Wednesday, July 19, 2017

The Child

A baby’s body is found on a construction site. Fiona Barton’s The Child follows several characters as they react to this discovery, including a newspaper reporter and the mother of a missing child.

More than anything, I read The Child because I needed something to read. I didn’t love Barton’s The Widow, but I clearly enjoyed it enough to read the author again. I was pleasantly surprised by The Child. I guessed the ending early on, but even that did not diminish my enjoyment. It was a fast and engaging story—a good pick for a summer read.

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Jane Steele

Lindsay Faye’s Jane Steele is an interesting play on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Jane Steele is fan of Jane Eyre, and her life in Victorian England often parallels that of the other fictitious Jane. Their paths differ, though, from the beginning of the book when Jane Steele confesses to the reader that she is a serial killer. Despite this confession, Jane is generally a sympathetic main character and the situations she finds herself in, including her romance, are interesting and unique. I wouldn’t consider Jane Steele must-read fiction, but it certainly does the job of entertaining a reader on a summer afternoon.