A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

Brixton Beach is a hard book to come by. It has very limited availability on Amazon--and only in the used market place. Luckily ILL was able to locate a copy for me to borrow; not so lucky with the other title I was looking for and was forced to break down and buy a used copy of off Amazon. Tearne is a British writer but is Sri Lanka born. The book opens upon a scene of terrifying chaos. Simon, a London doctor is frantically searching for a loved one amid the chaotic aftermath of a bombing on the London tube. The scene is bewildering and heart pounding and vividly drawn. In the next chapter we flash back to Sri Lanka; it is 1973 and Alice is nine. Her mother, Sita, is expecting a new baby. Sita is Singhalese; Stanley, Alice's father, is Tamil. In Sri Lanka the Tamils are a bitterly oppressed group and are seen as less civilized by the Singhalese, who are the ruling ethnic group. There's friction and tension slowly building to a violent conflict of civil war between th...

When the end came, it seemed to do so completely out of the blue, and it wasn't until long afterward that I was able to see that there was a chain of events leading up to it. Some of those events had nothing to do with us, the Morrisons, but were solely the concern of the Pyes, who lived on a farm about a mile away and were our nearest neighbors." from page seven I must confess that it took me longer than it really needed to in order to finish the novel Crow Lake by Mary Lawson. The entire story is building up to the big catastrophe that forever destroys all the hopes and dreams the Morrison clan ever dared to hope and dream for its future. In the eyes of the narrator, it is even worse than the tragedy of the car crash that claimed both parents' lives one evening on the heels of some good news the family has received and celebrated. Now you can see why I dreaded getting to the end of a book that drips in foreboding like nobody's business. What can be a worse tr...