Christine's Book Corner

The Graveyard Apartment  by Mariko Koike centers around a young married couple who move into the news apartment with their small child and pet dog.  The apartment is everything a person could want, close to shopping centers and a school.  Cheap price for such a spacious apartment, but there is one catch; it's built with a graveyard right outside.  Not long after the move in, weird and creepy things begin to happen to the family and the few other residents who live in the apartment.  One by one, the other tenants begin to move out until this family is the only one left with whoever or whatever it is that is haunting the building. I rated this book 4 out of 5  stars.  It was a quick read and held my interested the entire time.  I'm always up for a good horror story and that is what this was, a horror tale.  I kept wanting to find out what exactly it was that was causing the creepiness to the tenants of the building.  One would nat...

Summary from  Goodreads A profound and dazzlingly entertaining novel from the writer Louis Menand calls "Jane Austen with a Russian soul"   In her warm, absorbing and keenly observed new novel, Lara Vapnyar follows the intertwined lives of four immigrants in New York City as they grapple with love and tumult, the challenges of a new home, and the absurdities of the digital age.    Vica, Vadik, Sergey and Regina met in Russia in their school days, but remained in touch and now have very different American lives. Sergey cycles through jobs as an analyst, hoping his idea for an app will finally bring him success. His wife Vica, a medical technician struggling to keep her family afloat, hungers for a better life. Sergey’s former girlfriend Regina, once a famous translator is married to a wealthy startup owner, spends her days at home grieving over a recent loss. Sergey’s best friend Vadik, a programmer ever in search of perfection, keeps trying on different w...