A Week of Entertainment: Books Reviewed in Entertainment Weekly 27 Mar 09

Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the March 27th issue include:


The Believers by Zoe Heller. HarperCollins. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...marvelous, bighearted, gimlet-eyed novel..." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (13 reviews). Kindle edition $14.29.
"When radical New York lawyer Joel Litvinoff is felled by a stroke, his wife, Audrey, uncovers a secret that forces her to reexamine everything she thought she knew about their forty-year marriage. Joel’s children will soon have to come to terms with this discovery themselves, but for the meantime, they are struggling with their own dilemmas and doubts...The Believers explores big ideas with a light touch, delivering a tragic, comic family story as unsparing as it is filled with compassion." - Amazon.
Less expensive alternative: Notes on a Scandal,Heller's earlier novel made later into a critically-acclaimed filmstarring Kate Blanchett and Judi Dench.

Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey. Knopf. BIOGRAPHY. EW's slant: "...quite simply, the best example of literary biography I have ever read." Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (4 reviews). Kindle edition $18.90.
"Written with unprecedented access to essential sources -including Cheever’s massive journal, only a fraction of which has ever been published - Blake Bailey’s biography reveals the troubled but strangely lovable man behind the disguises... a soul in conflict...a proud Yankee who flaunted his lineage while deploring the provincialism of his Quincy, Massachusetts, family circle...Blake Bailey has written a luminous biography, a revelation of a writer of timeless fiction and of the man behind the page." - Amazon.
Less expensive alternative: No good choices here, although you might consider As Good As I Could Be, a memoir of Cheever's daughter.

Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Storyby Isabel Gillies. Scribner. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "...there's redemptive grace in her struggle, if not always in her prose." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (7 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99.
"A story about love, marriage, family and heartbreak, Gillies' memoir - which reads like an intimate conversation between friends over a martini - is the moving story of how her perfect first marriage came to a shocking and sudden end...Gillies approaches her life with no axes to grind. Instead, she reminds herself and her readers that how we handle the bad stuff is what shapes us and our future..." - Amazon.

Murder in the Latin Quarterby Cara Black. Soho Crime. MYSTERY FICTION. EW's slant: "Movie Pitch: Kinsey Milhone turned loose in Before Sunset". Kindle edition $9.99. This is the 9th book in the Aimée Leduc mystery series - all set in Paris. For more on this series, check out the author's website.
"A Haitian woman arrives at the office of Leduc Detective and announces that she is Aimée’s sister, her father’s illegitimate daughter. Aimée is thrilled. A virtual orphan since her mother’s disappearance and her father’s death, she has always wanted a sister. Her partner, René, is wary of this stranger, but Aimée embraces her and soon finds herself involved in murky Haitian politics leading to murder. The setting is the Latin Quarter on the Left Bank of the Seine, in the old university district of Paris." - Amazon.