Iris and Ruby by Rosie Thomas

Fiction/Literature

Ruby is a rebellious teenager who runs away from home in England to visit her grandmother in Cairo. She has basically no relationship with her grandmother, but is desperate to leave and try something new. Showing up on the doorstep of her grandmother, the manservent Mamdooh is none too pleased to see her. She eventually convinces her way in and finds Iris, her grandmother, who is old, ailing, and struggling to remember her past. Ruby offers to help Iris document her history so that it is not forgotten and Iris can't pass that up.

Iris came of age in Cairo during WWII. She fell in love with a soldier and got engaged, working as a secretary to the British government. It was times of high stress but lots of partying and lots of love. People did things quickly for fear that war would wipe out everything.

As Ruby pieces together her grandmother's past, she also finds her own love story in Cairo. She starts to fall for the brother of the taxi driver that took her from the airport to Iris' house. This boy shows her around the city and she starts to love both Cairo and him.

This was a great coming of age story from two different generation's perspective. We learn about Iris' journey to adulthood during the war and we see Ruby's as she grows up in Cairo. Ruby is a believable teenager, starting off a little annoying but coming in to her own. I'm not sure I ever really understand her relationship with her mom, or her mom's relationship with Iris. They tried to flush out the latter in the book but it was a fairly short conversation near the end of the book and not really sufficient for me to understand or believe it.

The event that finally brings everyone together seemed a bit drastic but I guess typical to a coming of age fictional story. I've been having bad luck with books recently, unable to get through a few of them before giving up, so I was happy to be able to easily get through this one.

First Line: "I remember"

Rating:
(3.5/5)

The Christos Mosaic by Vincent Czyz

Thriller

Drew is a smart, but lazy, American ex-pat living in Turkey. When his friend Kadir asks him to hide something for a day and someone ends up murdered because of it, Drew knows he's stumbled upon something dangerous. With a background in religious studies, Drew finds out that previously undiscovered Dead Sea Scrolls are at stake here. These scrolls are expected to have knowledge in them that would change Christianity, which makes it not too surprising that so many people are after these scrolls and that they are willing to kill for them.

Drew and his friends are hunted from Turkey to Egypt while Drew tries to find out what these scrolls mean. The question is whether Jesus was a real person or whether he is represented as a mosaic of people.

This book starts with rather lengthy descriptions of people and timelines. This made me worried about what I was getting in to as it was pretty heavy stuff. I decided not to read this section and after I finished the book I came back and couldn't even recognize some of the groups/people mentioned.

This book delves deeply in to the Bible. In order to determine whether Jesus is a real person or not, there needs to be a strong understanding of all the Gospels and Bible passages. This means that many passages are quoted within the book to help support the points being made, which makes the book read more like an academic paper than a fiction novel. Furthermore, my understanding of the Bible isn't very strong, which made me a fish out of water when it came to these passages. While I could follow the basic direction the author was heading, the difference between Bible characters and how they played in to Jesus' teachers were lost on me. This said, it is obvious that Czyz has done an incredible amount of research for this book. I just wish it was a little more digestible.

When I picked up this book, I thought I was going to be reading a religious thriller where the character hunts down Dead Sea Scrolls that could rock Christianity, with some easy explanation about why it could shake the world's faith. Instead, this book was much more detailed and a lot of it went right over my head. I'm sure there's an audience for this, specifically those with good knowledge of the Bible, but I wasn't it.

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for letting me be a part of this tour!



First Line: "Saints lie."

Rating:
(3/5)

About the Author Vincent Czyz is the author of The Christos Mosaic, a novel, and Adrift in a Vanishing City, a collection of short fiction. He received two fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts and the W. Faulkner-W. Wisdom Prize for Short Fiction. The 2011 Truman Capote Fellow at Rutgers University, his stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, Shenandoah,AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, Tin House(online), Boston Review, Quiddity, The Tampa Review, The Georgetown Review, and Skidrow Penthouse, among other publications. He spent a total of nearly a decade in Istanbul, Turkey before settling in Jersey City. His work often deals with the existential themes found in art, myth and religion, dreams, and primal ways of perceiving the world. Find Vincent on Twitter and Facebook.