Gone

Gone by Michael Grant is the first book in YA/Sci-Fi/Horror series that will keep you up at night. First, because it's difficult to put down and secondly, because it's hard to shake the images this book creates.

One second, everything is normal. Kids are in school while their parents work or take care of younger children. Then in the blink of an eye, everyone 15 and over disappears. Gone.

Suddenly these children are left alone to deal with some very adult situations. If that wasn't enough, some of them are beginning to develop some strange powers and frightening animal mutations are starting to appear.

Gone is a nail biting, edge of your seat kind of book. It's disturbing without being overly gruesome. It's frightening without inducing too many nightmares. And there's just a touch of romance, but not too much.

Oh, by the way...I did not appreciate R.E.M's It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) being referred to as an "old" song. Even if it was recorded in 1987 and well before the characters of this book were born. It makes me feel old, ok? So just stop it!

Wonder

Wonder by R.J. Palacio is a story about ten year old August Pullman, a boy with rare and severe facial deformities. August has been homeschooled his entire life to accommodate his many surgeries. Now he is embarking a new journey, entering middle school!

This was a book club read for a local group. They tend to pick some downer books and my expectations for this one were not high. However, I was surprised to find a book the was uplifting and completely inspiring. I wanted to jump into the book and just hug Auggie! I won't give anything away, but this book left me teary. I thoroughly enjoyed cheering August Pullman on throughout this book. A must read!

The Power of Six, 365 better each day, and Winning by Losing

I haven't been reading much the last week what with dealing with a three week long migraine. I found it's a little hard to focus on the words when I'm half blind with pain. 

 The Power of Six is the second in the I am Number Four series. Because of my lack of competent thinking at the moment, I'm just going to tell you what I thought of it.

The series itself, while predictable sci-fi/alien/young adult fiction, is an enjoyable easy read. The Power of Six by itself was a little disappointing to me. It wasn't that the story wasn't good or the writing was bad, it's just that it was a middle book, if that makes sense. See this is where my migraine has me go on random tangents!

The book starts where the first book left off and had no real ending. It wasn't even so much a cliff ending to me, but rather just an abrupt ending. There was no closure whatsoever and it just left me feeling like there were chapters missing.

Now I know this is supposed to make me rush out and buy the next book to find out what happens next, but really I just felt like I had wasted my time. Sure I got to meet some new characters and see a little character  development with the previous people, but I just felt like this book was a series of random dialog and fights. I mean, several chapters were of the Numbers just kind of sitting around waiting to happen. And then when danger did present itself, it seemed fairly easy to handle. Not that they didn't struggle, but it just seemed like no big deal.

All in all, if you like the first book, you have to finish the rest, otherwise it's just a waste. It's an enjoyable time wasting read...but still wasteful.




This book had a lot of great ideas, however most of it could be found from just about any magazine on the racks for women.  Lot of it was also common sense, like go outside and listen to music that makes you happy. I had this as a 21 day check out from the library so I didn't have the time to read one a day as I had wanted. Reading a few "days" at a time, the tips started to become a little repetitive. I think it would have been a bit better if the book had been sorted by topic instead of randomly flipping back and forth between weight loss and depression. Overall, many of the tips were interesting and helpful. Actually, I would have liked to see this as a one a day desk calendar rather than in book form.

Unfortunately, my checkout of Winning by Losing expired before I was able to finish reading it, though I did put it on hold for the next available copy.

Going into this book I was expecting...I don't know, Jillian to be mean and yell at me or something. What I found instead was a good break down of really useful weight loss information.

Now I know what you're thinking, rapid weight loss is not healthy. Well! She actually only promotes 1-2 pounds of weight loss per week and the advice in the book is the as what you would find from other sources.

But like I said, I was unable to finish the book due to time constraints. I just have not reached a point where I am able to devote 100% of my reading time to non-fiction or in this case self-help. Anyway, once I have finished the book, I will be soon to update on what I thought of this book.

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.

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. ;)

Water for Elephants

"As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just shy of a degree, he was put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It was there that he met Marlena, the beautiful equestrian star married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. And he met Rosie, an untrainable elephant who was the great gray hope for this third-rate traveling show. The bond that grew among this unlikely trio was one of love and trust, and, ultimately, it was their only hope for survival."

I just couldn't put this book down. I stayed up until almost 2 am finishing Water for Elephants. 


Gruen has an amazing talent for painting a picture in my mind. I felt as though I was in the book and watching everything take place. To be able to clearly see in my mind a circus act performed was incredible. Each and every step was viewed in my mind rather than just the general idea that a performance was taking place.


I finished the book torn between wanting to go to a circus (I've never been) and wanting to boycott them for past offenses, though I'm sure things are much better these days. 


Great book, must read!

I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas

I downloaded I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas expecting a humorous, cynical read about Christmas. Bah hum bug.

What you get instead of constant humor is a lesson in humanity. Black doesn't claim to be perfect, he admits many faults throughout this book. Black walks us through a typical holiday season from his perspective from Thanksgiving through Christmas. While his view of the commercial Christmas is negative, he celebrates Christmas day with friends and by donating to various charities. Black sets a good example even though he admits that he could never possibly do or give enough.

With the stage and microphone stripped away, we are left with a man who has fought to get where he is today. A man who is not without regrets. When you take away the humor, we're left with a man who had a brush with marriage and fatherhood.

I did get a chuckle or two from this book but I felt more sobered by Black's book than tickled. I didn't walk away from this book hating Christmas but rather inspired to do more for others.