Coming Soon: Outlander read-a-long

I've been hearing for years now how great the Outlander series is. I think I've tried to read the first book about three times. But every time I failed to get past the first chapter. I just always figured it wasn't the right time for me to read it yet. I guess I was right! Because if I had read it the first time, how would I be able to experience it for the first time with this read a long? 

June 11th - July 23rd I get to read Outlander with a group of amazing bloggers. Lucky for me, they've set up a great schedule breaking the book up into easy to manage chunks and will be doing a series of questions and answers about each chapter. How cool is that?

June 11th – Questions for chapters 1-7 announced at Gone with the Words

June 18th – Questions for chapters 1-7 answered & questions announced for chapters 8-14 at Stalking the Bookshelves

June 25th – Questions for chapters 8-14 answered & questions announced for chapters 15-21 on Tangled up in Blue

July 2nd – Questions for chapters 15-21 answered & questions announced for chapters 22-28 on Into the Hall of Books

July 9th – Questions for chapters 22-28 answered & questions announced for chapters 29-35 on Logan E. Turner

July 16th – Questions for chapters 29-35 answered & questions announced for chapters 36-41 on The Reading Housewives

July 23rd – Questions for chapters 36-41 answered on Gone with the Words. The end.

Want to participate? Click on the icon above to read more and sign up! I'm super excited. :)

I may be crazy...

Book crazy that is.

I go through these phases where I just cannot read enough. There's something so therapeutic about shutting out the real world and escaping into a book. I thoroughly enjoy becoming completely immersed into a characters thoughts and life. So much so, that I am often saddened to finish a book simply because I feel like I am losing my connection with a really good friend.

As you probably can tell, I am going through one of those periods of reading books back to back or even several at a time. I used to never be able to read more than one thing at a time, but now I find myself sometimes keeping one book in my purse, a back up in the car, one in each bathroom and a couple going on my Kindle Fire. To keep from losing interest in a good book or becoming confused about a story line, I'm trying to limit myself to one fiction book at a time.

Right now I am not completely comfortable with my book review skills and that is something that I hope to improve on over time with practice. But I have found recently that I enjoy writing about what I'm reading. Plus I am really forgetful and if I don't write about it right away I won't be able to tell you anything about the book later except for whether I liked it or not.

Oh! I was going to tell you why I am crazy! So over the past week, I've been suffering pretty hard from migraine headaches and today my brain just would not allow me to focus on my current read (The Power of Six (Lorien Legacies)) so instead I started looking for other books to right. That in of itself is a little crazy since my bookshelf currently holds over a hundred unread books from a local book fair I like to frequent twice a year, but I also already have about ten books already checked out from my local library through Overdrive. Since I only have 21 days for each book, I don't want to check out too many at one time. Luckily, they allow me to place books on a wish list. For a couple hours I just browsed around the Overdrive site and various other websites looking for books that seemed interesting. I just checked my list and was startled to find that I had placed 34 books on my wish list. At least next time I need a book I won't have to do much searching!!! Of course this is not to say that I will not happily accept any recommendations you may throw my way!

The Language of Flowers

Victoria Jones is a young woman who grew up shuffled from one foster home to the next with the exception of one woman, Elizabeth, who fought to love and keep her. During their short 15 months together, Elizabeth taught Victoria about flowers and what it's like to be a family. When their little family crumples, Victoria is sent to live in a group home until being emancipated at the age of 18. Her sudden homelessness on her 18th birthday does not improve her distrust and bitterness towards all of humankind. Through Victoria's love of flowers she begins a journey to mend her shattered heart.

The Language of Flowers is a story about mothers and daughters, forgiveness, love and heartache. Vanessa Diffenbaugh weaves a story is equally difficult to read as it is to put down. Her book debut is stunning and realistic.

The back of the book contains a modern dictionary of flowers and their meanings.

I read this book in less than 24 hours, staying up until 3 am to finish it. I felt each characters joys and pains as if they were my own. I highly recommend this book!

Something Missing

 From Amazon:

A career criminal with OCD tendencies and a savant-like genius for bringing order to his crime scenes, Martin considers himself one of the best in the biz. After all, he’s been able to steal from the same people for years on end—virtually undetected. Of course, this could also be attributed to his unique business model—he takes only items that will go unnoticed by the homeowner. After all, who in their right mind would miss a roll of toilet paper here, a half-used bottle of maple syrup there, or even a rarely used piece of china buried deep within a dusty cabinet?

Even though he's never met these homeowners, he's spent hours in their houses, looking through their photo albums and reading their journals. In essence, Martin has developed a friendship of sorts with them and as such, he decides to interfere more in their lives—playing the part of a rather odd guardian angel—even though it means breaking many of his twitchy neurotic rules. 

Along the way Martin not only improves the lives of others, but he also discovers love and finds that his own life is much better lived on the edge (at least some of the time) in this hilarious, suspenseful and often profound novel about a man used to planning every second of his life, suddenly forced to confront chaos and spontaneity.  

Something Missing is a great book. There were many chapters that had me on the edge of my seat and nervous for Martin. I got caught up in the story line right away and found Martin's strict rules for stealing common household items intriguing. I also began to wonder if I was a client with as many times as I've thought to myself "I swore we had one more..." I was slightly paranoid! 

Filled with humor and suspense, Something Missing is a short read that will keep you interested. Check it out! 

Prodigal Summer

From Amazon: Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches the forest from her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and confound her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the complexities of a world neither of them expected.

Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes a green and profligate countryside, these characters find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one part of life on earth.

With the richness that characterizes Barbara Kingsolver's finest work, Prodigal Summer embraces pure thematic originality and demonstrates a balance of narrative and ideas that only an accomplished novelist could render so beautifully.

I'm not going to lie to you, I struggled getting into this book. A friend of mine accurately described the book as "mothy". The entire book is filled with a lot of scientific talk of nature, especially moths. There's also a scene that I won't spoil for you but one of the characters has a dream about a moth that was quite...unusual. Not that I don't also have strange dreams but this one took the cake in my opinion. 


The book focuses on three main characters who never quite intersect. Deanna is a moody middle aged woman living up 'air in the mountain as a forest ranger. I found it hard to understand her constant mood swings. Lusa is a young widow learning to cope not only with the loss of her husband but also trying to find acceptance among her four sister in laws. I found Lusa to be a likable character and would have happily read a book just about her. Lastly, the was Garnett, a retired high school teacher in his 80's. Garnett is as a crotchety old man as they come. Many of the chapters devoted to him had me laughing out loud. 


The personal story lines of Prodigal Summer were enjoyable, they drew me in and left me wondering what happened to each character after the final page was turned. The long winded paragraphs about bugs, birds, wildlife and plants were dry and tedious reading. I found myself skipping ahead to get back to the story. I also found some of it to be preachy. I don't know how many times I needed to hear each character talk about the importance of leaving predators alone and not using pesticides. I wanted to just scream "I heard you the first time lady!"


All in all, I enjoyed the book but don't think I would read anything else by this author unless it was about these characters (I really do want to know what happened to them). I felt that it slowed me down on my reading (I have something like 12 ebooks checked out from Overdrive at the moment) and made me work too hard at paying attention to what was going on rather than just enjoying the story.

Common Sense Media

Take a look at any of the Porky's movies or revisit cult classic Animal House and you'll see that crudeness in movies is not a new thing. I guess as a parent, I am beginning to notice every curse word, crude joke and potty humor in movies and television shows. Sometimes it's obvious that a movie is going to be crude, but other times it's unexpected. Everyone seems to know that Bridesmaids had a lot of crude humor, Friends with Benefits kind of gives it away in the title, but not all movies come with fair warning.

Even children's movies are not safe from adult humor. I was shocked by a scene in Madagascar 2 featuring a very sexual exchange between two hippos. And I didn't even have kids of my own at that point!


 Now as a parent I need to be careful about what my daughter sees and hears. She repeats everything. Honestly, I don't want my kid walking around talking about butts and repeating sexual innuendo.

The most effective way to avoid this would be to sell our televisions and place our daughter in a tower (making sure to keep her hair CUT!!!) to be sure that she was never, ever exposed to this raunchy world that we live in. Many people are actually doing this. We're being told to limit or completely cut our kids off from tv and video games. We're told that television viewing is bad for their health, discourages family time and teaches our children bad values. A friend of mine just enrolled her son into a charter school that tells kids and parents they need to shut down all devices for weeks at a time and report back about their experiences.

I think it's great that so many families are cutting the cord and spending more time together as a family. Really, it's wonderful. However, there are the rest of us who enjoy watching television. But we're still concerned about what our children see and hear.

Ready for my plug? Oh come on, this is a review blog, so you had to know I was fixing to plug something. Sheesh!

Anyway, when I want to watch something while my daughter is awake or we want to watch a movie as a family, I rely on Common Sense Media to help me out. I use their search engine to find the movie of choice and they then tell me everything I need to know about the movie regarding sex, language (even the word butt), violence, role models, etc. Seriously, everything I want to know before viewing with my daughter.

So if you're one of those parents that took their kids on opening weekend to see Cars 2 and got upset about the violence, this website is for you. Find out before you go if a movie is right for your family. Different things bother different people. Some families would think the scene I embedded from Madagascar 2 was funny and that it isn't inappropriate or that the violence in Cars 2 was tame, but other families might be offended or their kids would get scared. Whatever, it's a great website that I highly recommend!

Best Staged Plans

Best Staged Plans

From Amazon:

"As a professional home stager, Sandy Sullivan is an expert at transforming cluttered rooms into attractive houses ready for sale. If only reinventing her life were as easy as choosing the perfect paint color. She’s eager to put her family’s suburban Boston home on the market, to downsize, and to simplify her own life. But she must first deal with her foot-dragging husband and her grown son, who has moved back home after college to inhabit the basement “bat cave.”

After reading them the riot act, Sandy takes a job staging a boutique hotel in Atlanta recently acquired by her best friend’s boyfriend. The good news is that she can spend time with her recently married daughter, Shannon, in Atlanta. The bad news is that Shannon finds herself heading to Boston for job training, leaving Sandy and her southern son-in-law, Chance, as reluctant roommates. If that’s not complicated enough, Sandy begins to suspect that her best friend’s boyfriend may be seeing another woman on the side.

Filled with characters who are fresh and original, yet recognizable enough to live in your neighborhood—plus plenty of great tips and tricks for fixing up houses, and lives—this is a wise and witty story of letting go and moving on.Best Staged Plans is Claire Cook at her most humorous and heartfelt."

I wanted to like this book. So much so that when my 21 days with Overdrive ran out before I had time to read a single line of it (hey! I'm a busy reader and I just checked out too many at once this time!) I checked it back out. Anyhow...

I felt like the book was kind of dragging along. I'm a quick reader and I tend to read 150 or so pages of whatever book at bedtime, more if I'm completely hooked (and not completely exhausted!). But I was reading this one only a chapter at a time. Which is why it took me a couple nights to reach 46%. I know it was 46% because that's what my Kindle Fire told me and also where I quit this book.

Backing up...The plot is basic about this woman who so desperately wants to move out of her family home and into something smaller, something fresh and new. In the process, she will be kicking her grown son out of her basement. Claire Cook switches between dialogue of the main character, Sandy, complaining that her family isn't doing enough to ready the house and flashbacks to when Sandy's children were young and the house was newly theirs. When an opportunity arises for Sandy to head to Atlanta to stage a hotel, she packs her bags (May I note that she does this without discussing the trip and extended stay with her husband. In fact she only tells him when he walks into the bedroom to find her packing.) and heads south.

Arriving in Atlanta she stays with her newlywed daughter, Shannon, and her son-in-law, Chance. For an unexplained reason she seems to despise Chance. She's just short of rude to her son-in-law (though it seems like up to this point she had been bitchy to everyone) with her only excuse being that she doesn't know what her daughter sees in him, though he is nice enough.

Back to way I stopped at 46%. Call me sensitive or defensive if you like. Upon arriving at her daughter's new home (which she also talks trash about), Sandy finds Shannon in the kitchen wearing omg! an apron while cooking dinner. Chance leaves the kitchen to sit in the living room while mother and daughter catch up. When Shannon announces that she needs to iron her husband's work shirt all hell breaks loose. Sandy embarks on a two page tangent on how she raised her daughter better than this, that women fought and died for the rights to equality that Shannon so clearly chooses to throw away, and why on earth did Sandy waste all that money on Shannon's education just to have it wasted. Seriously. All over cooking dinner for her mother's arrival, wearing an apron...to protect her clothes, and ironing her husband's shirt. Seriously. Oh but wait, Mom wearing just joshing you! Hahahahahahahaha CLICK, I am so beyond done with this book.

As I said, maybe I'm defensive but this just grated on my nerves. While yes I am a stay at home mom, my husband and I share responsibilities in the home. We did this before kids, before I left the work force and will continue to do it. I do wifey things for him, but he helps me with things as well. But even if I did all the "wife" duties, that doesn't make me a slave for my husband nor does it throw away women's rights. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing household things...besides someone has to do it right? What is Chance is a terrible at ironing? I know I am! What got me the most was when Sandy's blood boils over the whole thing. Why is it so terrible that her daughter did this one thing?

Anyway, this book was dry and in my case offensive. I wasn't very into it to begin with, but that whole thing just ended it for me. The cover was very pretty though. ;)