Blue Jeans and Coffee Beans by Joanne Demaio

Blue Jeans and Coffee Beans by Joanne Demaio  ISBN 9781479262779

Here is my latest book review on this easy reading novel.

At times I find myself scratching my head trying to figure out how and why a book got its title. I was happy to be able to truly understand the title of this book as one of the main characters was a designer of denim clothing. This is the author’s second novel. I wasn’t able to read her first but I was very pleased with this story. Other than some confusion at first trying to sort out all the different characters, it was an interesting story of old friends meeting up at the beach where they had hung out in the summers while growing up. Now they are all in their late 20’s or early 30’s and life hasn’t been kind to all of them. Some have survived tragedies, others are having financial and marital problems and others are having emotional problems due to unanswered questions form their childhood. Maris feels cut off after losing her mother, a woman she only knew through old 8mm home movies, and Eva who was adopted and has spent much of her life trying to track down her birth parents.

As someone who moved around way too much while growing up, I always wonder if there are really these kinds of deep long term relationships from a person’s teen years. Since I read a lot of books about close friendships, I can only assume that they do exist. If so, these were a group of kids that grew up that still cared for each other, they weren’t being catty behind the others backs. So this was a great picture of friendship and relationships. It also involved finding the clues to what Maris and Eva searched for all these years.

This is an interesting and readable book with characters that you can relate to and like. I don’t like reading books where I really end up hating several of the characters. While some of the story may seem a bit far fetched, they do say that truth is stranger than fiction, especially in Eva’s search for her birth mother, a delicate topic even still in today’s world.

The Perfect Ghost by Linda Barnes

The Perfect Ghost by Linda Barnes Minotaur Books 2013 ISBN 9781250023636

This is another book from the Amazon Vine program that I just read. I gave it 3 stars on my Amazon review as I think it could have used some editing help.

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This book is a huge departure for Linda Barnes and her Carlotta Carlyle book series. She has an interesting main character Em, which is part of a two person team of biography writers. Teddy does the interviews and she does the writing. That is until the fateful day when Teddy is killed in a car accident and she has to take on the rest of the interviews and writing on her own and still make the books deadline. Em is a very quiet, low self esteem girl who had apparently been raised in foster homes and with step fathers that were abusive. She also has a case of agoraphobia, although if needed, she can leave her house. I would have liked to have had more background into her early life to understand what was making her tick now.

The current book that they had been working on was about a movie star turned director. As Em interviews and investigates him, more and more things bother her that she feels that she has to figure out. It is during this part of the book that I felt like it bogged down a bit. I set the book down after reading almost 2/3 of it and a week later I hadn't picked it up again. It took yet another week to try to finish it. This is usually a signal to me that the book had gotten boring or redundant and the story just didn't interest me anymore. I did persevere however and made it to the end. It did perk up a bit and had a rushed yet surprise ending. Perhaps with some tighter editing, the book might have earned 5 stars. 

 

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Tom T's Hat Rack by Michelle Spry

Tom T's Hat Rack: A Story About Paying it Forward by Michelle Spry, Spry Publishing 2013 Paperback ISBN 9780988778238 .

A review I wrote for Amazon.com. This is a chapter book for children. The main character is 10 years old and has just finished 4th grade.

I don’t read a lot of children’s books anymore now that I’m grown up and so are my children. However, I do like a well written children’s book. This one was charming with a definite message of not only ‘Paying it Foreword’ as it is stated, but the main character Shelby is presented as a friendly, helpful, loving, kind, wonderful child. While I know that there couldn’t possibly be such a perfect little girl, the message is clear. If you are friendly, helpful, kind, polite, and willing to get along with everyone including teachers, parents and older people, then others will like you and be kind and pleasant to you in return. My only concerns are for a child that is in an abusive situation that nothing works to get the abuser to be loving and kind to them. But the practicality of the message is clear. You get back the responses from others in the same way you give them.

This book delves into subject matter that many would think not appropriate for a child to know and that is her substitute grandfather, who along with his wife has been her babysitter for 10 years, develops cancer. Rather than shut Shelby out they involve her deeply into the healing process so that she can help her beloved Mr. T in any way she can. In return Mr. T gets to have a warm loving face with him during his treatments and recovering.

When Mr. T proposes that he and Shelby make a special ‘mystery’ project that summer when school is out that would help others, Shelby jumps at the chance to help. Not only does she get to help, Mr. T involves her in every step of the project from writing out the shopping list for supplies, measuring, cutting and sanding and even helping to insert screws in with a drill. All these are activities that a 10 year old can easily do with proper supervision. I think that is one of my favorite things in this book. I see so many kids who other than working cell phones or video games don’t have any practical skills of any sort any more. Hopefully this book will encourage parents and kids to get busy doing real projects, not ‘dumbed down’ ones.

Another interesting feature in the book was the first paragraph telling what Shelby’s parents did for a living so they aren’t just some amorphous beings like Charlie Brown’s adults in books and movies. They became real people.

While the book has lots of bright illustrations by Peggy A. Guest, I wasn’t impressed with them. The people's faces were rather weird looking but not so much as to detract from the book.

Proceeds from the book will be donated to the American Cancer Society.

 

 

The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius

The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius by Kristine Barnett. Random House 2013 ISBN 9780812993370, ebook 9780679645245

It was a total pleasure to read this book. While my son isn't the genius that Jacob in the book is, it was interesting to read about a woman and her autistic son, Jacob, that in many ways traveled some of the same paths that I have been traveling for year. This is a very special book which showed not only the help she gave her son, but also other autistic children. The author, Kristine Barnett, is a very giving woman even though dealing with chronic physical problems and another child in the family that also had special needs.
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Here is the review that I wrote for Amazon.

I could so much relate to this woman's story and how she is raising her autistic/genius son. No, I don't have a genius son, but I do have an autistic son who is rather bright and in many ways their stories are roughly parallel. The author tells the story of how her son who seemed normal at birth became more and more distant and different as he got older till at around age 2 he became non-verbal. Then she hunted down the doctors, therapists, and treatment ideas that would hopefully be able to help her son. She found though, that their ideas didn't seem to be doing much for her son and at times seemed almost detrimental. Please note that she is not knocking these people trained in dealing with autistic people, only that what they were doing didn't work for her and her son Jacob. I ran into the same thing when I was having trouble getting my son to eat. The recommendation: if he doesn't eat dinner, send him to bed hungry and he will soon learn to eat his dinner. Well, two mornings with my son throwing up on the kitchen floor due to being too hungry was enough for me. That didn't work and I wasn't about to see just how many mornings my son would be sick until he decided to eat supper because some childless therapist thought it was a great idea. I doubt that any therapist would give that sort of advice now, but that was close to 30 years ago when as much wasn't known about treating autistic children.

The author learned to combine her talents as a mother and a daycare provider with how she helped her son. As she started to notice and encourage his unique talents to get him to react to everyday situations and to talk, he started to respond. I called this going through the backdoor with my son. Instead of the normal frontal approach, you have to go out back and find a different way, or many different ways of reaching these children. Happily Jacob responded and then was able to pour his intellect into math, physics, and astronomy.

This book is one about hope and finding each child's unique talent or interest to help them come into normal relationships. Well written by one very busy mother whose family spent everything they had to not only help Jacob but also to open a center for other autistic children where they can participate in activities that usually they are kept out of such as sports of all kinds (many autistic children have coordination problems). If you have an autistic child and are looking for new ideas to help them, this book just might give you some answers and food for thought, although I'm sure that it will upset some mainstream providers of care.

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I hope many of you will read this book or pass it on to families that are coping with autism in any of its shapes and forms.



  

Joni & Ken: An Untold Love Story

As a member of the Amazon Vine Group, I get to review 4 or more books and items each month. For a prolifica reader like myself this is a jackpot. even more so when a book comes my way that touches my heart and this one did. Here is my review that I posted on Amazon for Joni & Ken: An Untold Love Story by Ken & Joni Eareckson Tada with Larry Libby.

I was only 12 years old when Joni had her accident. She dove into some water that was too shallow and broke her neck. Instantly she became a quadriplegic destined to live the rest of her life in a wheelchair with someone else taking care of all her physical needs. It would have been hard to grow up in any youth group in the late 60's early 70's without hearing about Joni, so it was refreshing to hear the latest on what is going on with this woman. At this point in time she is one of the longest surviving quads, which I am sure that Joni would lay at God's feet and those of her faithful caregivers over the years.

In her thirties, Joni meet a young man named Ken Tada and after much time together, prayer and discussion they took the step to get married. At this point you would think their marriage would somehow be `different' because of Joni's difficulties. Yet as I read this book I couldn't help but compare it to my marriage and others that I have seen. Marriage is hard work whether you are a quad, suffer from severe arthritis like I do, or happily have no health problems. It is so easy to drift apart or just be living in tandem, and forgetting why you married in the first place. As their marriage started getting stale, Ken had an opportunity to both read a book by John Eldredge Wild at Heart and also visit and talk with him. As Ken started understanding himself as a Godly man things started to change for the better with their marriage, but Joni was facing another health care crisis. She noticed a lump on her breast and at the point of diagnosis, it was already at stage 3 cancer. Within days of discovering it, Joni was taken into surgery where she had a mastectomy followed by chemotherapy. I can't even imagine the horror of the nausea when you can't even bend over and aim where the nausea would go or not even be able to wipe off your own mouth. And that would only be the least of dealing with cancer. Yet God was good and Ken with a renewed love for Joni was with her every step of the way.

As I said the story of their marriage really isn't so different than many of ours. They just found out what to do to rescue it from the doldrums and put God back in the center of it. This was a fantastic book to read and I also look forward to reading Wild at Heart as well.

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I found it interesting after writing my review, I read some of the others that were posted and found that some writers felt like the book didn't tell the story well. For someone like me though, who 3 weeks after I got married to my husband came down with a devastating chronic disease that had been creeping up on me for years, but it exploded almost eleven years ago now I knew what they were talking about. We in many ways live through what Joni and Ken do so I didn't need the details for what Joni and Ken go through. I live it every day. I have learned that when we start feeling distant from each other, the best thing to do is pray about it and pray for God's blessings on your mate. I think it is enough that we know that even this woman, that so many look at as so spiritual, also has troubles with her marriage jsut like the rest of us do. It takes work and dedication to your marriage vows to keep a marriage on the same set of tracks instead of parallel ones. I did appreciate the book very much and have also put John Eldredge's books on my wish list. I hope you will read this book and be touched by it as well.

Needing to Read

On a forum I participate on, someone wrote a post about wants vs. needs and I thought abut what do I feel that I need and I realized it is books. Some people could go a year while only reading one book (according to my son and a statistic he once quoted me, that is the average amount of books read in the US in a year. Obviously they would never consider books a need. I see some people with 'needs' that I think are pretty silly. Who really needs shoes with 5" heels? But as I thought about it, this is what I came up with for my need to read.

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I could go without a cell phone (I do), I could go without the internet (that would be tough), I could go without TV (no problem), but I personally need books and lots of them to keep me sane. Not sure what would happen if I went without a book for a week, but I suspect I would spontaneously combust. That being said, I know this particular need and handle it in the most economic way. I don't constantly buy new books, or download a new one to my Kindle as soon as I have read my latest book. Nope I buy them at bag day at the library, I borrow them from the library, I use the library to library exchange if I need to, I download FREE Kindle books, I read and review books for Amazon and they send them to me for free (maybe 30-40 a year). So a habit that could cost me at least a $1000 or more a year at the rate I read, probably costs me $50 or less a year. I think this is an example of dealing with ‘needs’ in the cheapest way possible.

 

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I do love my books! I hope you do to!

My Kindle and Me

Been a long time since I posted, but not a long time since I read a book. I've actually read a lot of books, but get side tracked from writing up reviews on them. anyhow, for my birthday I received a Kindle Keyboard 3G .  When Kindle's first hit the market, I thought that there was no way in the world that I would ever want one. I love books, I love reading books, holding books,and having selves full of books all over my house. Then I started noticing just how sore my hands were getting when I read, especially books like thick paperbacks that are constantly fighting you. With severe arthritis, the last thing I wanted was more pain in my hands. I was also having authors asking me to review their work that was, surprise, only available on a Kindle or e-reader.

So I checked into Kindles, studied the descriptions and realized that since we are too far out of town to get WiFi and we didn't have it at our house, I would need a 3G Kindle so I could actually connect to Amazon's Kindle store. So with hubby's blessing I bought one and expected to only read some books on it. When it showed up in just a couple of days, I had fun figuring it out. I was happy to see that I had a dictionary on board and that turned out to be one of the first things that really got me happy. Now instead of having to pick up our 5# dictionary, I can look up words on my Kindle. I also found that I was able to download for free many of my favorite authors like Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte, Jean Stratton Porter. I found that my Kindle would alert me to my newer favorite author's latest releases and I was able to use it get a sample of their books to be sure whether or not I had read it yet or if there was another book in the series that I needed to read first.

This past week really showed me though, just how nifty a Kindle can be. I had checked a book out of the library, Jane Austen's Guide to Dating , when I started reading it, I kept finding references to Northanger Abbey one of Jane's books that I had read but only once so the references were obscure to me. So I pulled out my Kindle and looked up Northanger Abbey and started reading it. The book itself kept making reference to yet another book that the young ladies in the novel were reading. So I wondered to myself, could that be a real book? I looked up Udolpho on my Kindle and sure enough it was there!  Now I know I can find a copy of all Jane Austen's works at my local library, but the chance of finding this book that a book written in 1818 was commenting impossible and yet here I now have it on my Kindle! If my Kindle only had a good US and world atlas and a dictionary of old fashioned word usage it would make reading really fun. I think using my Kindle for more than reading, had made me realize what a valuable addition to my reading it can be even when I have  my  nose buried in an old fashioned book. Is this 6 degrees of separation when it comes to books?