Reviews: The Hurricane Sisters and Midnight Crossroad

Big week in reading for me – which means it was a big week in writing procrastination. But, oh well, at least I accomplished something!!

My four-book week started with new titles from two of my favorite authors; The Hurricane Sisters by Dorothea Benton Frank and Midnight Crossroad by Charlaine Harris.

The Hurricane Sisters is the first-person account of three generations of women, weaving their stories together in a richly told tale that makes us feel like we know them all personally.  As with other Benton Frank novels, she brings the low country of South Carolina to life for us in her wonderful descriptions. I fantasize about living at the beach house featured in this story. What I didn’t know about this book before I started reading was that the author was tackling the tough issue of domestic violence which was tucked skillfully within the stories of the three women. With bare honesty, she shows us the insidious way the violence of domestic abuse can take hold of even the strongest of women.

I was particularly enthralled with the artful way she inserted this issue into her storyline without being preachy because I am currently working on a middle-grade novel where we see the affects of domestic abuse through the eyes of my 11-year-old protagonist.  I hope that I can handle this issue even half as well.   

Switching gears entirely . . . Charlaine Harris serves up another helping of weird with intriguing characters in her latest, Midnight Crossroad.  I am a big fan of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels and was eager to start this trilogy, hoping that it would pull me in the same way.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t as excited about these characters as I wanted to be. As always, Ms. Harris creates an intricate plot line sprinkled with idiosyncratic human and supernatural characters that live at a sparsely inhabited desolate crossroads in the heart of Texas.  

So why didn’t I love this book?  I should have loved it! I WANTED to love it, but in the end I didn’t love it.

Oh, I liked it well enough and finished reading it.  I was satisfied with the ending, but I have to admit I am not dying to read the next two installments in this trilogy.

I’m not at all sure that my review is fair.  I think my ho-hum attitude is all Sookie Stackhouse’s fault.  She’s ruined me.  I expect to love future characters in Charlaine Harris’s books as much as that clairvoyant barmaid from Bon Temps, Louisiana, and it just isn’t going to happen.  (Big sigh.)

And although the HBO True Blood series has steered far from the original books, I will be watching the final season which starts on Sunday night. 

In my next post, I will review my other two reads of the week and feature an interview with their author, Angie Stanton!