BOOK REVIEWS

There are some good books around at the moment and here are reviews on three of them.

Lucky Dog: How being a veterinarian saved my life by Dr Sarah Boston is a wonderful look into the differences between the medical treatment of our pet animals and the medical treatment of humans (in Canada in this instance) and Sarah Boston pulls no punches with her comments/complaints.  This is the story of a veterinarian oncology surgeon to small animals who contracts cancer and chronicles the differences in the path taken with her and with the animals she treats in her practice.  Full of great stories about dogs and cats with cancer and how oncology surgery and treatment gives these animals a second chance at life.  It is also full of the disturbing differences in the processes Sarah slugs her way through to get the treatment she understands (in some instances better than the oncologist) to defeat the cancer that threatens her life.  There are sections of the book where I thought the author went on a little too long on her complaints, but for all that, it is still a very interesting read and worth the time.

Girl on a Train by Paula Hawkins is has a very different format and because of this is most intriguing.  Rachel has gone through a bad marriage breakup and it has changed her for the worse.  She travels daily on a train that passes the backs of houses along one section of the line and Rachel has become obsessed with the pieces of the lives she sees of two occupants of one of the houses.  The story has many twists and turns and there are a couple of surprises early in the story that kept me reading.  Definitely worth the read.

 

Outside the Lines by Amy Hatvany is this author’s sixth novel and this shows in the way the plot and characters are developed.  The story has the obligatory romance between the main character and a secondary character and yet this doesn’t in any way detract from the plot.  (You can see I’m not a romance reader........oh well, we all have our defects).

So to the story, when Eden was ten years old she found her father, David, bleeding on the bathroom floor. The suicide attempt led to her parents' divorce, and David all but vanished from Eden's life.  Twenty years later an adult Eden (now a successful chef) begins to wonder where her father is and even if he is still alive so she begins the search, much to the distress of her mother who has since re-married.  She meets Jack, the romance interest and manager of a homeless shelter; because she has been told her father is living on the streets.  He helps her in the search for her father and more importantly in her understanding of why some wish to remain on the streets.  Eden helps Jack by cooking for the homeless people with the added benefit of meeting people she hasn’t any frame of reference to understand.  All up I thought it was a good read, with some social commentary that added to my education.