The Photograph****

This book changed my life. Really.

Years ago, in my more than two decades love affair with my husband, we each wrote each other, at separate times, a horrible letter. We were young, we were angry, we had the clarity of those who've never had scary medical tests, we were not who we are now, either singularly or together. Anyway, I saved these two missives of acrimony because I thought someday I might use the words in a novel. However, after reading Ms. Lively's powerful The Photograph, I shredded the sheaves. I realized that, were I to suddenly die, my children might find those horrible words and, hence, see their parents' marriage through a different, sadder lens.

In The Photograph, Glyn, a widower in his early sixties, finds a photo of his lovely, young wife, Kath holding hands with Nick, her sister Elaine's husband. It's clear from the surreptitious way Kath and Nick are hiding their hands: they were lovers. Even though Kath has been dead for several years, Glyn becomes obsessed with finding out "the truth" about Kath, Nick and the years long gone. In the extraordinarily competent hands of Ms. Lively, the reader enters into the thoughts of all the players on her novel's stage. The impact of the found photograph resonates in the lives of not only Glyn, Nick and Elaine, but also in the life of Nick and Elaine's daughter, Polly, and in the life of Oliver, Nick's ex-business partner. Each character realizes several truths about the past and are able to see more clearly the present.

I cried as I read the last chapter of the book--I was so moved by interplay of love and loss Lively creates. It's so easy to look at another through the lens we choose and when we do so, we often miss so damn much. Others, and the lives we share with them, are marvelously untidy. The Photograph is a masterful novel--unflinching and yet sympathetic towards those who fill its pages.

Dragon Slippers**

Dragonslippers by Jessica Day George was a perfectly respectable, predictable, fantasy novel with a smart, cheeky young woman as the protagonist, Creel. I read this book with my 11 year old daughter and we both thought it was OK. It's certainly not taxing--it's fantasy Muzak, pleasant, forgettable and kind of a waste of reading time. Parts of the plot were so similar to the vastly superior Goose Girl by Shannon Hale that it had a whiff of plagiarism.

However, if you have a daughter in the 7-12 range who is always on the lookout for fantasy books with strong young women in them, I bet she'd enjoy this book. An few hours lost to an OK book are not really squandered, they're whiled away, and that's just fine.