Bookin' It Thru Life

I stumbled on these books when I was perusing what I like to call the Nook "cheap reads" section.  Most of the time you get what you pay for; see my post on His Baby Bond ...eeee gods!  In this case, the first book in the trilogy was a cheap read offered with the hope of drawing you in and getting you to buy the other two which were progressively more expensive...but let's keep it in perspective in the final analysis I think the whole trilogy was like eleven dollars and fifty cents so we're not breakin' the bank here or anything.  These books were certainly worth the price of admission. The Twisted Cedar Mysteries follow one main thread over the course of the trilogy.  True crime writer Dougal Lachlan is drawn into a decades old unsolved crime which continues to fester and develop even as he and his sidekick try to pin it down.  Lachlan reminds me a little of Balducci's heroes (which as I've written before, I find somewhat indistinguishable from each oth

I picked these up on the Nook when I was heading for Jamaica this spring.  I wanted to have enough to read to keep me busy should I either finish or not enjoy the other "real" books I took along.  I had seen the trailers for the movie "Annihilation" and thought that it looked interesting; reading the book is always a go-to for me if a movie I want to see is based on a book.  These books were in the genre of Cronin's The Passage Trilogy, with some echoes of Lost, a hint of Alien, a Charlie-like Voice directing traffic, some serious Freudian relationship challenges and more than a little Predator.  See why they made it a movie?  I'm not sure I could adequately evaluate any of the books on their own and I am fairly certain that had I read the first one when it originally came out it would have gracefully faded from my memory long before the sequel was available. However, given that I was able to get them all at the same time, I found them fairly enjoyable. 

Amazon describes this as "a dark and twisted page-turner" ...gotta say, that's quite the exaggeration.  I mean, is it dark and twisty?  Sure, I guess.  The beyond the backyard hideout gave me the creeps.  A page-turner?  Not so much.  First off, I get annoyed with the trope of the unreliable narrator.  While I think its ok for a character to be confused and therefore untruthful, or to tell his or her own "truth" even if it ends up being a complete fantasy...but in this book the narrator was telling us things as if they were true when they weren't, and not only were they not true, the narrator herself did not believe them.  Her actions may have been unhinged, and her motivations deranged, but at no point did I understand her to not know that her actual actions were wrong and would result in harm.  This motif bugged me the whole book and really took me outside of the story.  The plot itself was one that has been done before, and done better.  Interesting twist

Mrs. by Caitlin Macy March 2018 On Amazon the description includes the following sentence:  Macy has written a modern-day HOUSE OF MIRTH, not for the age of railroads and steel but of hedge funds and overnight fortunes, of scorched-earth successes and abiding moral failures. A brilliant portrait of love, betrayal, fate and chance, MRS marries razor-sharp social critique and page-turning propulsion into an unforgettable tapestry of the way we live in the 21st Century. I gotta tell ya, that's an insult to Edith Wharton...  Set in the NY apartments, schools and similar involved-mom venues,this is "urban chick lit" (if there is such a thing).  Gossipy, bitchy women?  check.  Competitive kid-raising?  check.  Power parents and privelege in spades?  oh yeah.  Enjoyable read?  Eh. Rating:  #6 Bearable, Just Barely.

Pretty much what the title implies...its a "horror" story about a nanny.  This one doesn't seduce the husband and start breastfeeding the baby; its a little more subtle then that, but still.  You feel a bit like the family is taking advantage of the nanny; you feel a bit like the nanny is losing it.  Ultimately its more about the mental health crisis in our world then anything else which in this wrapping is frankly not all that compelling.  By halfway through the book I just wanted it to be over cause I really didn't care about these people and was only vaguely interested in how the book resolved.  If I'd had another book waiting in the wings I probably would have just skipped to the end to satisfy what curiosity I did have and bail on the rest.  As it was, I'm a fast reader so I only wasted a couple of hours. Rating:  #8 Only As a Last Resort

This book...I should have seen it coming.  You would think that at some point I would have read it but no, I did not.  Nor have I ever seen the movie.  Nor, now that I have read the book, would it have been a movie I would have been dying to see.  And frankly, had I realized "which book" this was, I probably would not have read it either. But I stumbled on it (as I do a lot of the books I read) somewhere in the Nook world and thought, sure, 4 guys go into the wild and have some adventures, why not? First, now that I have read it, I did google it and its well known both as a book and as the source of the movie by the same name.   The writing, I will admit, was good...though not as good as the internet seems to think it is. Dickey was a Poet Laureate.  I don't know about all that because poetry this was not, but I did find several passages to be note worthy and I thought the writing was noticeably superior to much of the fiction I come across. I found this book

I picked this up at the library right before we went to the beach thinking it would be a good beach read-scary books don't work so well for me at home because I do a lot of my reading after everyone is asleep I tend to freak myself out...but at the beach, a) someone is always awake and b) I'd be able to read it in the light of day on a beach!  The book is about a young family in Japan who moves into a haunted hotel. Its translated from Japanese to English but I don't think that it lost much in translation, though its hard to say for sure.  That aside, the writing was fine-nothing that I bumped on.  The plot though-not so much.  The husband's ex-wife was a suicide and by the end of the book we are well versed in her life and death, but it remains as background to the whole story and never gets incorporated into the action.  Its like the smoking gun that turns out to just be a funny color grey-not really important at all.  And the ending-ugh.  Let's just say it was

Ah, Harry, how wonderful you are!  Before Potter there was you and you are fantastic!  I read this in awe and wonder at how I could possibly have missed reading this book before now.  Though I disagree with the reviewers that say you are a heroine who is unconcerned with romance because, well, turns out that's not quite true, I do believe that you are a heroine appropriately concerned with romance because let's face it, it would be unrealistic for a happy, healthy young woman to not have some sort of attachment to someone! Similar to The Hero and the Crown , this is a fantasy/adventure story about a young woman who must find her place in the world and does so by saving the day.  If you look at reviews and commentary online there is much about how the background for the story has challenges due to its colonial/empire parallels, and there are those who disparage the lack of development of characters beyond our hero.  Fair assessments all, though they don't in this reader

A Facebook friend turned me on to this author, and specifically this book, and all I can say is "Where have you been all my life????".  I really, really, really enjoyed this story.  The writing was top-notch and the story was a classic adventure/fantasy with a strong female lead.  These books have been around for a really long time, I just never heard of them before.  Which, I find odd.  I did not even recognize the author and she's been writing in this genre since I was a kid.  This particular book is aimed at the "young adult" audience which may not be where I tend to look for books so perhaps that is why I missed it but as I have said before, specifically about The Hunger Games which is one of my favorite books, young adult fiction should really not be pigeon holed as such-its a self-limiting description which truly should be tossed out the door.  I read this book second, on the heels of The Blue Sword , and at first I was a little miffed at myself that

After The Blue Sword , The Hero and the Crown , Sunshine and Deerskin I had high hopes for Beauty .  Alas, good books are still hard to find, even by authors we love.  The story we all know-its a variation on Beauty and the Beast.  And perhaps this book did not stand a chance and I should blame Walt Disney because all I could see was Hermione and all I could hear was "Be Our Guest" and well, I couldn't get past it.  Recommend this?  Maybe to the younger crowd depending on their appetite. There is certainly nothing PG rated or above in this book and in that space, I suppose its a fine read.  Is this a young adult book that passes muster for a wider audience?  Not in my opinion. Rating:  #5 Good Enough

#7-Eh Barton won a Pulitzer Prize for some other book she wrote...I don't see a Pulitzer in her future for this one.  Was it well written?  There were no obvious flaws in the actual writing.  Did I like the story?  I found the story and the characters...forgettable?  The backbone of the story, and it seemed to me the whole reason for its having been written, was to showcase the bond between a mother and her daughter and I found this part of it believable.  But the circumstances of the main character seemed designed solely to create a situation in which this relationship could be exploited, which I found distracting.  On the other hand, I thought the underlying theory was accurate:  sometimes, you just want your mom, and there is literally nothing else that will do.  In her absence, there is just that-an absence.  I don't think it matters if she was a great mom, a terrible mom, an indifferent mom or frankly a cruel mom -I suspect the same longing exists.  (Mine was a great m

So I read this book for the first time many, many, many years ago...like I think I might have been 13 or 14, which scarily enough means it was over 30 years ago (dear god, did I really do that math right?); certainly it was before I went to college.  I may have read it again in the intervening years; I don't really know.  What I do know is that there are certain scenes from this book that have stuck with me since my first reading even to this day.  And I also know that this was one of the books I read that solidified my love for the romance novel...and my equally fervent annoyance at most books in the genre.  Because this one was so well written, the characters so etched in my mind, the land and the story and the love stories  buried in the plot were so palatable that its hard  (dare I say impossible?) to find other books that match up.   I mean, I probably should have started with a Harlequin romance or something and eventually stumbled onto this one instead of reading this one fi

Last summer I read Horse Heaven by Smiley at the beach.  Scorewise, I think I would have given it a #3, Liked It Very Much.  As I was heading to the beach again this month, I thought I'd grab another one of her books.  Plus, it was a Pulitzer Prize winner so I thought, how can I go wrong? Writing-wise, Smiley is a master.  Her descriptions of the land are exquisite, and the way she wraps her words around the characters...wow.  Of the father in the story:  " He was never dwarfed by the landscape-the fields, the buildings, the white pine windbreak were as much my father as if he had grown them and shed them like a husk ."  The land in this book is as much a character as any of the people.  Smiley writes about it with a startling intimacy.  I live in Minnesota, I have spent some time in Iowa, but never would I have been able to describe it the way she does.  She also writes of family relationships with bewildering accuracy.  Between a man and his father-in-law:  " It

This was a powerful book about family-the love that exists and sustains and challenges, the secrets and jealousies that can tear apart.  More importantly, with one exception The Story of Edger Sawtelle is by far the best book I have every read addressing the love between a boy and his dogs (the best being Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls which is to this day unrivaled in that category), or really to state it more broadly between a man and his animals.  If Wroblewski didn't have Big Dan and Little Ann as role models, he managed to channel their spirits anyway.  If you are not up for sorrow and sadness, don't embark on reading this one because it has both in spades.  And, suprisingly, a ghost.  Its also a testament to his writing that the main character was deaf and that was the least important thing about him.  In some ways I'm torn on whether I actually liked the overall book-no spoilers here but I wasn't super happy with the ending.  That said, Wroblewski can