Review: The Dismantling by Brian DeLeeuw + Giveaway

dismantling by brian deleeuwFormat read: ebook provided by the publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genre: thriller
Length: 288 pages
Publisher: Plume
Date Released: April 28, 2015
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository

Brian DeLeeuw hits that sweet spot between literary and commercial suspense with his brilliantly adept, ingeniously plotted novel—a chilling, fast-paced drama that urges readers to question the meaning of atonement and whether revenge might sometimes be the only way we can liberate ourselves from our past.
Twenty-five-year-old med school dropout Simon Worth is an organ broker, buying kidneys and livers from cash-strapped donors and selling them to recipients whose time on the waitlist is running out. When a seemingly straightforward liver transplant has an unexpectedly dangerous outcome, Simon finds himself on the run. In order to survive, he must put aside his better moral judgment and place his trust in a stranger who has a shocking secret.

My Review:

There are a lot of things that get dismantled in this suspense thriller. A career, a life or two, a criminal enterprise and a cadaver.

It all starts with the cadaver. Medical school dropout Simon Worth dropped out over that cadaver. As he and his study group dissected the anonymous donor, he kept seeing the face of his dead sister in place of the corpse. He couldn’t take the nightmares, and he ran away.

That he still feels responsible for his sister’s death (he isn’t, not really) is what makes his nightmares so peculiarly devastating. Not that his next choice is much better.

He finds himself, with the help of one of his very, very few medical school friends, in a new job where his medical knowledge, incomplete as it is, comes in very handy. Simon is the new face of Health Solutions Inc., a company that matches poor but willing organ donors with recipients who are willing to pay to get moved to the top of the transplant list.

Which is all completely illegal. But Simon is able to elide the moral issues by telling himself that everyone involved, including the highly compensated donors, knows exactly what they are getting into when they game the system.

As long as everybody in the chain of illegalities has something to lose, the delicate balance of crime stays under the radar. Of course, it can’t possibly last forever, and everyone seems to get that except poor Simon, who gets caught actually caring for the people in this chain of questionable practice.

It all falls apart when one retired football player needs a liver, and one of his friends decides to buy one for him. Not that Leonard Pellegrini really wants a new liver or a new lease on life, but his friend Howard Crewes is trying to buy himself atonement for an entirely different event. Leonard was perfectly content (happy never comes into this thing) drinking himself to death, and understands completely that his liver is just the first and most vulnerable organ to pay the price of his oblivion.

But Crewes wants absolution, Leonard’s wife and kids want him to stick around a few more years, and Peter DaSilva, the actual head of Health Solutions Inc., just gets greedy. So everyone ignores the warning signs.

The donor, Maria Campos, just wants a new life with enough money to set herself up far away from her old life. There are plenty of warning signs on her side of this particular equation, too.

Although the system is successfully gamed, it all falls apart when Lenny commits suicide, and Maria runs instead of showing up for her followup care and finds herself admitted to a hospital with obvious signs of being an off-the-books organ donor.

As the investigations coincide, all the players start trying to clean up any collateral damage, and any potential witnesses.

Simon and Maria run for their lives, still arguing over how much danger they are really in. When the entire structure completely dismantles, it is just barely possible that they might be able to start over again. If they can get past the mess that got them there.

Escape Rating B-: This is a book where I have a lot of mixed feelings. For some reason, I found it difficult to care a lot about Simon or even Maria. Simon just seems to be an emotional mess who has gotten himself in way over his head. It’s not that what happened with his sister isn’t terribly sad, it’s that Simon is so good at suppressing his own emotional reactions to everything that I didn’t get enough of a feel for him to, well, feel for him.

On that other hand, the case that brings down the whole house of cards did connect to a lot of my feel buttons, probably because it was so real. Although it isn’t named specifically, Leonard Pellegrini and a lot of the other ex-football players who are in the support group he doesn’t want to be a part of are suffering from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) which is very, very real.

(Without spoiling it completely, Leonard’s ultimate fate mirrors the real-life case of Dave Duerson, a member of the 1985 Chicago Bears Super Bowl Championship Team. Which explains why I remembered the case.)

(It is also possible that the on field hit that is responsible for Crewes’ guilt, which gets all of them into this mess, is intended to represent the case of Darryl Stingley, who was paralyzed in an helmet to helmet hit during an exhibition game between the Oakland Raiders and the New England Patriots.)

Leonard is suffering from CTE, and he’s been drinking in order to make the pain, and the headaches, mood swings and general depression, stop. He doesn’t want to go on living. But he also isn’t willing to fight all the people around him who want him to. There are plenty of warning signs, but Health Solutions Inc. is greedy and his family is desperate. It is a recipe for disaster on every side.

For me, the football tie-in gave me a lot more feels, and a lot more sympathy, for the reasons why everyone got themselves into this mess than anything to do with Simon or the donor Maria. The football references gave the story a real-life grounding that Simon and Maria’s story did not.

However, the football connection made the rest of the story all too plausible. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the concept of organ brokering, it is all too easy to believe that some variation of this is probably happening.

And that does give me the chills.

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This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews.
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.

Review: Becoming Josephine by Heather Webb

becoming josephine by heather webbFormat read: ebook borrowed from the library
Formats available: ebook, paperback
Genre: historical fiction
Length: 320 pages
Publisher: Plume
Date Released: December 31, 2013
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository

Rose Tascher sails from her Martinique plantation to Paris to trade her Creole black magic culture for love and adventure. She arrives exultant to follow her dreams of attending Court with Alexandre, her elegant aristocrat and soldier husband. But Alexandre dashes her hopes and abandons her amid the tumult of the French Revolution.

My Review:

220px-Josephine_de_Beauharnais,_Keizerin_der_FransenIn history, she’s the one we think of first when we hear the name Josephine. Her full name was Marie Josephe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie de Beauharnais. History refers to her as the Empress Josephine, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Napoleon is the one who named her Josephine; until they met, she referred to herself as Rose. He attempted to remake her just as he tried to remake France after the Revolution and the Terror. It is possible that he was more successful with France.

Rose/Josephine’s early life makes a great novel all by itself, even before Napoleon appears on the scene.

She was a planter’s daughter in Martinique. Her family owned a sugar plantation. Even though this made her a member of the upper crust of Martinique society, the plantation was in debt and money was tight. Her parents sent her to France to marry a rich relative, in the hopes that her husband would then save the family’s finances.

Instead, the man she married turned out to be a bigger spender than her family (and with less excuse) and eventually lost his inheritance and forced his own parents into debt. He temporarily rose with the Revolution, and then suffered an ignominious (and ultimately fatal) fall among the insanity and excesses of the Terror.

He fell under the guillotine. Rose survived several months imprisonment, but her health was broken. After her release and recovery, she met Napoleon. And the rest, as they say, is history.

But instead of a barebones historical account, the author has presented us with a livelier, and often more heartbreaking, story from Rose’s point of view. It’s her story of how she went through the first three decades of her life as Rose, and then turned herself into, or was transformed into, Napoleon’s Empress Josephine.

Ultimately we see Rose as a survivor. She’s always done the best that she can to save her family, her own children, and herself. She is a woman often alone in an age where women were financially dependent on men. So she often uses the men around her to keep herself and her children fed, clothed and housed, and ultimately to secure a future for them.

After her first bitter (and melodramatic) disappointment with her first husband, Rose doesn’t look for love. She looks for security from her many affairs, but seldom finds much. She becomes Napoleon’s Josephine initially for security. He is a boor, but he falls head over heels for her (his correspondence bears this out).

Her tragedy is that she falls for him after he has discovered that she is using him. Their relationship never recovers, and it seems that neither do they.

Escape Rating A-: We see the entire story through Rose/Josephine’s eyes. She shares her inner thoughts on her life as she lives it, and her reasons and choices. It is as if she is telling her story to the reader personally, and we live it vicariously through her eyes.

It can be difficult to make a known historical character sympathetic, especially when history has already formed its opinion.

I’ll confess to wondering at points where Rose’s descriptions of her own behavior, particularly when she is being self-sacrificing, did not make her slightly more beneficent than she was in real life. But then, when we tell stories on ourselves, we often emphasize the good we have done, and discount the self-serving.

(Rose’s stories about life under the Terror reminded me a bit of The Spymistress. Different war, but same concept, a woman living under an occupation trying to do the best she can for the prisoners of that war.)

Because this is Rose/Josephine’s personal story, we see how she treats other people, and how they treated her, through her eyes. Sometimes she is soap opera melodramatic. Sometimes she is petty and even cruel, or at least thinks those thoughts.

At the end, what we feel is how very human she was. She steps from the pages of history and comes alive.

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***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.

Review: The Spymistress by Jennifer Chiaverini + Giveaway

spymistress by jennifer chiaveriniFormat read: ebook borrowed from the library
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genre: historical fiction
Length: 384 pages
Publisher: Dutton/Plume
Date Released: October 1, 2013
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository

Born to slave-holding aristocracy in Richmond, Virginia, and educated by Northern Quakers, Elizabeth Van Lew was a paradox of her time. When her native state seceded in April 1861, Van Lew’s convictions compelled her to defy the new Confederate regime. Pledging her loyalty to the Lincoln White House, her courage would never waver, even as her wartime actions threatened not only her reputation, but also her life.

Van Lew’s skills in gathering military intelligence were unparalleled. She helped to construct the Richmond Underground and orchestrated escapes from the infamous Confederate Libby Prison under the guise of humanitarian aid. Her spy ring’s reach was vast, from clerks in the Confederate War and Navy Departments to the very home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Although Van Lew was inducted posthumously into the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame, the astonishing scope of her achievements has never been widely known. In Chiaverini’s riveting tale of high-stakes espionage, a great heroine of the Civil War finally gets her due.

My Review:

This is a quiet kind of story. While the U.S. Civil War that is the reason for the book contains myriad stories of blood, gore, guts and warfare, the story of Elizabeth Van Lew is about a much quieter kind of courage, and makes for a quiet book.

What do I mean by that? Elizabeth Van Lew was a real person, a woman who was born and raised in Richmond Virginia, and continued to live there throughout the Civil War, in spite of being a strong Union sympathizer caught in the capital of the Confederacy.

Lizzie decided that her duty as a loyal citizen of the United States, the entire United States and not just the South, was to provide as much aid and comfort as she could to Union prisoners of war, up to and including running a sort of underground railroad to help them escape across Union lines.

She also created an extremely effective spy ring, and found ways to get messages to Union generals. Lizzy knew her stuff, she had embedded a servant into the “Gray House” to spy on Jefferson Davis, and had inserted a Union sympathizer guard into the infamous Libby House prison.

Lizzie was effective. But while she was the spy ringleader, most of what kept me reading was her accounts of the Confederate strategy and her reports of battle-readiness (or the lack thereof) of the Confederate troops and the defenders of Richmond.

Because she is most effective as a reporter, we don’t see her act. While she does feel threatened, she doesn’t face much personal danger. Her co-conspirators are arrested, but she isn’t touched.

We also don’t see as much of her interior life as necessary to make her a sympathetic character. We don’t see her displaying her feelings, even in private, beyond her jubilation at Union victories and her dismay at Confederate winnings. She’s so busy trying to make sure that she manages everything and everyone she can, that we don’t get to know her as much as readers might want.

But the life of the city that she reports on is fascinating. We see the war from the other side, not just the Confederate propaganda to its own citizens but also the way that things were on the ground. The hunger, the desperation, the effect of the continuing war on regular citizens.

The battles are often far away, but the effects are felt at home. And then, Richmond falls and Lizzy is finally recognized for her true accomplishments.

Escape Rating C+: It took me about 100 pages to get into the book, but it got more interesting as the war progressed, even when the battles are far from Richmond. Lizzie’s eyes and ears in the Gray House gave her a view of what was really happening, as opposed to what was being reported in the press.

Because she so often worked from the shadows, we don’t see enough of her in action. While this is historically accurate, it also takes some drama away from the fiction.

As a character, Lizzie is a bit dry, but the events that she reports on keep the reader pushing on, even though we know the result. The last quarter of the book, when the Union troops are closing in and Lizzie and her friends aren’t sure whether to celebrate or lock themselves in, do an excellent job of portraying a city on the edge of collapse.

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~~~~~~GIVEAWAY~~~~~~

Jennifer is giving away a paperback copy of The Spymistress to one lucky (U.S.) commenter.
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***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.

Review: The Spirit Keeper by K. B. Laugheed + Giveaway

spirit keeper by k b laugheedFormat read: ebook provided by NetGalley
Formats available: ebook, paperback
Genre: Historical fiction
Length: 353 pages
Publisher: Plume
Date Released: September 24, 2013
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository

This is the account of Katie O’Toole, late of Lancaster Co., Pennsylvania, removed from her family by savages on March the 2nd in the year of our Lord 1747

The thirteenth child conceived of miserable Irish exiles, Katie O’Toole dreams of a different life. Little does she know that someone far away is dreaming of her.

In 1747, savages raid her family home, and seventeen-year-old Katie is taken captive. Syawa and Hector have been searching for her, guided by Syawa’s dreams. A young Holyman, Syawa believes Katie is the subject of his Vision: the Creature of Fire and Ice, destined to bring a great gift to his people. Despite her flaming hair and ice-blue eyes, Katie is certain he is mistaken, but faced with returning to her family, she agrees to join them. She soon discovers that in order to fulfill Syawa’s Vision, she must first become his Spirit Keeper, embarking on an epic journey that will change her life—and heart—forever.

My Review:

“Enjoy the ride” sounds like pretty good philosophy no matter which direction life’s currents sweep you. It is also the instruction that young Irish colonist Katie O’Toole receives from the Native American prophet Syawa as he lays dying in the middle of a journey to either kidnap or rescue Katie from the only home she ever knew and take her through the unspoiled American wilderness of the mid-1700’s to fulfill a vision Syawa always knew he wouldn’t live to see.

Syawa doesn’t leave Katie alone. Because the whole point of his vision, at least from his perspective, seems to have been to find Katie and give her into the care of his best friend and bodyguard, a warrior she refers to as Hector because she can’t manage to pronounce his name.

Syawa also leaves his “Spirit” in Katie’s keeping. Hector believes this literally. Katie is sure that this is a lie. But then, the Native beliefs are not hers.

This story is one of discovery. Katie’s discovery of the vastness and beauty of the American continent, and her discovery of the depths of her own heart. Quite possibly it will also be her discovery of the truth of Syawa’s vision and his spirit quest.

What we have in this story is Katie’s long journey from downtrodden colonial daughter of alcoholic and abusive parents who is presented with a life-altering choice in the midst of an attack on her colony by Natives. Syawa and Hector protect her and only her from the marauders. She can choose to go with them, or not. Communication is awkward, mostly by sign and gesture.

It is the first time anyone has ever valued her for herself. And this value seems to have nothing to do with sexual favors. Whatever they want, it is not lascivious. But in the face of her mother’s continuing abuse, she chooses the path that seems to allow her some little dignity, and changes her life.

In spite of the hardships that accompany her choice, it is difficult to fault her for it. But as she struggles to learn a new language and a new way of viewing the world, we see the continent before we spoiled it and a way of life that is long gone.

Even as Katie begins to adapt to the immensity of the journey, she still thinks herself superior to the beliefs of the Natives that she travels with, and those whose villages she travels through, even as she falls in love with one.

She’s certain that the vision quest and spirit keeper thing is a hoax, one that she goes along with because her new life is the best one she’s ever had, in spite of its hardships. But what if it’s all true?

Escape Rating A-: Katie falls in love with a man, but the reader falls in love with her journey. It’s almost impossible not to be captivated by her descriptions of the beautiful wilderness that she is traveling through, even though it is often by one aching footstep at a time.

Her adjustment is slow and sometimes painful. It’s not that she lived a life of ease before, but initially she struggles to communicate with her companions; they do not share a language, and is sometimes trapped in her own misery.

Katie’s story is a conversion, not religious per se, but a conversion from her early perspective of seeing the colonial way as superior to seeing the Native methods as being, if not superior, at least equally valid for their own time and place.

Also Katie is aware that the world she traverses is going to be irrevocably changed by the invasion of the whites, whatever happens, hers is like a record of Eden before the snake. Or before the demon rum.

Because the narrative is in the form of Katie’s journal, some readers may find the attempt to reproduce Katie’s mid-18th century spelling less than congenial. I’ll only say that after the first few pages, I was so lost in her story that I stopped noticing. She told much too compelling a yarn for me to care about her idiosyncrasies.

My only caveat is that the story ends at the close of the first winter of their long journey. That journey is not over, and I am left longing to see what comes next.

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~~~~~~GIVEAWAY~~~~~~

K.B. is giving away a copy of The Spirit Keeper (US/Canada)! To enter, use the Rafflecopter below:

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***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.