange secret], as well her societal interactions. Aimee Bender writes exquisitely. The fairy-tale magic realism propelling The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is charming and irresistible.
The Swimming Pool by Holly LeCraw
The Swimming Pool contains far too many secrets that could have devastating effects on all involved. The setting: Cape Cod. Siblings Jed and Callie take some time off to stay at the family’s house on the Cape. Jed leaves his job in Atlanta and Callie leaves her husband back in Greenwich, Conn. The story involves intricate family secrets that connect two families in rather unexpected ways. Both Callie and Jed have many questions and unresolved feelings toward the deaths of their parents. LeCraw deftly unravels the past and mixes it with the present through a riveting narrative style.
Tethered by Amy McKinnon
Amy MacKinnon’s an exquisite writer who arranges sentences with precision and care. TETHERED delves into the absolutely necessary, though some might feel morbid field of undertaking. MacKinnon provides the pertinent details and visuals. In Clara Marsh, TETHERED has the ideal detached heroine who left her own painful childhood behind to pursue this unusual profession at a funeral home in Brockton, Mass. [her mother died in a car accident leaving her to be raised by an abusive grandmother]. She leads a quiet and solitary life and prefers it that way. She gardens and even has her own perfect secret garden that few people know about. Gardening is her escape. When a young girl, Trecie, begins hanging around the funeral home and then shows up in child pornography, Clara is reluctantly drawn into a case along with Detective Mike Sullivan. The case is also connected to an unidentified child [nicknamed Precious Doe] who died three years prior. The funeral home gave her a service and buried her. Signs lead to the Reverend and then even to Clara’s own boss who treats her as his daughter. Who really is the mastermind behind this child pornography ring and will it be too late to save Trecie from the same fate as poor Precious Doe? TETHERED is a clever thriller that keeps you turning pages and guessing to the end.
Dead Light District by Jill Edmondson
In Dead Light District, Author Jill Edmondson has added exactly the right amount of research to this novel to provide background information and advance the plot but not bog the reader down in details. Private Investigator Sasha Jackson learns about sex trafficking, sex trade and prostitution—probably more than she’d ever expected. It disgusts and scares Sasha to think about the mistreatment and exploitation of women throughout the world. This provides her with a moral dilemma at times in searching for the missing Mexican call girl, Mary Carmen. Did Mary Carmen leave on her own accord or was she kidnapped or did a former pimp find her? When a pimp is found murdered, for Sasha, all signs point to Mary Carmen and she’s not so sure that’s all that bad a thing. Couldn’t Mary Carmen have acted in self-defense? Edmondson has created the ideal character in Jackson—liberal morals, ex-drummer/singer turned PI, single woman over 35 who’s sassy and fun.
The Social Climber’s Handbook by Molly Jong-Fast
Through acerbic wit and a ruthless plot, author Molly Jong-Fast highlights greed, excess and selfishness in the quick moving The Social Climber’s Handbook. It’s an amusing and sometimes disturbing novel about moneyed and powerful Manhattanites. The clever Jong-Fast provides a diabolical twist making The Social Climber’s Handbook an even juicier read. Dick and Daisy Greenbaum, an unhappy couple with two disaffected young daughters, possess affluence and status but lack an affinity for each other or anything of real importance. What happens when their protected world collapses around them? Jong-Fast applies a critical eye to marriage and family amidst the standards of “the wacky world of wealth.” Some parts are cringe-inducing and others laugh-out-loud.
The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom & Party Girl by Marc Schuster
This is a refreshing novel about a woman facing the realities of getting older and losing her comfort zones through divorce. Using wit, situational humor and deft observations, author Marc Schuster constructs a fast-paced story with various twists and turns.
One night when she’s out with a co-worker, she tries cocaine and soon finds she really likes it. Audrey’s Wonder Mom by day and Party Girl at night. Soon the lines blur and she’s a real mess. Audrey can no longer keep her dark secret. While becoming a drug addict may be extreme, author Marc Schuster uses it as a metaphor for many quick fixes that Americans use to solve their issues. The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom & Party Girl hovers between amusing and tragic but doesn’t cross the line too much in either direction.
book review: Beat
Posted by Amy Steele in Books on August 13, 2009
author: Amy Boaz
publisher: The Permanent Press
What happens when you’ve been loved grandly, then discarded, is that you combat the urge to bury yourself. To let others bury you. The shame (of loss, of failure) is debilitating, and wears away your fighting spirit—the will to defend yourself. It happened, didn’t it? He loved me, didn’t he? You’re left with a sense of unreality: it was all a dream. You no longer exist.
As Beat opens, an American mother and her 7-year-old daughter explore the Louvre. Days pass and the duo wander the streets of Paris from café to museum to bistro to park. Once it has been established that this is not a vacation for Frances and her daughter Cathy but an escape from the New York suburbs, the reader starts to wonder why this mother moves from one seedy hotel to another with one eye over her shoulder during this excursion. Through flashbacks that piece together a fiery romance, author Amy Boaz methodically reveals the reasons. Her marriage to Cathy’s father Harry had grown stale and during a party, Frances fell for an older Sanskrit poet from the Midwest named Joseph [a bearded outdoorsman—someone different from anyone she would encounter at her job as a magazine editor in Manhattan]. Through this sexual awakening, a spellbound Frances allows Joseph to take control over everything. In doing so, she endangers herself.
Frances is such a flawed character that I found her annoying at times and also sympathetic. Annoying in that she gave up so much of her own life because of this man. But then sometimes you get caught up in a moment of love or lust for a while before you realize that you are giving up more than the other person which is exactly what I think happened to Frances. And that is why I ended up being sympathetic. Frances is so in love with Joseph that she wants to impress him. She wants him to move to New York to be with her but he won’t do it. She takes most of the trips out West. She admits that she’s a terrible mother at times. She has her fallacies. She loves her daughter although one night in Paris, she leaves her alone and asleep in a dingy hotel room to get a drink in a bar across the street. Finally, Frances also comes to terms with what she has given up and that she may or may not have gotten played by this charmer Joseph. She realizes that she gave up too much and must take some of it back and with that, I could empathize.
At what point does longing become its own torture, of waiting, sitting, counting? I wait for my lover’s calls, his exquisite silhouette to appear outside the arrival gate, his leters in my mailbox daily, and his sweetest words to transport me once again to that place of joined oblivion. I wonder if I am ever truly happy knowing him: whether love is a form of willful sabotage.
Through dazzling, smart, dynamic writing, Boaz spins an enigmatic, unique story about dissatisfaction, passionate love, and the value of individual character. Boaz writes vividly and thoughtfully. Each character is painstakingly established through lyrical prose. Whether in Colorado, New Mexico, Paris, or New York, Boaz details the scenery, the smells, the people, the sounds, the colors, and every other detail of the area so that the reader feels transported to that setting. Beautifully written, Beat often read likes poetry (and Boaz turns to Beat poets quite often). As Frances learns to cope with a love affair that has soured, Beat is at turns a tortured love story and a thriller unlike any other.
GRADE: A-
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