A Week of Entertainment: Kindle Books Reviewed in Entertainment Weekly's Feb 25th Issue

Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the February 25th issue include:

The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain. Ballantine Books, 2011. Print length: 336 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "By making the ordinary come to life, McLain has written a beautiful portrait of being in Paris in the glittering 1920s - as a wife and one's own woman." Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (19 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99; Hardcover $14.85. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness - until she meets Ernest Hemingway and her life changes forever. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group - the fabled 'Lost Generation' - that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris, which hardly values traditional notions of family and monogamy. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold on to her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. A heartbreaking portrayal of love and torn loyalty, The Paris Wife is all the more poignant because we know that, in the end, Hemingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but Hadley." - Amazon.

History of a Suicide, by Jill Bialosky. Atria, 2011. Print length: 272 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "She writes so gracefully and bravely that what you're left with in the end is an overwhelming sense of love." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (4 reviews). Kindle edition $10.99; Hardcover $13.67. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"On the night of April 15, 1990, Jill Bialosky’s twenty-one-year-old sister Kim came home from a bar in downtown Cleveland. She argued with her boyfriend on the phone. Then she took her mother’s car keys, went into the garage, closed the garage door. She climbed into the car, turned on the ignition, and fell asleep... Those are the simple facts, but the act of suicide is anything but simple. For twenty years, Bialosky has lived with the grief, guilt, questions, and confusion unleashed by Kim’s suicide. Now, in a remarkable work of literary nonfiction, she re-creates with unsparing honesty her sister’s inner life, the events and emotions that led her to take her life on this particular night. In doing so, she opens a window on the nature of suicide itself, our own reactions and responses to it - especially the impact a suicide has on those who remain behind." - Publisher.

Rodin's Debutante, by Ward Just. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. Print length: 272 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...Just's spare prose packs a solid emotional punch." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (2 reviews). Kindle edition $14.30; Hardcover $16.46. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Tommy Ogden, a Gatsbyesque character living in a mansion outside robber-baron-era Chicago, declines to give his wife the money to commission a bust of herself from the French master Rodin and announces instead his intention to endow a boys’ school. Ogden’s decision reverberates years later in the life of Lee Goodell, whose coming of age is at the heart of Ward Just’s emotionally potent new novel. Lee’s life decisions - to become a sculptor, to sojourn in the mean streets of the South Side, to marry into the haute-intellectual culture of Hyde Park - play out against the crude glamour of midcentury Chicago. Just’s signature skill of conveying emotional heft with few words is put into play as Lee confronts the meaning of his four years at Ogden Hall School under the purview, in the school library, of a bust known as Rodin’s Debutante. And, especially, as he meets again a childhood friend, the victim of a brutal sexual assault of which she has no memory. It was a crime marking the end of Lee’s boyhood and the beginning of his understanding...that how and what we remember add up to nothing less than our very lives. Ward Just's sixteen previous novels include Exiles in the Garden, Forgetfulness, the National Book Award finalist Echo House, A Dangerous Friend, winner of the Cooper Prize for fiction from the Society of American Historians, and An Unfinished Season, winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award and a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize." - Publisher.

And Furthermore, by Judi Dench. St. Martin's Press, 2011. Print length: 288 p. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "...telling stories to ghostwriter John Miller - who already wrote her biography in 1998 - is not Dame Judi's strong suit..." Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (3 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99; Hardcover $14.66. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"In this warmhearted memoir, actress Dench brings such a fresh and natural reaction as she describes her roles from Mother Courage to Cleopatra, Lady Bracknell and Sally Bowles that a sense of identification occurs; Dench shows the theatrical inside plumbing of the player and how personal insights, emotional backstories, and initial responses create the character. She believes she is blessed with her marriage to actor Michael Williams and a supportive and understanding family, sharing stories about them as well as about actors Sir John Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, Daniel Day-Lewis, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Stephen Sondheim." - Publishers Weekly.
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