It's a new year, after all

My "year of reading dangerously" ended on a high note this past weekend when I checked in with my last couple of books. Finishing on time took some work, and some serious dedication to reading the last couple of days. 111 books in a year is a lot. Seriously.  There were points in the last year that I wondered what I was thinking, but I'm glad that I took on the challenge and pulled it off.  I learned so much, about everything from raising dogs to polygamy to the latest trends in YA fiction.

And next year, I'm not doing nearly so much.  I've resolved to make it through 60 books in the next year, five per month.  That seems more than do-able, but since I have some major changes and challeges coming up in this next year, it may be just as tough as the 111 I took in in 2011!

So, what am I taking on that is going to be so demanding?  The biggest challenge of all is one I'm not talking about just yet, so you'll have to stay tuned for details as they come, but suffice to say that it will be life-changing and wonderful.

I'm also trying to get back into a routine of writing fiction regularly again.  It's hard, when you're paid to write silly little articles, to take your other writing seriously.  Especially when you're not getting paid for it (yet, anyway).  So perhaps instead of a year of reading dangerously, I'll have a year of writing dangerously.

I think that making resolutions is setting yourself up to fail though.  There's just too much pressure to change with the flip of a switch.  When you're ready to make a decision, as someone pointed out on Facebook today, you should change then.  Other things I have read discuss how it takes thirty days to have a new behaviour become a habit, so expecting instant success because the calendar has changed is counter to reality.  We'll see what happens. 

Book Review - The Nine Lives of Christmas

The Nine Lives of Christmas by Sheila Roberts

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


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.



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Book Review - The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


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.



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Book Review - Before I Go To Sleep

Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


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.



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Book Review - Single Wife

Single Wife by Nina Solomon

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


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.



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Book Review - So Much Pretty

So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


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.



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Book Review - House of Dark Shadows (Dreamhouse Kings #1)

House of Dark Shadows by Robert Liparulo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


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!



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Book Review - Turn of Mind

Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


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.



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Book Review - Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict

Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


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.



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Book Review - Then Came You

Then Came You by Jennifer Weiner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


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.



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Book Review - Robopocalypse

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


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.



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Book Review - A Great And Terrible Beauty

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


It was the title and the cover that drew me in. What an amazing title, that could lead to so many different ideas, so many different twists and turns that could lie within it's bounds.

While I enjoyed the book, it wasn't quite as epic as I thought it might be.

A Great and Terrible Beauty is a ghost story in the gothic sense, full of Colonial India, British boarding schools, dead mothers, gypsies, and hidden away secrets. There's even a shrieking maid or two and a charming spinster teacher. This is a fun read, no doubt, and is very close to a four-star rating for me, but the slightly overhanded hints that this might be the saga of a female Harry Potter type turned me off the slightest bit.



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Book Review - The One That I Want

The One That I Want by Allison Winn Scotch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Everyone knows what it's like to be stuck in your life like the main character, Tilly; to be living day to day, feeling like you're repeating yourself, feeling like changing anything would be as hard as wading through quicksand, feeling like it's easier to deny that anything is wrong, that anything is boring, that our plans may have been misguided.

Or maybe it's just me.

Either way, I could relate strongly to the main character in this book, though the reasoning and type of life issues that dealt to the denial and the being stuck were very different in our lives. Still, I ached for her as she dealt with her difficult marriage, her trying sibling relationships, the hearbreak of her alcoholic father and the emptiness left by the loss of her mother. When an unexpected gift of clarity leads her back to her once-intense love of photography and leads her to re-examine the life she's lived, Tilly finds that everything is not quite as she thought it was, and what she once thought was the key to her happiness might just be the quicksand itself that is holding her back from change.

You'll root for Tilly and her family as they struggle through re-making themselves, and you might see a little bit of yourself in her triumph.



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Book Review - A Heartbeat Away

A Heartbeat Away by Michael Palmer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


There are some times of the year when the US government is particularly vulnerable to attack. One of those times is during the State of the Union address, when nearly all the members of the line of succession to the presidency are located in one room.

In A Heartbeat Away, the terrorist group Genesis takes advantage of this by releasing a deadly virus during the State of the Union, forcing a lockdown of the capitol building to prevent spreading the virus through the country. Meanwhile, an intrepid journalist and hermetic virologist strive to unlock both a cure and the identity of the Genesis group, uncovering multiple nefarious plots along the way.

With a lot of action, some shocking moments that made me gasp out loud and a gripping plot, this book is worth a read. Then again, if like me, you could think of worse things than a shake-up in American political structure, you may find a few points where you're wondering whether or not it'd be good for the US (trust me, I don't actually wish the Washington politicos ill, but it did make me wonder!).



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Book Review - If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now

If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now by Claire LaZebnik

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


I wanted to like this book more than I did, but I found it very difficult to relate to the main character. The title and the cover were what grabbed me, and - to be honest - if I'd read the blurb or the beginning of the book I probably wouldn't have chosen it.

Rickie is a 25-year-old single mom, living at home with her wealthy parents while raising her son Noah. She struggles with the fact that her parents provide her with everything she could want, including clothing, support, and free babysitting, and with the fact that her gluten-intolerant son needs a special diet and is occasionally flighty. These horrors of her terrible, tragic life are also complicated by her relationship with her brother-in-law's brother, who travels out of town frequently.

She's very put upon. As you can see, I'm terribly sympathetic. Especially since her family is incredibly accepting of how rude she is to them, despite their best efforts to smother her by buying her expensive clothes and giving her a credit card (that they pay the bill for) to use fo her personal expenses.

But hey, life can always get better! Her son Noah has an incredible new PE teacher and T-ball coach, who not only is hot and smart, but is great with kids and loves Noah, giving him special attention and helping him make friends and learn about sports - since his mom can't even be bothered to play catch with him once in a while. He does have a girl friend, but that's okay! Rickie can solve that problem too.

I think if you can relate to Rickie and her "problems" you might relate to this book. I spent my time reading it being frustrated with her and wishing she'd grow up.



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Book Review - Now You See Her

Now You See Her by Joy Fielding

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Marcy's life is a bit of a wreck. Her mother killed herself. Her daughter presumably died in a canoeing accident, though her body was never found. Her husband left her for a golf pro at the club, just before their anniversary. To try to perk herself back up, she decides to take their anniversary trip to Ireland on her own - why waste a fun vacation after all? And it's sitting in a pub, chatting with an American tourist that she sees her daughter - outside in the rain, through the ad-pasted front window of the pub.

This revelation turns Marcy's life upside-down. She would do anything, of course, to find her daughter whom she loves and desperately misses. She begins searching the streets for her daughter, showing around pictures, asking questions, and eventually becoming friends with the handsome young bartender from the pub where she'd spotted Devon - her daughter - as well as the American tourist she'd been chatting with at the time. While both men seem determined to help her on her quest, one also ransacks her room, gets her in trouble with the local police, and is undermining her at every turn. But which?

This is a fun, sometimes very sad, romp through Cork, Ireland - a place I've always wanted to visit. The main character is engaging and sympathetic, though the story has some holes and strange twists that seem overly-dramatized. Still, it's an engaging read.



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Book Review - Born in Our Hearts: Stories of Adoption

Born in Our Hearts: Stories of Adoption by Filis Casey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This heartwarming anthology of adoption stories made my heart ache. I desperately wanted to take so many of the children home and love them forever - I could feel the impact they made on their adoptive families, and the love between those children and the people of their forever homes shone through the pages beautifully.

The book ended with a rather startling - for me, at least - tale involving an adoptive mother and her new son having an encounter with the Dalai Lama in a botanical gardens during one of his visits to the United States. It spoke to me more deeply than many other things have and oddly felt like a kind of reassurance that we're on the right path, my husband and I, in pursuing adoption ourselves.

For those not in the know, we converted to Buddhism several years ago, and the peace, awareness, and acceptance it taught us carried us through some of the worst times in our lives with some measure of life still in us. I greatly respect the Dalai Lama and read his teachings with the devotion of an avid student, so this blessing... it said to me something more personal that it was here, in this book, on this day.



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Book Review - The Millionaires

The Millionaires by Brad Meltzer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Have you ever read a book and thought, "This would make a great vintage Tom Cruise action movie." Not current Tom Cruise, mind you, because he's too old to be a great Oliver (the leading character) now, but in his "The Firm" era he'd have rocked this role.

Speaking of which, if you like books like "The Firm", you'll love "The Millionaires." It's full of upper-crust rich folk banking intrigue, Secret Service agent action, and even a little bit of Disney imagineers and a race through the happiest place on earth to put the icing on the cake. Oliver is a bit player at a bank for the wealthy, an associate working under one of the partners, slaving away in hopes of one day making it into an Ivy League business school for his MBA in a bid to "save" his family from a mountain of medical debt.

One of Oliver's responsibilities involves wire transfers of unclaimed accounts, which are transferred over to the government. A stray fax with some inconsistencies pointed out by younger brother Charlie - an underling at the bank and notorious "Good Time Charlie" of sorts - sparks an idea. What's a perfect crime? When no one knows a crime took place? Who would know, then, if unclaimed money went missing?

If you like action, mystery and intrigue, I recommend this one highly. It's very entertaining, and led to several nights of staying up late to catch just a few more pages.



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Book Review - In Search of April Raintree

In Search of April Raintree: Critical Edition by Beatrice Culleton Mosionier

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


There ahave been more than a few times over the last couple of years that my book club has chosen a book that I never would have looked twice at. This was one of them.

When I mentioned to a few non-book-club friends that I was reading this book, they surprised me by telling me they'd read it in high school, and as I researched a little, I discovered that this is a fairly common school novel for teens in Canada. Being Canadian by immigration rather than birth, I started to look forward to reading it; in discussions I've discovered that my husband and I vary vastly on the books we read in school, and the same goes with some of my friends. They weren't taken by To Kill a Mockingbird or The Grapes of Wrath, two of the books in school that taught me to absolutely love books, and I realize looking back, that those are fairly classic American tales. In Search of April Raintree on the other hand is a classic Canadian tale of a Metis woman, and her struggles in Canadian society.

April, born to alcoholic parents in a poor neighborhood, doesn't really understand how different her situation is from most Canadian kids until she is taken from her parents, along with her little sister Cheryl, and is placed in foster care. Oh, she was aware she was different, particularly from white children as they taunted her and others in the playground. She knew that her family looked different, acted differently, were seperate from white Canada, but that rift became accentuated when she was placed in a white foster family.

My heart broke for April as she struggled to come to terms with her nationality, attempting to both pass for white and embrace her native half in various parts of her life. Her denial through school was easy enough, as she looked more "white" than her sister, but that relationship gave her away every time.

The style of writing in this book is sparse, and it reads much as though it was written for a younger audience (which I'm guessing it was). I usually like YA books, but most contemporary YA is written in a more adult style for a more sophisticated breed of young adults than I think this was originally written for. As such, I found myself rolling my eyes and being annoyed in some places. The dialogue is stilted and sometimes unbelievable, but the lessons and experiences in the novel are worth the occasional frustration with the writing itself. In Search of April Raintree speaks of a wound to the Metis people of Canada that has festered for generations, and has infected both sides of the divide, from the stereotyped "poor, drunk Indians" to the ignorant white populace who lost out on a chance at cultural diversity. It's sad, almost unbearably so, to follow a child's suffering, but has it's moments of triumph as well, which is what earned it a three-star rating from me, despite the technical problems with the prose.

This isn't a relaxing read, or necessarily one you'll enjoy, but it can be an important one if you are interested in becoming more sensitive to the plight of the Metis people.



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Book Review - The Thirteen

The Thirteen by Susie Moloney

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Imagine how much scarier suburbia would be if the annoyingly perfect snobs on the cul-de-sac earned the title "witch" in more than just the euphemistic sense? When Paula returns to Haven Woods, the suburb where she grew up, to visit her ailing mother she is faced with the ghosts of her childhood and the witches of the present. And when those witches need to appease their "father" it becomes a dangerous situation for her young daughter, Rowan and her ebbing romance with a friend from her adolescent days who is also a recent returnee to the town.

This is a fun, fantastical twist on modern life in the 'burbs. It's an entertaining read, with bewitching characters, just right for a cool October evening.



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