Minik Kahramanlardan Büyük Sözler: Farenin Bisikleti - Emine Korkmazer itibaren Beyaz Balina Yayınları içinde LIT biçim

Amanda Timmerman amanda362f — This was a great book. A huge gang of criminals steals all the mail for one day in New York City.

Emilia Dudzinska emiliadudzinska — A very interesting book albeit obviously aimed at an American audience and primarily at a heterosexual female audience. It made me want to lend or give copies to all my straight friends and colleagues!

Venkatesh Chitturi chitturi_venkatesh — though I am a big fan of the author. the book disappointed me

Arun Ganesan designer87 — There is nobody like Neruda when it comes to imagery.

淺野 雄介 runninghiga1ad — I should start by saying that I'm not even close to the target audience for this book. I happen to have met the author, however (and teach her kids!) and I thought it would be an interesting experience to read the work of someone I actually know, and whom I could probably call up and talk about the process with. So I opened up to the first chapter with a certain amount of hedging, almost expecting to not like it at all. What followed was an interesting, if light jaunt through a genre I'm pretty foreign to. The big picture is this: the associate pastor of a Houston mega-church gets his girlfriend in a family way, and is unceremoniously invited to leave. After getting married, the pastor and his wife experience a horrible tragedy, which leads them both to not only leave the big city for a new job at a smalltown Baptist church, but also forces them to reexamine their relationship and lives. A few things that I liked: * a friend of mine assumed I wouldn't like this because they said it was 'religious fiction.' I was actually kind of surprised to see that this really isn't the case. There are definitely religious overtones. I mean, the protagonist is a Baptist preacher! But the work never proselytizes, and I appreciate that. * There is a workmanlike determinedness to how this book smashes from one plot point to the next. Coleman seldom lingers on moments or crises long enough for them to wear out their welcome. Most of the parts of the book I actively disliked were gone so fast I barely remember them. And while the plot is very straight forward, the author still managed to jump around to different people's perspectives and create a few well-earned moments of illumination that I didn't necessarily manage to anticipate. That may sound like faint praise, but the amount of predictability in a book can drastically decrease its enjoyability. While "Potter Springs" isn't going to win any Pulitzers, I actually had to keep reading it to see what would happen next. * Hurricane Megan and Doppler Dan. Cute. And then there were the things I didn't care for so much: * The plot moves along brisky enough, but I think sometimes at the cost of introspection. There were several chapters and sequences that I think almost would have worked more effectively as short stories, given a little room to breathe on their own, without the pressure to give way to the next event or chapter. * The ending was a little too tidy for my tastes. I think it would have been far more interesting territory to explore for Mark and Amanda to find a way to live with their personal tragedy. I'm pretty sure most of Ms. Coleman's audience preferred it the way she wrote it, though. * The book jacket touts a cast of memorable and quirky characters, but most of the supporting cast are mere outlines of stock small-town inhabitants who never really earn any kind of real uniqueness. There's the interchangable church women full of nosiness and wisdom, the bumbling head pastor who seems simple except when he needs to be wise, and the spiteful deacon whose cartoonish gossiping is not so believable as necessary to move the plot forward. * Probably my biggest problem was with the pastor's wife, Amanda. I liked her as a character, but she drove me crazy in her inexplicable devotion to her jerk of a husband. Mark is redeemed somewhat by the end of the novel, but for most of the work, the only thing we see of Mark is how thoughtless and self-centered he is. Yet every time Amanda finds herself pushed away and marginalized by her husband, she begins fondly recalling the warm and loving husband that we the reader have never actually ever met. I'm all for dedication to your spouse, but Amanda started driving me crazy about halfway through, right up to the end. And honestly, there were other little things that niggled me, but I chalk most of that up to me not being the person Britta Coleman wrote this for. I like things to be ambiguous and rough around the edges; to show how ugly the shadowy mundane can be when you shine a bright light on it. "Potter Springs" deals with some dark secrets, but when it shines its light, things are full of hope and faith. The antithesis of my world-view. In a perfect world, her next novel would be a more dour and cynical look at the same character-types, but I have a feeling that her audience wouldn't take too kindly to that. Her audience would greatly enjoy another "Potter Springs" and I'll enjoy the next "Empire Falls", and the world will be a happy place.

Dmitry Konkin jjohnston — cool to get inside the director's head. lots of pictures.