Quick Book Reviews Blog

The search for truth is an objective humanity has always been aiming for, and though there are certainly those who recognize ignorance as bliss, most people want to see reality in all of its beauty and horror... often not knowing what they are asking to see until it's too late. Regardless, it seems we always have and will continue to strive for truth and justice, no matter what the cost, as do the people of Muriga, a quiet Spanish town, in Gabriel Urza's novel, All That Followed .

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, better-known by its acronym DARPA, is a rather well-guarded secret of the state, and as such draws a lot of suspicion by its very nature. When such a huge and unknown mass of mystery hangs in the air, it always draws people who want to pierce it and expose its true nature.

Though at first most people have very concrete goals and ideas as to what they want to accomplish before their time on this Earth is up, as we get older most of us shift our focus towards just trying to be happy and keeping it all together. Some have the misfortune of being left to scramble and make up for many lost years in their final stretch of life, as is Saul in Eric Rill's An Absent Mind .

Ever since most of us were young we were taught not to stick our noses in other people's affairs, not to jump to conclusions, make assumptions based on appearances... basically, we were taught not to gossip.  However, we knew way better than to let those lessons get to us... whether we do it for the mere pleasure of this type of voyeurism or to convince ourselves we have it pretty well, there is no denying: gossip is fun.

Family secrets aren't usually that big of a deal... most have them, and they generally revolve around hilariously embarrassing moments or medical issues. It's not that often that you see a family keeping so many skeletons in its closet that it threatens to burst, but it's certainly that kind of story which gets our attention, and that's what we are treated to in Mary Kubica's The Good Girl .

The concept of actions and consequences is one we're all privy to and have experienced in one form or another... as a matter of fact, you've made it far enough to be reading book review blogs in life, chances are you've experienced the phenomenon in some surprising ways. Perhaps unfortunately, the consequences of some decisions can take years upon years to make themselves known, and even if we don't really see it, the accumulation of the decisions we make and the secrets we keep can have a very powerful effect further down the line. This is precisely the kind of thing three sisters are exposed to in  Trail of Broken Wings  , the first book by Sejal Badani.

World War II, still fresh in the annals of our history, was without a doubt the deadliest and most far-reaching conflict we know of... for now of course, as we have a tendency to constantly outdo ourselves. In any case, the few years it spanned were some of the strangest and most tumultuous ones, at least in the 20th century, and so it is quite understandable why many authors choose it as the backdrop for their works of fiction, as did Alex Rosenberg in The Girl from Krakow .

The concept of dating (or “courting”, depending how fancy you are) is one that that seems to have undergone a tremendous amount of ages as societies have been developing over the course of thousands of years. We've constantly been inventing rules and traditions, and then reshaping them to fit whichever direction society tended to go. Thankfully, it has come to a point today where people (in most developed countries at least) have a great amount of freedom in whom they choose to go out with and what they do together.

While technology certainly has enhanced our lives and opened countless new roads and possibilities for us to take, it is nevertheless a double-edged sword and deep down most of us know that someone, somewhere will find a way to use these advancements for a greater evil. Many have already written about the pitfalls of our technological development and how it can be used for terror, and Alert by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge falls into that category.