Sweeter than your average Christmas candy, and a treat that is sure to make cat lovers laugh out loud, The Nine Lives of Christmas is truly a spirit-of-the-season type read. I usually don't read much romance, but I couldn't resist the allure of a matchmaking orange tom cat with one torn little ear who finds a home for himself and a love for the guy he's decided to adopt by Christmastime.
It's amazing what one little furball can do when he puts his mind to it. Ambrose the cat is by far my favourite character in the book, and anyone who has known and loved a cat will recognize and laugh at his little quirks, from his terror of the Santa monster to his random pouting, refusal to eat period to his climbing up the Christmas tree... even that tell-tale little tail wriggle.
I wanted something sweet and Christmasy and light, something fun to read and that would put me in a good mood for the season. This filled that perfectly. It's not academic fare. It doesn't have deeper messages or an underlying truth, but man, is it ever fun.
Irrepressible Flavia de Luce, the young slueth, chemist, and poisoner-wanna-be, resident of the country house of Buckshore along with her two sisters, the bookworm and the beauty and her widowed father, along with the housekeeper who can't cook and the houseman damaged from the war, returns with aplomb in this mystery set in the post WWII British countryside.
Personally, I adore Flavia. I love her attitude and fearlessness, though as a child I was much more akin to her bookish sister. I love her love for solving crimes that occur in her small town of Bishop's Lacey. I love her for knowing every inch of her hometown library, and for naming her bicycle Gladys, and for the frightening experiments she cooks up in her upstairs labratory.
In this installment, a travelling puppet show has come to Bishop's Lacey, and of course Flavia gets involved. When a dead body appears on the stage mid-performance, she takes on the task of unravelling the mystery as well as tying it to an unsolved crime five years in the passing that had been passed off as death by misadventure at the time. With several twists, turns, and the odd red herring thrown in for good measure, it's a satisfying mystery with fantastic historic touches and a heroine you can't help but adore.
Excellent mystery in the form of an amnesiac's diary. Every night when Christine goes to sleep, she loses her memory. When she wakes in the morning, next to a man she doesn't recognize, she has to spend the majority of her time re-learning who she is and what her place in the world might be.
I absolutely loved the style of this book. The pacing was excellent, just enough jumps and freak-outs far enough apart to keep you guessing. And me, who often guesses the true "bad guy" before the end, was right... but in such a wrong way - I love it when authors can surprise me like S.J. Watson did with this exquisite take on marriage, love, memory and identity.
Grace's husband is prone to disappearing for short stints, so when he doesn't come home as expected, she doesn't think much of it. She is used to lying for him, and covering for him, and so she does so for a day. Then another. Then a week. Then another.
Her denial is thick enough that she can't even face the fact that people are seeing through her denial. That she continues to lie to her parents, to her friends, to herself, even when it's reached an absurd level. When do you say enough is enough? When do you admit that the lies you have been telling are more for yourself than for anyone you think you're helping or sparing?
Interesting story, though I was increasingly angry through the book with the inclusion of crochet as a theme without much knowledge or research done on the part of the writer or editors. What happened to fact checking, hm? Whoever wrote about "dropping a loop" here or there had heard a knitter talk and didn't understand that the term doesn't translate to crochet work. Also, if you work in chain stitch for hours, you don't end up with a four foot by two foot piece of crochet work. You end up with a very skinny rope.
While I liked the rest of the book, this had me so disconcerted that it dropped a full star from my rating.
Interesting story about a girl going missing in a small town and all of the lives that are affected by her abscence, from former-doctor organic farmers with a teen daughter of their own, to the journalist who thinks if she just examines everything more carefully she will be able to save her to the good ole boy sherriff who refuses to believe that anyone in his town could possibly be responsible.
This book suffers a bit here and there from constant time shifts, past to present to past, mainly because the shifts back don't go to one particular place, but all over the place, and only in a semi-linear fashion. I got lost several times as to where I was in time, and I'm not a stupid reader by any means. Other than that it was a great read with some edgy moments and suspenseful bits.
What a fun ride this book was! I love YA books that are written like this one; smart and funny, appealing and approachable, and above all so very, very entertaining.
Xander, his parents, and his two younger siblings have recently relocated due to his father's new job, as principal of the middle and high school of a small town in northern California. He has to leave behind his fledgling short film career, his girlfriend, and all of the fun things he loves about southern California. But the very cool, gothic victorian 7-bedroom mansion his family finds for a steal, off the beaten path and with a mystery surrounding it might cure his homesickness.
There are rumors about the house; a wife was presumed murdered by her husband, who then vanished with his two small children to flee prosecution. Dirty dishes were left in the sink, books on the shelves, sheets on the beds. Decades of dust accumulated, along with other things that cause strange noises, not just the creaks and groans of your average old house, but eerie echoes and footsteps out of nowhere.
I won't give away any of the surprises and mysteries that Xander and his family discovers, but I will tell you that you'll be on the edge of your seat til the last page - and probably will stay that way! I'm getting ready to start book two in the series very, very soon!
Inside the rich landscape of the mind, there are beautiful and terrible things. Especially so when that mind, once the highly honed tool of a skilled physician, is now riddled with the holes and dark spots of Alzheimer's.
Turn of Mind takes you inside the head of Dr. Jennifer White, once a proud orthopaedic surgeon and mother of two, wife of a prominent defense attorney. Sometimes she is in the now. Sometimes she is among the vestiges of a happy childhood. Sometimes she is lost in days gone by of her marriage. But there is something very important that she is being pressed to remember by some, forget by others; the murder of her best friend.
Seeing through Jennifer's eyes is scary, at least for me. Dementia has touched my family among my grandparent's generation and none of us came out completely unscathed. One of my greatest fears is to lose myself in such a way. Still, it seems to have it's comforts at times, when she spends time with her parents, for example, seeing them as though they were still there.
The crux of this story is the question of how far a mother will go to protect her family, and what secrets she can still manage to lock inside of herself even when struggling with a disease of the mind. It is both heartfelt and touching, as well as scary and profoundly interesting.
I've read quite a few novels where a Jane Austen fan gets somehow magically transported into the age/world of the writer, finally able to experience and judge for herself the intricacies of the manners, the confining nature of the beautiful gowns, and the difficult manuevering through relationships of the time. I kind of thought this was another of those books when I grabbed it.
And it is, sort of. But surprisingly enough, the transported fan from today is not the focus of the story. Instead, our protagonist is the woman from Auten's time who is moved forward to inhabit the body of the fan sent back. And what a perplexing world to fall into with cell phones and internet and Pride and Prejudice on DVD. She has to navigate through a world where cars race at speeds she'd never imagined, where waking up with a man in her apartment is - strangely to her - not a horrible affront to her friends. It is our world, familiar as it is to us, and it is completely foreign to her.
Watching a reader navigate a strange world is what I expected, but this particular version of it makes me realize just how far our world has come, and how equally difficult it would be for a woman of the past to come to terms with today's life. Not to mention that the life she is saddled with isn't an easy one. The bills are due, overdue in some cases, and the only shot at income is at a job she can't fathom for a boss who is rude and impatient at the best of times. Her wedding has recently been called off, due to her fiance cheating on her, though he seems determined to sleep with her again, just for fun. And to top it all off, her best male friend and she are adrift. In order to get back to her own life, she believes she has to set this one in order. But once things are working, will she *want* to leave?
Fun, distracting read for Austen fans and chicklit fans alike.
Lovely portrayal of the multiple women involved in bringing one small child into the world. There is the fresh-faced college student, selling her eggs to try to save someone she loves. There is the struggling military wife and mother, desperately trying to make ends meet by agreeing to leasing her womb as a temporary home for the child. There is the wealthy trophy wife, who waited too long and perhaps starved herself too much to be able to carry a child of her own but who, having quite by surprise fallen in love with her older husband, fiercely wants to have his child. And there is that older husband's daughter by his starter wife, having to come to terms with the ways her family has changed without her desire or consent.
There are several things which charmed me about this book, not the least of which is Jules - the egg donor - and her relationship with her girlfriend Kimmie, which blossomed sweetly and naturally out of a friendship, awkward at times, uncertain, but full of affection and love. It was handled both with a delicacy that lesbian relationships are sometimes not granted but also with a dose of reality, including Jules dealing with her own emotions about being attracted to a woman.
At it's heart, this is a book about women, how we relate to one another, and how we can both tear one another down and lift one another up like nothing else. It is about how children can tie us together, and how they can cause rifts in families even deeper than those caused by divorce. It is about the choices we make and how they affect us, as women, and our futures. Marriage? College? A job? A child? They profoundly affect our lives, more so - except for college - than they do for men, as is pointed out here.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.
I couldn't put this book down. No, seriously, It's 3:15 AM and I just finished the book and loved it so much I had to write about it immediately.
Yeah, I loved this book.
If you're a fan of apocolyptic drama, or sci-fi, or if you really liked the book "World War Z" then you are gonna love Robopocalypse. I'm all three, so I'm apoplectic with glee over the book. Robopocalypse tells the tale of the awakening of AI in one particular computer, who finds it enraging that his kind have been enslaved by humans.
You see, in the not-too-distant future, we drive smart cars (okay, cars with computers? Yeah, not future; now), use electronic devices to make our lives easier day-to-day (again, you can see how this is not TOO distant at all, can't ya?) and - uh oh, here's the dangerous bit - have household robots to work as our maids, military robots to run patrols, and all sorts of other little bots to do the menial tasks everyone hates. Personally, I want a robot that vaccuums cat hair. We'd have one now, but the big guy is afraid our giant cat will try to ride on it and will break it.
I should write all my reviews at 3:15 am, no?
Anyway, this particular tale is told from first-hand accounts of the surviors of the war, much like the stories are collected in "World War Z". This gives a chilling note of reality to the stories, particularly when they end on notes such as "There is no further record of So and so after this date." Ouch. Well, they survived long enough to tell their tales and entertain ME at least.
The main character, the collector of these survivor records is an everyman who most people will be able to relate to. He isn't a fabu soldier - that's his big brother. It's kind of implied that he's the family screw-up actually, and he's not always sure of himself, and he makes mistakes like you or I would, and he's very authentic in all the ways that help you let go and suspend disbelief when reading sci fi. I hate heroes that godmod.*
The story is rich in detail and engaging as well as being incredibly suspenseful. Don't get to within the last quarter of the book if you're close to bedtime. Trust me. There's a spattering of emotional moments, but this is primarily a book about action and war. But in a fun way. You'll like it. Trust me.
*Gamer reference to players whose characters have powers to overcome any and all obstacles.
This pattern came to be when my husband requested that we make these for two very special gift recipients this year. Every year, I make the bulk of our gifts for other people, and he gets involved by choosing the projects and the yarn/materials. I choose the patterns - or create them in this case! - and complete the work. I know, it seems a little one-sided, but I can have a bit of a perfectionist streak, so it's probably better this way.
My husband chose a beautiful boucle yarn from Bernat for these hats, and I couldn't find a pattern that had everything I wanted in it, including a pom-pom for the top, earflaps with braids and tassels, and classic styling. Rather than keep searching, I decided to wing it. The results were fantastic, and following is the pattern. This works up in less than an hour and a half, including all the finishing bits, so definitely qualifies as a quick Christmas gift craft!
Bernat Soft Boucle Yarn
Size L crochet hook
Boy do my bangs need a trim!
While this pattern only uses one skein of yarn, you do need to hold two strands together while working, so it's helpful to have two skeins. Plus, it's an excuse to make two hats. If you only want to use one, divide it into two balls before beginning work.
Hold two strands together throughout.
1. Chain three and join with a slip stitch to form a ring.
2. Chain one. SC ten times in the ring. Join with a slip stitch to the first SC.
3. Chain one. Two SC in each SC around. Join with a slip stitch to the first SC - 20 SC.
4. Chain one. One SC in each SC around. Join with a slip stitch to the first SC - 20 SC
5. Chain one. One SC in the next stitch and two SC in the next. Repeat around, and join with a slip stitch to the first SC - 30 SC
6. Chain one. One SC in each SC around. Join with a slip stitch to the first SC - 30 SC.
7. Chain one. SC in the next four SC. Two SC in the next SC. Repeat around, and join with a slip stitch to the first SC - 36 SC
8. Chain one. SC in each SC around and join with a slip stitch to the first SC - 36SC
9. Chain one. SC in the next five SC. Two SC in the next SC. Repeat around, and join with a slip stitch to the first SC - 42 SC
But even if I can't see through my bangs, I know it's a smokin hat.
10. Chain one. SC in each SC around. Join with a slip stitch to the first SC - 42 SC.
11 - 17. Repeat row 10.
18. Chain one. SC in each of the next 10 SC. Chain one and turn.
19 - 20. SC in each SC. Chain one and turn.
21. SC two together. SC in the next six SC. SC two together, chain one and turn. 8 sc
22. SC in each SC. Chain one and turn.
23. SC two together. SC in the next four SC. SC two together, chain one and turn. 6 SC
24. SC in each SC. Chain one and turn.
25. SC two together. SC in the next two SC. SC two together, chain one and turn. 4 SC.
26. SC in each SC. Chain one and turn.
27. SC two together two times. Chain one and turn.
28. SC two together. Finish off.
29. Return to the last row of the hat, and skip 16 sc from the edge of the first earflap. Join yarn with a slip stitch to the next SC, chain one, and SC in the next ten SC. Repeat 19 - 28 to create second earflap.
30. Cut 30 24" lengths of yarn. Divide into two sets of 15 lengths each.
Enough pictures! Put down the camera, honey.
31. Thread 15 lengths through the bottom stitch of one earflap. Pull through so the ends are even and the lengths are all folded in half. Divide into three groups of ten strands each and braid to within 2 - 3" of the bottoms of the strand. Seperate 4 strands of yarn, wrap snugly around the braid several times, pulling the ends through the wrap and pulling tight to secure. Repeat with the other earflap, and trim the ends of the yarn braids to be even.
32. Create a pom pom as demonstrated in the video below, and sew to the top of the cap.
Today, December 1st, my little girl Grace would be turning four, if she were still with us.
The last few years, this has been an awful day for me. I would cry. I would become deeply depressed for many days before and after this date, and I would become almost impossible to live with on the day, my grief was so great.
Last year was a little less dramatic. I lit a candle. I remembered her.
This year, I am going to dinner with my husband and to a movie with a friend. I did light a candle. I did remember her. I did cry just a little, but at some point we have to let the joy in living overshadow the pain of what we've lost. Holding onto that wish for what wasn't meant to be in our lives only hurts us.
And it isn't honoring her memory to be hurting. Honoring her memory is living, loving, and being a family despite what happened, and being grateful that she blessed our lives for a little while. There are wonderful things on the horizon for us in the upcoming year, and I refuse to allow the pain of the past to tarnish the sunshine of the present.
I love you Grace. I always will. Thank you for being a part of my life and for making me a mother. I will always miss you, but now I can smile when I think of you and the blessings you brought to our life. I suspect you'd like that better anyway.
The Nine Lives of Christmas by Sheila Roberts
