February 2020 Book Reviews

I am determined this year to finally meet my ongoing goal of reading 50 books in a year.  That works out to be about a book per week.  I manifest it in my start today journal and I keep a book on me at all times!  This month I read some interesting ones.

Carnegie’s Maid by Marie Benedict

It tells the story of a young girl that comes from Ireland to America to make money to send back to help her family.  Clara is mistaken for a girl who is to become the maid to Andrew Carnegie’s mother.  Clara sees this as an opportunity and she tries to fit into this life.  She works hard to anticipate her boss’s every need and to quickly pick up how to be a ladies maid.

Clara quickly develops a friendly relationship with her boss’s son, Andrew Carnegie.  This book is the story of her experience in America and her budding relationship with one of the richest men in the world.

Overall I found it a little boring.  I felt entertained, I wanted to see what happened to the characters.  But, at no time did I feel a pressing need to pick up the book and keep reading.  The only thing that made me finish it quickly was the fact that it was a book club book and I had to have it done before our meeting.  I found the ending to be very rushed and not well thought out.  Overall that was something that was mentioned by every person in my book club, they all agreed that the ending was not good.

I gave this book 3 out of 5 stars.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

This book is unique because it is told from the perspective of the pet dog.  The story is about a man and how he handles losing his wife.  Again, it is told from the perspective of his dog. 

I have been hearing about this book for years and was very excited to finally read it.  I was very disappointed. The narrator being a dog was very odd. I had a hard time with the contrived way that the dog knew about things that it could not be a part of.  At times the dog knew things that there was no way that it could and then there were other times that there were massive plot holes that were blamed on the dog not knowing. Well, I found these to be conflicting, either the dog knows everything or it doesn’t.  I found the ending to be rushed, the case against Denny was going badly and then all of the sudden things changed? This was hard to wrap my head around, I felt like the author was just trying to wrap things up.

I finished this book because I hate not finishing books but I did not enjoy it. 2 out of 5 stars.

Twisted Twenty-Six

Many, many years later and Stephanie Plum is still at it!  This is the twenty-sixth book in the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich.  I really liked the first few, and now I read them just because I feel like I can’t give up now.

Personally I felt like the last 3 or so were horrible.  One went down a bit of a science-fiction storyline and I really did not like it.

Twenty-six seems to get back to the original types of stories that I originally liked.  In this novel, Stephanie’s grandmother is at it again.  She married a mobster and quickly after, he died.  Now people are after his money and his keys (we don’t know what the keys are though).  Stephanie has to try and figure out what the keys are and where they are before her grandmother is harmed because all of the mobsters seem to think she knows more than she does.

I give this book 4 out of 5 stars.  It was nice to have a Stephanie Plum book that I enjoyed again.

So far this year I have read SEVEN books!  I am going to have to pick up the pace a bit to meet my goal.

Also, Check-Out:

The 10 Best Books I Read in 2019