Nonfiction Book Reviews

For any readers of young adult paranormal books, Lois Duncan is probably a very familiar name.  She produced such hits as I Know What You Did Last Summer and Hotel for Dogs (another book that is being produced into a movie - this one is coming out in January of 2009.)

I don’t happen to be one of those people - I had heard the name Lois Duncan before and vaguely recognized it, but as far as I can remember, I haven’t read one of her books before.  I saw the book, Who Killed My Daughter? by Lois Duncan while doing check-in on Friday, and was instantly intrigued.  I don’t read true-life murder mysteries by writers like Ann Rule, but I figured that since this was a true-life murder mystery written by the mother of the victim, it would make it more interesting to me.

So I came home with it, and figured that since I was so tired, I would take it into the bedroom with me and read it until I fell asleep for my afternoon nap.  Two hours later, I was wide awake, and thoroughly engrossed in the story.  Unlike most true-life murder mysteries you can find on the bookshelf, I knew that this one ended on a question mark.  Here’s a quotation from the book flap:

Our teenage daughter Kaitlyn was chased down and shot to death while driving home from a girlfriend’s house on a peaceful Sunday evening.  Police dubbed the shooting “random.”  But to our family, the circumstances didn’t add up to “random,” especially after we made the shocking discovery that Kait had been keeping some very dangerous secrets from us…

After spending two years investigating Kait’s death, our family has managed to accumulate enough information to form a fragmented picture of what may have happened to her, but the jigsaw puzzle still lacks the few key pieces that could nail the identity of her killers.  It is my hope that reading Kait’s story will motivate potential informants to supply us with those pieces.

The shooting happened July 16, 1989, and the book was published in 1992.  I read the book knowing that it was solved now - after all, this book was old, and there was no way that it could still be an unsolved mystery.

I was wrong.

I finished the book Friday night at 1:00 in the morning.  It had made me so paranoid and freaked out (not only was this some wild stuff, but it was true wild stuff, and there are some really bad people in this book!) that I went around closing all the blinds in the house, convinced that the Vietnamese mafia was outside of my house, watching me.  Nevermind that I’m in Idaho, and as far as I know, there is no Vietnamese mafia for hundreds of miles.  I was convinced they had it out for me.

I then jumped online, happy to finally be able to find out “whodunnit.”  I had made myself wait until I finished the book before I looked, because I didn’t want to spoil the surprise by knowing the ending before I got to it.  I was shocked and a little mad that there wasn’t an ending to be found.  Not mad at Lois and her family, but mad the police force for not figuring it out. It’s almost 20 years later, and still no arrested killer? It seemed impossible.

Which is how Lois and her family feel about it too, I’m sure.  Six months after the shooting, on New Year’s Day of 1990, Lois’s husband said, “I thought they would have arrested the murderer by now.”  Little did he know he’d be saying that 19 years later…

You wouldn’t believe everything included in this book: Vietnamese mafia, insurance scams, drug cartels, psychics, frighteningly real (and accurate!) dreams, and the most inept police force you’ll ever meet.  If you asked this police force to add 2 + 2, I have no doubts but that they’d come up with the number 7, and then defend that answer within an inch of their lives.

If you’ve heard of this case before, or if you’ve already read Who Killed My Daughter?, you’ll want to check out the family’s website, Who Killed Kait Arquette? and read through the different links on there.  There are quite a few updates on there, like the fact that part of the inept and stupid police force has been convicted of felonies, and have been exposed as “rogue” cops.  That really doesn’t surprise you after reading the book.

There is also a cool section where you can read and post comments, and Lois Duncan will respond to those comments personally.  I put a comment up on Friday night/Saturday morning, and Lois had already responded to my comment by Sunday afternoon.  She is very on top of that board and responds quickly to each and every comment.

But the coolest part was the excerpts section - apparently, Lois Duncan is writing a sequel called, The Tallykeeper and might publish it also without an answer of “whodunnit.”  If she does, you can be sure that I’ll read it quickly and write up a review for it on here.  The excerpts alone made me breathless and sent my heart racing.

My only real problem with Who Killed My Daughter? was the psychics readings.   I’ve always been a skeptic when it comes to that kind of thing, but then again, so has Lois Duncan.  She was sort of dragged into it at first, but by the end, she had become very reliant on what they said.

I didn’t mind that so much (I don’t have to believe something or be thoroughly convinced about its validity in order to enjoy a book) but instead my problem lay in the readings themselves.  Here’s an excerpt from one of the psychic readings:

 There will be this that will show that she will have had some kind of connection to these two suspects and that they know her.  There is something about them which will cause her to recoil as if there will have been some kind of other encounter at another time.  They will seem to have some way to fear that something is known about them by her and thus now by others.  This will seem to put a fear into them they will still be under the containment and control of the questioners and can be asked questions even if there is not fully know the meaning of the questions even by the questioners.

Come again?

Some passages make more sense, and some make less sense.  I found myself skimming the psychic readings after a while, because the stuff like above doesn’t make sense to me.   Perhaps I’m a little slow, I don’t know, but it seems rather convoluted to me.

Other than that, it was one of the most gripping books I have read in a very, very long time.  I simply could not put it down.  I think anyone who has even the slightest interest in true-life murder mysteries should pick this book up.

I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars.  Good luck, Lois - I hope you find the killer soon.

Havs

True Ghost Stories by Hans Holzer was not my favorite ghost story collection, but it was average.  He said at one point in the book that he’d written over 100 books (I checked out his Wikipedia article, and it looks like he’s written exactly 138 books thus far) and that made me wonder just how old he is.  So I looked that up too, and apparently he was born in 1920.  I’m not surprised.  His style of writing is that of an older person, and it was obvious enough that it bugged me throughout the book.  Here’s a quick excerpt as an example:

“This was very necessary, you see, because she had just been through a nervous breakdown due to an unhappy love affair…The conversation at the dinnertable had been about art and poetry, two subjects very dear to Dorothy’s heart…That night she went to bed with anticipatory fears, but nothing happened.” Page 95-95, True Ghost Stories.

Maybe it’s just me, but that narrator voice is very annoying, and after reading 502 pages of stilted phrases, it made me want to poke my eyeball out with a fork. No, I’m not overly dramatic, why do you ask?

As a redeeming quality, there was quite a bit of interesting information in it.  I really don’t read many paranormal books (I read Don’t Call Them Ghosts and another book about ghosts in New England, and that’s been it for me, ever).  So perhaps the information he gives would be review for other people, but to me, it was all new.  He talked about the differences between ghosts, and how sometimes people think they’re experiencing a ghost when in actuality it’s a psychic imprint, and other random information like that I’d never heard.  If those interesting tidbits had been put by themselves into a book, it would have made for an interesting book.  As it was, you had to wade through chapters of poorly told ghost stories to get to them.

Oh, and he also talked some about how he became a Psychic Investigator, which I thought was one of the most interesting parts of the book - I wish I had learned more about that transformation, because he had started out as a pure skeptic.  There was no such thing as ghosts, period.  To go from that to being a leading expert in the world on paranormal activity is quite a jump, and I enjoyed the little bit that he did explain.  Perhaps I need to see if he wrote an autobiography and read that if he has.  Maybe I just picked up the wrong book by him, I don’t know.

Overall, I would say that the book tends to wear on - it’s long, the ghost stories start to run together, and the narrator voice is grating.  If you’re looking for a plethora of ghost stories as inspiration for story or skit that you’re writing, you’ll find all you want here and more.  But it wasn’t a book that would keep you up at night, reading, too scared to go to sleep.  In fact, I had a hard time forcing myself to read it at all.

I give True Ghost Stories 2.75 out of 5 stars.

Havs

I know this is a little late, considering I’ve been blogging here for several weeks now, but I figured this was the start of my first full month at Today, and I wanted to talk a little about why I chose nonfiction as my blog subject.

I actually work at the local library, and when I first started there this past August, I was a fiction reader to the bitter end.  Sure, I had read an occasional nonfiction book, but I remember telling people that nonfiction books were “boring” and that I liked reading fiction because it had plot lines!

The first book to really make me see how wrong I was, was Three Cups of Tea, a book about a guy named Greg Mortenson who went to Afghanistan to climb K2, ends up getting lost (twice!), and finally wanders into a local village on the verge of death.  The villagers saved his life (he almost froze and starved to death) and as he was recuperating, he asked to be shown around the village.

They did so, and as they walked around, he realized that there wasn’t a school.  He asked where the school was located, and they hemmed and hawwed - they really didn’t want to tell him.  They finally gave in, and took him around the corner to see this group of children out in the open, writing on the ground with sticks.  They were quiet, concentrating, and there were no adults in sight.  He was in shock.  He was trying to imagine a group of kids in America, let loose outside and told to go do homework without any adult supervision.  His imagination failed him.  That would never happen in America.

He decided right then and there that he wanted to help build a school in this village.  He had no idea what he just got himself into!  He built that school, and then built hundreds of others.  He’s done absolutely amazing work in Afghanistan, and some of the surrounding countries too.  It was a captivating look at this man’s life, and how he was able to affect so many people’s lives, when at many times during his life, he was actually homeless and completely broke!  I finished the book with a can-do spirit, and a real feeling of “Wow!  That was an amazing book!!!”  And just like that, I was hooked.

I quickly started reading only nonfiction books, and found that I loved a large variety of them.  Some of my favorites are the 921’s - that’s library speak for autobiographies and biographies. (In the Dewey decimal system, all of the auto/biographies are in the 921 section, and at our library, there are whole ROWS of books dedicated to just that decimal.)  I also enjoy cookbooks (I like reading cookbooks.  The strange thing is, I don’t particularly like to cook, although I love to eat.  Hmm….) I love political stuff, and just for kicks and grins, an occasional paranormal story too!  I think you’ll find that my tastes are pretty varied, so hopefully we can find some books in common.

If you’ve read a great nonfiction book that you think I should read and review, please leave a comment on this or any of my posts - I’d love to hear from you.

I’m very excited to be onboard here at Today, and I look forward to many years of bragging about my latest find in the nonfiction world!

Havs

I ran across Don’t Call Them Ghosts: The Spirit Children of Fontaine Manse on accident at the library tonight, and decided that it looked interesting enough to preview on my 15 minute break. I was instantly hooked. It was almost physically painful to close the book after 15 minutes - I wanted to know what happened next!! I took the book home and finished it in about 2 hours (it’s a pretty quick read - simple narration, and only 255 pages long).

The true story is of a family who moved into a house and two days later found out (in a very dramatic fashion) that it was haunted by ghosts. As time passed, Mrs. McConnell eventually figured out that there were three of them, and they were all children. Although she was quite terrified of them at first, she eventually realizes that the children are harmless, and she ends up calling them her “other children” and loves them as much as she loves her own children.

Most ghost stories are about terrible hauntings where the ghosts do horrible things to the inhabitants of the house - this book was not like that in the slightest. Sweet, simple, and cozy is how I would describe both the book and the author. She was quite hilarious when it came to writing up her inner dialog - she would talk along to herself, calling herself a “dumb butt” for not understanding something fast enough, and often said that she was just a simple country girl. Mrs. McConnell is unbelievably believable in this book. I could see myself curling up with a cup of hot cocoa and talking with her like an old friend - she comes across as being very approachable and down to earth. A down-to-earth, salt-of-the-earth woman who just so happens to love three children she can’t see or hear.

My only small quibble with the book is the fact that there are so many mistakes in the printing of it - misplaced quotation marks are the worst offenders, although misplaced apostrophes and commas also rate high. I don’t know if this was a mistake on the author’s part or the layout person in charge of printing, but either way, the editor in me had a hard time with that. But overall, this is one of the best books that I’ve read in a very long time. I give it 5 out of 5 stars, and highly recommend that if you’re interested in ghosts or spirits at all, to pick this one up. And make sure to pick up a box of Kleenexs too!

Two giant thumbs up!

Havs