Book Review: Dead Light District by Jill Edmondson

Title: Dead Light District: A Sasha Jackson Mystery
 by Jill Edmondson

Paperback, 224 pages
Published December 20th 2010 by Dundurn
Genre: mystery
Source: review copy provided by author

Comments: This mystery doesn't hesitate to show the underside of the great city of Toronto - the seedy side of this hugely cosmopolitan city. Private investigator Sasha Jackson is asked to find a missing woman, an illegal immigrant who works for a local madam. Sasha solves the mystery but not before encountering two murders and a good look at the convoluted workings of the underground.

More than a few times, I wanted to give Sasha and many of the characters in the book a good mouth washing with harsh soap. The language they use makes the book more realistic and fitting for the environment and circumstances, but the f--- words do fly! For this reason, I'd suggest the novel for adults only.

Goodreads book description: "As open-minded as she is, private investigator Sasha Jackson feels out of place when her latest case plunges her into the world of commercial sex. A classy madam has hired Sasha to find a missing Mexican hooker, which seems easy enough at first. However, everything becomes complicated when a nasty pimp turns up dead in the wrong hotel. Things get even worse when a spaced-out call girl, an arthritic old lady, and a Rastafarian pawnbroker enter the scene.

Sasha figures out why the hooker ran away but not where to. How fast can anyone run in stiletto heels? When the next body turns up, Sasha has her moral compass tested as she tries to understand the sex trade and how those enmeshed in it will do anything to survive - even if it means murder." (Goodreads)

I would recommend the book for mystery lovers who like an interesting plot but who don't mind stark language.

Objective rating: 3.75/5

Challenges: Immigrant Stories Challenge 2011, Mystery and Suspense Reading Challenge 2011

Book Giveaway: Little Princes by Conon Grennan

Several copies of the travel memoir, Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal, are available for give away, thanks to HarperCollins Publishers.


See the previous post for my review of this amazing 5 star book, which describes author Conor Grennan's volunteer work in Nepal in a children's home for kids orphaned or kidnapped and abandoned by child traffickers.


The children are delightful, happy and full of humor in spite of their circumstances, and they pull on his heart so much that Conor goes into the remote Nepalese mountains to try to find their parents or relatives, anyone to give them hope that they are not abandoned or alone. He also founds a children's home in Nepal and the Next Generation Nepal organization to continue helping orphaned children.


GIVEAWAY: To enter, please leave your email address with a comment, U.S. residents only please, no P.O. box addresses. For an extra chance to win, become a follower through Google Friends Connect or let me know if you are already a follower. The giveaway will end March 17.

UPDATE: Congrats to Sue, Margie, Bellezza, and Blue Heron, the winners.

Book Review: Little Princes by Conor Grennan

Title: Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal
Author: Conor Grennan
Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: William Morrow (January 25, 2011)
Genre: travel, memoir
Source: Publisher
Objective rating: 5/5


Comments: I didn't expect to be so moved by this book, a story of a young man's trip in 2004 to volunteer in Nepal at a home for orphaned children. He discovers that many Nepalese children were being taken from their impoverished families and villages by child traffickers promising to take care of and educate the children. Instead, the children are kept in houses, neglected, some  half starved, some sold into wealthier Nepalese homes as child slaves. The lucky children rescued from this situation land up in orphanages like The Little Princes Children's Home,  run by international organizations.

Conor becomes so close to the "orphans" where he volunteers, The Little Princes Children's home, that he returns to Nepal after his first stint is over, to volunteer a second time and to found his own home for children under his new organization, Next Generation Nepal (NGN). He is helped by a French volunteer, Farid.

The book is a heart-warming account of Conor's work in Nepal, his relationship with the children in the home, little bundles of energy who are full of humor and laughter. When Conor finds seven starving children in Katmandu who had been taken from their remote mountain villages and just about abandoned into poverty by child traffickers, he arranges for them to be moved to one of the children's homes run by an international organization, ISIS. The children disappear before they can be rescued, however, and Conor vows to find them again. Those seven found children form the core of Conor's new children's home.

A close relationship develops between Conor and Liz, a woman and international volunteer whom he meets online and who encourages and advises him through the frustrations of finding the missing children and traveling to remote villages to locate any relatives of the children living at the Little Princes Home.

"The village I had been looking for was somewhere up the mountain...if we could even find the trail in the pitch-dark. My two porters and I had been walking for thirteen hours straight. Winter at night in the mountains of northwestern Nepal is bitterly cold, and we had no shelter." (from Little Princes).

There are about 15 pages of color photographs included in the book, of the children, Mount Everest Base Camp where Conor visited, the parents in the village of Humla holding pictures of their "lost" children, and children in their school uniforms posing for the camera.

Rating: I gave this a 5/5 star rating, without reservation. I was in tears several times reading this book, moved by Conor's compassion and sacrifice, and his love for the children. A must read for those interested in South Asia, Nepal, the plight of children in these areas, and even for curious armchair travelers.

The author lives in Connecticut with his wife and son and does fundraising for his Next Generation Nepal organization. Visit http://www.nextgenerationnepal.org/

© Harvee Lau 2011

Shift: 13 Exercises to Make You Who You Want to Be

Teaser Tuesdays asks you to choose two sentences at random from your current read. Identify the author and title for readers.


Shift; 13 Exercises to Make You Who You Want to Be
by Takumi Yamazaki
Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: One Peace Books (March 1, 2011)
Language: English
Genre: motivational, self-help
Objective rating: 4.5/5
 
Let yourself dream a crazy dream.
Everything can change in an instant.

Grant your wish.

From the Epilogue:

"Don't trick yourself into thinking that you don't have the power to make your dreams come true. Remember that the goal comes first and the method comes later. You can make a shift at any time."

Comments: This book actually works. I read the book in one sitting, did all the exercises, and got up out of my chair, made a phone call, and set the ball rolling on a project I really wanted to begin. I feel I have to hang on to this book so that I can re-do some of the exercises just in case my motivation decides to flag or falter down the road.

Sounds too easy to be true? Your own motivation is the key, according to the author, who gives exercises to get you writing, and thinking, and writing down your dreams, problems you see, people you would ask for help, etc.

From the publisher: Author Takumi Yamazaki is a best selling author in Japan. He has authored ten successful titles in the catefory of business which have sold a cum8ulative total of over 800,000 copies. A self-made millionaire, Takami travels around the world giving seminars on motivation. He presently lives in Tokyo, Japan.

Thanks to The Cadence Group for a review copy of this book.

See Book Review Party Wednesday for more book reviews on Cym Lowell's site.

Sunday Salon: Mysteries, Poetry, and a Name Change

Welcome to the Sunday Salon. Click on the logo to join in!

I've decided to change back again to my other blog name, Book Dilettante. I think the Bird Dog in my name confused people who thought my blog was about hunting! So it's back to Book Dilettante, which was my second choice for a long time. The blog address is now http://bookdilettante.blogspot.com

Finally was able to get to the library after more weekend snow. Some of the books I had reserved had been sent back, so I re-requested them and borrowed others. Among those I asked for is Death of a Chimney Sweep (Hamish Macbeth) by M.C. Beaton, a cozy mystery that came out this month.  I also borrowed a book of poems by Charles Simic,  Sixty Poems. Simic, whom I have never read,  is the 15th Poet Laureate of the U.S. Looking forward to it.

Book reviews last week:
Zero Day
Cat Sitter among the Pigeons
Radio Shangri-La
Red Jade

I joined the Chinese Literature Challenge 2011 and hope to read a few new books for this. Fresh Ink Books has a nice list of books to recommend. I also just joined the Immigrant Stories 2011 Challenge at Books in the City. Click on the button on the left to join.

I'll be going swimming this afternoon (indoors, of course) and watching the Oscars tonight, in between reading my newly borrowed books and some that came by mail.

What have you been doing this past week? Have any of your plans been disrupted by the snow?

Book Review: Red Jade: a Detective Jack Yu Investigation

Red Jade: A Detective Jack Yu Investigation
Author: Henry Chang
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Soho Crime; 1 edition (November 1, 2010)
Genre: crime fiction, PI, mystery
Setting: NYC, Seattle
Source: Library
Rating: 4/5

Comments: Interesting mystery that gets the reader into the world of Chinatown tongs and the criminal underworld they run. In Red Jade, The bodies of a man and his wife are discovered in a case that looks like a murder-suicide. Detective Jack Yu had been transferred from working in Chinatown, but the family of the victims asked for him to be recalled to do the investigation.

Pretty soon, Jack is also searching for a Hong Kong woman who disappears from Chinatown, escaping from the Chinese underworld with a stash of gold coins and a "fistful" of diamonds. She is one of the more intriguing characters in the novel. She is resourceful about hiding from the criminal elements hunting her down as she escapes from New York to Seattle, trying not to stand out or be discovered by the tongs.

"She had a lot of different jewelry. I remembered, but she always wore a jade charm. Hanging off her wrist. It was white and gray, with pa kua, Taoist, designs on it. Round, like a coin, a nickel." (p. 55)

Detective Yu takes us through Chinatowns in New York and Seattle - pawn shops, jewelers, restaurants, temples, while introducing the Cantonese and Toisanese dialects.

Publisher's description: Two bodies are discovered at an address on the Bloody Angle, Chinatown's historic Tong battleground. NYPD Detective Jack Yu's investigation takes him across the country to another Chinatown, this one in Seattle, in pursuit of a cold-blooded Chinese American gangster and a mysterious Hong Kong femme fatale

The Chinese cop, Tsai remembered, the American-born Chinese, the jook sing, empty piece of bamboo. They (the defense lawyers) would dredge up his tainted career, his Chinatown misadventures, and destroy his credibility. (p. 56)

About the author: Henry Chang was born and raised in New York's Chinatown, where he still lives. He is a graduate of Pratt Institute and CCNY. He is the author of Chinatown Beat and Year of the Dog, also in the Detective Jack Yu series.

Challenges: Immigrant Stories Challenge 2011, Mysery and Suspense Reading Challenge 2011, Chinese Literature Challenge 2011

Book Review: Radio Shangri-La by Lisa Napoli

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Radio Shangri-La: What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth
Author: Lisa Napoli
Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Crown (February 8, 2011)
Genre: Travel, memoir
Source: TLC book promotion review copy
Objective rating: 4/5

Comments: A combination of travel in Bhutan, history, and memoir, Lisa Napoli's book, Radio Shangri-La, describes not only the author's life and how her several trips to Bhutan have affected her personally, but also gives a detailed history of the country, its politics, religion, customs, and people. Bhutan is a land-locked country in South Asia, bordered on the east, west and south by India and on the north by China. It's set spectacularly at the east end of the Himalayas.

Isolated from the rest of the world by decree, Bhutan requires that tourists pay a tax of $250 per day to stay in the country. The result is a country still pristine, non commercial, even though it is becoming more modernized, politically and economically. Bhutan measures  progress not in terms of economic advancement, however, but in levels of happiness - the Gross National Happiness index.

The book: A former radio journalist in Los Angeles, Lisa Napoli decides to leave her disappointing life behind and travel to the other side of the globe to help start Bhutan’s first youth-oriented radio station, Kuzoo FM. She finds fulfillment in her work there and a new acceptance of herself while living in the stark beauty of this country nestled in the Himalayas

The work Lisa does to help develop Kuzoo FM puts her in close contact with the young people, the local community, as well as the small group of foreigners in Bhutan, and she gives some interesting accounts of her contacts. In the U.S., in between trips to Bhutan, she meets Bhutanese living and working in the U.S. She also witnesses the coming of democracy to the Kingdom and the beginning of modernization. The hefty daily tax for tourists still stays, however, to prevent an overload of tourists that the still-developing country can't yet handle.

When Lisa invites one of the young Kuzoo announcers to visit her radio station in the U.S., I could understand when she became frantic when the adventurous girl wanted to stay beyond the time set by her visa. Everything turned out okay in the end, however.

For those who enjoy memoirs and travel books, following Lisa's experiences in the little known Asian country of Bhutan in Radio Shangri-La will be more than rewarding.


Click here for an Excerpt

Lisa's website: Lisa Napoli and blog: Everything Bhutan.
Radio Shangri-La Book Drive: Books to Bhutan

From TLC: Lisa will talk to book clubs by speaker phone or Skype, or in person if they are in the Los Angeles area (she claims she will even bring a real live Bhutanese person to your meeting if you're in LA!). Her book is the featured prize in the TLC Book Club of the Month Contest in February:
http://tlcbooktours.com/2011/02/book-club-of-the-month-contest-for-february-2011/


Catch all the reviews of the book at the following stops: http://tlcbooktours.com/

Thanks to Lisa at TLC Book Tours for this book tour opportunity.

© Harvee Lau 2011