Summer Sisters

Summer Sisters
by Judy Blume

Mass Market Paperback, 416 pages

Published July 25th 2006 by Dell (first published 1998)

ISBN 0440243750

My rating: 4 of 5 Stars

Finished Book: July 18, 2011

About the Book
(Goodreads)
In the summer of 1977, Victoria Leonard's world changed forever - when Caitlin Somers chose her as a friend. Dazzling, reckless Caitlin welcomed Vix into the heart of her sprawling, eccentric family, opening doors to a world of unimaginable privilege, sweeping her away to vacations on Martha's Vineyard, a magical, wind-blown island where two friends became summer sisters...

Now, years later, Vix is working in New York City. Caitlin is getting married on the Vineyard. And the early magic of their long, complicated friendship has faded. But Caitlin has begged Vix to come to her wedding, to be her maid of honor. And Vix knows that she will go - for the friend whose casual betrayals she remembers all too well. Because Vix wants to understand what happened during that last shattering summer. And, after all these years, she needs to know why her best friend - her summer sister - still has the power to break her heart..

My Thoughts on This Book


This was a book club selection.  Overall, everyone liked it.  Most of us remember Judy Blume from when we were MUCH younger.  It was interesting reading her as an adult.  Some of us liked it more than others, but overall, I liked it.  It was a good, easy summer read.  I thought the book had good character development, however it lacked a plot for the most part.  It followed the life of two life long friends.  I found myself finding bits and pieces of each friend while relating it to my own childhood friends.  If you are looking for an easy read, this is your book!

Room

Room
by Emma Donoghue (Goodreads Author)

Hardcover, 321 pages

Published September 13th 2010 by Little, Brown and Company

ISBN 0316098337

Finished This Book:  March 20, 2011
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

About This Book 
(Goodreads)

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough...not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.

Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, ROOM is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.  


My Thoughts on This Book

It took me a while to figure out that this was written from a 5 year old's perspective.   With that, imagine trying to understand a 5 year old telling a story of being locked up in a room with his kidnapped mother.  It is a tragic story and is told extremely well.  I could relate to both the boy and his mom at any point during the story.  There were times when I found myself shaking, I wanted to know what was going to happen next.  This book was riveting and sucked me in from the beginning.  However, about half way through, it slows down for me.  You reach a climax in the book and the remainder is tying up the story of this duo.  Had it not been for that, I would have rated it with 5 stars.

Kane and Abel

Kane and Abel
by Jeffrey Archer

Kindle Edition, 656 pages

Published April 1st 2010 by St. Martin's Paperbacks 

(first published 1979)

ASIN B003JMF4FC

Finished Book: February 18, 2011

My Rating: 4 Stars

About the Book
(Goodreads)

William Lowell Kane and Abel Rosnovski, one the son of a Boston millionaire, the other a penniless polish immigrant-born on the same day near the turn of the century on opposite sides of the world-are brought together by fate and the quest of a dream. Two men - ambitious, powerful, ruthless - are locked in a relentless struggle to build an empire, fueled by their all-consu...moreWilliam Lowell Kane and Abel Rosnovski, one the son of a Boston millionaire, the other a penniless polish immigrant-born on the same day near the turn of the century on opposite sides of the world-are brought together by fate and the quest of a dream. Two men - ambitious, powerful, ruthless - are locked in a relentless struggle to build an empire, fueled by their all-consuming hatred. Over sixty years and three generations, through war, marriage, fortune, and disaster, Kane and Abel battle for the success and triumph that only one man can have...

My Thoughts on This Book


This was a book full of intertwined characters and story lines.  I was mesmerized by the life of both the main characters in the book.  I loved and hated both of them at different times in the book.  It was an amazing story of strength, courage, deception, greed, and a little bit of love in the mix.  I liked that there was a lot of detail about each character, luring the reader in.  What I didn't like about the book was that it seemed like the author ran out of gas in the end.  I felt like the last 100 pages drug on and on.  To top it off, I didn't like how he tied the end together in the end.  I'm not sure how I would have ended the book, but that certainly wasn't it.  Overall, it was a good read.

The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder

The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder
by Rebecca Wells

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

About the Book:
The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder is the sweet, sexy, funny journey of Calla Lily's life set in Wells' expanding fictional Louisiana landscape.  In the small river town of La Luna,  Calla bursts into being, a force of nature as luminous as the flower she is named for.  Under the loving light of the Moon Lady, the feminine force that will guide and protect her throughout her life, Calla enjoys a blissful childhood-until it is cut short.  Her mother, M'Dear, a woman of rapture and love, teaches Calla compassion, and passes on to her the art of healing through the humble womanly art of "fixing hair."  At her mother's side, Calla further learns that this same touch of hands on the human body can quiet her own soul.  It is also on the banks of the La Luna River that Calla encournters sweet, succulent first love, with a boy named Tuck.

But when Tuck leaves Calla with a broken heart, she transorms hurt into inspiration and heads for the wild and colorful cit of New Orleans to study at L'Academie de Beaute de Crescent.  In that extravagant big river city, she finds her destiny-and comes to understand fully the power of her "healing hands," to change lies and soothe pain, including her own.  When Tuck reappears years later, he presents her with an offer that is colored by the memories of lost love.  But who know how Calla Lily, a "daughter of the Moon Lady," will repond?

A tale of family and friendship, tragedy and triumph, loss and love. 

My Review:
I liked it.  I liked the characters and the setting.  I was a bit thrown of by the Moon Lady exerpts (could have done without that).  Experiencing a young girl as a teenager in loved made me relate back to my own childhood and first love.  Once Calla moves away to experience life, I loved her new gay friends in New Orleans.  Really, they made the book for me.  Being someone obsessed about my own hair, the book made me want to be a hairdresser too.  There was one unexpected twist in the book, but otherwise, it was a tad bit predictable for me.  It is hard for me to imagine having my childhood friends in my day to day life, but maybe that's how a small town in the south would be.  I would have like to have seen the book end differently, but I enjoyed it.  It kept me reading and I loved the character development throughout.

The Irresistible Henry House

The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you looked at this blog, you'd think I fell off the face of the earth.  The problem is reading too many books at one time, and then there is that mothering thing and wife thing.  So little time for my favorite pass time!

This book was selected as our next book club book.  It was a fast read indeed for me.  Many of our book club selections this past year have been fiction based on real life events.  This happens to be one of them.  The book is based on the use of "practice babies" which began at Cornell University back in 1919.  Infants were loaned out to universities to be used as practice babies in practice houses (a.k.a. home economics) to be used to teach young women how to mother.  Can you believe it?  Gives you a whole new outlook on home ec, eh?  A set number of practice mothers would take turns caring for the baby throughout the year.  Believe it or not, this practice continued until 1969.  It draws the question of how this affected these young infants.  Did they grow up to have normal lives or disfunctional ones?

The book is definitely a fictional story, but follows the life of one practice baby, Henry.  Henry comes to the practice house as a young infant and ends up being raised in this environment his entire childhood.  He is loved by so many, yet lives a life desperately seeking love.  The author does a good job at allowing you to feel what he feels.  My heart ached for him.  I could only imagine how he must have felt.  Coming from a divorced family myself, I could relate to many aspects of this book.

What amazes me most about this book is that I had no idea practice houses even existed at one time.  How can this be?  How screwed up was this?  It is no wonder the women's liberty movement took place.  They were groomed to be mothers and nothing else.  It is hard for me to fathom that this was the only choice for women of this time period.  How far we have come!!!

Moloka'i

Moloka'i by Alan Brennert
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is our book club book for March.  It was very different from the other books we've read.  It takes place in and around Honolulu.  It is the story about a girl named Rachel who contracts Leprocy in the late 1800s.  At the age of seven, she is shipped off to the island of Moloka'i in order to quarantine her from the rest of her family.  She lives a life of seclusion away from her family and learns to live independently.  As lonely as it was, she learns to live a life full of meaningful relationships and trials.  The story kept my interest and felt so much compassion for the people who contracted this dreadful disease.

The interesting thing about this book as that it is based on historical information.  That many of these events actually happened.  Can you imagine shipping you off to an island if you contracted a disease that couldn't be cured?  Discovering facts like these, makes me feel like I live under a rock in my content little life.  What struggles people had to endure.  And how blessed are we to live freely??  Very.

The Language of Secrets

The Language of Secrets by Dianne Dixon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book landed in my lap.  I was contacted by a Advertising Director of a publishing company.  She had seen was I was reading through GoodReads (my all-time favorite website) and thought I might like this new book.  She mailed it to me.  I read it.  It was great! 

Once I started the book, I had a hard time putting it down.  I wanted to keep reading to find out what happened.  The book is about a young boy who is caught up in a family of secrets and regret and throughout the process, becomes a lost child.  As an adult, he starts looking for answers as to what happened to him as a child, which he has no memory of.  The book if full of many unexpected twists and turns.  It is what keeps you reading.  I wanted to know more, more, more. 

I fell in love with so many of the characters in this book.  I found that as I read, I was trying to put myself in their situation.  What what I have done?  Made me look at the consequences of our decisions and how they not only effect me, but those I love.  Towards the end of the book, it gave me insight as to how parents really feel when their kids are grown and move away.  Do we ever really know what our parents experienced as young parents?  As children, do we really now our mother or father?  And as parents, we try to protect our children and make a good life for them.  Then perhaps you raise your children and be the everything in their life and then all of sudden, you are in the shadow of their own lives.  They've moved on and without you?  Does life really go by that fast that before you know it, it has passed you by?  Looking back, will I regret the wife that I was?  The mother I was?  The daughter I was?

I loved this book.  It is though provoking and intriguing to say the least.  Read it!

The Help

The Help by Kathryn Stockett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was our February book club book.  Oh, how I loved this book. It takes place in the time of Martin Luther King, Jr.  I have read about this period of time, but never from a black maid's perspective. 

The book takes place in the south at a time where white families were cared for by black maids.  Not only did they take care of cooking the meals and cleaning the house, they helped (and mostly) raise their employer's children as well.  It was a time when black people were required to use separate entrances, use a black bathroom, etc.  I was very moved by this book and gave me an entirely new view of how they must have felt living through this and how strong their faith was that things would eventually change.

Great book!!!!!

She's Come Undone

She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is our January book club selection and what a book!  This is actually the second time around for me.  I read this book for the first time when I was in my third year at college.  I remember enjoying it, but thinking the main character, Dolores, was whack!  Reading it the second time, I felt like I really didn't remember the last two sections of the book at all, so it was like reading it for the first time.  And Dolores, well she didn't seem so whack afterall, well kind of!

The book captures the life of Dolores from the time she is around 12 up until she is 40.  Being in my 30's reading the book this time around, I felt like I could better relate to Dolores and all she went through in her life.  Dolores was the product of a divorced family, which many of us are.  However, Dolores sprials out of control and is put into difficult situations in which she isn't equipped to deal with.  To be honest, I don't really care for Dolores from the time she is 17 until she is about 24.  After that point, I get her and I want her to do well.  It's almost as if she becomes a different person.  It is such an empowering time and a time of self discovery.  As young adolescents, we certainly become self absorbed and feel like we can conquer the world, don't we?  I find it amazing that there are times in our life when we feel lost and depleted, then something just clicks and we get our act together and our life takes a completely different path.  This book is about accepting our journey and who we become along the way.  I highly recommend this book.  Great read.

Finding Noel: A Novel

Finding Noel: A Novel by Richard Paul Evans

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So I have to say that this book was quite different from my previous entry.  I enjoyed the book, but it had a lot of heart ache and redeeming qualities to it.  The book is about a man named Mark who falls on hard times.  He keeps falling down time after time and then meets an angel out of no where.  He meets Macy.  Their meeting is somewhat a chance meeting and he helps Macy to discover who she is and coming to grips with her past and where she came from.  Is their such thing as fate or destiny?  That's what this book is about.  For a Christmas book, it seemed like there was an awful lot of death, but I guess death brings closure and that's what the author was wanting.  I liked it and do agree that certain people come into our lives at certain times.  Some stay in our lives and others don't.  At Christmas time, we do look back on our lives and remember those lost, but not forgotten.

The Art of Racing in the Rain

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Art of Racing in the Rain is narrated by a beloved dog named Enzo. Yes, it is narrated by a dog. This was a book club selection and I was pretty skeptical to say the least. Don't get me wrong, I am a dog lover, but a book narrated by a dog? Seemed a little sketchy to me! The book takes you on a journey of Enzo's life with his owner(s). The dog reminded me of an old soul trapped in a dog's body. Throughout the story, the dog has much to say about life and how us humans tend to ruin things without even knowing it.

The book is about love, loyalty, tragedy, and fate. As I read this book, my dog Bugsy had to be at my side. I began to look at Bugsy and wondering . . . . . . hmmmm. This book is for anyone who loves dogs and loves a good story.

Skylight Confessions

Skylight Confessions: A Novel by Alice Hoffman

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a book club selection. The cover looked intesting, although it was a lot darker than I thought it would be. It was about fate, love, and spirits. One woman's fateful decision impacts her life and those around her the rest of her life. Can't write too much without it ruining the ending.

It was written very well. The author never gave you too much detail about each character, so it kept you guessing. Great characters. Sad set of circumstances. If you are looking for a fairy tale ending, not the book for you. It was dark, but I liked it. Interesting read.

Handle with Care

Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a book club selection and my third Jodi Picoult book. Jodi Picoult doesn't disappoint the reader in this novel. Just as you can expect from her, there are twists and turns and you never know when she is going to drop the big one. I was sucked in from the beginning and had a hard time putting it down. Essentially, the book is about two best friends, one being an OBGYN. The one gets pregnant and ends up giving birth to a child with Osteogenesis Imperfecta or better know as brittle bone syndrome. The mom later sues her best friend for malpractice. Would she have aborted the baby? That is the question. What would you do? And how could you sue your best friend? You see both sides and it is hard to determine what you would do if you were her and lived her life. While reading the book, I empathized with all the characters (to a point). I thought the plot and characters were very similar to "My Sister's Keeper," which I loved. I couldn't tell how she was going to end it, so it kept me reading. I liked it, but am glad I'm done. The issue in this book is extremely controversial and as a parent, made me feel uneasy at times. Jodi Picoult definitely leaves you coming back for more!

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel by Lisa See

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was a book club book and is one of my absolute favorites. Once I started the book, I couldn't put the thing down. The book takes place in 19th century China and is about the friendship of two young girls and their journey throughout life. A girl named Lily is matched up with a laotong or "old same" named Snow Flower. The girls come to think they are alike, but they soon find out they are very different. The book is about friendship, loyalty, secret language among women, footbinding, and love. The story line takes you through years of friendship and many long-kept secrets among friends. The role of women in this time period is fascinating.

Don't we all long for an old same or longtime friend to get through life with??

Water for Elephants

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a very intriguing book. This was one of our book club selections. This is probably not one of would have selected to read on my own. However, it seems to pop up on a lot of book club selections.

It is about a man who eperiences great tradgedy and decides to run away and ends up on a traveling circus train in the 1920's. It is an amazing story about what this man sees and all of goes on in the circus. The book had some many great characters with great depth. It was had to put it down. Some of the characters in the book were based on real circus characters from the time period which made for an even more interesting read for me. The author of this book did a fantastic job as portraying so many different charcters. It is amazing that a woman could portray an old man so well.