Adventures with an alligator

With this month's read we travel to the United States through Homer Hickam's Carrying Albert Home.

A short review on  Book Page by Kenneth Champeon had this titbit about this quirky novel. Ann@booksonthetable wrote this somewhat longer review of a book that is bit of a genre hybrid.

Hope you enjoy your trip across America.

We'll meet on Thursday 28 April at the Community Meeting Room at the Gordon White Library at 6.00pm.

Travelling with Daniel Ascher fails to excite our readers

The general consensus was that this was a delightful light book which was pleasurable to read but its impact was rather short-lived. As we have to share books, many of our readers had read The Travels of Daniel Ascher several weeks ago and therefore memories of more recently read books have rushed in to replace those referring to Deborah Levy-Bertherat's novel.

One of our readers found trying to sort out the relationships confusing so had to resort to a diagrammatic representation of who was who and who was related to who, so she could keep track of the characters. There was some discussion as to whether the main character was Daniel or Helene. Conversation then veered towards why Daniel acted as he did and where he went after quietly slipping out at the end as Helen had uncovered his long-held secret. Most of our book clubbers agreed with Helene that Daniel and Suzanne were finally travelling the world and  sharing adventures together.

There was discussion about survivor guilt and how Daniel manifested this through his adventure series 'The Black Insignia' while remaining safe and hidden from the world in his cellar.

Some of our readers really enjoyed the pen drawings and looked at them in detail linking them to the information related in the story. Other readers are more plot-driven or word-focussed and had not even noticed the sketches. Some of our readers found the lack of punctuation, especially quotation marks, particularly off-putting while others had automatically supplied their own as they read. The common use of run-on sentences, also know as comma splice apparently, really ruined the experience of this novel for some of our book clubbers.

After the challenges of our previous selections some of our readers found this novel just too light-weight but overall, folk had enjoyed the read and then moved on to other reads.

Our next read takes us to the United States through Homer Hickam's Carrying Albert Home. It'll be interesting to  hear our book club squaddies' reaction to this quirky novel.

I hope you enjoy your  adventures with an alligator.

Unpacking Deborah Levy-Bertherat's 'The Travels of Daniel Ascher'

Just a reminder to everyone that Between the Lines Book Club meets this Thursday 31 March at 6.00pm at the Community Meeting Room at Gordon White Library.

Hopefully folk found this book a lighter load than our previous two selections!

Looking forward to hearing about your experiences travelling with Daniel.