Getting down to the end – Book reviews for library biffer Ms. Anna.

The Sinner. Tess Gerritsen.

Margi Moyer, i.e. Mommy, gave me this book and told me that this author was almost as good as Patricia Cornwell. That is alot to live up to, but it is true - Mrs. Gerritsen is almost as good as Patricia Cornwell, the only difference is that Patricia Cornwell is a scientist while Mrs. Gerritsen is a writer. There was no quoting of Latin and pretentious use of long multi-syllable words as Cornwell does. The lead character, Maura Isles, is normal. She isn’t the superwoman like Katy Scarpetta is (the lead character from Patricia Cornwell’s novels). So, really, Mrs. Gerritsen is no Patricia Cornwell, but she can tell a great story. I read this book while I was sitting in the Santo Domingo airport… waiting for my flight to New Orleans. And, well, I couldn’t put the book down. I couldn’t stop reading it. No sleep, no snacking, only being involved in the story. The story line involves: people with no faces, bizarre diseases, pregnant nuns, incest, bad ass woman detectives, FBI love lines, ex-husbands, sexual thoughts about priests, and the whole gambit of other interesting twists and turns.

I read the prelude and I thought… blech… another boring novel. But soon I thought, okay, this is a pretty good Patricia Cornwell knock off. It truly is. But Mrs. Gerritsen can really tell a good story. The characters are a bit too feminist. But as a feminist, I noticed this fact then dismissed it as I did like both of the main characters. I understand both detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles. With the recent Patricia Cornwell books I usually figure out the culprit before the end of the book, but with this author I was truly enraptured with the story and had absolutely no idea who the offender was.

• “She heard rustling all around her in the shadows, and thought of thousands of insect legs skittering across the walls and clinging to the ceiling above her head. She might be stoic about the gory and grotesque, but scavenging insects truly repelled her.” – This is a great excerpt to show her type of writing, which is very good, yet sometimes feels like she used the Microsoft Word Synonyms option.
• “Was there any house of cards more rickety than the belief in human chastity?” – Answer: probably not.
• “Neanderthals buried their dead with flowers. It was evidence of their grief, and therefore, their humanity.” – I like this passage for two reasons. First, because it shows that this author did her scientific research and isn’t just writing from whatever is in her mind and second, because of the fact that I believe that it is a very sweet concept to think of our genetic ancestors going though the same stages of mourning as us.
• “So many different lives intersecting in a myriad of ways. Most people were wrapped up in their own little corners of the universe. A cop sees it all.”
• “We met over a few dead bodies.” – I like this so much. Because it is a girl saying – yeah, we started a relationship steeped in business and the business is dead bodies. Awesome.
• “The first stages of love were always fraught with confusion. As were the last stages of love.” – This author knows relationships. Its, actually, quite impressive.
• “Is it sin to find a priest attractive? If not sin, then certainly folly.” – There are many situations when attraction is truly folly and I know this quite well.
• “Death does not discriminate; whether saints or sinners, in the end, all are equal.” – Remember that.
• “Only the forgotten are truly dead.”

I love the quote section of reviewing books, because it reminds me of my favorite parts of the book. Anyway, as you can see from the quotes this author is very introspective. She really understands relationships, the criminal justice system, and the mindset of a medical examiner. In the end the book kept me guessing, therefore, it is a winner. Overall, I will start reading Tess Gerritsen (after Patricia Cornwell) when I am in the mood for a novel. But then again I am a sucker for a female medical examiner.

Cutting for Stone. Abraham Verghese.

Since I had raced through my last novel and was only in the Charlotte airport I needed to find a new one to keep me entertained through the rest of my flights. I hate buying books in airports. Instead of finding aisles and aisles of glorious interesting books, you find an overflowing section of self-help books and the latest Dan Brown novel. Airports are a perfect microcosm of the worst parts of American society. I digress. As I sift through Dr. Phil, Stephanie Meyer, and other books that literally pain my conscience mind I find two books worth reading. The first is called, I believe, In Search of the Land of Z, and is about a 1920’s discovery of some ancient ruin in the rainforest and the second is called Cutting for Stone, and is about twins growing up in Ethiopia in a hospital. Cutting for Stone is a whooping 667 pages long and therefore is drastically longer than In Search of the Land of Z, which makes me favor the former. What threw me over the edge were the recommendations in the front cover from Atul Gawande, who I very much like as a medical writer, and Tracy Kidder, who I absolutely adore (read his book Mountains Beyond Mountains).

‘Begin at the beginning and go on until you come to the end, the King said, very gravely, then stop.’

This is a fictional story about a set of twins born to a nun and a doctor. Their mother dies in childbirth and their famous surgical father abandons them. They are taken in by two other surgeons working at the hospital in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. I don’t want to give away the story because it is so wonderful, but the 667 pages of this are rife with tales of intertwining lives - both of the twins, Shiva and Marion, their mother and father, their surrogate parents, their nanny and her daughter, and many other characters in between.

Some characters are vile, some are courageous, others are just lost; but all are strongly written and developed. Most characters have a particular chapter dedicated to them so you really understand a piece of their history. One of my favorite relationships in the book belongs to Shiva and Marion’s surrogate parents Ghosh and Hema, who worked side by side for so long, while being in love, yet never had the courage to tell each other. Once their love did blossom it stayed in full bloom for the rest of their lives. When Ghosh asked Hema to marry him, she said yes, but only for a year – if after a year you are sick of me then we can just call it off – thus leading to a sort of renewing your vows every year. Or when Ghosh tells the boys that pregnancy is a sexually transmitted disease knowing that this will just rile up Hema who is an obstetrician. To really get a feel for these two characters here is a few words straight from them:

• “Life became sharply focused, meaningful just when she wasn’t thinking of meaning.” – Hema, the twins surrogate mother
• “…what madness, so much worse than tragic! What to do except dance, dance, only dance…” – Hema
• “A rich man’s faults are covered with money, but a surgeon’s faults are covered with earth.” – Hema
• “Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportions.” – Ghosh, the twins surrogate father, and my favorite character.
• “The land of milk and honey, milk and honey, and love for money.” – Ghosh’s thoughts on Ethiopian hookers.
• “He had a theory that bedroom Amharic and bedside Amharic were really the same thing: Please lie down. Take off your shirt. Open your mouth. Take a deep breath … The language of love was the same as the language of medicine.” –Ghosh
• “Tizita meant “memory tinged with regret.” Was there any other kind, Ghosh wondered.”

My second favorite part, aside from the characters and their well developed relationships, is the medicine. As Abraham Verghese is foremost a surgeon, he executes many surgical scenes with stunning detail. The most vibrant for me is his depth in recounting information on fistulas, which is probably the most grotesque and discussing medical misfortune that I could ever think of. The book starts out with the traumatic birth of the twins, in which their mother dies. This scene only leads in to more exciting and interesting surgeries.

Finally, the book takes place in Ethiopia (yes, now I really must go to Ethiopia as it sounds like a radically moving and fascinating place) but characters range in their backgrounds and political instability abounds. The book adds another dimension when it addresses the political aspects of Ethiopia and what it goes through during the attacks by Eritrean guerrilla fighters. The politics and fear instilled in the people of Ethiopia during this time is stirring.

• “Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”
• “Pus somewhere and Pus nowhere means Pus in the belly.”
• “Beware of a man with a glass eye and a big liver…”
• “Whatever American needs, the world will supply. Cocaine? Columbia steps to the plate. Shortage of farmworkers, corn detasselers? Thank God for Mexico. Baseball players. Viva Dominica. Need more [surgical] interns? India, Philippines zindabad!”
• “You live it forward, but understand it backward.” – this pertains to M&M panels and to life.
• “Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed.” – when healing must be explained through stories and not through doing.
• “a small spark may perhaps be hidden” – motto of Royal Humane Society (pioneers of resuscitation).
• “Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”

Overall, I am becoming more inclined to well written medically inclined stories, because not only do you get a wonderful story but you learn something also. Abraham Verghese is now ranked among Tracy Kidder and Atul Gawande for me. The story is well constructed and multifaceted. The chacters, the settings, the surgeries, and the timeframe all bring important aspects to one simple story. The story of growing up. The story of one life… affected by so many.

Outbreak. Robin Cook.

I was naturally drawn to this book because I love the movie so much – Dustin Hoffman, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Morgan Freeman – yes please. Unfortunately the book was kinda ho-hum. I mean I became enthralled in it and read it in one day, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good book (I mean I have read Twilight). First, I know this is supposed to be a medical thriller, but come on, just because you throw the word Ebola around a few times doesn’t mean it’s a medical thriller. The story is about several outbreaks of the Ebola virus around the US and Dr. Marissa Blumenthal, new to the CDC, is in charge of first identifying them and then deciding on a course of action. It is a fine novel, its not good, not great – just fine.

Also, how Marissa can handle dating three guys at the same time is a mystery to me. How do I get that to happen to me? Do you have to be 5’ tall and be brunette? Another thing that really bothers me is when males write their lead characters as females. It doesn’t bother me at all when it’s the other way around. But something about guys thinking they can write a good, strong female lead, well it doesn’t compute in my head. Especially this guy – Dr. Robin Cook – if I saw him in a dark alley or even a well lit street I would run the other way.

Overall, the book was okay. It was written just fine and the story took appropriate twists and turns, but it was nothing all that stirring. In the end, I would say watch the movie, because the movie is awesome.