Redbery Books

February 2012

November 2011

September 2011

June 2011

April 2011

All of us gave the book a 5 for both Readability and Interest, and we all said we would read something else by Portis. Someone noted that this is the second book we've read in which a male author has written through the eyes of a female protagonist. The first was One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus. Both were also fiction (though Fergus's book is historical fiction to some extent), and both were set in the "old West" (but, again, with Fergus's book being in the waning years of that period).

February 2011

December 2010

October 2010

3.7 out of 5 for Interest and 3.4 out of 5 for Readability

August 2010

May 2010 Jefferey Deaver doesn't know about Wisconsin. That's the prevailing opinion about The Bodies Left Behind, which we reviewed at the Rivers Eatery. Most of us "enjoyed" the book in so far as it was an engaging plot, a fast-paced story, and a quick read, but we were not impressed with Mr. Deaver's lack of accuracy about Wisconsin's landscape, which was the story's setting. His poor knowledge of local plants jolted us out of the story, and we were REALLLY not impressed when a wolf encounter led one of the characters to recall that wolves "were being reintroduced into the state" (p. 169). (Fact - wolves returned to Wisconsin on their own; they were not re-introduced.) It should come as no surprise, then, that our ratings were the lowest we have given to any book this year. On a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (great), this book ranked 3.75 for Readability and 2.8 for Interest.

March 2010 Readability: 4 stars; Interest: 4 stars (both out of five stars)

January 2010 (4.7 stars, out of five, for readability and 4 stars for interest)

October 2009