When I first picked up this book, I was hoping for a fairy tale. The brief description of it mentioned a dark woods, with an even darker history that would unfold as the story did. It hinted at something sinister living in the woods, and a family who gets caught up in all that somehow. It also sounded really scary! It seemed like this book would be a great horror/fairy tale story, and I was excited to see what I would find between the covers.

At first, I was completely disappointed by this book. Its one of those books that takes a long time to describe everything, and does it all slowly, so as to build up to the big events. Now, sometimes that works, but here, it just didn’t work for me.

I was also becoming unimpressed by the writing itself. For example, one page starts with a paragraph describing the woods as “though a vast dark shape was flexing all its legs”, and later, in a different paragraph on the same exact page describes the woods “as if the dark or something else as vast was stalking many-legged under the cover of the trees”. In this book about the dark woods, Campbell names many of his characters woodland sounding names. One of the main characters is named “Heather”, and another, arguably more important character, is named “Sylvia”. As in Sylvan, as in Woods! It was all painfully obvious, and all bad, very, very, bad.

Then, somewhere along the way, this book got better. Then it got pretty good. I was not expecting it to. Basically, the story is a simple one. Heather and Sylvia are sisters, now adults, who grew up next to Goodmanswood, somewhere in England. Sylvia moved to America, and elsewhere to research for books she writes, and Heather stayed there with their mother, Margo, and Heather’s son (now also an adult), Sam. When the book starts, Lennox, the partiarch of the family, is now in the nearby nuthouse, having gone crazy from a moss he found while researching parts of the woods.

Sylvia returns, out of the blue, and stays with the family. Soon, it is revealed that Sylvia is pregnant. She won’t say who the father is, but knows. The actual father doesn’t know for a big part of the book, but then figures it out. It’s all a little V. C. Andrews. Anyhow, the story of what’s going on with this family becomes more and more entwined with whats going on in the nearby woods. The reader spends a long time wondering if there is really something out there, or, if it’s just the characters slowly going mad. The end leaves more questions than answers, but does seem to vaguely answer a few questions before setting itself up for a sequel. Overall, I think it might have made a better movie than a book. At least that way, when you are dragging through all the description of the woods that seems to be going nowhere for such a big portion of the story, you would have something to look at.

Marian Keyes is my new favorite “chick lit” author, and this book, her newest, is the best one yet! Now, I haven’t actually read each and every one of her books, but, I have read a lot of them, and well, you get the idea!

Anna is from Ireland, (always, Irish characters!), and living in New York, working in marketing for a cosmetics company. Or, rather, thats what she was doing before her accident. At the start of the book, Anna is back in Ireland, where her family is helping to care for her until she heals. Keyes gives the reader bread crumbs along the way to piece together exactly what happened to Anna, when it happened, and the impact of it all. Where is Anna’s husband, Aidan, while she is getting better? Keyes leaves this as a bit of a mystery for a while. The answer is truely shocking. Part of this book is sad, but even the sad parts have the sarcastic and spirited comedy Keyes shows in her other books.

As a result of everything, Anna spends some time checking out horoscopes and psychics, hoping that a particular somebody is really out there, and that she can make contact.

Anna has a large family, of many sisters (each with a strong personality), a dad, (who is rather quiet), and a mom, (who is a stitch!). The mom is fabulous, and each time she appeared, it made the book that much more funny. She is one of those moms that always seems to know the news about everybody, but no one is quite sure just how she is keeping so on top of things. She’s also the kind of mom who tries using the hip new slang she picks up from her daughters, sometimes awkwardly, and who mixes references to popular culture in daily speech, sometimes terribly. Hysterical!

If you have read Keyes other book, Rachel’s Holiday, than some of the characters in this new book will be delightfully familiar to you. Anna and Rachel are sisters, and many of Rachel’s friends from the other book appear here.

This book isn’t out until early June. I got to read an advance copy, because I work in a bookstore. I really enjoyed this book! Marian Keyes fans will love it. If you haven’t read Keyes before, and would like to read some of her books, this book is a great choice to start with!

Start with the premise that “we are not alone”. Believe for a moment that a flying saucer really did crash land in Roswell, New Mexico, and that the U. S. government and military recovered both the ship and the alien crew, and have been covering that information up from the very start. Assume at least one alien survived the crash. You now are in the proper mindset to read this book.

It goes as one would expect. Aliens crash. Government grabs them, and quickly secrets the crew and ship away to some underground facility in the middle of the desert. Everything is High Security. The military wants to kill the aliens and learn from their advanced technology, to use that knowledge against the Russians. The scientists want to study everything. The President wants to be kept out of the loop, in the hopes of avoiding looking bad in the future, whatever the outcome.

This is one of those books that has so many characters, introduced one on top of the other, that the reader just about needs a scorecard to keep track of who did or said what. After a while though, I noticed that it didn’t really matter if I was lost in any particular part, because Randle has built in redundancys in his story line. The most blatent example of takes place towards the end of the book. Two men sit outside the underground facility, about to take drastic action (I will leave out just what they are about to do, in case you want to read the book). One mentions to the other a reference to “Custer’s Last Stand”. Then, in the very next chapter, (All the chapters are short. Most are only a few pages.), the readers are following a group who is underground and struggling to escape from the facility. One of them also refers to “Custer’s Last Stand”. These instances take place only a few pages from each other.

If you are looking for something with lots of action, that doesn’t waste time with full explanations, or deep characters, than this is the book for you. If you wanted somthing more, than I recommend skipping this book. If you are looking to just read a fiction book with lots of aliens in it, then this isn’t the book for you, either. Like the movie “Alien”, the reader has to go through a big portion of the story before much happens with an alien, and even then, its sporatic and largly unexplained. They mostly jump out and attack people, and then run away.

I read some of the blurbs on the back of the book, and the author’s note. From these, it seems that this book is trying to present itself as “historical fiction”. The back page says that the author, Randle, is “a captain in the U. S. Air Force, and an authority on alien abduction”. I found it in the science fiction section of Barnes and Noble. You be the judge.