Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Not Quite Perfect

Not Quite Perfect
by Annie Lyons

Genre: Chick Lit

Synopsis: Sometimes having it all isn't enough... Emma has everything she's ever wanted. Her boyfriend's just proposed and her career has finally taken off. And so what if her latest client just happens to be downright gorgeous? She's getting married. Isn't she? Rachel's married with 2.4 children (well, actually, 3) and life is all about trying to leave the house in a non-stained top. Once it was about skinny cappuccinos, cocktails and dynamic ad agency meetings. She wants her old life back, but can it ever be the same? A sparkling, funny tale of two sisters and how often you don't know what you've got until it's gone.
from GoodReads

Review:  This book had a slow start for me.  I didn't feel like there was enough of a plot and that Emma was a less interesting, less quirky Bridget Jones.  But then the story started to pick up, there were more twists, and I became much more interested in the lives of Emma and Rachel.  There were even times where I was tearing up and I felt so much sympathy for the characters.  The language in the book is very British and I struggled figuring out what the characters were saying at times.  This is a good, light quick read.

Rating: 3.5 stars

The Legacies: The Lost Files #1-3

I Am Number Four: The Legacies: The Lost Files #1-3
(Six's Legacy, Nine's Legacy, The Fallen Legacies)
by Pittacus Lore

Genre: Young Adult Fiction, Fantasy, Short Stories

Synopsis:  You know we're out there, living among you.

You know we're waiting for our day to come.

You have seen the power of our legacies.

You know this is why they hunt us.

You may think you know our stories.

You are wrong.

We each have our own story.

We know the time has come to share them with you.
from the back of the book

Review:  I was looking for another good dystopian fiction series to read aloud in the car as we were driving that both my husband and I would like as young adult dystopian fiction is a genre where our interests overlap.  I didn't realize when I picked this one up that it was not the first book in the series but yet 3 small novellas in one larger book.  There were times that we weren't sure of exactly what was meant by something and now that we've starting reading the first book (I Am Number Four) it would have made more sense because things are explained well in the first book.  As we started reading the first novella we realized it sound a bit like Endgame: The Calling.  Little did we know that Pittacus Lore is a group of authors that wrote these books and one of them is James Frey who also wrote Endgame.  There are definite similarities between the books.  Parts of this book took itself a little too seriously and we just had to roll our eyes.  The second novella was a little more teenage-romancy which made the book much more young adult.  Overall the novellas were entertaining and it made me want to read the first book in the series to see what is going to happen (we've already started it).  I have a feeling I'm in for the long haul because there are 7 books so far and lots of lost files or novellas and it is hard for me to stop before I know the conclusion of the storyline.

Rating: 3.5 stars

Where She Went

Where She Went
by Gayle Forman

Genre: Young Adult Fiction

Synopsis:  It's been three years since the devastating accident... three years since Mia walked out of Adam's life forever.

Now living on opposite coasts, Mia is Julliard's rising star and Adam is LA tabloid fodder, thanks to his new rock star status and celebrity girlfriend.

Then change brings them together again, for one night.

As they explore the city that has become Mia's home, Adam and Mia revisit the past and open their hearts to the future-and to each other.
from the back of the book and GoodReads

Review:  I loved the first book of this series so much and I really wanted to know what happened to Mia and Adam so my rating may be somewhat biased because I loved the characters so much from the first book.  I wish I had reread If I Stay before reading this book because I didn't remember what Adam was talking about at times, especially what he said to Mia at the end.  This book flashes back to moments after Mia woke up in the first book to the present when Adam and Mia and together for one night.  The book moves fairly quickly even though it takes place just in the span of 12 hours or less.  I was pretty much just as connected to the characters as I was in the first book and I really wanted to see them back together.  There were parts that I thought were confusing and that I needed to reread and I feel like I was supposed to infer something but I couldn't figure out what.  

Rating: 4 stars

Garbage Bag Suitcase

Garbage Bag Suitcase
by Shenandoah Chefalo

Genre: Memoir, Non-fiction

Synopsis: Garbage Bag Suitcase is the true story of Shenandoah Chefalo's wholly dysfunctional journey through a childhood with neglectful, drug-and alcohol addicted parents.  She endured numerous moves in the middle of the night with just minutes to pack, multiple changes in schools, hunger, cruelty, and loneliness.

Finally at the age of 13, Shen had had enough.  After being abandoned by her mother for months at her grandmother's retirement community, she asked to be put into foster care.  Surely she would fare better at a stable home than living with her mother?  It turns out that it was not the storybook ending she had hoped for.  With foster parents more interested in the income received by housing a foster child, Shen was once again neglected emotionally.  The money she earned working at the local grocery store was taken by her foster parents to "cover her expenses."  When a car accident lands her in the hospital with grave injuries and no one came to visit her during her three-week stay, she realizes she is truly all alone in the world.

Overcoming her many adversities, Shen became part of the 3% of all foster care children who get into college, and the 1% who graduate.  She became a successful businesswoman, got married, and had a daughter.  Despite her numerous achievements in life though, she still suffers from the long-term effects of neglect, and the coping skills that she adapted in her childhood are not always productive in her adult life.

Garbage Bag Suitcase is not only the inspiring and hair-raising story of one woman's journey to overcome her desolate childhood, but it also presents grass-root solutions on how to revamp the broken foster care system.

Review:  I appreciated reading this memoir about the author's neglected childhood experiences and subsequent adulthood.  The author was pretty matter of fact about the events in her early life and the effects of the neglect later in her life.  I've read other memoirs about children in foster care and children who had parents who neglected them but none of them included such a frank discussion of how this impacted their later life including their relationships-both love and friendship, money sense, etc.  I found that part of the book very intriguing as well as her suggestions on how to improve foster care.

What I was missing from the book was the emotions.  I prefer memoirs that tug at my heart and really make me feel for the author and this book did not do that for me because the writing was so straightforward and seemed that just the facts were included.  Chefalo's story (the events of her life) in itself causes me to feel angry that no one helped her before the age of 13 when she asked to be placed in foster care but it wasn't the writing style that made me feel these emotions.  I feel that perhaps the purpose of the writing was to open readers' eyes to the flaws in the system, the effects of neglect, and what we can do about the system.  To me, that makes this book a little more narrative non-fiction and less of a memoir.  I did feel a call to continue my inner dialogue about being a foster parent after reading this book which to me makes this book successful.

I was provided a copy of the book by the author in return for my honest review.  Thank you so much for the book!

Rating: 3.5 stars

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

The Midwife's Confession

The Midwife's Confession
Helen Klein Ross

The Midwife's Confession

Genre: Fiction

Summary (from Goodreads): Dear Anna,
What I have to tell you is difficult to write, but I know it will be far more difficult for you to hear, and I'm so sorry—


The unfinished letter is the only clue Tara and Emerson have to the reason behind their close friend Noelle's suicide. Everything they knew about Noelle—her calling as a midwife, her passion for causes, her love for her friends and family—described a woman who embraced life.

Yet there was so much they didn't know.

With the discovery of the letter and its heartbreaking secret, Noelle's friends begin to uncover the truth about this complex woman who touched each of their lives - and the life of a desperate stranger - with love and betrayal, compassion and deceit.


Marcie's Review: I really enjoyed reading this book, but found it hard to believe that such close friends could keep such major secrets from each other.  It was like reading about soap opera characters.

Marcie's Rating: 4 stars

Becky's Review:  I enjoyed reading this fast paced drama of two friends investigating what caused their friend's suicide.  This book is told in alternating perspectives between the two friends, one of their daughters, Noelle and later another character.  Grace, Tara's daughter, was sullen and a typical teenager and there were times I just wanted to move on from her because I couldn't deal with the teenage angst anymore.  I thought some of the book was a little over dramatic but the book kept me engaged.  I did not see the twist in the book coming!

Becky's Rating: 4 stars

Thursday, March 10, 2016

The Nightingale

The Nightingale
by Kristin Hannah

Genre: Historical Fiction

Synopsis:  In love we find out who we want to be.
In war we find out who we are.

FRANCE, 1939

In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France...but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When France is overrun, Vianne is forced to take an enemy into her house, and suddenly her every move is watched; her life and her child’s life is at constant risk. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates around her, she must make one terrible choice after another.

Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets the compelling and mysterious Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can...completely. When he betrays her, Isabelle races headlong into danger and joins the Resistance, never looking back or giving a thought to the real--and deadly--consequences.

With courage, grace and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah takes her talented pen to the epic panorama of WWII and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the women’s war. The Nightingale tells the stories of two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France--a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the durability of women. It is a novel for everyone, a novel for a lifetime.
 
from GoodReads

Becky's Review:  This is a heartbreaking tale of two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, during World War II who live in France during the German occupation there.  They both sacrifice so much and do whatever it takes to survive during the war but also are so brave to stand up for what they believe is right.  The story shows us what happened to the women and children who watched their men go off to war and the loss of innocence in childhood because of the horrific things that happened all around them.  My heart just ached for all the characters in the story and their struggle.  Vianne puts up a quiet struggle against the Nazis later in the war and Isabelle is bold and daring and ready to storm into the war working for the Resistance.  Isabelle is a hard character to like at the beginning because she is so young and brash but her transformation throughout the book makes us love her by the end and root for her to survive.  By the end this book had me in tears and the story has stayed with me.

Becky's Rating: 4.5 stars

Marcie's Review:  I agreed with Becky.  A beautiful, heartbreaking book.

Marcie's Rating: 5 stars

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

The Art of Crash Landing

The Art of Crash Landing
Melissa DeCarlo

The Art of Crash Landing

Genre: Women's Fiction

Summary (from Goodreads): From a bright new talent comes this debut novel about a young woman who travels for the first time to her mother’s hometown, and gets sucked into the mystery that changed her family forever.

Mattie Wallace has really screwed up this time. Broke and knocked up, she’s got all her worldly possessions crammed into six giant trash bags, and nowhere to go. Try as she might, Mattie can no longer deny that she really is turning into her mother, a broken alcoholic who never met a bad choice she didn’t make.

When Mattie gets news of a possible inheritance left by a grandmother she’s never met, she jumps at this one last chance to turn things around. Leaving the Florida Panhandle, she drives eight hundred miles to her mother’s birthplace—the tiny town of Gandy, Oklahoma. There, she soon learns that her mother remains a local mystery—a happy, talented teenager who inexplicably skipped town thirty-five years ago with nothing but the clothes on her back. But the girl they describe bears little resemblance to the damaged woman Mattie knew, and before long it becomes clear that something terrible happened to her mother, and it happened here. The harder Mattie digs for answers, the more obstacles she encounters. Giving up, however, isn’t an option. Uncovering what started her mother’s downward spiral might be the only way to stop her own.

Hilarious, gripping, and unexpectedly wise, The Art of Crash Landing is a poignant novel from an assured new voice.


Review:  The story itself was interesting and well-written and most of the minor characters were delightfully fun, but I could not stand the main character.  Talk about a spoiled brat with a huge sense of entitlement.  She basically seemed to go up to everyone and expect them to help her with her problems without her doing anything at all in return.  She grew up towards the end, of course, but it wasn't fast enough for me to like this book.  Also, the whole mystery about her mother was needlessly confusing, the names of all the characters involved kept getting all confused in my mind.

Rating: 2.5 stars

The Magician's Lie

The Magician's Lie
Greer McAllister

The Magician's Lie

Genre: Historical Fiction

Summary (from Goodreads):Water for Elephants meets The Night Circus in The Magician’s Lie, a debut novel in which the country’s most notorious female illusionist stands accused of her husband's murder --and she has only one night to convince a small-town policeman of her innocence.

The Amazing Arden is the most famous female illusionist of her day, renowned for her notorious trick of sawing a man in half on stage. One night in Waterloo, Iowa, with young policeman Virgil Holt watching from the audience, she swaps her trademark saw for a fire ax. Is it a new version of the illusion, or an all-too-real murder? When Arden’s husband is found lifeless beneath the stage later that night, the answer seems clear.

But when Virgil happens upon the fleeing magician and takes her into custody, she has a very different story to tell. Even handcuffed and alone, Arden is far from powerless—and what she reveals is as unbelievable as it is spellbinding. Over the course of one eerie night, Virgil must decide whether to turn Arden in or set her free… and it will take all he has to see through the smoke and mirrors.


Review:  Comparing this book to The Night Circus isn't fair; it sets the reader up for disappointment.  Although this book is about a magician, it doesn't have the same spellbinding magical quality of The Night Circus, and it certainly isn't as novel and clever.  So please don't go into this book expecting that.  Comparisons aside, though....

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book about a female illusionist at the turn of the 20th century.  The book is less about the onstage magic in Arden's life, and more about her unusual adolescence and her adult relationships.  The summary doesn't indicate this, but most of the novel is spent on Arden's retelling of her past, with flash-forwards to the present day after she has been captured by Virgil.  I found myself rushing through the present day parts so that I could get back to her fascinating past.  I haven't read many stories set in this time period, and haven't read any about women on the entertainment circuit, so I appreciated this glimpse into a unique part of American history.

Rating: 4 stars

What Was Mine


What Was Mine
Helen Klein Ross

What Was Mine

Genre: Fiction

Summary (from Goodreads): Simply told but deeply affecting, in the bestselling tradition of Alice McDermott and Tom Perrotta, this urgent novel unravels the heartrending yet unsentimental tale of a woman who kidnaps a baby in a superstore—and gets away with it for twenty-one years.

Lucy Wakefield is a seemingly ordinary woman who does something extraordinary in a desperate moment: she takes a baby girl from a shopping cart and raises her as her own. It’s a secret she manages to keep for over two decades—from her daughter, the babysitter who helped raise her, family, coworkers, and friends.

When Lucy’s now-grown daughter Mia discovers the devastating truth of her origins, she is overwhelmed by confusion and anger and determines not to speak again to the mother who raised her. She reaches out to her birth mother for a tearful reunion, and Lucy is forced to flee to China to avoid prosecution. What follows is a ripple effect that alters the lives of many and challenges our understanding of the very meaning of motherhood.

Author Helen Klein Ross, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, weaves a powerful story of upheaval and resilience told from the alternating perspectives of Lucy, Mia, Mia’s birth mother, and others intimately involved in the kidnapping. What Was Mine is a compelling tale of motherhood and loss, of grief and hope, and the life-shattering effects of a single, irrevocable moment.


Marcie's Review: I'm not sure exactly what I thought about this book.  It's well-written, made up of chapters written from the perspective of all the important people in Mia's life as she grows up, although predominantly the reader sees the perspectives of Lucy and Mia's birth mother.  Lucy is clearly a biased narrator, expecting that the reader will sympathize with her desire for a child, and understand, and even approve of, her motivations for stealing a baby from a shopping cart.  The first part of the story was fascinating, reading about how Lucy got away with her crime and how Mia's birth mother worked to rebuild her life after her daughter disappeared.  The latter part of the book didn't live up to the promise of the first half, though.  Mia's birth mother didn't seem to recognize Mia as her own person; Lucy was a completely unbelievable falling apart runaway, and Mia, while understandably confused and angry, seemed too eager to give up her entire identity.  The author did a nice job, though, helping the reader understand how Mia would feel split in two between her love of the only mother she knew and the knowledge that her mother did a terrible thing.

Marcie's Rating: 4 stars

Becky's Review:  This book was a quick and easy read with short chapters told by rotating narrators.  Most of the story was told by the three main characters but there were chapters from other characters who came in and out of Mia's, Lucy's and Marilyn's lives.  I wanted more emotion from this book.  Clearly this is an emotional story about longing for a child so much that you kidnap a baby and about losing a child for 21 years but it was written in such a matter a fact way.  I did sympathize for all the characters, including Lucy.  Once Mia finds out the truth and visits with her birth mother I had a hard time believing how easily she accepted her new family.  Once I got to the end I understood Mia's reactions a bit more and I did appreciate how the author ended the book.

Becky's Rating: 3.5 stars