Blackwood

Blackwood, by Gwenda Bond.

Phillips wanted to tell her that she never had to do anything for the people she was talking about, that they didn't deserve her consideration. His gram's words stopped him. His family was sworn to protect the island, and that meant the people who lived on it too. His mother and father were among that number. No one deserved to have their life hijacked by alchemists from beyond the grave.

I was recently told of a site called NetGalley, and this is the first galley I received from the site. Blackwood is loosely based on the Roanoke Island incidents, where colonists randomly disappeared, and now the same thing has happened in present day. Miranda's father is one of the missing, but when the missing people return, they find him murdered in an alleyway. Miranda and her friend Phillips, returned from boarding school because of the incident, must find out what happened to him, and also deal with some freaky stuff that's happening at the same time to the townspeople.

I don't know much about the Roanoke incident but this book was interesting. Miranda has never been able to leave the island, and she never knew why, until now; at the same time, Phillips never knew why he used to hear voices in his head - the reason he left the island and went to boarding school in Kentucky, where the voices have been silenced. The townspeople put on a play each year about the incident, which is why Miranda has some knowledge of the events, and what happens in present-day on Roanoke is eerily similar to the play.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Blackwood will be in stores on September 4, 2012.

*Disclosure: I received a galley of this book from NetGalley to review. The opinions expressed, however, are my own.

Read More

I Never Promised You a Goody Bag

I Never Promised You a Goody Bag: A Memoir of Life Through Events - the Ones You Plan and the Ones You Don't, by Jennifer Gilbert.

I lived on the energy output of my pure defiance. No longer was I the dimply, happy-go-lucky nice girl from the suburbs. No longer was I the messy procrastinator who flew by the seat of her pants. No longer did I take it as an article of faith that everything would be fine. The new Jen didn't take anything for granted. I was fierce and on top of things - I was type A-plus-plus. I faced down all opposition - the attacker and anyone else in the world who tried to tell me that I couldn't do everything that I set my mind to. I looked them all in the eye, I thrust my shoulders back, and I said, You picked the wrong girl.

I Never Promised You a Goody Bag is about Jennifer Gilbert, who lived a relatively normal life until she was 22 years old. She had just returned from London, and was trying to make a new life for herself in NYC, when she went to visit a friend. She accidentally got off at the wrong subway stop, and she backtracked until she found her friend's apartment building. While ringing the doorbell, she saw a 250-pound man coming down the hall towards her, and he started to attack her with a screwdriver. Her friend opened the door and saw this happening, and immediately closed it and got help.

Later, she was to find out that the man had followed her from the subway, and had targeted her to attack; as to why, she did not know. He was later convicted of attempted murder and sent to jail, but it took Jennifer a long time to recover from both the wounds and the mental pain of being targeted and attacked like that.

Meanwhile, she was running her own party planning business in NYC, called Save The Date, and she put on a mask and rarely told any of her friends or employees about the attack. She thought this is what it would take for her to get past it.

This story had many layers and kept me interested until the very end. Jennifer details her life pre- and post-attack, and said how her relationships with her family and friends changed afterwards. She also talks about her company, what it was like to date and trust men after the attack, and who she eventually ended up with and the three children they now have together. The title of the book, too, is very apropos to both her party planning business and life in general - life is hard and there are lots of obstacles to overcome, i.e., a "goody bag" is never promised.

4 stars out of 5.

*Disclosure: I was provided a copy of this book to review. The opinions expressed here, however, are my own.

Read More

Kingdom Keepers V: Shell Game

Kingdom Keepers V: Shell Game, by Ridley Pearson.

Finn wasn't about to get back to sleep. He tiptoed into the kitchen and made himself a strong cup of tea to help him stay awake. Tiptoed because he didn't want to wake his supportive mother or his doubting father; didn't want to hear them bicker about how to deal with their oddball son who claimed to travel into other worlds at night. His mother knew the truth. A scientist by training, she'd put together enough empirical evidence to convince herself. Finn's father was the exact opposite. He believed his son hormonally imbalanced, "poisoned by puberty," he called it. He wanted Finn to see a counselor - a shrink - to exorcise whatever demons possessed his son into convincing himself that he could wake as a hologram in another world where evil witches vied for control of an amusement park.

I had never heard of the Kingdom Keepers series before reading this book, but the concept behind it is quite interesting. All of the Disney witches and evil characters of lore become real at night, and they are trying to destroy the Disney parks; it is up to Finn and his friends, as DHIs, to protect the parks. To protect themselves from harm, they enter the parks as holograms - so that their actual bodies are safe in their beds. With the new advanced 2.0 program, they are able to use this even more to their advantage, and the only way they themselves can be harmed is if they become fearful, turning their bodies real again.

Crazy concept, right? But it works, as you can see, because this is the fifth book in the series. I had not read any of the previous books, so I liked that the novel explained a bit about the DHI concept to its new readers, as the excerpt at the top shows, although I've heard that to fully appreciate this book, you should really start from the beginning of the series. This end of this novel, too, definitely sets up a sixth book, which was a little disappointing because the book ended so abruptly, with the DHIs on board the Disney Dream cruise ship fighting the Overtakers, the evil Disney characters that come to life at night. With real people dressed up as the characters aboard the ship too, it is often hard for the DHIs to tell the people from the villains, though it's of course the villains that try to harm or kill the DHIs.

Shell Game clocks in at a lengthy 544 pages, so I'm not sure if I will be reading the full series soon (the first book is about 350 pages as well, according to Amazon), but if I ever have more free time, I may return to the series.

3.5 stars out of 5.

*Disclosure: I was provided with a copy of this book to review. The opinions expressed, however, are my own.

Read More

The Rock Star's Daughter

The Rock Star's Daughter, by Caitlyn Duffy.

Having a mother who has one foot in the entertainment industry and spends the majority of her time milling around the house and ordering stuff on QVC isn't really that rare for Los Angeles. But I would consider my life to be abnormal because of my dad.

My biological father is a rock star.

We recently got a Kindle Fire for my family (my dad actually won it), and although I'm sort of "against" e-readers - I find having a "real" book while I read to be much nicer, though for people that travel/commute a lot an e-reader is nice to have - one of the first things I did when we got the Fire was log on to the Amazon bookstore to see if I could find any free books. One of the first ones I found was this one, and I soon found myself hooked and wanting to see what happens to the main character, Taylor.

Taylor's dad is Chase Atwood, one of the most famous musicians in the world. However, she doesn't know him very well, because she lives with her mother in L.A., and his home base is New Jersey. When her mom dies of an overdose, though, he is the closest thing she has to family, and she gets to tour with the band over the summer. She also gets to know Jill, her stepmom, and Kelsey, her young half-sister, better, and eventually they start to grow on her. Taylor also meets Jake, whose mom is a groupie, and starts to hang out with him more and more as well.

This book is the first book in the Treadwell series (Treadwell being the name of Taylor's prestigious boarding school in Massachusetts that she attends), and it's currently FREE (e-version for Kindle) on Amazon. The second book in the series, which follows a different Treadwell girl, is called The Believer's Daughter and Amazon has it for $1.99, so I might "invest" in that at some point too.

I liked this novel a lot. My only complaint is that towards the end, it started to wander a bit, but you could chalk this up to the author just wanting to wrap up all the plots in it, I suppose. Taylor's relationship with Jake surprised me too, or at least how things ended up being left off, but I think Taylor made the right choice with that. It was funny, too, how all of her friends in L.A. assumed she was having such a glamorous summer, whereas most days she just got to stay in the hotel and/or attend her dad's concerts, but she didn't get much time to explore the cities that the tour took them too, for the most part.

4 stars out of 5.

Read More

Dirt

Dirt, by David Vann.

Galen lay down in the hollow between two furrows, curled on his side. Breathing heavily, wet with sweat, the air cool now on his skin. His forehead in the dirt. The world only an illusion. This orchard, the long rows of trees, only a psychic space to hold the illusion of self and memory. His grandfather giving him rides on the old green tractor, the putting sound of the engine. His grandfather's Panama hat, brown shirt, smell of wine on his breath, Riesling. The feel of the tractor tugging forward, the lurch as the front wheels crossed over a furrow. All of that a training to feel the margins of things, the slipping, none of it real. The only problem was how to slip now beyond the edges of the dream. The dirt really felt like dirt.

This book took me a while to get though. Galen is a hard character to understand - he is constantly telling his family that he is an "old soul" and that they are "young souls" - and about the only thing that gets him excited in life, both literally and figuratively, is his 17-year-old cousin, Jennifer, who is much more experienced sexually than he is. His grandfather, who was abusive, is deceased, and his grandmother, who seems to be in the early stages of dementia, is in a nursing home. His mother is "at once domineering and needy," and has guilted Galen into not going to college to stay home and "play house" with her, for the most part. The two of them and his aunt, cousin, and grandmother go to a family cabin and Galen gets to have sex with Jennifer, who is bored and likes to play around with his mind.

When they get back to their respective houses, Galen's mother, who saw them having sex, threatens to call the police and get Galen sent to jail, since he is 22 and she is 17; it would be rape and possibly incest, she says. Galen will not let this happen and locks his mother in a shed on their property. Over the next few days, their relationship slowly dissolves, and Galen has to decide if he wants her to die in the shed or if he should save her life.

I didn't really like this book at all, but I will admit that I didn't see the shed twist coming. On other reviews on Amazon.com, most of them are positive, and the novel is compared to a Greek tragedy; indeed, the press release that arrived with the book calls it "a modern-day Greek tragedy with echoes of Flannery O'Connor, William Faulker, and Cormac McCarthy." David Vann, too, is the author of many books, and he has an MFA from Cornell and writes for various magazines as well. It could be that others will like Dirt, but I just couldn't get into Galen's mind - it's very "trippy" in there - and except for the surprise of him locking up his mother, and the ensuing consequences, the novel was unable to keep my interest.

1.5 stars out of 5.

*Disclosure: I was provided a copy of this book to review. The opinions expressed here, however, are my own.

Read More

You Have No Idea

You Have No Idea: A Famous Daughter, Her No-Nonsense Mother, and How They Survived Pageants, Hollywood, Love, Loss (and Each Other, by Vanessa Williams and Helen Williams, with Irene Zutell.

I know who Vanessa Williams is (I should know, as an entertainment blogger), but what I did not know about her is that she is so multifaceted. She started off as a beauty queen, and then, when a "scandal" about her came out, she was forced to resign from her Miss America position. Vanessa then started a career as a recording artist, and from there she moved on to Broadway; after that, she became involved in films and TV.

You Have No Idea is written by her and her mother, Helen Williams, along with Irene Zutell, and I was surprised by how much I ended up enjoying it. It mostly focuses on Vanessa, but we get a bit of Helen's background as well, along with her opinions and reactions to some of the events in Vanessa's life. The tone of the book, which was probably purposefully written this way, is more of a conversation between friends; it really draws the reader into the novel and Vanessa's life.

We follow Vanessa from when she was a little girl, always dancing and singing, through her pageant days, through the so-called "scandal," where naked photos of her from when she was a teenager surfaced. She quickly turned to singing, and then from there got a lucky break and became a Broadway star. Readers of this blog might also know her from TV's Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives, where she had supporting roles on both shows. I've never seen either show but I may watch a few episodes of Ugly Betty in the near future just to see her role in it, since it is talked about a lot throughout the novel.

3.5 stars out of 5.

*Disclosure: I read this book for the BlogHer Book Club and was compensated for doing so. However, the opinions expressed here are my own.

Read More

An Uncommon Education

An Uncommon Education, by Elizabeth Percer.

After several hours had passed of her being uncomplaining but displeased, she asked me about my plans now that my caregiver role had ended. I told her I intended to attend the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at UMass with the goal of conducting medical research in neurofibromatosis and she shook her fine head.

"They used to say that girls went to Wellesley to make a difference in the world. It was your motto or something. Have you done that? Made a difference? Do you intend to? Her face was open and curious, if not harsh. It was the most direct exchange we had ever had.

"No," I answered. "I don't think I have. Or will."

She nodded, accepting my answer. "Your mother was the same way. Could have had an uncommonly good education, but she had other ideas. Perhaps if you had been a boy you would have done more with your potential," she remarked.

"I have had a good education," I said. "And now that I'm doing what I want with it, it's also uncommon."

An Uncommon Education, out in stores today, is the first novel of author Elizabeth Percer, and in the blurb I received, it was being compared to Prep, one of my favorite books, so I was excited to read it. Unfortunately, it takes a more meandering approach, though curiously almost skipping the main character's high school years, and I only found it vaguely similar to Prep and other books of its genre.

Naomi Feinstein lives with her mother and father, and is best friends with the boy next door, Teddy. When Teddy's father dies and he and his strict Orthodox mother move away, her world collapses. Her father has had a heart attack too, and she decides that she is going to become a doctor and study hearts; this choice will go on to define her high school and college years. Rose Kennedy, one of her idols, had said that she wished she had went to Wellesley, and since Naomi also lives in Massachusetts, she sets Wellesley as her goal college. Once she actually arrives there, however, she has problems fitting in at first, and she joins Shakes, the secret Shakespeare society on campus; another choice that will end up defining her time at Wellesley.

This book was interesting in that at some points in it, I was fascinated by Naomi and her character; and at other points, unfortunately, the prose seemed rather verbose and I was just trying to get through the novel. The author herself attended Wellesley, which we can divine from the very detailed descriptions of the campus buildings and the aura surrounding the campus itself, and the writing itself was overall very good. I liked Naomi as a person, but at the same time I was frustrated with some of the choices that she made. I also was thinking that she and Teddy would reunite romantically some day, and they do reunite in her senior year of college; however, there is a twist regarding this.

3 stars out of 5.

*Disclosure: I received a copy of this book to review. The opinions expressed, however, are my own.

Read More