4.5 Stars. Mostly what I took away from this book is humor and grace. Somehow Rick Bragg's first memoir is the last one I've read and I have literally laughed 'til I cried in every one. I've read my family members bits here and there and retold stories I remember and made everyone listening to me laugh too. Maybe they're just [...]
Claire Harris is a New York socialite, throwing extravagant parties and softening up her husband's potential business partners for him. Her past comes back to haunt her one night and she flees to Paris on the eve on the German occupation to find an old lover. Their reunion doesn't go well and she finds herself working in a florist shop and reluctantly assisting the French Resistance. I'm not quite sure what to think. On the one hand, I did enjoy the book. I love almost any WWII novels and this is no exception. On the other hand, it was a bit too romance-y for me. It just couldn't quite make up its mind what it wanted to be. I can overlook romance--who doesn't love a good love story?--but when I'm suddenly hit with "Heat flooded her core," my eyes start rolling in my head and I start turning pages faster. "Can we please just get through this already?" To be fair, there were only a couple of those scenes but that was a couple too many for me. I can't put my finger on any examples of this, but I'm also left with the feeling that it needed one more good proofreading before it was published. It's not bad by any means, it could have just been a little more polished. I knew that the love story was going to center around Claire and Grey from their first meeting, so I did buy it. In retrospect though, I wish that part had been more fleshed out. Well, not that kind of fleshed out, but just the slow, getting-to-know-you part of things. Claire hates him at first, they meet a few times and she starts to change her mind, and then we're to the heated core. Quite a bit of time…
Young orphan Jim Burden is sent from Virginia to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. There is a Bohemian family on the train with him. None of them really speak English. They all get off at the same station in Black Hawk. It turns out that the family has just bought the farm next to Jim's grandparents. Neighbors are still far apart back in 1800s Nebraska but Jim still spends a lot of time with the Shimerda family, especially Ántonia, the oldest girl and closest to his age. As he watches Ántonia grow, he realizes that she has an indomitable spirit and admires her for it. I liked Ántonia. A lot. She's smart, feisty, hard-working, loving, and full of life. As she grew older, I got more worried for her. This is a classic after all. I expected it to take a Thomas Hardy turn. I was pleasantly surprised when it didn't. More than that, Ántonia embodied the American immigrant spirit. Her family starts out living in a dugout, basically a cave dug into the earth. They were comfortable back home in Bohemia so this is an adjustment for them, but rather than complain about it, as her mother does, Ántonia does her best to help raise the family out of that hole in the ground. She has setbacks of course, and people talk about her and her unfamiliar ways, but she just keeps doing what needs to be done. Ántonia lives in the town of Black Hawk for a while and becomes friends with a group of other immigrants. The wider group shows just how much these new settlers have to offer the country. Some become successful businesswomen, others become farm wives, some are content to just keep working in hotels and laundries. They all make some kind of…
Rory Stewart walked through India, Pakistan and Nepal in 2002, a time that was very unstable given the events of 2001 and the subsequent war. He decided that he wanted to walk through the heart of Afghanistan as well. He met with a lot of bureaucracy, but he was eventually given permission to undertake his journey on the condition that several soldiers accompany him. He sets out across Afghanistan in winter, towering mountains and layers of snow between him and his final destination of Kabul. I was a little disappointed in this and I'm having a hard time putting my finger on why, exactly. I think I expected more interaction with people? He's on foot and relies on the kindness of strangers for shelter and food. It's not like there are Holiday Inns on every street corner in Afghanistan. Heck, for that matter, there aren't even any streets to form corners in the rural areas he travels through. Just spending a night or two in one place, I felt like I didn't get a good sense of what the average people were really like. Which is kind of stupid to say. People are people. Afghans are like people everywhere--mean or kind, religious or not, apathetic or passionate. The one thing they are is crushingly poor. The country has been at war for so long, and I believe there's been a terrible drought that has dried up everything, so there's no chance to grow crops or lead a normal life. Anyway, I guess I didn't get a feel for what an average day in the life of an average Afghan is really like. Mr. Stewart mostly saw other people at night, when they'd settled in the house for what little dinner they could scrape together. What do they do with their…
Jess, his mom, dad, grandmother and farmhand/adoptive brother, Johnson, live a quiet life in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. They farm, visit with relatives, play some baseball, and get up to a whole lot of no good, as my grandmother would say. Jess's dad is a mischief-maker. He just can't help it. Johnson and Jess adore him and follow his lead in everything. Whether it's Halloween tricks or trying to find out exactly how long Uncle Gurton's beard really is, they are always up to something. I laughed so hard reading this! My poor husband might as well have read it with me; I read all the good parts out loud to him anyway, and they were all good parts. He's not much of a reader and it just blows his mind when I start guffawing out of the blue at something I've read, but even he let out a few chuckles as I read to him. I read and enjoyed Brighten the Corner Where You Are by this author several years ago. It was funny and then all of a sudden it had this serious message. It was also written from a child's point of view, so the kid's missing what's going on but the older reader really sees it. Well played, Mr. Chappell. I waited for something to come out and hit me in this book too. It didn't really happen. There was a bit in there about the cost of war, and I guess you could even say something about what soldiers in WWII were fighting to protect, but mostly this felt like a bunch of good family stories of the sort that tend to take on a life of their own. I feel like I write this every time I read a well-written book…
Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality has taken boys on board and is heading to London. Sophronia knows that something is afoot, if she can only figure out just what it is. Someone seems to be determined to kidnap Dimity and her brother (What is his name? I can't be bothered to look it up just at this moment), and Sophronia's friends aren't speaking to her. Hmmm...I loved this while I was reading it and laughed my way through several parts, even going so far as to read them to my husband. But now that I'm sitting down to write my review a couple of weeks later, I find that I've forgotten most of the book. I'm going to knock it back a star. I think it's fallen prey to the "filler" curse. How often does book two of a series only feel like filler? Entirely too often for my taste. The book was as witty and charming as I expect Gail Carriger's books to be. I loved that Lord Akeldama finally made an appearance. He will eat Sophronia up! Hopefully not intentionally. I actually enjoyed the triangle that is forming between Sophronia, spoiled Lord Felix, and down-to-earth Soap. I'm Team Soap all the way! I fear that it's a doomed relationship before it even gets started though. The whole thing with the other girls shunning Sophronia felt very forced. She's a smart girl and she should have realized what was going on. I guess sometimes it's hard to see it when you're right in the middle of things though. And I think that's all I have to say about that. I'll definitely continue with the series, I just hope the next installment is a bit stronger. Read an excerpt. Check out my 4-star review of the…
Sophronia Temminick is a tomboy in Victorian England. The youngest of innumerable sisters, she is left alone to pretty much do as she pleases. What pleases her is climbing dumbwaiter shafts, spying on her sisters, and generally acting in ways not becoming to a lady. When she is packed off to finishing school one day, she is not pleased. She quickly realizes this is not just any finishing school. Mademoiselle Geraldine's staff trains young women in "The Fine Art of Finishing Others." These are lessons Sophronia can enjoy. Distraction, poison, espionage, subterfuge--she enjoys it all. But there is a serious plot afoot and one of Sophronia's classmates seems to be at the heart of it. Sophronia is determined that she and her friends will discover the secret. I just adore Gail Carriger's books and her young adult series does not disappoint. Some authors writing YA for the first time will dumb down their writing but Ms. Carriger is most definitely not guilty of that. She writes with all the wit she normally employs, she just happens to be writing about teenagers. I tore through the book, grinning all the way through. I enjoyed seeing a few characters from The Parasol Protectorate in this new series. They're younger and, of course, more inexperienced, which made it all the more entertaining. The forbidding Lady Kingair as an awkward adolescent and the inscrutable Genevieve Lefoux as a mischievous scamp were endearing. Sophronia is every inch the formidable heroine I expected her to be. She's young and makes some mistakes but she's also practically fearless and loyal. She makes friends in unusual places and doesn't seem to have any prejudices. She just takes people as they are. Her friend Dimity is hilarious! Of course there are mean girls in her class and they are…
Soooooo........yeah. I just rated Walden, one of the great American classics, two stars. That probably says more about me than it does about the book, doesn't it? Don't answer that. But here's the thing--well, a few things. 1. I'm not generally an abstract ideas kind of person. I like narrative and stories and characters that come to life for me. Walden has none of these. Obviously. The section that I liked best? Thoreau described a pretty epic battle between some tiny red ants and some big bullying black ants. There were sides and protagonists and bravery and heroism, the agony of defeat, and the high cost of victory. I flew through those few pages. And then I got back to ideas and it was like I'd stepped in quicksand again. 2. I found Thoreau to be great in small, quotable chunks. Page after page? He wore on me. I don't care how much he spent on potatoes, I don't care about his theories about measuring bodies of water, I don't care exactly what day the pond thawed each year. And yet this book has produced quotes that most people will recognize. "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away." “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck…
Sixteen strangers move into a brand-new apartment building next door to the estate of missing, eccentric millionaire, Sam Westing. When Westing turns up dead, the sixteen people are given clues and charged with finding out who killed him. I swear I read this when I was in fifth grade, but I didn't remember a thing about it when I just re-read it. But it was a lot of fun. I had a pretty good idea where the mystery was going, but I really think that as a kid, I would have been stumped. There were all kinds of crazy twists and turns throughout. At first glance, I was a little puzzled as to why this won a Newbery Medal. It's a mystery with some great puzzles involved, but is it really a lasting contribution to children's literature? I was surprised by how much was going on under the surface of this book. The sixteen investigators are partnered up in some unusual ways. They learn to move past some of their prejudices by working with someone they normally would never interact with. Even the young, pretty thing shows us why it's bad to dismissively label someone like that. The only thing that jarred with this message was the serious use of the term Mongoloid. But I guess even that goes to shows that there's always room for us to improve our views of others. I think this quote shows something of what I'm trying to say here: "She meant, you know, that people are so afraid of revealing their true selves, they have to hide behind some sort of prop." Throughout the game, these props are systematically stripped away, and the characters are left to openly be themselves. And the other characters learn to accept them as they are. Don't get…
Kathleen and Joyce are both living on Cape Ann. When they meet, they're both a little lonely and going through some tough times in their lives. Kathleen is facing a breast cancer diagnosis and Joyce has a terrible teenager at home and a mostly-absent husband. They immediately click and become confidantes. I think it says just about everything you need to know when I write that I really never did get the two names straight in my head. They're not even that similar but I had to have context before I could think, "Right. Kathleen=cancer, Joyce=family trouble." The book just felt a little too generic to me. They could be any two women anywhere at just about anytime. And that may be exactly what the author was going for. Anyone who's had this kind of deep, soul-baring friendship may immediately recognize it and love the book. I'm too private for that kind of thing. I'm quiet so I don't have many friends but the ones I do have are truly close friends. I would do anything for them and they would do anything for me. Nobody hears everything though. So this kind of tell-all friendship just leaves me in the dark. Some women will enjoy this book more than others. I didn't really connect with it but if you think you will, give it a try. Read an excerpt. Find author Anita Diamant on her website, her blog, Facebook, and Twitter. Buy Good Harbor at Malaprop’s | Better World Books I have an affiliate relationship with Malaprop's, my local independent bookstore located in beautiful downtown Asheville, NC; and Better World Books. I will receive a small commission at no cost to you if you purchase books through links on my site. My opinions are completely my own.