The Red Tent

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons. Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood - the world of the red tent. It begins with the story of her mothers - Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah - the four wives of Jacob. They love Dinah and give her gifts that sustain her through a hard-working youth, a calling to midwifery, and a new home in a foreign land. Dinah's story reaches out from a remarkable period of early history and creates an intimate connection with the past. Deeply affecting, The Red Tent combines rich storytelling with a valuable achievement in modern fiction: a new view of biblical women's society.

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The Sherwood Ring

The Sherwood Ring by Elizabeth Marie Pope

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of my all time favorite books. I finally managed to get a copy when it came back in print. It is the story of a young woman who comes to spend the summer with her uncle in the old Revolutionary home which is also populated with a number of ghosts. She has a relationship with the ghosts and a young man she meets on her way to the house. It is a delightful book! While it isn't quite as exciting as it was when I first read it about 45 years ago, it is still a great story.


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Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon, #1)

Angels & Demons by Dan Brown
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I felt really betrayed with this book in several ways.

1. The ending is all wrong. The reader is led down one path and is waiting for the ending to resolve all the false clues and suddenly, from left field, comes the perpetrator.

2. The ending is inconsistent with what you know about the characters. I hate this. If people are going to act in a psychotic way, there are clues to their behavior in everyday life. On the surface, sociopaths can fool a lot of people, but in reality, there are always signs and eventually the people around then feel uneasy. Something is not right. Serial killers are usually dysfunctional individuals who are most frequently loners. Brown ignores this and gives us a murderer that is not plausible.

3. The author has a hidden agenda and betrays the reader with it. This, I think, bothered me the most. Until the end, I thought that Brown wrote with compassion and understanding, but in the end he tries to manipulate the reader.

4. The numerous false leads are either inadequately explained or simply don't exist. A writer, no matter how thrilling the middle chapters of his book are, doesn't get a free ride in the last chapter. Things need to be explained, clues need to be sorted out and resolved. Characters need to burst forth in the clothing they have been wearing throughout the novel, not a new and bizarre garb. If it has been a costume, the reader needs to be able to see where he was mislead, and it has to make sense.

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