Reviews & Recommendations

Nemesis (n.)
1) An opponent or rival whom a person cannot best or overcome;
2) A person’s undoing;
3) Joshua Templeman.

This was a great book. A first for Sally and I am sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for her next book The Comfort Zone to come out this summer, Expected publication: July 2017

The hating Game was a book if you need to laugh out loud! A great summer read if your heading to the beach! Or just a Staycation!

Recommend!

 

The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood



5 stars! The audio is really fantastic. In kinda the same vein as A Man Called Ove.

 

I'm finishing up this book: The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan



I didn't know a lot about the Dust Bowl. This is a fascinating story of the time. I have the book and have been listening to it on Overdrive. I like the audio better. It is non-fiction and there is a lot of information to take in and it's easier to listen to the story. But, that's just me.

It's non-fiction, American history, but oh so relevant and cautionary for today's society!!

 

Alice, I Think by Susan Juby




Alice MacLoed is Canada's answer to Georgia Nicolson (Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging) Bullied after showing up for her first day of school dressed as a hobbit (and bursting into song and dance without warning), Alice is homeschooled by her overprotective hippie parents. At age 15, she tells her counsellor, she'd like to go back to regular school. From the Vancouver Sun: “Imagine a younger, non-smoking, non-drinking, non-dieting Bridget Jones in a remote British Columbia locale. Imagine Adrian Mole with a father who writes (but never publishes) romance novels and a younger brother who breeds rare and unusual fish. Imagine Holden Caulfield in a 1950s housedress, nurse shoes and full 1980s makeup, adjusting to life at an alternative high school after 10 years of home-schooling.
Imagine Alice. You’re going to love her.”

I haven't read a YA book in a long time that made me laugh this hard. My 12 year-old is reading it now and lots of belly laughs can be heard coming from her room. I've noticed that the reviews on Good Reads vacillate between love and hate. I can see Alice's constant march to the beat of her own drum might not be for everyone. As for handing it to kids and teens, it makes passing references to drugs and sex, but Alice is not doing those things, or interested in them. More tame than an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, IMHO. It's set in the late 90's, by my estimation. You may need to explain some of the cultural references to a teen or tween reader.

 

Fast easy read. Love a mystery with a bit of romance. Won't be on my top 10 list for the year but it was really enjoyable and I want to continue this South Shores series.

 

Does Bart read?

 

Read my lips! Kiss Bart!

 

Making my summer reading list!

 

kiss

 

Read this one pretty quickly. It would make a good summer read as the story flows easily and has a fairly simple plot (although still interesting).

 

I just finished this audio book a couple of weeks ago. You're right - it was wonderfully read. Poignant, hopeful, unique.

 

This was a good book!! Im a sucker for multi generational family sagas!


In this bestselling, page-turning saga, four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan, exiled from a home they never knew.

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant-and that her lover is married-she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.

Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters-strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis-survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.

 

I listened to this, the audio version is spectacular. Over 160 people contributed, feels like a play review rather than a book review. I think reading this would be hard work as there are so many characters but the audio version - just wow! The story is of the couple of days surrounding the death of Abraham Lincoln's son - the Bardo being the Buddhist word for what I would think of as purgatory - for those souls not quite ready to move on because of unfinished business. I would say quite original but there are touches of Neil Gaimans "the Graveyard book" in there. Just loved it!

 

This is a super fun series... not serious reading by any sorts, but I love fun mysteries, over the top characters and the characters are great! Part of an ongoing 10 book series... Free with Kindle unlimited.



https://www.amazon.com/Carrots-Nichols-Adventure-Colleen-Helme-ebook/dp/B004PYDGBM

 

I'm almost done this one and really like it. Alice is funny and charming. It's not a deep thinker, is a bit predictable but is fun and enjoyable all the same. A great summer book.

 

Loved -


Reading this and cannot put it down -

 

AUDIO. Interesting story, loved the sweet, smart, slightly mischievous protagonist. Fantastic narration by Jayne Entwistle.

 

This was pretty good

Named a Best Book of 2015 by the San Francisco Chronicle

From the bestselling author of Mary: Mrs. A. Lincoln, a magical novel about the surprising acts we are capable of in the name of love.

Set in 1942 New York and Berlin, A Master Plan for Rescue is an enchanting novel about the life-giving powers of storytelling, and the heroism that can be inspired by love. In essence, it is two love stories. It is the story of a child who worships his parents, then loses his father to an accident and his mother to her resulting grief. And it is the story of a young man who stumbles into the romance of his life, then watches her decline, forever changing the arc of his future. Each is propelled by the belief that if he acts heroically enough, it will restore some part of what—or whom—he has lost.

But when they meet, this boy and this man, their combined grief and magical thinking will allow them to dream the impossible. Sharing stories of the people they have lost, they are inspired to join forces and act in their memory. To do something so memorable that it might actually bring their loved ones back—even if only in spirit.

A Master Plan for Rescue is a beautiful tale, propelled by history and imagination, that suggests people’s impact upon the world doesn’t necessarily end with their lives, and that, to some degree, we are the sum of the stories we tell.

 

I loved this one!