RANDOM READINGS

FAITH by Jennifer Haigh

2011-06-26T09:29:00.001-07:00

"It is the spring of 2002 and a perfect storm has hit Boston. Across the city's archdiocese, trusted priests have been accused of the worst possible betrayal of the souls in their care. In Faith, Jennifer Haigh explores the fallout for one devout family, the McGanns.

Estranged for years from her difficult and demanding relatives, Sheila McGann has remained close to her older brother Art, the popular, dynamic pastor of a large suburban parish. When Art finds himself at the center of the maelstrom, Sheila returns to Boston, ready to fight for him and his reputation. What she discovers is more complicated than she imagined. Her strict, lace-curtain-Irish mother is living in a state of angry denial. Sheila's younger brother Mike, to her horror, has already convicted his brother in his heart. But most disturbing of all is Art himself, who persistently dodges Sheila's questions and refuses to defend himself.

As the scandal forces long-buried secrets to surface, Faith explores the corrosive consequences of one family's history of silence—and the resilience its members ultimately find in forgiveness. Throughout, Haigh demonstrates how the truth can shatter our deepest beliefs—and restore them. A gripping, suspenseful tale of one woman's quest for the truth, Faith is a haunting meditation on loyalty and family, doubt and belief. Elegantly crafted, sharply observed, this is Jennifer Haigh's most ambitious novel to date."

*****Rate this 5/5. I loved this book, the best by Jennifer Haigh yet.

WRECKER by Summer Wood

2011-06-06T13:26:00.000-07:00

"After foster-parenting four young siblings a decade ago, Summer Wood tried to imagine a place where kids who are left alone or taken from their families would find the love and the family they deserve. For her, fiction was the tool to realize that world, and Wrecker, the central character in her second novel, is the abandoned child for whom life turns around in most unexpected ways. It's June of 1965 when Wrecker enters the world. The war is raging in Vietnam, San Francisco is tripping toward flower power, and Lisa Fay, Wrecker's birth mother, is knocked nearly sideways by life as a single parent in a city she can barely manage to navigate on her own. Three years later, she's in prison, and Wrecker is left to bounce around in the system before he's shipped off to live with distant relatives in the wilds of Humboldt County, California. When he arrives he's scared and angry, exploding at the least thing, and quick to flee. Wrecker is the story of this boy and the motley group of isolated eccentrics who come together to raise him and become a family along the way."

*****Rate 5/5. I LOVED THIS BOOK. A novel about how people with their own problems and issues, baggage if you will, all come together and form a strong bond and a family together. This family that was formed is more true and more precious than people from an actual 'normal' family. The characters are all eccentric, but so very loveable and wonderful. I would have given this a 6 or a 7, it was that good, and I hated finishing it.

THE PEACH KEEPER by Sarah Addison Allen

2011-05-26T16:52:00.000-07:00

"The New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Chased the Moon welcomes you to her newest locale: Walls of Water, North Carolina, where the secrets are thicker than the fog from the town’s famous waterfalls, and the stuff of superstition is just as real as you want it to be.
It’s the dubious distinction of thirty-year-old Willa Jackson to hail from a fine old Southern family of means that met with financial ruin generations ago. The Blue Ridge Madam—built by Willa’s great-great-grandfather during Walls of Water’s heyday, and once the town’s grandest home—has stood for years as a lonely monument to misfortune and scandal. And Willa herself has long strived to build a life beyond the brooding Jackson family shadow. No easy task in a town shaped by years of tradition and the well-marked boundaries of the haves and have-nots.
But Willa has lately learned that an old classmate—socialite do-gooder Paxton Osgood—of the very prominent Osgood family, has restored the Blue Ridge Madam to her former glory, with plans to open a top-flight inn. Maybe, at last, the troubled past can be laid to rest while something new and wonderful rises from its ashes. But what rises instead is a skeleton, found buried beneath the property’s lone peach tree, and certain to drag up dire consequences along with it.
For the bones—those of charismatic traveling salesman Tucker Devlin, who worked his dark charms on Walls of Water seventy-five years ago—are not all that lay hidden out of sight and mind. Long-kept secrets surrounding the troubling remains have also come to light, seemingly heralded by a spate of sudden strange occurrences throughout the town.
Now, thrust together in an unlikely friendship, united by a full-blooded mystery, Willa and Paxton must confront the dangerous passions and tragic betrayals that once bound their families—and uncover truths of the long-dead that have transcended time and defied the grave to touch the hearts and souls of the living.
Resonant with insight into the deep and lasting power of friendship, love, and tradition, The Peach Keeper is a portrait of the unshakable bonds that—in good times and bad, from one generation to the next—endure forever"

***Rate this 3/5. I had to force myself to finish this book because it was so predictable. I loved Garden Spells and The Sugar Queen by this author but this book did not measure up. It seemed that the author attempted to throw a little 'magic' just to keep the reader interested but the plot was too contrived and predictable.

THE ART OF DEVOTION by Samantha Bruce Benjamin

2011-04-17T11:09:00.000-07:00

A debut novel about a disturbing family history. In the first half of the 20th century, a wealthy family grows up on an enchanting island in the Mediterranean. Like most literary families with a perfect facade, this one hides some dark secrets. Sophie is a widow, raising her daughter Adora and her son Sebastian. Adora and Sebastian are unnervingly close, and their unnatural relationship is the source of whispers around town. Adora grows up to become the unofficial queen of the island, with all the summer families worshipping at her feet. She and her husband, Oliver, enjoy a gilded lifestyle and internal misery. Concurrently, Oliver's best friend, James, and his wife Miranda send their daughter, Genevieve, to the island each summer to stay with the royal couple. Adora and Genevieve become obsessed with each other, alienating Miranda and putting a now-elderly Sophie on alert. When a dashing young man enters the fold one summer, relationships become even more complex and mysterious, leading each unfortunate member of the cast toward ruin. The point of view shifts among Sophie, Adora, Miranda and Genevieve; unfortunately, the voices are indistinct and serve to blur a potentially creative narrative structure. As the family's history unfolds, secrets are revealed and each woman's deception, manipulation and misfortune are uncovered. (Kirkus Reviews)

*****Rate this 5/5. This books shows the dark side of love: Obsession and that what you see is not necessarily what you get. Some pay a very high price for the people they want in their lives.

MOMMY'S LITTLE GIRL by Diane Fanning

2011-04-09T11:00:00.001-07:00

"When news broke of three-year-old Caylee Anthony’s disappearance from her home in Florida in July 2008, there was a huge outpouring of sympathy across the nation. The search for Caylee made front-page headlines. But there was one huge question mark hanging over the case: the girl’s mother. • Why did Casey Anthony wait one full month before reporting her daughter missing? • Why were searches on chloroform and missing children found on her computer? • Why did she go out partying with friends less than one week after Caylee disappeared? As the investigation continued and suspicions mounted, Casey became the prime suspect. In October, based on new evidence against Casey—her erratic behavior and lies, her car that showed signs of human decomposition—a grand jury indicted the young single mother. Then, two months later, police found Caylee’s remains a quarter of a mile away from the Anthony home. Casey pled not guilty to charges of murder in the first degree, and she continues to protest her innocence. Did she or didn’t she kill Caylee? This is the story of one of the most shocking, confusing, and horrific crimes in modern American history."

*****Rate this 5/5 I thought that the author presented the case as it should be presented, without forming judgement or blame. The facts themselves point to the horrific story of this sweet child's short life. There were several times when I would weep and have to lay the book down, unable to continue......it is so tragic. I only hope that when all is said and done that there will be justice for the unforgotten one in all of the media blitz, Caylee Marie Anthony, who deserved a better life.

CLEANING NABOKOV'S HOUSE by Leslie Daniels

2011-04-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

“I knew I could stay in this town when I found the blue enamel pot floating in the lake. The pot led me to the house, the house led me to the book, the book to the lawyer, the lawyer to the whorehouse, the whorehouse to science, and from science I joined the world.” So begins Leslie Daniels’s funny and moving novel about a woman’s desperate attempt to rebuild her life. When Barb Barrett walks out on her loveless marriage she doesn’t realize she will lose everything: her home, her financial security, even her beloved children. Approaching forty with her life in shambles and no family or friends to turn to, Barb must now discover what it means to rely on herself in a stark new emotional landscape. Guided only by her intense inner voice and a unique entrepreneurial vision, Barb begins to collect the scattered pieces of her life. She moves into a house once occupied by Vladimir Nabokov, author of the controversial masterpiece Lolita, and discovers a manuscript that may be his lost work. As her journey gathers momentum, Barb deepens a connection with her new world, discovering resources in her community and in herself that no one had anticipated. Written in elegant prose with touches of sharp humor and wit, Cleaning Nabokov’s House offers a new vision of modern love and a fervent reminder that it is never too late to find faith in our truest selves." ****Rate this 4/5. A light read that was at times poignant and touching and also incredibly funny when you least expected it

A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES by Deborah Harkness

2011-03-24T09:31:00.000-07:00

"In Harkness's lively debut, witches, vampires, and demons outnumber humans at Oxford's Bodleian Library, where witch and Yale historian Diana Bishop discovers an enchanted manuscript, attracting the attention of 1,500-year-old vampire Matthew Clairmont. The orphaned daughter of two powerful witches, Bishop prefers intellect, but relies on magic when her discovery of a palimpsest documenting the origin of supernatural species releases an assortment of undead who threaten, stalk, and harass her. Against all occult social propriety, Bishop turns for protection to tall, dark, bloodsucking man-about-town Clairmont. Their research raises questions of evolution and extinction among the living dead, and their romance awakens centuries-old enmities. Harkness imagines a crowded universe where normal and paranormal creatures observe a tenuous peace. "Magic is desire made real," Bishop says after both her desire and magical prowess exceed her expectations. Harkness brings this world to vibrant life and makes the most of the growing popularity of gothic adventure with an ending that keeps the Old Lodge door wide open. "

*****Rate this 5/5 Over 5oo pages of witches, vampires, daemons, history lessons, lyrically described food and wine, beautiful locations. I Loved This Book!

WILLIAM & HARRY: BEHIND PALACE WALLS by Katie Nicholl

2011-02-18T14:06:00.000-08:00

Beginning with the birth of the elder William in 1982, the author covers all the major events of the princes' lives up to the present. She mostly colors in their childhood with the idiosyncrasies of their mother, the late Diana: her quest to deviate from royal tradition, giving birth in a hospital and hiring young nannies, and her eschewing her sovereign kin, preferring to shop, watch soaps and gab on the telephone. The media's chronicling of the unhappiness between Diana and Charles and Diana's tragic demise comprise the drama of the princes' formative years. The ability of classmates to follow their family saga compounded the princes' suffering, especially William's. Though their bodyguards sat at the back of the classroom or on the sidelines of the football field, the princes mostly fit in at school like anyone else. Nicholl describes William as the scholar and Harry as the prankster, but she extols them both as lushly romantic figures, mentioning numerous heiresses who caught their eye, including William and Harry's relationships with long-term girlfriends, Kate Middleton and Chelsy Davy, respectively. Nicholl unearths little about key friendships, and the only mentors she names are father, Prince Charles, and grandparents, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. Adulthood brings boozing and clubbing amid harsh military training, since both princes joined the armed forces in hopes of reaching the front lines; Harry helped thwart two attacks in Afghanistan. With tabloid relish, Nicholl cuts from military feats to public blunders that incited obloquy: William flying a service jet to visit his girlfriend and Harry donning a Nazi costume at a birthday party. The author finishes on a high note, commending the princes' public service and speculating on when William will propose to Middleton.

*** Rate this 3/5. I have always been fascinated by British royalty and enjoyed reading what has transpired with the sons of Diana since her death.

THE RED GARDEN by Alice Hoffman

2011-02-15T07:04:00.001-08:00

"The Red Garden introduces us to the luminous and haunting world of Blackwell, Massachusetts, capturing the unexpected turns in its history and in our own lives. In exquisite prose, Hoffman offers a transforming glimpse of small-town America, presenting us with some three hundred years of passion, dark secrets, loyalty, and redemption in a web of tales where characters' lives are intertwined by fate and by their own actions. From the town's founder, a brave young woman from England who has no fear of blizzards or bears, to the young man who runs away to New York City with only his dog for company, the characters in The Red Garden are extraordinary and vivid: a young wounded Civil War soldier who is saved by a passionate neighbor, a woman who meets a fiercely human historical character, a poet who falls in love with a blind man, a mysterious traveler who comes to town in the year when summer never arrives. At the center of everyone’s life is a mysterious garden where only red plants can grow, and where the truth can be found by those who dare to look. Beautifully crafted, shimmering with magic, The Red Garden is as unforgettable as it is moving"

*****Rate 5/5 of course because Alice Hoffman is my favorite story teller! I loved the generational story of a small town filled with magical beings, magical places and magical and eccentric people! Ms. Hoffman always fills my void of magic, fantasy and fairy tales. I love her writings and I was not disappointed in her latest book! Since I have read everything she has ever written I must accept a long wait until her next novel!!

THE GOOD DAUGHTERS by Joyce Maynard

2011-01-22T14:34:00.001-08:00

"Two families, the Planks and the Dickersons, are mysteriously entwined in this exquisite novel that centers on decades of life at a New Hampshire farm. Youngest daughters Ruth Plank and Dana Dickerson, born on the same day in the same hospital, take turns narrating the struggles they face as children. Ruth feels a coldness from her mother; Dana is unsettled by her kooky parents constantly uprooting her and her brother Ray. Regardless, the Planks pay a yearly visit to the Dickersons no matter where they've ended up living. As the girls come of age, Ruth takes an interest in art, sex, and Dana's brother, Ray, with whom she later reunites, at Woodstock, in a swirl of drugs and mud. Meanwhile, Dana realizes that her desires are directed toward women and sets off to pursue agricultural studies at a university, where she meets Clarice, an assistant professor. As time goes by, the floundering Plank Farm is in danger of being seized by Ruth's former boyfriend, a man who has had his eye on the land for years. As Ruth and Dana pursue love, contemplate children, and search for home, the truth of what unites their families is finally--at long last--revealed, in this beautifully written book."

*****Rate this book 5/5. I LOVED THIS BOOK! The descriptive language of love and loss in this book was a pleasure to read. I have not read this author before, but I will seek out her other books. This book tells the story of two incredible women, how they adapt to life, their loves and their losses and how things come together in the end. Very beautiful book!

RESCUE by Anita Shreve

2011-01-19T13:31:00.001-08:00

"Webster, a paramedic living with his parents in rural Vermont, meets Sheila Arsenault when he pulls her, bloodied and unconscious, out of a car wreck caused by her driving under the influence of alcohol. Her glossy brown hair draws him compulsively back, and he steadfastly ignores all warning signs as their relationship develops. Restlessness, a decidedly rocky past, and hints of alcoholism surround Sheila as their affair barrels into marriage and an unexpected pregnancy. An act of Sheila's finally causes their breakup, and Webster is left as the single father of two-year-old daughter Rowan. Years later, he must revisit decisions made during his marriage, as Rowan's teenage years begin to mirror her mother's history. Shreve, the best-selling author of The Pilot's Wife and Testimony, brings her usual balance of tension, family drama, and debatably likable characters to the mix in this story of love, duty, addiction, and loss. VERDICT For Shreve fans and all contemporary fiction lovers, this is a solid read, though not the author's most compelling or dazzling work. Excellent fodder for book clubs; there is plenty to discuss in the protagonists' motivations, decisions, and characterization."

****Rate this 4/5. Anita Shreve is back as an author! I had been somewhat disappointed in her last few books but she is now writing like the author I originally liked. Interesting book.

ZEITOUN by Dave Eggers

2011-01-13T16:37:00.000-08:00

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared. Eggers’s riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun’s roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy — an American who converted to Islam — and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research — in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria.

****Rate this book 4/5. The most horrific part of reading this non-fiction book was that it was true. It was difficult to note that racial profiling and abhorrent treatment of a man existed in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. I had watched all of the coverage after this disaster but never knew that a prison had actually be set up to contain American citizens and then accusing them of being terrorists. What a horrific event for Zeitoun and his family, who were truly good and kind American citizens. I doubt that I would be as forgiving as they have been or even stayed in the area.

MOCKINGJAY by Suzanne Collins

2010-12-06T14:30:00.001-08:00

This concluding volume in Collins's Hunger Games trilogy accomplishes a rare feat, the last installment being the best yet, a beautifully orchestrated and intelligent novel that succeeds on every level. At the end of Catching Fire, Katniss had been dramatically rescued from the Quarter Quell games; her fellow tribute, Peeta, has presumably been taken prisoner by the Capitol. Now the rebels in District 13 want Katniss (who again narrates) to be the face of the revolution, a propaganda role she's reluctant to play. One of Collins's many achievements is skillfully showing how effective such a poster girl can be, with a scene in which Katniss visits the wounded, cameras rolling to capture (and retransmit) her genuine outrage at the way in which war victimizes even the noncombatants. Beyond the sharp social commentary and the nifty world building, there's a plot that doesn't quit: nearly every chapter ends in a reversal-of-fortune cliffhanger. Readers get to know characters better, including Katniss's sister and mother, and Plutarch Heavensbee, former Head Gamemaker, now rebel filmmaker, directing the circus he hopes will bring down the government, a coup possible precisely because the Capitol's residents are too pampered to mount a defense. "In return for full bellies and entertainment," he tells Katniss, explaining the Latin phrase panem et circenses, "people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power." Finally, there is the romantic intrigue involving Katniss, Peeta and Gale, which comes to a resolution that, while it will break some hearts, feels right. In short, there's something here for nearly every reader, all of it completely engrossing. (Publishers Weekly review)

*****Rate this 5/5. I thoroughly enjoyed this trilogy even though it was geared towards young adults. A very well-written trilogy with a strong female character who I became immediately fond of and cheered for. I will miss Katniss!

CATCHING FIRE by Suzanne Collins

2010-12-02T13:35:00.001-08:00

"I really liked The Hunger Games. But I love the new book, Catching Fire…Collins has done that rare thing. She has written a sequel that improves upon the first book…Katniss is more sophisticated in this book, and her observations are more acute. We see this when she notices how much more difficult it is to kill people once you know them, or when she observes the decadent (and for the reader perhaps uncomfortably familiar) citizens of the Capitol gorging and then taking pills to make themselves vomit, or with her gradual realization that she may just stand for something greater than herself. All this is accomplished with the light touch of a writer who truly understands writing for young people: the pacing is brisk and the message tucked below the surface." (from NYTimes review)

*****Rate this 5/5. A wonderful sequel to the first in the series. I even will have to pay late fees to keep this book and finish it, something I never do. Katniss is again a survivor using her wits and her unbelievable strategy to survive to again get through the 'games'. Now I am looking forward to starting the third in the series, The Mockinjay.

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST by Stieg Larsson

2010-11-16T14:36:00.001-08:00

Lisbeth Salander—the heart of Larsson’s two previous novels—lies in critical condition, a bullet wound to her head, in the intensive care unit of a Swedish city hospital. She’s fighting for her life in more ways than one: if and when she recovers, she’ll be taken back to Stockholm to stand trial for three murders. With the help of her friend, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, she will not only have to prove her innocence, but also identify and denounce those in authority who have allowed the vulnerable, like herself, to suffer abuse and violence. And, on her own, she will plot revenge—against the man who tried to kill her, and the corrupt government institutions that very nearly destroyed her life.
Once upon a time, she was a victim. Now Salander is fighting back.

*****Rate this 5/5 of course. I feel sad now that I have finished the Millenium trilogy! I will so miss Lisbeth Salander, I have literally fallen in love with her character. I am also sad that the author died after finishing these books. It would have been wonderful to continue on with his well-written, suspenseful and intriguing books!!

THE ICE PRINCESS by Camilla Lackberg

2010-11-07T13:25:00.001-08:00

At the start of Läckberg's haunting U.S. debut, the first of her seven novels set in the Swedish coastal town of Fjällbacka, biographer Erica Falck returns home to sort through her deceased parents' belongings and work on her next book. But this is not the same hometown she grew up in. Summer tourists are turning the former fishing village into a thriving resort, and Erica's controlling brother-in-law is pressuring her to cash in by selling the family home. The apparent suicide of childhood friend Alexandra Wijkner contributes to Erica's grief. Once inseparable, they drifted apart before Alex's family abruptly moved away, and Erica feels compelled to write a novel about why the beautiful Alex would kill herself. Läckberg skillfully details how horrific secrets are never completely buried and how silence can kill the soul. A parallel between the town's downward spiral and the fate of one of Fjällbacka's wealthiest families adds texture. (Publishers Weekly)

*****Rate this 5/5. After reading Stieg Larsson I thought I would try another Swedish author. Ms. Lackberg is very popular in Sweden, almost like Agatha Christie, if you will. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Thought I had the whole thing figured out, but I didn't! Great book.

THE HUNGER GAMES by Suzanne Collins

2010-11-05T09:42:00.000-07:00

In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival.

*****Rate this 5/5. While this is a book designated for young adults, I thoroughly enjoyed it and plan to read the other 2 books in the trilogy. I loved the characters, the story and the cunning strategy used by the main character Katniss. I loved it!!

*BREAKING NIGHT: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey From Homeless To Harvard" by Liz Murray

2010-11-01T09:46:00.000-07:00

From runaway to Harvard student, Murray tells an engaging, powerfully motivational story about turning her life around after growing up the neglected child of drug addicts. When Murray was born in 1980, her former beatnik father was in jail for illegally trafficking in prescription painkillers, and her mother, a cokehead since age 13, had just barely missed losing custody of their year-old daughter, Lisa. Murray and her sister grew up in a Bronx apartment that gradually went to seed, living off government programs and whatever was left after the parents indulged their drug binges; Murray writes that drugs were the "wrecking ball" that destroyed her family-- prompting her mother's frequent institutionalization for drug-induced mental illness and leading to her parents inviting in sexual molesters. By age 15, with the help of her best friend Sam and an elusive hustler, Carlos, she took permanently to the streets, relying on friends, sadly, for shelter. With the death of her mother, her runaway world came to an end, and she began her step-by-step plan to attend an alternative high school, which eventually led to a New York Times scholarship and acceptance to Harvard. In this incredible story of true grit, Murray went from feeling like "the world was filled with people who were repulsed by me" to learning to receive the bountiful generosity of strangers who truly cared.

****Rate this a 4/5. While I appreciate the hardships and trials this young lady went through, I thought that her lengthy description of how she and her 'street' friends lived and partied could have been a bit less informative. It wasn't overtly sexual or descriptive of drug use, but more about what a friend's hairstyle, etc., was. This book is raw and descriptive in how Liz and her family lived from day to day. Her parents were not able to overcome their addictions or their lifestyles in order to raise their daughters, but the book does establish their l0ve for one another

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE by Stieg Larsson

2010-10-28T14:25:00.001-07:00

(Barnes & Noble Review)
Joy is not the first emotion one would expect to feel while reading a long Swedish crime novel that deals with misogyny, sex trafficking, police corruption, and a handful of explicitly gruesome murders. Yet The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second novel in Stieg Larsson's internationally bestselling Millennium series, turns a reader inside out with a joy that can't be squashed, not even by the grim knowledge that the 50-year-old author died suddenly in 2004 after finishing three books and will publish no more. While it's not critical to have read the opening volume, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, before picking up this one, it's a good idea. That's where readers will get a solid introduction to Larsson's magnetic protagonists: the crusading investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist ofMillennium magazine, and the anarchic punk computer hacker Lisbeth Salander. While the first novel was mostly Blomkvist's story, the second belongs to Salander, answering some questions about her quicksilver personality while raising many more. A notable difference between the two books is that the first, while teeming with characters in a complicated plot amid an exotic (to Americans, anyway) Nordic milieu, respectfully adhered to a fairly traditional structure. As Blomkvist himself noted in Dragon Tattoo, the puzzle was "a sort of locked-room mystery in island format," of the kind popularized by classic crime writers like Dorothy Sayers. In contrast, the second novel blows many such conventions all to heck, and part of the joy here is the shared exhilaration in -- and indeed complicity with -- the author's playful insubordination. Larsson's biggest new tweak is his focus on Lisbeth Salander as heroine. While there are plenty of female crime novelists who've created male detective heroes -- Christie and Poirot; Sayers and Wimsey; James and Dalgliesh; Rendell and Wexford -- it's the rare male mystery writer who presents a female sleuth as his central character. And what a character Salander is. She looks like a skinny, sulky, 14-year-old club kid, aggressively festooned with tattoos and piercings; she's in fact 26, with a photographic memory, a passion for esoteric math, and membership in a shadowy international band of computer hackers. Unbothered by any notions of social courtesy, she's nevertheless possessed of a steely sense of justice that "did not always coincide with that of the justice system." She's also had some training with a world-class boxer, attempting to compensate for her tiny frame with swift reflexes and a never-say-die fighting style. But just when we might start thinking Lisbeth is some kind of Lara Croft crime-fighting hologram, Larsson steers us toward her vulnerabilities. Piecemeal, he drops clues that invite readers to form a patchy construct of her troubled life. As the author hinted throughout Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth suffered through a traumatic childhood and spent several of her early teen years in a psychiatric clinic for children in Uppsala. Since then, she's been forced to defend herself against more than one vicious misogynist, including her legal guardian, Nils Erik Bjurman, a sexual predator whose attack on Lisbeth and her subsequent revenge were meticulously chronicled in Dragon Tattoo. During a life consumed with self-protection, Lisbeth has yearned for trusting contact while at the same time doubting its legitimacy. As the new book opens, she has abandoned two sexual relationships that might have offered her true intimacy: most recently with journalist Mikael Blomkvist and before that with Miriam Wu, a lesbian sociology student and co-owner of an S&M boutique, whom Lisbeth had left for Blomkvist without a word of apology. Now, it seems, Lisbeth's worst suspicions about human nature are once again confirmed. A freelance journalist and his criminologist girlfriend have been shot dead in their apartment in Stockholm's Enskede district. The couple was about to publish some incendiary findings about the trafficking of underage eastern European prostitutes in Sweden that would implicate a number of prominent lawyers, policemen, and journalists. The articles were scheduled to appear in Blomkvist's Millennium magazine. And the murder weapon, found on the apartment building's cellar stairs, carries the fingerprints of Lisbeth Salander. As if this weren't damning enough, the body of a third murder victim is soon discovered: it's Lisbeth's detested legal guardian, Nils Bjurman. At this point, both the police and the frenzied media are certain they have an easy investigation on their hands, with Salander as the prime suspect. Fueled by misinformation, "the police appeared to be hunting for a psychotic lesbian who had joined a cult of sadomasochistic Satanists that propagandized for S&M sex and hated society in general and men in particular." We're pretty sure that Lisbeth is none of those things. Nor is she a prostitute, or retarded, as some are eager to claim. But what do we really know about Lisbeth and her past? Larsson encourages readers to defend her, along with Blomkvist and her former boss at a private security company called Milton, who reminds an investigating policeman, "Files are one thing. People are something else." But how do we know she isn't guilty? As Salander herself notes while hiding from the police and conducting her own secret inquiry, "Nobody was innocent. There were only varying degrees of responsibility." At varying points in the story, Lisbeth is not only the chief suspect but also a principal sleuth, a key victim, and a potential motive for the murders. In the meantime, along with Lisbeth and the police, others are conducting their own parallel investigations, including the Millennium staff, members of Milton Security, and the media. "Whatever the Enskede murders had been about," observes the veteran police inspector on the case, "it was much more complicated than they had supposed." So where is the joy in this big, dark, messy, imperfect book? It's in the author's invitation to make the reader as complicit here as anybody else, and in his cheeky defiance of crime-novel conventions. It's in the mix of stylistic elements: the real and the hyper-real, the surfaces and the depths, the ever-fixed and the ever-changing. And it's in Larsson's captured thrill of merely being alive in this big, dark, messy, imperfect world, even when things are looking truly hopeless. At one point while on the run, Lisbeth makes off with a thug's motorcycle and finds herself on the open highway, grinning with irrational exhilaration. We watch her go: a tiny, besieged young woman, trying to maneuver a powerful Harley toward an unclear future, having the time of her life. And somehow, whoever we are or might imagine ourselves to be, we know exactly how she feels.

*****Rate this 5/5. I am so anxious to start the third book in this trilogy and only wish that the author had not died because I love his writing. Lisbeth Salandar is the perfect heroine........

*THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO" by Stieg Larrson

2010-10-18T09:36:00.001-07:00

(Washington Post review) this remarkable first novel by the Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson…has been a huge bestseller in Europe and will be one here if readers are looking for an intelligent, ingeniously plotted, utterly engrossing thriller that is variously a serial-killer saga, a search for a missing person and an informed glimpse into the worlds of journalism and business…It's hard to find fault with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. One must struggle with bewildering Swedish names, but that's a small price to pay. The story starts off at a leisurely pace, but the reader soon surrenders to Larsson's skillful narrative. We care about his characters because we come to know them so well. The central question—what happened to Harriet?—is answered in due course, and other matters involving romance and revenge are wrapped up as well. It's a book that lingers in the mind.

*****I loved this book and now anxiously await obtaining the second in the series. I am glad that I didn't pay attention to some of the negative reviews and judged it myself. A 590 page book that I read in 2 days!!!

THE WISE WOMAN by Phillipa Gregory

2010-10-09T16:31:00.001-07:00

In this book, originally published after her bestselling debut with the Wideacre trilogy, New York Times bestselling author Philippa Gregory takes readers to Henry VIII's England, on a journey to the outer reaches of passion, where magic and female power meet.
Alys joins a nunnery to escape the poverty of her life on the moor with her foster mother, Morach, the local wise woman with whom she lives as an outcast, but she soon finds herself thrown back into the world when Henry VIII's wreckers destroy her sanctuary. Summoned to the castle as the old lord's scribe, she falls obsessively in love with his son Hugo, who is married to Catherine. Driven to desperation by her desire, she summons the most dangerous powers Morach has taught her, but soon the passionate triangle of Alys, Hugo, and Catherine begins to explode, launching them into uncharted sexual waters. The magic Alys has conjured now has a life of its own — a life that is horrifyingly and disastrously out of control.
Is she a witch? Since heresy means the stake, and witchcraft the rope, Alys is in mortal danger, treading a perilous path between her faith and her own female power.

*****Rate this 5/5. This is one of the earliest books written by Ms. Gregory and it was a great book. I had read her books on the Boleyns and Henry the Eighth, but decided to give this a try and I am glad that I did.

ANGELINA: An Unauthorized Biography by Andrew Morton

2010-09-24T08:33:00.000-07:00

"If there is a celebrity today who merits the spadework of an unauthorized Morton biography, it's Jolie, with a potential audience that includes just about anyone who has gone through a supermarket checkout line in the last decade, glanced at tabloid headlines about Angelina, say, open- mouth kissing her brother or swapping vials of blood with Billy Bob Thornton and wondered: "What was she thinking?"If there's anyone to blame here, according to this book, it's the parents, since the bitter relationship between actor Jon Voight and Marcia Lynne (later Marcheline) Bertrand runs as a subplot throughout. Her father left Bertrand for another woman when Angelina was 2, and her mother/manager is portrayed as vacillating between being a laissez-faire hippie mother and a pushy sort of stage mom who, according to Morton, tried among other things to push her daughter into a relationship with Mick Jagger.It's at this point [after Jolie and Brad Pitt come together] that the book seems to move into hyperdrive, with endless rounds of globe-trotting, location shooting, child-acquiring and philanthropic efforts. But the faster it seems to move, the harder it is to put down. Maybe that's because, like salt, we have a craving for explanation, for back story, and Morton's book offers a satisfying dose of both. While the healthier approach might be to limit the intake by vowing to pick it up occasionally and flip to the index for a snippet like: "Haven, James relationship with" or "United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees," that's not likely to happen.Chances are you won't be able to put this book down until your mouth is dry and your blood pressure is racing."

***Rate this 3/5. I usually love Andrew Morton's books, but I liked his series on Princess Diana better than this one on Angelina Jolie. It did, however, give me a clearer impression on why she is like she is as an adult. If the facts of her childhood are entirely true, it is a wonder that she grew up normally at all. The book also portrays both her and Brad Pitt as master manipulators of the press, for their own advantages and agenda which I found surprising because I bought into the hype myself.

FURIOUS LOVE: Elizabeth Taylor: Richard Burton: and the Marriage of the Century by Sam Kashner

2010-09-15T08:42:00.000-07:00

The definitive story of Hollywood's most famous couple
He was a tough-guy Welshman softened by the affections of a breathtakingly beautiful woman; she was a modern-day Cleopatra madly in love with her own Mark Antony. For nearly a quarter of a century, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were Hollywood royalty, and their fiery romance—often called "the marriage of the century"—was the most notorious, publicized, and celebrated love affair of its day.
For the first time, Vanity Fair contributing editor Sam Kashner and acclaimed biographer Nancy Schoenberger tell the complete story of this larger-than-life couple, showing how their romance and two marriages commanded the attention of the world. Also for the first time, in exclusive access given to the authors, Elizabeth Taylor herself gives never-revealed details and firsthand accounts of her life with Burton.
Drawing upon brand-new information and interviews—and on Burton's private, passionate, and heartbreaking letters to Taylor—Furious Love sheds new light on the movies, the sex, the scandal, the fame, the brawls, the booze, the bitter separations, and, of course, the fabled jewels. It offers an intimate glimpse into Elizabeth and Richard's privileged world and their elite circle of friends, among them Princess Grace, Montgomery Clift, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Peter O'Toole, Michael Caine, Marlon Brando, Rex Harrison, Mike Nichols, Laurence Olivier, Robert Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Noël Coward, John Huston, Ava Gardner, the Rothschilds, Maria Callas, and Aristotle Onassis. It provides an entertaining, eye-opening look at their films, their wildly lucrative reign in Europe and in Hollywood—and the price they paid for their extravagant lives.
Shocking and unsparing in its honesty, Furious Love explores the very public marriage of "Liz and Dick" as well as the private struggles of Elizabeth and Richard, including Le Scandale, their affair on the set of the notorious epic Cleopatra that earned them condemnation from the Vatican; Burton's hardscrabble youth in Wales; the crippling alcoholism that nearly destroyed his career and contributed to his early death; the medical issues that plagued both him and Elizabeth; and the failed aspirations and shame that haunted him throughout their relationship. As Kashner and Schoenberger illuminate the events and choices that shaped this illustrious couple's story, they demonstrate how the legendary pair presaged America's changing attitudes toward sex, marriage, morality, and celebrity. Yet ultimately, as the authors show, Elizabeth and Richard shared something priceless beyond the drama: enduring love.
Addictive and entertaining, Furious Love is more than a celebrity biography; it's an honest yet sympathetic portrait of a man, a woman, and a passion that shocked and mesmerized the world.

****Rate this 4/5. A very thoroughly researched story of the love between Dick & Liz. I will alsways consider these two to be the love story of the century. I believe that Liz will love Richard Burton until the day she dies as Richard loved her until his own passing.

LEAVING THE WORLD by Douglas Kennedy

2010-08-30T16:32:00.000-07:00

"On the night of her thirteenth birthday, Jane Howard made a vow to her warring parents: she would never get married, and she would never have children.
But life, as Jane comes to discover, is a profoundly random business. Many years and many lives later, she is a professor in Boston, in love with a brilliant, erratic man named Theo. And then Jane becomes pregnant. Motherhood turns out to be a great welcome surprise—but when a devastating turn of events tears her existence apart she has no choice but to flee all she knows and leave the world.
Just when she has renounced life itself, the disappearance of a young girl pulls her back from the edge and into an obsessive search for some sort of personal redemption. Convinced that she knows more about the case than the police do, she is forced to make a decision—stay hidden or bring to light a shattering truth.
Leaving the World is a riveting portrait of a brilliant woman that reflects the way we live now, of the many routes we follow in the course of a single life, and of the arbitrary nature of destiny. A critically acclaimed international bestseller, it is also a compulsive read and one that speaks volumes about the dilemmas we face in trying to navigate our way through all that fate throws in our path."

*****Rate this book 5/5 would give it higher if I could. I picked this book up and noticed the length, 480 pages, and said to myself, "well it better be good". I started reading, hoping to find a reason to not like it. It was after all a book about a woman written by a man, and I was prepared to not like it. I read this book in 2 sittings! It drew me in and I only put it down to get some sleep for the night. I loved it! Great story, great characters, and I loved the main character, Jane, even though a man wrote her story!

AMBULANCE GIRL by Jane Stern

2010-08-27T08:25:00.001-07:00

Five years ago Jane Stern was a walking encyclopedia of panic attacks, depression, and hypochondria. Her marriage of more than thirty years was suffering, and she was virtually immobilized by fear and anxiety. As the daughter of parents who both died before she was thirty, Stern was terrified of illness and death, and despite the fact that her acclaimed career as a food and travel writer required her to spend a great deal of time on airplanes, she suffered from a persistent fear of flying and severe claustrophobia. But a strange thing happened one day on a plane that was grounded at the Minneapolis airport for six horrible, foodless, airless hours. A young man on a trip with his classmates suddenly became dizzy and pale because he hadn’t eaten in many hours, and there was no food left on the plane. Without thinking about it, Jane gave him the candy bar that she had in her purse. A short time later the color had returned to his cheeks, the boy was laughing again with his friends, and Jane realized that this one small act of kindness—helping another person who was suffering—had provided her with comfort and a sense of well-being.
It was shortly thereafter that this fifty-two-year-old writer decided to become an emergency medical technician, eventually coming to be known as Ambulance Girl. Stern tells her story with great humor and poignancy, creating a wonderful portrait of a middle-aged, Woody Allen–ish woman who was “deeply and neurotically terrified of sick and dead people,” but who went out into the world to save other people’s lives as a way of saving her own. Her story begins with the boot camp of EMT training: 140 hours at the hands of a dour ex-marine who took delight in presenting a veritable parade of amputations, hideous deformities, and gross disasters. Jane—overweight and badly out of shape—had to surmount physical challenges like carrying a 250-pound man seated in a chair down a dark flight of stairs. After class she did rounds in the emergency room of a local hospital, where she attended to a schizophrenic kickboxer who had tried to kill his mother that morning and a stockbroker who was taken off the commuter train to Manhattan with delirium tremens so bad it killed him.
Each call Stern describes is a vignette of human nature, often with a life in the balance. From an AIDS hospice to town drunks, yuppie wife beaters to psychopaths, Jane comes to see the true nature and underlying mysteries of a town she had called home for twenty years. Throughout the book we follow her as she gets her sea legs and finally bonds with the burly, handsome firefighters who become her colleagues. At the end, she is named the first woman officer of the department—a triumph we joyously share with her.
Ambulance Girl is an inspiring story by a woman who found, somewhat late in life, that “in helping others I learned to help myself.” It is a book to be treasured and shared.

*****Rate this 5/5. I happen to 'know' Ms. Stern through my Perfume of Life forum and always wanted a little background into her life. I decided to read a book she wrote that she said 'saved her life' after a bout with depression. I loved getting to know her through this book, an interesting read. Being a registered nurse, I can identify with her fears in the medical world.

GREEN ANGEL by Alice Hoffman

2010-07-23T08:02:00.000-07:00

Left on her own when her family dies in a terrible disaster, fifteen-year-old Green is haunted by loss and by the past. Struggling to survive physically and emotionally in a place where nothing seems to grow and ashes are everywhere, Green retreats into the ruined realm of her garden. But in destroying her feelings, she also begins to destroy herself, erasing the girl she'd once been as she inks darkness into her skin. It is only through a series of mysterious encounters that Green can relearn the lessons of love and begin to heal enough to tell her story.

*****Rate a 5/5. Alice Hoffman's prose is so lyrical and beautiful that even when she writes a short book, her words are still powerful. She has the ability to even make pain beautiful. Another great one by my favorite author.

GREEN WITCH by Alice Hoffman

2010-07-13T11:32:00.001-07:00

Green, whose lyrical narration was the hallmark of Hoffman's survival story Green Angel (2003), returns in an equally spellbinding tale that emphasizes themes of rebirth. A year after Green lost her family in the fiery destruction of an unnamed city, those living in a nearby village struggle to reinvent their lives. Some, rumored witches, choose to isolate themselves. Green, now almost 17, feels compelled to record their losses, but is also determined to discover the fates of two friends: Heather, a former schoolmate, and Diamond, the mute boy who stole her heart. Her quest takes her to an island of prisoners, where she discovers old acquaintances and strangers who have suffered as much as she. Banded together, they have the power to change the course of the future. Hoffman's sparse prose encapsulates the pain of grief and the resiliency of the human spirit, and suggests that love is a stronger force than tyranny. Haunting, philosophical, and filled with poetic imagery (“my beloved city is still in pieces, the buildings like silver stars—some fallen, some rising, some constant in the sky”) this book will leave an indelible mark.

*****Rate this 5/5. There is no better way to spend an afternoon than to read Alice Hoffman's latest book. Her prose is poetry to me and I never tire of it. I love her imagination and her fantasies. I loved this book.

THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE by Aimee Bender

2010-07-13T07:57:00.001-07:00

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose. The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden—her mother’s life outside the home, her father’s detachment, her brother’s clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a luminous tale about the enormous difficulty of loving someone fully when you know too much about them. It is heartbreaking and funny, wise and sad, and confirms Aimee Bender’s place as “a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language

*****Rate this 5/5. I thoroughly loved this book! It was so very sad, but so beautifully written that I hated finished it. Now I am off to the library to see what else I can find by this particular author.

THE KITCHEN HOUSE by Kathleen Grissom

2010-06-26T15:52:00.001-07:00

When a white servant girl violates the order of plantation society, she unleashes a tragedy that exposes the worst and best in the people she has come to call her family.
Orphaned while onboard ship from Ireland, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives on the steps of a tobacco plantation where she is to live and work with the slaves of the kitchen house. Under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate daughter, Lavinia becomes deeply bonded to her adopted family, though she is set apart from them by her white skin.
Eventually, Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. Lavinia finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds. When she is forced to make a choice, loyalties are brought into question, dangerous truths are laid bare, and lives are put at risk.
The Kitchen House is a tragic story of page-turning suspense, exploring the meaning of family, where love and loyalty prevail

*****Rate this 5/5 An excellent first novel. Great historical fiction with loveable characters...

THE PASSAGE by Justin Cronin

2010-06-20T05:47:00.000-07:00

First, the unthinkable: a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment. Then, the unspeakable: a night of chaos and carnage gives way to sunrise on a nation, and ultimately a world, forever altered. All that remains for the stunned survivors is the long fight ahead and a future ruled by fear—of darkness, of death, of a fate far worse.As civilization swiftly crumbles into a primal landscape of predators and prey, two people flee in search of sanctuary. FBI agent Brad Wolgast is a good man haunted by what he’s done in the line of duty. Six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte is a refugee from the doomed scientific project that has triggered apocalypse. He is determined to protect her from the horror set loose by her captors. But for Amy, escaping the bloody fallout is only the beginning of a much longer odyssey—spanning miles and decades—towards the time and place where she must finish what should never have begun.With The Passage, award-winning author Justin Cronin has written both a relentlessly suspenseful adventure and an epic chronicle of human endurance in the face of unprecedented catastrophe and unimaginable danger. Its inventive storytelling, masterful prose, and depth of human insight mark it as a crucial and transcendent work of modern fiction.

***Rate this 3/5. I want completely enthralled through the first 400 pages of this novel, but then it began to sag. I scanned the rest of the book. I feel it would have been a much better novel if it were shorter.

THE GIRL WITH GLASS FEET by Ali Shaw

2010-05-22T10:18:00.000-07:00

An inventive and richly visual novel about young lovers on a quest to find a cure for a magical ailment, perfect for readers of Alice Hoffman
Strange things are happening on the remote and snowbound archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land. Unusual winged creatures flit around the icy bogland, albino animals hide themselves in the snow-glazed woods, and Ida Maclaird is slowly turning into glass. Ida is an outsider in these parts, a mainlander who has visited the islands only once before. Yet during that one fateful visit the glass transformation began to take hold, and now she has returned in search of a cure.
Midas Crook is a young loner who has lived on the islands his entire life. When he meets Ida, something about her sad, defiant spirit pierces his emotional defenses. As Midas helps Ida come to terms with her affliction, she gradually unpicks the knots of his heart. Love must be paid in precious hours and, as the glass encroaches, time is slipping away fast. Will they find a way to stave off the spread of the glass?
The Girl with Glass Feet is a dazzlingly imaginative and magical first novel, a love story to treasure.

*****Rate this 5/5. A beautiful, but sad and tragic love story about a girl who is slowly turning to glass and how her love turns Midas' heart from one that is frozen to one that will finally experience first love. Magical and beautiful in the same vein as Alice Hoffman's books, which are my favorite.

STAR: How Warren Beatty Seduced America by Peter Biskind

2010-05-18T07:19:00.000-07:00

In his refreshing biography, Biskind (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls) examines Beatty's dual—and often dueling—status as Hollywood legend and notorious womanizer without letting either subsume the other. Beatty's film career began with a starring role in director Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass opposite Natalie Wood, the first of his co-stars with whom he had relationships (the list includes Leslie Caron, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, and Annette Bening, whom he married). As producer and star of 1967's Bonnie and Clyde, Beatty inhabited the brief and violent life of the titular bank robber in a film Pauline Kael called “the most exciting American movie since The Manchurian Candidate.” From 1971's McCabe & Mrs. Miller, now considered one of the finest westerns of all time, to his Oscar-winning turn as director in 1981's Reds (which he both produced and starred in), Beatty had a hand in some of New Hollywood's most important films. But Biskind does not gloss over the fact that Beatty has not had a box office hit since 1990's Dick Tracy, nor does he ignore the string of flops that have deflated the actor's career (Ishtar, Bugsy, Love Affair, etc.). Yet his respect for Beatty never dwindles, and readers are left with a complicated portrait of a complicated man, arguably a great actor of his generation.

***Rate this 3/5. I must admit that I scanned many chapters in this book because I grew tired of reading about Mr. Beatty's conquests. I find him to be an emotionally vacant person as well as narcissistic and self-absorbed. I knew this prior to reading the book, but didn't realize how truly self-absorbed and superficial he is. Shame, truly...........

THE WALK by Richard Paul Evans

2010-05-13T11:57:00.001-07:00

My name is Alan Christoffersen. You don’t know me. ‘Just another book in the library,’ my father would say. ‘Unopened and unread.’ You have no idea how far I’ve come or what I’ve lost. More important, you have no idea what I’ve found." —Prologue
What would you do if you lost everything—your job, your home, and the love of your life—all at the same time? When it happens to Seattle ad executive Alan Christoffersen, he’s tempted by his darkest thoughts. A bottle of pills in his hand and nothing left to live for, he plans to end his misery. Instead, he decides to take a walk. But not any ordinary walk. Taking with him only the barest of essentials, Al leaves behind all that he’s known and heads for the farthest point on his map: Key West, Florida. The people he encounters along the way, and the lessons they share with him, will save his life—and inspire yours.
Richard Paul Evans’s extraordinary New York Times bestsellers have made him one of the world’s most beloved storytellers. A life-changing journey, both physical and spiritual, The Walk is the first of an unforgettable series of books about one man’s search for hope.

*****Rate this 5/5. I received this book yesterday, sat down and was immediately engrossed in it, read at least 2/3 of it before going to bed. Got up this morning and finished it. I loved this book, it's message and this author's writing style. Now I can't wait for the 2nd book in the series. Do yourself a favor and read this, it is a great book!

MAJOR PETTIGREW'S LAST STAND by Helen Simonsen

2010-05-11T06:36:00.001-07:00

Set-in-his-ways retired British officer tentatively courts charming local widow of Pakistani descent. Shortly after being informed that his younger brother Bertie has suddenly passed away from a coronary, Maj. Ernest Pettigrew answers his door to find Mrs. Ali, proprietress of his village food shop. She's on an errand, but when she steps in to help the somewhat older man during a vulnerable moment, something registers; then they bond over a shared love of Kipling and the loss of their beloved spouses. Their friendship grows slowly, with the two well aware of their very different lives. Though born in England, Mrs. Ali is a member of the Pakistani immigrant community and is being pressured by her surly, religious nephew Abdul Wahid to sign over her business to him. The major belongs to a non-integrated golf club in their village and is girding himself for a messy battle with his sister-in-law Marjorie over a valuable hunting rifle that should rightfully have gone to him after Bertie's death. He also must contend with his grown son Roger, a callow, materialistic Londoner who appears in the village with a leggy American girlfriend and plans to purchase a weekend cottage for reasons that seem more complex than mere family unity. Add to that a single mum with a small boy who bears a striking resemblance to Abdul Wahid, and you have enough distractions to keep the mature sweethearts from taking it to the next level. But the major rallies and asks Mrs. Ali to accompany him to the annual club dance, which happens to have an ill-advised "Indian" theme. The event begins magically but ends disastrously, with the besotted major fearing he has lost his love forever. His only chance at winning her backis to commit to a bold sacrifice without any guarantees it will actually work. Unexpectedly entertaining, with a stiff-upper-lip hero who transcends stereotype, this good-hearted debut doesn't shy away from modern cultural and religious issues, even though they ultimately prove immaterial.

****Rate this 4/5. A charming first novel by a new author describing life on the English countryside. I immediately loved the Major and loved the refinement and beauty of Mrs. Ali. I could not wait for them to get together and become a married couple, but they courted in a proper fashion and with such love and sacrifice that it made their union even more splendid.

*OPRAH: A BIOGRAPHY by Kitty Kelley

2010-04-29T15:30:00.000-07:00

For the past twenty-five years, no one has been better at revealing secrets than Oprah Winfrey. On what is arguably the most influential show in television history, she has gotten her guests-often the biggest celebrities in the world-to bare their love lives, explore their painful pasts, admit their transgressions, reveal their pleasures, and explore their demons. In turn, Oprah has repeatedly allowed her audience to share in her own life story, opening up about the sexual abuse in her past and discussing her romantic relationships, her weight problems, her spiritual beliefs, her charitable donations, and her strongly held views on the state of the world.
After a quarter of a century of the Oprah-ization of America, can there be any more secrets left to reveal?
Yes. Because Oprah has met her match.
Kitty Kelley has, over the same period of time, fearlessly and relentlessly investigated and written about the world's most revered icons: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, England's Royal Family, and the Bush dynasty. In her #1 bestselling biographies, she has exposed truths and exploded myths to uncover the real human beings that exist behind their manufactured facades.
Turning her reportorial sights on Oprah, Kelley has now given us an unvarnished look at the stories Oprah's told and the life she's led. Kelley has talked to Oprah's closest family members and business associates. She has obtained court records, birth certificates, financial and tax records, and even copies of Oprah's legendary (and punishing) confidentiality agreements. She has probed every aspect of Oprah Winfrey's life, and it is as if she's written the most extraordinary segment of The Oprah Winfrey Show ever filmed-one in which Oprah herself is finally and fully revealed.
There is a case to be made, and it is certainly made in this book, that Oprah Winfrey is an important, and even great, figure of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But there is also a case to be made that even greatness needs to be examined and put under a microscope. Fact must be separated from myth, truth from hype. Kitty Kelley has made that separation, showing both sides of Oprah as they have never been shown before. In doing so she has written a psychologically perceptive and meticulously researched book that will surprise and thrill everyone who reads it.

*****Rate this 5/5. I always anxiously await Ms. Kelley's biographies because I can always depend on them to be meticulously researched and a good read. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It only reinforced my original opinion that Oprah is a narcissistic demigoddess! I used to wonder why she had to be constantly in the spotlight but eventually grew to believe that she has to be, that is the love of her narcissist ego. She has taken it now to a level where she truly believes that her God wants her to be who she is and bring pleasure to the masses. It is sad that this is the only true love of her life. Power is a need to some people, to Oprah it is a lifeforce.

THE GIRL WHO CHASED THE MOON by Sarah Addison Allen

2010-04-11T05:49:00.000-07:00

In her latest enchanting novel, New York Times bestelling author Sarah Addison Allen invites you to a quirky little Southern town with more magic than a full Carolina moon. Here two very different women discover how to find their place in the world...no matter how out of place they feel. Emily Benedict came to Mullaby, North Carolina, hoping to solve at least some of the riddles surrounding her mother's life. For instance, why did Dulcie Shelby leave her hometown so suddenly? Why did she vow never to return? But the moment Emily enters the house where her mother grew up and meets the grandfather she never knew—a reclusive, real-life gentle giant—she realizes that mysteries aren't solved in Mullaby, they're a way of life.Here are rooms where the wallpaper changes to suit your mood. Unexplained lights skip across the yard at midnight. And a neighbor bakes hope in the form of cakes.

Rate this 3.5/5 While I loved "Garden Spells" and "The Sugar Queen" this was not all that I expected. I wanted to know more about Emily's family, her mother as well as who her father was. The story starts after she comes home to her mother's birthplace but doesn't explain what her mother did after she left it, or who her father was. I kept waiting for that but it was never explained. I hope that the author's next book is better because I love her version of fantasy and make-believe, but the story didn't quite make it.

THE HELP by Kathryn Stockett

2010-03-29T05:45:00.000-07:00

Be prepared to meet three unforgettable women:
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town...

*****Would rate this 6/5 if I could. I loved this book. My grandmother was born in Mississippi and this book took me back to her time and her life. I loved the story told from the 2 black women and the white woman's viewpoint. It is amazing that it is this author's first novel.

GAME CHANGE by Heilemann and Halperin

2010-03-16T17:44:00.001-07:00

In 2008, the presidential election became blockbuster entertainment. Everyone was watching as the race for the White House unfolded like something from the realm of fiction. The meteoric rise and historic triumph of Barack Obama. The shocking fall of the House of Clinton-and the improbable resurrection of Hillary as Obama's partner and America's face to the world. The mercurial performance of John McCain and the mesmerizing emergence of Sarah Palin. But despite the wall-to-wall media coverage of this spellbinding drama, remarkably little of the real story behind the headlines has yet been told. In Game Change, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, two of the country's leading political reporters, use their unrivaled access to pull back the curtain on the Obama, Clinton, McCain, and Palin campaigns. How did Obama convince himself that, despite the thinness of his résumé, he could somehow beat the odds to become the nation's first African American president? How did the tumultuous relationship between the Clintons shape-and warp-Hillary's supposedly unstoppable bid? What was behind her husband's furious outbursts and devastating political miscalculations? Why did McCain make the novice governor of Alaska his running mate? And was Palin merely painfully out of her depth-or troubled in more serious ways? Game Change answers those questions and more, laying bare the secret history of the 2008 campaign. Heilemann and Halperin take us inside the Obama machine, where staffers referred to the candidate as "Black Jesus." They unearth the quiet conspiracyin the U.S. Senate to prod Obama into the race, driven in part by the fears of senior Democrats that Bill Clinton's personal life might cripple Hillary's presidential prospects. They expose the twisted tale of John Edwards's affair with Rielle Hunter, the truth behind the downfall of Rudy Giuliani, and the doubts of those responsible for vetting Palin about her readiness for the Republican ticket-along with the McCain campaign staff's worries about her fitness for office. And they reveal how, in an emotional late-night phone call, Obama succeeded in wooing Clinton, despite her staunch resistance, to become his secretary of state. Based on hundreds of interviews with the people who lived the story, Game Change is a reportorial tour de force that reads like a fast-paced novel. Character driven and dialogue rich, replete with extravagantly detailed scenes, this is the occasionally shocking, often hilarious, ultimately definitive account of the campaign of a lifetime.

***Rate this 3/5. A good accounting of the different personalities during the 2008 campaign. Very informative and revealing about the greed of needing the power of the presidency, not for the money or acclaim, but for the power that the office of the President creates.

THE GIRLS by Lori Lansens

2010-03-08T06:28:00.000-08:00

Some books translate so smoothly to audio that they seem meant to be read aloud, and this fictional autobiography of 29-year-old conjoined twins Rose and Ruby Darlen is one such tale. Though joined at the head, "The Girls" have separate bodies and distinct personalities, which come to life through Zimbalist's and Davidovich's narration. Zimbalist takes on the husky voice of Rose, a writer who's intent on penning her life story-in other words, this audio. She has coerced Ruby, voiced to bubbly perfection by Davidovich, into contributing her own chapters, and the combination of their interwoven first-person narratives makes for an illuminating portrait of two extraordinary women, their unshakeable bond and the people who have guided them along the way. Zimbalist does a fine job voicing not only Rose but the girls' uncle Stash, with his heavy Slovakian accent, their levelheaded aunt Lovey and their crotchety Italian neighbor, among others. Further complementing the narration is occasional music, adjusted to match the mood and tempo of the story. This is a masterful production of an unusual and inspiring story.

***Rate this 3/5. While I loved the premise of the story and the characters Rose and Ruby, the book was far too long. I thought that some entire chapters could have been eliminated. I read this author's latest book, "The Wife's Tale" right before this one and was enchanted with it.

THE WIFE'S TALE by Lori Lansens

2010-03-02T13:37:00.001-08:00

On the eve of their silver anniversary, Mary Gooch is waiting for her husband, Jimmy — still every inch the handsome star athlete he was in high school — to come home. As night turns to day, it becomes frighteningly clear to Mary that he is gone. Through the years, disappointment and worry have brought Mary’s life to a standstill, and she has let her universe shrink to the well-worn path from the bedroom to the refrigerator. But her husband’s disappearance startles her out of her inertia, and she begins a desperate search. She boards a plane for the first time in her life and flies across the country to find her lost husband. So used to hiding from the world, Mary learns that in the bright sun and broad vistas of California, she is forced to look up from the pavement. And what she discovers fills her with an inner strength she’s never felt before: perfect strangers who come to her rescue, an aging, sometimes hostile mother-in-law who needs her help, friends who enjoy her company. And through it all, Mary not only finds kindred spirits, but reunites with a more intimate stranger no longer sequestered by fear and habit: herself.With the generosity and delicate grace that had readers falling in love with her bestselling novel, The Girls, Lori Lansens brings us another moving and beautifully wrought story, this time of a woman taking small yet courageous steps toward her authentic self.

*****Rate this 5/5 I can't say enough about this book, I literally started and finished it in one sitting. I loved Mary, the main character and her journey to self fulfillment and redemption. She proves that kindness and understanding always win out in the end. Anyone reading this book will fall in love with Mary on the very first page, will cheer for her as she fights her battles, and in the end, looking for her stray husband, she finds something even greater, she finds herself!

ROSES by Leila Meacham

2010-02-28T12:51:00.001-08:00

This enthralling stunner, a good old-fashioned read, may herald the overdue return of those delicious doorstop epics from such writers as Barbara Taylor Bradford and Colleen McCullough. Meacham's multigenerational family saga, set in East Texas circa 1914–1985, charts the transformation of Mary Toliver, a wide-eyed 16-year-old heiress, into a calculating cotton plantation queen as hardheaded as Scarlett O'Hara. Her brother, Miles, goes off to WWI, returns home, but then goes back to France to marry Marietta, a French Communist, leaving Mary to deal with their plantation, Somerset, and Darla, their alcoholic mother (who later hangs herself ). Many years later, Mary, now an elderly, terminally ill widow, resolves to defeat the “Toliver Curse” and regrets “selling her soul for Somerset” and giving up her true love, Percy Warwick, the father of their secret child, to marry their friend Ollie DuMont, who helped her save Somerset when Percy refused. Meacham uses three well-balanced viewpoints: Mary's, Percy's and Rachel's, Mary's great-niece, who must confront Percy when she discovers some disquieting family information after Mary dies. A refreshingly nostalgic bouquet of family angst, undying love and “if onlys

*****Rate this 5/5. I loved this book and even though it was over 600 pages, I found it very difficult to put down. The generational theme of love and extreme loss was mesmerizing. I loved the characters, the rich setting in Texas, the whole theme of the book. I will be looking for other books by this author.

A FAIR MAIDEN by Joyce Carol Oates

2010-02-23T11:58:00.001-08:00

Sixteen-year-old Katya Spivak is out for a walk on the gracious streets of Bayhead Harbor with her two summer babysitting charges when she’s approached by silver-haired, elegant Marcus Kidder. At first his interest in her seems harmless, even pleasant; like his name, a sort of gentle joke. His beautiful home, the children’s books he’s written, his classical music, the marvelous art in his study, his lavish presents to her — Mr. Kidder’s life couldn’t be more different from Katya’s drab working-class existence back home in South Jersey, or more enticing. But by degrees, almost imperceptibly, something changes, and posing for Mr. Kidder’s new painting isn’t the lighthearted endeavor it once was. What does he really want from her? And how far will he go to get it?

****Rate this 4/5. Like most of Joyce Carol Oates' books, this one is odd but kept my interest nonetheless. It is a dark tale about a very lonely, misguided young lady who is deceived by an elderly man. I did enjoy it, but I never know what Miss Oates will come up with in her next book.

THE FORGOTTEN GARDEN by Kate Morton

2010-02-15T16:25:00.000-08:00

A four-year-old girl abandoned aboard a ship touches off a century-long inquiry into her ancestry, in Morton's weighty, at times unwieldy, second novel (The House at Riverton, 2008). In 1913, Hugh, portmaster of Maryborough, Australia, discovers a child alone on a vessel newly arrived from England. The little girl cannot recall her name and has no identification, only a white suitcase containing some clothes and a book of fairy tales by Eliza Makepeace. Hugh and his wife, childless after several miscarriages, name the girl Nell and raise her as their own. At 21, she is engaged to be married and has no idea she is not their biological daughter. When Hugh confesses the truth, Nell's equilibrium is destroyed, but life and World War II intervene, and she doesn't explore her true origins until 1975, when she journeys to London. There she learns of Eliza's sickly cousin Rose, daughter of Lord Linus Mountrachet and his lowborn, tightly wound wife, Lady Adeline. Mountrachet's beloved sister Georgiana disgraced the family by running off to London to live in squalor with a sailor, who then abruptly disappeared. Eliza was their daughter, reclaimed by Linus after Georgiana's death and brought back to Blackhurst, the gloomy Mountrachet manor in Cornwall. Interviewing secretive locals at Blackhurst, now under renovation as a hotel, Nell traces her parentage to Rose and her husband, society portraitist Nathaniel Walker-except that their only daughter died at age four. Nell's quest is interrupted at this point, but after her death in 2005, her granddaughter Cassandra takes it up. Intricate, intersecting narratives, heavy-handed fairy-tale symbolism and a giant red herring suggesting possible incest create a thicket of clues as impenetrable and treacherous as Eliza's overgrown garden and the twisty maze on the Mountrachet estate. Murky, but the puzzle is pleasing and the long-delayed "reveal" is a genuine surprise.

*****Rate this 5/5. I loved this book, it was similar to The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield with it's mystery and winding story. I loved the magical aspects of it and shall look forward to Ms. Morton's next book.

SECRETS OF EDEN by Chris Bohjalian

2010-02-10T11:30:00.000-08:00

Bohjalian (Law of Similars) has built a reputation on his rich characters and immersing readers in diverse subjects—homeopathy, animal rights activism, midwifery—and his latest surely won’t disappoint. The morning after her baptism into the Rev. Stephen Drew’s Vermont Baptist church, Alice Hayward and her abusive husband are found dead in their home, an apparent murder-suicide. Stephen, the novel’s first narrator, is so racked with guilt over his failure to save Alice that he leaves town. Soon, he meets Heather Laurent, the author of a book about angels whose own parents’ marriage also ended in tragedy. Stephen’s deeply sympathetic narration is challenged by the next two narrators: deputy state attorney Catherine Benincasa, whose suspicions are aroused initially by Stephen’s abrupt departure (and then by questions about his relationship with Alice), and Heather, who distances herself from Stephen for similar reasons and risks the trip into her dark past by seeking out Katie, the Haywards’ now-orphaned 15-year-old daughter who puts into play the final pieces of the puzzle, setting things up for a touching twist. Fans of Bohjalian’s more exotic works will miss learning something new, but this is a masterfully human and compassionate tale.

****Rate this 4/5 Another great book by Chris. I liked this much better than Double Bind, but The Midwife remains my favorite by this author.

*SAVING CEE CEE HONEYCUTT by Beth Hoffman

2010-02-06T10:20:00.000-08:00

Twelve-year-old CeeCee Honeycutt is in trouble. For years, she has been the caretaker of her psychotic mother, Camille-the tiara-toting, lipstick-smeared laughingstock of an entire town-a woman trapped in her long-ago moment of glory as the 1951 Vidalia Onion Queen. But when Camille is hit by a truck and killed, CeeCee is left to fend for herself. To the rescue comes her previously unknown great-aunt, Tootie Caldwell. In her vintage Packard convertible, Tootie whisks CeeCee away to Savannah's perfumed world of prosperity and Southern eccentricity, a world that seems to be run entirely by women. From the exotic Miz Thelma Rae Goodpepper, who bathes in her backyard bathtub and uses garden slugs as her secret weapons, to Tootie's all-knowing housekeeper, Oletta Jones, to Violene Hobbs, who entertains a local police officer in her canary-yellow peignoir, the women of Gaston Street keep CeeCee entertained and enthralled for an entire summer. Laugh-out-loud funny and deeply touching, Beth Hoffman's sparkling debut is, as Kristin Hannah says, "packed full of Southern charm, strong women, wacky humor, and good old-fashioned heart." It is a novel that explores the indomitable strengths of female friendship and gives us the story of a young girl who loses one mother and finds many others

*****Rate this 5/5 I adored this charming novel. I had to pace myself to keep from devouring it in one sitting! I loved the way this author poetically writes.....encompassing both sadness and laughter together in such a way. I loved every character because I love books about strong women with a good heart and soul.

REMARKABLE CREATURES by Tracy Chevalier

2010-02-02T04:59:00.001-08:00

Mary Anning has been a unique girl ever since she survived being struck by lightning as a baby. She has a special knack for finding rare fossils of unknown creatures on the beaches near her home. Elizabeth Philpot is a young spinster when she meets Mary, instantly taking an interest in fossils herself. From this moment, we watch the friendship grow between these two different women as they navigate family, love, society, and the male dominated world of Fossils.
Chevalier has a uncommon ability to make people from a very specific time and place come alive once more. I had to pause a few times to remind myself that these characters lived long ago, as they felt so real and tangible to me. She has a writing style full of prose so beautiful and soft, it will make the vision at the edges of your sight blur until the only thing in focus is the page in front of you.
Unusual side effect: reading this book made me want to go scour the beaches for my own fossil finds!

Rate this 5/5. I loved this book. It is a story of how a solid friendship can last over the years and a story of two women, who, even though of different social classes, have so much in common.

THE SWAN THIEVES by Elizabeth Kostova

2010-01-23T09:01:00.001-08:00

Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe has a perfectly ordered life—solitary, perhaps, but full of devotion to his profession and the painting hobby he loves. This order is destroyed when renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient. In response, Marlowe finds himself going beyond his own legal and ethical boundaries to understand the secret that torments this genius, a journey that will lead him into the lives of the women closest to Robert Oliver and toward a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism.Ranging from American museums to the coast of Normandy, from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth, from young love to last love, THE SWAN THIEVES is a story of obsession, the losses of history, and the power of art to preserve human hope.

***Rate this 3/5. I so wanted to love this book but I could not. I compared it to her first book, The Historian, and it came up very short. This book went on and on, back and forth in time, between the psychiatrist, the wife, the other woman, and a mysterious 18th century couple and in the end, nothing was really resolved. This was 561 pages and rather a boring read.

THE WHITE QUEEN by Phillippa Gregory

2010-01-14T07:38:00.000-08:00

Philippa Gregory, "the queen of royal fiction" (USA Today) Presents the first of a new series set amid the deadly feuds of England known as the Wars of the Roses.
Brother turns on brother to win the ultimate prize, the throne of England, in this dazzling account of the wars of the Plantagenets. They are the claimants and kings who ruled England before the Tudors, and now Philippa Gregory brings them to life through the dramatic and intimate stories of the secret players: the indomitable women, starting with Elizabeth Woodville, the White Queen.
The White Queen tells the story of a woman of extraordinary beauty and ambition who, catching the eye of the newly crowned boy king, marries him in secret and ascends to royalty. While Elizabeth rises to the demands of her exalted position and fights for the success of her family, her two sons become central figures in a mystery that has confounded historians for centuries: the missing princes in the Tower of London...

*****5/5 I have loved all of the books by this author on the Tudors but now she is headed in a new direction with the Plantagenets, who were before them. I really admired the White Queen, Elizabeth, and loved the telling of her story. I now look forward to further books on this family!

NOAH'S COMPASS by Anne Tyler

2010-01-10T10:33:00.000-08:00

Like Tyler's previous protagonists, Liam Pennywell is a man of unexceptional talents, plain demeanor, modest means and curtailed ambition. At age 60, he's been fired from his teaching job at a “second-rate private boys' school” in Baltimore, a job below his academic training and original expectations. An unsentimental, noncontemplative survivor of two failed marriages and the emotionally detached father of three grown daughters, Liam is jolted into alarm after he's attacked in his apartment and loses all memory of the experience. His search to recover those lost hours leads him into an uneasy exploration of his disappointing life and into an unlikely new relationship with Eunice, a socially inept walking fashion disaster who is half his age. She is also spontaneous and enthusiastic, and Liam longs to cast off his inertia and embrace the “joyous recklessness” that he feels in her company. Tyler's gift is to make the reader empathize with this flawed but decent man, and to marvel at how this determinedly low-key, plainspoken novelist achieves miracles of insight and understanding.

****Rate this as a 4/5. I love Anne's books, but I could not even force any empathy for her main character, Liam. I feel he led a life where everyone treated him as a doormat. He meets Eunice, who actually makes him realize how much he has missed. I was so hoping that he would take advantage of her being his 'rememberer, as it were, but did he? No.....he continued on with his solitary aloneness with no thought of every changing it.

THE ICE MAN: Confessions Of A Mafia Contract Killer by Philip Carlo

2010-01-05T14:04:00.000-08:00

Carlo (The Night Stalker) has written another captivating true-crime book. This one tells the spine-chilling story of Richard Kuklinski, a.k.a. "the Ice Man" because he liked to freeze his victims to throw off forensic investigators. Born into an abusive family, Kuklinski claimed to have killed for the first time at age 14. After a run-in with the Gambino family, he became a hit man for the mob, managing to live the double life of a professional assassin and devoted family man. The author spent over 200 hours interviewing the incarcerated Kuklinski and his family. If one is to believe Kuklinski, he killed upward of 200 individuals, including Jimmy Hoffa, Carmine Galante, and Roy DeMeo. It was only through the diligent work of New Jersey police officer Pat Kane, who spent six years building a case against Kuklinski, that the killing spree ended. This work is written like a novel; readers will become so engrossed in the details that they'll forget that this is a true story. Highly recommended for readers of true crime; perhaps the finished version of this book will provide the update that Kuklinski died on March 5, 2006, at age 70 of natural causes.

*****Rate this 5/5 I truly enjoyed this rather interesting account of Richard Kuklinski's life. His life began as a tragedy that no child could emotionally survive without damage, and he didn't, nor did his brother. It is a fascinating study of the mind of a psychopath and I am glad that I read it. HBO presented a special on this man a couple of years ago, and therein began my quest to find further information.

PUSH A Novel by Sapphire

2010-01-03T08:10:00.000-08:00

An electrifying first novel that shocks by its language, its circumstances, and its brutal honesty, Push recounts a young black street-girl's horrendous and redemptive journey through a Harlem inferno. For Precious Jones, 16 and pregnant with her father's child, miraculous hope appears and the world begins to open up for her when a courageous, determined teacher bullies, cajoles, and inspires her to learn to read, to define her own feelings and set them down in a diary

***Rate this a 3/5. This is a shocking and sad novel in that it is not fiction, but a true story. It is culture shock to anyone in white suburbs without a realization that this lifestyle exists. Sad and tragic, but a story that needed to be told.

*APPETITE FOR LIFE: The Biography of Julia Child by Noel Riley Fitch

2010-01-02T10:03:00.001-08:00

Julia McWilliams was always adventurously hunting for food to fill her 6'2" frame. When, in her late 20s, the Smith College-educated Californian took a wartime job with the OSS that sent her to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and China, she began cultivating a taste for authentic eatables as an alternative to service fare. Almost resigned to spinsterhood, she met and married Cambridge, Mass.-born government official Paul Child, who was on Asian duty, and accompanied him to his USIA posts in France and Germany. A gastronomical epiphany that occurred in Rouen, at the bistro where the couple once lunched, led her to attend the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Parisand the rest is history. In 1961, Child published the three-pound bestseller Mastering the Art of French Cooking when she was 49, and a few years later she was a TV superstar conducting gustatory symphonies with whisks and pans and patter. Her life is told warmly and compellingly by Fitch, author of several books on literary and culinary Paris, who nicely captures Child's exuberant mannerisms and plummy voice that fans know so well. Her graphic diary-letters, extracted at length by Fitch, register the couple's experiences together and the emotions they shared.

****Rate this book 4/5. I have to admit that after I saw the movie "Julie & Julia" I became very interested in the life of Julia Child. This was a very good book about a fabulous woman. She was ahead of her time as far as I am concerned: an appetite for life as big as her appetite for food. I loved her marriage to Paul Child being remembered as one in which they both respected and loved each other deeply, and were indeed, true partners. I doubt many of us have the love and consideration for each other that these two did, and total opposites nonetheless. Fascinating woman, Ms. Julia Child. Your life was rich and full and you enjoyed every minute of it.

TOO MUCH MONEY by Dominick Dunne

2009-12-31T12:02:00.000-08:00

"My name is Gus Bailey...It should be pointed out that it is a regular feature of my life that people whisper things in my ear, very private things, about themselves or others. I have always understood the art of listening."The last two years have been monstrously unpleasant for high-society journalist Gus Bailey. His propensity for gossip has finally gotten him into trouble -- $11 million worth. His problems begin when he falls hook, line, and sinker for a fake story from an unreliable source and repeats it on a radio program. As a result of his flip comments, Gus becomes embroiled in a nasty slander suit brought by Kyle Cramden, the powerful congressman he accuses of murder, and he fears it could mean the end of him.The stress of the lawsuit makes it difficult for Gus to focus on the novel he has been contracted to write, which is based on the suspicious death of billionaire Konstantin Zacharias. It is a story that has dominated the party conversations of Manhattan's chattering classes for more than two years. The accused murderer is behind bars, but Gus is not convinced that justice was served. There are too many unanswered questions, such as why a paranoid man who did not go anywhere without bodyguards was suddenly left without protection the very night he perished in a tragic fire. Gus believes the answers lie with Konstantin's hot-tempered and vengeful wife, Perla. He intends to uncover the truth, even though doing so will gain him another dangerous enemy.

In true Dominick Dunne fashion, Too Much Money is peppered with thinly veiled fictions, keeping readers guessing about the real-world villains and intrigues that lie beneath its chapters. Dunne revives the world he first introduced in his mega-bestselling novel People like Us, and he brings readers up-to-date on favorite characters such as Ruby and Elias Renthal, Lil Altemus, and, of course, the beloved Gus Bailey. Once again, he invites us to pull up a seat at the most important tables at Swifty's, get past the doormen at esteemed social clubs like The Butterfield, and venture into the innermost chambers of the Upper East Side's most sumptuous mansions. Too Much Money is a satisfying, mischievous, and compulsively readable tale by the most brilliant society chronicler of our time -- the man who knows all the secrets and isn't afraid to share them.

*****Rate this 5/5. I am so sad that this is the end of Dominick Dunne's writing career. I read every book he ever wrote as well as all of his columns in Vanity Fair. I will truly miss him. I loved this book, another fitting tribute to Mr. Dominick Dunne.

*Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin

2009-12-18T14:29:00.000-08:00

Official Book Club Selection is Kathy Griffin unplugged, uncensored, and unafraid to dish about what really happens on the road, away from the cameras, and at the star party after the show. (It’s also her big chance to score that coveted book club endorsement she’s always wanted. Are you there, Oprah? It’s me, Kathy.)Kathy Griffin has won Emmys for her reality show Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List, been nominated for a Grammy, worked and walked every red carpet known to man, and rung in the New Year with Anderson Cooper. But the legions of fans who pack Kathy’s sold-out comedy shows have heard only part of her remarkable story. Writing with her trademark wit, the feisty comic settles a few old scores, celebrates the friends and mentors who helped her claw her way to the top, and shares insider gossip about celebrity behavior–the good, the bad, and the very ugly. She recounts the crazy ups and downs of her own career and...

Rate this 3.5 out of 5. For the first 2/3 of the book, I was completely enthralled as Kathy is a very good story teller. She makes fun of herself before other people can, but sometimes I get the impression that being a star, being on camera, being in the spotlight is of such vast importance to her, that she leaves nothing else room in her life. She was actually a very sore loser because she lost out on her first Emmy nomination and stormed out, not attending the followup parties, etc. She justifies her yelling at the winners (Extreme Makeover) by saying it was all in fun and why couldn't they take a joke. It seems to me that she was wound up as a little performer in her early age, got a good response from it, and now can't get through a day without it being 'all about her'.

I Want: My Journey From Addiction and Overconsumption To A Simpler, Honest Life - Jane Velez-Mitchell

2009-12-03T14:34:00.000-08:00

Host of her own Headline News show, journalist Velez-Mitchell addresses a number of her own issues in this honest but ultimately unremarkable narrative, focusing largely on former addictions to alcohol, cigarettes, food and money: "I've consumed all of those in massive quantities, and they've just made me miserable. Now, I want... the opposite of material. As sappy as it might sound, what I want is spiritual." Velez-Mitchell then recounts a childhood with parents who taught her to shun all authority but their own; a young adulthood in which she nearly drank herself into oblivion; her decision to get sober; how she came to terms with her homosexuality; and her climb to success in the world of television news. Despite these revelations, though, Velez-Mitchell's off-putting, self-righteous tone may make readers feel they're being scolded, rather than invited to understand or sympathize.

**Rate this book 2/5. While I thought that her addiction and recovery from alcohol would be interesting reading, it was not. She did attend AA, but this is briefly mentioned. She spends most of the book acting self-righteous and self-absorbed. She not only had an alcohol addiction that she overcame, she also was a compulsive shopper, became an animal rights crusader and a vegan, hug the trees, save the whales. It is a little bit of a stretch to believe all of her 'good deeds'. I was disappointed in this self-serving book.

ANGEL TIME: SONGS OF THE SERAPHIM By Anne Rice

2009-11-18T10:34:00.000-08:00

Full of provocative moral reflections, this kickoff to bestseller Rice's new Songs of the Seraphim religious romance series centers on hired assassin Toby O'Dare, a one-time aspirant to the priesthood until personal tragedy unmoored his life. Guardian angel Malchiah visits Toby, who's just consummated his latest kill, and offers him redemption for his sins. After accepting the offer, Toby is whisked away to 13th-century England, where, in the guise of a Dominican friar, he becomes the protector of a Jewish couple accused wrongly by the gentile populace of having murdered their young daughter for her conversion to Christianity. Two eloquently told if clunkily joined digressions give the backstory on Toby and on the persecution of the Jews in medieval Europe. Readers will revel in Rice's colorful recreation of the historical past and in her moving depiction of characters struggling to reconcile matters of the heart with their personal sense of faith.

Rate this 5/5. I loved Anne's new venture into the light side instead of the dark. This book involves good versus evil, time travel and redemption. Now I can't wait for the second book in the series.

HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY by Audrey NIffenegger

2009-11-03T16:04:00.000-08:00

Six years after the phenomenal success of The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger has returned with a spectacularly compelling and haunting second novel set in and around Highgate Cemetery in London. When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina. These two American girls never met their English aunt; they only knew that their mother, too, was a twin, and Elspeth her sister. Julia and Valentina are semi-normal American teenagers -- with seemingly little interest in college, finding jobs, or anything outside their cozy home in the suburbs of Chicago, and with an abnormally intense attachment to one another. The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders Highgate Cemetery. They come to know the building's other residents. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword puzzle setter suffering from crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder; Marjike, Martin's devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth's elusive former lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt's neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including -- perhaps -- their aunt, who can't seem to leave her old apartment and life behind. Niffenegger weaves a captivating story in Her Fearful Symmetry: about love and identity, about secrets and sisterhood, and about the tenacity of life -- even after death.

****Rate this as 4/5. The first 3/4 of the book were priceless, and kept my rapt attention. Then I was totally disappointed by the last few chapters, as well as the end. It just did not comply or fit in with the beginning of the story. I liked The Time Traveler's Wife so much better. I felt like the ending of the book was somewhat rushed on this one, which is a shame since the first 3/4 were excellent and I loved the characters.

THE KENNEDY WOMEN by Laurence Leamer

2009-10-18T14:10:00.000-07:00

Based on five years of research, and with unprecedented cooperation from Kennedy family and associates, Laurence Leamer paints startling, in-depth portraits of the mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters who struggled to build and maintain the Kennedy dynasty—from steerage on an immigrant vessel to the slums of Boston, from the court of St. James to the White House.

*****Rate this 5/5. The years of research paid off because this book was so well-written and thorough. One always hears of the Kennedy men, but little of their wives, sisters and mother. This book introduces all of them in depth and the lives they lived. This book was over 800 pages and took some time to read, but it was worth the effort. I had just finished Bobby and Jackie, A Love Story, so this book expanded on that one.

THE MANSIONS OF LIMBO by Dominick Dunne

2009-10-13T09:22:00.001-07:00

Dominick Dunne has met them all--stars and slugs, criminals and victims, the innocent and the hideously guilty--and now his two provocative collections of Vanity Fair portraits are in one irresistible volume. From posh Park Avenue duplexes to the extravagant mansions of Beverly Hills, from tasteful London town houses to the wild excesses of million-dollar European retreats, here are the movers and shakers--and the people who pretend to be.
Among colorful profiles and revealing glimpses of Elizabeth Taylor, Claus von Bülow, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Aaron Spelling, discover who dumped an heiress the night before the wedding to run off with the best man . . . what happens when the ex-husband of a movie legend becomes president . . . why a beautiful singer fell in with the mob . . . and, in Dunne's most personal story, how a lying murderer and a limelight-loving judge denied justice to his family after his daughter's life was brutally destroyed.
Filled with pathos and wit, insight and sass, this candid, controversial volume gives you an extraordinary peek into the rarefied world of the rich, the royal, and the ruined. For Dunne is the man who knows all their secrets--and now those secrets are out.

****Rate this 4/5 as I enjoyed Fatal Charms more. I have to now anticipate Dominick's last book which will be released in December called "It's Only Money" It will the last book I read of his because I have read everyone ever published. I will dearly miss this author's writing!

FATAL CHARMS And Other Tales of Today by Dominick Dunne

2009-10-11T14:41:00.001-07:00

From the author of the best-selling People Like Us and The Two Mrs. Grenviles comes this unvarnished look at the gilded world of the real-life rich and famous. Here are the highly colorful and highly provocative look at the gilded world of the real-life rich of famous. Here are the highly colorful and highly provocative close-up interviews Dominick Dunne has written for Vanity Fair. In them, Dunne tells all about today's creme de la creme as only as insider can tell it. Here is his engaging profile of the everlasting regal Elizabeth Taylor; a bizarre encounter with Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos exiled in Hawaii; a revealing, behind-the-scenes portrait of the great poseur Claus von Bulow; an inquiry into the squalid life and mysterious death of Alfred Bloomingdale's mistress, Vicki Morgan; Dunne's moving account of his daughter's violent death and the man who got away with her murder; as well as revealing glimpses of Ivan Boesky, Ava Gardner, Diane Keaton, Gloria Vanderbilt, Candy and Aaron Spelling, and others-plus a look inside the exclusive Mortimer's restaurant and the real Palm Beach. Sassy and stirring, candid and controversial, Fatal Charms is a startling expose of charm-in all its guises-both fatal and benign.

*****Rate this 5/5. I thought that I had read every book ever written by Dominick Dunne, but possibly due to his recent death I was able to locate both this book and "The Mansions Of Limbo" which I searched for years to obtain! Any time I read any of Mr. Dunne's books, I feel like I am conversing with an old friend. He 'lived' old Hollywood, he knew and was friends with so many stars and celebrities. I adore him and I am looking forward to his final book which will be out in December. You will be greatly missed Dominick Dunne!

*BOBBY & JACKIE, A Love Story by C. David Heymann

2009-10-11T08:48:00.000-07:00

Pulitzer-nominated biographer Heymann delivers a gawk-worthy beach read with this fascinating look at Jackie and the Kennedy clan in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassination. Life for JFK and Jackie was less than perfect; one story finds him cheating on Jackie during their 1953 Acapulco honeymoon, leaving the new Mrs. Kennedy "by herself on the verandah." Still, Jackie's devastation was real; afterward, her love for his brother Bobby was equally genuine. Unable to find peace (her Georgetown home had become a stop for all D.C. tour buses), Bobby gladly volunteered to play surrogate father to her kids; before long, an affair began. According to Truman Capote, it was "perhaps the most normal relationship either one ever had." It was not necessarily simple, however; both saw a number of people while together. Promiscuity aside, the Kennedys were also notoriously "chintzy" in their personal lives-they didn't tip and employed undocumented workers at home- though Jackie fares marginally better. It's anyone's guess how the affair would have ended if Bobby hadn't been killed; just four months later, she married Aristotle Onassis. Heymann's research is top notch, with plentiful attributions, making this train-wreck love story a substantial guilty pleasure and a sizzling reminder of how the rich are different.

*****Rate this a 5/5 as it was read in two sittings! Quite an engaging tale of the Kennedys and loaded with tidbits I never knew before. A very interesting read!

MADNESS UNDER THE ROYAL PALMS by Laurence Leamer

2009-09-29T11:57:00.000-07:00

Leamer (The Kennedy Women) reveals the secrets of the Palm Beach elite who reside behind the high walls and manicured hedges of this exclusive enclave. A winter resident since 1994, the author gains the trust of his subjects, playing tennis with them and attending their parties. Such firsthand experience is supplemented by newspaper articles and interviews with scores of men and women who, although usually guarded, are unusually open to Leamer (the informant for the chapter "Palm Beach Millionaire Seeks Playmate" gave the author access to his personal papers, including unpublished memoirs). The book's highly visual vignettes-dominated by divorce, infidelity, excessive drinking and violence-produce a depressing picture of sad, angry, insecure and frequently nasty people hiding behind empty smiles, luxury cars and socially invisible servants. Leamer reflects: "Like [Henry] James, I found that few of the lives have the beauty of the surroundings, or the depths of the artistic vision that inspired this island." Some readers may find this book a penetrating portrayal of a privileged segment of the American population; others might regard it as a book-length gossip column.

****Rate this as a 4/5. I found this book to read as well as any good fictional story but it was true! Palm Beach people live much differently than the rest of us do. I am also anxious to read this author's book about the Kennedy Women

NEVER MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE TWICE by Nene Leakes

2009-09-22T04:44:00.000-07:00

Outrageous, captivating, and unafraid to tell it like it is, Nene Leakes shares her wild journey from a scandalous past to the pinnacle of reality television stardom. Lauded by her fans for her refreshing honesty, infectiously genuine style, and clever sense of humor, Nene is an empowered, self-made woman who has not forgotten where she came from and knows exactly where she wants to go.
In this straight-talking and provocative memoir Nene charts her journey from family black sheep to single mother to making good and realizing her dreams. With her charm and bold, self-possessed voice, Nene tackles her painful childhood; the abuse she suffered at the hands of a violent boyfriend; her struggle to support her firstborn son; and her path to true love, self-acceptance, and pride.
In Never Make the Same Mistake Twice, Nene dishes on her cast mates; takes on the rumors about her past; and shares hard-earned and inspiring life lessons in her fierce, no-nonsense, and irreverent style.

****Rate 4/5 Love this book. My guilty pleasure is the Real Housewives and my favorite character on the Atlanta show is Nene. In this book she talks and thinks just like she does on the show.

THE SECRET LIFE OF MARILYN MONROE by J. Randy Taraborrelli

2009-09-13T07:47:00.001-07:00

From New York Times bestselling author J. Randy Taraborrelli comes the definitive biography of the most enduring icon in popular American culture. When Marilyn Monroe became famous in the 1950s, the world was told that her mother was either dead or simply not a part of her life. However, that was not true. In fact, her mentally ill mother was very much present in Marilyn's world and the complex family dynamic that unfolded behind the scenes is a story that has never before been told...until now. In this groundbreaking book, Taraborrelli draws complex and sympathetic portraits of the women so influential in the actress' life, including her mother, her foster mother, and her legal guardian. He also reveals, for the first time, the shocking scope of Marilyn's own mental illness, the identity of Marilyn's father and the half-brother she never knew, and new information about her relationship with the Kennedy's-Bobby, Jack, and Pat Kennedy Lawford. Explosive, revelatory, and surprisingly moving, this is the final word on the life of one of the most fascinating and elusive icons of the 20th Century.

*****Rate this well-written book about Marilyn as 5/5. I like the fact that the author did extensive research prior to writing it. There have been many misconceptions about her life and a lot of unknown facts. This book covers it all. I have read many books on Marilyn, but this is the most researched and well-written one by far.

SOUTH OF BROAD by Pat Conroy

2009-08-31T14:42:00.001-07:00

Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a well-known Joyce scholar. After Leo's older brother commits suicide at the age of thirteen, the family struggles with the shattering effects of his death, and Leo, lonely and isolated, searches for something to sustain him. Eventually, he finds his answer when he becomes part of a tightly knit group of high school seniors that includes friends Sheba and Trevor Poe, glamorous twins with an alcoholic mother and a prison-escapee father; hardscrabble mountain runaways Niles and Starla Whitehead; socialite Molly Huger and her boyfriend, Chadworth Rutledge X; and an ever-widening circle whose liaisons will ripple across two decades-from 1960s counterculture through the dawn of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. The ties among them endure for years, surviving marriages happy and troubled, unrequited loves and unspoken longings, hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns, and Charleston's dark legacy of racism and class divisions. But the final test of friendship that brings them to San Francisco is something no one is prepared for. South of Broad is Pat Conroy at his finest; a long-awaited work from a great American writer whose passion for life and language knows no bounds.

*****Rate 5/5. I waited a long time for Mr. Conroy's novel and I was not disappointed. His writing is so descriptive and lyrical. I loved this book, now I have to wait for the next!!

*UNMASKED: The Final Years of Michael Jackson by Ian Halperin

2009-08-21T14:47:00.001-07:00

In late December 2008, Ian Halperin told the world that Michael Jackson had only six months to live. His investigations into Jackson's failing health made headlines around the globe. Six months later, the King of Pop was dead.
Whatever the final autopsy results reveal, it was greed that killed Michael Jackson. Friends and associates paint a tragic picture of the last years and days of his life as Jackson made desperate attempts to prepare for the planned concert series at London's 02 Arena in July 2009. These shows would have earned millions for the singer and his entourage, but he could never have completed them, not mentally, and not physically. Michael knew it and his advisors knew it. Anyone who caught even a fleeting glimpse of the frail old man hiding beneath the costumes and cosmetics would have understood that the London tour was madness. Why did it happen this way? After an intense five year investigation, New York Times bestselling author Ian Halperin uncovers the real story of Michael Jackson's final years, a suspenseful and surprising thriller.

Rate this 3/5. Before starting this book, I thought that it would another malicious expose, but it was not. I have never read this author before, but I will read some of his other books. Even though he focused mainly on Jackson's trial for alleged child molestation, which is olds news, I enjoyed the book. I feel that he was fair and researched his material very well. He felt, as I do, that Michael was used horribly by his syncophants for greed and that is in essence, what eventually killed him.

LASHER by Anne Rice

2009-08-20T06:07:00.001-07:00

So stunningly bad is the first third of this book that only the lunatic and the true devotee are likely to get beyond it. It is actually a riot of Rice's worst sins: strained and wooden characterizations, the abandonment of plot for the sake of a tangled and murky history, and a sort of mutant prose stumbling between a modern person's idea of old-fashioned elegance and an old-fashioned person's idea of how people actually talk in the 1990s. Part of the purpose of this 200-page cancer is to make the transition from the novel's progenitor, The Witching Hour (1990), but this could have been accomplished in 10 or 15 pages. Well, let's say you made it through. What you get now is the best of Rice: a deliciously perverse image of an infant, Lasher, who grows to sexual maturity within days of his birth and immediately starts copulating with his mother even while she swoons with the pleasure of his suckling. Of course, it's always nice to read about sex, and Rice's romantic imagination doesn't let her down: Lasher is dark, handsome, sadistic, childlike, and tender. His mother cannot resist him even after she has twice miscarried in the space of three months. But Rice cannot quite bring home the promising story of Lasher's desire to repopulate the earth with his own kind, and the story limps to an unsatisfying conclusion. By the end, then, we've had a bit of everything: the good, the bad, and the truly ugly. Indeed, without her reputation, Rice would never have found a publisher for this wretched mess.

***Rate this 3 out of 5 by comparing it to The Witching Hour. Too much in depth on backgrounds of the characters, including Lasher. However, I will continue to read her books as they are so well-written and entertaining.

SKINNY BITCH by Rory Freedman

2009-08-17T17:34:00.001-07:00

The frank, "get real" approach of this diet book may be just right for those who have tried and tried without success to lose weight and keep it off. As the title indicates, the language is salty as Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin tell readers just what they must get rid of in their everyday eating: sugar first, followed by meat and dairy. Freedman and Barnouin recommend a vegan lifestyle, and tell why, and then offer more than 75 recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacking. They help readers break through the mental denial about bad food habits, and offer responsible and fun food choices without denying cravings and appetite.

***Rate this 3/5. Since I have been attending Weight Watchers meetings, I was introduced to this book and anxious to read it. It does contain salty language and how one gets rid of sugar, all meat and dairy in their diets and becomes a 'skinny bitch'. It seems to me that both of the authors are promoting a Vegan diet which works for them, but would not work for me. Although the chapters on animal slaughter and dairy are quite informative and could turn off most people into eating either, I could not follow the Vegan diet. Interesting book though on why most 'diets' do not work. I will stick with my Weight Watchers diet, which I am doing quite well on! :)

THE WITCHING HOUR by Anne Rice

2009-08-07T16:30:00.001-07:00

We watch and we are always here'' is the motto of the Talamasca, a saintly group with extrasensory powers which has for centuries chronicled the lives of the Mayfairs--a dynasty of witches that brought down a shower of flames in 17th-century Scotland, fled to the plantations of Haiti and on to the New World, where they settled in the haunted city of New Orleans. Rice ( The Queen of the Damned ) plumbs a rich vein of witchcraft lore, conjuring in her overheated, florid prose the decayed antebellum mansion where incest rules, dolls are made of human bone and hair, and violent storms sweep the skies each time a witch dies and the power passes on. Newly annointed is Rowan Mayfair, a brilliant California neurosurgeon kept in ignorance of her heritage by her adoptive parents. She returns to the fold after bringing back Michael Curry from the dead; he, too, has unwanted extrasensory gifts and, like Rowan and the 12 Mayfairs before her, has beheld Lasher: devil, seducer, spirit. Now Lasher wants to come through to this world forever and Rowan is the Mayfair who can open the door. This massive tome repeatedly slows, then speeds when Rice casts off the Talamasca's pretentious, scholarly tones and goes for the jugular with morbid delights, sexually charged passages and wicked, wild tragedy.

*****Rate this 5/5 and would score higher! I loved this book! Even though it was almost a thousand pages, it captures you at the first page and doesn't let go.

HOW NOT TO DIE by Jan Garavaglia, MD

2009-07-26T12:33:00.000-07:00

Thousands of people make an early exit each year and arrive on medical examiner Jan Garavaglia’s table. What is particularly sad about this is that many of these deaths could easily have been prevented. Although Dr. Garavaglia, or Dr. G, as she’s known to many, could not tell these individuals how to avoid their fates, we can benefit from her experience and profound insight into the choices we make each day.In How Not to Die, Dr. G acts as a medical detective to identify the often-unintentional ways we harm our bodies, then shows us how to use that information to live better and smarter. She provides startling tips on how to make wise choices so that we don’t have to see her, or someone like her, for a good, long time. • In “Highway to the Morgue,” we learn the one commonsense safety tip that can prevent deadly accidents—and the reason you should never drive with the windows half open• “Code Blue” teaches us how to increase our chances of leaving the hospital alive—and how to insist that everyone caring for you practice the easiest hygiene method around• “Everyday Dangers” informs us why neat freaks live longer—and the best ways to stay safe in a car during a lightning stormUsing anecdotes from her cases and a liberal dose of humor, Dr. G gives us her prescription for living a healthier, better, longer life—and unlike many doctors’ orders, this one is surprisingly easy to follow.

****Rate this 4/5. I love watching Dr. G on her show and when I heard she had written a book, I immediately wanted to read it. This was a very informative book about making changes in your life and living longer.

MOMMYWOOD by Tori Spelling

2009-07-25T14:53:00.000-07:00

Tori Spelling might have grown up with everything a girl could wish for, but these days she's just another suburban working mom...whose toddler regularly recognizes her in the pages of Us Weekly. Welcome to Mommywood, where the stars are two feet tall and your neighbors know who you are before you move in.
Like most parents, Tori wants her children to have the one thing she didn't have as a kid — a normal family. On their hit Oxygen reality show, Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood, the starlet and her husband Dean McDermott regularly wrestle dirty diapers, host the neighborhood block party, and tackle temper tantrums on the red carpet. But when the cameras aren't rolling, Tori's still having awkward run-ins with a former 90210 costar at a laser tag birthday party, scooping rogue poo out of the kiddie pool on a resort vacation, and racing to win back her pre-baby body before the media starts calling her fat. For all her suburban fantasies, Tori Spelling is no June Cleaver.
With the same down-to-earth wit that made her entertaining memoir sTORI telling a #1 New York Times bestseller, Tori tells the hilarious and humbling stories of life as a mom in the limelight. From learning to be the kind of parent her own mother never was to revealing what it's like to raise a family while everyone is watching, Mommywood is an irresistible snapshot of celebrity parenthood that you won't get from the paparazzi.

****Rate this 4/5. I adore Tori and watch all of her and Dean's shows. For growing up the way she did, she is doing her very best to raise a normal family. She has a great sense of humor, and reading her book, you think of her as a girlfriend, not a celebrity. Bravo, Tori.....I enjoyed your second book even more than the first!

THE DRESSMAKER by Elizabeth Birkelund Oberbeck

2009-07-23T11:36:00.001-07:00

In the rural French town of Senlis, mild-mannered, middle-aged tailor Claude Reynaud fashions wedding gowns, dresses and suits for Parisian women in the know; for the locals, he repairs torn seams, sews on buttons and alters hemlines. Claude's predictable life turns upside down when the charming parisienne Valentine de Verlay commissions him to make her wedding dress, and he falls in love with her. Claude's wife left him eight years ago (but, we learn early on, no divorce papers have been signed), and Valentine's fiance, Victor, is a singularly unlikable, one-dimensional character (whose last name, of all things, is "Couturier"). Claude and Valentine couple early on, but, despite being in love with Claude, Valentine stays on track for the marriage to Victor. When Claude joins up with a major Paris designer to be closer to Valentine, former Cosmopolitan columnist Oberbeck cleverly portrays Claude's entr e into high fashion, but she makes a weak case for Claude's dislike of all the attention. An inexplicably tragic side plot involving the teenage girlfriend of one of Claude's nephews further derails the proceedings. Oberbeck successfully creates the intrigue one wants for a wedding gown designer who falls in love with his client and vice versa, but doesn't manage it all the way through to the principals' New York collision.

***Rate this a 3/5. Although this book started out so well, it sagged in the middle and totally fizzled out in the end. I don't know why I finished it..............disappointing!

ELIZABETH by J. Randy Taraborelli

2009-07-15T14:12:00.000-07:00

For more than six decades Elizabeth Taylor has been a part of our lives. Now acclaimed biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli looks past the tabloid version of Elizabeth's life and offers the first-ever fully realized portrait of this American icon. You'll meet her controlling mother who plotted her daughter's success from birth...see the qualities that catapulted Elizabeth to stardom in 1940s Hollywood...understand the psychological and emotional underpinnings behind the eight marriages...and, finally, rejoice in Elizabeth's most bravura performance of all: the new success in family, friendships, and philanthropy she achieved despite substance abuse and chronic illness. It's the story of the woman you thought you knew--and now can finally understand.

****Rate this 4/5. An amazing and thorough account of one of my favorite actresses, Elizabeth Taylor. What a beautiful woman she truly is, both inside and out. Her life, her loves, her career and her kindness towards the unfortunate are legend. I truly admire her and I always will.

*MICHAEL JACKSON: THE MAGIC & THE MADNESS by J. Randy Taraborrelli

2009-07-12T17:47:00.001-07:00

So much has how been said and written about the life and career of Michael Jackson that it has become almost impossible to disentangle the man from the myth. This book is the fruit of over 30 years of research and hundreds of exclusive interviews with a remarkable level of access to the very closest circles of the Jackson family - including Michael himself. Cutting through tabloid rumours, J. Randy Taraborrelli traces the real story behind Michael Jackson, from his drilling as a child star through the blooming of his talent to his ever-changing personal appearance and bizarre publicity stunts. This major biography includes the behind-the-scenes story to many of the landmarks in Jackson's life: his legal and commercial battles, his marriages to Lisa Marie Presley and Debbie Rowe, his passions and addictions, his children. Objective and revealing, it carries the hallmarks of all of Taraborrelli's best-sellers: impeccable research, brilliant storytelling and definitive documentation.

****Rate this 4/5. I think I like Mr. Taraborelli's biographies more than any one else who writes biographies. This is due to the fact that he carefully researches his star and his sources, and does not speculate, but gives hard facts. He makes an interesting biography regardless of whoever he writes about. I had read this book long ago, but in light of Michaels' recent passing, I wanted to read it again. My next 2 books will be by Randy as well about Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe.

MY REMARKABLE JOURNEY by Larry King

2009-07-01T08:28:00.001-07:00

In this humorous, anecdotal account, King at 75-plus marvels good-naturedly at his staying power for a half-century as a talk-show host for radio and TV. Born in Brooklyn in 1933 to Jewish immigrant parents, young Larry Zeiger was profoundly influenced at age nine by the untimely heart-attack death of his father and by the medium of radio. Rejected by the army for bad eyesight and uninterested in going to college, he got his break filling in for a deejay at a radio station in Miami, where he took the name King in a pinch. His early scrapes are hilarious, especially with women (he married eight times), and he had an uncanny ability to snag famous personalities like Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra and Richard Nixon to be interviewed on air. By simply being curious and unassuming, King could make anyone seem fascinating, from a plumber to the famously laconic Robert Mitchum. Despite being fired in 1971 for financial shenanigans, King swept back on the air in Washington, D.C., before being hired to host a show for Ted Turner's fledgling CNN in 1985, where he has been following current affairs for the past 25 years. King, writing with Fussman (After Jackie), has produced a cultural history as much as a personal testimony, touching on world-shaping events over the last 50 years and sharing, with inimitable humor and grace, some quirky POVs from King's family and friends.

****Rate this 4/5. I love Larry King, and I loved this autobiography. I don't think there is anyone better than Larry when it comes to interviewing people. This was a very enjoyable and funny book to read. I especially loved his take on all the different presidents he has known and interviewed, very interesting and informative.

*AFTERMATH, INC. Cleaning Up After CSI Goes Home by Gil Reavill

2009-06-28T19:18:00.000-07:00

In this grisly, swaggering tale of gut-churning crime scenes and the men who clean them up after the forensics team is done, veteran true crime scribe Reavill (Beyond All Reason: My Life with Susan Smith) holds nothing back. From descriptions of crimes ("The fusillade of bullets tore through Johnson's body.... Blood, bits of flesh and bone fragments exploded everywhere") to hepatitis C "bleed-outs" ("All four walls of the bathroom looked like someone had taken a blood hose and turned it on them"), Reavill grabs the reader by the throat and doesn't let go. He follows the techs from Aftermath, Inc.—a bioremediation outfit in suburban Chicago—as they make the rounds of shotgun suicides, multiple murders and meth lab cleanups; dealing not only with the gross-out of the work but trying to stay sane doing it. While some black humor seeps in around the edges, Reavill mostly depicts a cadre of low-key, hardworking men doing a horrible job with respect and compassion. The narrative pace flags a bit in the last 50 pages when Reavill tries to connect Aftermath's work with larger moral issues, but otherwise, if anything can get CSI watchers to flip off the tube and pick up a book, this is it.

***Rate this 3/5. An interesting book on an occupation that I have always wondered about. I wondered what type of people do the job, what they charge ($250/hr) and how they do it. This is not a book for people with a queasy stomach as it is very descriptive, but it was worth the read. Sometimes, you have to just read this type of book, ya know!

YANNI IN WORDS by Yanni with David Renson

2009-06-21T11:06:00.001-07:00

Yanni is practically a force of nature. Not only has he sold over 20 million albums worldwide, and earned 35 gold and platinum awards, this inspirational artist has entertained millions more with his groundbreaking concert events at the Acropolis, in Athens, at India's Taj Mahal, and in China's Forbidden City. No wonder the Washington Post called Yanni's career "a miracle, a lesson in pluck that could be taught in business school, preached from pulpits and woven into bedtime stories." And yet, even Yanni's greatest fans know very little about the man behind the music.
Yanni in Words is the remarkably forthright, never-before-told story of the critically acclaimed musician's personal odyssey: from his childhood under a Greek military dictatorship to success as his country's national 50-meter swimming champ at fourteen; from his college years at the University of Minnesota, where he earned a degree in psychology; to his wild years playing rock and roll across America before going solo. Yanni openly discusses his intense nine-year relationship with Linda Evans (Linda herself contributed to the book); his battle for respect from critics and a music industry bewildered by his new style of contemporary instrumental music; the journey through a burn-out depression that threatened to derail his career and prevented him from touching a piano for a year; and his eventual recovery and return. This is a story of how a single-minded musical vision and indomitable will to be heard became the source of Yanni's biggest frustrations, greatest triumphs, and deepest insights about creativity.
Yanni in Words is also a love letter to his parents, under whose enlightened and gentle guidance he learned lessons about love and truth that have lasted a lifetime. It is brimming with a clear-eyed understanding of the human condition, the rewards of original thinking, and the secrets of satisfaction -- all of which evolved as Yanni confronted challenge after challenge in pursuit of his musical dreams. Yanni in Words also includes an exploration of the creative process by which Yanni composes his unique music -- and that anyone can use to pursue their own creativity. As poignantly memorable as it is unprecedentedly candid, this is the story everyone has been waiting to read. Yanni in Words is heartfelt, open, inspirational, honest, and emotional. Just like Yanni's music. Only in words.

****Rate this 4/5. I adore Yanni's music....it was interesting to read his book. He is very frank about his lovelife and Linda Evans, but the part I enjoyed the most was how and why he writes the beautiful music that he does. It contains so much soul and love, and as he explains, that is how and why he writes it. He had a dream, and he fulfilled it, and I am happy that he did.

A RELIABLE WIFE by Robert Goolrick

2009-06-15T05:17:00.000-07:00

Rural Wisconsin, 1909. In the bitter cold, Ralph Truitt, a successful businessman, stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement for "a reliable wife." But when Catherine Land steps off the train from Chicago, she's not the "simple, honest woman" that Ralph is expecting. She is both complex and devious, haunted by a terrible past and motivated by greed. Her plan is simple: she will win this man's devotion, and then, ever so slowly, she will poison him and leave Wisconsin a wealthy widow. What she has not counted on, though, is that Truitt — a passionate man with his own dark secrets —has plans of his own for his new wife. Isolated on a remote estate and imprisoned by relentless snow, the story of Ralph and Catherine unfolds in unimaginable ways. With echoes of Wuthering Heights and Rebecca, Robert Goolrick's intoxicating debut novel delivers a classic tale of suspenseful seduction, set in a world that seems to have gone temporarily off its axis.

*****Rate 5/5! If I could have rated this at a 6 or 7 on a scale of 1 to 5, I would have. I enjoyed this book so much. A 'read in one sitting book', I was up until 1:00AM finishing it. A beautifully written thriller that keeps one turning the pages.

CROSSROADS by Belva Plain

2009-06-14T09:02:00.001-07:00

No one explores the rich tapestry of the human heart as Belva Plain does. Her more than twenty New York Times bestsellers have captivated readers and garnered legions of devoted fans. Now Plain dazzles us once again with a new novel of rare eloquence and raw emotion…a powerful tale about the consequences of greed—and the acts of love and forgiveness that can heal the heart.Cassie Wright never saw it coming. As owner of Wright Glassworks, the foremost company in a thriving New England town, Cassie’s life was quiet, focused on her work and home…until a tragic accident turns her carefully ordered world upside down. For there is a surviving child to think about—and Cassie must take in one-year-old Gwen, who has no one else to care for her. As the years pass, Cassie will raise Gwen as her own, and a little girl who lost everything will flourish in a world of privilege and opportunity. Enter Jewel Fairbanks. Beautiful and conniving, Jewel will touch the lives of both Cassie and Gwen in powerful ways. From the moment they meet, Jewel envies Gwen, who seems to have everything Jewel wants. The two couldn’t be more different, but their lives will soon become inextricably intertwined. Both will marry—but to profoundly different men. For Gwen, it is honest, hardworking Stan who steals her heart; Jewel will set her sights on Jeff, a shrewd businessman who owns the company where Stan works. But when Stan makes a shocking discovery on the job, relationships begin to shift and change...and soon a tangled drama of greed, jealousy, and betrayal will encircle both couples, as a chain reaction of unexpected events changesfour lives forever—in ways they never could have foreseen….

****Rate this 4/5. It has been a long time since I last read a novel by Belva Plain. This book reminds me of why I loved her books initially, it was very good.

THE STORY SISTERS by Alice Hoffman

2009-06-07T06:56:00.000-07:00

Alice Hoffman’s previous novel, The Third Angel, was hailed as "an unforgettable portrait of the depth of true love" (USA Today), "stunning" (Jodi Picoult), and "spellbinding" (Miami Herald). Her new novel, The Story Sisters, charts the lives of three sisters–Elv, Claire, and Meg. Each has a fate she must meet alone: one on a country road, one in the streets of Paris, and one in the corridors of her own imagination. Inhabiting their world are a charismatic man who cannot tell the truth, a neighbor who is not who he appears to be, a clumsy boy in Paris who falls in love and stays there, a detective who finds his heart’s desire, and a demon who will not let go.What does a mother do when one of her children goes astray? How does she save one daughter without sacrificing the others? How deep can love go, and how far can it take you? These are the questions this luminous novel asks. At once a coming-of-age tale, a family saga, and a love story of erotic longing, The Story Sisters sifts through the miraculous and the mundane as the girls become women and their choices haunt them, change them and, finally, redeem them. It confirms Alice Hoffman’s reputation as "a writer whose keen ear for the measure struck by the beat of the human heart is unparalleled".

*****Rate this 5/5. I wait patiently every time I know that Ms. Hoffman is releasing a new book with anticipation. Then I have to have the book immediately upon it's release date. After I do have it, I try not to literally read it all in one sitting! This is how much I love her writing and her latest book is just another jewel in her crown. This story was so sad, yet so filled with redemption. I loved it.........now I patiently wait for her next book.

THE MIRROR EFFECT by Dr. Drew Pinsky

2009-05-25T11:04:00.000-07:00

Based on groundbreaking new research: widely respected addiction and behavior specialist Dr. Drew Pinksy’s exploration of narcissism in celebrity culture—and how it is damaging our culture, our children, and our lives.
Britney Spears. Lindsay Lohan. Paris Hilton. Anna Nicole Smith.
Who are these troubled, and troubling, figures who dominate our national attention—celebrities, moguls, train wrecks? Why are we so deeply interested in their lives and loves, their endlessly repeated journey from rising star to inevitable flameout? In spite of extreme fame, fortune, and opportunity, why do their lives always seem so steeped in drama? And—most important—how are their lives changing ours?
In this shattering new book, authors Drew Pinsky and S. Mark Young offer an eye-opening new look at our celebrity-crazed culture-from what drives people to seek fame in the first place, to how our obsession with celebrity is changing the emotional landscape of America. Drawing upon an unprecedented academic study of celebrity personality they recently published in The Journal of Research in Personality (Sept: 06)—the first such study to collect in-depth research data from actual celebrity sources—Pinsky and Young explore the widespread prevalence of narcissistic behavior among celebrities from all walks of fame, from actors and musicians to comedians and reality TV stars. Their core finding was that individuals who become celebrities are more likely to have certain kinds of psychological damage—narcissistic personality issues, often rooted in childhood trauma, with attendant mood disturbances, melodramatic tendencies, and substance abuse problems—than average Americans. And those issues, in turn, lead to the private—and increasingly public-struggles of celebrities that ultimately command public attention.
Pinsky and Young map this terrain—but then press further, exploring how these celebrities’ constant public exposure (in every sense of the word) is being modeled on a 24-hour basis to the rest of our culture—and especially our children. The American demand for celebrity gossip seems insatiable: Magazines like People, In Touch, and Us Weekly continue to grow at a rate of 50 percent per year; 100 million viewers tune into shows like Entertainment Tonight and Hollywood Insider every night; and gossip websites like perezhilton.com and tmz.com have exploded on the Internet and even spawned their own TV shows. Pinsky and Young argue that this ongoing real-life soap opera—with its daily cycles of bacchanalian drinking and drug use, wanton self-exposure and other pornographic behavior, and self-destructive excess of every kind—is doing serious and potentially long-term damage to children, adolescents, and adults alike.
With his insider access to celebrities of all kinds—many of whom he has treated—and his years of clinical work with issues of addiction, drug abuse, and other disorders, Dr. Drew Pinsky has a fascinating vantage point from which to assess this revealing cultural phenomenon, and a trusted voice that will bring the issue home to both parents and troubled teenagers.

***Rate this as a 3/5. I loved Dr Pinsky's "Cracked: Life On The Edge In a Rehab Unit" and throught this would compare. It does give a very concise description of narcissism vs. egotism and they are so different, but I liked his first book better.

NEW MOON by Stephenie Meyer

2009-05-08T07:22:00.001-07:00

I FELT LIKE I WAS TRAPPED IN ONE OF THOSE TERRIFYING NIGHTMARES…For Bella Swan, there is one thing more important than life itself: Edward Cullen. But being in love with a vampire is even more dangerous than Bella ever could have imagined. Edward has already rescued Bella from the clutches of one evil vampire, but now, as their daring relationship threatens all that is near and dear to them, they realize their troubles may be just beginning. . . . Legions of readers entranced by the New York Times bestseller Twilight are hungry for the continuing story of star-crossed lovers Bella and Edward. In New Moon, Stephenie Meyer delivers another irresistible combination of romance and suspense with a supernatural spin. Passionate, riveting, and full of surprising twists and turns, this vampire love saga is well on its way to literary immortality

***Rate this as 3.5/5. Second in the Twilight series, I found this book not as interesting as the first book. It did lag in the middle and was over 560 pages.......could have been told in a shorter version, but overall, not as interesting as the first book. Off to read the 3rd in the series.

TWILIGHT by Stephenie Meyer

2009-05-02T15:50:00.000-07:00

In a style reminiscent of Anne Rice, Meyer brings the macabre to a small Washington town in a novel combining mystery, romance, fantasy, and sensuality. Isabella Swan has moved to her father's house in tiny Forks, Washington, a twilight town where perpetual rain and mist stand in stark contrast to her mother's home in Phoenix. Isabella is the new girl who discovers that small town life is pretty slow-paced, and small town people are pretty friendly. She settles in quickly, and finds the most intriguing thing about her new school to be the Cullen family, a group of four amazingly beautiful young people who keep to themselves in school. Edward Cullen is Isabella's lab partner, and he avoids interacting with her or even looking at her. However, when an accident almost ends her life, Isabella finds out the truth about Edward and his family, a group of benevolent vampires who have chosen the misty city so that they can blend in and live among humans without discovery. Isabella and Edward begin a courtship dance in which they are drawn closer and closer, knowing the danger of their being together. Isabella soon discovers that not all vampires are kind, and the book shifts into suspense mode with Isabella running for her life. Meyer's description of the lovers' emotions is palpable, and readers will be drawn into the couple's spiraling dance, feeling the intense longing that comes from being a hair's breadth away from the thing you want most in the world.

*****Rate 5/5. I must admit that I was extremelly hesitant to even begin this series of books about vampires, even though I love books about vampires! My heavens, I adored The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. I was not finding many books to sink my teeth into and decided to pick this up and read it just because everyone raved about the series. Well, it literally 'grabs you by the throat' the very first chapter. This author has a way of snatching her reader's interest immediately. I am now looking forward to the second book "New Moon" in the series of 4. Even though each novel is around 450-500 pages, it is fast and suspenseful reading.

THE LAST SECRET by Mary McGarry Morris

2009-04-13T15:47:00.001-07:00

Mary McGarry Morris has been hailed as “one of the most skillful writers at work in America today” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). In The Last Secret, she tells the riveting story of Nora Hammond, a woman blessed with the perfect life: a charming husband, two bright teenage children, a successful career in the family’s newspaper business, and an esteemed role in the charity work of her New England town. But Nora’s comfortable existence threatens to unravel when she learns of her husband’s longtime affair–and when the specter of a sordid incident from her youth returns with terrifying force. Confronted by shame and betrayal, Nora suddenly feels dangerously alone. With no one to turn to, she becomes easy prey to a ghost from her past–the cunning, relentless Eddie Hawkins.A tautly told tale of psychological tension and chilling moral complexity, The Last Secret accelerates to a shattering conclusion as it explores the irreparable consequences of one family’s crimes of the heart. The Last Secret burnishes Mary McGarry Morris’s reputation as one of our most prodigously gifted writers.

*****A 5/5. Another winner from one of my favorite authors! I literally got this book the very day it was released and sat and read it in a day and a half. I love Ms. Morris's writing, and I now have to wait for another book. I have read everything she has ever written and I was not disappointed in her latest venture. Riveting, suspenseful with very interesting characters. Even though I felt sorry for Nora in the end, you reap what you sow and secrets can be damaging.

ANGELS OF DESTRUCTION by Keith Donohue

2009-04-04T09:40:00.001-07:00

Keith Donohue’s first novel, The Stolen Child, was a national bestseller hailed as “captivating” (USA Today), “luminous and thrilling” (Washington Post), and “wonderful...So spare and unsentimental that it’s impossible not to be moved (Newsweek. His new novel, Angels of Destruction, opens on a winter’s night, when a young girl appears at the home of Mrs. Margaret Quinn, a widow who lives alone. A decade earlier, she had lost her only child, Erica, who fled with her high school sweetheart to join a radical student group known as the Angels of Destruction. Before Margaret answers the knock in the dark hours, she whispers a prayer and then makes her visitor welcome at the door. The girl, who claims to be nine years old and an orphan with no place to go, beguiles Margaret, offering some solace, some compensation, for the woman’s loss. Together, they hatch a plan to pass her off as her newly found granddaughter, Norah Quinn, and enlist Sean Fallon, a classmate and heartbroken boy, to guide her into the school and town. Their conspiracy is vulnerable not only to those children and neighbors intrigued by Norah’s mysterious and magical qualities but by a lone figure shadowing the girl who threatens to reveal the child’s true identity and her purpose in Margaret’s life. Who are these strangers really? And what is their connection to the past, the Angels, and the long-missing daughter? Angels of Destruction is an unforgettable story of hope and fear, heartache and redemption. The saga of the Quinn family unfolds against an America wracked by change. As it delicately dances on the linebetween the real and the imagined, this mesmerizing new novel confirms Keith Donohue’s standing as one of our most inspiring and inventive novelists.

*****Rate this book a 5/5. It held my interest from the very first sentence. I enjoyed this immensely. I will also read his other book The Stolen Child and have ordered it from my library. I love the combination of excellent story telling combined with fantasy and magic.

SANCTUARY by Norah Roberts

2009-03-23T15:02:00.001-07:00

Twenty years after her mother's disappearance, Jo Ellen gets photographs in the mail. They are photographs of her mother: some candid, some close-up, and some of her naked, beautiful, and dead.
Jo Ellen hasn't been back in years. She thought that she had left that house a long time ago. Left the darkness that came over the island off the coast of Georgia and her family's lives when her mother, Annabelle, disappeared. But that island, Sanctuary, is a part of her. It haunts her dreams, and Jo realizes that it is time to go home, back to the island inn run by her family. Upon her return, Jo finds tragedy and loss still heavy and looming, and she is enmeshed once again in the troubled relationships she has struggled so long and hard to forget. With the help of one man, she learns the truth about who is stalking her and about the sordid past. But the threat that drove Jo back to the island in the first place has followed her there. And Sanctuary proves to be a more dangerous place than anyone had ever thought.
Nora Roberts's latest novel, Sanctuary is a story of dangerous liaisons and family betrayals. Roberts's characters are right there, real and honest. These characters are the plot. They bring you into a different world for a time and keep you there with their story, their words.

****Rate this 4 out of 5. I have never read Norah Roberts before, but I did enjoy the mystery associated with this one. Quite a good read overall, kept my interest and I liked the characters.

CUTTING FOR STONE by Abraham Verghese

2009-03-19T07:06:00.000-07:00

A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel — an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics — their passion for the same woman — that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him — nearly destroying him — Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.An unforgettable journey into one man’s remarkable life, and an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others.

***Rate this 3/5. All in all, this could have been a much better book if there were less words. Reading 533 pages in a story that could have been told in a more concise way was disturbing to me. I really wanted to love this book, but I couldn't.

THE TEA ROSE by Jennifer Donnelly

2009-03-08T13:26:00.001-07:00

East London, 1888 - a city apart. A place of shadow and light where thieves, whores, and dreamers mingle, where children play in the cobbled streets by day and a killer stalks at night, where bright hopes meet the darkest truths. Here, by the whispering waters of the Thames, Fiona Finnegan, a worker in a tea factory, hopes to own a shop one day, together with her lifelong love, Joe Bristow, a costermonger's son. With nothing but their faith in each other to spur them on, Fiona and Joe struggle, save, and sacrifice to achieve their dreams.But Fiona's life is shattered when the actions of a dark and brutal man take from her nearly everything-and everyone-she holds dear. Fearing her own death, she is forced to flee London for New York. There, her indomitable spirit propels her rise from a modest West Side shop-front to the top of Manhattan's tea trade. But Fiona's old ghosts do not rest quietly, and to silence them, she must venture back to the London of her childhood, where a deadly confrontation with her past becomes the key to her future.

****A 4/5. A very good historical novel which I enjoyed reading even though it was 534 pages long. This is a new author for me, but I will read her novels from now on.

A GOOD WOMAN by Danielle Steel

2009-02-04T15:28:00.000-08:00

From the glittering ballrooms of Manhattan to the fires of World War I, Danielle Steel takes us on an unforgettable journey in her new novel—a spellbinding tale of war, loss, history, and one woman’s unbreakable spirit....Nineteen-year-old Annabelle Worthington was born into a life of privilege, raised amid the glamour of New York society, with glorious homes on Fifth Avenue and in Newport, Rhode Island. But everything changed on a cold April day in 1912, when the sinking of the Titanic shattered her family and her privileged world forever. Finding strength within her grief, Annabelle pours herself into volunteer work, nursing the poor, igniting a passion for medicine that would shape the course of her life. But for Annabelle, first love, and a seemingly idyllic marriage, will soon bring more grief—this time caused by the secrets of the human heart. Betrayed, and pursued by a scandal she does not deserve, Annabelle flees New York for war-ravaged France, hoping to lose herself in a life of service. There, in the heart of the First World War, in a groundbreaking field hospital run by women, Annabelle finds her true calling, working as an ambulance medic on the front lines, studying medicine, saving lives. And when the war ends, Annabelle begins a new life in Paris—now a doctor, a mother, her past almost forgotten…until a fateful meeting opens her heart to the world she had left behind. Finding strength in the most unlikely of friendships, pulling together the broken fragments of her life, Annabelle will return to New York one more time—this time as a changed woman, a woman of substance, infused with life’sexperience, building a future filled with hope…out of the rich soil of the past. Filled with breathtaking images and historical detail, Danielle Steel’s new novel introduces one of her most unique and fascinating characters: Annabelle Worthington, a remarkable woman, a good woman, a true survivor who triumphs against overwhelming odds. For Annabelle’s story is more than compelling fiction, it is a powerful celebration of life, dignity, and courage—and a testament to the human will to survive.

***A 4/5 Not usually being a fan of Danielle Steel novels, I ordered this book bccause it involved medicine and a woman becoming a medical doctor. I wound up thoroughly enjoying it, though! Now I guess I will have to read a few more of her novels!

SING THEM HOME by Stephanie Kallos

2009-02-01T07:34:00.001-08:00

Sing Them Home is a moving portrait of three siblings who have lived in the shadow of unresolved grief since their mother’s disappearance when they were children. Everyone in Emlyn Springs knows the story of Hope Jones, the physician’s wife whose big dreams for their tiny town were lost along with her in the tornado of 1978. For Hope’s three young children, the stability of life with their preoccupied father, and with Viney, their mother’s spitfire best friend, is no match for Hope’s absence. Larken, the eldest, is now an art history professor who seeks in food an answer to a less tangible hunger; Gaelan, the son, is a telegenic weatherman who devotes his life to predicting the unpredictable; and the youngest, Bonnie, is a self-proclaimed archivist who combs roadsides for clues to her mother’s legacy, and permission to move on. When they’re summoned home after their father’s death, each sibling is forced to revisit the childhood tragedy that has defined their lives. With breathtaking lyricism, wisdom, and humor, Kallos explores the consequences of protecting those we love. Sing Them Home is a magnificent tapestry of lives connected and undone by tragedy, lives poised—unbeknownst to the characters—for redemption.

**Rate this one 2/5. While I loved the author's first novel, I was disappointed in her second book. The book was way too long in telling the story and I couldn't establish any bond with any of the characters like I did in her first book.

DISQUIET by Julia Leigh

2009-02-01T02:59:00.001-08:00

Leigh follows her internationally acclaimed The Hunter with a haunting family drama tightly packed into a tense novella. Olivia, referred to primarily (and somewhat affectedly) as "the woman," has fled her abusive husband with her two sharp-tongued young children. She seeks refuge at her mother's chateau in France, which she left on bad terms to get married 12 years earlier. Soon after Olivia's unexpected arrival, her brother shows up with his wife, Sophie, and the body of their stillborn child. Although the plot feels a bit slight, there is great emotional weight and disturbing imagery, as Sophie wanders aimlessly, still wearing her hospital ID bracelet and carrying her lifeless daughter in her arms as if the baby were a doll. The chateau is an ideal gothic setting for the morbid events that occur over the course of several days; indeed, there is only one scene that takes place off the chateau's grounds, infusing the novel with an unsettling atmosphere of claustrophobia. Death and impending death reign, but Leigh also paints a subtle portrait of a broken family trying to piece itself back

*Rate this one 1/5. Although it is 'THE' novella to read, I was disappointed in it. It was short, being only 120 pages, but it was too dark, confusing and left too many unanswered questions about the characters. I did not care for this short novella, but did finish it since it was short.

THE LITTLE GIANT OF ABERDEEN COUNTY by Tiffany Baker

2009-01-31T08:39:00.001-08:00

When Truly Plaice's mother was pregnant, the town of Aberdeen joined together in betting how recordbreakingly huge the baby boy would ultimately be. The girl who proved to be Truly paid the price of her enormity; her father blamed her for her mother's death in childbirth, and was totally ill equipped to raise either this giant child or her polar opposite sister Serena Jane, the epitome of femine perfection. When he, too, relinquished his increasingly tenuous grip on life, Truly and Serena Jane are separated--Serena Jane to live a life of privilege as the future May Queen and Truly to live on the outskirts of town on the farm of the town sadsack, the subject of constant abuse and humiliation at the hands of her peers.Serena Jane's beauty proves to be her greatest blessing and her biggest curse, for it makes her the obsession of classmate Bob Bob Morgan, the youngest in a line of Robert Morgans who have been doctors in Aberdeen for generations. Though they have long been the pillars of the community, the earliest Robert Morgan married the town witch, Tabitha Dyerson, and the location of her fabled shadow book--containing mysterious secrets for healing and darker powers--has been the subject of town gossip ever since. Bob Bob Morgan, one of Truly's biggest tormentors, does the unthinkable to claim the prize of Serena Jane, and changes the destiny of all Aberdeen from there on. When Serena Jane flees town and a loveless marriage to Bob Bob, it is Truly who must become the woman of a house that she did not choose and mother to her eight-year-old nephew Bobbie. Truly's brother-in-law is relentless and brutal; he criticizes her physique and the limitations of her healthas a result, and degrades her more than any one human could bear. It is only when Truly finds her calling--the ability to heal illness with herbs and naturopathic techniques--hidden within the folds of Robert Morgan's family quilt, that she begins to regain control over her life and herself. Unearthed family secrets, however, will lead to the kind of betrayal that eventually break the Morgan family apart forever, but Truly's reckoning with her own demons allows for both an uprooting of Aberdeen County, and the possibility of love in unexpected places.

*****A total 5/5. What a wonderful first novel this author has written. I literally had to pace myself in order not to read it all in one sitting. I loved the main character, Truly, and all the other characters in this wonderful book. I hope to read this one again some day. Now when is her second novel going to be published? I can't wait...............

SECRETS CAN BE MURDER: THE KILLER NEXT DOOR by Jane-Velez Mitchell

2009-01-15T12:51:00.001-08:00

Respected television news journalist Jane Velez-Mitchell asks a probing, disturbing question: Are killers like Scott Peterson and Andrea Yates all that different from the rest of us?
What kind of monster would do this? When journalists break the story of a child who's been kidnapped, a young woman who's been brutally raped, or a family who's been slaughtered, that's the question most of us ask. Secrets Can Be Murder exposes the hidden motivations behind the most sinister acts of recent times, with a behind-closed-doors look at these sensational crimes that will astound you.
After weighing in on high-profile cases for CNN, Fox News, Court TV, and MSNBC, author Jane Velez-Mitchell helps us understand these infamous crimes by unmasking the deceptions that turned toxic, exploding in rage and violence.
People lie every day to protect secrets, big and small. From desperate Hollywood personalities covering up their eccentric lifestyles to Bible Belt mothers who take the lives of their own children, Secrets Can Be Murder probes twenty-one separate cases. Each illustrates how leading a double life can land you in prison, and how failing to spot liars can get you killed.
Secrets Can Be Murder offers the inside story on each horrific case, unlocking the jaw-dropping secrets of the accused and revealing the common, innocent mistakes of the victims. After all, many of us have gone out alone late at night like Imette St. Guillen, or partied while on vacation like George Smith and Natalee Holloway.
From Dan Horowitz, the high-profile lawyer whose wife was brutally murdered by a teenage neighbor while Horowitz was defending a housewife accused ofmurder, to Neil Entwistle, the British husband who ran out of funds for an extravagant American lifestyle, Velez-Mitchell shows how each of these crimes has its own secrets to spill.
Many of us possess the same trusting nature as victims and carry around the same secrets as criminals—whether it's debt, infidelity, or fetishes. With fascinating new insights from investigators and psychologists plus the friends and family of both the victims and the perpetrators, Secrets Can Be Murder illustrates just how little separates our so-called normal lives from that of a sociopath—and how you can stay out of harm's way.

***Rate this 3/5. I watch Jane's show on CNN and always have found the backstory on murder's as interesting as the case itself. This covered many trials and murders and was quite interesting overall.

*THE BLUE COTTON GOWN: A MIDWIFE'S MEMOIR by Patricia Harman

2009-01-05T06:44:00.001-08:00

A debut memoir interweaving a nurse-midwife's personal and professional trials with the intimate stories of her patients In Patricia Harman's exam room, patients open their hearts. Harman, a nurse-midwife, manages a private practice with her husband, an ob-gyn, in Torrington, West Virginia—a practice now providing only gynecological exams and first trimester care because they've been forced by escalating malpractice insurance costs to give up delivering babies. Despite this, the women who sit before her receive nurturing in all aspects of their lives.This unique memoir juxtaposes the tales of these women with Harman's own story of keeping a small medical practice solvent and coping with personal challenges. Her patients include a mother of seven who is stalked by her ex-husband; a teenager who is pregnant with twins and loses first one then the second baby; a young mother addicted to drugs; a long-time patient's dangerously anorexic daughter; and a professor who needs help and support in transitioning to become a man. The nurse-midwife tells her secrets, too. Her outwardly successful practice is in deep financial trouble. She develops serious medical problems, including uterine cancer, and her thirty-year marriage seems on the verge of collapse. This vivid narrative, full of courage, is impossible to put down.

****Rate this book 4/5. Every health professional can read and identify with this wonderful book. We are taught to hold our emotions in check, not get involved with our patients so that we can treat them effectively. This is nigh on impossible to do with some patients, as described in this book. I love the way this author uses phrasing, at one time she describes her emotions regarding patients as being "embroidered on my heart with colored thread". I can so identify that. Over the years there have been patients that I feel the same way about, and yes, they are still embroidered on my heart. I also love the way she phrased her thoughts on one especially starlit night when she sat thinking to herself: "reaching over the porch rail, I hold my hands open and let the starlight pour into them. I take the light and splash it up on my face. Four or five times, I let it pool and pour it over my head". The visual in my mind is breathtaking

THE HOUR I FIRST BELIEVED by Wally Lamb

2008-12-31T06:09:00.000-08:00

Wally Lamb's two previous novels, She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, struck a chord with readers. They responded to the intensely introspective nature of the books, and to their lively narrative styles and biting humor. One critic called Wally Lamb a "modern-day Dostoyevsky," whose characters struggle not only with their respective pasts, but with a "mocking, sadistic God" in whom they don't believe but to whom they turn, nevertheless, in times of trouble (New York Times). In The Hour I First Believed, Lamb travels well beyond his earlier work and embodies in his fiction myth, psychology, family history stretching back many generations, and the questions of faith that lie at the heart of everyday life. The result is an extraordinary tour de force, at once a meditation on the human condition and an unflinching yet compassionate evocation of character.

When forty-seven-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his younger wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Three Rivers, Connecticut, to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke. But Maureen finds herself in the school library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed, as two vengeful students go on a carefully premeditated, murderous rampage. Miraculously she survives, but at a cost: she is unable to recover from the trauma. Caelum and Maureen flee Colorado and return to an illusion of safety at the Quirk family farm in Three Rivers. But the effects of chaos are not so easily put right, and further tragedy ensues. While Maureen fights to regain her sanity, Caelum discovers a cache of old diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings in an upstairs bedroom of his family's house. The colorful and intriguing story they recount spans five generations of Quirk family ancestors, from the Civil War era to Caelum's own troubled childhood. Piece by piece, Caelum reconstructs the lives of the women and men whose legacy he bears. Unimaginable secrets emerge; long-buried fear, anger, guilt, and grief rise to the surface. As Caelum grapples with unexpected and confounding revelations from the past, he also struggles to fashion a future out of the ashes of tragedy. His personal quest for meaning and faith becomes a mythic journey that is at the same time quintessentially contemporary -- and American.The Hour I First Believed is a profound and heart-rending work of fiction. Wally Lamb proves himself a virtuoso storyteller, assembling a variety of voices and an ensemble of characters rich enough to evoke all of humanity.

*****Rate this 5/5. I am so glad that I finished off 2008 by reading this wonderful book. It is so rich in characters, storyline, setting, everything really. It spans both the main characters life as well as his ancestor's lives, which were fascinating. Caelum's quest for knowledge gave him answers to himself and his true identity. A truly mesmerizing read that I hope to read again someday. I had waited so many years for Wally Lamb to write a new book since I had previously read and loved his first two books, and I was not disappointed. This is a masterpiece for the author, Wally Lamb!

NEVER ENOUGH by Joe McGinniss

2008-12-18T06:41:00.001-08:00

At thirty-nine, Nancy Kissel had it all: glamour, gusto, garishly flaunted wealth, and the royal lifestyle of the expatriate wife. Not to mention three young children and what a friend described as "the best marriage in the universe."That marriage -- to Merrill Lynch and former Goldman Sachs investment banker Robert Kissel -- ended abruptly one November night in 2003 in the bedroom of their luxury apartment high above Hong Kong's glittering Victoria Harbour.Why?Hong Kong prosecutors, who charged Nancy with murder, said she wanted to inherit Rob's millions and start a new life with a blue-collar lover who lived in a New Hampshire trailer park.She said she'd killed in self-defense while fighting for her life against an abusive, cocaine-addicted husband who had forced her for years to submit to his brutal sexual demands.Her 2005 trial, lasting for months and rich in lurid detail, captivated Hong Kong's expatriate community and attracted attention worldwide. Less than a year after the jury of seven Chinese citizens returned its unexpected verdict, Rob's brother, Andrew, a Connecticut real estate tycoon facing prison for fraud and embezzlement, was also found dead: stabbed in the back in the basement of his multimillion-dollar Greenwich mansion by person or persons unknown.Never Enough is the harrowing true story of these two brothers, Robert and Andrew Kissel, who grew up wanting to own the world but instead wound up murdered half a world apart; and of Nancy Kissel, a riddle wrapped inside an enigma, a modern American woman for whom having it all might not have been enough.In this singularly compelling narrative, Joe McGinniss -- past master at exposingthe dark heart of the American family in the bestsellers Fatal Vision, Blind Faith, and Cruel Doubt -- explores his darkest and most disturbing subject yet: a smart and beautiful family so corroded by greed that it destroys itself from within.Here is a family saga almost biblical in its tragic proportion but dazzlingly modern in flavor -- and utterly unstoppable in its pulsating narrative drive. From the shimmering skyscrapers and greed-drenched bustle of Hong Kong to the moneyed hush and hauteur of backcountry Greenwich, McGinniss lures readers irresistibly forward, as this twisted tale of ambition gone mad and love gone bad rushes to its terrible, inexorable conclusion.

****Rate this 4/5. I had watched the Lifetime movie "The Two Mr. Kissels" and became fascinated withe both the characters and how money corrupts and destroys people. This book captured the essense of Nancy Kissel, who was willing to give everything in her life up for greed.

TESTIMONY by Anita Shreve

2008-11-21T13:45:00.000-08:00

At a New England boarding school, a sex scandal is about to break. Even more shocking than the sexual acts themselves is the fact that they were caught on videotape. A Pandora's box of revelations, the tape triggers a chorus of voices--those of the men, women, teenagers, and parents involved in the scandal--that details the ways in which lives can be derailed or destroyed in one foolish moment.Writing with a pace and intensity surpassing even her own greatest work, Anita Shreve delivers in TESTIMONY a gripping emotional drama with the impact of a thriller. No one more compellinglyexplores the dark impulses that sway the lives of seeming innocents, the needs and fears that drive ordinary men and women into intolerable dilemmas, and the ways in which our best intentions can lead to our worst transgressions.

****Rate this one 4/5. Anita Shreve is back. I was not overly impressed with her last two books, but this one redeems her as a good writer in my opinion. It is a story that is fast moving, told from almost every angle, allowing the reader to form their own opinion as to the 'guilty' party. I loved it!!!

AUDITION: A MEMOIR by Barbara Walters

2008-10-25T18:01:00.001-07:00

Young people starting out in television sometimes say to me: “I want to be you.” My stock reply is always: “Then you have to take the whole package.”And now, at last, the most important woman in the history of television journalism gives us that “whole package,” in her inspiring and riveting memoir. After more than forty years of interviewing heads of state, world leaders, movie stars, criminals, murderers, inspirational figures, and celebrities of all kinds, Barbara Walters has turned her gift for examination onto herself to reveal the forces that shaped her extraordinary life.Barbara Walters’s perception of the world was formed at a very early age. Her father, Lou Walters, was the owner and creative mind behind the legendary Latin Quarter nightclub, and it was his risk-taking lifestyle that gave Barbara her first taste of glamour. It also made her aware of the ups and downs, the insecurities, and even the tragedies that can occur when someone is willing to take great risks, for Lou Walters didn’t just make several fortunes—he also lost them. Barbara learned early about the damage that such an existence can do to relationships—between husband and wife as well as between parent and child. Through her roller-coaster ride of a childhood, Barbara had a close companion, her mentally challenged sister, Jackie. True, Jackie taught her younger sister much about patience and compassion, but Barbara also writes honestly about the resentment she often felt having a sister who was so “different” and the guilt that still haunts her.All of this—the financial responsibility for herfamily, the fear, the love—played a large part in the choices she made as she grew up: the friendships she developed, the relationships she had, the marriages she tried to make work. Ultimately, thanks to her drive, combined with a decent amount of luck, she began a career in television. And what a career it has been! Against great odds, Barbara has made it to the top of a male-dominated industry. She was the first woman cohost of the Today show, the first female network news coanchor, the host and producer of countless top-rated Specials, the star of 20/20, and the creator and cohost of The View. She has not just interviewed the world’s most fascinating figures, she has become a part of their world. These are just a few of the names that play a key role in Barbara’s life, career, and book: Yasir Arafat, Warren Beatty, Menachem Begin, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Roy Cohn, the Dalai Lama, Princess Diana, Katharine Hepburn, King Hussein, Angelina Jolie, Henry Kissinger, Monica Lewinsky, Richard Nixon, Rosie O’Donnell, Christopher Reeve, Anwar Sadat, John Wayne . . . the list goes on and on.Barbara Walters has spent a lifetime auditioning: for her bosses at the TV networks, for millions of viewers, for the most famous people in the world, and even for her own daughter, with whom she has had a difficult but ultimately quite wonderful and moving relationship. This book, in some ways, is her final audition, as she fully opens up both her private and public lives. In doing so, she has given us a story that is heartbreaking and honest, surprising and fun, sometimes startling, and always fascinating.

****I rate this as a 3.5/5. I have always been a huge fan as well as an admirer of Miss Walters. She fought very hard to get to the place in life that she resides in. She has met so many interesting people, more than many journalists will meet in their lifetimes, let alone their careers. Yet, she seems to put people at ease when she interviews them and asks the questions that I would ask them. She is never condescending to anyone and treats everyone she interviews with equal poise and grace, whether she likes them or not. Her life wasn't always easy, she did have a lot of heartbreak like all of us do, but what a life she has lead. I continue to admire you Barbara, and good book by the way!!!

STORI TELLING by Tori Spelling

2008-10-10T15:30:00.000-07:00

She was television's most famous virgin -- and, as Aaron Spelling's daughter, arguably its most famous case of nepotism. Portraying Donna Martin on Beverly Hills, 90210, Tori Spelling became one of the most recognizable young actresses of her generation, with a not-so-private personal life every bit as fascinating as her character's exploits. Yet years later the name Tori Spelling too often closed -- and sometimes slammed -- the same doors it had opened.
sTORI telling is Tori's chance to finally tell her side of the tabloid-worthy life she's led, and she talks about it all: her decadent childhood birthday parties, her nose job, her fairy-tale wedding to the wrong man, her so-called feud with her mother. Tori has already revealed her flair for brilliant, self-effacing satire on her VH1 show So NoTORIous and Oxygen's Tori & Dean: Inn Love, but her memoir goes deeper, into the real life behind the rumors: her complicated relationship with her parents; her struggles as an actress after 90210; her accident-prone love life; and, ultimately, her quest to define herself on her own terms.
From her over-the-top first wedding to finding new love to her much-publicized -- and misunderstood -- "disinheritance," sTORI telling is a juicy, eye-opening, enthralling look at what it really means to be Tori Spelling.

****I loved this book, rate it 4/5. I have to admit that Tori and Dean In Love is one of my guilty pleasures. In spite of being born into incredible wealth and privilege, Tori's life was not always easy. Her relationship, or lack of same, with her mother is beyond dysfunctional. I feel sorry for Tori's mother, Candy Spelling, because she has missed having a relationship with her wonderful daughter and her lovely grandchildren. Go Tori and Dean, I loved your love story.....................

LIFE WITH MY SISTER MADONNA by Christopher Ciccone

2008-10-10T15:26:00.001-07:00

Madonna up close, by the brother who knows her better than anyone.
Christopher Ciccone's extraordinary memoir is based on his forty-seven years of growing up with, working with, and understanding the most famous woman of our time, who has intrigued, scandalized, and entertained millions for half a century.
Through most of the iconic star's kaleidoscopic career, Christopher played an important role in her life: as her backup dancer, her personal assistant, her dresser, her decorator, her art director, her tour director.
If you think you know everything there is to know about Madonna, you are wrong. Only Christopher can tell the full scale, riveting untold story behind Madonna's carefully constructed mythology, and the real woman behind the glittering façade.
From their shared Michigan childhood, which Madonna transcended, then whisked Christopher to Manhattan with her in the early eighties, where he slepton her roach-infested floor and danced with her in clubs all over town -- Christopher was with her every step of the way, experiencing her first hand in all her incarnations. The spoiled daddy's girl, the punk drummer, the raunchy Boy Toy, Material Girl, Mrs. Sean Penn, Warren Beatty's glamorous Hollywood paramour, loving mother, Mrs. Guy Ritchie, English grande dame -- Christopher witnessed and understood all of them, as his own life was inexorably entwined with that of his chameleon sister.
He tangled with a cast of characters from artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, to Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Moss, Demi Moore, and, of course, Guy Ritchie, whose advent in Madonna's life splintered the loving relationship Christopher once had with her.
The mirrorimage of his legendary sister, with his acid Ciccone tongue, Christopher pulls no punches as he tells his astonishing story.
Life with My Sister Madonna is the juicy, can't-put-it-down story you've always wanted to hear, as told by Madonna's younger brother.

**This was a well-written book by Madonna's brother Christopher (would rate it 3/5) I don't for the life of me understand why he allowed himself to be the butt of her jokes, the willing victim of her wrath because she was his sister. Madonna comes off as a very controlling, self-absorbed, selfish tightwad who even made her own family pay for their plane tickets to her wedding. If that is what fame and fortune does to you, I would rather live in my world.

*RANDOM READINGS*

*FAITH* by Jennifer Haigh

*WRECKER* by Summer Wood

*THE PEACH KEEPER* by Sarah Addison Allen

*THE ART OF DEVOTION* by Samantha Bruce Benjamin

*MOMMY'S LITTLE GIRL* by Diane Fanning

*CLEANING NABOKOV'S HOUSE* by Leslie Daniels

*A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES* by Deborah Harkness

*WILLIAM & HARRY: BEHIND PALACE WALLS* by Katie Nicholl

*THE RED GARDEN* by Alice Hoffman

*THE GOOD DAUGHTERS* by Joyce Maynard

*RESCUE* by Anita Shreve

*ZEITOUN* by Dave Eggers

*MOCKINGJAY* by Suzanne Collins

*CATCHING FIRE* by Suzanne Collins

*THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST* by Stieg Larsson

*THE ICE PRINCESS* by Camilla Lackberg

*THE HUNGER GAMES* by Suzanne Collins

*BREAKING NIGHT: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey From Homeless To Harvard" by Liz Murray

*THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE* by Stieg Larsson

*THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO" by Stieg Larrson

*THE WISE WOMAN* by Phillipa Gregory

*ANGELINA: An Unauthorized Biography* by Andrew Morton

FURIOUS LOVE: Elizabeth Taylor: Richard Burton: and the Marriage of the Century by Sam Kashner

*LEAVING THE WORLD* by Douglas Kennedy

*AMBULANCE GIRL* by Jane Stern

*GREEN ANGEL* by Alice Hoffman

*GREEN WITCH* by Alice Hoffman

*THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE* by Aimee Bender

*THE KITCHEN HOUSE* by Kathleen Grissom

*THE PASSAGE* by Justin Cronin

*THE GIRL WITH GLASS FEET* by Ali Shaw

*STAR: How Warren Beatty Seduced America* by Peter Biskind

*THE WALK* by Richard Paul Evans

*MAJOR PETTIGREW'S LAST STAND* by Helen Simonsen