Town House Book Review

TownHouse by Tish Cohen
HarperCollins
Published May 2007

I blogged about this author, a week or so ago, and have just now finished reading the book. It turns out that this is Tish Cohen's first adult novel. She has previously published one children's story as well.

Anyway, going by the cover, I would have stopped to take a look, checked out the back cover (about an agrophobic who cant leave the house) and quickly put this book back on the shelf. It is so not my usual type of book.




So when I receive it in the mail, I know I have to make a decent attempt to read it. Guess what. I read it all the way through in 7 hours straight. Stayed up until 2am. I actually shocked myself when I surfaced to check the time.

It was funny, thought provoking, and the language was definitely no holds barred. I found the style of writing to be very refreshing actually.

The story is about Jack, who has been an agrophobic since his son was a baby. He has lived in his house since he was born there - that was 36 years before. Jack's father died in this house. Jack still lives in the past. The house is still exactly like it was when his father died. Nothing major has been renovated or repaired since that day. We also learn about the people in Jack's life - his teenage son, his ex-wife, the shrink, the bank manager, the real estate agent, and the girl from next door.

Harlan is now seventeen and in his last year of high school. He has a secret he hides from his father. Jack's wife Penelope left some time previously and also has some news that she is reluctant to tell Jack. The bank manager fore-closes on the mortgage and Jack has just a few weeks to come up with the outstanding balance or the house will be sold. Lucie, the kid from next door, literally pushes into Jack's house and starts meeting him for breakfast every day before school. She knows how to make a great pot of coffee.

Slowly one step at a time, Jack is forced to start living outside his house. He also begins to learn just how much he has really missed. And he learns that he likes living in the present. He had wanted things to stay the same, because bad things were always happening. But eventually he learns that change is inevitable - and not always bad.

The language and grammar of one's inner mind is so different from every day speech when we have to be careful about what we say, how we say it and who we say it to. But our inner minds are so free to say what we think. Thats how this book is written. Everything that Jack says, does, sees and reads, ends up on the pages of this book. Profanity and all. Freedom of speech - which thankfully is still available in the inner mind. That is why I read it straight through.

If you do not like reading profanity, then I would suggest you do not read this novel.

Freedom Writers Diary - Book Review

Well I finished the Freedom Writers Diary. (This is the cover version that I have). It was a hard book to get through because of all the painful stories. These are teenagers who were shot at, raped, assaulted by gangs and by parents, jailed, living on the streets and doing drugs. But at school they were reading about Anne Frank and Zlata Filipovic - two girls who lived through wars and wrote diaries. Anne of course lived through the Second World War in Europe. Zlata lived in Bosnia and lived through the Bosnia/Serbian war of the early 1990s. She was forced into hiding because she was of mixed ethnic race. Anne did not survive her war - but she was not killed in the gas chambers. Anne died because of disease - specifically Typhus. Zlata survived and her family escaped their war to Paris. She now lives in Ireland.




Anyway the kids wrote letters to Miep Gies - the Dutch women who helped hide Anne Frank's family in the office building. Miep was invited to America for some war related anniversary, so Ms Gruell - the kids teacher - arranged for Miep Gies to speak to the kids as well. This had a huge impact on them, so the following year, the teacher invited Zlata Filipovic to visit and speak to the kids. Another huge impact.

When the kids started High school, they were put into a "English for Dummies" class with a freshman teacher, because they were not expected to graduate. They were expected to drop out, be killed, end up in jail or on the streets. All of the 150 kids in Gruell's English classes stayed in school for the entire 4 years and they all graduated. Of course they had problems, but they stuck it out. Several of these kids were the first in their families to EVER graduate high school.

The Grand Complication by Allen Kurzweil - Book Review

The Hero of this story is Alexander Short, a Reference Librarian at the New York Public Library. Alexander's job is to mostly take "call slips" from members of the public who request books from the stacks. He does a few other jobs as well such as telephones and the front desk, depending on the senior Librarian's mood. And because Alex is not a conservator, he is banned from the Conservation Room.

He has a number of quirks, one of which is collecting call slips with interesting examples of penmanship. Another quirk is "Girdling" - a notebook on a string tied to his wrist or his jacket - in which he jots down (in an old form of shorthand) anything that he thinks is unusual. He also likes enclosures and mechanical things such as timepieces.

One day he is asked by an elegant man (Henry James Jesson III) with very elegant penmanship on the call slip, to retrieve a book from the stacks called the Secret Compartments in Eighteenth Century Furniture. It is a book on false fronts and secret recesses.

Alexander is drawn into Jesson's desire to find the object that was once housed in a drawer of a small glassfronted display box. The object turns out to be a timepiece. But not just any timepiece. The Queen. The Marie Antoinette. One of a kind.

The only trouble was, Marie Antoinette never got to hold her watch because it was not completed until after she was beheaded. The watch later ended up in a Museum in Jerusalem. In 1983 it was stolen from the museum and has never been seen or heard of since. The book goes into a lot of detail (too much detail in my opinion) over the theft from the Museum, how it was done, and why other vandalism was done at the same time.

Jesson's all consuming desire to find the watch affects Alex, and thus begins to affect Alex's marriage as well. Anyway, Alexander eventually discovers that he has been manipulated by Jesson into finding the watch, and he turns the tables on Jesson, and walks away to save his marriage.

The entire story was a search for a magnificant watch. The background was the New York City Public Library. I loved all the Library details. The ending was somewhat of a disappointment. Never mind that the watch has never been found for real. I would have liked Alex to have found it.

Review 1

Review 2