Night Embrace

By Sherrilyn Kenyon

Talon is a vampire-ish guy but not a vampire. Yeah, he has fangs and can drink human blood and has to stay out of the sun for fearing of burning up and he's pretty much immortal. But he is not a vampire, he's a vampire killer. He's also a very lonely guy.
Back in the time of the Druids, he was a king, with a pregnant wife and a little sister he loved dearly. His wife died in childbirth as did the baby and he and his sister ran afoul of politics and were both slaughtered. When Talon was brought back to life as a vampire hunter by divine intervention, he was so scarred by the deaths of those he loved most that for hundreds of years he remained self-contained and isolated, without emotional attachments. Lots of hook-ups but no love. But then he met Sunshine.
Sunshine is an artist who lives in New Orleans and she and Talon feel an immediate bond, although Talon tries to resist falling in love. Falling in lust is OK but not love. Because Talon bears an ancient curse. Back in the olden times, he killed the son of a god and that god has declared that anyone Talon loves will die. So if Talon allows himself to love Sunshine he guarantees she will shortly die.
Meanwhile, it will soon be Mardi Gras in New Orleans and the masses of humanity attending the festival will also attract lots of vampires, or as they are referred to in the book, daimons. So Talon and the other vampire hunters gathered in New Orleans will be very busy trying to protect an unsuspecting public. To make matters worse, it transpires that a group of cast out gods, including the one that cursed Talon, are planning to bring about the end of the world in order to regain all their lost powers. So the Talon and the vampire hunters have to try to stop these rogue gods, plus Talon has to protect Sunshine while he and she struggle to find a way to be together and keep her alive. Plus it turns out that Sunshine is Talon's dead wife reincarnated.

This was a pretty good story. The plot is pretty complicated with lots going on and lots of different characters, all of them drop-dead gorgeous, even the bad guys. There are werebears and werewolves and werepanthers and ghosts and lots of gods popping in and out and psychics and vampires and vampire hunters and lots of people who seem to be there mainly to lead the reader on to the next story that will feature that particular character. Yup, there is a lot going on in this story, maybe too much. Still, I enjoyed the book even if at times I felt a bit lost or overwhelmed with the number of characters to keep in mind and all their complicated relationships and pasts.

Toast

By Nigel Slater

Nigel Slater is the author of several cookbooks and a columnist for The Observer in London, England. This book is a look back at his childhood from the year his mother died when he was nine until he graduated from cooking school and got a job at the Savoy Grill. It looks at his life very much from the foods partaken during those years.
Nigel was a middle class boy growing up in England. His father was a man with a narrow outlook who loved growing flowers and who had a fiery temper at times. Nigel was a skinny, frail-looking child who was a constant disappointment to his dad. He was a lonely boy who, after his mother died, had no real love in his life. His dad married the cleaning lady, a woman that Nigel claims only married his dad for his money and the chance to move up in life. The marriage didn't last very long as Nigel's dad died when Nigel was about fifteen. The stepmother lived up to the reputation of the typical stepmother, criticizing and judging Nigel and piling chore after chore on him, a little boy who had never been required to do any chores, including putting his toys away or making his own bed. It got to where it seemed that everything he did was wrong. For example if he stayed in the house, she complained that he was too much indoors. But if he went out to play she complained that he spent too much time outside.
But through it all runs the foods of his life, meat and potatoes, candy and desserts, cakes and puddings and a few things he really disliked such as milk and eggs. One of his favorite foods at the time was buttered toast, hot or cold, he liked it either way. His mom was not a good cook but that didn't matter. His stepmom was a good cook, but that didn't endear her to him either. She went out of her way to make delicious foods but perhaps did it only to prove her indispensability to Nigel's father. But all his young life, Nigel had a feel for food and ended up making a career out of it, something neither of his parents lived to see. Except for the stepmom, and I suppose she doesn't count.

I liked this book a lot, in fact I read in one day. Nigel's story is touching, engaging and at times rather puzzling when he refers to foods eaten that were unfamiliar to me. I didn't discover the glossary in the back of the book until I had finished reading it. It would have helped a lot if I had known about it. I guessed that icing sugar was probably powdered sugar and that Setlers must be some kind of antacid. But what ribena or maltesers were I couldn't begin to guess. Turns out one in a beverage and the other a malted milk ball. Anyways, despite the language barrier, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Nigel's memoir. I bet his cookbooks are pretty good too.

Swimming to Antarctica

By Lynne Cox

Lynne Cox is not your average person. She is a swimmer but not for her your backyard swimming pool. Nope, she swims in the open ocean. But even beyond that she swims in places where people are not supposed to be able to survive, like the icy waters of the Bering Strait. She has even swum off the shore of Antarctica, which would probably kill a lesser person. But Lynne has managed to condition her body to survive the freezing temperatures, but not without some toll to herself.
She began her long distance swimming career as a teen off the coast of California when she and the other members of their high school swim team swam the Catalina Channel, a swim that took them about 12 hours. She followed that up with a record-breaking swim of the English Channel. She had terrible cramps following that swim, not knowing at the time that she was becoming dehydrated on her swims, something she later learned to prevent. Since those early days she has broken and set numerous long distance swim records and has swum in places no one else had ever tried to swim. Her life has been one continuous adventure as she proves that the human body is capable of coping with extreme conditions, given the right preparation and training. Her story is amazing and inspiring and just plain unbelievable and I really enjoyed reading about this remarkable woman. An excellent read.

Birds Without Wings

By Reina Murray with Sylvester I. Okoro

Like so many people, Reina's parents messed up their own relationship then married other people, bringing strangers into their children's lives. Although Reina does not go into detail about her mother's husband, it is apparent that there was something not good going on there otherwise her father wouldn't have gotten sole custody of Reina and her brother and sisters. Too bad for the kids that Daddy's new wife was the stereotypical stepmother: evil, cruel, warped and maybe just a tad insane. Then to compound the father's stupidity, he often left his kids alone with this monster for months at a time as he had to travel for his job. No, while Daddy was away from home, the monster stepmom had free rein to indulge her depraved urges to dominate and destroy the children entrusted to her care. Not that he didn't have a clue as to what was going on. No, the stepmom didn't hide the fact that she whipped and beat his children, but they were going by the old testament precept of spare the rod and spoil the child. But even if a parent sees nothing wrong with spanking a misbehaving child, what this woman was doing went way beyond that -- she actually drew blood when she disciplined her stepkids.
But nothing lasts forever and Reina eventually got big enough to face her stepmother down. In a final confrontation, she knocked the woman on her ass and her stepmother never laid a finger on her again. But when Reina became an adult and married and had a family of her own, she cut her father out of her life since he stayed married to her abuser. So for twenty years she didn't see him and rarely spoke to him. It was only when her father was quite elderly that she consented to come see him and his wife and upon seeing how weak and infirm the woman had become, Reina was able to put her fears behind her and have a more normal relationship with her dad.

This was a good read. Reina and her siblings had a rough time of it. Even beyond the physical abuse they received from the stepmother was the psychological abuse. She treated the kids like servants, making them maintain the house, requiring them to enter the house only through the back door, making them use rags to bathe and dry themselves, making them eat their meals out in the garage. But these kids were resourceful. They managed to take care of themselves and they managed to cope with the abuse. And they often managed to get around their monster stepmom. They survived.

War Memorials

By Clint McCown

Nolan Vann is not having a good time. The trouble all started with insurance. Even though Nolan worked in his father's insurance agency in a small town in Tennessee, when he built a new addition on his house he neglected to inform his insurance company and then when a huge tree fell on the new addition, demolishing it, it wasn't covered by his insurance. To compound his stupidity, Nolan tried to back date his insurance policy and was caught by his father and was fired. Then he failed to tell his wife about the addition to the house not being insured and he also didn't tell her he had lost his job, instead choosing to struggle by with a series of crumby jobs, the latest being a repo man.
But things were off in Nolan's life even before his big screw-up. His wife is seeing another man, although Nolan doesn't tell her that he knows this, and she is pregnant by that man, something Nolan also knows. His marriage is not strengthened when he accidentally kills his wife's pet lizard that she loves. Nor is it strengthened when Nolan starts up a flirtation with a beautiful would-be zookeeper, whom he meets when repossessing her washer and dryer. Nolan just goes from bad to worse, but he is not a bad guy, he has a good heart: he is just your typical loser trying to get by. His part of the country is lousy with war memorials, commemorating every war from the Indian wars to Desert Storm. But Nolan wonders why there isn't a memorial to the ordinary guys on the homefront who struggle everyday to hold things together. Because it's a war, it's just not fought with guns and bombs.

I really enjoyed this book. Nolan comes off as a real dope right from the beginning. But he is gradually revealed as a guy who is basically sweet at heart. He just messed up but he is trying to get things back on track without damaging either himself or his errant wife in the process. It's a good, quirky, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic story of a smalltown guy just trying to cope.

Pamela

By Samuel Richardson

Pamela is a young woman who gets a job as a maid in an upper class house. Everything is fine until the lady of the house dies and her horny son takes control. He has his sights set on pretty Pam and does everything he can to force her to yield to his importunings. But she staunchly resists all his advances, even after he kidnaps her and destroys what is left of her reputation. He eventually gives up and asks her to marry him and she agrees.

This novel was written back in the 1700s and takes the form of letters written by Pam to her mother in which she chronicles all her misadventures. It is really long, the version I read over 500 pages. Its hard work wading through all that but still its a pretty good story, as Pamela seems to overcome every dirty trick her boss throws at her. She is a really resourceful and determined young woman and stands her ground no matter how her boss tries to trick, force or lure her.

Heart Choice

By Robin D. Owens

On Celta people are a little different. Many of them have magical powers that they call Flair. In fact, most of their technology is based on magical power. Although they originally came from Earth they no longer rely on Earth technology instead using their magical powers to handle almost everything in their daily lives, from dusting the living room to placing a call.
The most powerful are the Great Lords who are very wealthy and pretty much run things on Celta. One of these Great Lords, Straif Blackthorn, suffered a terrible tragedy when everyone in his family died of an infectious disease. Normally this disease isn't fatal but for his family it was because of a genetic defect they all shared. Only this man survived and he was so traumatized by the event that he set off on a quest to find a cure, either for the disease or for his faulty genes. He was just a teen when he left his home and he didn't return for fifteen years, abandoning his family's estates and neglecting the duties required of the Great Lords. Still, after fifteen years of searching in vain for a solution to his condition, Straif has now realized it is time to come home and resume his duties and restore his neglected estate.
So he hires an interior decorator to help him with the process of repairing and refurbishing his mansion. The woman, Mitchella Clover, is not a member of one of the Great families, she is just a commoner and her magical abilities are of a lower order than Straif's. But she is a talented decorator and is just the person to help Straif reestablish his home and thus his place in society.
Of course, since this is a romance novel, Straif and Mitchella fall in love. Which wouldn't normally be a problem. But Straif, being the last of his family, is anxious to have children, lots of children. And Mitchella is sterile, she is unable to conceive or to bear a baby. Straif has to make some tough choices, give up his dream, or lose the love of his life.

This was a pretty good story. The magic and the different way the people of Celta live their lives are really inventive and interesting. That's the part I enjoyed the most, reading about how they manage their lives using all these magical abilities and magic-based technologies. Over all, I enjoyed the story, although, I did find it a little slow in places.

Magnificent Obsession

By Lloyd C. Douglas

Robert Merrick is a young wastrel, content to live off his fortune, frittering away his days with drink and merry-making. One day, while out on the lake in his sailboat, he was knocked unconscious by the boom and fell into the lake. There was a suspicion that he was drunk at the time. Anyway, an inhalator (a device used to help people breathe) was rushed to his side and saved his life. Unfortunately, on that same lake a man died because the inhalator was not available to save him when his crisis happened at the same time. This man was a respected brain surgeon and his death was a great loss to the world.
When Merrick learned of the terrible coincidence, he felt really badly. He decided to turn his life around and even decided to go to medical school with the eventual goal of becoming a brain surgeon.
In the meantime, Merrick happened to meet the dead man's very young and beautiful widow and became completely smitten. She, of course, was not thrilled to met the man who indirectly was the reason for her own husband's death. Merrick pined after her but kept his distance.
He went on to become the brain surgeon and entered into practice at the same hospital as the dead man. Here he became friends with the dead man's friends and was given a journal, written in code, by the dead surgeon. Merrick managed to decode the journal and found within it a philosophy of living that the author claimed would increase a person's power and bring success to them if followed correctly. It was something to do with helping people, giving them secret loans, and not expecting to be repaid, instead the person helped would, in the course of time, help someone else. So Merrick decides to give the philosophy a go and it works for him even going to far as to give him a moment of intimate communication with God, or as he calls it, the Major Personality. To Merrick, religion becomes not a matter of faith but a science, using the method revealed in the journal to build his own personal power and establish communion with God. He becomes a very successful surgeon and helps out a lot of needy people, in secret, because that is required by the method.
Meanwhile, his love affair with the widow just continues to decline. Every time he tries to help her out, it blows up in his face. Her bad opinion of him grows and grows, until she is gravely injured in a train crash and Merrick rushed to her side in time to save her life. Her suspicions of him are gradually assuaged and they finally get together in the end.

The method is based on some verses in the Bible from the New Testament book of Matthew. The author refers to Jesus Christ as a man who figured out how to magnify himself using this method.

I didn't much care for this book. I thought the method sounded unlikely. I have no problem with helping people out but the idea that it will accrue power to yourself just didn't ring true. But besides that, I just found the book a little dull.

The Stone Diaries

By Carol Shields

This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for 1995.

This is the fictional autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett. She was born in 1905 in Canada and her life started out not so good. Her mother died giving birth to Daisy and a few months later her father walked out of her life, leaving his baby daughter with a neighbor woman. Soon after this, the neighbor woman moves in with her grown son and together they raise Daisy until she is eleven when the woman dies in an accident. The son has lustful thoughts about young Daisy and so he sends her off to live the father she doesn't remember. The father, a stone cutter, has done well for himself and he manages to give Daisy a good home. She goes off to college and marries soon after graduating but her husband dies on their honeymoon, falling out of a window while intoxicated. Daisy moves back home, still a virgin, and lives with her father until she is about thirty. She moves out when her dad remarries and Daisy finds she is uncomfortable with the new wife. So she goes back to Canada to visit the man who helped raise her and they decide to get married. He has a good job and Daisy bears three children for him. Of course, he is a lot older than she and he dies when she is in her fifties. She then gets a job writing a gardening column for the local newspaper, and she really enjoys it and is very crushed when, after doing the column for about nine years, the newspaper gives the column to someone else. Daisy becomes very depressed but eventually recovers and moves to Florida to be with her two best friends from childhood, Beans and Fraidy. By this time Daisy is getting old and the novel concludes with the circumstances of her death.
Daisy is just an ordinary woman who lives an ordinary life, but who goes through her life marked by the absence of love in it. Her mother dead, her father gone, her foster mother dying and her foster father sending her away, her first marriage a tragedy and her second marriage almost a marriage of convenience, Daisy never feels truly loved, and never experiences a grand passion. Even with her own children and grandchildren there is a sense of distance and estrangement. All through her life she searches but never finds much sense of purpose or fulfilment, mainly she just goes through the motions, doing what is expected, doing her duty, being a good mom, a good wife. But in the end satisfaction still eludes her, as she admits on her deathbed that she is not at peace.

This was a pretty interesting read, though I can't really say why. The book has no plot to speak of, just the details of an ordinary life. But the story just grabs you from the very start with the strange and sad beginning of Daisy's life, in the kitchen of her parent's house as her obese mother gives birth to a baby that she didn't even know she was carrying.

Review by Publishers Weekly.

Comfort Me with Apples

By Ruth Reichl

"Comfort me with apples for I am sick of love" is a quote from the "Song of Solomon" from the Bible and it is a pretty apt quote for Reichl's book. In this book she describes her early years as a restaurant critic and featuring prominently are her two love affairs she had while married to her first husband.
She started out wanting to be a writer but she had a passionate interest in food and when the opportunity came along to be the restaurant critic for a locally published magazine she decided to try it out.
In the meantime, her husband, an artist, was becoming a commercial success and he had to travel a lot, which put a strain on their marriage, especially when he revealed that he was no longer sure that he wanted to have children. At this time, Reichl was in her thirties and time was running out for her. Somehow she became involved with her boss and that affair lasted until the boss married someone else. She then fell head over heals in love with Michael, a reporter, and eventually married him.
Of course, the book is about more than Reichl's love life. She talks a lot about food and restaurants and the many chefs she has known and also includes a few recipes: Crab Cakes; Dacquoise; Asparagus with Balsamic Vinegar; Michael McCarty's Pasta and Scallops; La Vieille Maison Soup; Dottie's Spinach; Dry-Fried Shrimp; Soy Sauce Chicken; Channing Way Shrimp Curry; Sweet Potato Pie; Apricot Pie; Big Chocolate Cake; Mushroom Soup; Swiss Pumpkin; Miang Kam; Charlene's Semolina Egg Noodles with Smoked Ham, Asparagus, Onions and Garlic; Warm Salad; Raspberry Ice Cream; Grilled California Goat Cheese on Toast; Chinois Curried Oysters with Cucumber Sauce and Salmon Roe; Danny's Lemon Pasta (based on a recipe of Danny Kaye's); and Fried Capers and Calves' Brains with Sherry Butter Sauce.

This was an interesting and absorbing book and I enjoyed it a lot even though I can't agree with her adulterous lifestyle. She has been there and done that, met a lot of interesting and famous people and travelled to many exotic and far away places. Her life certainly doesn't sound dull. And she tells a good story too.

Let the Hurricane Roar (aka Young Pioneers)

By Rose Wilder Lane

Molly and David are a young newlywed couple, setting out from Minnesota to the Dakota Territory to homestead on fifty acres. They have a team of horses, a wagon, and little else with which to start their new life together and it is not much longer before Molly is pregnant. It's pretty isolated where they have set up house in a small dugout, but Molly is certain she can have the baby with only her husband to assist.
She has a pretty rough time giving birth, a lot rougher than either she or David expected, but she has a strapping baby boy and David gets the fields plowed and planted. Their fifty acres has a creek so water is plentiful and easy to get and there is plenty of slough hay to cut and store for the horses. They make friends with there nearest neighbors, the Svensons, who speak very little English, but, out there on the prairie, the isolation brings them together.
The wheat crop is healthy and promises to fill their pockets with cash, so David takes the rash step of buying items on credit, including lumber and windows to build them a little house instead of living in the dugout. Molly is thrilled at the prospects of a real house, but their dreams come crashing down when a plague of grasshoppers moves in and destroys not only the crops, but the seedling trees they had planted and all the grass for miles around. The young couple find themselves deep in debt with no way to pay. Everyone in the area is suffering too and there are no jobs to be found. David decides the only thing he can do is to go back east and get work there and save up some money. Molly is to stay behind and move in with the Svensons and keep their land from being stolen by claim jumpers.
Seems like David has it all under control until he breaks his leg and gets stuck in Iowa and the Svensons decide they are fed up with the Dakota Territory and they are leaving. Molly tries to find a place in the closest town where she can stay with the baby but no one wants her. She makes the rash decision to spend the winter by herself in the dugout, just her and her baby. She will face down fierce blizzards, wolves, terrible cold temperatures and worst of all, fear and loneliness.

This was a terrific story of a young couple coping with the harsh realities of homesteading in the Dakota Territory, told mainly from the point of view of the girl, Molly. She is just seventeen when she gives birth to her baby and her husband in only three years older than she. The problems she and David face are typical of what pioneers had to deal with and many were forced to give up and move on, including the author's parents, James and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Of course, Laura Ingalls Wilder told the same stories in her own series of books about homesteaders, the LITTLE HOUSE series. That is my only quibble with Lane's book, that it is mainly just a retelling of one of her mother's stories, including the grasshoppers, the blizzards, the homestead by the slough, it is all a bit too familiar. Still I enjoyed the book a lot, although it did make me wonder how anyone managed to stick it out on the Dakota prairie. Probably should have just left it all to the Sioux.

The Wrath

By David Robbins

On an archaeological dig in the valley of the Dog People in Egypt, a pathogen is released that quickly spreads throughout Egypt and from there to the rest of the world. This disease affects the eyes, making them bulge out; the salivary glands, making the afflicted foam at the mouth; the joints and tendons, forcing the person into a hunched-over-on-all-fours stance; the brain, destroying the cortex and turning the person into a blood-thirsty, ravenous beast; and it causes an intense fever that results in the victim tearing off all their clothes and running around nude: thus the dog people.

As you can tell from the description, this is a rather silly book. Even the front cover of the book is silly, as it shows a hairy beast with huge fangs and pointed dog ears, which does not describe the sufferers of the dog people disease. Going by the cover you would think they turn into werewolves, but not so.
Another silly thing about the book, which was published in 1988, is that the doctors studying the infected people keep catching the disease and turning into dog people themselves. Like doctors in 1988 didn't understand how to deal with infectious diseases without exposing themselves to them.
But besides that, it's a pretty fair story, about struggling against an implacable foe and not always winning. But happily, the calvary arrives in the nick of time and all is not lost.

The Collected Plays of Neil Simon Volume IV

By Neil Simon

This volume contains five plays: LOST IN YONKERS, RUMORS, JAKE'S WOMEN, LAUGHTER ON THE 23RD FLOOR, and LONDON SUITE. LOST IN YONKERS not only won a Tony Award it also won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1991.
Set during World War II, LOST IN YONKERS is about two boys who have to spend several months with their Old World grandmother after their mother dies and their father has a job that requires him to travel. The grandmother is less than thrilled to have the boys and she warns them that she runs a tight ship and that they are expected to do what she tells them. She is a real harridan and the boys are frightened of her. The old woman had a very hard life and she wants her children and her grandchildren to be tough enough to take what life dishes out. She is not the kind of grandma that buys her grandkids toys and bakes them cookies. She seems not to understand that family love goes a long way toward easing life's harsh realities.
RUMORS is a fun farce about a dinner party that starts out with the guests arriving to discover their host unconscious, suffering from a gunshot wound to his ear and his wife is missing. As the guests arrive, the consensus is that the man tried to kill himself because his wife left him and they decide they have to protect his reputation by covering up the his attempted suicide.
LAUGHTER ON THE 23RD FLOOR is about a comedic television show in the 1950s struggling to cope with the demands of the network and their sponsors. It is mainly about the star of the show and his crew of comedy writers.
LONDON SUITE is a series of vignettes about the goings on in a particular set of rooms in a hotel in London.
JAKE'S WOMEN is about a writer who seems to find talking to his imaginary women more compelling than talking to the actual women in his life. Mostly it is about the destruction of his marriage to his current wife due to his attachment to his previous wife who died.

I enjoyed RUMORS the most. It is a fun-filled, laugh-filled farce and simply a LOL joy to read. I also liked LAUGHTER ON THE 23RD FLOOR, with its lively repartee and LONDON SUITE because it was just light and fun. JAKE'S WOMEN was boring and LOST IN YONKERS was excruciating. That old grandma was not a pleasant character with which to spend an afternoon.

The Year of the Quiet Sun

By Wilson Tucker

Brian Chaney is offered a job on a time machine project. Chaney is a scholar and a demographer and is offered the job because they want him to go into the future and see if trends predicted in the current time were correct and to gather information about demographics of the future. He agrees to join the project, one of the main reasons being the attractive woman who offered him the job; she first approached him while he was sunning himself on a Florida beach and she was wearing a see-through blouse with nothing on underneath. (And delta pants, whatever those are. The delta pants are mentioned quite often in the story. I did a Google search on them and the only thing I could find where some baggy, ugly clam diggers and some ever uglier military-looking pants, which can't be what the delta pants are as the Chaney character found them quite alluring and sexy and they are described as form-fitting.)
Their first trip in the time machine will be just two years into the future. When Chaney makes his leap, he is surprised to find out that Chicago is experiencing fierce race riots and martial law has been declared. Subsequent leaps by other team members to about the year 2000 reveal that the USA is embroiled in a race war, black vs white, with the blacks being backed by China. Chaney's final leap puts him at about 2030 where he gets stranded because there is no electricity to send the machine back to his time. The good news is that the war is over and he is reunited with the delta pants woman he has been lusting after. The bad news is that the country is depopulated, that nukes were used in the war, and that the woman is old and decrepit. Also, the whites apparently won which is bad news for Chaney since he is black, a fact that is not revealed until the very end of the book, although it is occasionally hinted at.

This was a pretty boring book. It takes them forever to go on the first time travel trip. It seemed to be mostly about Chaney's unrequited love for the woman, a woman he never gets until he meets up with her again in the future when she is old and dried up. The descriptions of America's future were not even close, which made it kind of irritating to read.

The Three Sisters

By Rebecca Locksley

The Tari people, who have magical abilities to varying degrees, used to rule over and protect the other tribes. But times have changed and the Tari have retreated to their mountain homeland and left the other tribes to suffer under the harsh rule of an invading people, the Mir. The Mir have come into the land with a new religion and new ways of doing things and have set about destroying the culture and religion of the native peoples.
Living among the natives are three young Tari women. Taken from the Tari as infants they know very little about the Tari and live as outcasts. One of the sisters, Elena, is married to a native chieftain and she is taken captive when her village is overrun by the Mir. Since she is very beautiful, the overlord takes her for his harem. When the two other sisters find out Elena has been taken they set off on a quest to free her from captivity, using their innate Tari powers to do so. What they don't know is that there is a cadre of Tari who wish Elena to remain captive, as there is a prophecy proclaiming that her half-breed child will save the Tari people from destruction. So as the two sisters work to free Elena, their efforts are sabotaged by the other Tari who want Elena to stay where she is.

This was a really good story. The abilities of the Tari were very interesting and the two sister setting off on their quest have quite a struggle to gain Elena's freedom. At one point, having so far failed, they are forced to retrench and go to the Tari homeland for help, only to fall into the hands of the Tari faction who are working against them. The Tari people and their magical abilities are very interesting and I found this book an exciting and fascinating read.

Best Enemies

By Jane Heller

Amy and Tara were best friends from the time they were is grade school together. So when Amy is planning her wedding, naturally she asked Tara to be her maid of honor. Bad idea, because Tara lands in the sack with Amy's hubby-to-be and Amy catches them in the act. The friendship is over and Tara runs off with the guy and they get married. Amy goes into therapy to cope with her depression.
A few years later, Tara has written a book and the publisher Amy works for assigns the book to her to do the publicity for it. Which means Amy will be forced to work with the hated Tara and her vile husband.
Complications ensue when Amy pretends to be engaged to a very successful author and Tara's vile hubby runs off with his secretary. Because Tara's book is all about her beautiful and perfect life including her perfect marriage, it is imperative that the hubby be located in time for all the publicity events and presented to the public as the loving husband he is portrayed to be in Tara's book. This crisis brings the two women together and once again their friendship blooms.

This was a pretty good story. It is told first from Amy's point of view and then from Tara's. The only real problem I had with it was Amy's willingness to be friends with a person who has proven herself to be completely selfish and untrustworthy. But other than that, I enjoyed the story.

Behold the Man

By Michael Moorcock

Karl is a dissatisfied man. Something is missing from his life. Maybe it is God. So when an eccentric genius offers him a ride in his experimental time machine, Karl says OK, provided he gets to choose the time and place of his destination: 28 AD in Israel. He wants to find Jesus Christ.
So the time machine works and Karl finds himself in the Holy Land but he is in bad shape from the crash landing which wrecked the time machine and so now he is stuck there. He is rescued by a religious community of Essenes under the nominal leadership of John the Baptist. Now John is expecting the arrival of the Messiah and he is pretty sure Karl must be it despite Karl's assurances that he is not. At one point John tries to get Karl to baptize him but Karl flees.
He wanders in the desert for a month or more but eventually finds his way back to civilization and heads for Nazareth, determined to find Jesus. And find him he does: Mary, Joseph and Jesus in Nazareth. But this holy family is not so holy: Joseph is bitter and disappointed, Mary is a slut and Jesus is a giggling, deformed idiot.
But Karl knows that Jesus will die on the cross as the Jewish messiah and so he sets about to make the story of Jesus come out the way the Bible recorded it. The only way he can do it is to become Jesus and preach and teach and eventually die on the cross.

This is a nasty book. It is not enough for the author to deny the divinity of Jesus Christ; no, he has to make him out to be a drooling idiot and his mother as a fat whore. So, according to this book, the Saviour is just some loser from the future who went into the past and ended up dying on the cross and rotting. Just nasty.

Night of the Jabberwock

By Fredric Brown

Doc Stoeger is the editor and owner of a smalltown weekly newspaper. It's Thursday night and Doc and his typesetter person are just finishing up the preparations for running this week's edition Friday morning. Doc is feeling rather disenchanted with running a smalltown newspaper as there never seems to be any news to put in the weekly. If there ever is any news, it seems to happen earlier in the week so by the time his paper prints it, it's old news. He wishes, just once, he could print breaking news. He's about to get his wish & then some.
At first it starts out badly, with two of his front pages stories being either reduced or cancelled altogether. Then things start to popping, first with a rumor that a close friend of Doc's was run over. He also hears about an accident at the fireworks factory. Next he finds out a lunatic has escaped from the asylum. Then Doc happens to run across two gangsters wanted by the police for a series of bank robberies. And next Doc actually foils a bank robber who was robbing the town's bank. He is going to have the best issue ever of his newspaper. But then...
He is asked not to print the story about his friend because his friend was drunk and fell down and it could damage the man's reputation if this was revealed to the public. He is asked to quash the escaped lunatic story to protect the family of the lunatic. He is told to not write about the gangsters by the police who are close to nabbing the rest of the gang. He decides not to print the bank robbing story because the thief was the bank owner's own 15 year old son. Doc's wonderful, news-breaking issue is kaput.
Until the police discover two dead bodies in the trunk of Doc's car, that is. Looks like someone is framing Doc for murder and he is on the run to prove his innocence and to avoid being gunned down by the local police chief, who is an old enemy of Doc's. And just maybe Doc will manage to produce that news-breaking edition he has been longing for.

This was a pretty good story. At first, it kind of hilarious how Doc keeps getting leads on great stories only to have them vanish. Also, Doc is a real boozer, and alcohol figures prominently on nearly every page in the story. Although, as one of the cops says, "Doc didn't drink that much. He'd get drunk, a little, a night or two a week, but he wasn't an alcoholic." Wrong. Doc is a real boozer, it is nothing to him to sit and drink 4, 5 shots of whiskey, neat, in a row. As he says, he doesn't like whiskey, but he likes its effect. A constant theme throughout the story is Doc's search for another drink of booze.
Anyway, the story starts out kind of funny and amusing but it gets less amusing as it progresses, with one of the gangsters being burned alive and then Doc being framed for murder and the police ordered to shoot him on sight.
But even with that somber turn, it's a really great story and despite the gruesome bits pretty much a lot of fun to read.

Craig Claiborne's A Feast Made for Laughter: A Memoir with Recipes

This is Claiborne's look back at his life, starting with his childhood in the South and touching on his professional life with a big emphasis on the food he has eaten, and the feasts he has thrown and it concludes with a section of recipes.

It was an OK book. Although he starts out pretty frankly, by the time he gets to his adult life the frankness disappears and we find out nearly nothing about his private life, although he does mention the time he was arrested for driving drunk and that he developed high blood pressure and had to modify his diet because of it. But other than that we find out nothing about who he loved as an adult or anything about his family, other than that he broke off relations with his mother because he felt she was smothering him.
But if you like reading about food, you'll love it. I frankly became very tired of reading what seemed like endless lists of menus of food eaten at meals he enjoyed. After wading through several, I just started skipping them altogether.
At the back of the book he also has a long list of cookbooks and books on food that he recommends and along with a list of those he wrote himself that adds up to over 100 books. And included, as I said before, are 100 of his favorite recipes like Chiffonade of Lobster Chez Denis, Cotes de veau belles des bois, Salade gourmande, Tripes lyonnaise, Pigs' Feet Sainte-Menhould, Lemon Lotus Ice Cream, Coquilles Saint-Jacques, Coulibiac of Salmon. He has a recipe for Stuffed Cabbage, or as he calls it Chou vert farci, that has 29 ingredients and 16 steps to prepare. A bit overwhelming, for me. I think I copied down maybe 5 of his recipes. The others seemed too complicated, had uncommon or hard to find ingredients, or had ingredients that I don't eat, like tripe, which I have never seen in a store here, and which I wouldn't want to eat even if it was available. For example, his Brandade de morue or mousse of salt cod. First of all: mousse of salt cod? It just sounds nasty. Second, salt cod? I have no idea what that is, except I know it involves cod fish. But I am sure I have never seen salt cod for sale here. I doubt I would eat it even if it was available for I fear it would be like lutefisk, which is totally gross and disgusting.
One good thing about his recipes, though. I finally found out what a scotch egg is. It's a big meatball with a hard boiled egg in the center. Which seems like an strange thing to do with a meatball and an egg, but what do I know. I am not a foodie.

Ladies of the Lake

By Haywood Smith

Dahlia was her grandmother's favorite grandchild. Cissy, the grandmother, encouraged Dahlia to study ballet and she was very proud of Dahlia's accomplishments as a professional dancer. However, in her later years, her mind began to fail, and in the beginning of this story, she tries to shoot Dahlia and one of her other sisters when she mistakes them for rapists. And thus begins this story of four sisters living together for one summer in the house their now deceased grandmother left them.
For Cissy has stipulated in her will that the four women cannot inherit her property, which is worth millions, unless they spend three months together in the house. Cissy, even though it appeared she favored Dahlia best, still wanted the sisters to have better relationships with each other and hit upon this method to achieve her goal.
Dahlia gets along best with her sister Violet, has a neutral relationship with sister Rose and doesn't get along with sister Iris at all, which is mainly the fault of Iris, who has always been jealous of all the attention Dahlia's talent as a dancer has gotten her. Violet, Rose and Iris all have stable marriages but Dahlia's marriage is kaput. Dahlia's husband ran off with his secretary and all his and Dahlia's money, including a refinance of their home, which has left Dahlia hanging on by the skin of her teeth. The money from the sale of Granny's lakeside acres will enable Dahlia to hang on to her home and keep her ballet school up and running.
Staying at the old house brings back lots of memories of their childhoods spent at the lake. Various complications arise, including Dahlia's weird health problems and allergies, the discovery of two long dead bodies in a bricked up root cellar in Granny's basement, and Dahlia getting attacked by chiggers and later on by a rapid raccoon. Dahlia gains a love interest in local boy done good Clete Slocum, who, it turns out, knew old Granny better than anyone in her family, including her favorite, Dahlia.

This was a pretty good story. Dahlia is very weird, what with the ballet moves she does when she is bored or distracted, the quoting of lines from movies, her strange health problems and allergies, her religiousness and her propensity for getting herself into trouble. Iris is just plain mean. Violet and Rose don't play much of a role in the story, Violet mainly threatens to pound Iris and Rose tries to keep the peace. The granny's relationship with Clete and his relatives was also strange, she was more involved with them than with her own family. She had a whole thing going on with them that her real family never even knew about. Also Dahlia's decision to dump Clete to go back to her marginal life in Atlanta didn't really make a lot of sense either. There where a lot of things in the story that just didn't ring true. Like Dahlia is so religious she stops to pray at the drop of a hat yet sees nothing wrong with breaking the law when it suits her: she talks the sisters into taking the bodies from the basement and dumping them in a park because she doesn't want to slow down the possible sale of Granny's land and she see nothing wrong with routinely driving faster than the posted speed limit. And the granny so concerned with her granddaughters relationships, yet spent more time helping out the neighbors than she did with her own relatives. And Clete being so hung up on Dahlia who he really doesn't know at all and yet keeping all kinds of secrets from this woman who is supposed to be the love of his life. And the cops not following up on their discovery of who dumped the bodies in the park.
Despite this, it made for a pretty good story, even though I thought Dahlia was a pain and a pill and if I'd been her sister I probably wouldn't have been able to stand her either. Some parts of the story were pretty funny, like when Dahlia got all eaten up with chiggers or when she started doing ballet moves at the hardware store. So even though I didn't really like Dahlia very much, I did like the story and I enjoyed reading it, though I was disappointed that the dead bodies in the cellar plot turned out so tamely.

The Lightning Thief

By Rick Riordan

Percy Jackson is a problem child. He keeps getting into trouble and having to change schools. Diagnosed with dyslexia and hyperactivity disorder, he finds it hard to achieve even a passing grade, much less good grades. But his problems go beyond your average troubled child's because Percy is different. As is revealed to him when he is attacked by a harpy while on a class field trip. The harpy, disguised as a math teacher, comes after Percy but he is able to fight the monster off when his Latin teacher, arriving in the nick of time, tosses Percy a pen that changes into a sword.
Turns out Percy's mom got pregnant with him by the old timey Greek god Poseidon, making Percy a half-blood, half god, half human. And the old timey monsters like harpies, minotaurs, gorgons can smell him and they hate half-bloods and desire only to kill them. The only safe place for a boy like Percy is at a summer camp just for half-bloods. It is a protected location where half-bloods learn to defend themselves against the monster who are out to get them.
Meanwhile, things are not good on Olympus, which is located on a cloud above the Empire State Building in New York City. Someone has stolen Zeus's lightning bolt and all the fingers are pointing at Percy. Poseidon and Zeus are in a power struggle and Zeus figures Poseidon got his son to sneak into the throne room and snatch the bolt when no one was looking. All the gods are taking sides and if the bolt is not returned, and soon, their heavenly war will plunge the world into actual war.
So Percy goes off on a quest to find the lightning bolt and return it to Zeus and save humanity from a new world war, clear his name and Poseidon's name and rescue his mom from the clutches of Hades, god of the underworld, who snatched her for leverage against Percy and Poseidon. With Percy go two friends, Grover, a satyr and Annabeth, another half-blood. They will travel across America from the East Coast to the West Coast because the entrance to the Underworld is located in Los Angeles and Percy has to confront Hades as part of the quest. They have to face down various lethal monsters and Percy has to learn how to be a hero and complete his quest successfully.

This was a pretty good story. Very heavy on the Greek mythology, of course. I don't really like stories based on mythology and I pretty much didn't care for that part of the story. Greek gods, yikes, who needs them? Not me. All that mythological crap just leaves me cold, Greek, Indian, Celtic, I don't care, it all sucks.
But despite the mythology and the stupid Greek gods (and, wow, do they come off as stupid in this story), Percy and his two buddies have lots of exciting and weird adventures. And it was interesting to see how the author brings the Greek gods and other mythological creatures into modern times. Makes for an engrossing and captivating read.

Confessions of a Little Black Gown

By Elizabeth Boyle

The setting is England, 1814. England and the United States are enemies. Thalia Langley's twin sister, Felicity, Duchess of Hollindrake, is throwing a big house party meant to establish her reputation as a society matchmaker. She is bringing together eligible society bachelors and belles in the hopes of making several matches. One of the girls she has her sights set on is her sister, Thalia.
Thalia and her cousin Philippa are not the typical young English ladies of the gentry. They are two young women of action and intrigue and at the moment they are concealing a wanted criminal, an American privateer condemned to die. They are helping him escape the hangman's noose, because Philippa is madly in love with him.
The British government suspects the two girls might be hiding the man and so they send an agent in disguise as a vicar to the house party, his orders are to murder the American if he finds him. But the agent, Lord Larken, finds himself smitten by young Thalia and becomes involved with her, compromising his mission. Things become even more complicated the night of the big dance when a deadly French agent shows up at the house determined to get to the American first, a French agent who holds the key to Lord Larken's father's untimely and disgraceful death, information that Larken has been tying to obtain for years.

This was an OK story. However, I found the girls too forward and unladylike, more like modern women than young ladies of the 1800s. Thalia willingly lets Larken seduce her and then it turns out cousin Philippa is pregnant so she has been rolling in the hay with her lover too. I know loose women are not a modern invention still I find it disconcerting to read about girls of that time with no more scruples than any slutty girl of today. Then at the end Thalia and her lover run off to get married at Gretna Green and the scene in the wedding chapel read like something from a Las Vegas wedding chapel not 19th century Britain. I also didn't find the spy story all that interesting or compelling or even believable. And finally, I don't care for the cover of the book with the woman's head missing as if the most important thing about her is her tits that look as if they are about to fall out of her dress, talk about objectifying a person.

The Sword and the Satchel

By Elizabeth Boyer

Kilgore is the teenage son of a local lord in place that sounds a lot like Scandinavia in the days of the Vikings. At the start of the story a mysterious sword has suddenly appeared in the lord's hall, jammed into a wooden beam, with a note attached: "Whoso pulls Kildurin from the tree shall rule over all the minions of Surt, to the confusion of the wicked and the confounding of their Power."
Naturally, everyone wants to have a go at pulling on the sword, but it doesn't budge until one night young Kilgore, unobserved, gives it a tug and it comes right out. Hearing someone coming, he stabs the sword back into the beam but sticks back in a slightly different place so now everyone knows it has been moved but who did it is not known. For some reason Kilgore keeps his secret until the wizard Skanderbeg and his magic satchel show up at the hall. For Skanderbeg is there to guide the sword bearer to battle against the evil ice wizard Surt who is trying to bring everlasting winter to Kilgore's world.
So off they go, Kilgore and the elf sword, Kildurin, and Skanderbeg the fire wizard and his satchel which has an infinite capacity to hold whatever is put into it. On their travels they have lots of adventures and close encounters and get to know lots of characters and eventually Kilgore goes up against the evil Surt and frees his world from Surt's domination.

This was an okay story. I don't know Norse mythology, but a lot of it read like a retelling of that sort of thing, which doesn't appeal to me very much. I don't really care for reworkings of old myths. Also, the characters never really came alive for me and the novel seemed to drag on way too long. I kept wanting them to get where they were going and get it over with.

Fat Girl

By Judith Moore

Judith Moore was an unhappy child who compensated for her misery with the comfort of food. She didn't just eat too much, she loved food deeply as you can tell from her detailed descriptions of the foods she has eaten and the foods she would like to eat. She was a foodist.
Her father vanished from her life when she was little and she ended up living with her maternal grandmother while her mother took off too. Her grandmother was a busy, no-nonsense farmer who had no time or love for her grandchild. The grandmother cooked three big meals a day for her farmhands and Judith began her fat life at her grandmother's table enjoying a delicious array of homemade goodies as, from the descriptions, the grandmother was a really good cook. Judith was starving for affection and she filled that emptiness with food.
Her mother came back into her life and took her off to New York to live while the mother tried to pursue a career as a singer. One of the few nice things Judith has to say about the mother is that she had a lovely, sweet singing voice. But the mother blamed Judith for blighting her life and she never let her forget it. She was an abusive mother, withholding affection from a little girl starved for it. Plus she rode Judith about her fatness, putting her on numerous diets that sometimes worked and sometimes didn't. But she made such a big deal about Judith's weight and her eating that it became the little girl's obsession too. She had no armour against the cruelness of classmates and no refuge in parental love and saw herself through fat-colored glasses that convinced her she was repulsive and unlovable.
The bright spot in this story is Judith's intelligence. For she grew up to have children of her own, and according to her obituary, she was the loving and involved mother to her own children that her mother never was. Plus she had a successful career with accomplishments and awards and although she struggled with her weight and sadness all her life, all in all, it sounds like she did pretty good.

This was a hard book to read. Not because of the abuse she received at the hands of her nasty mother or the cruel remarks from friend or classmates. No, it is the self-disgust of the author that I found shocking and repulsive. It is not the descriptions of her fat little thighs rubbing and getting sores that upsets. No, it is the repeated denigrations of herself and of that little, sad fat kid she used to be. Still, it is a gripping, if uncomfortable read, and, if not an undistorted picture of growing up fat, it is certainly how she saw herself.

Homer's Odyssey

By Gwen Cooper

Homer is a blind cat. He was adopted as a little kitten by Gwen Cooper. He was still recovering from the surgery where his eyes were removed due to a terrible infection. Like all baby cats, he was born blind and he lost his eyes before ever being able to see.
Gwen was not at a good point in her life when she adopted Homer. She had recently broken up with the man with whom she thought to spend the rest of her life. When he told her he no longer loved her, she had to move out of his place and into the home of a friend. This was just a temporary arrangement as she was expected to find her own place soon. But the weeks stretched into months and still Gwen lived with her friend along with Gwen's other two cats and eventually with the blind kitten, Homer.
The friend was very tolerant of Gwen and her kitties but eventually asked her to move out and Gwen had to take the humbling step of moving back in with her parents. Her meager salary was just not enough to afford a decent dwelling of her own. At this point she had to take a look at her chosen career path and make some changes. Although living with her parents was not as bad as she feared it would be, still she needed to make her way in the world, on her own and with her kitties.
As luck would have it she landed a good job in New York City, just in time to witness the horrid and tragic events of 911. Away from her apartment at the time, her kitties were left alone for several days until she could manage to get back to them. Fortunately all three kitties were OK, although very frantic and ecstatic to see Gwen again.
The place where she worked depended on the many businesses located in the Twin Towers and surrounding area, so Gwen was once again looking for work. Despite the urgings of friends and family, she decided to stay in New York, mainly because she met a man she really, really liked, the man she eventually married.
Throughout this story of a young woman finding out how to stand on her own two feet is the story of Homer and the other two cats. Often, facing difficult times and hard decisions, the author drew hope and inspiration from Homer's undaunted and lively life. Blind though he might be, Homer still enjoys life with all the zest and vigor of any sighted kitty. Brave and fearless despite his blindness and miniature size, at one point Homer even stands off a burger long enough for Gwen to dial 9-1-1. Homer is a heroic figure to Gwen and earns admirers among those lucky enough to meet him with his pluck and courage. Whenever life seems overwhelming, Homer is Gwen's shining example of how to face life without flinching.

This was a pretty good story. I enjoyed reading about Homer's gungho attitude and his amazing exploits, really surprising the things he can do without eyes. The part about 911 was heartbreaking and I really felt her anguish, especially about the kitties left alone for days in the apartment. I didn't care too much for the gushing descriptions of the new boyfriend. But over all I enjoyed reading about Homer the wonder kitty.

Enchanting Pleasures

By Eloisa James

The setting is Regency England. Gabrielle Jerningham is traveling to there from India to marry a man she has never met. She only has a miniature portrait of him but that has been enough for her to construct a romantic fantasy about her future husband, Peter Dewland, and convince herself that he loves her and she loves him. Problem is he doesn't love her...or any woman. He would really rather not be married at all.
Strangely, Gabrielle was supposed to marry Peter's elder brother, Quill, who will inherit the title when their father dies. But Quill had a terrible accident and now may be incapable of fathering a child so the family decided Peter would marry her, but very much against Peter's will. Still he bows to the family pressure and will try to be a good husband to Gabby, he thinks. That is until he meets her.
Because Gabby is not Peter's fantasy of his ideal mate. He wants a tall, slender and sophisticated woman of fashion. Gabby is short, rambunctious, plump, bosomy and messy and lives up to her nickname of Gabby. Peter is horrified and repulsed. Then at Gabby's first society ball her bosoms pop out of the scanty top of her dress and that is the final straw for Peter. He refuses to go through with the wedding and he appeals to Quill to step into his place.
Now to Quill, Gabby is anything but repulsive. He finds her charming, funny, exciting and beautiful. He is glad to marry her. But will Gabby be willing to go along with the bridegroom switch or is she really in love with the standoffish Peter? And even if she is willing to give up Peter will she find a maimed husband an acceptable alternative?

Well, this is a typical modern day Regency romance and unlike the founder of Regency romance's novels, Georgette Heyer, this book contains quite a bit of sex. Still the sex is pretty understated and mild compared to many in the romance genre and none of it is illicit, as all the sex scenes occur after Gabby is wed. Gabby, a total innocent, displays a charming and very believable reticence when she finds out what sex is all about. Gabby's and Quill's sexual relationship is key to the whole story as they struggle to cope with Quill's infirmities and still have a healthy and fulfilling marriage. It all comes together very nicely in the end and I found Gabby to be delight and Quill a gallant if sometimes stubborn leading man.

The Member of the Wedding

By Carson McCullers

It the 1940s during WW II and Frankie is an unhappy kid. When she finds out her brother is getting married she concocts a ridiculous fantasy in which she joins her brother and his new wife on their honeymoon and together they will travel the world and have great adventures:

"Boyoman! Manoboy!" she said. "When we leave Winter Hill we're going to more places than you ever thought about or even knew existed. Just where we will go first I don't know, and it don't matter. Because after we go to that place we're going on to another. We mean to keep moving, the three of us. Here today and gone tomorrow, Alaska, China, Ireland, South America. Traveling on trains. Letting her rip on motorcycles. Flying around all over the world in aeroplanes. Here today and gone tomorrow. All over the world. It's the damn truth. Boyoman!"
"And talking of things happening," she said. "Things will happen so fast we won't hardly have time to realize them. Captain Jarvis Addams [Frankie's brother] sinks twelve Jap battleships and decorated by the President. Miss F. Jasmine Addams [Frankie] breaks all records. Mrs. Janice Addams [the bride] elected Miss United Nations in beauty contest. One thing after another happening so fast we don't hardly notice them."
"And we will meet them. Everybody. We will just walk up to people and know them right away. We will be walking down a dark road and see a lighted house and knock on the door and strangers will rush to meet us and say: Come in! Come in! We will know decorated aviators and New York people and movie stars. We will have thousands of friends, thousands and thousands and thousands of friends. We will belong to so many clubs that we can't even keep track of them all. We will be members of the whole world. Boyoman! Manoboy!"

This kid has gone off the deep end and totally lost touch with reality. And it's not like she is a baby, she is twelve and old enough to know better. And she sure is going to have a rude awakening when she finds out that the last thing her brother and his wife will want is his kid sister tagging along on their honeymoon.

This book just made me tired. Frankie is a loon and I just didn't have the patience to put up with her nonsense. Boring!

Bullwhip Griffin (By the Great Horn Spoon)

By Sid Fleischman

Praiseworthy Griffin is an excellent butler. But when the woman he works for is on the verge of bankruptcy, he and his young master, Jack Flagg, the woman's nephew, hit upon the idea of heading off to California to find a fortune in gold. It's 1849 and folks are flooding into the gold fields hoping to strike it rich. If Jack and Praiseworthy get lucky, they maybe able to get back home to Boston in time to save Arabella, the aunt, and her house from foreclosure.
Right off the bat they run into trouble when their money is stolen. Praiseworthy is a butler very similar to P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves, and nothing keeps him down for long, he is up to the challenge. He and Jack smuggle themselves on board the boat in barrels that are supposed to be filled with potatoes.
But you can't stay for the many months it will take for the boat to travel from Boston all the way down the coast to South America and through the stormy waters off of Tierra del Fuego and back up the west side to California inside a potato barrel. So Praiseworthy presents himself and Jack to the Captain as stowaways and they are put to work shoveling coal until Praiseworthy hits upon a scheme to unmask the theif who stole their money and who is also on board the ship.
Money and good name restored, they continue their voyage, landing in San Francisco ready to light out to the gold fields. But it's an unpleasant surprise discovering how very expensive the supplies they will need are do to the high demand. But never mind, because Praiseworthy always manages to find a way and with minimal supplies they set out to pan for gold among the rough and tumble gold camps of California. They will find gold and lose gold, hit upon money-making schemes and have encounters with bears and thieves and even with true love.

Basically this is a children's book but I still found it quite enjoyable to read. I don't know how historically accurate it is but it is filled with what sounds like authentic details and information about the life of the typical 49er. Praiseworthy is an ingenious fellow and his schemes are nifty and he manages to pull their fat out of the fire every time with a little help from Master Jack. It maybe meant for younger readers, but I enjoyed it a lot too.

The Cotton Queen

By Pamela Morsi

Babs and Laney are mother and daughter. Both lost their fathers when they were little. Both took part in their hometown's Cotton Queen contest with Babs winning runner-up and Laney winning Cotton Queen. Both rode in the cotton festival parade. Both had troubled marriages that ended in divorce. Both gave birth to a daughter who went on to be Cotton Queen in her turn. Both left their hometown only to end up moving back to start over. So in many ways they are a lot alike. Which aggravates Laney to no end, since she sees herself as totally different from her mother, Babs.
Babs wanted nothing more than to be a good wife and mother. Soon after Laney was born, Babs lost her husband to a tragic accident. Trying to raise her daughter on her own, she moved to Dallas and found a job. But while there she was attacked by a man and so traumatized by this that she lost her job and found herself pregnant by her attacker. Desperate, she turned for help to a friend from high school who was now a successful attorney in their home town. He had always liked her and when he asked her to marry him she agreed even though she didn't love him. Theirs was not a good marriage, she was so affected by the rape that she could no longer enjoy sex and so their sex life was terrible. Still, she tried to make up for it by being what she thought was the perfect wife, cooking, cleaning, decorating, dressing well, hosting parties designed to promote her husband's career. Too bad that wasn't what he wanted in a wife.
Meanwhile, her daughter Laney is seeing all this and deciding that the last thing she wants to be is like her mother. Not for her the life domestic, she wants a career. She doesn't care about the Cotton Queen contest but enters it to keep Babs happy. Once she graduates, she can't leave home fast enough. She moves in with a guy and they eventually marry, but the guy is a creep and Laney ends up pregnant and living at home with her mother, who, to Laney's chagrin, has landed on her feet and has developed a career of her own as an events planner. Now Laney is the one stuck at home doing the mommmy thing while Babs is out conquering the world. This is just not the way it was supposed to be!

I really enjoyed this book, it grabbed me and held me right away. Babs' trials and her efforts to keep her daughter were really touching. And Laney's rebellion was so familiar to me as it probably is to most daughters who seem to see only their mothers' flaws and not their strengths. However, as Babs settles into her new marriage, I thought the portrayal of her was a bit over the top, as she manages to alienate not only her husband but also her daughter without ever having a clue as to how controlling and rigid she is. But she warms up later in the story and becomes more human after she becomes involved with the Rape Crisis group and starts to get a handle on her stifled feelings about her own rape. Altogether, it was a terrific story.

Black Like Me

By John Howard Griffin

As a citizen of Texas, Griffin, a white man, saw people of different races everyday but his attention was especially drawn to black people, or as they were called then, Negroes. (Of course, negro is just another way of saying black since that is the original meaning of the word in Spanish.) Griffin, at a time when the civil rights of blacks was just starting to become a national concern, decided to investigate the status of blacks in the South. His plan was to go undercover as a black man using skin dyes and a medication that causes the skin to darken when exposed to ultraviolet light.
He revealed his new self to the world in New Orleans and tried living as a black man. His first problem was simply finding places where a black man could eat, get a drink of water, use the toilet or wash his hands and finally, find a place to sleep. It's hard to believe, but in those days blacks were not even allowed to use the same dishes as white people so you couldn't even go the back door of a cafe or restaurant and buy a glass of water to drink. Ridiculous.
His next step in the plan was to try and find work. Even though he was an educated and experienced man of letters he was completely unable to find any work at all while in New Orleans. He ended up assisting a black man who had a shoe shine stand -- it was the only work he could get. Of course, he didn't need the money since the whole trip was being sponsored by a black-oriented magazine. But he was really surprised that when he tried to cash his travelers checks no one would do it. The only place that was willing to take a black man's travelers check was a Catholic thrift store.
After a few weeks in New Orleans, he decided to get more deeply into the role of a black in the South by going to Mississippi. At the time, whites in the deep South maintained that the blacks in their communities were completely happy and contented with the status quo and had no wish to be full citizens with all the rights that includes. Griffin wanted to see the truth of Mississippi for himself.
Again he planned to look for work and once again could not find anyone who would hire him. He hitchhiked and rode buses and traveled around Mississippi and into Georgia and Alabama. Two things that struck him during his travels, besides the difficulties of finding just the basics of life, were the hate stares of casual passersby and the filthy and salacious talk of the white men who gave him rides when hitchhiking.
These white men would offer him rides, especially in the evening, and many of them would want to talk to him about his sexual experiences with white women and black women, or want to brag to him about their own sexual exploits. Griffin found this kind of interrogation disgusting and disheartening and began to dread conversation with these men.
As for the hate stares, for no reason, just because he was there, white people, particularly white women, would glare at him with anger and hate in their eyes. He found these hate stares shocking and depressing. In fact, these hate stares were one of the most depressing experiences during his whole undercover investigation and lead him into a much deeper appreciation for the downtrodden oppression of the life of the typical black person in the South. Of course, Griffin really knew he was a white man and could go back to being white anytime he wanted. So, although he got a taste of what blacks knew as their everyday experience, he never really knew what it truly meant to be black at that time and place with no escape from the reality of segregation and discrimination.
Montgomery, Alabama, was the nail in his black coffin. The hatefulness of the whites there so oppressed and distressed Griffin that he felt he could no longer continue the masquerade. But after making the switch and now able to enjoy all the privileges of the white race, he felt no joy in it, just how shabby and sour it all was, how unbearable. Walking into a black neighborhood as a white man, he experienced the same hate stares he'd received from whites, but now the stares were directed at him, the white man, from the local blacks.

This was a pretty good book. The things he finds out about being black are not too surprising, although they may have been at the time the story was published in about 1961. He and his family faced a lot of negative feedback after the story came out, negative feedback that he did anticipate but he still went ahead with the project, which was rather brave of him. If his imposture had been discovered by less tolerant types than it was, he could have been beaten or killed. Even almost fifty years later it is a fascinating and compelling story.

A Big Little Life

By Dean Koontz

Dean Koontz really loved his dog, Trixie. She was a trained assistance dog who had to retire due to health issues. She was smart, friendly, obedient and well-trained and she became like a daughter to Koontz and his wife. In fact, Koontz feels that Trixie became a major influence on his writing and helped to open his eyes to the importance of joy in everyday matters, to the importance of innocence and of love. Koontz feels that his dog was sent to him as an emissary from God and that she was a holy spirit in a dog's body, sent to enlighten him as to the mystery of life, death and creation.

This was an OK book. At times the it grows a little tedious reading about how wonderful and special Trixie was, who, according to the author, was even able to speak an actual human word, ball. I don't have a problem with the author's beliefs about his dog, most people who love their pets feel pretty much the same way. But it did get a little boring reading about Trixie's perfection. Also, the book is a lot about Koontz's own beliefs about God and death and the purpose of life, which is OK, but not really what I care to read about.

A Date You Can't Refuse

By Harley Jane Kozak

Wollie Shelley is talked into going undercover by the FBI at a media training center. The FBI suspects the place is more than a media training center and they want Wollie, even though she is not a trained investigator, to scope out the place and its people, especially the head man, Yuri Milos, an European with a shady background. But when her on-again, off-again boy friend, who is an FBI agent finds out, he hits the roof. He can't understand why his boss would expose Wollie to a potentially dangerous situation and he can't understand why Wollie would agree to do it. Of course, the $50,000 that Milos is willing to pay her for a mere three months work might have something to do with it. And the fact that her mentally-ill brother may not be kicked out of the group home he is living in if the FBI uses its influence if she cooperates might also be a contributing factor. But when the bullets start flying the first day on the job, and a dead body is found a few days later, not to mention the suspicious demise of the young woman who had the job before her, Wollie should probably be in the group home with her brother, having her head examined for staying on the job. But she sticks it out, even though she may lose her boyfriend and ultimately even her life.

This was an OK book. Given the reasons for staying on the job were not as compelling as the reason for leaving, i.e., death, I found it hard to swallow the premise that Wollie would stay, especially after she see the huge cache of weapons and the firing range and finding the dead man. I mean, I know she loves her brother, but I'm also sure her brother would not be happy if she died trying to earn the money to keep him in the group home. Other than that, the plot was OK, despite the weak foundation, but I didn't enjoy the rather violent ending. Too bloody for my taste.

Stray

By Rachel Vincent

Faythe is a werecat, a human who can assume the form of a large cat, in her case a black panther-looking cat. In her world, female werecat's are a rarity and so her family, or pride, expects her to settle down, marry and have lots of babies. It's her duty.
Faythe doesn't see it that way. Feed up with her father's overbearing and dictatorial ways, she has left the family home and gone off to college. She wants to be independent but even at college she is aware she is being watched by her father's loyal minions. She is precious to them and they are not willing to risk her in any way, despite her desire for independence.
All is not well in her world, though. For although the werecats of the United States are very civilized and quiet, the same can't be said for those south of the border. The jungle cats, as they are called, are wild and cruel and ruthless and they have sent a couple of their toms to grab any female werecats they can find. So for her own safety, Faythe is forced to come home where she can be protected. Two young female werecats have been snatched and Faythe is next on their list. Fortunately she has a house full of strong male toms, her brothers and her father's minions, to keep her safe. If only she weren't so determined to have her own way...
Yes, she ends up getting snatched through her own bullheadedness and stupidity and thrown into a cage to face a cruel and heartless werecat interested only in making a profit off her and maybe getting a little action if he can force her.

This was an OK book. I didn't think the werecats acted very cat-like at times and they seem to spend very little time in their cat bodies. Most of the time they are human form, even the bad cats preferring to rape and abuse their victims as men, not cats. Also, although this book is probably classed with the paranormal romance genre, this book is short on romance and very long on gruesome, graphic violence. Reads more like something written by a man than by a woman. Barely 16 pages into the book finds Faythe is beating off an attacker. The book was just too violent for my taste. Plus the cats were more like wolves than cats, what with the pair-bonding and the going on long runs in the woods. I can't think of any cat species that pair-bonds and the only cat I know of that runs much is the cheetah. Cats, including big cats like lions and tigers, jaguars and leopards and even panthers, for the most part, prefer to stalk and pounce and, when running, stick to short, fast bursts of speed to snare their prey. Also, like I mentioned before, these werecats spend most of their time being and acting human, humans with short fuses, but still human.