I have’t been updating the books I have been reading that much lately. I just keep coming across stuff that I will read too quickly to even mention. Last Friday I found a galley of a new book by Mary Doria Russell called A Thread of Grace, due out in February 2005. Honestly, it was just okay. It read a bit like a TV movie. Teh novel is set during the end of WWII in Italy. Apparently in real life Italian citizens formed a network to help save the lives of 43,000 Jews (this is from the back of the book. I do not know how they got such a specific number). She bases the book on this and creates an entire cast of characters. There are multiple people to keep track of—Clauette Blum and her father Albert Blum, refugees scrambling over the Alps, Renzo Leoni, an Italian Jew who seems like the bad boy with the good heart. And there are many others. But they seem all seem like typecast characters. The energy keeps you going through the book, but the whole time I kept wondering who they were going to cast for each character.
And yesterday I picked up a copy of Don Lee’s Country of Origin which has been sitting on my office shelf for a while. I have not finished it yet, but it’s good so far. This book follows the disappearance of Lisa Countryman, an American who came to Japan in search of herself. When she goes missing, her sister urges the U.S. Embassy and the Tokyo police into action. I will let you know when I finish what I think.