Review of The Story Sisters, by Alice Hoffman

Fiction Review, General, Starred Review 0

story_sistersThe Story Sisters

by Alice Hoffman

Shay Areheart Books (Crown), New York, 2009. 325 pages.
Starred review.

Sisters Elv, Meg, and Claire Story have their own language, Arnish, created by Elv, along with stories of the fairyland Arnelle. But Elv’s fantasies begin to take a dark path. On top of that, threesomes are always difficult, and Elv and Meg begin an unspoken rivalry for Claire’s devotion. But Elv’s path becomes dangerous; Claire, once rescued by Elv, cannot continue to follow her.

The story of the Story Sisters is dark and sad, but somehow it is also uplifting and beautiful. Some terrible things happen to them; they let each other down in tragic ways. But in the end family (blood family and chosen family) pulls them through.

This book did get me crying. I found myself forgetting it was fiction and wanting to ask God why He let some of these events happen to these girls! Yes, the author created a believable world. And in her cruelty to her characters, she made a wonderfully compelling story. Some terrible things happen, but the characters eventually rise above their difficulties.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/story_sisters.html

Review of Still Life, by Joy Fielding

Fiction Review, General, Starred Review, Suspense 0

still_lifeStill Life
by Joy Fielding

Atria Books, New York, 2009. 369 pages.
Starred Review.
Sonderbooks Stand-out 2010: #6 Fiction

This book is wonderful. Richly textured and thought-provoking, it also includes life-or-death suspense.

Casey Marshall has a perfect life. Having lunch with her best friends, it’s clear that one at least thinks it’s a bit too perfect. Casey and her handsome husband are even talking about starting a family soon.

But after lunch, something happens. Casey wakes up in darkness, only able to hear voices. They are talking about a terrible accident that happened to “the patient,” run down by an SUV. She begins recognizing distraught voices of people she knows and loves, and it dawns on her that the accident happened to her.

Nobody knows that she can hear them. People tell her husband that he should get on with his life, but he says he can’t stay away from her, he loves her too much. Her sister Drew is mad because Casey’s the executor of their parents’ estate, and Drew wants her allowance. A nurse’s aide talks about how handsome her husband is, and how she thinks she’ll be able to seduce him. Casey hears her making progress.

Then a detective comes along. He suspects the accident was not an accident after all. Now Casey has memories of all her friends and wonders who would want to hurt her.

Eventually the book becomes like the old classic Rear Window. Casey knows who wants to kill her, even though they have everyone else completely fooled. She knows when that person is planning to do it. But she is absolutely powerless to stop them. Or is she?

I would love to say more, but I will settle for saying that I loved this book and found the ending thoroughly satisfying.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/still_life.html

Another Fix

48-Hour Book Challenge, General 0

Okay, this bug took me a half-hour to fix. But it’s important for my blogging….

Because of changes I’d made to the blog header, the pages with a single post were not providing any link at all to take you back to the main page. Fortunately, I’m learning enough that I was able to fix it. I hope that is the last bug I need to fix! The good thing is that if I fix it on this blog, I can just copy the files to my other blogs.

Bug Fixed!

48-Hour Book Challenge, General 0

Yay! I did have one bug left after the upgrade that I thought I was stuck with — I was getting strange characters showing up in my old posts.

Well, this morning I decided to try getting rid of the CHAR-SET line in the new wp-config.php files. Presto! No more problems! So that’s a nice way to start the morning.

Again, I think that fixing my blog counts as blogging time. Doing it took only about 5 minutes, though.

Also overnight, I decided which stats to keep, so here’s my status on Saturday morning at 10:00, almost 12 hours into the 48-Hour Book Challenge:

Time Spent: 4 1/2 hours
Blogging: 2 hours
Reading: 2 1/2 hours
Networking (See the rules. There’s a provision for visiting other blogs of people doing the challenge and leaving comments after 5 hours participating. It will be fun!): None yet

Books Finished: 1
Books Reviewed: None yet

Pages read: 325

As mentioned before, I have a stack of books to review, from the time when my blog was down (and from already being behind). Let’s see. There are 18 books in it. So I hope I will end up reviewing more books than I finish reading, and thus not get further behind. Last night, I was too tired, though. After I do some more reading this morning, I plan to get started on the reviews.

I’m still loving this! Wasn’t even able to sleep in much. I’m too excited! Of course, that’s making me laugh at myself, and making my son laugh at me. It’s a harmless obsession, but so much fun!

Challenge Progress – Friday Night

48-Hour Book Challenge, General 0

So, I’m progressing on the 48-hour Book Challenge. It’s 1:50 am. So I’ve been going almost 3 1/2 hours now.

In that time, I finished one book, The Eternal Smile, by Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim. I read some chapters. In the Bible, I read Mark 4; I Chronicles 6-8; Psalm 119:145-176; Proverbs 4-5. I read the Introduction and Chapter 1 of 10-10-10, by Suzy Welch. And I read the first 8 chapters of Dragon’s Keep, by Janet Lee Carey.

I had some very irresponsible late nights this past week, so it almost feels normal to be up this late. But tomorrow I can sleep in! Huzzah! More luxury!

I also did some blogging in that time (about an hour and a half). I am counting as blogging time spent upgrading my other blog, Sonderquotes, and posting an entry on it. Sonderquotes is a blog of great quotations I run across in my reading, so it’s directly related to Sonderbooks.

Since I did the work of changing the files when upgrading this blog, upgrading Sonderquotes is a matter of deleting the old files and copying in the new. A lot of clicking. A lot of dragging. In between, while the computer is working, I read. (Just looking up to click now and then. So you see, it still counts as reading and blogging, since it was working on the blog!)

And Sonderquotes looks so pretty now! I’m so happy to have it matching this blog and sonderbooks.com! This time it was a piece of cake compared to all the work of figuring out how to do it with this blog. Now I only had to copy files.

So — the first three and a half hours done. Tomorrow I will sleep late and have breakfast, and then tackle the reading again. I didn’t do any reviewing tonight because I’m too tired, but tomorrow I hope to get a lot of reviews written.

Happy reading!

The 48-hour Book Challenge

48-Hour Book Challenge, General 1

48hbcTonight, Friday night at 10:30 pm, I am officially beginning the 48-hour Book Challenge!

The rules are here on motherreader.com. Basically, in the next 48 hours, I will spend as much time as possible reading and blogging about it.

I’ve been laughing at myself all day for how excited I am about this! You see, whenever I have a special day and try to think of a dream-come-true way of indulging myself, the first thing I think of is ALWAYS to sit around and read all day long. But I ALWAYS conclude, for one reason or other, that it’s not practical, or it’s too lazy, or for some reason or other I just can’t do that.

But it’s all in the marketing: Now it is not laziness, it’s a challenge! Woo-hoo! I am not indulging myself — I am working hard! Okay, the truth is, I AM indulging myself, and I have a wonderful excuse, so I’m not feeling even a little bit guilty! Thank you, MotherReader, for providing the excuse!

What’s more, my blog has been broken for the last three weeks. Just today, I got it working. What’s more, in order to fix it, I had to learn enough about WordPress that now I was able to give the blog the same color scheme and look as my main site, sonderbooks.com. This morning before work, I finished fixing the color scheme to match. For the more than a year that I’ve had the blog, and my three other blogs, I’ve meant to make them look like the main site, but I never got around to figuring out how to do it.

Well, in order to figure out how to fix the problem and upgrade the blog, I had to learn enough about WordPress to adjust the look. I’m really happy with what I ended up with! And I just happened to finish tinkering with it this morning.

What’s more, the challenge happened to hit the only weekend in months and months when I have nothing on the calendar. Yes, I’ll go to church on Sunday. Yes, I’ll write for 15 minutes on Saturday. (I haven’t missed a day of at least 15 minutes writing in 2009!) Yes, I have to take Tim to a group project meeting on Sunday. But the cool part is that I can listen to an audiobook on the way there, and read while I am waiting for him to finish! It will simply provide a change of scenery.

The clear schedule is so rare as to almost be miraculous. Definitely a Sign. I HAD to do this!

I also have a STACK of books to review, since the blog was down for three weeks. It doesn’t really say in the rules, but I’m assuming that time spent “blogging” includes time writing reviews of books you’ve already read. So I’m going to spend time reading, and break it up by writing reviews, and maybe just maybe I can catch up!

Along with updating the look, I also had been toying with the idea of converting my site to a blog only. Well, the blog breaking convinced me that I don’t want to do that. But I think I will make more of the blog — with personal entries like this one about being a reader and a writer and a librarian and a blogger. I’m going to start thinking of sonderbooks.com as an archive of the book reviews. It is arranged by type of book, so is a good resource for finding books to read.

There was one problem with the upgrade. The one thing left that doesn’t work is the “Pretty Permalinks.” So now none of the links from sonderbooks.com to the blog will work. I will need to go in and change those, but I can do that, eventually. In the meantime, if a link to the blog doesn’t work, go to the blog’s main page and then do a search in the blog for the book you want.

I’m also very excited about getting involved in the Kidlit blogging community, the Kidlitosphere. Technically, mine isn’t just a Kidlit blog, since I also review books for adults. But I’m a Youth Services Librarian, and I definitely have an emphasis on YA and children’s books.

Well, why am I spending all this time explaining myself when I could be reading?

Here goes!!! Woo-hoo!!! Woo-hoo!!

Alas!

General 0

I spoke too soon. Although I can now add posts, ONLY the main page works. NONE of the links to other pages — including the permalink to this post — seems to work. None of the pages work. The feed doesn’t work. If I can’t figure it out, I may have to start over with a new blog. I am very bummed.

Guessing the Top Ten Picture Books

General 0

I’m am having so much fun following the blog of Betsy Bird, Children’s Librarian at New York Public Library.  http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/blog/1790000379.html

She recently did a survey of the librarians and children’s book lovers who follow her blog, asking them to list their ten favorite picture books of all time.  For awhile now, she’s been posting the top 100, where she scored the books with ten points for a first place vote, nine for second place, and so on.

It’s been truly wonderful reading the list, being reminded of so many incredible books.  I am proud that I have read almost all of them, and made sure that I did read any I wasn’t familiar with.  Almost the only book I didn’t really like was Who Needs Donuts? but I brought it home for my teenage son, and, just as I guessed would happen, it is now one of his all-time favorites.  (He has a thing for donuts, hammered into him as a toddler when we let him play “Dilbert’s Desktop Games” with its refrain, “Gotta get more donuts!”  He also loves highly detailed pictures.)

This week, she offered a challenge.  Can you guess which books will make the top ten?

If any of my readers want to play, you will want to read all the books in slots 100 to 11.  Instructions for submitting your choices are at: http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/blog/1790000379/post/170043817.html.  You only have about 24 hours — Sunday night, May 3, at midnight is the deadline.  Today I submitted my guesses and really enjoyed doing it.

However, the fun of reading these posts got me thinking.  Originally, I hadn’t submitted my votes.  I rather scorned the idea of choosing only ten favorites.

But then the fun of the list coming out made me wish I had voted for the ones I love.  At the same time, my co-worker read some of my favorite books and has asked me repeatedly for a list of favorites.

With all this in mind, I have started on several lists.  I like it that Betsy Bird confined the list to Picture Books, but did not include Easy Readers.  Somehow, breaking it into narrower categories makes it easier to recognize wonderful books without excluding others.  So I have started on lists of my favorite Board Books, Picture Books, Easy Readers, Beginning Chapter Books, Middle Grade Books, and Young Adult Books.  Hmm.  I will have to also do a list of favorite Fiction for Adults, but I do not think I will make a list for Nonfiction — too much variety.

One thing I don’t like about the lists idea is when a new book comes along that is worthy of the list, how can you kick off an old favorite?  With that in mind, I think I will give up my idea of having Top Ten lists, and just make them as long as they need to be.  I also want to have some sort of rule to keep from hastily putting a new and wonderful book on the list.  I think I will require myself to have read the book at least two times, at least a year apart.  (One of those times can be the audio version.)

Now, I’m already making lists each year of my favorites in each category — the Sonderbooks Stand-outs.  This would be something different.  I will need to add a whole new area to my website for lists of favorites.  Who knows?  Once I make the general lists, I might make some new lists, such as lists of favorite YA fantasy, lists of Jane Austen related books (I already have that going within each review), lists of math-related fiction, and the like.

What do you think?  Please comment on my blog if you like the idea.

The little catch is that I’m in the middle of a local move, my house is filled with boxes, and I’m already quite behind on writing reviews and posting them on my main site.  I also want to give myself some time to make sure I remember all my favorites before I start posting the lists.

So — that’s what I have in mind, and here’s hoping it won’t be too long before I bring you some lists of favorites.

Review of Heart and Soul, by Maeve Binchy

Fiction Review, General, Romance, Starred Review 0

heart_and_soul.jpg

Heart and Soul

by Maeve Binchy

Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2009.  418 pages.

Starred review.

Sonderbooks Stand-out 2010: #4 Fiction

Maeve Binchy’s books are warm, friendly, and cozy.  She specializes in telling stories about a community of people.  In Heart and Soul, the community is a new heart clinic in Dublin.  We look through windows into the lives of the people who come to work at the clinic, the patients, and others touched by them.

To add to the fun, the author brings back old friends who played a part in her earlier books.  You definitely don’t need to have read the earlier books to appreciate Heart and Soul, but it does make you feel that you are catching up with old friends.  I found myself wishing that I had not missed her last book, Whitethorn Woods.  I will definitely have to rectify that.

In Maeve Binchy’s earlier books, there seemed to be a pattern that the more ideal the marriage seemed, the more sure you could be that it was doomed.  These more recent books are gentler.  People still have problems, but personally I’m glad that there are less dirty rotten cheating husbands than in some of her earlier books.  Her characters cope with their problems with courage, compassion and resilience, and it’s delightful to spend time in the company of these people.

Buy from Amazon.com