Savannah Blues by Mary Kay Andrews | Book Review

This is a very short throwback review.  I noticed that I had posted a review of Christmas Bliss by Mary Kay Andrews without having posted reviews of the first three books in that series!  So I'm going to try to make up for it.  Savannah Blues is the first book in the Southern series by Mary Kay Andrews.  

Goodreads writes:

Meet Weezie (aka Eloise) Foley, a feisty antiques “picker,” banished by her spiteful ex-husband from the house she herself restored in Savannah’s historic district, who must come to terms with a life that has suddenly changed…and not, it seems, for the better. In Mary Kay Andrews’s delectable New York Times bestseller, Savannah Blues, readers will feel the sultry Georgia breezes and taste sea salt in the air, as they lose themselves in a wonderful, witty tale brimming with sass and peopled by a richly endearing cast of delightfully eccentric characters. Revenge is sweeter than sweet in Mary Kay’s capable hands, and readers of Fannie Flagg, Adriana Trigiani, Emily Giffin, Rebecca Wells, and Jill Conner Browne will definitely want to spend some quality time in Savannah.

In May, 2010, I wrote this on Goodreads:

This book had it all- quirky, lovable characters, intrigue, mystery, Southern setting, plenty of humor, and just a sprinkle of romance. The entire plot was outrageous, yet totally believable. The story came to a wonderful finish with a few pleasant (and one unpleasant) surprise that left me very satisfied.

Looks like I was a lot less verbose in 2010!  But now I can begin to fill in "holes" in my list of books reviewed on this blog.  :)

Before Green Gables by Budge Wilson | Book Review

(To be honest, I wasn't terribly impressed with the cover.  Maybe I expected it to more closely resemble the covers of the Anne of Green Gables books?  But there's so many different editions of those... but anyway.)

I LOVED LOVED LOVED LOVED THIS BOOK!!!

If you've ever met me, this will not surprise you overly much.  I love all the Anne of Green Gables books.  I read the first one, Anne of Green Gables, to pieces as a child.  There was a Top Ten Tuesday where we were challenged to list influential books in our reading lives and these books were definitely on my list.  I really wish Goodreads would let me do crazy stuff like award 7 out of 5 stars to books like this one.  I know that's not mathematically correct but I'm a reader, not a mathematician.

When readers first dive into Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery and first meet Anne, she is 11 years old.  She is brand new to Prince Edward Island, having arrived from the orphanage on the mainland.  There are very brief allusions to her life before PEI, but mostly the books concentrate on her day to day escapades.  And boy does she have escapades!  She's a dreamer and chatter and has such a tender heart and so much love for those around her... but her red hair just gets her in so much trouble!

Before Green Gables does exactly what the title tells you it's going to do:  it tells you about Anne's life before she arrives at Green Gables.  And oh, is it heartbreaking!  <---That's not a spoiler.  In Anne of Green Gables, Anne is introduced as an orphan who is being taken in my Marilla and Matthew.  AN ORPHAN.  In the very early 1900s.  You know she wasn't eating bon bons in a mansion.

Instead, Anne was working very hard from a very young age.  At one point in the book Anne reminds the lady she is working for/living with that it is her fifth birthday.  Of course nothing comes of that.  No cake; no presents.  Anne instead sits down in a rocking chair to feed bottles to two babies.  At five!  The first family she lives with has four little boys living in the house, all under the age of five, who Anne looks after.  Then, when Anne is 8, she goes to live with another family who has 8 children under the age of five.  (Multiple sets of twins.)  In order to go to school (which is a 2 mile walk each way) Anne must first fetch 13 buckets of water from a well and empty them into tubs out on the back porch and wash all those dirty diapers.  When she gets home she has to prepare dinner for the family of 11.  But Anne is just completely indomitable.  She relishes her long walks to school when she can just be by herself with her thoughts.  She finds joy in watching the forest animals.  She finds a meadow with an echo, and "talks" to her new "friend" as often as possible.

I am just so very impressed with this book and with Budge Wilson's ability to "capture" Anne's Anneness!  I don't know if I could discern between an Anne speech written by L.M. Montgomery and one written by Budge Wilson.  Anne has the same spirit and the same disdain for her hair and the same dreaminess and the same intelligence and the same quick wit and the same heart in all of the books.  A reader could easily go straight from Before Green Gables to Anne of Green Gables without missing a beat.

I cannot remember the last time I re-read a book (I'd have to go all the way back to high school, probably) but I'm seriously considering a re-read of Anne of Green Gables after reading this!  

A cute anecdote about me and Anne and my mom:

When I was 10 (11? can't quite remember) my mom gave me Anne of Green Gables to read at the beginning of summer and told me to let her know when I finished.  I devoured it.  Practically overnight.  I was that kind of kid.  So I told my mom and she hands me the second one, Anne of Avonlea.  Turns out my mom had got all 8 in a box set and was just doling them out one by one.  Yeah... I ferreted out that box o'books before we got to the third title!  I was what could charitably be called a "challenging" child.

Top Ten Tuesday

This is a neat weekly feature over at a blog I really enjoy, The Broke and the Bookish.  They read books similar to some that I've been reviewing, and they're fun and they write well.  Totally worth checking out.

Top Ten Most Unique Books I've Read

1. The Madman's Daughter trilogy by Megan Shepherd.  The first one, The Madman's Daughter, is a re-imagining of The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells.  In this one, the point of view is the teenage daughter of Dr. Moreau.  The second one, Her Dark Curiosity, is even better:  it's a re-telling of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.  But get this:  Megan Shepherd is crazy talented and she re-told Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with the same characters from The Madman's Daughter and advanced the story and it was fantastic.

2. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children and Hollow City, both by Ransom Riggs.  These are worth picking up and looking at just for the crazy historic photographs in them.  I recommend reading them because they're great, but at least go look at the photographs.

3. My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag... And Other Things You Can't Ask Martha by Jolie Kerr.  Actually still reading this, but it's just fantastic!  It's a cleaning book that's so well-written I'm reading it straight through like a novel.  And the tips actually work!  My cleaning life is getting better and better.  Full disclosure:  I picked it up just for the title and was rewarded with much more.

4. My Lobotomy by Howard Dully.  A memoir of a guy who had an honest-to-goodness icepick lobotomy as a kid.  Mind-blowing.  (See what I did there?)

5. Hidden Treasures: What Museums Can't or Won't Show You by Harriet Baskas.  This book is exactly what the title says:  a collection of photographs and short essays on really crazy, kooky, unique, gross, or weird things that museums have in their collections/archives, but that they don't display for one reason or another.

6. The Kingdom of Little Wounds by Susann Cokal.  A fairytale of syphilis.  <---Those are the author's own words to describe her book.  Aren't you intrigued?  Bonus:  incredibly well-written.

7. Every Day by David Levithan.  The main character is gender neutral.  I can't think of how to explain this, but the main character wakes up in a different body every day, and sometimes it's a guy's body and sometimes it's a girl's body.  But you can't use "he" or "she" to refer to A (the main character) because they don't identify themselves as either.  I thought it'd be hard to read the book, but David Levithan does a great job with it.

8. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.  So many unique things about this book:  the narrator of the story is Death personified; the way Death keeps talking about the color of the sky when people die; and in the middle of the book is a section that is meant to look like handwritten pages from a book that is part of the story... so a book within a book.

9. Red by Allison Cherry.  This book isn't going to win any great literature awards, but I enjoyed it.  It's a light little read that you could take on vacay.  The premise is a whole town just for redheads and the redder your hair, the higher your social status.  But what happens when the secret gets out that Scarletville's most popular girl is actually a brunette who dyes her hair red?  Full disclosure:  I'm a redhead.

10. By the Numbers series by Janet Evanovich.  These are the Stephanie Plum mysteries.  They make me laugh out loud and I highly, highly, highly recommend them.  Stephanie Plum is about my age and she's a kick-ass bail bondswoman.  Her sidekick is Lula, an extremely rotund ex-hooker.  Stephanie is being pursued romantically by Joe, a handsome clean cop and Ranger, a dangerous steamy-hot personal security guy.  Then there's her mom, who just wants her to get married and have babies and her crazy grandma.

I could probably do a Top 50 list on this topic!  These were just the first ones to come to mind.  I work in a library and I'm always grabbing books that look crazy unique.  Like Would You Kill the Fat Man?  Come on... you know that sounds intriguing...

What about you?  What are the Top 10 Most Unique Books in your reading life?

Uninvited by Sophie Jordan | Book Review

(Love the cover!  I don't know if you can see it here, but the DNA strands in the hair are sorta sparkly.  And it's neat the way the DNA strands are so naturally woven into the hair.  And this looks exactly like the MC is described in the book.)

MURDER GENE!!!  Can you believe this is the 2nd book I've read in the past year that focused on discussing the possibility of a murder gene?  The other book was Defending Jacob by William Landay.  Also a very good book that I recommend.

So what do ya'll think?  Do you think there's a murder gene?  NPR did a piece on it a little while back; some smart-type people think there's a possibility that some people are more prone to murder than others!  Here's the NPR thing.

So in Uninvited... Davy has got this perfect-kid thing going on.  She's a music prodigy and she attends an elite private school and she has a gorgeous football captain boyfriend and next year she'll go to Julliard on scholarship.  She lives in a rather large house (it's implied; her older brother lives in the guest house out back by the pool) and her parents are still married and are supportive of each other and of her.  Last year in school, all the kids were tested for HTS, or Homicidal Tendency Syndrome.  No one thought anything of it, and no one is overly concerned.  These are good kids.  Rich kids.  Smart kids.  But then the results come back... and Davy has tested positive.

In just a few hours, her world falls apart completely.  The headmaster of her school "uninvites" her (kicks her out).  Her mom becomes scared.  Her dad becomes distant.  Some things take a little longer to sink in and change.  Her boyfriend dumps her.  Julliard rescinds their admission.  She starts a new school.

Man, ya'll:  Davy's life SUCKS after her diagnosis.  It is just terrible how horribly she's treated by everyone around her!  And she's not alone: all the teens who have been diagnosed are treated the same way.  They're stuffed together in a basement classroom in a low-rent public high school.  They're literally caged.  There's a big chain-link fence across the front of their classroom to keep them in all day and separated from the general population.  They have to arrive at school half an hour late so they're not interacting with other students, and leave for home half an hour after the final bell.  And their teacher is a total jerk.

So Davy goes from having a shiny bright future to having no future.  Until a government agent contacts the family with a proposition:  Davy attends a special training camp for gifted & talented HTS carriers, and if she excels the government will provide her with employment (aka hope for a future).  Well, yes please!  Davy's not stupid; she signs right up.  And she might/might not know someone else in the program (don't want to give any spoilers).  But ya'll: this program is TOUGH COOKIES.  It's tense.

I loved this book!  I devoured it rather quickly.  It was not what I was expecting.  I can't exactly remember what I was expecting, but it wasn't this.  I don't know that I ever read the phrase "murder gene" in any of the reviews I read and I'm curious as hell about that so I would've read it sooner if I'd known.  (Yup; I'm aware of the run-on sentence.)  I loved Davy.  She's totally acing life in general at the beginning of the book, but it's not because she's had anything handed to her.  Girl is motivated and hard working!  Even when life kicks her in the kidneys she keeps going to school and doing her work!  Who does that?  She barely mopes.  She just kicks ass and takes names.  

More good news:  Goodreads told me that Uninvited is Uninvited #1.  That means there will be more books featuring Davy!  Woo-hoo!

Weekend Pintest #4

Has anyone else been sucked into the vortex of Pinterest quite as much as I have?  I mean, other than the craft blog ladies.  Ya'll, I could lose hours of my life browsing that site.  A couple months ago I realized, though, that I was pinning much more than I was doing.  So now my goal is to try at least one pin from my boards every weekend.  Some weeks I attempt upwards of two or three!  I know:  my life is very exciting.

So this week I tried a new Greek yogurt "recipe."  I put it in quotes because it doesn't feel like cooking... there's no baking and I didn't actually make the yogurt... it feels more like "assembling" than "cooking."  But I digress.

Apple Pie Greek Yogurt

Click HERE for the original blog post, with the details!

It boils down to Greek yogurt, apple butter, a few spices you'd find in a real apple pie, apples, chopped walnuts, and caramel sauce!  Mmm.  I thought this made a good bit of Greek yogurt, so I had it for breakfast three days in a row.  I just separated the Greek yogurt/apple butter/spices mixture into three Tupperware containers and refrigerated, and added the toppings the same day I planned to enjoy it.

Yum!

Into the Still Blue by Veronica Rossi | Book Review

(I really like all the covers in this trilogy because they're very non-gender-specific.  As someone who recommends books to both guys and girls, I love when a book not only fits both genders in terms of plot but also in cover appeal.  Most guys refuse to touch books that are pink & shiny you know.)

Into the Still Blue opens with the stalemate between Sable & Hess and Aria & Perry.  Both are determined to reach the Still Blue, but both are missing a key component.  Sable & Hess don't have Cinder, and Aria & Perry don't have transportation.  Aria & Perry have the added conflict of trying to get Outsiders (Perry's people) and newly-rescued Dwellers to live together peaceably.  

I'm very sorry this is such a short review... I read the book months ago and am just now getting around to writing the review.

So the action starts immediately.  You get this anxious feeling of everythingmusthappenrightnow because in this world that Veronica Rossi has built the sky is on fire.  No joke.  And so they need to get to the Still Blue NOW or else they'll be trapped in a cave for a couple of years... with about 2 weeks worth of supplies.  I see Lord of the Flies in their future.  So Aria and Perry and Soren (of all people) make this extremely risky plan to go steal a bunch of giant airships from Hess & Sable.  When you're reading this part you're going to be doing many mental eye rolls and thinking "yeah.  Like that's going to work."  

But you know: Aria is a badass and Perry is tough as nails and even though they're dragging Soren along like dead weight it somehow works.

So there are some things I'm VERY excited about in this trilogy-closer but that I don't want to discuss in detail, therefore spoiling the book for ya'll:

1. Aria meets a certain soldier while they're in the giant metal mobile caterpillar.  (If you've read the book you'll know what that sentence means and you'll be excited too.  Go read the book so we can discuss!)

2. There's a heartbreaking moment at the end of the book that I totally compare to this:

but without the cold.  And with a different conclusion.  But still very much like this in the feels.

Please comment if you'd like to discuss further!  And I might be weird, and the Titanic reference might not make sense to anyone else... But I can try to explain if you comment!

Top Ten Tuesday

This is a neat weekly feature over at a blog I really enjoy, The Broke and the Bookish.  They read books similar to some that I've been reviewing, and they're fun and they write well.  Totally worth checking out.

Top Ten "Gateway" Books/Authors in My Reading Journey

(I'm actually going to do a Top Ten that's tangentially related.  I'm going to do a Top Ten Books/Authors That Really Impacted Me.)

1. The Bible, of course.  Can't even begin to list all the ways this book has changed and continues to change my life.  (On a tangent... Do you underline "Bible"?  Italicize it?  Anyone know?)

2. The Father Tim books by Jan Karon.  My mom and I read these together, aloud, during my oh-so-awkward and emotionally twisted middle school years.  You know middle schoolers:  so confused and awkward.  Trying to be all grown but with the emotional aptitude of a child.  This was a safe/comfortable way for my mom and I to keep strengthening our bond.  I could just cry to think of all the time she and I spent lounging on my bed or on her bed or on the back porch, reading aloud together.  It was ABSOLUTELY 100% needed, and ABSOLUTELY 100% made me the person I am today.

3. Anne of Green Gables + the rest of the series.  I literally read the first one to pieces.  My mom had to replace it.  No joke.  I've read the entire series 3 times; I've read Anne many times more.  I could very well have been Anne if I'd been born in a different time and place.  My favorite favorite favorite quote is 

4. The Baby-Sitters Club series by Ann M. Martin (and later, the Baby-Sitters Little Sister books).  I think these were the first books that I had to talk to somebody about.  One of my friends was also a super-fan and we's spend recess talking about the books and we'd swap them and re-read them.  The Baby-Sitters Little Sisters books actually came after the Baby-Sitters Club books for me just because of publication timing.

5. The Felicity books by Valerie Tripp.  I think these were my first historical fiction and I loved them.  I definitely identified with the redheaded main character and I wished that I too could live in 1776.  I think I read the entire series of books 8-10 times over.

6. The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series by J.R.R. Tolkien.  My Uncle Joe got me the boxed set of the books when I was 12 and I loved them.  They completely ruined me for Harry Potter, as I'd already experienced the incredibly rich world of Middle-Earth.

7. Ruby Lee the Bumble Bee by Dawn Matheson and Pamela Barcita.  I read this book at Storytime at my old library and just loved it.  It's a beautiful picture book about Ruby Lee, a bumble bee with small wings.  She's a very round but beautiful bumble bee, and according to the laws of physics those little wings shouldn't be able to carry her.  But by God's good providence, she can fly!  After reading the book at Storytime I told two good family friends, who have a special needs daughter, about the book.  They ended up creating a non-profit to help other families with special needs children under the name "BumbleBee Fund" because of the book.

8. Technically, Eyes of the Dragon was my first Stephen King book, followed by The Gunslinger.  But I didn't actually care for either of them.  However, I'm not a quitter and I went on to read the remaining six books in The Dark Tower series and loved loved loved them all.  I stayed up all night long to finish the last book.  Since then I've read nearly every Stephen King novel ever published.

9. Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink.  I think I read this book 4-5 times as a kid.  I think I could call this one my first "comfort" read.

10. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.  I read this in 6th grade, and I think it was my first "grown up" book.  I thought it was hilarious and went on to read all of his other books.

What about ya'll?  What ten books have dramatically impacted your life?