NetGalley

Professional Reader 80% 25 Book Reviews 2016 NetGalley Challenge

Friday, June 22, 2018

The Last Cruise

By Kate Christensen 
Published July 10 2018 by Doubleday 
🌟🌟🌟⭐


3.5 stars rounded up.

If you have no desire at all to ever embark on a cruise ship, this book will reaffirm that notion.  If you have cruised and want to go again, you may change your mind after reading this book.  I am firmly in the first category since I suffer from motion sickness.  Now I also suffer from fear of being stranded in the middle of the ocean with no power, no crew, diminishing food supply, and a chance of rain.  For these passengers on the final voyage of The Isabella, at least there was plenty of wine and whiskey.  

The Isabella is being decommissioned or whatever you call it, and this one last voyage from California to Hawaii will be reminiscent of the good old days, in both music and food.  We get to know the musical quartet, from Israel, and one of the chefs, Hungarian, plus a couple of the passengers, Valerie and Christine.  The crew has discovered that they're  all being fired by the cruiseline once in Hawaii, and it's  not going over well.  Valerie is there to write about the dynamics of a crew made up of diverse cultures and their treatment by corporate, and then her story turns into something much larger in scale when the crew quits.  Christine is the light of their cruiseship lives, but she doesn't know if her own life, her marriage to a farmer, is what she wants.

So much going on here yet I had no problem keeping up with all the names and places.  The ending might make you angry or sad or confused, depending on how you take it.  My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley.   

Sunday, June 10, 2018

Love and Ruin - Review

Love and Ruin by Paula McClain
Published May 1 2018 by Ballantine Books



🌟  🌟  🌟  
3.5 stars.

At nearly 400 pages, I'm afraid this felt long-ish to me.  Not a fan of war stories except WW2, I probably should have skimmed  through the Spanish Civil War and the Finnish Russian war in the first half of the book.  I probably did skim the parts on Ernest Hemingway's second marriage to Paula, who he is leaving for our narrator, Martha Gellhorn.  No matter how romantic the adventures of Ernest and Martha may have been, I am not a fan of serial cheaters being seriously considered as husband material.  You know what they say:   "If he cheats WITH you, he will cheat ON you."  I couldn't buy Ernest as a romantic, knowing how many wives he ultimately had.  He actually was a little boy in need of constant attention and reassurance.  He was brash and brazen.  Sound like anyone else you know?  Yuk.

What kept me reading was that ultimately I came to like Martha for her independent thinking and having goals of her own, other than that of being his wife.  Also the fact that they were both writers working on different material, their struggles described in great detail, and the many different homes they had, was all interesting to me.   Then WW2 hit closer to home at about 75% in, and the ending was sad but a fine depiction of a woman with ambition, spirit, and intelligence.  The author had a great admiration for this woman, which is evident in the story telling.  

My thanks to NetGalley and Ballentine Books.