richardrbecker's reviews
497 reviews

To Kill A Mockingbird is one of the finest novels ever written. Harper Lee tackles some of the toughest issues of the time (and our time) with warmth, humor, and common sense. She does so almost effortlessly by telling the story through the eyes of smart and sassy six-year-old Jean "Scout" Louise Finch and simultaneously using the narrator's father, Atticus Finch, as a moral authority who is masterful at helping his children make sense of a senseless world (and helping us in the process).

The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family, neighbors, and an event that occurred near Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936. Harper was ten years old at the time, which may explain why Scout is mature before her years.

The story tackles prejudice by reputation as Scout, her brother Jeremy, and their friend Dill become fascinated by the reclusive Arthur "Boo" Radley; and it tackles racial prejudice as their family is subjected to ridicule and rumor after Atticus takes on a case to defend a black man accused of raping a young white woman. He believes in following one's conscience, even in the face of social ostracism. By the end of To Kill A Mockingbird, you will too.

The Great Gatsby has always been one of my favorite books, capturing the 1925 Jazz Age and telling a tale of how love can be fleeting against the constraints of high society. It remains an American classic because it defines the era, giving us a glimpse through the sensible eyes of Nick Carraway, a young idealist from Minnesota, as he sets out to make himself on East Coast.

When he rents a small house on West Egg district of Long Island, he is brought into the confidence of his neighbor Jay Gatsby. Coincidently, Gatsby picked his lavishly appointed Gothic mansion because it sits directly across the water from his cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband, Tom.

Gatsby and Daisy had met and fallen in love before the war, but time, distance, and Gatsby’s improvised post-war status kept the two apart for too long. Daisy, who was looking to settle into her life securely, was eventually charmed by Tom despite never having as deep of feelings for him as she did for Gatsby. Likewise, Tom’s passion for Daisy seems confined to being one of position, given his deep-rooted propensity for adultery.

While Gatsby was initially trying to attract Daisy’s attention by chance, his friendship with Nick provides an opportunity to rush things toward what he believes will be a story of lost love rekindled. Except, not everything is so simple nor so just as the characters race toward an uncertain and tragic end.

While I picked up A Game of Ghosts without ever having read another Charlie Parker novel, it didn't take long to discover why this series by John Connolly remains a fan favorite. Parker is fully developed as is his family, especially his daughter, and it's apparent their story arch is much bigger than a single book but no less enjoyable.

Like many authors who spin long series, Connolly does an exceptional job of giving new readers just enough without boring those who have joined him since the beginning. Doing so is very much a skill set on its own.

In this story, Parker is hired by the FBI to track down private investigator who has gone missing while piecing together a case against a cult-like family with ties to the supernatural side. He, in turn, brings in two additional players, Angel and Louis, to cover more ground and provide extra muscle — which contributes to being fruitful against this group called "The Brethren."

Along with this primary plot thread, there are plenty of subplots, and series plots spun in at the same time, including a fight Parker is having with his ex-wife over the custody of his daughter Sam. Sam, by the way, also has unique abilities. This thread worked reasonably well in the novel, even if Connelly didn't make it a crucial element to moving the story to its climax.

Some of the other subplots, however, didn't always play as well. While they help make the novel feel complex, some of them weigh down the more dramatic elements of the story, specifically those that feel confined to this one book (as conversely, the thread with "The Collector" was interesting.)

All in all, if you are looking for a New England PI story with a supernatural twist, John Connolly seems to serve up an excellent series with Charlie Parker. Even though it gets weighed down with some subplot blot )or perhaps just too many points of view), I found myself landing somewhere between 3 and 4 stars, but ultimately sticking with 4 for the writing style.

It's the misleading simplicity of Looking for Alaska that sucks in readers, taking them on a journey to a place where kids give each other nicknames (without being offended), and the biggest problems they face at prep school are coming up with the bigger prank. Except, those aren't their biggest problems.

The central thesis of John Green's novel, which is enjoying its second life since becoming a limited series, can be best summed up by two premises. The first is the story of Miles 'Pudge' Halter, who wanted to go to boarding school and get on with his life to see "the great Perhaps," proclaimed to possibly be the last words of poet Francois Rabelais. The second is from the girl of his dreams, Alaska, who wonders: "how do we escape this labyrinth of suffering,’ a quote attributed to Simon Bolivar.

Exert: “He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness. “Damn it,” he sighed. “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!”

How amazingly powerful to so succinctly build a story around such a complex and compelling question that it sticks with you, a talent the remains one of Green’s best. And perhaps that can sum up Looking For Alaska best of all. The first half the book will draw you in with a nostalgia for teenhood. And then, the back half of the book will challenge you to ask questions just as Green does with Miles.

No matter which question sticks with you the most — the need to seek the great perhaps or what is the labyrinth of which they speak — expect a riveting ride from a deceptively simple story. If nothing else, it will make you appreciate this fragile thing we call life all the more.

Written before there ever was a young adult genre, S.E. Hinton's coming-of-age story (one she mostly wrote in high school) stands the test of time. It does so, largely, because Hinton has always had a gift for breathing life into characters — people you either identify with or can quickly identify on the street.

The story captures the caste system that has always existed in high schools, and this time as it existed in Oklahoma during the 1960s. There are Socs, and there are Greasers. And when two Soc girls blow off their boyfriends at a drive-in movie theater and have a chance run-in with two younger Greasers, things become complicated and eventually escalate.

The protagonist of the story is one of these younger boys, Ponyboy Curtis. He's a fourteen-year-old narrator and the youngest member of an unofficial gang. Despite being a Greaser, he is especially bright, academically smart, and interested in literature. He might not even be a Greaser had his parents not died in a car accident.

Now he lives with his two brothers Darrel "Darry" and Sodapop. Darry is the defacto guardian, doing his best to hold the household together by working two jobs. When he was in school, nobody considered him a Greaser. He was a star football player with ambitions to go to college.

The other bother, Soda Pop, is a happy-go-lucky hard worker who dropped out of school to get a job. He is suffering some inner turmoil that goes unnoticed until the end of the novel, primarily because the plot is driven mainly by the Socs inserting themselves into the lives of Ponyboy and his friend Johnny Cade, the sixteen-year-old kid who helped walk two girls home.

The novel does a fantastic job sparring with familiar and timeless themes, including class division, violence, innocence, loss, and familial love. By struggling through these uninvited issues, Ponyboy undergoes a transformation in how he understands the world, his place within it, and what can be done about it. It was a riveting story, one I was thrilled to revisit recently with my daughter.

Set in Parkerfield, Georgia, during the civil rights movement of the 1950s, The Darkest Child is an unapologetic and grimly wrought story of poverty, domestic violence, child abuse, and the complicated trappings of racism. There are no heroes here.

The story is told by 13-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn, the darkest child of ten children, all of whom have different fathers. Their mother, Rozelle, is a beautiful and charming light-skinned who uses a violent hold over her children to exploit them and force them to work in domestic service, in the fields, as shoplifters, or at a local whorehouse. While the money she collects is used to provide life's essentials for her children, she also maintains a lavish wardrobe and, at one point, trades one of her daughters away for a car.

The only explanation for Rozelle's cruelty is the twisted belief that the hardships she thrust upon her children are somehow better than being abandoned as she was as a child. Having never learned how to raise children properly, she considers it proper to pass on her dark and damaged legacy.

Despite her dark skin, which her mother insists will prevent any man from marrying her, Tangy Mae is an excellent student and the only of her siblings that has a chance to graduate high school. At odds with this dream is her mother, who sees more immediate value in putting her daughter to work cleaning houses and working at the whorehouse than being one of only a few children to be among the first to attend a desegregated school.

There are many times throughout the novel that the story feels overbearing, but somehow Tangy Mae manages to make it bearable with her unrelenting intelligence, empathy, and propensity for hope. The only question that remains is whether Tangy Mae will be able to weather the pressures of a mother, family, and the outside world before her mother goes too far in bending all of her children to her will.

Excellently written, Delores Phillips does an excellent job capturing a narrative that doesn't pick racial sides, but people sides. Specifically, she picks Tangy Mae's side, and most readers will too.

As much as The Nickel Boys is an important book, it is not an enjoyable book in that as a dramatization of American history; it sacrifices the semblance of the masterful fiction that generally characterizes the work of Colson Whitehead. Perpahs it was as simple as miscasting his tragic protagonist as too intellectual and idealistic to share the fear and terror that accompanies this kind of abuse. Perhaps it is something else.

For all its merit, the novel documents and dramatizes rather than allowing one to climb into the head of those who lived it and, thus, leave some of themselves with us in the process (fiction or not, based on fact or not). Where it wins, however, is in the subject matter itself. Yes, there were places where the war against poverty played out as the war on those living in poverty regardless of color or creed.

Although the book is based on the Dozier School for Boys in Florida, it's also important to point out that the Nickel Academy's version of events punctuates a racial thread that existed at the time but did not diminish the horrors administered to ALL of the unfortunates who were cast there. Even the story of our protagonist, Elwood Curtis, sent to the school because he was charged with car theft (the kid only hitched a ride), is based on the story of a white student. This real-life person, Jerry Cooper, is the same student who was beaten with a leather strap, some 135 lashes before he passed out.

It doesn't really matter, but maybe it does matter in that the real White House Boys were equally brutalized. So even Colson's characters might think some students have it a little easier, they didn't. I felt a similar pang of misperception when reading how school books carried insults and demeaning comments supposedly because those students knew where they would end up. Maybe it is true, but it doesn't ring true because I remember reading all of those same insults in the used books we used at my innercity public school too. Where they were going has less to do with it other than kids will be jerks no matter where you are.

So, in the end, the reasons I would recommend this book not because of what most reviewers write about it (Jim Crow laws and whatnot), but because despite developing an empathic bond with Elwood, I do appreciate his perseverance, consummate hope, and drive to climb out of circumstance. I also appreciate how Whitehead wove the brilliance of Martin Luther King Jr. into the book as a point of inspiration. May we all aspire to the legacy he left us.

I am Legend is a timeless apocalyptic classic that tells the story of Robert Neville, the last uninfected man surviving in a world populated by vampires more akin to zombies than Dracula. They are infected with what Neville surmises is a bacterial agent, one with symptoms that explain vampiric lore, such as exposure to sunlight and stakes through the heart.

This backdrop of vampires is never as prominent as the book's central themes as Matheson digs into loss, loneliness, regret, and the human condition. The writing is crisp and easily consumable over the short span of only 162 pages (just longer than a novella), which is why so many of the movies spawned from this story had room to take a few liberties.

My favorite of those three films remains the Omega Man with Charlton Heston. Despite expanding the third act to be a fight for the survival of humankind, Heston portrays Neville as an appropriately reluctant average-man hero, which is how Matheson pens the character. This is important, I think, because Matheson's work is very much about the tenacity of an average American man in the 1950s.

What doesn't really make any of the movies but is especially important about Matheson's work, however, is his underlying statement that humans are predisposed to recreate the same societal structures that always lead to their next near extinction. We simply cannot escape it.

While not the scariest novel of the King's career, The Institute can be unsettling in much the same way that the laboratory flashbacks in Firestarter were but without much bite. And while the novel is not as graphicly horrific as some of King's more memorable nightmares, there is still something methodically pleasing to a story akin to pulling on a sweater string.

The novel opens with Tim Jamieson, a down-and-out officer forced to leave his job in Florida, headed to New York City to start a new life. But instead of traveling the distance, Tim lands a night knocker job in South Carolina. He isn't the protagonist as much as a future mentor, carefully positioned for Luke Ellis.

Luke is a 12-year-old boy who is kidnapped from his room in Minneapolis and waked up to find himself in a copy of his old room at a place called The Institute. He had been recruited, they tell him, along with other children, because of their TP (telepath) and TK (telekinetics) abilities. Presumably, they were recruited to help their country, but their treatment of the children makes the story suspect.

From there, the straightforward plot is one part medical mystery and one part prison break. There is a certain satisfaction in letting it play out despite being short on surprises.

Mostly, people will find this to be a curious mashup of other King character types and concepts plus an antagonist that comes across as a second cousin to the smoking man from the X-Files television series. The only other minor annoyance is King's recent desire to insert political statements that do not forward his plots. They are merely tiny jabs that come more from him than his characters.

After the Bolshevik Revolution launch a nearly bloodless coup d'état against the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky (which was responsible for overthrowing the Russian monarchy), Count Alexander Rostov is not killed or driven into exile. This unique "former person" isn't even asked to conceal his identity (provided he forget his former social standing) but is instead sentenced to live out the rest of his life on "house arrest" in the Metropol hotel.

As the days turn into weeks and weeks into months, the count begins to lose his resolve despite being the finest hotel in Moscow with a barber, restaurant, and a clientele that consists of visiting dignitaries and new government officials. But when he meets and befriends a feisty 9-year-old girl named Nina, Rostov expands his world by exploring the more common areas of the hotel with her and works to become a master of his circumstances.

There is a sadness that seeps into these circumstances that go beyond relinquishing privileges or being forced to live in a 100-square-foot attic room. The real loss is seeing Russia's once gentile past slowly erased under the pressure of the new guard, traded in for cronyism more than an often idealized but never realized communist society. People are promoted because of their associations over skills. Ingredients in the restaurant become increasingly scarce and unvalued. Architecture around the city is transformed from elegant into cookie-cutter apartment complexes.

After surviving two decades of this existence, the count discovers another new spark in his life when his young friend Nina returns to the hotel along with her 5-year-old daughter Sofia. He agrees to watch the young girl for a few months, which eventually becomes a permanent arrangement. As his love for Sofia as a daughter grows, the count begins to worry about her future and does not want her life to be limited in Communist Russia.

The journey Rostov takes is two-fold. Readers not only experience the transformation of a man of great charm and character, but also the transformation of a country by those with weak character. By doing so, Amor Towles deftly explores imprisonment, freedom, purpose, adaptation, and the love of friends and family. And much like the main character, he does it all while maintaining a high road of civility in a memorable epic story but served up as an intimate novel.