Books Read in December 2011
December was an incredibly slow reading month – I was so busy wrapping up my year lists and signing up & organizing for next year’s challenges that my actual reading fell by the wayside. Here’s the meagre accounting:
The Time Traveler’s Wife
I had balked at reading this because I unintentionally saw the movie last year (and didn’t really like it) and hesitate to read books after seeing the movie adaptations. It was better than I thought it would be but I can’t really objectively judge because I knew how it would end. (See? I shouldn’t have seen the movie first.)
How to Be an American Housewife
This was a very kind gift from Jen at Crazy for Books after I tried to enter her giveaway a year late(!) It’s the story of Shoko, a Japanese woman who married an American serviceman in the 1950s, and her efforts to become accepted in the American society in 
which she found herself. Since Shoko was trying so hard to be assimilated, she didn’t share much of her history and culture with her daughter, Sue, who has to take on a reconciliatory mission to Japan for her ailing mother. Although I wasn’t as enthralled by the book as Jen was, and found the redemption issues overly simplified and too easily solved, I did enjoy exploring the mother-daughter relationship, and considering how attempts to ‘fit in’ affect immigrants.
Snakewoman of Little Egypt
As he turns 40, anthropology professor Jackson Jones can’t decide whether he should go back to Africa where he did his fieldwork, or settle down at the university where he is. At the same time, Sunny, who grew up in a snake handling church in southern Illinois, rents a garage apartment from Jackson. She’s just been released from jail where she served five years for shooting, but not killing, her husband after he forced her at gunpoint to put her arm in a box of rattlesnakes. Of course, Sunny & Jackson commence a relationship.
I didn’t find Sunny’s metamorphosis or her relationship with Jackson plausible, nor could I warm to Sunny, Jackson, or Sunny’s ex-husband, Earl. My overall reaction: ‘meh’.
I received this as part of the Early Reviewers page at LibraryThing.com and I’m sorry I can’t give it a higher rating
The Goat Woman of Largo Bay
Shelf Awareness billed this as a ‘mystery’, but it’s about as much of a mystery as Alexander McCall Smith’s Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency. 
The protagonist, Shadrack Myers, tends bar at a failing former hotel in Jamaica run by aging American ex-pat Eric Keller. This story revolves around a mysterious woman who comes to inhabit the island just off-shore, that is owned by Eric. There’s some shady island politics thrown in, but Jamaica didn’t come to life for me the way Botswana did in Smith’s novels. The whole book seemed to me lack cohesiveness (not to mention a plot). My overall reaction: ‘huh?”
