The main character for both novels is Annemarie Zimmer. In Riding Lessons, she starts out as an 18-year-old equestrian who is an Olympic contender. Then she and her horse are in a horrific accident during a jumping event. It kills her horse and comes very close to paralyzing Annemarie. This all happens at the beginning of the book, and then it jumps forward 20 years. Annemarie has just lost her job, her husband has left her, she has a very difficult relationship with her teenage daughter, […]
Here there be monsters
I loved Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, and hated her follow up, The Ape House. At the Water’s Edge fell somewhere in between for me, leaning a bit more towards liking it (I think?). “I stared at him for a long time. If he wanted to end his search for the beast, he need look no further than a mirror.” Set in the 1940s, At the Water’s Edge stars slightly bratty Maddie Hyde, her extremely bratty husband (Ellis) and his equally bratty best friend (Hank). They flit around from party […]
Water for Nessie
At the Water’s Edge is more similar to Water for Elephants than Ape House in tone and time period, maybe that’s why I preferred it to the other Gruen novel I read this year. Maddie is an American society wife during WW2; she is married to Ellis Hyde although their relationship is constantly entwined with Hank, Ellis’ best friend. Colonel Hyde, Ellis’ father, discovered the Loch Ness monster and took the blurry pictures people are so skeptical of; in a drunken state Ellis berates his […]
All the Bonobos Survive
Ape House is a perfectly serviceable book to read on your day off. It isn’t as good as Water for Elephants but I give it a solid 3.5 stars; and it isn’t much of a time commitment. Isabel Duncan works in a language lab that is researching the communication skills of bonobos; the lab is bombed which leads to the sale of the apes to an anonymous owner. Isabel is more upset that her fiance was responsible for the sale of the bonobos than she […]
Rome is Where We Saw the Yellow Dog
Sometimes you enjoy a book because it comes at the right time. I recently spent a week in Scotland and so Sara Gruen’s novel, set in a Highland village on the shores of Loch Ness, evoked many vivid memories of incredible scenery and lovely accents. The main character of this story is not Scottish but American. Maddie Hyde is a society wife, who has been dragged to Scotland by her husband, Ellis, in an attempt to regain the family fortune. Accompanying them is Ellis’s best […]