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Monthly Archives: July 2011

Mailbox Monday

31 Jul

My mailbox looks a little like this one!Welcome to Mailbox Monday!

Mailbox Monday is a place to share all the wonderful books that have come to live in your home– including paper books, e-books and audio books.

Mailbox Monday was started by Marcia, who is now blogging at A girl and her books. When Marcia was ready to move on from being the weekly host, she was kind enough to set up the Mailbox Monday Blog Tour, August’s host is Staci at Life in the Thumb.

As for my mailbox:

Books for review:

The End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina

When a notorious millionaire banker hangs himself, his death attracts no sympathy. But the legacy of a lifetime of selfishness is widespread, and the carnage most acute among those he ought to be protecting: his family.

Meanwhile, in a wealthy suburb of Glasgow, a young woman is found savagely murdered. The community is stunned by what appears to be a vicious, random attack. When Detective Inspector Alex Morrow, heavily pregnant with twins, is called in to investigate, she soon discovers that a tangled web of lies lurks behind the murder. It’s a web that will spiral through Alex’s own home, the local community, and ultimately right back to a swinging rope, hundreds of miles away.

Goodie One Shoes by Roz Siegel

A Jimmy Choo Sandal. A Manolo Blahnik mule; a Sergio Rossi slide, a Prada sliver-heeled boot. As magic as Cinderella’s glass slipper. Even when they don’t fit, they can determine your life—or end it. Emily knows these things because she owns a discount shoe store on the colorful Upper West Side of Manhattan—Emily’s Place a neighborhood hangout for shoe lovers, where customers could find a sympathetic ear, a hot cup of coffee and the perfect shoe. Unfortunately, someone has decided that a sexy stiletto-heeled shoe is an excellent murder weapon. A member of the Emily’s Place “family”—the staff of women who run the store and love the shoes in it—is murdered with a red Jimmy Choo high-heeled shoe—sharp as an ice pick, the spiked heel is embedded in her head. Emily is still reeling from the shock of her friend’s murder when a bag is shoved through her mail slot containing the mate to the shoe that was the murder weapon. Emily realizes that her store and everyone connected to it is a target and that a psycho killer is stalking them all. In fact the killer seems to particularly want Emily to suffer. She insists on working with the detective assigned to the case, Paul Murphy to find the killer—and she will do whatever it takes. It’s personal.

Repeat It Today With Tears by Anne Peile

Susanna is a secretive child, obsessed with the father she has never known and determined that one day she will find him. As an adolescent she becomes increasingly distanced from life at home with her mother and sister. When she finally discovers her father’s address and seeks him out, in the free and unconventional atmosphere of 1970s Chelsea, she conceals her identity, beginning an illicit affair that can only end in disaster.

Books I bought:

Both of these are for the Nerds Heart YA tournament!  Check back here on August 5 for my decision as to which book advances to the next round.

What Momma Left Me by Renee Watson

How is it that unsavory raw ingredients come together to form a delicious cake? What is it about life that when you take all the hard stuff and rough stuff and add in a lot of love, you still just might have a wonderful life? For Serenity, these questions rise up early when her father kills her mother, and leaves her and her brother Danny to live with their kind but strict grandparents. Despite the difficulties of a new school, a new church, and a new neighborhood, Serenity gains strength from the family around her, the new friends she finds, and her own careful optimism.

How I Made It to Eighteen by Tracy White

How do you know if you’re on the verge of a nervous breakdown?  For seventeen-year-old Stacy Black, it all begins with the smashing of a window. After putting her fist through the glass, she checks into a mental hospital.  Stacy hates it there but despite herself slowly realizes she has to face the reasons for her depression to stop from self-destructing.  Based on the author’s experiences, How I Made it to Eighteen is a frank portrait of what it’s like to struggle with self-esteem, body image issues, drug addiction, and anxiety.

I have a feeling these are going to be hard to compare!

Your turn

What came in your mailbox this week? Let me know, then go to Life in the Thumb to check out others!

 
13 Comments

Posted by on July 31, 2011 in books, meme

 

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Revisited: Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis

29 Jul

BlackoutAll ClearMy rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

Last year, I read both of these books, which are by one of my favorite authors.  You can look back at my Rant: Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis, but in a nutshell, these make up one story, split into two volumes– and this isn’t noted anywhere obvious on the first book.  Which was released  8 months before the second book.  And my terrible memory for the details of what I read is one of the reasons I started blogging in the first place. And this really interfered with my enjoyment of these two books.

Book descriptions via the publisher’s website:

Blackout:

Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place, with scores of time-traveling historians being sent into the past. Michael Davies is prepping to go to Pearl Harbor. Merope Ward is coping with a bunch of bratty 1940 evacuees and trying to talk her thesis adviser into letting her go to VE-Day. Polly Churchill’s next assignment will be as a shopgirl in the middle of London’s Blitz. But now the time-travel lab is suddenly canceling assignments and switching around everyone’s schedules. And when Michael, Merope, and Polly finally get to World War II, things just get worse. For there they face air raids, blackouts, and dive-bombing Stukas—to say nothing of a growing feeling that not only their assignments but the war and history itself are spiraling out of control. Because suddenly the once-reliable mechanisms of time travel are showing significant glitches, and our heroes are beginning to question their most firmly held belief: that no historian can possibly change the past.

All Clear:

[Blackout recap omitted]

Now the situation has grown even more dire. Small discrepancies in the historical record seem to indicate that one or all of them have somehow affected the past, changing the outcome of the war. The belief that the past can be observed but never altered has always been a core belief of time-travel theory—but suddenly it seems that the theory is horribly, tragically wrong.

Meanwhile, in 2060 Oxford, the historians’ supervisor, Mr. Dunworthy, and seventeen-year-old Colin Templer, who nurses a powerful crush on Polly, are engaged in a frantic and seemingly impossible struggle of their own—to find three missing needles in the haystack of history.

I’ve now read these twice. The first time, I read Blackout in print and All Clear in audio. The second time I listened to both books.

All in all, I found my second read, where I went directly from Blackout to All Clear much more satisfying.

These books had:

  • A brilliant picture of life of ordinary people in England during World War II.
  • Some fascinating characters in extraordinary circumstances.
  • A great examination of the issues and paradoxes of time travel.

As well as great writing, humorous bits, touching moments, Agatha Christie, codes, spies, the worst kids ever (or are they?), and courageous people of all ages (male and female). What else can you ask for?

In the end, some of the same confusion I originally had in reading All Clear remained for me.

The book jumped around from early in the war to the very end, and the reader was meant to use the comments on the types of bombs falling on London to help keep the timeline straight, and that didn’t work very well for me.  This was carefully explained several times, and I don’t think it was supposed to be ambiguous, but I was still confused in parts.

On the other hand, I think some of the confusion about which characters were which was deliberate– the reader is not supposed to be certain about the identity of a couple of the characters, until events make some parts of the story clear. I can live with that.

Some of the characters could get a bit whiny. In an effort to be noble they withheld information that would have been better pooled. These and other such character flaws served to make them more real to me, but I could see it getting on the nerves of a different reader.

I really liked that the book was about historians looking into day to day life and about the ordinary heroes of war (of which there were many).  I felt that aspect really came alive for me, but others might be looking for something grander.

I consider the flaws to be minor in comparison to the plusses I listed above.  If the description intrigues you, I’d strongly encourage you to pick up these books– just make sure you have access to All Clear before starting Blackout!

Sound Bytes @ Devourer of Books

For more audiobook reviews, check out Sound Bytes

Audio Notes

Narrator: I thought Katherine Kellgren was absolutely amazing.  This is a really, really demanding book, with a huge number of characters with a variety of accents.  I felt she pulled it off beautifully, and I very much enjoyed listening to her.

Production:  Each book had an introduction by Connie Willis, recorded by her.  I don’t know if the content was also in the print versions– I don’t remember seeing it in Blackout when I read it over a year ago– but I think listening to it in the author’s voice was a definite plus (but I’m glad she didn’t read the entire thing!).  Beyond that, I think the production was solid.

Print vs. Audio?  For Blackout, I’ve now read this book in both formats!  I have to say that I enjoyed the audio, although it works well both ways.  Two warnings:  First, these books are long!  Blackout is just under 19 hours, All Clear is just under 24 hours!  This is a substantial time commitment– then again, the audio downloads are no where near as heavy as the print version :-) .  Second, Time Travel.  These books are non-linear, and if that’s going to confuse you in print, it will likely be worse in audio. Know yourself here.  I wouldn’t suggest these for your first books to listen to, but I was very happy with my choice to do so!

For more audiobook reviews, check out Sound Bytes at Devourer of Books!

 
2 Comments

Posted by on July 29, 2011 in books, reviews

 

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Mailbox Monday

25 Jul

My mailbox looks a little like this one!Welcome to Mailbox Monday!

Mailbox Monday is a place to share all the wonderful books that have come to live in your home– including paper books, e-books and audio books.

Mailbox Monday was started by Marcia, who is now blogging at A girl and her books. When Marcia was ready to move on from being the weekly host, she was kind enough to set up the Mailbox Monday Blog Tour, July’s host is Gwendolyn at A Sea of Books

As for my mailbox:

Books for review:

Pirate King by Laurie R. King

It’s here!  I have it at last!  My most anticipated book of the year arrived last Monday, and I couldn’t read it until Thursday– the horror of it all!

I’ve read it, but I won’t publish my review until release date, September 6.  I will say that fans of the series must read this book, and that it stands alone even better than most of the others, so feel free to pick it up if the description intrigues you !

In England’s young silent-film industry, the megalomaniacal Randolph Fflytte is king. Nevertheless, at the request of Scotland Yard, Mary Russell is dispatched to investigate the criminal activities that surround Fflytte’s popular movie studio. So Russell is traveling undercover to Portugal, along with the film crew that is gearing up to shoot a cinematic extravaganza, Pirate King. Based on Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, the project will either set the standard for movie-making for a generation or sink a boatload of careers.

Nothing seems amiss until the enormous company starts rehearsals in Lisbon, where the thirteen blonde-haired, blue-eyed actresses Mary is bemusedly chaperoning meet the swarm of real buccaneers Fflytte has recruited to provide authenticity. But when the crew embarks for Morocco and the actual filming, Russell feels a building storm of trouble: a derelict boat, a film crew with secrets, ominous currents between the pirates, decks awash with budding romance—and now the pirates are ignoring Fflytte and answering only to their dangerous outlaw leader, La Rocha. Plus, there’s a spy on board. Where can Sherlock Holmes be? As movie make-believe becomes true terror, Russell and Holmes themselves may experience a final fadeout.

Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman

I’m reading this for a TLC Book Tour.  It’s been getting fantastic buzz, and I’m looking forward to reading it.

Tom Violet always thought that by the time he turned thirty-five, he’d have everything going for him. Fame. Fortune. A beautiful wife. A satisfying career as a successful novelist. A happy dog to greet him at the end of the day.

The reality, though, is far different. He’s got a wife, but their problems are bigger than he can even imagine. And he’s written a novel, but the manuscript he’s slaved over for years is currently hidden in his desk drawer while his father, an actual famous writer, just won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His career, such that it is, involves mind-numbing corporate buzzwords, his pretentious archnemesis Gregory, and a hopeless, completely inappropriate crush on his favorite coworker. Oh . . . and his dog, according to the vet, is suffering from acute anxiety.

Tom’s life is crushing his soul, but he’s decided to do something about it. (Really.) Domestic Violets is the brilliant and beguiling story of a man finally taking control of his own happiness—even if it means making a complete idiot of himself along the way.

Black Light by Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan, & Stephen Romano

The debut novel from the writers of the multi-million-dollar-grossing Saw movie franchise.

Private investigator Buck Carlsbad’s psychic abilities place him in high demand among those looking for quick solutions to supernatural problems. But for Buck, each case is only a link in the chain of a lifelong obsession: to locate the long departed spirits of his mother and father, killed in an unsolved murder when he was only a child.

Then Buck gets a call from a reclusive billionaire with a very strange request, and finds himself on a bullet-fast train headed straight to hell.

BLACK LIGHT is the explosive debut that combines a noir sensibility with supernatural suspense and high concept action, as Buck leads the reader through an underworld of exotic darkness and adventure.

Tithe by Holly Black (audiobook)

Welcome to the realm of very scary faeries!

Sixteen-year-old Kaye is a modern nomad. Fierce and independent, she travels from city to city with her mother’s rock band until an ominous attack forces Kaye back to her childhood home. There, amid the industrial, blue-collar New Jersey backdrop, Kaye soon finds herself an unwilling pawn in an ancient power struggle between two rival faerie kingdoms — a struggle that could very well mean her death.

Your turn

What came in your mailbox this week? Let me know, then go to A Sea of Books to check out others!

 
5 Comments

Posted by on July 25, 2011 in books, meme

 

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Review: The Heroine’s Bookshelf by Erin Blakemore (with audiobook and book club notes)

22 Jul

The Heroine's BookshelfMy rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Summary via Goodreads:

The literary canon is filled with intelligent, feisty, never-say-die heroines, and legendary female authors. Like today’s women, they too placed a premium on personality, spirituality, career, sisterhood, and family. When their backs were against the wall, characters like Scarlett O’Hara, Jo March, Jane Eyre, and Elizabeth Bennet fought back—sometimes with words, sometimes with gritty actions. Their commonsense decisions resonate even more powerfully in a world where women are forced to return to the basics, paring down and shoring up their resources for what lies ahead.

In this compelling book of beloved heroines and the remarkable writers who created them, Erin Blakemore explores how the pluck and dignity of literary characters such as Scout Finch and Jo March can inspire women today. She divides these legendary characters into chapters that pair each with their central quality—Anne Shirley is associated with irrepressible “Happiness,” while Scarlett O’Hara personifies “Fight.” Each chapter includes insights into the authors’ lives, revealing how their own strengths informed their timeless characters. From Zora Neale Hurston to Colette, Laura Ingalls Wilder to Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen to Alice Walker, here are some of the most cherished authors and characters in literature.

This would have been so much fun to use as a guide for a year’s worth of book club meetings! One author a month– either pick one book to read or let everyone choose on their own, then let the content of this book steer the discussion…

But we will be discussing the whole book at once, which should still be interesting. Certainly, reading it was.

My favorite bits were the looks at the lives of the various authors. There is a lot I didn’t know, and it added interesting perspective.

I also enjoyed the glimpses into books I haven’t read– A Tree Grows in Brooklyn has been on my list for ages, and the Claudine novels weren’t really on my radar at all!  I’d read 9 of the 12 books discussed here, and all 3 of the others are now on my list.

I wish I’d spent more time on the insights into the books that I’ve read. Pieces like the “literary sisters” (women in other books that share some of the same characteristics) went right by with only passing thought on my part, as the audiobook was on to the next sentence before I’d had a chance to really reflect on each. I think this book needed a little more savoring and stopping and reflecting than I gave it– a downside of the audiobook for me.

Still, I was interested in the attributes the author picked out for each heroine, and in how the heroine embodied that characteristic.  If I re-read any of these books, I will revisit The Heroine’s Bookshelf first, and see how that changes my perspective on the book.

All in all, I enjoyed my experience with it!

Audiobook Notes

Sound Bytes @ Devourer of Books

For more audiobook reviews, check out Sound Bytes

Narrator: Tavia Gilbert didn’t really appeal to me.  I don’t think she did a bad job, I just didn’t love her.  I was impressed by the accents she used, although I’m the wrong person to say if she did them accurately or not.

Production:  No problems, no extras.

Print vs. Audio: I would have appreciated this more in print, I think.  It isn’t that I can’t take the time to pause and reflect with the audio, it’s that I don’t.  I recognize that about myself as a reader.  The good news is that the Audible.com bookmarks seem to correspond with the chapter breaks (they don’t always), so I can fairly easily go back to refer to a specific section, just like the print version.

For more audiobook reviews. check out Sound Bytes at Devourer of Books.

Book Club notes

To my surprise, my book club didn’t like this as much as I did.  There were five of us at the meeting.  Two of us enjoyed it.  One was very vocal about stopping her reading after the third chapter, because it wasn’t working for her,   The other two fell somewhere in the middle.

The club member that didn’t like it had only read 2 or 3 of the books discussed in The Heroine’s Bookshelf, and furthermore, she didn’t read those type of books.  The author hadn’t made enough of an effort to sell them  to her, and she didn’t feel it worth her time to continue to the sections about the books she had read.

Two members felt that the sections read like high school English class essays (well written ones, they agreed).  One thought this was a good thing, the other much less so.

I’d thought we’d be able to talk about Erin Blakemore’s interpretations of the books we’d all read, but it turns out there weren’t really any of those, and discussion didn’t ever really take off.

I’d say this was not a success for our book club.  I don’t think it has to be that way, and I was disappointed.

 
4 Comments

Posted by on July 22, 2011 in Book Club, books, M, reviews

 

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Book Club Books Selected

21 Jul

For those interested in what other book clubs are reading, I thought I’d update you on what one of my clubs has selected:

  • July: I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson
  • Aug: Devotion: A Memoir by Dani Shapiro
  • Sept: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
  • Oct: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
  • Nov: Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
  • Dec: Divergent by Veronica Roth
  • Jan: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
  • Feb: Just Kids by Patti Smith
  • Mar: Swim Back to Me by Ann Packer

Has anyone discussed any of these with their book clubs?  How did it work out?

 
5 Comments

Posted by on July 21, 2011 in Book Club, L

 

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Chat: Learning Curves by Elyse Mady

20 Jul

Learning CurvesI can’t call this a review, because I don’t really know what to make of this book.

If you’d asked me whether I read romance novels, I would not have hesitated before saying yes.  I read historical romance (mostly regency and surrounding time periods), I read romantic suspense, I read books that walk the thin line between women’s fiction or chick lit and romance. I even read a little paranormal romance.  However, it turns out I don’t really read this particular kind of straightforward contemporary romance.

Synopsis via Goodreads:

Leanne Galloway has no time for dating; her focus is on launching her academic career. Dragged along to her childhood frenemy Gillian’s bachelorette party at a male strip club, she just wants to get through the evening—but she can’t help interfering when Gillian sends a note to a sexy dancer proposing a hot hookup.

Brandon Myles is working backstage at the Foxe’s Den to fund his post-graduate studies in dance, but he’s forced onstage when the headliner fails to show up. He feels a surprisingly strong connection with a quiet woman watching from a table full of tipsy bridesmaids, and he’s delighted when she appears backstage after his set.

After a scorching spontaneous encounter, Leanne and Brandon agree to go their separate ways. But they’re both grad students on a small campus, and avoiding each other and denying their attraction won’t work for long, especially when a jealous rival appears, determined to ruin both their academic careers.

Oh my!

It was very steamy, and Brandon was perfect in every way– even just damaged enough for her to have some work to do…  Although it had a plot that took place outside the bedroom, it felt like the entire book revolved around sex.

Since the lead character was working on a Ph.D. in literature, I kept wanting to read more into the book.  Is the emphasis on sex actually standing in for something else?  Are the (rather flat) supporting characters actually archetypes representing a larger class of people?

Or is this simply a fun wish-fulfillment fantasy where the regular girl (good looking but nothing spectacular in the looks department, successful in her chosen field but awkward in the rest of her life) wins the perfect guy, and in doing so fixes most of the other problems in her life?  One where all the other trappings really don’t matter?

For the most part, I enjoyed reading it, even when being confused about what to make of it.  I admit to having some issues with the ending, but I think those are me against the genre, and I’m not going to sweat it.  It was quick and fun, and I’ll probably read more in its vein, trying to sort out the rules of the road, such as they are.

I requested this book for review from the publisher via NetGalley.  Thank you to Carina Press and NetGalley for giving me access to this book.

 
2 Comments

Posted by on July 20, 2011 in books, reviews

 

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Review: 22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson

19 Jul

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found this book well written, absorbing, and more than a little grim.

It very effectively portrayed a world turned upside down, which proceeded to turn inside out as well.

Summary via Goodreads:

In her powerful debut, Hodgkinson takes on the tale of a family desperately trying to put itself back together after WWII. Silvana and Janusz have only been married a few months when the war forces them apart. Silvana and their infant son, Aurek, leave Poland and disappear into the forests of Eastern Europe, where they bear witness to German atrocities. Meanwhile Janusz, the sole survivor of his slaughtered military unit, flees to France. There, he takes up with a local girl and, though he loves her, awaits the war’s end so that he can go in search of his wife and son. He eventually finds them in a refugee camp and they travel to England together, where they attempt to put the past behind them. But the secrets they carry pull at the threads of their fragile peace. Hodgkinson alternates viewpoints to relay the story of three desperate characters, skillfully toggling between the war and its aftermath with wonderfully descriptive prose that pulls the reader into a sweeping tale of survival and redemption.

On the surface, it seems time for the happily-ever-after. The war is over, and Silvana is leaving her destroyed land of Poland to join her husband in England. He has a good job, and their son can go to school, get a good education, and grow up in a stable, happy world.

Life is never that easy, and the past is part of the present and the future. Silvana and Aurek have a more difficult time adjusting than Janusz can understand.

The strength of this book is in the setting, and the contrast of the flashbacks to wartime Poland and France, and the scenes of life in Post-war England. The characters (major and minor) serve to build and reinforce these portraits.

This isn’t to say that the characters aren’t compelling on their own. Silvana in particular has true depth and interest as she meets challenge after challenge, never knowing if she will be able to handle the next one. She keeps going, as her fierce protection of Aurek leads her to stretch beyond what she can imagine. The hardest time may be when his need for her is no longer as strong.

I had a hard time rating this one– the quality was at 4.5 stars for me, but the gloom just kept me from completely being sucked in and compelled, making the overall experience closer to a 3.5 star one for me.  I compromised at the 4 stars listed.

I received 22 Britannia Road from Pamela Dorman Books for review.  Thank you for this opportunity!

 
5 Comments

Posted by on July 19, 2011 in books, reviews

 

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Review: State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

15 Jul

State of WonderMy rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book, largely because it isn’t really like anything I’ve read before.

Summary via Goodreads.com:

Dr. Marina Singh, a research scientist with a Minnesota pharmaceutical company, is sent to Brazil to track down her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson, who seems to have all but disappeared in the Amazon while working on what is destined to be an extremely valuable new drug, the development of which has already cost the company a fortune. Nothing about Marina’s assignment is easy: not only does no one know where Dr. Swenson is, but the last person who was sent to find her, Marina’s research partner Anders Eckman, died before he could complete his mission. Plagued by trepidation, Marina embarks on an odyssey into the insect-infested jungle in hopes of finding her former mentor as well as answers to several troubling questions about her friend’s death, the state of her company’s future, and her own past.

Once found, Dr. Swenson, now in her seventies, is as ruthless and uncompromising as she ever was back in the days of Grand Rounds at Johns Hopkins. With a combination of science and subterfuge, she dominates her research team and the natives she is studying with the force of an imperial ruler. But while she is as threatening as anything the jungle has to offer, the greatest sacrifices to be made are the ones Dr. Swenson asks of herself, and will ultimately ask of Marina, who finds she may still be unable to live up to her teacher’s expectations.

The uniqueness of this book is not just the setting, although I admittedly have very little experience with books set in the Brazilian wilderness. In fact, I’m not thinking of any others offhand.

And it’s not just the medical thriller aspect. I read a bunch of those years ago, but it’s been a while. If research was involved, it was somehow involving a disease that would escape or unwilling research participants. In State of Wonder, the researchers were on the trail of an existing cure for infertility. Better yet, it actually looked at the ethics involved, both with the research and the cure.

The unusual plot and setting were what set State of Wonder apart. These built on a base of amazing writing and great characters. I don’t normally comment on the writing, but I went from this to a book that lacked in this area. I could really see what a difference it made in my overall enjoyment of the book, even when I don’t stop to appreciate the individual words.

I do usually comment on the characters, and they were a strength here. I thought Dr. Marina Singh was interesting as an M.D. turned researcher who is at a standstill in her life– until she is pushed into this trip to Brazil, forcing her to confront her past, present and future.

But as much as I liked Marina (as a character and as a person I’d like to meet), it was the other characters that really fascinated me– none more so than Dr. Swenson, living in the Brazilian jungles in her 70s. What is driving her to continue her research? Why does she avoid all contact with the company that sponsors her work? What secrets has she discovered?

State of Wonder was readable, enjoyable and thought provoking– an all-around win!

I read State of Wonder as part of a TLC Book Tour.  Thank you to TLC and HarperCollins for sending me a copy and allowing me to participate in this tour! For other opinions on this book, check out the other tour stops:
TLC Book Tours

 
12 Comments

Posted by on July 15, 2011 in books, reviews, tour

 

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Teen Review: Dear Pen Pal by Heather Vogel Fredrick

14 Jul

This is a guest post by my 13 year old daughter

Amelia’s rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really did enjoy this book. I found that it was a fun, light, and fast read. This book, along with being fun, I think was relatively well written (at least it was good enough to not take away from the fun-ness). I found the balance between the characters and the plot to be a good one.

One of the things I love about the mother-daughter book club books is how each of the girls has a different voice. I felt that the different writing styles was really good for identifying with the 5 very different girls: Emma is a writer that comes from a family full of books, who is slowly figuring that “the pen is mightier than the sword”. Jess is the smart farm girl that can sing, who recently came out of her shell and attends a boarding school where she  rooms with the snobby daughter of a senator. Cassidy is the only girl on a boys hockey team, who is having trouble with change. Megan is the aspiring fashion designer who finds herself in the middle of a war between her eco-friendly vegetarian mother and her fashionista grandmother. Becca is the Mother-Daughter book club’s newest member who, is still a “frenemy” with the most of the other girls in the book club.

I found the interaction with Savannah (Jess’s new roommate) interesting. She starts out making life for the mother-daughter book club awful. After “Operation New Roommate” backfires, she puts a very sticky surprise in the girls pillows. Later, she helps Jess, Cassidy, Megan, Becca, Zach and Darcy with a “not-so-secret-puppy” for Emma. She then ends up stealing Jess’s date to the dance. Finally she becomes good friends with Jess.

This is one of the few series where the characters age with me. When I read the first book I was about a year younger, maybe less, than the girls. When I read the second I was the same age, and in this book they are again about a year older by the end . I like how over the 3 years all of the girls have developed and changed to be a lot better of people. I also like how you can tell that the girls are getting older and how that affects their relationships with each other as they “race” to see who of the 5 girls is going to get the first kiss (not who they expected).

The book club chooses to read Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster when Jess receives an anonymous  scholarship for a boarding school. I found the way that they always found a reason not to tell the end of the book both funny and useful in helping people become more interested in reading Daddy Long Legs. Because I haven’t read Daddy Long Legs I was then interested in reading it.

The mothers of the book club decide to become pen pals with an other mother-daughter book club in Wyoming that is also reading Daddy Long Legs. I found the addition of the pen pals was a nice change. I liked the pen pals because each girl had a different relationship with their pen pal.

This was a light fun read that over all I enjoyed.

Amelia is 13 years old, and will be entering 8th grade in the fall.  When she isn’t at school, dance or practicing rhythmic gymnastics, there’s a good chance she’ll be reading a book!

 
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Posted by on July 14, 2011 in books, Guest post, reviews

 

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Review: Don’t Breathe a Word by Jennifer McMahon

13 Jul

Don't Breathe a WordMy rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Summary via Goodreads.com:

On a soft summer night in Vermont, twelve-year-old Lisa went into the woods behind her house and never came out again. Before she disappeared, she told her little brother, Sam, about a door that led to a magical place where she would meet the King of the Fairies and become his queen.

Fifteen years later, Phoebe is in love with Sam, a practical, sensible man who doesn’t fear the dark and doesn’t have bad dreams—who, in fact, helps Phoebe ignore her own. But suddenly the couple is faced with a series of eerie, unexplained occurrences that challenge Sam’s hardheaded, realistic view of the world. As they question their reality, a terrible promise Sam made years ago is revealed—a promise that could destroy them all.

Certainly, the characters were interesting, even compelling.  They were complex, and just when you thought you understood where they were coming from, the world would shift.  This was mostly true of the secondary characters, but it was true of the primary ones as well, although in a more subtle way.  This was a story where the past mattered, regardless of how much the characters thought they’d left it behind.

The story was full of twists and turns, and they often didn’t make sense at the time, although the story held together in the end.  Some questions remain, but what would be the fun if they didn’t…

This is a book where the reader is supposed to be uncertain whether there is something supernatural happening, whether there are bad guys trying to make it look that way, or (just maybe) mental illness is making a fairly normal situation seem completely bizarre.

The problem is that for most of the book, I didn’t buy any of these explanations. I think this was a deliberate choice of the author, creating a situation that didn’t make sense however you looked at it, and throwing in more events that almost (but not quite) fit one explanation or another.

Oh sure, there was more than enough craziness going around, but something more clearly had happened. The possible world of fairies and magic was murky (again, I think deliberately), but there was no clear motivation for someone the be manipulating the situation.

In McMahon’s Dismantled, I loved the ambiguity, and I bought (with reservations) both possibilities. I’d hoped for the same here.

I have to say that the book pulled in together in the end, so maybe the fault was in my imagination along the way.

I requested access to this book via NetGalley so that I could review it.  Thank you to Harper Collins for giving me access.

For other views of this book, check out these blogs (most of them loved it!):

 
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Posted by on July 13, 2011 in books, reviews

 

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