On Jacqui's Bookshelf ...

Just starting to read ... The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Synopsis: A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.

An enchanting debut and a spellbinding tale of fate and belief in the bonds of love, The Time Traveller's Wife is destined to captivate readers for years to come.   Check out the movie trailer by clicking on this article's title above.

Just finished reading ... Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott
Synopsis:  Absorbed in her own failings, Clara Purdy crashes her life into a sharp left turn, taking the young family in the other car along with her. When bruises on the mother, Lorraine, prove to be late-stage cancer, Clara - against all habit and comfort - moves the three children and their terrible grandmother into her own house.

We know what is good, but we don't do it. In Good to a Fault, Clara decides to give it a try, and then has to cope with the consequences: exhaustion, fury, hilarity, and unexpected love. But she must question her own motives. Is she acting out of true goodness, or out of guilt? Most shamefully, has she taken over simply because she wants the baby for her own?

What do we owe in this life, and what do we deserve? This compassionate, funny, and fiercely intelligent novel looks at life and death through grocery-store reading glasses: being good, being at fault, and finding some balance on the precipice.

Jacqui's Review: The concept of the story was promising and in the end it delivered but I felt that at one crucial point in the story the plot was rushed and a little difficult to come to terms with based on what occured in the first third of the book.  Without explanation, the family withdraws from Clara who has supported them through such a difficult time.  Although I could understand the fear underlying the family's motivation, that Clara was bonding too closely to the children, it was still difficult to relate to.  1.5 out of 5.