Review: Mrs. Whippy by Cecelia Ahern

Title: Mrs. Whippy
Author: Cecelia Ahern
Category: fiction
Publisher: Whole Story Audio Books, 2008
Page count: NA; audio read by Marcella Riordan
Source: my library
Star rating: 2 out of 5

Not much to say about this. It’s barely a novella, more like a short story. The audio version isn’t even an hour long, and I listened to it driving to and from the movies one day! Still, it’s classified as a book, so it counts.

Emelda is 46 and is just ending a bad 25-year marriage to Charlie, with whom she has five sons who worship their father. Emelda has gained a lot of weight and really “let herself go,” and she’s allowed Charlie to treat her horribly during the end of their marriage.

Emelda does what a lot of women do during times of stress: She turns to ice cream. The descriptions of her experiences with ice cream are evocative and deliciously-written. And when she meets and (very quickly) falls in love with the neighborhood ice cream truck man, Mr. Whippy, her excitement is palpable.

I gave this novella two stars only because I wanted more. This would have made a fabulous full-length novel. I wanted more about Emelda and the man who mends her heart, and I certainly wanted more lovely descriptions of ice cream! I enjoyed this story, but can’t rate it higher, because it just ended too abruptly.

Review: A Billion Reasons Why by Kristin Billerbeck

Title: A Billion Reasons Why
Author: Kristin Billerbeck
Category: Christian chick-lit
Publisher: Thomas Nelson, February 2011
Page count: 299
Source: ARC from the publisher
Star rating: 2 out of 5

I tried so hard to like this book. Honestly, I did.

Katie McKenna is from New Orleans and has lived in California for a number of years. She’s a school teacher, and one day her ex, Luc DeForges, shows up at school and whisks her away (literally) to sing in his brother’s wedding back home in New Orleans. Katie tries to resist him, but Luc eventually wins her back, and then it’s happily ever after with a totally implausible surprise wedding at the end. There’s also a lot of strange stuff about Katie’s father’s death, and weirdly stereotypical New Orleanians. It’s a hot mess of plodding confusion, honestly.

There are so many (a billion?) reasons why Christian fiction gets on my nerves and makes my skin crawl. As a rule, I don’t read it, and this book reminded me why. It’s full of cliches. The characters are unbelievable. The action is so ridiculous, but presented as the norm. Christians should be making the very best art, not this stuff that gets published no matter how bad it is.

A few things bothered me about the author’s characterization of New Orleans. Billerbeck is from northern California, and much of the New Orleans in her story seems to be culled from Wikipedia. For example, Katie is from the Irish Channel neighborhood. Yes, the neighborhood gets its name from the 19th Century Irish immigrants who settled there, but that doesn’t mean that Katie’s father would have spoken with an Irish brogue. Billerbeck seems to have completely glossed over the fact that today, the neighborhood is poor and mostly populated by African-Americans, not first-generation Irish immigrants yearning for the homeland. Also, Katie loves the 1940s and swing/big band music, which Billerbeck apparently thinks is a major facet of New Orleans’ musical history. What a lost opportunity. Instead of teaching readers about jazz, Billerbeck confuses it with swing and entirely misses the mark. I wonder if the author has ever even visited New Orleans, honestly. The way she’s written the city is just bizarre. Authors, do not write of what you do not know. Please.

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This book was provided free to me by Thomas Nelson through its BookSneeze program for book bloggers. While it was provided to me with the expectation of a review, all opinions are mine and are not influenced by the publisher or by BookSneeze.

Review: Matched by Ally Condie

Title: Matched
Author: Ally Condie
Category: YA
Publisher: Dutton, 2010
Page count: 366
Source: my library
Star rating: 5 out of 5

Wow, there’s so much to say about this book! First, a brief synopsis. Cassia and her family are part of the Society, a far-in-the-future country made up of various provinces. The Society is all about conformity. People’s jobs, where they live, even how many calories they consume in each meal, are all chosen for them. Spouses are chosen, too, in a Matching Banquet. Cassia is turning 17, and her time has come to be Matched with the boy who will become her husband at 21. She is surprised but pleased to see the face that appears on the giant view screen at her Banquet. But the next day, when she looks at the Society’s information about her Match, she sees another face flash on the screen for a brief moment. What follows is a slow, boiling desire for change, for beauty, and for following one’s one wishes for life. Cassia is caught between loving two boys and living in terror of what will happen if the Society finds out.

In general I’m not a fan of dystopian fiction, because I’m not a fan of violence, which most of the genre seems full of. But Matched is different. There’s no “seen” violence, only some implied. I found myself greatly enjoying the world and the story because I wasn’t cringing from all the gore, as I was throughout this book’s most notable comparison, the Hunger Games trilogy. And while I never once believed the love story in those books, I believe it fully in this one and can’t wait to find out what happens next. I was, after all, a total sucker for the Twilight saga. There’s plenty of angsty teenage love there, and here. I can’t get enough.

The classic Dylan Thomas poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” features prominently in the book, in a beautiful and heartbreaking way. Condie treats the word “gentle” as “gently,” which is, I suppose, how most people read it. But I was taught in my excellent literary criticism class in college that “gentle” is short for “gentleman,” and was addressed to Thomas’ dying father. That reading makes more sense to me, and I can’t really wrap my head around reading “gentle” as “gently.” I had to set aside my own thoughts about the poem and let myself read it Condie’s way.

I do have a quibble which I find in almost every YA book I read. It doesn’t usually bother me, but it did in this book, probably because of the first person present narrative (which I love): the author, and apparently her editor and copy editors, have a serious problem with subject/verb agreement. A singular subject requires a singular verb! That little problem aside – which was big enough for this grammar nerd to notice it – this is a fantastic book. I’m eager for more.

Review: It’s Raining Cupcakes by Lisa Schroeder

Title: It’s Raining Cupcakes
Author: Lisa Schroeder
Category: middle grades
Publisher: Scholastic, 2010
Page count: 180
Source: Scholastic book fair at a friend’s son’s school
Star rating: 2 out of 5

Okay, I’ve come to a realization: I don’t like middle grades books. They’re just not my style. I don’t really care for the pace (rushed), the tone (simple), or, in general, the subject matter. I’m sure they’re well-written and kids in the target age range love them. And that’s great. But I don’t care for them. I dislike this book for those reasons and more.

In this story, Isabel’s mother and father decide to move out of their home and into an apartment over an old Laundromat. Isabel’s mother, who seems non-committal and scatter-brained, has decided on a whim that she wants to open a cupcake bakery. Isabel learns of a baking contest for kids and decides to enter, but is nearly eaten up with the fact that she doesn’t want to make a cupcake, but a tart instead. And her mother, who should be supportive of her daughter’s wishes, instead gets hurt, angry, and childish in reaction. I felt squeamish through the whole thing because the mother clearly suffers from severe depression with manic bursts of happiness, but instead of addressing that issue, Schroeder just has her characters – Isabel, her father, and her grandmother – basically just tell the mom to get over herself and be happy. And Isabel is a bit of a selfish brat and blames all her own problems on her mother.

Maybe the author never wanted this book to be issue-oriented, but it seems she missed a great opportunity for kids who read the book and have a parent who’s depressed. Lots of “me, too” moments and lessons were lost in the mother’s depressed fog, Isabel’s selfishness, and the father’s apparent complete cluelessness.

Maybe it’s just a kids’ book and I’m reading too much into things, but as a mom and a former teacher, it matters to me what kids read. Would I let my middle school-aged daughter read this (if I had one, of course!)? Probably not, unless she and I spent some serious time discussing what clinical depression is and how not to react to it.

Flash of Light!

WOW!!!

Around 8:50 p.m. CST, I was talking with my  husband, who’d just returned from his Bible study. I saw a bright flash of light, bluish-white, like a VERY bright camera flash. There was no sound. I immediately stopped our conversation to ask if he’d seen it. He hadn’t, because he was facing away from our front windows. The blinds were open and I was facing them, so I got to see the cool event! I looked at weather.com on my laptop and saw that we had a cloudless night, so it couldn’t have been lightning.

Right away, Twitter blew up with the #flashoflight hash tag, with people all over Mississippi reporting the sighting. And then folks in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida and North Carolina reported it, too. Some people said they heard a boom, most didn’t. And then the rumors flew of something hitting the ground in Covington County, MS, or a remote area of Oklahoma. Meteorologists said it could be a meteor fragment, no larger than a pebble, but was probably an asteroid, since five are coming close to Earth this week. This photo was posted on an Oklahoma web site.

Jokes flew on Twitter about aliens, Alf, Doc Brown’s DeLorean returning from 1955, rednecks spotlighting in the woods, and on and on. It was all funny, but the only thing I could think of was this:

The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Psalm 19:1

I’m amazed by events like this and am always in awe of Creation and what the Lord does with it! He is so worthy of praise that even the sky displays its beauty in praise of Him! Incredible!

Hide yo bread, hide yo milk!

I don’t know who these two ladies are. This is from an Alabama TV stations web site. But isn’t this just hilarious? When I saw it, I laughed so hard I snorted, and then I laughed some more! I love it!

Review: Digging Up Trouble by Heather Webber

Title: Digging Up Trouble (Nina Quinn #3)
Author: Heather Webber
Category: cozy mystery
Publisher: Avon, 2006
Page count: 240
Source: Paperback Swap
Star rating: 3 out of 5

Nina Quinn’s business, Taken By Surprise garden designs, is booming. Her love life with cute assistant principal, Bobby, is heating up. Her divorce from cheating husband, Kevin, is almost final. Things are going well for Nina, but in her typical fashion, she manages to get in the way of a crime yet again!

This story centers on a man quite literally dropping dead of shock when he discovers Nina’s makeover of his back yard. But from there unfolds a twisting and sometimes confusing story of blackmail, drugs, and nosy neighbors.

I enjoyed this story, but probably the least of all Webber’s books. It was hard to keep the characters straight, because there were so many of them! Still, she’s my favorite writer (along with Jen Lancaster!) and her characters and sense of place are so inviting that I’ll never stop going back for more!

NOTE: This is the first book I’ve completed in the Off the Shelf reading challenge!

Review: Winston Churchill by John Perry

Title: Winston Churchill
Author: John Perry
Category: biography
Publisher: Thomas Nelson, 2010
Page count:158
Source: Review copy from the publisher
Star rating: 4 out of 5

This little book is a condensation of historian John Perry’s larger work on Winston Churchill, a towering figure not only in English history, but in worldwide history.  We all know the face and voice of the man who looked a bit like a bulldog, and his most well-known quotes and speeches are recognizable by even the most novice history buffs, but what was behind the public figure, and what made him the man who guided England through some of its darkest days?

Perry begins early in Churchill’s life and details how Churchill loved and nearly idolized his parents, who were not as nurturing as parents should be. His nanny was much more influential and more of a mother to him, and she deserves a great deal of credit for the man Churchill would become.

We see throughout the book that Churchill could be haughty, arrogant and self-centered, believing he was set apart by God to do “the Lord’s work.” Whether Churchill was ever truly saved is still a mystery, and while he said many of the “right” things, it’d doubtful any historian can give hard and fast evidence for his salvation.

Whether Churchill was saved or not, one thing is certain: he was clearly, as he said, spared and set apart for a reason. His contributions to English history, and to the state of the world during and after World War II, cannot be downplayed. Christian or not, he had a large measure of grace to accomplish his work. This book makes that clear, even if it reaches a bit and tries to finesse Churchill’s incomplete belief system into a Christian worldview.

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This book was provided free to me by Thomas Nelson through its BookSneeze program for book bloggers. While it was provided to me with the expectation of a review, all opinions are mine and are not influenced by the publisher or by BookSneeze.

Pretty Little Liars

Oh boy, oh boy, do I love this show!

And it’s back tonight on ABC Family! I haven’t read the books by Sara Shepard, but the TV show is my total guilty pleasure. I can’t wait!!

Do you have any guilty pleasure TV shows? Come on, be honest!

Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

Title: Anna and the French Kiss
Author: Stephanie Perkins
Category: YA
Publisher: Dutton, December 2010 (hardcover)
Page count: 372
Source: Purchased by me
Star rating: 5+++ out of 5

I’m writing this as I’ve just finished the book, and I still have traces of tears in my eyes and on my cheeks. This book is utterly perfect. It’s the best young adult novel I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of them. It just couldn’t be better.

Anna is looking forward to her senior year at her Atlanta high school. Her best friend, Bridgette, will be there, and she’s got a fighting chance with her huge crush, Toph. But her father, a best-selling novelist, sends her away to boarding school, and Anna thinks her life is over. Despite her new school being in Paris, of all ridiculously wonderful places, it’s not what she wants, and she resists it.

Thankfully, Anna quickly makes friends with Mer, Josh, and Rashmi. And then there’s St. Clair. He’s an American-born French boy with an English accent, and he’s kind of perfect. I can’t say more, because I don’t want to give away the tiniest morsel to anyone who hasn’t read the book, but yeah. He’s pretty perfect.

This book debuted early in December 2010, but I think it’s going to be the book of the year in 2011. It’ll be that “Have you read this? You HAVE to read this!” book that people pass on to friends and nudge strangers about in book stores. I usually sell or trade all my books on Paperback Swap, but not this one. This one’s going in my permanent collection, and it’s just totally fitting that it’ll go right next to Diana Peterfreund’s Secret Society Girl series, because those are the only other books that have made me laugh, cry, ache, and tell everyone, friends and random strangers alike, that they HAVE to read this. Just have to.