Sunday Salon: Week Five

This week I've been reading The Horse Whisperer, If I Am Missing or Dead, and Garden Spells.

Let's start with The Horse Whisperer which is the first of the books I'm reading for the Lit Flicks Challenge.


I saw the movie some time ago and will probably see it again, as part of the Lit Flicks challenge is to read the book and see the movie. The book was certainly engaging, but it also had its rough spots. Nicolas Evans has the bones of a great book here - girl and horse experience a horrific accident, career woman in crisis, lone wolf horse whisperer on a ranch in scenic Montana, bland husband...a perfect recipe for affairs, accusations, love, healing and redemption. Something, however, gets a bit lost in the translation. Maybe if the book had been tighter, about 50 pages less it would have been a really good book. It's a bit bloated and I got a bit sick of career woman Annie and her boring husband Robert and some of the other very one dimensional characters. By far the most intriguing character is the horse whisperer Tom Booker, closely followed by the daughter Grace. Anyway, I have to say that I was surprised at the end which is radically different from the end of the movie. I'd recommend the book, but I wouldn't say it was amazing or anything.



I have been waiting for Janine Latus' If I Am Missing or Dead since April, and when I picked the request up at the library on Friday I noted for the first time a marker that informed me the book was in "heavy demand" and there would be no renewal. I've been borrowing books from the library for about 20 years and I've never seen one of those markers before. I guess I don't read a lot of popular books! This book actually has quite a misleading title. Janine Latus' sister was certainly killed by her boyfriend, but this is Janine's story about her abusive relationship with her husband and the echoes of abuse in her family home as she grew up. Her father is painted as a complete and total pig, sexualising his daughters, groping their friends and telling inappropriate stories. It is hard to know what is true in memoir, but if half of this book is true, I think Janine Latus has had a very tough and sad life. Again the book is bloated - the fact that her husband is a jerk but they have a great sexual relationship is mentioned oh, about 100 times. It is an interesting side of domestic violence and not one usually explored, but it was overdone here and in the last 100 pages or so I simply couldn't understand why she wouldn't leave him. Her only defence seems to be "I was scared to be alone" which didn't seem to hold water to me. I'd recommend the book, but from the reviews on Amazon it seemed a lot of people were misled and thought this would be a "true crime" (a genre of books I personally hate) about Latus' sister Amy. So as long as you know up front it is Janine's story it's a compelling, interesting and ultimately tragic tale of a family mired by domestic violence.



Garden Spells is a lovely little book about the Waverly family who have an unusual apple tree in the backyard and a legacy of being "magical" in their home town. he book centres of Claire, and her sister Sydney (and Sydney's daughter Bay) who has recently returned home after a lifetime of running away from what it means to have the magic Waverly touch. I love the descriptions of the lovely food Claire cooks from the magic garden and her almost-relationship with the boy next door is sweet. I've read some scathing reviews of this book, and I think they were a little harsh. I once described a book as being like cotton candy - sweet, fun and good while you're eating it, but basically unfulfilling - and I think Garden Spells is another one of those books. I'm not quite done with it yet.

Next up will be something from the shelf...maybe the next Anita Blake book or even the last Harry Potter!

Happy Sunday. :)