The Palace of Illusions, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (21 June − 29 June)

After an aborted attempt at reading The Other, I abandoned realistic fiction and picked up another book about deities. I was not disappointed.

The Palace of Illusions tells the story of an Indian princess who was born out of a fire as a sort of throw-in with the son her father asked for. The son, Dhri, was called upon to kill his father's greatest enemy, but it is the daughter, Panchaali, who is to be the catalyst for the event. The novel tells the story of Panchaali from her youth until the end of her life, and it tells it in a really engaging way by giving away the ending and most of the important points of the story really early in the book. Panchaali, the narrator, goes to a fortune-teller early on who tells quite a bit of the story, and at the end of each chapter she says things like, "Later, when this REALLY IMPORTANT thing happened, I understood why I shouldn't have done this stupid thing here" that totally spoil what's going to happen. I kept reading because I needed to know how it happened. Really cool.

Rating: 9/10

A Fractured Truth, by Caroline Slate (12 June − 14 June)

At the beginning of the story, this chick Grace is out of jail on parole after 7 years served for the murder, and she's trying to readjust to life -- including e-mail, because this book was published in 2003. There are some fishy things about Grace's life before this event: her father is killed or possibly has just gone missing, he was involved with some loan sharks and some iffy money practices, her husband caused her business to go bankrupt... it's not a good time. She's also now being followed around by a reporter that wants to write the "true" story of her husband, which Grace doesn't even know because he was basically a pathological liar. This is a pretty good novel -- the conceit of a liar's history is neat, and I definitely wanted to find out why Grace killed her husband (it's revealed at the end of the book, no worries), so it went fast.

Rating: 7/10

Change of Heart, by Jodi Picoult (6 June − 8 June)

So... yeah. I think we established a long time ago that I love Jodi Picoult. This is her newest book, and I waited a few weeks in a library queue for it. Unfortunately, the book was okay. I was expecting awesome.

The premise of the book is that the hired help kills a woman's husband and daughter and is given the death penalty for it. He seeks to atone by donating his heart, after his execution, to the woman's other daughter who has some heart condition or other. The catch is that he can't give his heart after dying by lethal injection, so an ACLU lawyer starts up a fight to get him hanged instead using some laws about religion and a lovely court battle. Along the way miracles happen. Like, miracles miracles − water into wine, feeding many with a little, curing the sick/dead (very Green Mile), etc. Some people think the murderer is a second coming, others don't, religion starts fights again.

Like I said, the book was okay − I saw a couple plot twists coming a hundred pages ahead, and the religion thing got a bit heavy-handed, but I still stayed up until 4 in the morning finishing it, and that's got to be a good sign.

Rating: 6/10

The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan (27 May − 6 June)

By request of the boyfriend, who is in love with epic fantasy series. In this one we have an attack on a farming community, after which three boys must leave the village and go on terrifying adventures in order to save the world. You know how it goes. This book was kind of disappointing in that the mysteries that crop up throughout the novel are not all taken care of by the end. This is clearly so that you'll read the next one, but I'm almost disinclined to do so. I don't mind getting a new mystery at the end, but when I've been waiting for nearly 800 pages to find out Rand's true lineage and I don't get to find out? Boo on that.

Rating: 7/10