A Week of Entertainment: Kindle Books Reviewed in Entertainment Weekly's Jan 28th Issue

Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the January 28th issue include:

Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell. Knopf, 2011. Print length: 336 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "The bewitching Swamplandia! is a tremendous achievement for anyone, period." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (22 reviews). Kindle edition $9.69; Hardcover $13.44. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Russell’s lavishly imagined and spectacularly crafted first novel sprang from a story in her highly praised collection, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006). Swamplandia! is a shabby tourist attraction deep in the Everglades, owned by the Bigtree clan of alligator wrestlers. When Hilola, their star performer, dies, her husband and children lose their moorings, and Swamplandia! itself is endangered as audiences dwindle. The Chief leaves. Brother Kiwi, 17, sneaks off to work at the World of Darkness, a new mainland amusement park featuring the 'rings of hell.' Otherworldly sister Osceola, 16, vanishes after falling in love with the ghost of a young man who died while working for the ill-fated Dredge and Fill Campaign in the 1930s. It’s up to Ava, 13, to find her sister, and her odyssey to the Underworld is mythic, spellbinding, and terrifying... Ravishing, elegiac, funny, and brilliantly inquisitive, Russell’s archetypal swamp saga tells a mystical yet rooted tale of three innocents who come of age through trials of water, fire, and air. - Donna Seaman for Booklist.

The Red Garden, by Alice Hoffman. Crown, 2011. Print length: 288 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...full of magic and grit and tragedy." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (32 reviews).Kindle edition $9.99; Hardcover $13.54. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"The lush and haunted wildlands of Massachusetts provide fertile ground for Hoffman’s endlessly flowering imagination... The Red Garden, a sequence of beguiling, linked stories, is rooted in colonial times and reaches into the present. The first foolhardy white folks - the Motts, Partridges, Starrs, and Bradys - to settle in this land of blackflies, bears, eels, and harsh winters in 1750 only survive because Hallie Brady, the first of a line of determined and adept women in what becomes the small town of Blackwell in Berkshire County, goes out into the snowy wilderness to find sustenance. As spring allows the founding families to cultivate the strange red soil in the village’s first garden, Johnny Appleseed stays for a spell, and, later, Emily Dickinson happens by. Generation by generation, humans and animals form profound bonds; women’s lives change, somewhat; men go to war; people are poor and in despair; illness and violence rage; strangers find refuge; and love blossoms impossibly, extravagantly, inevitably. In gloriously sensuous, suspenseful, mystical, tragic, and redemptive episodes, Hoffman subtly alters her language, from an almost biblical voice to increasingly nuanced and intricate prose reflecting the burgeoning social and psychological complexities her passionate and searching characters face in an ever-changing world." - Donna Seaman for Booklist.

Stuntman!: My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life, by Hal Needham. Little, Brown and Company, 2011. Print length: 320 p. MEMOIR. Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $12.99; Hardcover $18.00 Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Needham worked more than 40 years in Hollywood as a stuntman who filled in for John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Dustin Hoffman, and Burt Reynolds. Given the exciting and dangerous jobs he performed wrangling horses, staging fights, doing 'high falls,' and crashing cars, Needham has plenty of material, and he writes like a guy telling stories at a bar, laying out one anecdote after another about 1960s and '70s directors and big-time actors. Of course, as a thrice married, hard-living stuntman who was not only Reynolds's stunt-double but also his best friend, Needham has his share of fun and not-so-dirty little secrets that he doles out in a playful prose that makes it obvious that no matter how serious he took his job, he knew how to enjoy life." - Publishers Weekly.
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Note to readers: The book prices quoted here are the Amazon.com prices in effect at the time of the blog posting. Please follow the links to the individual book to check the current price.


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