Book cover I usually don't do the comparative thing, but this one stuck me pretty directly. Imagine the movie Crazy Rich Asians, but teenagers at a boarding school in the mountains outside of Aspen, with a broadly international cast. Main point: pretty much everybody is insanely rich. The main character, Jaya Rao, is a princess from an old kingdom of India who is literally there to break someone's heart....
Book cover Seems an appropriate way to start off the first book review of 2019 with a book that came out in 2009. On top of that, it's a book that I really, really enjoyed reading. This book follows the protagonist, Henry Lee both as a 13 year old in 1943, and an adult in 1986. If you have been reading my reviews for a while, you'll note that I get picky when time starts jumping around, and I'm really happy to say that this book gets this simple detail absolutely right: Every chapter title includes the year....
Book cover (paperback) This is the 1989 book that later became a movie (which I never saw). This won the Booker Prize. We follow a quintessential British Butler named Stevens sometime after World War 2 on a journey to look up an ex-employee. The journey itself is beautifully and descriptively written. While the main thread is the journey, the bulk of the story is Stevens' recollection of his past....