Three Short Reviews - Three Very Different Books

 I have to keep telling myself that I was only on the road for a little over two weeks because it feels like I've been out of touch a whole lot longer than that. And now I have accumulated nine un-reviewed books to catch up on - and I know that's never going to happen. I'm not even sure that would be fair to the books in question because, honestly, some of them are already starting to get a little bit hazy in my mind.

So I'll try a different approach:

I first read this classic when I was in my early teens, and I remembered it as a great adventure story. As it turns out, Around the World in Eighty Days is that and more. On the surface, it's the story of a wealthy Londoner who bets his fortune that he can circumnavigate the globe in just 80 days. He has done the calculations and he is convinced that it's doable. The problem is that there's little room for error, and he's not taken into account a bumbling London detective who is determined to arrest him for a theft our hero is not guilty of. This one is great fun; Vernes even manages to throw in a budding romance that takes a nice turn. This is a very accessible classic that I highly recommend.

Alexandra Oliva's The Radiant Dark is a first-contact novel, but it focuses as much on family dynamics as it does on the alien race fast approaching Earth. It's March of 1980 when a strange flickering in the night sky turns out to be a signal from a planet eleven light-years away. No one knows if they are friendly are not, but over the coming decades messages are exchanged with them as the two civilizations gradually learn to communicate with each other. It all evolves very slowly because of the immense distance between the two planets, but in the meantime people on Earth are forced to reassess their place in the universe. All of this is seen through the eyes of the Girard family and how it impacts the lives of each family member. The Radiant Dark is not the science fiction novel I expected it would be, but if you want a nice blend of scifi and family saga, you will really like this one.

I've read mostly short stories, as opposed to novels, from George Saunders so I don't have much to compare Vigil to. That said, this is one very strange little novel. Jill Blaine, who died in the 1970s, has been a spirit guide of sorts for the last several decades. Her current assignment is to help K.J. Boone, an 87-year-old man, through his deathbed experience. Boone, however, is not at all what Jill is used to; he's a ruthless businessman who feels no remorse at all about how he exploited the planet for his own purposes - and he's not having any of it. Things get complicated when other dead souls show up at Boone's home just to taunt and badger him during his final hours. I have to say that, even as much as I enjoy George Saunders short stories, Vigil just did not work for me at all. Frankly, I was just thankful that it is as short a book as it is. It won't scare me away from the short stories, but I can't recommend this one.

I'll stop with these three for now, hoping that I've given at least enough of a taste of each of them that you'll know whether they are for you or not. I'll get to the others soon, including the one I finished just this morning, The Daughters of Rosebud by Sonny Buttar (I absolutely loved this one.)