Antoinette Botsford

just listened to a brilliant recording of "The Storyteller" on Libby. What a great book. I am among those women trying to deflect the intellectual snobbery that some have about Picoult's work. The research and care she takes to show us different nuances of difficult subjects amazes me. The Storyteller, with rich narrative layers and complex characters, is among the best. Everyone who questions the Holocaust needs to read this book (or listen to it on some recording service). Her characters are very real and the situations in which they find themselves invite me to become better informed and positioned. Long beyond the time when one of her riveting stories reaches a conclusion, her characters and the life lessons that they realize are traveling with me and influencing my own journey. I find "Chick lit" a kind of demeaning term, and would not call Picoult's writing that. She has many wonderful female heroes, true, and their concerns are ones women everywhere share. But she's bigger than that. Picoult confronts issues that serve to unite, not divide, and that deepen, rather than trivialize, our knowledge of the concerns of women and human beings generally. Yeah, I am an unabashed fan!

This is one of the best, if not the best, of the new fantasy writers. Page's protagonist, a scientist-witch named Calendula, lives in what was (for me) a highly plausible environment, even if the opening scene presents her crafting a golem in the backyard of her San Francisco apartment. Even with such a start, Page shapes Callie and her lifestyle into an entirely credible and absorbing tale about relationships and ideals and evolution and the essence of life. Without being ponderous, Page's fascinating plot invites us all to think about old stuff in fresh ways! No cookie-cutter characters here. Quirks and surprises pull us on secret ley lines right to the heart of what matters. I could not put down the first volume and breathlessly await the next three!