My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

Ree Dolly’s father has skipped bail on charges that he ran a crystal meth lab, and the Dollys will lose their house if he doesn’t show up for his next court date. With two young brothers depending on her, 16-year-old Ree knows she has to bring her father back, dead or alive. Living in the harsh poverty of the Ozarks, Ree learns quickly that asking questions of the rough Dolly clan can be a fatal mistake. But, as an unsettling revelation lurks, Ree discovers unforeseen depths in herself and in a family network that protects its own at any cost.

In Winter’s Bone, author Daniel Woodrell does an excellent job of making the reader feel that they are in the harsh Ozark winter right beside Ree with his beautifully worded descriptions of the setting. Ree’s character is tough and strong but she has a rarely shown soft side too. She was a wonderfully developed heroine in this book. I loved the dialogue in this book as well. The way the people spoke was almost poetic, even when it was also vulgar or threatening. An example (without the vulgarity) is Ree talking to her mom:

“You’re about to look peachy, Mom”
“Could I?”
“Yup. So peachy you’ll be feelin’ all strutty, probably start dancin’, kick your toes to the ceilin’.”

This book is short – 193 pages, which makes it even more intense. Ree is focused on finding her father and I was right there along with her every step of the way, my heart beating just as fast as hers.

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My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Being Lara is the story of Lara Reid, who was adopted from Nigeria at age 3 by a white couple. Growing up she always felt different. Her birth mother shows up unexpectedly to her thirtieth birthday party, which sends Lara into a tailspin. She’s forced to confront the abandonment and identity issues she’s been trying to repress all these years.

I’d like to get two big problems I had with this book out of the way. First – the cover. That is not a picture of a Nigerian girl. I don’t even think she’s a black girl period. She might bi-racial but the main character is not. Lara is born from native Nigerian parents. I think it’s sad that the publisher didn’t put a dark skinned black girl on the cover – where they worried that they wouldn’t sell as many books?

Second, there is a huge continuity error in the section about Lara’s thirtieth birthday party. Lara makes a huge deal about taking a taxi to her party from her apartment. Then when Lara leaves the party, she leaves in her own car. How she gets to and from the party is actually relevant to the plot so it was a jarring error; I’m not sure how that got past an editor.

Okay, now on to the actual book review. I chose this book because my husband and I (both white) are in the process of adopting an African American little girl which makes me very interested in reading stories about transracial adoption. This book definitely taught me what not to do! Lara’s parents didn’t handle her being adopted or of a different race than them very well at all in my opinion. They didn’t really acknowledge that she was adopted until she was eight years old and they never attempted to acquaint her with the culture and country she was born in. It’s no wonder she had issues.

This book alternates between the stories of Lara, her adoptive mom Trish, and her birth mom Yomi. Learning Trish and Yomi’s back stories helped me understand where their characters were coming from in the present day storyline dealing with Lara as an adult. Yomi’s story also taught me about life in Nigeria and some of their customs and food.

I felt that Lara’s issues were treated too simplistically in some ways. I felt like Lara should have struggled more and delved deeper into herself when her birth mother came to town. Things moved along rather quickly to be realistic.

Even though this review has some negative points, I did enjoy this book and I feel like I did learn more about transracial adoption from reading it.

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(I received this book courtesy of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.)

This is the discussion schedule:

• May 22th—Boy Next Door discussion on Book Club Girl
• June 12^th – Queen of Babble discussion on Book Club Girl
• July 3rd – Size 12 is Not Fat discussion on Book Club Girl
• July 10th -Size 12 and Ready to Rock goes on sale
• July 31st -Size 12 and Ready to Rock discussion on Book Club Girl on Air, post questions for Meg’s Book Club Girl On Air interview at 7PM

You can find more information and sign up yourself at Book Club Girl.

I had a great Mother’s Day. I was served a wonderful breakfast of cinnamon rolls, bacon and coffee in bed this morning. I think that if someone brought me a cup of coffee while I was still in bed every morning that I could become a morning person. It was so pleasant to drink coffee and read in bed before getting up to face the world.

At church we got to see West sing with the Children’s Choir. Look how dapper he is in his collared tie-dyed shirt:

After church, Travis, his sister and my brother made a wonderful Mediterranean meal for everyone, including both grandmas. I couldn’t have asked for a nicer day.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I remember hearing that Cybill Shepherd’s autobiography was a major tell-all when it was released back in 2000. I love celebrity gossip but somehow never got around to reading it so when it was offered as a free Kindle book last year I snagged it.

Cybill definitely tells all about her sexual escapades but didn’t tell very much about anything else. I would have liked to know more about the more personal aspects of her life. This book was basically, “Here is the project I worked on and who I slept with while I was working on it.” There was an extra big dose of ego throughout as well.

Another large part of the book was Cybill trying to disprove her difficult to work with reputation. I thought it was kind of funny – if almost everyone you work with has a problem with you, maybe you should look inward. Because the book came out right after the television series Cybill came out, Cybill spends a disproportionate amount of the book writing about that series and her conflicts with the network, director, and her costars.

I recommend this book to only the most die-hard US Weekly readers or Cybill Shepherd fans.

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Amazon Kindle Store (99 cents)

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Narcopolis opens in Bombay in the 1970s. The narrator is a frequent customer at an opium den that has an attached brothel. Dimple, a eunuch, works making pipes in the den and in the brothel. The den has other regular customers besides the narrator – artists, family men, and gangsters. Narcopolis follows these characters through the decades as opium gives way to heroin from Pakistan.

This book had a different style from most of the books I read. The writing is dreamily hazy – making the reader feel like what the people on drugs must feel like a lot of the time. The time-line was hard to keep straight and sometimes it took me a few sentences to figure out which character the author was writing about. I think this was purposeful though to achieve the drugged up atmosphere.

Narcopolis starts with a prologue that is one six and half page run-on sentence. This had me a little worried, if the whole book was written like that I wouldn’t have been able to handle it. Luckily, the rest of the book is not like that so don’t let the prologue scare you away.

The author is a poet and that comes through in his prose. He almost romanticizes the era of the opium den. When heroin is introduced to Bombay, everyone’s lives start to fall apart. It’s much more addictive and renders the user much less functional than opium. Everyone lives a life of melancholy and some live lives of total despair.

Narcopolis is not for everyone. If you enjoy poetry and character driven novels you will probably enjoy this book. If you like a straight forward, linear plot than this book might not be for you.

Thank you to TLC Book Tours for providing me with a copy of this book. Here are the other tour stops:

Tuesday, April 17th: The Year in Books
Wednesday, April 18th: Chunky Monkey
Thursday, April 19th: Unabridged Chick
Friday, April 20th: Raging Bibliomania
Monday, April 23rd: The Feminist Texican [Reads]
Thursday, April 26th: A Novel Source
Monday, April 30th: Conceptual Reception
Tuesday, May 1st: A Reader of Fictions
Thursday, May 3rd: Ted Lehmann’s Bluegrass, Books, and Brainstorms
Tuesday, May 8th: Beastmomma
Wednesday, May 9th: Reading on a Rainy Day
Thursday, May 10th: What She Read…
Monday, May 21st: Stiletto Storytime
Thursday, May 31st: Poet Hound

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

As university students in late 1970s Bombay, Armaiti, Laleh, Kavita, and Nishta were inseparable. Spirited and unconventional, they challenged authority and fought for a better world. But much has changed over the past thirty years. Following different paths, the quartet drifted apart, the day-to-day demands of work and family tempering the revolutionary fervor they once shared.

Then comes devastating news: Armaiti, who moved to America, is gravely ill and wants to see the old friends she left behind. For Laleh, reunion is a bittersweet reminder of unfulfilled dreams and unspoken guilt. For Kavita, it is an admission of forbidden passion. For Nishta, it is the promise of freedom from a bitter fundamentalist husband. And for Armaiti, it is an act of acceptance, of letting go on her own terms even if her ex-husband and daughter do not understand her choices.

In the course of their journey to reconnect, Armaiti, Laleh, Kavita, and Nishta must confront the truths of their lives—acknowledge long-held regrets, face painful secrets and hidden desires, and reconcile their idealistic past and their compromised present. And they will have to decide what matters most, a choice that may just help them reclaim the extraordinary world they once found.

Oh my, where do I start? I loved this book so much but I don’t want to gush too much and ruin the story for you. Ms. Umrigar is a master of character development. Each character was multidimensional. Nishta’s husband Iqbal is a Muslim fundamentalist and as a secondary character could have easily been portrayed as a stereotype. But even he has unexpected yet realistic motivations for his actions.

The relationship between the four women was wonderful and complex. The prose was beautifully descriptive. I loved everything about this book and I highly recommend it.

Buy this book at:
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(I received this book courtesy of the Amazon Vine program.)

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

Little Women begins the much-loved story of the March sisters:  Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. The girls grow up amidst the turmoils, adventures, and hardships of the American Civil War. There is Meg, the eldest, plump and fair; Jo, the tomboy who longs to be a writer and fights against the constraints of her sex; Beth, shy, timid, and delicate, who brings out the protective instinct in others; and Amy, the youngest and brightest and, at least in her own estimation, the most important. The household is presided over by Mrs. March, their “Marmee,” who tries to rule with kindness and to create harmony among her four little women.

I read Little Women as a girl and loved it so I was excited to have the opportunity to review an audio production of the book. However, I was quite surprised when the audio book abruptly ended in the middle of the story. I discovered that Little Women was originally two volumes: Little Women and Good Wives. They were first published together as one book titled Little Women in 1880. Most versions of Little Women published today are both volumes together in one book. This audio recording is just the first volume. Because what most people read as Little Women is actually both volumes, I feel like there should have been some indication on the box somewhere that this audio book does not include the second volume.

(I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who may not have read it yet so I’ll say this – remember the Friends episode when Rachel convinces Joey to read Little Women? And he has to put the book in the freezer because of one particularly sad part? This audiobook ends before that sad part happens.)

Even though this book was written more than one-hundred years ago, it still has relevance today. I think that the four March girls and Marmee have some good lessons to teach young girls that are timeless. Reading it now as a mother myself, I marveled at Marmee’s patience and wisdom. I could learn a lot from her! I was very impressed at how independent and free-thinking the girls and their mother were given the time period the book was written in and took place. (Of course, Louisa May Alcott was a Unitarian so I shouldn’t have been surprised at that.)

Lorelei King narrated this audio book. I thought she did a great job for the most part. The two voices I didn’t like were Beth and Amy’s. I thought Beth’s was too breathy and Amy’s was too babyish – they didn’t sound realistic to me. Overall, I enjoyed this audio production. My biggest complaint is that it left unexpectedly hanging at the end.

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Amazon

(I received this book courtesy of the Solid Gold Reviewers program at Audiobook Jukebox.)

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s description:

Following his celebrated debut novel, Mr. Peanut, Adam Ross presents a stunning collection of stories about brothers, loners, lovers, and young people navigating lives full of good intentions, misunderstandings, and obscured motives.

A hotshot young lawyer, burdened by years of guilt and resentment, comes to the aid of his irresponsible kid brother, only to realize he’s a pawn in a treacherous scheme. A lonely professor, frequently regaled with outrageous tales by the office handyman, suddenly fears he’s being asked to abet a murderous fugitive.  A man down on his luck closes in on a mysterious job offer while doing a good turn for his fragile neighbor, but his efforts backfire in a terrifically surreal – and hilarious – manner. And an enterprising adolescent uses his brief career as a child actor to fulfill the crush he has on a friend’s older sister.

Laced through with glimmers of redemption and a refreshing combination of warmth and cynicism, these noirish narratives have a youthful energy that belies their hard-won wisdom, and together they showcase one of our truly essential new writers.

I normally don’t care too much for short stories but I loved Adam Ross’s Mr. Peanut so much that I had to pick up his collection of short stories. These stories were haunting like Mr. Peanut. They reminded me of Twilight Zone episodes because most of them ended with a dark moral and seemed eerie. I enjoyed most of them but was left wanting more. I thought some of them ended too abruptly.

I may just not be a short story person and I also think I had my hopes up way too high for this collection after reading Mr. Peanut. I think that’s why I felt unsatisfied these stories. I think they were good, just not as good as Mr. Peanut. If you haven’t read either, read this one first so your expectations aren’t over the top like mine were.

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(I received this book courtesy of the Amazon Vine program.)

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Marguerite Argeneau is a vampire on her honeymoon with her new vampire husband Julius. When she runs into Carolyn Connor, a forty-something mortal, she knows she is the perfect life-mate for her son Christian. The problem is that even though Christian is 500 years old, he looks 25 and Carolyn doesn’t want to be perceived as a cougar. Christian’s cousin Gia comes up with a plan: Christian can pretend that he is gay and that his family would not approve if they knew. Gia asks Carolyn to be Christian’s beard so his family doesn’t suspect he’s gay. The hope is that after Carolyn gets to know Christian, he can reveal he is not gay and she won’t care about the age difference anymore. And then of course he also has to tell her he’s a vampire at some point as well.

Under a Vampire Moon is the sixteenth book in the Argeneau series. It’s the first book in the series that I’ve read but I had no trouble following the story. I wasn’t up to speed on all the vampire mythology but that wasn’t important to understanding what was happening. Actually, Christian and his relatives don’t act much like vampires, they could have very easily been regular humans without altering the story. They drink bagged blood and as long as they drink enough of it, they can go out in the daytime.

Carolyn can be very frustrating and dense. Towards the end, her history is revealed and it explains most of her behavior. Christian’s cousin Zanipolo is a minor character in this book who was charming and funny – I wish he would have been featured more. Even though the plot follows the typical trashy romance formula, it did manage to surprise me in the end. I knew there was something up with Carolyn’s best friend Bethany but what ended up happening with her was not what I was expecting.

Since this book is an Avon paperback, I knew it would not be a great work of literary fiction. But for what it is – a trashy romance novel – I thought it was a fun read. I enjoyed it but not so much that I feel like I need to read any of the other books in the series.

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Amazon Kindle Store

(I received this book courtesy of the Amazon Vine program.)