Saturday, September 24, 2011

Thief of Todays and Tomorrows - by Susan Wells Bennett




This book came to me in an “odd” way. Months ago I won a few books through a contest and “Thief of Todays and Tomorrows” was one of the titles I could choose from. I found the unusual title intriguing, and another thing that caught my attention was the fact that it told the story of an Irish woman and her Italian husband… I’m Italian, and my companion is Irish.
It took me a while to get to read it, but once I began I could not put it down. No, this is not the whole truth… I had to put it down, from time to time, because the story was so full of emotion, so tender and sad and true that I found it almost overwhelming.
I have no limits of genre in my choice of books, so I read almost anything, from mainstream to fantasy to thrillers. But I find it difficult to say at what genre this book could belong. In my opinion, as most really good books do, it goes beyond genres and classifications, and reaches that wider, tragic stage that is real life.
Once more, Susan Bennet gives us characters so well defined and with such a strong  personality that they impress themselves in the mind of the reader, to stay there forever. And this is true not only for the main characters, such as Kate or Francis, but also for all the other people that surround them and that for the good or the bad influence their life.
Another thing that I truly loved of the book is the picture it gives of how life was in the US between the end of the Second World War and the Sixties. With a truly masterly hand, Susan Bennet paints a picture of the society of the period, and we could almost consider it another silent character, that slowly evolves and changes throughout the book, creating on one hand the stage on which the personal drama of the characters unfolds, and on the other lending to the book a feeling of “historical” novel, even if it is a rather recent history.
Thief of Todays and Tomorrows is a little masterpiece that carries the reader away to another time and another way of life, not very far removed from our present life but, under some aspects, light years away from it.
Definitely, a book worth reading, that fully deserves a five stars evaluation

4 comments:

  1. Thank you so much for the lovely review. I wish you great luck with your new blog! :)

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  2. The beauty of the cover was the first thing to catch my attention and then I read the title. How intriguing. I like the review and I can't wait to get a chance to read.

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  3. Ey, I work with Nikki McBroom on all of my covers -- she has done wonderful work for me. I hope you will read and enjoy the book!

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  4. I had the pleasure of reading Susan's book, An Unassigned Life, and absolutely loved it. This book sounds fabulous too.

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