When in Doubt, Add Butter

By Beth Harbison

Gemma Craig is a personal chef. She has five clients she cooks for every week. One of her most difficult clients is Angela Van Houghten, who claims to have a lot of food allergies. She requires foods with no diary, no onion, no soy, no nuts, no honey, no warm spices, no garlic, and so on. Plus she makes her husband and son adhere to her strict diet. Gemma cooks for the Van Houghtens on Mondays.
Tuesday is Paul McMann, a lawyer, who Gemma has never met in person, but who seems to appreciate her cooking judging by the kind and often humorous notes he leaves for her. Wednesdays in Lex Prather, who is also enjoyable to cook for, a pleasant man who enjoys fine cuisine. Thursdays are the Oleksei family, Russian immigrants who Gemma suspects of being gangsters. She is cooking recipes from their grandmother's cookbook and really enjoying learning about Russian foods. Friday is Marie Lemurra, who is almost as difficult to cook for as Angela, but not because she is so picky, she is just an unpleasant person to work for. Gemma soon loses Friday's client when she accidentally runs over Marie's pet peacock.
Money is tight so losing a client is bad news. So Gemma's friend takes her out drinking and Gemma hooks up with a man from the bar. They retire to her friend's place and have sex. He gives her his name and she promptly loses it. They run into each other at a store and he tries to give her his business card but hands her the wrong one and she doesn't realize it until he has left. Seems like they are fated to never connect again.
The weeks go by and Gemma comes to realize she is pregnant. The condoms they used were way past their use-by date. Now it is more important than ever that she locate Mr. Wonderful, if only to let him know he is going to be a daddy. But it turns out not to be that hard to find him, he has been right under her nose all the time.

I really enjoyed this story a lot, despite its rather contrived premise. It has a lot of humor, although it is not really a funny novel. Gemma has a lot of problems to deal with, including some unknown person trying to sabotage her career. Plus she has a lot of baggage from some poor decisions in her past. But I liked Gemma and liked this book. It was a good read. And the sex is not graphic, which I really appreciated. When they started to take each other's clothes off in the friend's apartment, I thought to myself, "OK, be prepared to skip ahead." But no skipping was required!

Savannah Blues

By Mary Kay Andrews

Weezie Foley doesn't have it so good. Recently divorced, the judge awarded her the carriage house located in back of the house in which she used to live with her now ex-husband. He got the main house and she got what was basically the garage. And to make matters worse, the other woman promptly moved in with the hubby. So not only did Weezie get gypped  in the divorce settlement, she also has to put up with the girl friend's constant complaints about Weezie and her dog.
Weezie earns her living as a "picker." Not of fruit or vegetables, but of antiques. She goes around to garage sales and estate sales and buys items to resell. It's not a great living, but she gets by. Her dream is to turn her carriage house into an antiques store but that requires cash she doesn't have. All she needs is one big antiques score and she thinks she has found it at an estate sale. An old cupboard could be worth many thousands if she can only beat all the other pickers and dealers to the item. She sneaks into the estate one night just to scope the place out but she finds her husband's girlfriend in an upstairs closet, shot to death. And of course the police think Weezie is the prime suspect.

This was an OK read, kind of a murder mystery slash romance. Weezie reconnects with a boy she knew in high school, but their relationship becomes rocky when he thinks she is carrying a torch for her ex. The on-again, off-again romance was kind of boring and repetitive. The killer turned out to be a very minor character. And the ex-husband who had been such a placid spouse through ten years of marriage suddenly and implausibly turned into a drunken wife-beater.  Those things rather spoiled it for me. Plus it was too long.

Angel with Attitude

By Michelle Rowen

Valerie Grace is a fallen angel, recently kicked out of heaven for the sin of pride and splashing down naked into the killer whale tank at MarineLand. Now she is alone in Niagara, New York and working at a run-down motel. Her task is to live a good life and hopefully, when she gets old and dies, she can get back into heaven. Of course, it isn't going to be all that easy, especially when  Nathaniel shows up, just in time to save Valerie from a brutal assault. Nathaniel is a Tempter Demon, his task is to tempt Valerie to join him in Hell. Nathaniel is very tempting to Valerie but she manages to resist his charms, to his dismay.
Then Valerie finds out that Lucifer had in his possession a key to heaven. And this key could be her ticket back to her former life in the clouds. But the key is now in the possession of a very nasty demon and this demon thinks using the key is just the thing that will finally win him his demon father's approval. Yes, he is a demon with daddy issues. Valerie gets a very talented witch, who works at a burger place, to summon Nathaniel. Now Nathaniel is under Valerie's control and they are going to the Underworld (along with the witch's ex-boyfriend whom she turned into a rat as punishment) to track down the stolen key and hopefully get Valerie back to her home. Or not.

Lots going on in this fun and lively read. It's pretty light reading but I found it quite enjoyable and amusing. And pretty innocent too, as the romance is understated and not at all X-rated, which I appreciated, not being a fan of detailed and implausible sex scenes.

How to Tame a Wild Bore & other Facts of Life with Lewis

By Kathy Grizzard Schmook

Kathy Schmook was Lewis Grizzard's third wife. Lewis was a humorist and author and was married four times. In this book, Kathy describes her life with Lewis and apparently it was not that great. She goes into great detail about Lewis's faults and shortcomings. I felt kind of sorry for Lewis, living under that critical eye of hers.
It's a pretty lopsided picture of their life together, as she completely leaves out any complicity she may have had in the failure of their marriage. (Although she does kind of hint that she had a fondness for expensive jewelry.) But even though the hate comes through loud and clear, this is still a funny read. I just hope that Lewis wasn't quite as disgusting as his ex-wife made him out to be.

My Wilderness Wildcats

By Mike Tomkies

I didn't really know anything about the wildcats of the England, Scotland and Wales. I didn't even know there were wildcats or what a wildcat was exactly. Turns out the wildcat is a small cat, about the same size as the domesticated house cat, but with a much different temperament. They truly are "wild cats" and cannot be tamed, unlike many large wild cats, such as tigers and lions. They are native to Europe but are rare.
Wildcats have pretty disappeared from England and Wales but can still be found in the more remote areas of Scotland. Tomkies was given two small wildcat kittens who had either lost their mother or been abandoned by her. Tomkies lived in such an isolated area of Scotland that there were no roads leading to his house, it could only be reached by boat. Being a naturalist, and not really knowing much about wildcats, Tomkies felt the two kittens would make interesting study subjects. He named them Cleo and Patra and built pens for them and raised them on meat and milk. In time he also acquired a rather elderly male wildcat, a refugee from a zoo, and was able to successfully breed him with one of the females who produced two kittens, Fred and Mia. Eventually, he released all the wildcats back into the wild, in the fullness of time.

This was quite an interesting read, although at one point it became a bit repetitious as he described his routine of giving the wildcats some freedom, while continuing to feed them, then capturing them and once again placing them in pens. He was worried that they couldn't make it on their own, but they proved him wrong. Even the elderly male who had spent most his life in a zoo eventually became a skilled and successful hunter. But besides the wildcats, this book is an interesting glimpse of a life lived in the back country, without electricity or central heating, just a man and his dog and a some wildcats.

Merrill Markoe's Guide to Love

Merrill Markoe goes on a journey of discovery to see if she can figure out how to improve one's love life. She goes to the places and takes the classes that others might be too fearful, embarrassed or frugal to do. She takes the weird classes,  including one where the attendees are given instruction on how to perform oral sex on men, visits psychics, attends meetings purporting to have the secrets that will assure success in the mating game. She meets some pretty iffy types but uses her friends for moral support as she talks them into attending many of these functions with her. She must be a pretty brave woman, in my opinion. She is also pretty funny and so is her book: not only funny but actually informative too.

The Husband Hunters

By Barbara Cartland

Andrina Maldon was the oldest of three sisters. They had been left without much to live on after their father died. They only really had three assets: the old house, a necklace that had belonged to their deceased mother, and their looks. All three girls were outstandingly good looking, but living in such an isolated, rural location meant that eligible bachelors were not abundant.
So Andrina hatched a plan to get her two sisters suitably established. She would take the necklace to London, and with the help of her godfather (a man she had never met) use the proceeds from the necklace to rent a home for a couple of months and introduce her lovely sisters to society. An excellent plan except Andrina really doesn't know what she is up against and has her first reality check when she is accosted by a man at an inn, a man who has the audacity to give Andrina her first kiss.
Things go even further downhill when, upon arriving at the godfather's house, she finds out that said godfather died years ago and that his son, the Duke, is the very man who accosted her at the inn.
But the Duke saves the day when he agrees to help Andrina with her quest of suitable husbands for the sisters. Chaperons are acquired, balls are given,  and the men start piling up, smitten by the girls' good looks and winning personalities. The only thing that can mess this up is the girls themselves, including the scheming, mercenary Andrina!

This was a pretty good read, with the Andrina character set on acquiring rich and respectable husbands for her two sisters. She is clearly impressed by wealth and privilege and thinks that those two criteria are the only ones that matter. Needless to say, she finds out  eventually that other things matter more and it all works out for the best. A light read but still fairly enjoyable.

Old Man's War

By John Scalzi

When human knowledge had increased to the point where immigration to other planets was possible, mankind quickly discovered that the galaxy is a very crowded place, full of other intelligent and advanced beings, who were in competition with humankind for habitable planets to colonize. So the Colonial Defense Force was founded.

The CDF has an odd approach to recruiting soldiers: they don't want young people, they want old people. Their promise to oldsters who join: they'll receive the best medical care and made young again and, after they have served, they will be given a homestead of their own.

So after his wife passed, John Perry joined the CDF. He thought he would receive some kind of rejuvenation treatments but what he got instead was way beyond what he had been expecting. As was the duty he was now required to perform. It was all a lot better and a whole lot worse than he had ever imagined.

This turned out to be an interesting read. After I got past the part where the oldsters found out what their new lives would really be like, I feared the story would  just turn out to be one of those sci-fi action novels with lots of battles and fighting. And it does have some battles and fighting, but that is not the main feature of the story. It is mainly a story about a man coping with the demands of his profession and trying to keep himself sane and human and alive. It turned out to be quite a good read. Looking forward to others in the series.

Hotel Paradise

By Martha Grimes

Emma is a girl alone, even though she lives in a hotel owned by her family and even though she has to help out in the kitchen and dining room every day. Only twelve years old, her work keeps her busy and she has no close companions, not her mother, not her father (who left years ago), not her brother, not the other girl who lives at the hotel and who Emma frankly hates. So it is not surprising that she latches onto a mysterious death that occurred forty years ago. Twelve-year-old Mary-Evelyn, wearing a lovely party dress, climbed into a leaky row boat at night, rowed out into the lake and drowned when the boat sank. Her family didn't report her missing until the next morning.
There are many unanswered questions about Mary-Evelyn Devereau and her strange family. And since Emma doesn't have much else to occupy her mind, she gets caught up in investigating this old death. The mystery deepens when a woman is found dead, possibly murdered, a woman who it seems has a connection to the long-gone Devereaus. Plus Emma is also intrigued by a brief glimpse of a young woman who bears a strong resemblance to one of the Devereau sisters. So Emma musters her resources and starts her investigation by interviewing the local oldsters, one of which lives at the hotel, Emma's own irascible, alcoholic great aunt Aurora.

This started out to be a very interesting read but, about half way through, I wanted it to be finished, as I was getting rather tired of it. I think my main problem with it was that I was thinking I was reading a murder mystery and I kept waiting for the crime to be solved and the mysteries cleared up. Some are cleared up, most are left pretty murky, including the mysteries surrounding Emma herself. So, even though I was disappointed by the book, I still think it was a worthy read, just for the chance to enter Emma's odd world. I think I would like to read more about Emma, see how she copes with the difficulties in her situation.

Hot Shot

By Charlotte Hughes

Detective Frankie Daniels finds herself in disgrace after her affair with a fellow officer and married man is made public. So when she is offered a position with a police force in a different town, she decides to accept it. So that's how she ends up in Purdyville, South Carolina, a small rural community with not much going on, at least compared to where she used to work, Atlanta.
One of the first things she does on her arrival in Purdyville is get in a brawl with one of the local punks and also, without knowing who he was, get into a spat with her new boss. Plus the house she had just rented burned down. She is feeling very disgruntled with everything and has quickly decided that Purdyville is not for her and that as soon as she can manage it, she is moving on. But her new boss, Sheriff Matt, is pretty sure that Frankie is just what his police force needs, not mention what he needs too.

I don't know, I just don't buy these tiny tough-guy female cops who are able to drop a man who probably outweighs them by 100 pounds. Plus I thought Frankie was unnecessarily belligerent. And I didn't care for the sex scenes (which I skipped) between her and the sheriff. And the plot wasn't a real attention grabber either. I'm not going to say it was a bad read, but it didn't appeal to me.

Miss Julia Stands Her Ground

By Ann B. Ross

Miss Julia is an older woman who has had to deal with some tough issues in the past. After her husband died, leaving Julia a wealthy widow, she discovered he had a secret life, when his lover and their child showed up at Julia's door. Then another will appeared that would have left Julia without any money at all. But Julia managed to cope and triumph, and even to find new love with a new husband. And she even brought the dead husband's lover and her child into her home to live, despite the objections of many in the community.
So now Miss Julia can sit back and relax and enjoy life a little. Or not. Because trouble is knocking at her door again in the form of that pesky Vernon Puckett who is still conniving to get his hands on Julia's dead husband Springer's money. He claims he has proof that Little Lloyd is not Springer's child and he has also brought along a man who is a dead ringer for the dead Springer  and he says he is Little Lloyd's true father. But Miss Julia is no push-over and she will do whatever it takes to keep her new little family together.

I hadn't read a Miss Julia story before I read this one but despite that the story was fairly easy to follow and the author did take quite a bit of time to recap past history, which helped a lot.  Miss Julia seems to overreact a bit when problems arise, but she is still an interesting character and not above using her position as creditor to many of the town's prominent citizens to blackmail folks into doing what she wants. That's kind of despicable and unscrupulous, except she only seems to use her power for good, making her friends and neighbors treat her dead husband's lover and his child with the same courtesy and consideration that they give to Julia.  Anyway, it makes for a fairly interesting story, with a pretty predictable outcome in the end.

Prison Planet

By William C. Dietz

Jonathan Renn had a ruthless business competitor who framed him by planting illegal drugs in one of Renn's imported shipments, with the result of Renn being convicted and sentenced to life on Swamp. Swamp is one of the prison planets set up by the Empire. Convicts are dropped off with minimal supplies and left to survive as best they can. Swamp is infamous for its deadly wildlife and the convicts survive by hunting its monsters and exporting the skins and musk, both of which are highly valued for their unique properties.
Dropped off with Renn is Marla Mendez, who stole money from her employer because her employer was cheating Marla. Marla was a human woman, but is now just a brain in the body of a robot dog.
Marla and Renn get along well and like each other but they end up going their separate ways after they are jumped by a gang upon their arrival. Renn was seriously injured and in order to pay for his medical treatment, Marla had to accept a contract with Skunk for a year. Renn, after he healed, signed on with Boater to learn all the skills needed to survive on Swamp. He wasn't aware that Marla had signed her freedom away to pay his medical bills.
Off in the swamps with Boater, Renn learned all the skills required and became a very good hunter. One day, after going off on his own, he came back to find his boss had been murdered by the same gang that jumped him and Marla. So he set out to track them down and make them pay for what they had done.

This was an OK story. I didn't really like it or dislike it. I do wish it had been more of a survival story, with more about the actual planet and its wildlife. Renn gets his revenge, reconnects with Marla, and they manage to get off planet so Renn can track down the guy who framed him in the first place. That last part was the least interesting and least believable part of the story. Overall, not a good read but not a complete waste of time either.

The Coroner's Lunch

By Colin Cotterill

It's Laos, 1976. The communists have been in power for only a short while. Dr. Siri Paiboun, medical doctor and communist revolutionary (of a sort, he became a communist because he was enamored of a girl who was an ardent communist) has put in his years, and now in his seventies is expecting to retire and receive a pension for his long service to the party. But instead he is told he is to be the national coroner, even though he has never worked as or trained to be a coroner. But Laos has a shortage of medical personnel due to the revolution and so he is stuck with the job.
Most of his cases are routine deaths by illness or misadventure. Until Mrs. Nitnoy, wife of a senior government official, dies suddenly while eating lunch. Her husband is sure she died from eating raw pork, which he claimed she loved to eat, but Dr. Siri's assistant noticed the scent of almonds on her body during the autopsy and later tests confirmed she was actually poisoned. Laos at this time is terribly impoverished and the hoops Dr. Siri has to jump through just to get a simple diagnostic test performed are quite daunting. But he manages to get it done despite all the obstacles. Now he has to figure who wanted the woman dead. The culprit appears to be the husband's girlfriend, who is later found dead of a suicide. But in this case, nothing is as it appears to be.
Dr. Siri also has to handle the case of three Vietnamese officials found floating in a lake who were apparently tortured to death. Again, nothing is as it appears to be and answers must be found quickly as friendly relations with Vietnam are at risk.
Dr. Siri may be old and he may not be a trained forensic coroner but he does have an advantage that no other coroner in the world has, his deceased clients visit him in his sleep and leave clues as to the truth of their various endings.

I enjoyed this story quite a bit, although I did find the plot rather hard to follow. But, despite this, I liked reading about Dr. Siri and his friends and neighbors, such an exotic and interesting setting. I also enjoyed the touch of mysticism, especially the visit by Dr. Siri to the Hmong village to investigate the strange deaths of three military officers. Quite a fascinating book, even if I did find the plot rather thick.

Cabin Pressure

By Corylee Spiro and Elizabeth Harwell

Anecdotes by a couple of flight attendants about airline travel, most just a paragraph or two long:

Upon boarding, a male passenger noticed a female flight attendant crawling on all fours between two rows of seats. Wanting to be helpful, he said, "Miss, are you looking for something?" Tired and food stained, she replied, "Yes, sir. I guess I'm looking for all that glamour they promised me in training."

The book is full of amusing anecdotes like that and it also gives the inside story of what the working life of a flight attendant is like. It was a funny and informative read, even though it was written more than twenty years ago. I enjoyed it very much, it's very amusing.

Amanda's Wedding

By Jenny Colgan

Ever since she was a child, Amanda has been a thorn in Melanie's side. Manipulative and mean-spirited, the only thing that matters to Amanda is Amanda. But after they grew up, Amanda drifted off in pursuit of her goal of social status and Melanie only heard from her when she basically wanted something.
And now Amanda is getting married and she is marrying a man that Melanie has had a secret crush on for years. But after listening to some rather frank things Amanda has said about her prospective husband, Melanie is convinced that Amanda doesn't love this man and is only marrying him for his social status. So when the man's brother comes to Melanie asking for her help in convincing the groom that he is about to make a horrible mistake, she can't help but go along, even though she may be about to get herself in a whole heap of trouble.

This was an OK read. I didn't much care for the ending, which seemed unlikely. Also didn't care for the misleading romance between Melanie and the groom's brother, which turned out to be a red herring. I also couldn't understand why Melanie and her friend let themselves be dragged into Amanda's life when they have so many reasons to avoid any association with her. I also didn't care for the drinking binges that seem to be a way of life for Melanie and her companions. That was disturbing. All in all, not a bad story, but mainly it just didn't click with me.

Getting Rid of Matthew

By Jane Fallon

Helen wanted to be a publicist but ended up as an executive assistant.  She became involved with her boss Matthew and their affair lasted for several years, even after he was no longer her boss. She was convinced she was deeply in love with Matthew and asked him time and again to leave his wife. But when Matthew finally did, Helen discovered she was totally mistaken in her feelings for Matthew. Now all she wants to do is get him out of her apartment and out of her life. And she figures the best way to do so is to get Matthew back together with his wife and family.
But how to accomplish this? Helen decides to spy on Matthew's wife Sophie and in the process she accidentally becomes friends with her, all without revealing to Matthew what she has been doing or to Sophie that she is the "other woman." And as Helen comes to realize, this can only end in disaster.

I really enjoyed this story a lot. It's not really a romance, it is more a coming-of-age story, even though the one who does the growing up is nearly forty years old. I liked Helen, even though she was a home-wrecker. I wanted to hate her, but I just couldn't. And I really liked the ending, which I thought was simply wonderful. Just an all-around enjoyable read.

The Marquis Takes a Bride

By Marion Chesney

Jennie Bemyss was young and inexperienced and sure she was in love with Guy Chalmers, whom she had known since childhood. But marrying Guy was out of the question because Jenny was already promised to another ... the Marquis of Charrington.
Their marriage had been arranged many years before. The Marquis really had no intention of following through on those arrangements, that is until he actually met Jenny. But it was also clear to him that Jenny's heart belonged to another. So the Marquis hatched a plan, to marry Jenny and to woo her away from Guy Chalmers.  He proposed a marriage of convenience with Miss Jenny. And Jenny agreed because marriage with the Marquis would mean finally getting away from her dreary rural life and getting to enjoy high society in London, plus getting to be close to Guy Chalmers too.
But the plan didn't work as the Marquis wanted. Jenny couldn't seem to see Guy for the low-down, lying, conniving creep that he really was. The Marquis began to think he made a terrible mistake in marrying Jenny and Jenny began to think her new husband was trying to kill her.

This was a pretty good read. One thing I liked about it was the lack of lasciviousness. So many more recent romances are more like reading porn, which doesn't appeal to me. However, with the plot to murder Jenny, the story was a little grim for my taste, I prefer a lighter fare, especially if I am reading a romance.  I expect it in a murder mystery, but don't really want it in a romance. But other than that, I enjoyed the story.

The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate

By Nancy Mitford

The Pursuit of Love: The story is narrated by Fanny, cousin of the main character Linda. Linda lives in the country and doesn't get to town much. Fortunately for Linda, Lord Merlin, a nearby neighbor, does get to town and he brings his town friends out to his estate, where Linda gets to meet the man who will be her first husband, Tony. Tony's family is in banking and are wealthy. Tony works in the family business and his parents want him to marry well, to a girl with good connections who will be a credit to Tony. Instead, he falls for Linda, mainly because she is young and beautiful and because she thinks Tony is swell. So they get married, to the disapproval of the parents on both sides. Tony's parents say Linda doesn't have the right connections and Linda's parents ( her father, mainly) don't like Tony's background (he is of German ancestry). It isn't too far into the marriage before Linda and Tony realize they have made a mistake. Tony is too stodgy to suit Linda and Linda is too flighty to suit Tony.
Linda meets another man, Christian, a Communist. Something about Christian strikes Linda's fancy and she is soon tagging after him like a lost puppy. She divorces hubby number one and marries hubby number too and toddles off with him to France to help war refugees. But her marriage begins to flounder with  Christian's growing attachment to another woman, a fellow aid worker.

I didn't really care for this story, mainly because the main character, Linda, did not appeal to me. Her behavior throughout the story is selfish, foolish, and disgusting. Nothing in her story made me like her, made me want her to have a happy ending, made me care about her.

Love in a Cold Climate: Set in the same time period as the first novel, this one centers on another aristocratic family living in the same area as Linda did before she grew up and left home. Once again the story is narrated by Fanny, the rather ordinary observer of her more beautiful relatives. The beautiful girl of this story is Polly, who is described as the leading beauty of her generation and also one of the richest, her father being one of the wealthiest men in England.
Polly came as a total surprise to her parents who had been married for twenty years without having children. But from early childhood, Polly was admired and acclaimed for her  beauty. As she grew into her teen years, though, her mother became increasingly dissatisfied with her daughter because Polly seemed to have no interest in boys.
By the time Polly was twenty, relations between the two were very strained, Polly confiding to Fanny that she absolutely hated her mother, she was so very tired of her mother's constant pressure on her to find a husband. But in the end Polly does find a husband, a husband that sets everyone on edge and causes a complete rift between Polly and her parents.

I like this story so much more than the first one. I thought it was quite a bit funnier and, even though Polly is not really a very sympathetic character, at least she is not doted on unreasonably like that horrible Linda. Although, oddly both books have very similar endings. There is a third book in the series, Don't Tell Alfred, I wonder who the author killed off at the end of it?

The Help

By Kathryn Stockett

It's 1962 and Skeeter is home in Jackson, Mississippi after graduating from college. She wants to be a writer and dreams of living in New York City, but her mother only wants to see her daughter happily married.
Skeeter lands a job with the local newspaper, writing a homemaking advice column. But she knows nothing about homemaking and turns to Aibileen, the maid of a close friend for help. In the course of time, Skeeter becomes more aware of the inequalities between the races in 1960s Jackson. Learning from  Aibileen, Skeeter decides to write a book about black women working as maids for the local white community. She conducts interviews, on the sly, with maids and gathers materials for her book, which she hopes will be her entree to a career in NYC. And the maids get to air their grievances. But since whites of that time and place are very intolerant, it all has to be done covertly, in order to protect the maids from violent retribution.
The book tells the story from the prospective of Skeeter, Aibilene and Minny, a maid who is more outspoken than is good for her. It follows Skeeter's rather pathetic love life and her mother's descent into chronic illness. As Skeeter's sympathies towards the civil rights struggle become more apparent, she finds herself cutoff from her closest friends, who do not understand or welcome the black struggle for equality.

This was an interesting book to read. It's always fun to read about people whose lives are so different from one's own. This book is well worth reading, but it is also entertaining, often amusing, and just a great read.

Let's Pretend This Never Happened

By Jenny Lawson

A "mostly true memoir" of  the author's life. Her father was a bit of a character, the kind of fellow who thought it would amuse his two young daughters if he made a hand puppet from a dead squirrel. An avid hunter, he later opened his own taxidermy shop so Jenny and her sister grew up in the presence of various dismembered critters is various stages of processing.  It definitely affected her development, as she describes in this humorous and often vulgar memoir.

I did enjoy this memoir, although I was left wondering how much of it really happened, given the disclaimer that it is "mostly true." But whether it is true or not, it is definitely very amusing.