The Walled City

The Walled City Ryan Graudin 4/5	Published 2014 First Sentence "The are three rules of survival in the Walled City: Run fast. Trust no one. Always carry your knife. "
Publisher's Description: 730. That's how many days I've been trapped. 18. That's how many days I have left to find a way out. DAI, trying to escape a haunting past, traffics drugs for the most ruthless kingpin in the Walled City. But in order to find the key to his freedom, he needs help from someone with the power to be invisible.... JIN hides under the radar, afraid the wild street gangs will discover her biggest secret: Jin passes as a boy to stay safe. Still, every chance she gets, she searches for her lost sister.... MEI YEE has been trapped in a brothel for the past two years, dreaming of getting out while watching the girls who try fail one by one. She's about to give up, when one day she sees an unexpected face at her window..... In this innovative and adrenaline-fueled novel, they all come together in a desperate attempt to escape a lawless labyrinth before the clock runs out.
Dear Reader, Wow - this book was nothing like I was expecting! I think I was anticipating a dystopian future novel, which this often had the feel of - but it was steeped in so much reality (and modernization combined with lack of progress - it's so difficult to explain!) that it was even better because of its strange connections to real life. At first I couldn't place the story in any time period, which actually worked well - but despite much of a traditional Chinese feel, the reader could occasionally see glimpses of cars and electronics which indicated that the time period was more contemporary than the setting usually let on. The story is told from the point of view of three young adults trapped inside the Walled City - which Graudin fictionalized, but which was actually a very real part of Hong Kong for years. Dai, Jin Ling, and Mei Yee are all trapped in different places and in different ways, and the reader gets to watch as their lives all come together at towards suspenseful tipping point. The book is full of the seedy underside of a city - a side which the bigger city largely tries to ignore and keep repressed within its confining walls. The reader travels through brothels and opium dens, noodle houses and trash-filled alleys, following the adventures of the three protagonists - adventures which twist and turn as much as the narrow streets of Hak Nam. I picked this book up when I knew I'd be alone most of Halloween weekend, needing a good diversion, and I found I couldn't put it down! NB: I was lucky to receive this book both as an ebook ARC from Netgalley and win a physical copy (signed by the author, even!) from the Goodreads First Reads program. Thank you to the publisher and suppliers all! Yours, Arianna

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You Should Have Known

You Should Have Known Jean Hanff Korelitz 3.5 / 5	Published 2014 First Sentence "Usually people cried when they came here for the first time, and this girl looked as if she'd be no exception."
Publisher's Description: Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself, devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice. Grace is also the author of You Should Have Known, a book in which she castigates women for not valuing their intuition and calls upon them to examine their first impressions of men for signs of serious trouble later on. But weeks before the book is published, a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only a chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disast and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself.
Dear Reader, Wow, it's been AGES since I finished a book! I mean, "ages" in mine & Amber's time, which really shouldn't count because we're kind of obsessed with books. ;) Anyway - I picked this one up because I had received it as a Goodreads First Read back in April, and I'd been meaning and meaning to read it. The impetus that finally did the trick? We found out that the author would be one of the panelists at the Hachette Book Brunch we attended in New York City a few weekends ago. Because of this (and because I erroneously received my complimentary keynote author's book too late to get started on it), I decided to see how much I could get through You Should Have Known before the event. The verdict? About half, which isn't too shabby considering it was a 400+ page book! It didn't take long to get really into the story, though. (Which I am sure helped me fly through it.) I had gotten a very different impression from the book blurb when I entered to win a copy earlier this year, and was entirely blown away by the intensely psychological situation this book explored. I had known the premise was that there was a woman (Grace) who had written an advice book on marriage, just before her own (seemingly perfect) marriage fell apart. I thought it was going to be a book about how a smug know-it-all got her comeuppance (or at least learned about hubris and what it means to be humble). But it was SO much more than that! Because it is the current "it book" to reference, think of the premise I just described, but with a Gone Girl twist: an unexpected and unexplainable mystery is stirred up maybe one-fifth of the way into the book. Many people feel as if the main character is unlikeable, which I can absolutely see. But I found I certainly liked her more than I thought I would. She wasn't really full of herself, she was just blind, and perhaps that was even a self-defense mechanism. Who knows. But she really did manage to pick up the pieces of her life relatively well. (Of course, she was lucky that she inherited not one but two homes, and could afford not to have to work immediately after her life had been entirely upheaved. Most don't have those luxuries.) Don't let yourself get turned off by Grace's seeming materialistic ways, though - the Birkin bag section which made her sound so petty actually comes around full circle in the end. And I think it was a good way of showing that while she was surrounded by people who could afford $10,000 handbags (multiples of them!) she didn't want that kind of excess for herself. She was content to have a small home and a happy family. Finding out she didn't ultimately have the either, and the repercussions of that discovery, is really what the author was trying to convey. And I think she did a great job of writing one woman's reaction to that. Yours, Arianna

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