Review Date: 4/1/2009

Helpful Score: 6

Not sure if I love this book more, or "Prayer for Owen Meany". These books are like 10 course dinner feasts, full of characters, ideas, places, thoughts, yet everything ties together in the end. I love how the most insignificant sentence in an early chapter turns out to be the most important thing later in the book. Irving does that alot, I find myself going back and re-reading paragraphs from chapters ago and marveling how they tie in. I imagine these books would have been great Radio Serial Shows, where you would get to hear one chapter a week and you couldn't wait to hear the next. I can't really say what the book is about, it is so much more than a straight plot line, but I will tell you that the title, "Cider House Rules", refers to the Cider House on an apple farm. The apple pickers stay in the Cider House while they are working to pick apples. The Cider House Rules are a list of Rules that are to be followed by those living in the Cider House. But the book also is about an orphanage, and an orphan who grows up with a doctor as a mentor and then he ends up at the apple farm where the Cider House is and then he falls for this girl...well, just read it.

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Review Date: 5/4/2009

Helpful Score: 12

I stayed up late last night to finish this book. I was so p***sed off when I finished, I couldn't even go to sleep. I don't want to give anything away, but basically there are 2 mysteries in this book that may or may not be intertwined. One of the mysteries is fascinating; you cannot wait to find out what happens. The other mystery is not nearly as interesting and I figured it out before the detectives. Here's the kicker: the author does not provide you with a resolution to the more interesting mystery. I felt like she had written a story she didn't know how to finish! There are a couple of subplots that are left unresolved as well, and again, those were the most interesting parts of the story, so you as the reader were emotionally involved enough to want to know what happened.

One more thing that really made me mad, and this may be a *spoiler*: I do not believe for one second that Rob/Adam's parents would have sent him off to boarding school after such a traumatic incident. Their kid is the only one found alive after three kids go missing in the woods. The other two are never found. The survivor is bloody and can't recall a thing. Then the parents send him away to boarding school????!!!! NO WAY. No way, no way, no way. Miss French has the character use this frequently as an excuse for his behavior. I guess she needed that plot point so she just made it up. Too bad she didn't have enough imagination to finish what she started.

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Review Date: 1/3/2009

I loved Nora, the lead character, a woman who prostitutes herself for a living in the Gold Rush era in San Francisco. It is very interesting how these women did not have a lot of choices back then, and how prostitution could be lucrative, especially if the woman is "classy" enough to work in a Parlor House, where the wealthy men went to enjoy the women's services. Nora starts out in the "Stalls", which is just a step up from the girls that walk the street. I imagined horse stalls, each girl had her own stall. It is also interesting to see so many hyprocrites, men who mouth off about the immorality of prostitutes and then sneaking to the stalls in the middle of the night to get a piece of the very action they just condemned. One guy even has the audacity to tell Nora that if she wasn't such a horrible person, he wouldn't never have been tempted, putting the blame for his sins entirely on Nora. Oh, and there is a good story, too! I learned so much about that world in addition to reading a mystery story where I really wasn't sure who "did it" until he was revealed.

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