by Valerie Martin

This is one of the modern day companion books to Classics that have become a genre of their own in recent years. The main character is Mary Reilly, house maid to Dr. Jekyll from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The start of it is fairly shocking. A little girl, Mary, is treated abusively by her father, setting the tone for what she will expect from people with authority later. She is born into servitude, destined to be a house maid with little chance of any other prospect in a Victorian society.

Mary is an intelligent young lady and not unhappy with her station in life. She sees through the shallow lives of the ladies and gentlemen she serves and is happier doing honest work. Her employer, Doctor Jekyll, is a scientist and does research in a private lab where the house staff is not allowed.

The book has no chapters, but is divided into three parts and an afterword, but there are separations within these that made for convenient stopping places.

I liked Mary, though she exhausted me with her willingness to devote herself to manual work. She's an honest and respectable girl and I like the way the author gave her a story of her own rather than relying just on how she interacted with Dr. Jekyll and of course, Mr. Hyde.

The dramatic conclusion was everything you would expect of a Gothic novel and really fleshes out the events of the original, which I read last year. I wasn't that enamoured of the Afterword, which was written as if by a separate chronicler who had published Mary's private journals. The device itself might have worked okay, but I felt there was too much speculation on the part of the unknown chronicler and assumptions that took away from the effect of the story itself.

A good read overall and something I'm glad to have enjoyed.

This review can also be found at Carole's Random Life in Books.

I thought that this book was a lot of fun! This was actually my first experience with Matthew Reilly's work despite the fact that his books have been on my radar for quite some time. I have had a copy of this book for years but it somehow slipped through the cracks of my review schedule. I am glad that I finally got around to reading this one because it was incredibly entertaining.

I haven't read Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton but I have seen the movie several times. I don't usually like to make a lot of comparisons but this book had a lot of similarities to that story. It was different enough that I didn't feel like it was the same story but they had the same feel. 

China has built a new zoo. It is a different kind of zoo that will end up changing the world. CJ, her brother, and a group of others are brought to the zoo to see just how different it really is. This zoo doesn't have your average zoo animals. This zoo is filled with all kinds of different dragons. Yes, dragons. During their visit to the zoo, things go very, very wrong. 

This was a pretty exciting book that was filled with action which made it really entertaining. There were some real surprises along the way and I enjoyed piecing together exactly what was going on. I liked CJ and liked how her skills as a veterinarian helped her to navigate the situation she found herself in. I also found that I had a lot of respect and couldn't blame them for their actions.

Rich Orlow did a great job with this story. This was a really exciting and often intense book which I think he was able to take up another notch. I thought he handled all of the characters voices very well. I thought he had a very nice reading voice which I found easy to listen to for hours at a time. I think that I enjoyed the story just a bit more largely because of his narration.

I would recommend this book to others. I found this to be a highly entertaining tale that read like an action movie. I think those action readers that don't mind some similarities to well-known stories will enjoy this one. I definitely plan to read more of Matthew Reilly's work in the future.

I received a digital review copy of this book from Gallery, Threshold, Pocket Books via NetGalley and borrowed a copy of the audiobook from my local library.

Initial Thoughts
This was entertaining. I haven't read Jurassic Park but I have seen the movie a few times and this book reminded me of that quite a bit. There was a lot of action in this book, sometimes maybe a bit much. I thought that the narrator did a fantastic job with the story. I am glad that I finally gave this one a try.

I am not a golf person, so this is an unlikely book for me, but this article by the author, Rick Reilly, piqued my interest:  "Whatever Trump Is Playing, It Isn’t Golf."

Rick Reilly is a long-time golf writer for Sports Illustrated.  The subtitle of this book is "How Golf Explains Trump."  Reilly's premise is that everything you need to know about Donald Trump, you can learn from the way he plays golf and manages his golf courses:  the cheating, the lying, the rule-breaking, the double-dealing, and the contract breaking.  I never would have made those connections without this book (again--not a golf person), but everything Reilly lays out about the way Trump conducts himself in the golf world maps itself to the way he conducts himself in the White House (including actions that potentially benefit his golf courses, and thereby his personal wealth, since he never did divest himself from his companies).

An eye-opening lens through which to view Trump World.

Can't wait for The Two Something Something's!