Fiction Addiction’s Blog

Here’s another review from my mom:

I just finished listening to the audio version of Tess Gerritsen’s new book, The Bone Garden.  While there is a brief mention of Maura Isles, the medical examiner from her last several books, the book is quite a departure from Gerritsen’s normal serial killer hunt.

There is a serial killer in the book, but one from the early 1800s.  The book begins in present time with bones being found in the garden of an old Boston home.  A search for who the victim might have been leads the house owner, Julia, to meet the elderly brother of the house’s previous owner.

Together they go through boxes and boxes of ancient correspondence and news clippings to discover the story of the bones. Their involvement is rather contrived and artificial but it serves as a way to introduce the real story that Gerritsen wants to tell. That of the people whose lives were associated with the person buried in the garden.

The story centers around 4 medical students in Boston in the early 1800s and their experiences in the very early and primitive field of medicine.  Gerritsen also reveals what life was like in the Irish tenements of the time and how the night watch (today’s police force) operated.

I am not normally a fan of historical fiction but I found that Gerritsen did a wonderful job of weaving historical facts with a compelling and poignant story that I couldn’t quit listening to.  The mystery plot was nothing special and the catching of the killer was a little anti-climatic but I enjoyed it for the historical content and a look into the lives of people who might have lived as Gerritsen describes.

Check availability of The Bone Garden at Fiction Addiction.

Author Kelly Corrigan was in that middle place in life where you are both a parent of your own children and a child of your living parents and torn between the needs of both. She was turning 37, a happily married mother with two young girls, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. A few months later, she learned that her 74-year-old father had just been diagnosed with bladder cancer. The Middle Place is Kelly’s lyrical tribute to her father and the special place he holds in her heart as well as a coming-of-age story of how a not-so-young and not-so-stoic woman learns that she really can hold it together through life’s big bounces.

I don’t usually read memoirs, but The Middle Place has been picked as a January Book Sense pick and I had an advance reading copy and so I thought I’d give it a go.

I found myself entranced by Kelly’s voice from the first page and unable to put The Middle Place down. I loved her turn of phrase – ”My first nonfictional boyfriend” — and found myself identifying with many moments in her life even though our backgrounds could not be more different.

I highly recommend The Middle Place as a selection for your reading group or for any 30-something woman who has ever found that even ”after all the paperwork — a marriage license, a notarized deed, two birth certificates, and seven years of tax returns — clearly indicates that you’re an adult, but all the same, there you are, clutching the phone and thanking God that you’re still somebody’s daughter.”

The Middle Placeby Kelly Corrigan is scheduled to release January 8, 2008 in hardcover for $23.95. Please email us to reserve your copy.