It’s Monday! What are you reading?

Blonde Bombshell by Tom Holt

There is a bomb on its way from the planet Ostar.  It’s job is to destroy Dirt, a small planet in a solar system far away.  It isn’t the first to try.  A previous bomb went missing five years ago.  Obviously Dirt has highly advanced defenses that are cloaked so the bomb can’t  detect them.  The bomb will have to investigate for a while first.  

In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom by Qanta A. Ahmed
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The author worked in a hospital in Saudi Arabia from 1999 to 2001.  I was disappointed in the writing.  She didn’t go in depth at all.  Everything was very superficial.  The women were all happy.  The only time she seemed to connect with her subject was in her description of Hajj.

The Housemaid’s Daughter by Barbara Mutch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cathleen leaves Ireland in the early 1900s to go to South Africa to marry her fiancé .  Her only companion is her housemaid and her daughter, Ada.  In Ada she finds a child after her own heart and she educates her more than is ‘proper’ for a black child.  When Ada disappears one day, Cathleen has to decide how to find her.

This book was very well done.  It gave a great overview of South African history during Apartheid.

The Inheritor by Marion Zimmer Bradley

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A psychologist and her teenage sister move into a house in San Francisco only to find that it belonged to a woman active in the local occult community and that she is determined to have a say in things even after death.

This was good sort of scary book.  It was written in the late 70s and set in 1983 with a lot of references to woman’s libbers and the sickness of homosexuals.

The Island by Victoria Hislop

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For 50 years Spangiola was an island leper colony on Crete.  On diagnosis people were sent here for the rest of their lives.  this is a family saga of four generations of women affected by living on and near the island.

I liked this book.  I wasn’t crazy about the ending because I’ve never liked the plot device of people freaking out because they find out something they didn’t know about their family history.  I just can’t relate.  I’d think it was cool to have a family scandal .