The Magicians by Lev Grossman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The Magicians has been touted as Harry Potter for grown-ups. I haven’t read Harry Potter (or even seen the movies!) so I can’t speak to how it compares to The Magicians.
Highly intelligent high school senior Quentin Coldwater loves to read and re-read a set of children’s fantasy novels to escape the boredom of his daily life. One day he stumbles upon the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy. He passes the rigorous entrance exams and begins his college education at Brakebills studying to be a REAL magician.
While at school he forms close friendships with a subset of students called the Physical Kids. They stick together after graduation, struggling to find their way in the world outside Brakebills. After making a surprising discovery, they decide to embark on a dangerous journey together.
This book and its characters were so dark and gloomy that I had a really hard time feeling connected to them. I thought Quentin especially was an ass and had a hard time sympathizing with him. The plot had enough action and suspense to keep my interest until the end; however I doubt I’ll read the second book in the series when it comes out. The moral of the story seemed to be, “Life sucks before you become a magician and it sucks after you become one too.”
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May 10th, 2011 in
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Today was wonderful! I started the day with my regular Sunday morning yoga class – a perfect way to start the day off on the right foot. When I got home the boys had pancakes and gifts waiting for me. Cash got me this pretty green jewelry set:
I think I look kind of like a crazy lady wearing all that jewelry with my workout clothes. After breakfast and gifts, I took a shower while West took a little snooze on the couch. He looks like a little caterpillar all cocooned up:
Travis made a delicious dinner of chicken and shrimp kabobs, his sister brought a yummy marble cake any my brother brought great appetizers. After dinner we continued our futile tradition of trying to get a mother’s day photo of the boys and me. (Previous Mother’s Day photos: 2008, 2009 and 2010) This was the worst year yet – they were so tired and slaphappy by the time we tried to take the picture. This is the first photo of the shoot. We should have quit while we were ahead.
You can’t tell but Cash is trying to squish my head with his in this photo.
This Easter we also celebrated my birthday and my mother-in-laws birthday because they were both within a few days of Easter. My mom brought my favorite birthday cake – strawberry. Cash claims not to like strawberry cake (impossible!) so I wanted to make a fun Easter dessert that he would like. I found the idea for these carrot garden beds in the April 2011 Family Fun magazine. They were quick and easy to put together and everyone at Easter dinner thought they were cute.
The Murderer’s Daughters by Randy Susan Meyers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
10 year old Lulu’s mother warns Lulu not to open the door to her estranged father and then retreats to her bedroom for a nap. Lulu’s father does indeed come over and convinces her to let him in. He then murderers Lulu’s mother and stabs her 5 year old sister Merry before trying to kill himself.
The girls are passed between relatives before ending up abandoned to a group home. This book follows their lives well into adulthood. One sister shuts out her father completely while the other keeps him in her life by visiting him in prison and writing letters.
This book explores the different ways that people respond to tragedy and how differently people choose to cope with the aftermath. The book alternates between Lulu and Merry’s point of view so the reader not only learns each sister’s point of view but also how each sister interprets the other’s actions. Both sisters were such well-developed characters that the directions their lives took was unpredictable yet realistic at the same time. They were both relatable and frustrating at times.
This was a wonderful debut novel from Randy Susan Meyers. I can’t wait to read whatever she writes next.
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(I received this book courtesy of the publisher and the GoodReads FirstReads program.)
April 27th, 2011 in
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April 24th, 2011 in
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Copper Sun by Sharon M. Draper
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Copper Sun is the story Amari, a fifteen year old African girl in the early 1700s. Slave traders raid her village, kill her family and capture Amari. After a harrowing journey across the ocean on a slave ship, she arrives in the Carolinas where she is purchased by a cruel plantation owner as a present for his sixteen year old son.
On the plantation she makes friends with Polly, a white, fifteen year old indentured servant. One day a chance opens up for Polly and Amari to escape the plantation and they take it. They hope to make it to the Spanish colony of Fort Mose, Florida but the journey is a long and perilous one.
This book is written for high school students but it doesn’t sugar coat the harsh reality of the time at all. It’s even brave enough to acknowledge that female slaves were raped by their owners but the concept is presented in a manner that’s appropriate for the intended audience. This was a hard read – the way slaves were treated was simply horrible. It’s so realistic – no matter how well things are going for Amari, she longs to go back to living with her family in Africa. (I detest stories about this time period that suppose that slaves who had kindly plantation owners didn’t have that bad of a life.) The author did extensive research to write this book and although fiction, it’s historically accurate as to what kinds of things were happening during the time period.
This book is a Coretta Scott King Award winner which is an award that recognizes outstanding African American authors and illustrators. It’s awarded for young adult and children’s books about the African American experience. Even though the subject matter was tough, I loved this book and I could not put it down.
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The Liberation of Alice Love by Abby McDonald
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Alice Love is a lawyer at a talent agency who keeps her life in perfect order. When she becomes a victim of identity theft, her life is suddenly thrown into chaos. To make matters worse, the perpetrator is someone Alice had thought was a close friend. Feeling betrayed and depressed, Alice is determined to hunt down the identity thief and uncover the reasons behind why she was the thief’s target. She has help from a charming fraud investigator along the way.
I liked this book a lot. It was refreshing to read a British chick-lit book that had an intelligent heroine that I didn’t want to strangle for most of the book (unlike Shopaholic, etc.). As Alice goes further down the path looking for the thief and realizes what a seemingly carefree life the thief lives; Alice goes through a personal journey of self-discovery, reevaluating her life choices. This book is fun but it also raises some interesting moral questions about truth and lies. Is it okay to lie in pursuit of the truth? In some cases, do the ends justify the means?
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(I received this book courtesy of the publisher and the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.)
April 14th, 2011 in
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Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Freedom is the story of Patty and Walter Bergland, suburbanites living in St. Paul, Minnesota with their two teenage children, Joey and Jessica. Their life is not even close to as perfect as it seems to outsiders. Patty is depressed and dissatisfied with her life with Walter. As part of her therapy, Patty writes her autobiography, detailing the sexual assault she suffered in high school and her life in college as a star athlete where she met Walter and his best friend Richard the rock star. The Walter/Patty/Richard love triangle starts in college and continues throughout the rest of their lives in the book.
This book was a chore to get through. All of the characters had such bleak lives with no fun or happiness in them at all. I don’t mind reading about characters with sad lives but I found it unrealistic that every character in this book had basically joyless lives and no redeeming qualities. I also found the political messages in the book very heavy handed even though I agreed with most of them. The flow of the story was interrupted with editorial style political commentary.
I really liked The Corrections when I read it nine years ago so I had high hopes for Freedom. Unfortunately, it just didn’t measure up.
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April 12th, 2011 in
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