"Seeing the World Through Books"
Helpful votes received on reviews:
90% (12,322 of 13,704)
Location: New England
In My Own Words:
After more than eighteen years reviewing books on Amazon .com, I am now devoting most of my time to my own website (the link is above). I give 5 stars for "outstanding," 4 stars for "good," 3 stars for "fair," 2 stars for poor, and 1 star for total failure. Because life is short (and I am getting old), I don't finish dull books, and if I don't finish a book, I do not review it; hence, the prepo… Read moreAfter more than eighteen years reviewing books on Amazon .com, I am now devoting most of my time to my own website (the link is above). I give 5 stars for "outstanding," 4 stars for "good," 3 stars for "fair," 2 stars for poor, and 1 star for total failure. Because life is short (and I am getting old), I don't finish dull books, and if I don't finish a book, I do not review it; hence, the preponderance of 4 and 5 star ratings here! In addition, most of the books I review are international fiction, which is very difficult for a foreign author to get published in the US. Obviously, most of these books have already gone through a rigid vetting process by the American publisher, who wants to sell those books here!
In recent years I have reviewed fiction written by authors from Algeria to Zanzibar, an interest stimulated by my job as an international student advisor and English teacher at a Massachusetts college. Longer versions of my reviews, and graphics which illustrate the books I review, are posted on my website, SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS, with link above.
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Contributions
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
In this multi-leveled coming of age story, Brazilian author Adriana Lisboa recreates the perennial search for "family" and "home" by a thirteen-year-old girl who, following the death of her mother in Rio, has gone to Colorado in search of her biological father, a mystery man. The only father she has known is a different man who signed her birth certificate during his six-year marriage to her mother. In straightforward, unpretentious and realistic language, the life of Evangelina, known as Vanja, opens and shuts like the "crow-blue" mussel shells she remembers so vividly from Copacabana Beach in Rio. When Vanja arrives in Lakewood, Colorado, where her legal father… Read more
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
In this final book of his Copenhagen Quartet, author Thomas E. Kennedy creates yet another vibrant portrait of life in Copenhagen, the city which has been his own home for the past thirty years. The novels may be read in any order, as each is written in a different literary style, each is set during a different season, and each features different characters. What unites the characters in these novels is that all are acutely aware of the role art, music, and beauty in bringing peace to their damaged souls as they explore the themes of love and death, freedom and confinement, commitment and betrayal, and the worldly and the spiritual within their Danish environment. This final… Read more
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
(4.5 stars) Dark, stark, and potent in its story and its message, Past the Shallows reduces life to its most basic elements as perceived by two young brothers, Miles and Harry Curren, who share the story of their uncertain and impoverished lives on an island at the tail end of the inhabited world. Tasmania, off the south coast of Australia, where their father fishes for abalone in the dark water, offers no refuge, either physically or emotionally, from fate and the elements - just open water from there all the way to Antarctica. As difficult as the setting may be, the boys' dysfunctional family life is worse. Their father, a threatening and often intemperate "hard man," offers the young… Read more
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