Fictional Babies

Wow. I must admit I'm pretty intimidated by the quantity and quality of posts here. To avoid having quality in mine, I'll just write a review of the books I've read this last week. Quality will come later.
"The Last Girls"--Lee Smith. Karen asked that I review this because she likes books about the South. So do I. This one is about five women who took a trip down the Mississippi when they were at an all-girls college in the 1960s, and who take another trip thirty years later to scatter the ashes of one of the women who died under slightly mysterious circumstances. Smith is ambitious in her attempt to detail the lives of five women, and the story of them all as a group. The characters are precisely drawn, but none of them are really likeable, and so it's hard to care. It's also a much bigger story than Smith can accomplish in 400 pages or however long it was. I liked reading it, and I was drawn in, but I'm not sure I would read it again.
"The Da Vinci Code"--Dan Brown. You've all heard my ranting and raving about this book. I got drawn in, I admit it. But it was also terribly written and pretty predictable. And the ending sucked. I liked where the Grail ended up being, but I really wanted to see the Church get turned upside down. Cop out, is all I can say.
"The Bean Trees"--Barbara Kingsolver. Okay, I love Barbara Kingsolver, with a passion. This is her first novel, I think, and much less ambitious in size and scope than her later ones (ie, "The Poisonwood Bible", which is kinda the best book ever). It's obviously a first novel, and it's easy to see where Kingsolver will go later, because the themes she alludes to are so rich and could easily have filled novels of their own. Kingsolver is such a good writer though, and her characters are so real, that it doesn't even matter that there are flaws in the book's scope. One of the characters is a three-year-old girl whom I want to adopt. This three-year-old is probably the cutest kid in literary history. I would see this movie, if only for the kid. Anyway. Turtle is her name, and she has a fixation with vegetables. That never really gets explained, but it's pretty darn cute. Two thumbs up for this one.

On my list for this week: "The Phantom Tollbooth". Because it's time. "Snow". This got a lot of press maybe two years ago. It's Turkish and is supposed to be stunning, but I haven't been able to get past the first three pages. Cross your fingers for me, because it's one I own. "Crossing California". Jewish Chicago in the 1960s. Another one I may not make it through. And when all else fails, "The Moffats". Eleanor Estes wrote a series of books in the 1940s, I think, about four kids growing up in the South (this is what I remember from when I was six. I might be wrong.). The main character is Rufus, a name worthy of attention, I should say. I loved these books when I was young, and then they went out of print. Recently back in print, I bought the first one at a children's bookstore in New York (Books of Wonder. Go. It's amazing. And they have a cupcake cafe on site.). We'll see how it compares to my youthful expectations of it.

Happy reading, friends, and enjoy the cooler weather!