Book review: Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk

Genre: Fiction.

Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk has Carl Streator, a journalist, who while researching sudden infant death syndrome, comes across a African poem, that when read out, kills people. Along the way he teams up with Helen Hoover Boyle a real estate agent, who sells and resells the same haunted houses, for a tidy profit. She knows the culling song too. Her assistant assistant Mona, who is a wiccan, and Mona's boyfriend Oyster. Oyster likes to blackmail businesses by threatening class action lawsuits for non existent issues.

All this sounds like the premise of a pretty decent book. Unfortunately, what we get instead is a lazy book. The plot is thin. The characters and the dialogues are terrible. The book resorts to cheap tricks to pad it thickness, uses list of words, repeated sentences, whose sole purpose is to occupy space. You don't like or hate the characters, you just don't care about them.

Avoid this.

Rating: 1 / 5; Skip it.

Book review: The street lawyer by John Grisham

Genre: Fiction. Drama with some elements of a thriller.

This book tells the tale of a lawyer Michael, whose climb up his law firms corporate ladder is interrupted when a homeless man takes him and his co-workers hostage. This incident forces him to reevaluate his life. Along the way he also starts to dig into why his firm was targeted by the homeless man and uncovers a mystery.

Michael's philosophical crisis and his journey through it is not that interesting. The crisis might have been triggered by a dramatic incident, but it is basically a upper middle class lawyer having a mid-life crisis. The mystery in the book never quite develops and there are no intelligent twists and turns. There is nothing interesting or exciting about this book but it is not badly written. The end result is a solidly average book.

Rating: 2.5 / 5. Average.

Book review: Victoria Grandolet by Henry Bellamann

Genre: Period Drama set in the South of USA.

This book was originally published way back in 1943. The book is titled after one of the characters in the book Victoria Grandolet. The book starts with Victoria marrying into the Grandolet family and then explores her journey into this new experience.

The settings and people in the book are laid out pretty well though it could get a bit ponderous from time to time. I did not find the narrative thread in the book to be interesting nor were the characters or their interactions anything to write home about.

All in all the book was pretty dull and the only reason to get this is if you are curious about the author.

Rating: 2 / 5, Below average. Not terrible but bland overall.