songs from humpback whale

Let me tell you a little something about love. It's different everytime. It's nothing more than a chemical reaction, an arrow over an equation, but the elements change. The most fragile kind of love is that between a man and a woman. Chemistry, again: if you introduce a new element, you never know how stable the original bond is. You may wind up with a new union, with something left behind. I believe that you can fall in love many times with many different people. However I don't think that you can fall in love the same way twice. One type of relationship my be steady. Another may be fire and brimstone. Who is to say if one of these is better than the other? The deciding factor is how it all fits together. Your love, I mean, and your life.
The problem is that when you're old enough to really find a soulmate, you're already carrying around all this extra baggage. Like where you grew up, and how much money you make, and whether you like the city or the country. And sometimes, most of the time, you fall really hard for someone who you just can't squeeze into the limits of your life. The bottom line is: when your heart sets its sights on someone, it doesn't consult with your mind.

Not my favorite JP. It felt like the leftovers from too many other books that were smushed together and made a meal that lacked order and originality. It lacked that awkwardness that is necessary for the characters to feel real and the plot to seem plausible. It felt like it could have been her first book.
B-

perfect match

PROs
The central mother central mother character was one that was more flawed than usual. I liked that that the priest molestation stuff was written as an undertone rather than as some fictious expose. Good surprises, good characters, good flow, good story.

CONs
I have no idea what the book title means.

QUOTEs
There is no cosmic rule that grants you immunity from the details just because you have come face to face with a catastrophe. The garbage cans still overflow, the bills arrive in the mail, telemarketers interrupt dinner.
This sums up 2009.

[from an interview with JP in the back]
Crawiling into the minds of characters is actually one of the best parts of writing for me. After all, I'm never going to get to be a five-year-old boy, so it's a challenge to be able to pull it off. It's a little like trying on a costume--and getting to shrug it off my shoulders when I'm finished.
JP has a little theatre major in her too, which is just one of the many reasons we are BFF.

A

heart books

I was skeptical of this book because the word heart is in the title. I just read a JP about a motherless daughter, so that element didn't wow me either. But, overall, I loved the book. It reminded me of Lost Season 1 with the flashbacks and character unpeeling. I loved the main character and kept picturing her as Ellen Page.
A


Knowing a JP book is going to be about religion is like knowing an episode of Lost is going to be about Ben: cream of the crop hour is coming. The Gnostic Christianity element was awesome. This book incorporated a few of JP's trademarks that I have come to love: a New England setting, a legal drama, a story told from a variety of narrative viewpoints, and incorporating characters from her other books. Some of the chapters were too short, though, and I didn't resonate as well with these characters are with ones in her other books.
B