Eve's Christmas - Janet Dailey

Rating: 2 Drink more Mint Juleps before reading (åå)

Pages: 317

Challenges: None

Synopsis

Eve is a free-lance music teacher living in a small town with her parents. She runs into Luck McClure who is commiserating the loss of his wife (6 years ago) in a bottle of alcohol. He grabs her in his arms and calls her a brown mouse. Later they meet again when Luck accidentally throws a ball through her car windshield. Luck doesn't remember who Eve is though he does remember seeing a brown mouse during his drunken stupor. Eve rekindles Luck's heart and he actively pursues her. Eve on the other hand is full of insecurities and questions his feelings. Will their relationship advance beyond casual acquaintances?

Review

I thought this book was ok. I got a little frustrated with all of Eve's insecurities and just wished at times she would enjoy the moment (which is a good lesson for me!). I especially enjoyed the snowing scenes and when Luck and Eve were snowed in. I used to live in Illinois and we would get snowed in frequently. Here in Kentucky when it snows it is best to stay in because snow removal teams are not very experience nor are people driving...but as for being snowed in we rarely get enough snow. :( Bummer. And if we do get snow -no worries it will have melted with in a week! I would like a couple of good snow days a year! The other thing I liked about this book is that Eve's Mom is a baker and loves baking at the holidays...so do I. But I have forgone baking this year in favor of a health baby. My gestational diabetes keeps me from eating sweets and let me tell you I CAN'T make them and not try them! LOL! So I have decided not to bake this year...instead I am cleaning and organizing the house to get our small 2 bedroom condo ready for another baby. I guess that is a good exchange!

I do like Janet Dailey but have enjoyed some of her other books much better, for example the Calder Pride series.

Gestational Diabetes - What to Expect

Rate: 2 Drink more Mint Juleps before reading (åå)

Pages: 72

Challenges: None

Yes I have been diagnosed with Gestational Diabetes sadly from the 1 hour test. It was so bad that I didn't even have the option of taking the 3 hour test. I guess that could be a blessing too. What this means is essentially I can have NO sweets and very little carbs/starches. I can have 6 starches a day, which is about 90 grams of carbs. After playing with my diet for 2 weeks and cutting carbs I seem to have gotten my blood sugars under control - Yeah!! Although I still have bad days where it seems my hormones are high. :) But I haven't had to go on insulin yet which is great. My diet though is essentially Atkins - lots of meats and fats!

Anyone have any good Atkins or low carb recipes?? I am all for them!!

Review

This book is good for the basics and I would recommend it to someone who has just been diagnosed. Probably a little too basic for people who have been dealing with diabetes for a few weeks. Although I did learn about the different type of insulin's and some effects diabetes may have on the baby, so that was helpful.

By the way - I don't know how people on Atkins stay on the diet...If there wasn't a baby dependent on me I would have completely fallen off the wagon MANY times...actually every time I see a dessert or a roll!

There's No Place Like Here - Cecelia Ahern

Rating: 2 Drink more Mint Juleps before reading (åå)
Pages: 340
Challenges: Chick Lit, Summer Reading Thing


Synopsis (from BN.com)
Lost and found People disappear every day, some because they choose to leave their old lives behind, and some for more unpleasant reasons. Things, too, disappear: mittens and cell phones, wallets and luggage. In every case, someone is left behind; someone is left to wonder what happened.

Ever since her classmate Jenny-May vanished when they were ten years old, Sandy Shortt has been obsessed with finding things. Now grown, Sandy's obsession has become a calling, with her own agency devoted to locating missing persons. But with every failed case, Sandy is plagued with questions: Where do missing people go? Are they alive or dead? Did they intend to disappear, or did they suffer some cruel fate? As these questions threaten to consume her, Sandy suddenly finds that she, herself, has disappeared, and that she has found all the answers she's always searched for in a magical place where all lost things and people go.

A romance that explores the meaning of loss and love, There's No Place Like Here is Cecelia Ahern's most satisfying, most inspired, most entrancing novel yet.

Review
I did not like this book at all. I thought it was slow and at some points very confusing whose perspective the story was being told from (I listened to it on CD). I didn't like the story concept that there is this black hole - a mysterious world where missing things/people go. For some reason Sandy found herself here. They don't explain how or why and then mysteriously leaves with no explanation of how and why. Just weird. This is classified as Chick Lit, but it's not what my impression of Chick Lit is. Has anyone else read this? What do you think?

I have PS I Love you in a challenge and I am hoping that it is better!

Harvesting the Heart - Jodi Picoult

Rating: 2 Drink more Mint Juleps before reading (åå)
Pages: 464
Challenges: Summer Reading Thing, Reading Full Circle Challenge

Synopsis (from BN.com)
Paige has only a few vivid memories of her mother, who left when she was five. Now, having left her father behind in Chicago for dreams of art school and marriage to an ambitious young doctor, she finds herself with a child of her own. But her mother's absence, and shameful memories of her past, make her doubt both her maternal ability and her sense of self worth.


Review
I really like Jodi Picoult books but I struggled with this one. I had a hard time with first I cannot believe that a child who was abandoned would abandoned her own. OK she just left for a while, but when she left she didn't have any intent on coming back. Second, she seemed to have very little anger against her mother for leaving her. I just really struggled with Paige and didn't believe she would react the way that she did. Also I struggled with her as a mother leaving her child. So needless to say I struggled a lot with this book but FINALLY finished it. If you are interested in Picoult I would start with Salem Falls and skip this one!

First Among Sequels (Thursday Next) - Jasper Fforde

Rating: Don’t bet on this one…wait for the movie (···)

Pages: 363
Challenges: Once Upon a Time II

Synopsis (from BN.com)
Jasper Fforde returns to BookWorld in this New York Times bestselling installment of his Thursday Next series Jasper Fforde has thrilled readers everywhere with his gloriously outlandish novels in the Thursday Next and Nursery Crime series. Now, after a two-year hiatus, the demand for Thursday Next has more than tripled. And with Thursday Next: First Among Sequels, Fforde's famous literary detective is once again ready to make the world safe for fiction. Thursday Next is grappling with a host of problems in BookWorld: a recalcitrant new apprentice, the death of Sherlock Holmes, and the inexplicable departure of comedy from the once-hilarious Thomas Hardy novels, to name just a few—all while captaining the ship Moral Dilemma and facing down her most vicious enemy yet: herself.

Review
I have really enjoyed this series but this was my least favorite book. I was distracted when listening to this book so that may be part of it. Also I thought this book was confusing in parts there are 3 Thursdays so sometimes it was hard to keep track of them.

The Book of Lost Things - John Connolly

Rating: 2 Drink more Mint Juleps before reading (åå)

Pages: 480

Challenges: Once Upon a Time, tl;dr

Synopsis (From BN.com)
High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the death of his mother, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness. Angry and alone, he takes refuge in his imagination and soon finds that reality and fantasy have begun to meld. While his family falls apart around him, David is violently propelled into a world that is a strange reflection of his own -- populatedby heroes and monsters and ruled by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a mysterious book, The Book of Lost Things.
Taking readers on a vivid journey through the loss of innocence into adulthood and beyond, New York Times bestselling author John Connolly tells a dark and compelling tale that reminds us of the enduring power of stories in our lives.

Review

I can summarize this book by saying it is the Wizard of Oz in a forest with side aventures through off-kilter fairy tales. For example, Snow White calls the dwarfs by number. She has lost her beauty and is very demanding. The dwarfs are praying for a prince to take her off their hands. I thought it was pretty gory and graphic for a young adult book. It did keep my interest though!

Dewey has also finished this book recently and her review is here she really liked the book.

Little House in the Big Woods - Laura Ingalls Wilder

Rating: 2 Drink more Mint Juleps before reading (åå)

Pages: 238

Challenges: First in a Series, Novella Challenge

Synopsis

This is the first book in the Little House in the Woods series. You might remember the show with Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert. ;) Here they live close to their family and get help harvesting, they eat Sugar Snow (living in Minnesota they make Maple Syrup from the trees and put it on the snow). There were lots of fun little stories in this book. In fact I felt more like it was a collection of short stories than a book, which is OK.

Review

I didn't like the book a lot. I listened to it on audio and I had a few problems with it on Audio. First off how can you read the book and not imagine Melissa Gilbert as Laura. Secondly the voice on the audio was clearly a mature woman - I would have expected someone who could sound like a young girl. I think that I would enjoy this series in a few years reading it with my daughter - from the books! It will be fun sharing the stories with her and seeing her face as she listens to the stories. I do think it is appropriate for young children, since no big traumas happened in the book (i.e. no violence, death or relationship actions that need to be explained). Also because it seems more like short stories it would be a good book to read a chapter at a time. It wasn't a bad book I just didn't enjoy it for the time and place that I am now.

Drums of Change - Janette Oke

Rating:2 Drink more Mint Juleps before reading (åå)

Pages: 240

Challenge: Reading Full Circle, Novella Challenge, A-Z Challenge (D Title)

Synopsis (from BN.com)
A young Indian girl must make a choice between the old ways of her people, the man she loves, and the white man's religion.

Comment

I just had to put in the Barnes & Nobel synopsis. Talk about summarizing a book in one sentence! I didn't think this book was excellent but I can think of more than one sentence...so here goes

My Synopsis

Running Fawn (notice I took on the challenge of using the character's name in the synopsis...just to prove I have read the book) and her Indian Tribe are at a pivotal point for their generation. The Indian Tribe is going through a transition to live on the White Man's Indian Reserve (after the Buffalo was eliminated and their food source was completely gone). A White man (the tribe calls him "Man with book") joins the tribe to teach them the Gospel. He starts a school and takes a special interest in Running Fawn and Silver Fox (the Chief's son). After the school has to disband Man with book convinces the tribe to let Running Fawn and Silver Fox to a boarding school to learn the ways of the white man. When Running Fawn learns her father is ill she leaves the school to meet up with the tribe. Silver Fox realizing she is in trouble follows her to help her make it to the tribe. This book has a little Christian inspiration, a little history, and a little romance.

Review

Although the book has a little of the topics it is very little. The concept is good and there are some American Indian books that I have loved, but this one missed the mark. I think that there were a lot of different parts of the history that could have been explored and the romance happened in the last chapter of the book. If you want to read Jannette Oke I would recommend Love Comes Softly.

By the way- was my synopsis better than B&N?

Blue Moon - Luanne Rice

Rating: 2 Drink more Mint Juleps before reading (åå)

Challenge: Themed Reading, Spring Thing, Reading Full Circle

Publishers Weekly (From BN.com)
Though its setting is quite different, this highly readable, richly detailed slice of life offers the same absorbing vision of a single family in a particular time and place as do Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicles. Set in a Rhode Island fishing village-cum-resort town, the narrative focuses not on the upper-middle-class, white collar characters that Rice has heretofore brought to life in such well-reviewed novels as Crazy in Love and Secrets of Paris , but on a family of hardworking restaurateurs. The action revolves around Cass Keating Medieros, the youngest granddaughter of Sheila and Eddie Keating, founders of the family's successful restaurant, Lobsterville. Though Cass and her fisherman husband Billy have been ``madly in love since eighth grade, and proud of it,'' their marriage has begun to show the strain of caring for their partially deaf daughter Josie. Meanwhile, their teenaged son is experiencing his own first grand passion; their nephew dabbles in Satan worship; and Cass's embittered sister Nora blossoms when romance unexpectedly comes her way. These and other engaging subplots keep the narrative sailing briskly along; frisky sex scenes are another plus. A dangerous sea storm clears the decks for this multigenerational saga's unabashedly teary and heartwarming resolution. Rice writes with assurance and is particularly adept at illuminating the inner lives of the novel's youngest characters. 35,000 first printing; Literary Guild selection; author tour. (Sept.)

Review

I was really disappointed in this book. I kept thinking it would get better or there would be something that happened, but not until the last few chapters was there a conflict. Now the question is why did I continue a book that nothing happened in? I don't know. I wasn't committed to finding out what happened to the characters or anything, so I don't know why I kept up with it. I guess I need to get better at giving books up! Also I listened to this on audio and am wondering why on a book with a majority of female characters was a man picked to narrate? Seems odd...

Has anyone else read Luanne Rice? I am not sure if I will read any of her other books (unless some of you have some good reviews).

Seven Loves - Valerie Trueblood

Rating: 2 Drink more Mint Juleps before reading (åå)

Pages: 232

Synopsis (from BN.com)
Who most deeply affects our lives? Sometimes it is those who touch us briefly, even unexpectedly. For May Nilsson, these include the lover she takes in her forties; the handsome, troubled young rebel she is determined to rescue; the police officer who inadvertently plays a major role in her greatest catastrophe. Moving back and forth in time, from May's childhood to her eighth decade, SEVEN LOVES weaves together the strands of an ordinary life made extraordinary by the complex passions that drive it.

This book has 4 stars at BN. I am not sure why...although I think it would be a good discussion book for a book club. I think the ones that you like typically are good discussions. This book was very disjointed. The concept that it was about the 7 great loves May had.

Here are the problems I had with this book:

#1 - she had a woman at work who she had a crush on as one of her great loves but neither of her daughters! Hello???!! Are you serious?

#2 One of the people she loved was a man who I don't beleive she ever talked to...he was an aide in the nursing home she was in. I can understand this more than the woman, but still no daughters! On some level for the story I guess the daughters would have told a similar story but then please don't call it Seven Loves...ok - I am moving on...

#3 I had a hard time following the characters in the book because it was very disjointed. I couldn't remember who characters were and when things happened because it jumped around so much.

#4 Affairs. I am scared to think affairs may start the way the author discribed. May liked a man at a conference and sat down with him and had a drink. Before they knew it they were in an affair. Do affairs really start like that? One day you are monomgomous and then next day not? With so little thought. I guess I would have like to have seen her give some thought to the affair and how it would effect her family.

...as you can see this would be a good discussion.

There is a quote in the reading guide from Trueblood where she said in an interview, "she is a bit of an anti-plot, because of the 'contained arc: the beginning, the complication, and the resolution. Novels like that, I just don't believe. It's hard for me to see that things really could ever be tied up with a resolution.'" I am not sure that things always can be tied up with a resolution...but you are telling a story...please tell it in a way that people can follow it!

The best thing that I can say is...It's OVER!! :)

The Widow of the South - Robert Hicks

Rating 2 Drink more Mint Juleps before reading (åå)
Pages 448 (Audio)

Synopsis (from BN.com)
In 1894 Carrie McGavock is an old woman who has only her former slave to keep her company…and the almost 1,500 soldiers buried in her backyard. Years before, rather than let someone plow over the field where these young men had been buried, Carrie dug them up and reburied them in her own personal cemetery. Now, as she walks the rows of the dead, an old soldier appears. It is the man she met on the day of the battle that changed everything. The man who came to her house as a wounded soldier and left with her heart. He asks if the cemetery has room for one more.
In an extraordinary debut novel, based on a remarkable true story, Robert Hicks draws an unforgettable, panoramic portrait of a woman who, through love and loss, found a cause. Known throughout the country as "the Widow of the South," Carrie McGavock gave her heart first to a stranger, then to a tract of hallowed ground-and became a symbol of a nation's soul.
The novel flashes back thirty years to the afternoon of the Battle of Franklin, five of the bloodiest hours of the Civil War. There were 9,200 casualties that fateful day. Carrie's home -- the Carnton plantation -- was taken over by the Confederate army and turned into a hospital; four generals lay dead on her back porch; the pile of amputated limbs rose as tall as the smoke house. And when a wounded soldier named Zachariah Cashwell arrived and awakened feelings she had thought long dead, Carrie found herself inexplicably drawn to him despite the boundaries of class and decorum. The story that ensues between Carrie and Cashwell is just as unforgettable as the battle from which it is drawn.
The Widow of the South is a brilliant novel that captures the end of an era, the vast madness of war, and the courage of a remarkable woman to claim life from the grasp of death itself.

I didn't really like this book much. It was sad and depressing and not much happened, believe it or not in the middle of the Civil War. It was slow and dark. I don't recommend this book and probably won't read more by this author.

The Dress Lodger – Sheri Holman

Type: Fiction
Rating: åå
Pgs 320

Synopsis
In Sunderland, England, a city quarantined by the cholera epidemic of 1831, a defiant, fifteen-teen-year old beauty in an elegant blue dress makes her way between shadow and lamp light. A potter's assistant by day and dress lodger by night, Gustine sells herself for necessity in a rented gown, scrimping to feed and protect her only love: her fragile baby boy. She holds a glimmer of hope after meeting Dr. Henry Chiver, a prisoner of his own dark past. But in a world where suspicion of medicine runs rampant like a fever, these two lost souls will become irrevocably linked, as each crosses lines between rich and destitute, decorum and abandon, damnation and salvation. By turns tender and horrifying, The Dress Lodger is a captivating historical thriller charged with a distinctly modern voice. . . . (From BN.com)

What led you to pick up this book? It has been on my reading list for a while and then I found it at the ½ price book store.

Summarize the plot, but don’t give away the ending! It is the story of Gustine who is part of the poor in Gustine, where she is a Dress Lodger – a person who wears a dress to earn money as a prostitute. The owner of the dress takes a cut of the money and has her followed by “the Eye” who watches the dress. Gustine also has a baby who needs medical treatment. To gain favor with a Doctor she helps him obtain dead bodies to perform cadaver studies on hoping in return he will cure her son. During all of this cholera epidemic hits.

What did you like most about the book? I liked that the ending summarized what happens to all the characters.

What did you like least? The first thing is that it was difficult to determine who was telling the story. Sometimes it was dead people and at one point it was the cholera disease itself. Also there were some plots that I don’t think added much to the book (i.e. the theatre about cholera and the actors of the theatre specifically).

Have you read any other books by this author? What did you think of those books? Yes, Mammoth Cheese . I didn’t record it in my book journal, but from what I remember I liked it better than this one.

What did you think of the main character? I liked her. She wanted the best for her son, even though she had very little to offer. She worked hard and was smart to figure out ways to get the things that she wanted even though she was poor.

Share a favorite scene from the book. I liked the change in the relationship between Gustine and the eye. I also liked the scenes with Gustine and her son.

I didn’t really like this book very much. I had a hard time finishing it and it was quite depressing. It is a unique idea and there were plot surprises which I like.