Candy's Raves (and Rants)

I actually heard about this book from the author. On my MySpace page, I have Frank McCourt as one of the people I’d like to meet. Apparently, the author is a former student of Mr. McCourt (how cool is that?). Anyway, she left a comment, I looked at her MySpace and picked up her book to read. Of course, I’m just now getting around to reading it!

First, let me get this out of my system — I hate when authors don’t use their real name. I could understand if this book was some sort of expose of the industry the author is in, but it’s not. So it irritates me. Apparently, the author uses a fake name because she’s some important person in the entertainment industry. Whatever. I can forgive it though because I wouldn’t know this if I hadn’t visited her website – http://www.juliaholden.com

Now, then… the book.

I knew I’d like it when the word bumf*(k showed up twice on the first page. I grew up there, so I so totally know exactly where that is. *laugh*

I loved the conversational tone of the book. I felt like I was sitting down having coffee with a good friend of mine, listening to her tell me this amazing story. For the first few chapters, it drove me nuts, but once I got used to it, I really enjoyed this type of “voice”.

The story is completely and utterly superficial. It’s about a dress, people. (Okay, more than that, but really, it’s a dress). It’s about a dress and clothing. If you are looking for something deep, this isn’t the book for you.

I really wish the author had wrapped up the grandma and Paris story though. Oh, I know, blah blah blah… but I really wanted to know what good old grandma was up to in that dress in Paris!

Paris! Oh, I’m jealous. I’ve always wanted to visit Paris. The author does an amazingly good job of making Paris a character in the book. Well done!

The main character… oh man. What a twit. I spent a good deal of time wanting to reach through the pages of the book and give her a shake, a smack, or something. The story is far-fetched, the plot is very much unrealistic, but you know what… it doesn’t matter. It was a great story, a great break from reality and I enjoyed the heck out of it. Give this new author a try… maybe eventually she’ll come out of the closet :p

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From the Publisher

What do you wear to change your life?

If there’s one dress that could make Jane Stuart think that anything is possible, it’s her late grandmother’s vintage 1920s Parisian dress. And when the dress becomes her ticket out of Kirland, Indiana, Jane takes her first tentative steps on her own reckless, passionate, and oh-so-dangerous adventure…

This movie was disappointing. The cast was amazing and did a good job, but the screen writers should have stuck with a documentary instead of turning it into a drama. It did not do the book justice. The slaughterhouse scenes were nasty, but were much more graphic (and got the point across better) in the book. Don’t waste your time, read the book.

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Movie Description:
Richard Linklater’s fictional tale (inspired by Eric Schlosser’s 2001 book of the same name) critiques the junk-food juggernaut that’s arguably responsible for America’s alarming obesity rates. Don Henderson (Greg Kinnear), a corporate exec of a national fast-food chain, follows beef’s journey from the corrals to the slaughterhouses and ultimately to your stomach. The power cast includes Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette and Bruce Willis.

Very interesting, one of the few books I found myself arguing with the author simply because the premise seems so ludicrous, but you have to admit, he makes, as sad as it is, a lot of sense. I also like that he gave the “exception to the rule” at the end, made me feel a little validated for reading to my kids every single night *laugh*

A book from a different perspective, everyone should read it.

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FROM THE PUBLISHER
Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime?These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much heralded scholar who studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life — from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing — and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives — how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of … well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan. What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and — if the right questions are asked — is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed thinking, shows how to see through all the clutter. Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.

Eh… I’m glad this wasn’t my first Picoult book, it may have been my last. I thought it dragged a lot, I really didn’t like any of the characters and it just kind of “was”. Most interesting thing about it was the whale stuff

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FROM THE PUBLISHER
Jodi Picoult’s powerful novel portrays an emotionally charged marriage that changes course in one explosive moment….For years, Jane Jones has lived in the shadow of her husband, renowned San Diego oceanographer Oliver Jones. But during an escalating argument, Jane turns on him with an alarming volitility. In anger and fear, Jane leaves with their teenage daughter, Rebecca, for a cross-country odyssey charted by letters from her brother Joley, guiding them to his Massachusetts apple farm, where surprising self-discoveries await. Now Oliver, an expert at tracking humpback wales across vast oceans, will search for his wife across a continent—and find a new way to see the world, his family, and himself: through her eyes.

I could have done without some of the “prose” and “fancy writing” *laugh* but the story is fascinating. He never comes out and gives a word to the mental illness his father surely has, and to me, he didn’t come out as being very sympathetic to his father either. But. I thought about it for a while after I finished this. Would I? Would I be sympathetic to a man I hardly knew who ranted and raved randomly? I finished this a few days ago and I’m not sure if I liked the book. It was well written, but it left me feeling very empty, unresolved. I cannot find the line in the book, but the author says something about the book his father was to write and that perhaps HE is writing the book for his father, I found that interesting because while the author is not homeless, he seems to be as lost and falling into bad habits as his father did, the addictive personalities of families.

Oh, I don’t know. Anyone else out there read it? I’m just not sure what I thought of this at the end of the day. Read the Q&A with the author in the back too… that was interesting as well.

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From the Publisher
“Sometimes I’d see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. But if I let him inside the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up.”

Nick Flynn met his father for the third time when he was twenty-seven years old, working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he’d received letters from this stranger, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Nick, his own life precariously unsettled, was living alternately in a ramshackle boat and in a warehouse that was once a strip joint. In bold, dazzling prose, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (a phrase Flynn senior uses to describe his life on the streets) tells the story of two lives and the trajectory that led Nick and his father into that homeless shelter, onto those streets, and finally to each other.

This was a very well done book, a must for anyone with a child that needs help explaining what is happening with grandma/grandpa and Alzheimer’s. Well presented and beautifully illustrated. Well done, Ms. Schnurbush.

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Book Description
Libby likes to do various everyday jobs with Nana, such as planting flowers and feeding the birds. One day, Libby’s mom notices that Nana’s clothes don’t match—she’s wearing striped shirts and flowered pants. Libby likes to wear her favorite blue striped shirt and orange flowered pants, too, so she doesn’t think Nana has made a mistake. But when Nana forgets the name of her favorite bird and how to say some words in one of Libby’s books, Libby becomes afraid that Nana is very sick. Libby’s parents explain that Nana has Alzheimer’s disease and doctors can’t fix it like they can fix a broken arm. They tell Libby that Nana might even have to come live with their family or be attended to by a nurse at some point. Libby’s parents also explain that Nana may have mood spells—she might be very happy one minute and very angry the next. Libby realizes that she can do many things to help Nana on her own, like giving her big hugs and planting flowers and listening to birds just like before. It’s okay if sometimes both Libby and Nana both wear striped shirts and flowered pants.

I dunno if I liked this or not. The story was pretty good, but it was… well… complicated. I felt like I needed a road map to follow the story, it felt disjointed, like it was everywhere all at once. I didn’t like that it didn’t let you in on parts that would have helped the story along until the last quarter of the book. A very unsatisfying read.

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From the Publisher
In this stunning coming-of-age novel, award-winner Miriam Toews balances grief and hope in the voice of a witty, beleaguered teenager whose family is shattered by fundamentalist Christianity

“Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing,” Nomi Nickel tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have disappeared and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village. Not the East Village in New York City where Nomi would prefer to live, but an oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada.

This darkly funny novel is the world according to the unforgettable Nomi, a bewildered and wry sixteen-year-old trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion and in the shattered remains of a family it destroyed. In Nomi’s droll, refreshing voice, we’re told the story of an eccentric, loving family that falls apart as each member lands on a collision course with the only community any of them have ever known. A work of fierce humor and tragedy by a writer who has taken the American market by storm, this searing, tender, comic testament to family love will break your heart.

I found this one kind of funny, but more than that, it was a really well done storyline. I found myself rooting for Dena, hoping she’d find her way into her life, her character felt so empty for the vast majority of the book, it was sad really. Fannie Flagg is a most excellent writer, her characters jump off of the page at you. While Dena was meeting with Tennesee Williams, I could smell the ocean air of New Orleans and hear him talking… very well done. Definitely worth a read!

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FROM THE PUBLISHER
Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! is the funny, serious, and compelling new novel by Fannie Flagg, author of the beloved Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (and prize-winning co-writer of the classic movie).

Once again, Flagg’s humor and respect and affection for her characters shine forth. Many inhabit small-town or suburban America. But this time, her heroine is urban: a brainy, beautiful, and ambitious rising star of 1970s television. Dena Nordstrom, pride of the network, is a woman whose future is full of promise, her present rich with complications, and her past marked by mystery.

I absolutely love the narrator for these books. She does an amazing job — for her alone, I will be purchasing the next one to listen to. The story is, of course, fun, silly, adventurous, etc etc. You can’t help but laugh AND be entertained. This is a great series!

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From the Publisher
The author of The Secret History of the Pink Carnation continues the romantic adventures of England’s greatest spy with a newly arrived adversary from France, the murderous Black Tulip.

The Pink Carnation, history’s most elusive spy and England’s only hope for preventing a Napoleonic invasion, returns in Lauren Willig’s dazzling imaginative new historical romance. The Masque of the Black Tulip opens with the murder of a courier from the London War Office, his confidential dispatch for the Pink Carnation stolen. Meanwhile, the Black Tulip, France’s deadliest spy, is in England with instructions to track down and kill the Pink Carnation. Only Henrietta Uppington and Miles Dorrington know where the Pink Carnation is stationed. Using a secret code book, Henrietta has deciphered a message detailing the threat of the Black Tulip. Meanwhile, the War Office has enlisted Miles to track down the notorious French spy before he (or she) can finish the deadly mission. But what Henrietta and Miles don’t know is that while they are trying to find the Black Tulip (and possibly falling in love), the Black Tulip is watching them.

Oh for the lurrrvvvee of my sanity, Georgia… GO OUT WITH DAVE. It’s been SEVEN – count ‘em sweetheart – SEVEN – books. Get a grip, girl. Still really cute though

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From the Publisher
On the rack of romance. And also in the oven of luuurve. And possibly on my way to the bakery of pain. And maybe even going to stop along the way to get a little cake at the cakeshop of agony. Shut up, brain, shut up. Georgia is in quite a predicament. Dave the Laugh has declared his love for her (at least she thinks he was talking about her), leaving her in a state of confusiosity. And then when she finally decides to give Masimo an ultimatum — to be her one and only — he tells her he needs to think about it. To distract herself from her romantic woes, Georgia throws herself into Mac-Useless play rehearsals and planning a Viking wedding, and tries to avoid all thoughts of boy decoys, Italian-American dreamboats . . . and let’s not forget guitar-plucking Sex Gods!