Hideous Kinky

I bet that title got everybody's attention! Seriously, I just finished reading Esther Freud's Hideous Kinky, and I am disappointed. It was on the list of 1001 books to read before you die (which generally has not let me down), and the blurb on the back of the novel sounded like something I would really, really like, but it didn't work for me. The narrator is a five-year old English girl who is telling of trying to exist in a "semi-normal" life while traveling to Marrakech with her hippie mother and seven-year old sister. I did not find the mother realistic in actions or thought (whether drug-induced or not), and I did not find the abilities of these two children to be  probable. It was a cute book and I did not mind reading it, but one I needed to have read before I die...afraid not!  

Kostova's The Swan Thieves

I thought that Elizabeth Kostova had done an outstanding job with her novel The Historian until I read her second novel, The Swan Thieves.  Without even going into the plot, I can tell you that her descriptions of artists and their paintings and their feelings have caused me to wonder where my sketch book is and if I have any charcoal (and I am not an artist by any means). This novel deals with several kinds of obsession: an artist's with his subject, women with their lovers, a psychiatrist who must help his patient.
          Do not attempt to read this novel unless  you want to spend time thinking and lightly analyzing behaviors, thoughts, and new ideas. Kostova employs the flashback device of intermingling more than one time period and story, but unlike most, the flashbacks are not distracting, are fascinating, and are easily followed. I now am anxiously awaiting her next novel...