Category: blogging

Review: The Boy from the Sun

Posted on by Cindy

Title: The Boy from the Sun
Author: Duncan Weller
Date: Febuary 2007
Genre: Childrens

I have been trying to pick up more childrens books from either local or Canadian authors. Duncan Weller I discovered is not only Canadian but he is a local author.

The Boy from the Sun is a magical tale. It starts out as an ordinary day. As three children sit on the sidewalk on the way home from school. The children were all sad. Then a little body with a yellow shining head floats down beside them. Asking them why they are sad. With no answer the little boy makes a beautiful bird appear along with many more magical things. The children follow the boy as he takes them on a journey to the Sun.

The drawings are very simple black and white. The boy with the yellow shining head introduces all kinds of things that are colorful to the world to the children.

This story won the 2007 Governor General’s Award and the 2008 Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Picture Book Award. In 2009 The Boy from the Sun will be an animated short film.

copyright 2010, Cindy (Cindy’s Love Of Books)
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Review: The December Man

Posted on by Cindy

Title: The December Man
Author: Colleen Murphy
Date: 2007
Genre: Play

I am still trying to figure out why I reserved this from the library. I have no memory of requesting neither does my husband. I figured there must be a reason so I read the short book.

If you are unfamiliar with the events that happened on Dec. 6, 1989, a crazed gunman Marc Lepine massacred 14 female engineering students at Montreal’s École Polytechnique. I hate even mentioning his name! He shouldn’t get any more fame and that the women he killed should be more known.

The story is about a fictional student, a man who was in the room with mass murderer Marc Lépine and survived. Before he opened fire on them, Lepine freed the male students in the class.

She tells the story backwards, beginning where her main character, Jean, ends up 15 years later. Jean (Rylan Wilkie) is a shy boy from a working class family. His mother Kathleen (Nancy Beatty) cleans houses for wealthy families and his father Benoit (Brian Dooley) is a factory worker.

In the first scene Benoit and Kathleen are committing suicide. Each subsequent scene moves closer to that fateful day when Jean escapes the massacre and to the climax of the play. Jean and his parents are understandably elated he has been spared but the audience can’t share in their happiness because we already know this moment of joy will turn to unbearable grief.

Her play, The December Man, won the 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award for drama. looks at the story of a fictional student, a man who was in the room with mass murderer Marc Lépine and survived.

copyright 2010, Cindy (Cindy’s Love Of Books)
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Review: The Boy who Cried Wolf

Posted on by Cindy

Title: The Boy Who Cried Wolf
Author: B.G. Hennessy (retold)
Date: March 7, 2006

I borrowed this book from the library today because my son who is in kindergarden has been telling everyone and anyone that when he gets to school that he doesn’t feel well so they use to bring him to the office. Now they are catching on and don’t bring him. He was telling me that his teacher doesn’t believe him anymore so I told him about this story.

I told my son that he was like the boy cried wolf. He had no clue about what I was talking about. This book is a funnier version of the classic tale. The plot is the same, but humorous embellishments have been added to the story. “I am the most bored boy in the world,” the shepherd says and the picture of the little shepherd is of him picking his nose. For fun he runs into the town yelling, “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf.” The towns people answer his cries twice but ignore him the third time, when three hungry wolves actually do appear. The ending is cute the sheep end up in a tree rather than a wolf’s stomach.

copyright 2010, Cindy (Cindy’s Love Of Books)
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Review: The Husband by Dean Koontz

Posted on by Cindy

 

The Husband: A Novel TITLE: THE HUSBAND
AUTHOR: DEAN KOONTZ
DATE: 2007

This was the first-ever Dean Koontz novel that I have read. He came recommended to me by a person on an online site that I am on. I wasn’t sure at first when I started to read but then I was sucked in. His style of writing is very good and it captures you almost right away.

The Husband, Mitchell Rafferty, is a landscape contractor. One day a job he receives a phone call telling him that his wife Holly has been kidnapped, and unless he can come up with two million dollars in a very short time, she will be killed. To prove that they are serious, the kidnappers direct Mitch to look for a dog walker who is coming up across the street. As he watches, the man is shot in the head. The police are called. When he returns home, having been told to tell no one about the kidnapping, his kitchen looks as if a bloody struggle has taken place, and he realizes that it has been staged so that he will appear to be Holly’s murderer if the police should investigate.

Mitch and his brother and three sisters have had an unusual upbringing. His parents, both tenured professors of psychology at UCI.

In adulthood, all of them dislike, if not hate, their parents—the three sisters living as far from them as possible and having no contact, Mitch working in landscaping and having little to do with them, and his brother Anson living in Newport Beach, where he is a multimillionaire. As Mitch discusses his parents with Anson, Anson comments, ” I have no shame, no capacity for guilt.”

Mitch has no idea at all why Holly has been kidnapped. In the meantime, Mitch has been forced to fight for his life against an intruder in his house, his house and car have been bugged, and his brother Anson has suddenly balked at providing the ransom money. He has no idea of the motive or why these events are happening. As it finally becomes clear the reason behind the kidnapping, the terrifying implications regarding Holly’s future become clear, and Mitch’s ability to rescue her seems more and more unlikely.

There are many moments of excitement, plus an ever-increasing body count, and several fight-to-the-death episodes keep the action very high. I found it to be suspenseful and a page-turner and hard to put down at times.

copyright 2010, Cindy (Cindy’s Love Of Books)
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Review: Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner

Posted on by Cindy

TITLE: CERTAIN GIRLS
AUTHOR: JENNIFER WEINER
DATE: APRIL 2008

Jennifer Weiner’s first novel, Good In Bed, and this latest one, Certain Girls, are written from the voice of Philadelphia Jewish girl, writer, mother, and wife Cannie Shapiro. I fell in love with Good in Bed and couldn’t put it down. I ended up rereading it so that I could remember everything about Cannie.

Since we left her, Cannie has published a best-selling fictionalized sexually-charged version of her life (which she tries to hide, and continues to write books using a different name and writing science fiction novels at a steady salary). She marries a diet doctor Peter Krushelevansky, and settles down to raise her daughter Joy. As Joy nears her bat mitzvah she discovers her mother’s novel, cannot separate fact from fiction, and goes on her personal mission to discover her identity while at the same time Peter decides he wants to have another baby with the uterus-free Cannie.

Throw in Joy’s insane but brilliant Aunt Elle, her lesbian grandmother, estranged grandfather, her father Bruce and his new wife and family, and all of the angst of being 13 and you get the picture.

Jennifer writes this novel from two perspectives in two unique voices, Cannie and Joy. As the stories unfold we experience the drama from both the perspective of mother and daughter, and this adds extra layers of depth to the story line.

This is a book about life and living. Parts are laugh out loud hysterically funny and parts will just make you cry. And the end is a shocker; I did not see it coming and neither will you. But again, that’s life, isn’t it?

copyright 2010, Cindy (Cindy’s Love Of Books)
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Review: Remember me? by Sophie Kinsella

Posted on by Cindy

Remember Me?: A Novel

 

TITLE: REMEMBER ME?
AUTHOR: SOPHIE KINSELLA
DATE: FEBRUARY 2008
GENRE: CHICK LIT

What happens if you wake up one morning and realize that all of your dreams have magically come true overnight? This is what happened to Lexi Smart. She wakes up in a hospital to find that she doesn’t recognize herself – literally. The frizzy hair she had is gone, replaced by a sleek, shiny mane, and the lifelong nickname “Snaggletooth” just doesn’t apply anymore.

When the nurse gives Lexi her bag she thinks the nurse made a mistake. She doesn’t believe the Louis Vuitton handbag is actually hers. Why? Because Lexi has no memory of the past three years. In her mind, she’s a struggling assistant manager at a flooring company who just had a typical crazy night out with her girlfriends in 2004. In reality, she’s actually a member of the Board of Directors of that flooring company and is waking up from a minor car accident in 2007.

Lexi finds that she has everything she has ever wanted: she is beautiful, married to a ridiculously good-looking guy, makes a lot of money, and lives in the most beautiful loft she has ever seen. So what if everyone at the office not-so-secretly wishes she hadn’t recovered from the car accident? And so what if her oldest friends don’t want anything to do with her anymore? And does it really matter if her new husband scolds her like a child for not putting her shoes away properly?

This is a tale of Lexi’s quest to discover what happened to her during those three years to turn her into a person whom she doesn’t physically or emotionally recognize, and what she does when she finds out that her new life may not be as picture perfect as it seems.

For me the most interesting parts of the book come when Lexi is trying to discover what drove her to this complete personality change. She looks at what her husband and friends demonstrate that her life has become and searches for some fragment of the Lexi she knows within it.
Ironically, it is not with her husband that Lexi finds remnants of the woman she used to be, but with his architect partner, Jon. Jon delivers startling news to her soon after their first meeting and, unsure of whether to trust him, she holds him at arm’s length while trying to decipher the puzzle of the last three years.

copyright 2010, Cindy (Cindy’s Love Of Books)
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Review: Bringing home the Birkin by Michael Tonello

Posted on by Cindy

TITLE: BRINGING HOME THE BIRKIN
AUTHOR: MICHAEL TONELLO
DATE: APRIL 2008

This was the first book I received from Harper Collins facebook group. I was pleasantly surprised when I was reading it. In all honesty, I didn’t think I would like it. Then I started to read it and couldn’t put it down.

The author calls it a memoir book. Which hasn’t really been my thing to read, so that might have been why I was thinking I wouldn’t like it.

If you’ve been dying to get your hands on a Birkin, then I suggest this book to you. I personally have never wanted one. I guess its one of those bags that I knew I never could afford so never lusted after it. You probably heard all the stories about how hard it is to actually get a Birkin bag, and that there is a two-year waiting list, and even worse a waiting list for the waiting list. Well, Tonello dispels all the myths that surround this bag.

After moving to Spain, on the promise of a job, Tonello finds himself in a desperate situation when the position falls through. After selling his precious Hermes scarf on eBay, he discovers the sheer number of fanatics that will pay a small fortune to get their hands on anything “Hermes”, especially the Birkin. And after a number of encounters Tonello discovers that the Birkin is where the money is at.

Getting his hands on one, however, proves to be anything but easy. And in the beginning, he hits a brick wall in the form of sales assistants. Then he discovers a formula and tries it out several times. He discovers this formula is the key and puts it into action.

I’ve tried not to reveal too much. What I will say, however, is that after the first few chapters I was hooked and had a hard time putting the book down. I ended up reading it all on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Tonello’s writing style is very descriptive of the beautiful cities he visits and his brilliant sense of humor served for very entertaining reading.

copyright 2010, Cindy (Cindy’s Love Of Books)
If you are reading this on a blog or website other than Cindy’s Love Of Books or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.