On Gemma Doyle’s 16th birthday, after having an argument with her mother about leaving India and going to a school in London, Gemma takes off alone in an angry huff.  Suddenly she can not move her feet and a weird sensation covers her as she has a vision of her mother dying.  When she returns from her walk, she discovers that her mother is indeed… dead.

Two months later Gemma is enrolled in a London boarding school for girls.  She is still dealing with the strange visions and feeling grief and guilt over her mother.  As time goes on, Gemma learns to not only control the visions, but also discovers a realm where she has powers and where she rediscovers her mother who directs her through what apparently is some sort of hereditary magic. 

As Gemma makes friends (Felicity, Ann, and Pippa) at the school, she lets them in on her new found powers and together the girls explore the realm, not realizing the dangers that lurk within, or the clues given in Gemma’s visions.

Segue:  You know how you may pick a dessert from a dessert tray thinking it is one thing, but upon biting into it you discover it is something else entirely, and even better than expected?  Well, that’s how I felt about this audio. 

At first synopsis, I thought for sure this was an historical fiction read.  Which… it was.  But, it is also is adventure, mystery, paranormal, a dab of horror, a splash or romance, and dare I say I think I may have experienced just a pinch of steam punk? 

A Great and Terrible Beauty is narrated by Josephine Bailey and I would say that in the places that I felt a little lost in what was happening in this stuffed full of genre book, it was Josephine’s clear and incredible voice control that held me captive. 

While the start of this novel read is kicking and full of action that made me say “Wha?”, the middle seamed to be filled with just a lot of … stuff.  Filling really – about the school, about Gemma…. it just lost the power that it had in the beginning, and maybe it was just too strong an entrance to possibly hold that level of excitement… I dont know…

My favorite part of the book was the friendship of the four girls.  As in most books that center around a friendship, the girls have diverse personalities, and I like that.  I did enjoy how they came together as quite an unlikely quartette, and well… you will see if you check this one out.

While I did mention the middle fizzle, if you hang on the ending takes you souring again into the “WHOA!” zone and actually had me smiling form the effects of just good writing.  Definitely worth a go (and the occasional “whoa!”)

If you do decide to venture into this one on audio be sure to listen to the authors notes at the end.  Libba Bray has a pretty funny message about how this book came to be and details of how she came to this story.

Amazon Rating

Goodreads review

The 2011 WHERE Are You Reading Map has been updated to include A Great and Terrible Beauty

I borrowed this audio from our local library

In 13th-century England, the legendary figure known by generations as Robin Hood leads an uprising that will forever alter the balance of world power and will make one man of humble beginnings an eternal symbol of freedom for his people.

An expert archer once interested only in self-preservation, Robin now serves in King Richard’s army. Upon Richard’s death, Robin travels to Nottingham, a town suffering from a despotic sheriff and crippling taxation. There he falls for the spirited widow Lady Marion, who is skeptical of the motivations of this mysterious crusader from the forest.

Hoping to earn the hand of Maid Marion and to save the village, Robin assembles a gang whose lethal mercenary skills are matched only by its appetite for life. Together, they begin preying on the indulgent upper class to correct the injustices of the sheriff.

 

Robin Hood was an outlaw in English folklore. A highly skilled archer and swordsman, he is now known for “robbing from the rich and giving to the poor”, assisted by a group of fellow outlaws known as his “Merry Men”.Traditionally Robin Hood and his men are depicted wearing Lincoln green clothes. The origin of the legend is claimed by some to have stemmed from actual outlaws, or from ballads or tales of outlaws.

Robin Hood became a popular folk figure starting in the medieval period continuing through modern literature, films, and television. In the earliest sources Robin Hood is a yeoman, but he was often later portrayed as an aristocrat wrongfully dispossessed of his lands and made into an outlaw by an unscrupulous sheriff.

 

So seriously… doesn’t that sound a lot like Robin Hood?  That’s ’cause it is!  I kid – but really this audio was all action, all testosterone, strong men who fight for their women…

ahhh… I admit it – I do like the era… I like men who act like men (packing a bow and arrow doesn’t hurt either…) and women who wear the long beautiful dresses but are still tough….

whats not to love?

I have seen the movie Men In Tights (no, I am not proud but there it is…) and probably a cartoon or two in the past, but not this movie as pictured here on the cover of my audio.

And I did enjoy it.  I have never read anything about Robin Hood before… haven’t even really sat through a movie about him… so this was really an experience.  I wasn’t sure going in if it would be a fit for me but it was funny and full of energy.

Thanks Tanya with Black Stone Audio who hooked me up with one at BEA!

Good Reads Review

The 2011 WHERE Are You Reading Map has been updated to include Robin Hood

I received this audio at BEA from Blackstone Audio

In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life’s essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel’s lifelong project to bear witness for those who died.

There are few books that cross my path that I say are a must read for everybody.  This would be one of those rare reads.  I have had this book for over a year on the shelf.  I took it down a couple of months ago, started it… and put it down for something else.  Recently when browsing audio books at my library, this audio stood out to me and I thought maybe if I listen to it… so I borrowed it.

I love audio for the ability it has to let me multi task.  I can listen to a book while folding laundry, cooking, dusting, cleaning… yet this story took me so far into the Nazi German concentration camps that I was rendered useless to do anything else but listen… for fear I may miss a word, or a moment of this incredibly powerful and heart wrenching story.

Elie Weisel’s memoir recaps everything from the sounds, the smells, and the visual empowerment of the camps.  Along side his father Shlomo, they work in the camps trying to stay energized and look strong as the weak are picked out one by one and taken to the gas chambers to be asphyxiated.

There are moments in this audio that will not ever leave me as Elie retells a story of watching an elderly man hiding a piece of bread to share with his son, and the son beats his father to the death to have all of the bread.

…….

I pause here – because that particular part of the story brought me to my knees in my kitchen.  Surrounded by ingredients I was using to make dinner, I looked at the excess I had in front of me as I listened to a man being beaten to death.. for a scrap of bread. 

Elie recaps how as a teenager in the camp, always seeming to have to protect his own aging father, he admits to becoming weary of the task, at one time, as his father draws ill he admits to thinking, “If only I could get rid of this dead weight … Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever.”

While Night may not seem to be for everyone, I have to disagree.  This audio changed me.  I have read several books regarding the Nazi Concentration Camps and each time I am slammed with the reality of what a confusing and painful world we live in.  I listened to this audio astounded how people can be so cruel to one another… and yet, I think it is so important that we recognize this. 

Although I picked this up at my library, I will be looking for my own audio copy of this book.  I think this is something I need to listen to again, and yes I will be reading the book as well… still open to the page where I left it in the Reading Room. 

 

Side thought:  A few years back when we were in Honduras I had my first experience of the starving children living in the dump.  That visual of the dirty kids, the flies, the unbelievably thin dogs, the buzzards, and of course that smell of rot – will never leave me.  I could not help but sense my eyes feel with tears….

We were told at that time not to look at them with pity… they did not need our pity.  They needed our compassion.  This thought comes to me today as I write this review.

~Sheila

Night, I discovered is the first book in a trilogy… followed by Dawn, and then Day.  Dawn, unlike Night, is a work of fiction about a girl named Elisha who is a Holocaust survivor.  Day is also a fictional story of a Holocaust survivor who is hit by a taxi in New York City, while he recovers from his injuries, he reflects on his memories of the war and the loss of family and friends.

Amazon sells the three books in one. 

Night, on audio, is 4 hours long.  In book format it is 109 pages. 

Good Reads Review

 

The 2011 WHERE Are You Reading map has been updated to include NIGHT.

I borrowed the audio from my local library

 

Knit one…

Mary Baxter lives in Providence, R.I..  After losing her five-year old daughter, Stella to meningitis, Mary struggles even getting out of bed.  Her marriage to her husband Dylan seems to be crumbling  as Mary’s depression makes it impossible to be there for him, let alone even smile.  Her job as a writer for a local newspaper has become unbearable and she has bitter memories of her child hood and even adult life connects to her own mother who always has seemed distant and aloof and currently resides in Mexico. 

 

Purl two…

At her mother’s urging, Mary joins a knitting circle and meets Alice who invites her to a weekly evening gathering of knitters which at first seems frightening to Mary, but then figures, what does she have to lose?  Instead of loss…. Mary gains insight into the women, and occasionally a few men, who make up the knitting circle…

Knit Two, Purl Two…

Harriet, Scarlett, Lulu, Beth, and Ellen all slowly knit their way into Mary’s life.  As Mary learns how to make scarves and hats, and even socks… she also learns that every one has hurts and her own life becomes entwined – with theirs…

 

Sometimes a book or audio can come to your attention at just the right time.  (Yes even in reading – timing does count!  😀 )  I had recently borrowed two audio from our local library that I thought were going to be fantastic, and turned out to not hold me at all.  Going to the cabin last weekend, a 3 1/2 hour drive… I needed audio that would sustain me, so I grabbed this one and another one I had just received as well for back up.

The Knitting Circle appealed to me right from the start for several reasons.

The cover… soft and inviting, I want to go hang out there

Perhaps my inability to knit and my fascination with those who do was an attraction

But mostly… the books draw for me was the cultivating of women’s’ friendships, a topic that always draws me in.  I think having a house full of boys really drew that out of me… knowing that I needed “girl time” to hang out with my girlfriends and talk about life and dreams and yes, even hurts. 

 

I enjoyed the flow of this story it was very paced, never hurried, and somehow that fit into the theme of a books knitted around friendships.  The message within the book for me (and I think for our author too, who had also lost a daughter), was the power of friendship.  It’s easy to get drawn into thinking we are the only ones dealing with certain pain and tragedy and when we open our eyes and our hearts find that there is a whole world of hurting out there, and together – we are stronger.

 

Amazon Rating

Goodreads Review

 

The 2011 WHERE Are You Reading Map has been updated to include Knitting Circle

I received this audio from Kathy (Bermuda Onion)

Thank you Kathy!  😀

Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who one night dreams of a distant treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. And so he’s off: leaving Spain to literally follow his dream.

Along the way he meets many spiritual messengers, who come in unassuming forms such as a camel driver and a well-read Englishman. In one of the Englishman’s books, Santiago first learns about the alchemists–men who believed that if a metal were heated for many years, it would free itself of all its individual properties, and what was left would be the “Soul of the World.” Of course he does eventually meet an alchemist, and the ensuing student-teacher relationship clarifies much of the boy’s misguided agenda, while also emboldening him to stay true to his dreams. “My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy confides to the alchemist one night as they look up at a moonless night.

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself,” the alchemist replies. “And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”

Do you ever have one of those books on your list….you know the one that you say you will always read “someday”…  Well that was what this book was for me.  This is a book I have had on my shelf for many years.  I felt it would be important for me to read, and that alone kept it on my radar.  Yet unread it went – year after year…

until…

thank you Audible.com for putting it on sale and making me think “why not?”

Now – going back to my initial thought here… have you ever had that “must read” on your radar for so long and then when you finally do read it, realize that you knew nothing about what it was about… merely was attracted to the title, the cover, the buzz….. and universal knowledge that you must must must read this book?

No?

Ok that’s just me then…. 😉

I am going to come right out and say it – LOVED this audio.  LOVED it.   LOVED IT LOVED IT.  I may not have known what I was about to read (for some reason I felt it was going to be a heavier read…) but the buzz, the hype…. all was correct in making me know I had to read this.  YOU have to read this, or listen to it on audio because….

SO FANTASTIC.

Ok… I will try to take the gush level down enough to actually write a review…

I did not know going in this book would read like a fairy tale – but it does.  It reminds me of one of those long ago stories told, handed down from generation to generation… it really is breathtakingly beautiful.

As soon as I started listening to this audio I knew I was going to like… told in that “story telling” pace and voice I settled in for what was going to be a GOOD READ.  It is a reoccurring dream that takes Santiago on a journey far and away from his family.  The obstacles along the way only add to the story as he spends almost a year in a glass shop assisting the owner in bettering his shop and profits, each set back – becomes part of the journey. 

Why this is not a movie, I do not know.  I seen that the rights to the film were bought by Warner Brothers in 2003, but the movie never panned out due to problems with the script.  I read that in one scene they had 10,000 soldiers for a battle and that has nothing to do with the book.  Kudos in that case for the movie being stopped as that would just have rated:  annoying.

The book is really a story about following your dreams and filled with intelligent and thought-provoking quotes.  I embraced the words at every opportunity, basking in their internal meaning:

“When each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises.”

“The boy and his heart had become friends, and neither was capable now of betraying the other.”

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”

“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”

“Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.” You’ve got to find the treasure, so that everything you have learned along the way can make sense. “

I really wish I could do this book more justice by telling you it made my heart gush – it is beautiful and if you have not taken the time to read this I would highly recommend you put this on the priority reading list. 

 

The 2011 WHERE Are You Reading Map has been update to include The Alchemist

I purchased this from audible.com

Sisters Meredith and Nina have grown apart once they reached adulthood.  Meredith took over the family business and raised a family, while Nina followed her dreams to traveling the world as a photojournalist.  When their doting father suddenly becomes ill and dies the sisters world is rocked to the core.  As a dying wish, their father had made the girls promise to spend time with their Russian mother, who has never been the warm motherly type.

As the girls try to come together on a decision of what to do, their mother, Anya, starts to act oddly – leaving burners on in the house and even pealing the wallpaper off the walls.  Anya starts to share fairy tales that she used to tell when the girls were little and through these tales, the girls discover the stories are not stories at all but the facts of Anya’s life growing up in war-torn Russ.  In amazement of this new discovery, Meredith and Nina decide to help their mother uncover the truth of her tragic past, in the hopes of understanding more about her as well as themselves. 

Kristen Hannah is one of those author’s whose book covers draw me in and I always plan to read … and then rarely do.  In fact out of all of her attractive looking books, the only other one I have read in Firefly Lane with my book club a few years back.  (I remember I was in Honduras on a bus when that book came to its rocky ending that left me in tears)

SO here I am again with Kristen Hannah with probably the least likely choice of all her books – Winter Garden.  Why?  Because winter is my absolute least favorite time of year…. (however… I do like gardens?)  But of course none of this random ramblings has anything to do with the book….

Winter Garden started slow for me.  The two sisters thing and dysfunctional family synopsis has been done and done and done again.  I listened halfheartedly taking in all the facts but not really engaged. 

Then the audio suddenly took a turn to the “holy wah” when Anya started detailing her story of growing up in Russia…. suddenly I was glued to my kitchen, unwilling to shut the audio off, or leave the room I was folding laundry on my kitchen table and cleaning kitchen counters, and straightening seasonings in the cupboards – all to keep on listening. 

It all came to a tearful fully engaged version of me as the story unfolded into what I could only refer to as Kristen Hannah working her magic of story telling. I literally had tears rolling down my face as I heard the story pour out of Anya.

In recap… the first half of the book was meh…. the second half…. a rollercoaster of emotions that has left me wondering what I should choose next of Kristen Hannah’s books.

Amazon Rating

Goodreads Review

The 2011 WHERE Are You Reading map has been updated to include Winter Garden

I purchased this audio from Amazon

Michael Bennett is back in this 4th book in the Michael Bennett series.  While taking his ten (TEN!) adopted children to a seaside retreat with live in nanny Mary Katherine and (the hilarious and wise) Grandpa.

What Detective Michael Bennett had hoped for was a little r & r and perhaps exploring his growing feelings for Mary Katherine, he uncovered much more than he bargained for when a rash of bizarre crimes tear through the city, terrorizing  everyone who lives there .  So much for vacation…

When Michael is pulled away from the retreat to investigate the crimes, his family is left open for attack.  Working the case with attractive colleague FBI Agent Emily Parker, Michael finds himself questioning what the future may hold.  All the while the clock is ticking towards who is behind the odd murders that seem to be copy cats old famous crimes…

TICK
TOCK

 

 

A couple of years ago when I started to embrace audio books – this series was one of my first audio experiences.  I know this is a Patterson book and I know some people struggle with his books and in some cases I agree, Patterson does have some gory graphic books out there.  This series is not one of them.  I think it is the touch of author Michael Ledwidge that gives this series its likability for me.

This series is centered around a detective, Michael Bennett who had adopted with his wife, 10 children.  As the series opens, Michael loses his wife to cancer and while adjusting to a life without her, maintaining a huge household, and maintaining a high-capacity job, I kind of fell in love with this family.

In this fourth in the series, I enjoyed the start of a possible relationship between Michael and Mary Katheryn and even the annoying presence of the attractive Emily…. tossed in for good measure.  The story line of the kids is always interesting and the crimes are usually good and not too graphic.

Usually.

I found in Tick Tock the gore level was raised – not a lot, but enough for me to notice.  I could almost sense the shift from Ledwidge to Patterson.  While I still enjoyed this audio, it was probably the one I have enjoyed the least out of the series.

Will I continue with the next one when it comes out?  Absolutely… there is still more of this story to be told and I for one want to know what will happen. 

Amazon Rating

Goodreads Review

The 2011 WHERE Are You Reading Map has been updated to include Tick Tock

I picked up this audio through Amazon