Library Loot: May 8th

Library Loot Event is a weekly event hosted by Marg at The Adventures of a Intrepid Reader and Claire from The Captive Reader. This weekly event encourages bloggers to share the books they have checked out from the library. I always find many new books to add to my reserve list!

If you’d like to participate, just write up your post and link up.  And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!

 

Library Loot:  May 4th -10th

This last week I finished the following books:

Sing You Home – Jodi Picoult – I really enjoyed this audiobook!  4/5

My Library Loot for this week:

 

Again this week hubby went to the library for me as I was cleaning the house in anticipation of my parents arrival for the weekend.   We had a wonderful visit with my parents, though WAY too short.  It was nice to spend Mother’s Day with my mother as I see her very seldom.  Hubby is getting ready to make supper and I am able to enjoy my free time getting some blogging done. 

I started a new meme last weekend called, “Beyond Words”.  “Beyond Words” is a weekly feature at Reading in White Bear Lake, in which readers share the unfamiliar words they have encountered in their reading over the past week. This is a great way to build your vocabulary from what you are reading as well as from what others are reading.

Remember…..you are never to old to learn!! I love learning and reading, what better combination could there be.  I would greatly appreciate your support and participation in getting this meme rolling.  

Happy Mother’s Day! I hope everyone is enjoying a wonderful weekend.  It is a bit rainy here in MN once again.  Argh…I can’t wait for spring/summer weather to be here to stay for a while!

Happy Reading!

Beyond Words: May 8th, 2011

Beyond Words

Happy Mother’s Day! Beyond Words is a weekly feature at Reading in White Bear Lake, in which readers share the words they have encountered in their reading over the past week.  This is a great way to build your vocabulary from what you are reading as well as from what others are reading. 

Remember…..you are never to old to learn!! I love learning and reading, what better combination could there be.

The gift of using words best comes from knowing words
as intimately as you know your own family.
Lloyd Edwin Smith

New words to me this week:

Bedraggled – (adj.) soiled and stained by or as if by trailing in mud
Listen to the audio pronunciation.
page 4, Purge by Sofi Oksanen
“Muddy, ragged, bedraggled, but a girl nonetheless.” 

Tricot – (noun) : a plain warp-knitted fabric (as of nylon, wool, rayon, silk, or cotton) with a close inelastic knit and used especially in clothing
Listen to the audio pronunciation
page 4, Purge by Sofi Oksanen
“The dress? Western.  The tricot was too good to come from over on the other side.”

Babushka – (noun): an elderly Russian woman
Listen to the audio pronunciation
page 4, Purge by Sofi Oksanen
“And what if the old woman was like the babushka that Katia had told her about, or like Oksanka, who did work for men like Pasha, sending girls to the city for men like him.”

I love being a part of this and I hope you will too!  If you’d like to participate, just write up your post and link up. I hope you will participate!

Happy Reading!

Review: Whistling in the Dark by Lesley Kagen

Title: Whistling in the Dark
Author:  Lesley Kagen
Publisher: NAL Trade; trade edition
Web: www.lesleykagen.com
Date of Publication: (May 1, 2007)
ISBN-10:  0451221230  
Pages:  320 pages
Format:  Paperback
Setting:  1959 – Milwaukee, Wisconsin

About the Book: (from Goodreads.com)

It was the summer on Vliet Street when we all started locking our doors...

Sally O'Malley made a promise to her daddy before he died. She swore she'd look after her sister, Troo. Keep her safe. But like her Granny always said-actions speak louder than words. Now, during the summer of 1959, the girls' mother is hospitalized, their stepfather has abandoned them for a six pack, and their big sister, Nell, is too busy making out with her boyfriend to notice that Sally and Troo are on the loose. And so is a murderer and molester.

Highly imaginative Sally is pretty sure of two things. Who the killer is. And that she's next on his list. Now she has no choice but to protect herself and Troo as best she can, relying on her own courage and the kindness of her neighbors.

Related Media:

About the Author:  Lesley Kagen is a writer, actress, and restaurateur. She lives in Wisconsin with her husband, Peter.  Lesley and Peter have two sons.

My Review:

I check out my copy of Whistling in the Dark from the public library.  I read Whistling in the Dark as the monthly selection for my book club, “Wine, Women and Words”.

Though I was not yet born in 1959, I grew up in small town, USA and had a similar childhood venturing off in our small town.   Nothing ever happens in small town, USA.   I am sure that is how the parents felt that summer in Milwaukee.   The two main characters, Sally and Troo O’Malley were ages 10 and 9.  Troo was a feisty girl with a bit of an attitude.  Sally was the over imaginative older sister who’s job was to look after Troo.   Whistling in the Dark is told by Sally the 10 year old.   I didn’t really feel the voice used to tell the story was realistic for a 10 year old.  I had a hard time getting into this book.  I can’t pin point the reason exactly.  

I didn’t always feel connected to the characters nor did I feel they were that developed.  I didn’t have any real strong feelings for the characters.  I enjoying having an emotional connection to the characters in a story.  I did feel sorry for Sally and the pressure she put on herself to look after Troo. 

Like I said, the beginning of the book was a little slow for me, but the book does pick up towards the end of the book.  The one thing that really bothered me about the book, was the whole mystery.  Sally has all these different ideas about who the killer could be, but in the end it felt to me like the author pulled the identity of the murderer out of no where.   The character was so minor in the overall book.   I like to be able to think back in the story and go, “AAAAH, I should have guess he was the killer” based on the various clues weaved within the story.   That was missing for me in this book.  Whistling in the Dark received missed reviews from my book group.  A few of us finished it and thought over all it was an Ok read. 

My Rating:  3/5 – I finished the book and thought it was ok.

Other Bloggers Reviews:

Booking Mama

Irregular Tammie

Read Them and Eat

 

Happy Reading!

Review: Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman

Title: Saving CeeCee Honeycutt
Author:  Beth Hoffman
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Web: http://bethhoffman.net/
Date of Publication: (October 26, 2010)
ISBN-10:  0143118579  
Pages: 320 pages
Format: Audio Book
Setting: Willoughby, Ohio (1967) and Savannah, Georgia

About the Book: (from Goodreads.com)
For years, twelve-year-old CeeCee Honeycutt has been the caretaker of her psychotic mother, Camille. The tiara-toting, lipstick-smeared laughingstock of an entire town, Camille was a woman trapped in her long-ago moment of glory as the 1951 Vidalia Onion Queen. But when she is hit by a truck and killed, CeeCee is left to fend for herself. To the rescue comes her previously unknown great-aunt Tootie in her vintage Packard convertible.

Related Media:

About the Author: Beth Hoffman was the president and owner of a major interior design studio in Cincinnati, Ohio, before turning to writing full time. She lives with her husband and two cats in a quaint historic district in Newport, Kentucky. Saving CeeCee Honeycutt is her first novel.

My Review:   I selected to listen to this audio of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt based on some reviews I had read.  This audio was narrated by Jenna Lamia . She is an amazing narrator.  She plays all the characters with very distinct and believable voices, especially the pre-teen CeeCee.   Saving CeeCee Honeycutt was a joy to listen to!

CeeCee is the narrator of the story and her voice is very appropriate for her age.  Don’t you hate when you read a book that is narrated by a child, but the dialogue doesn’t sound like a child!  This is not the case with Saving CeeCee Honeycutt. 

I really enjoyed all the characters in Saving CeeCee Honeycutt.  CeeCee herself is a strong, compassionate girl.  CeeCee in many regards ended up parenting her mother, Camille, more than Camille actually was able to parent her.  CeeCee was a reader and enjoyed books and the escape they offered her from her daily live.  I could really relate to that, as a child I also used reading as an escape. 

Camille, CeeCee’s mother, suffered from mental health issues.  She was an interesting character and well developed.  I could just see her an the Vidalia Queen.  After Camille’s death, Aunt Tootie comes to Willoughby, Ohio to see CeeCee.   In my eyes this is the moment in which CeeCee is saved by her Aunt.   Tootie gives CeeCee an opportunity for a new life, where CeeCee is able to be a child and have friends.  

Aunt Tootie is from Savannah, Georgia and is a proper southern woman.  The descriptions of Georgia are rich and lush and just delicious.  I love old homes as does Aunt Tootie. She saves and restores old homes validating the history of those homes.   The strong female relationships portrayed in Saving CeeCee Honeycutt are amazing.  

Themes throughout Saving CeeCee Honeycutt included family secrets, stigma of mental illness, abandonment, love, acceptance and strength of family/friends. What an amazing cast of strong lovely women that came into CeeCee’s life just at the right time.  

My Rating: 4/5 – highly recommended – drove around the block a few times not wanting to have the story end.     Looked forward to getting into the car to hear some more!  Great Audio.

Other Bloggers Reviews:

She is Too Fond of Books

Redlady’s Reading Room

Stacy’s Books

Book Journey

Happy Reading!

It’s Monday! What are you reading? - May 2nd, 2011

 I have been following Shelia’s blog, Book Journey for a while now and decided it was time I participate in in her weekly event, “It’s Monday!  What Are you Reading?”   It is a chance to share what you have read and what you plan on reading in the upcoming week.   I have already found some titles that I just *had to add to my TBR list.

Last week looked like this for me:

I finished the book Lake of Dreams by Kim Edwards.

Review: Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom 

Review:  Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand – Helen Simonson

Participated in Library Loot hosted by Claire at Captive Reader. 

Added a new weekly feature to my book blog, Beyond Words. 

My Plans for this week:

 

One miscarriage too many spelled the end of Max and Zoe Baxter's marriage. Though the former couple went quite separate ways, their fates remained entangled: After veering into alcoholism, Max is saved in multiple senses by his fundamentalist conversion; Zoe, for her part, finds healing relief in music therapy and the friendship, then romantic love with Vanessa, her counselor. After Zoe and Vanessa, now married, decide to have a baby, they realize that they must join battle with Max, who objects on both religious and financial grounds. (from Goodreads.com )

Listening to audiobook, while traveling and commuting. 

 

 

Old Aliide Truu lives alone in a cottage in the woods, pestered by flies she wishes would leave her in peace. Her isolation is interrupted when she spies a young woman under a tree in her garden. The girl is strange; arriving in the dead of night, bruised, dirty and shoeless - why is she at Aliide's door? Overcome by curiosity the old woman decides, warily, to take her in. Zara is on the run from men who tortured, raped, and sold her into slavery. Her only possession is a tattered photograph of her grandmother and another woman; in which Aliide recognizes herself and her sister. Horrified, she begins to realize that the past she has long tried to forget has finally caught up with her - Purge is a hauntingly intimate portrait of one family's shame against a backdrop of European war. (from Goodreads.com )

Library Reserve  - discovered on some book blog. 

 

Ford's strained debut concerns Henry Lee, a Chinese-American in Seattle who, in 1986, has just lost his wife to cancer. After Henry hears that the belongings of Japanese immigrants interned during WWII have been found in the basement of the Panama Hotel, the narrative shuttles between 1986 and the 1940s in a predictable story that chronicles the losses of old age and the bewilderment of youth. Henry recalls the difficulties of life in America during WWII, when he and his Japanese-American school friend, Keiko, wandered through wartime Seattle. Keiko and her family are later interned in a camp, and Henry, horrified by America's anti-Japanese hysteria, is further conflicted because of his Chinese father's anti-Japanese sentiment. Henry's adult life in 1986 is rather mechanically rendered, and Ford clumsily contrasts Henry's difficulty in communicating with his college-age son, Marty, with Henry's own alienation from his father, who was determined to Americanize him. (from Amazon.com)

Book Club Selections for May – need to have read by next Monday.

Those are my reading plans for the week.  What are your reading plans????  Join in with Shelia at Book Journey and share what you reading plans are for the week!

Happy Reading!!

Review: Lake of Dreams by Kim Edwards

Title: The Lake of Dreams

Author: Kim Edwards http://www.kimedwardsbooks.com/

Publisher: VIKING: Penguin Group

Date of Publication: 2011

ISBN: 978-0-670-02217-5

Pages: 384 pages

Format:  Hardcover (from Library)

Setting: Fictional town of Lake of Dreams, New York

About the Book: (from Goodreads.com)

With revelations that prove as captivating as the deceptions at the heart of her bestselling phenomenon The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Kim Edwards now gives us the story of a woman's homecoming, a family secret, and the old house that holds the key to the true legacy of a family.

At a crossroads in her life, Lucy Jarrett returns home from Japan, only to find herself haunted by her father's unresolved death a decade ago. Old longings stirred up by Keegan Fall, a local glass artist who was once her passionate first love, lead her into the unexpected. Late one night, as she paces the hallways of her family's rambling lakeside house, she discovers, locked in a window seat, a collection of objects that first appear to be useless curiosities, but soon reveal a deeper and more complex family past. As Lucy discovers and explores the traces of her lineage00from an heirloom tapestry and dusty political tracts to a web of allusions depicted in stained-glass windows throughout upstate New York-the family story she has always known is shattered, Lucy's quest for the truth reconfigures her family's history, links her to a unique slice of the suffragette movement, and yields dramatic insights that embolden her to live freely.

With surprises at every turn, brimming with vibrant detail, The Lake of Dreams is an arresting saga in which every element emerges as a carefully place piece of the puzzle that's sure to enthrall the millions of readers who loved The Memory Keeper's Daughter.

Related Media:

About the Author: 

Kim Edwards grew up in Skaneateles, New York, in the heart of the Finger Lakes region. The oldest of four children, she graduated from Colgate University and the University of Iowa, where she received an MFA in Fiction and an MA in Linguistics. After completing her graduate work, she went with her husband to Asia, where they spent the next five years teaching, first on the rural east coast of Malaysia, then in a small city an hour south of Tokyo, and finally in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

During her time in Asia, Kim began to publish short fiction, and in 1990 her story “Sky Juice” won the Nelson Algren Award. Her stories and essays have since appeared in a wide range of periodicals, including Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Anteaus, Story, and The Paris Review. They have won many honors, including a National Magazine Award for Excellence in Fiction and a Pushcart Prize, as well as inclusion in The Best American Short Stories. Two of her stories have been performed at Symphony Space and broadcast on Public Radio International. Kim has also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kentucky Arts Council, among others. Her story collection The Secrets of a Fire King was short-listed for the 1998 Pen/Hemingway Award.

My Review:

I chose to read this Lake of Dreams, because of my love of Edward’s first book, Memory Keeper’s Daughter.   I found the writing to be very descriptive, which I really liked about this book.  The elements of nature within the book were very vivid in my mind.  I could feel the awe is spotting the white deer.  I felt the characters were well developed.  I liked the character of Lucy Jarrett, but did find her a bit self absorbed and driven.  I think my favorite character is Rose Jarrett, who you only get to know through the letters that are discovered that were written by this long lost relative.   My favorite quote from those letters is as follows:

“Do not act out of anger.  Act from love or not at all.”  (Lake of Dreams, Kim Edwards, page 273)

Wouldn’t it be a better world if we all could remember to act from love or not at all.  Great words to live by.  Throughout Lake of Dreams run the themes of family secrets, women suffrage movement, dreams, and sacrifice for the sake of love.  Rose Jarrett is such a strong and adventurous woman for her time.  I know I would not have had the strength she had to make the choices she did.  Lake of Dreams is an engaging read that moves along at a nice pace.   I found the ending to be very satisfying.  

My Rating: 3/5 – I would recommend this book to others, but didn’t find it keeping me up late to read more  

Other Bloggers Reviews:

Bibliophile by the Sea

The Book Chic

Fiction Addict

Cover Me

 

Happy Reading!

Beyond Words: New Weekly Feature

Beyond Words

I want to introduce you to a new weekly feature that will be appearing on Reading In White Bear Lake.  I am excited to add this weekly feature to my blog.   Beyond Words is a weekly feature that will build your vocabulary.  I find that since I am no longer in the academic world, I don’t take the time to learn new words.   If I do learn them, I quickly forget them.   I read voraciously, but find that I will skip over words that I am not familiar with.   Well, not anymore, Beyond Words will feature those words each week that I would normally skip right over.   I will post words that I come across in my weekly reading that I was previously unfamiliar with or unsure of their meaning.  

Why??   A wise mentor of mine once told me, “make the dictionary your friend”.   She believed that one true determination of level of success was your vocabulary.  A integral part of success is the ability to effectively communicate.   The other reason this idea has popped into my head is my children.   They both have great vocabularies beyond their years, but my youngest frequently asks me, “What does this word mean?”   I sometimes find it difficult to communicate the definition of a word I know in a manner he will understand.  This feature will give me practice in doing that.  This year my youngest has an amazing third grade teacher.  He uses vocabulary words at times that make me take a second listen! 

Remember…..you are never to old to learn!!   I love learning and reading, what better combination could there be.

The gift of using words best comes from knowing words
as intimately as you know your own family.
Lloyd Edwin Smith

 

New words to me this week:

Avaricious – (adj.) greedy of gain : excessively acquisitive especially in seeking to hoard riches
Listen to the audio pronunciation
Lake of Dreams by Kim Edwards (did not mark the page as I encountered this word before I can up with the idea for this feature!)

Insular – (adj.) characteristic of an isolated people; especially: being, having, or reflecting a narrow provincial viewpoint
Listen to the audio of pronunciation
page 278, Lake of Dreams by Kim Edwards
“His work had fallen out favor and he will not adopt the popular artistic fads, and so he was insular even before this loss.”

I hope you enjoy the addition of this feature to Reading In White Bear Lake.   I plan on adding a Mr. Linky or a similar application so you can share you newly discovered words with us each week as well.   I hope you will participate!

Happy Reading!