Ocean City Free Public Library Book Blog

In their first semester of college at Smith, four girls who live on the same floor manage to forge a strong connection with each other, despite their completely different backgrounds. Bree is a Southern belle, April is the moody uber feminist, Sally has just lost her mother and Celia is the wannabe writer. The novel spans their wild times at college and what happens afterwards when the girls meet up for Sally's wedding. As can be expected during college, the girls experiment with their sexuality, drugs, alchohol, and social issues. As can be expected post-college, the girls have problems with relationships, jobs and finding their niche in the world. April is truly the only one that carries on with the feminism after graduation. I think the problem with this book is that it tried too hard to be like a more socially conscious version of Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep but with college students instead of high schoolers. Instead, readers end up with something that's more chick-lit ...

Portia Nathan is in an unenviable position - as an Admissions Officer at Princeton University, she has the job of deciding to either fulfill or destroy people's dreams on a daily basis. The problem is is that Portia doesn't really have much of a life outside of the admissions process; she's so immersed in studying the lives of the people applying to Princeton that she has virtually cut herself off from a life outside of that institution. Obviously, there are some major reasons for why Portia is the way she is. The rest of the novel delves into that. I enjoyed this book, though the prose was a bit wordy, though I guess when you're married to a well known and award winning poet (Paul Muldoon), you learn a thing or two about semantics. My one complaint is that I totally called the one "twist" near the end. I'm usually really bad at anticipating plot, so I'm not sure what that says about Korelitz's narrative. But overall, a solid read.

This book falls into the category where you just WISH they'd make a movie out of it even though it probably would be lousy because the scenes wouldn't match up exactly with what's in your head. At any rate, Secret History is a lengthy thriller about a group of friends who attend a small college in Vermont and wind up murdering someone within their circle (I promise I'm not ruining anything, you find out who dies on the very first page). All of them are incredibly intelligent and highly interested in Classics. One night, they partake in a crazy Dionysian ritual and things just go downhill from there...Let's just say that people with big mouths are silenced in more ways than one. Though there was an awful lot of "academic" talk spread throughout the novel (think classics and ancient Greek philosophy), Tartt still manages to create a taut and suspenseful read. Some readers might object to the rampant drug and alcohol use, but it actually helps to captur...