Hazel and her friend Carlene headed a murder mystery Book Club group that met in members homes. They would read cozy mysteries set in a certain location and then all join in the meeting to discuss what they read over coffee, tea, and tasty treats.
Imagine Hazel’s surprise when at one such meeting at Carlene’s home, Carlene takes a sip of her tea and collapses in her chair, dead, with a suicide note next to where she has collapsed. Hazel is skeptical… Carlene had just spent a lot of money on a spa weekend and having her hair done… who does that before planning to check out for good? Plus Carlene was way more of a “setting the scene” type gal… she would more likely have planned a suicide in her own bed wearing her best nightgown and robe with her hair beautifully spread out around the pillow… not like this, not with foam hanging from her open mouth.
As Hazel starts to look more closely at each of the groups members she discovers more than she bargained for. She discovers secrets that Carlene had worked hard to hide… and more than one person in the group would have motives to take her out for good.
Cozy mysteries are not really my thing. While if you suspend reality they can be fun to read, I rarely pick one up. I find I have to many questions… too many things that can slide in these books that I think, “no, no it could not have possibly happened that way,”…
However… if you add the words “Book Group” in a title, it could be a dictionary on book clubs and I would want to read it.
Murder At The Book Group was a fun change from my normal reads. The murder, happening during the groups regular book club meeting puts them all as suspects. It was not like their now dearly departed hostess was a great person… she actually had many flaws and many people had reason not to like her. In fact, the more Hazel digs into what happened, the more she finds out how truly unlikable Carlene was.
I did enjoy the book, I probably will never be a big cozy mystery fan but the occasion dip into these fun reads works for me.
Hello! Judith from Leswammes’ Blog here, sitting in at Book Journey. Well, let’s have a look…snoop…snoop… Sheila’s got SO many posts on her blog; how many books has she read? And it’s not just about books; she seems to live the life of two people, always so busy!
Although I’ve never met her, through her posts I’ve got the feeling I know Sheila a bit. And I’m happy to look after her books blog, while she is away (did you know she has a room full of books, a personal library? Wow indeed!).
Ah here, look: The Summerhouse by Jude Deveraux. This is one of Sheila’s favorite books and her post about it made me want to read it, too. It’s a great book about what-ifs: what if you could change your past? What would your current life be like? I loved the stories of the three friends who all go back to their pasts. A great idea for a story. Here is my review.
Oh, and look at this: The Passage by Justin Cronin. I loved that book (my review), and so did Sheila. Yes, I’m not really one for vampires, but this was such a great, epic read! We both didn’t love the sequel, The Twelve, quite so much (in fact, I didn’t even finish it while Sheila still enjoyed it).
Yeah, Sheila’s got good taste! We ‘met’ through her “It’s Monday” meme, more than four years ago (closer to five!!). Through this meme, I got to know a large part of the blogging universe. It’s a great meme for a starting blogger to meet up with new bloggers, but also for established bloggers to see what their blogging friends are up to.
But I really l♥ve Book Journey because of the Morning Meanderings. I’m amazed how Sheila can find time to post about her life almost every morning (and have a life interesting enough to write about every day!).
Could you fill a blog post every day about your life? I could, but only if I copied the same post on most days. What about you: Are your days groundhog days or Sheila days?
I grew up on VC Andrews books…. in fact last year, my first book of the year was the first book in this series, Flowers In The Attic. I reread it because the movie was coming out and I wanted to have the story line fresh in my head. Recently, I discovered that Petals On The Wind (the second book) was now a movie as well. I rented it and …
~Sheila
To bring you up to speed… Flowers in the attic is about four children that are placed in the attic of their very rich grandparents home and kept there for two years due to their mother marrying a man who was practically her brother and the grandmother saying the children were the devil’s spawn. When the children’s father is killed in a car accident, the mother has no choice but to return to her childhood home which she hated, looking for help to survive. The grandmother allows her to stay with stipulations, in order for the mother to get her inheritance, the now sickly grandfather was never to know that children were born of this union. The children must be kept hidden until the grandfather’s passing. Thus… the attic.
In the attic, are the two older siblings, Chris and Cathy (who are in their upper teenage years), and the twins Cory and Carrie, who are 5 when they enter the attic. Basically, the over closeness of the children causes the two older siblings to become a little too close, and in the mother’s twisted obsession with her inheritance, she tries, and succeeds in poisoning one of her children, Cory dies at the age of 6.
Flash forward to the Grandfather dying, and the mother has now met a man who also has money and she has told him that she was unable to have children. While the children are now to be set free of the attic, their mother has instead abandoned them to the care (ha ha) of their cruel grandmother. The children finally escape out an attic window…
Ok…
In Petals On The Wind, now Chris and Cathy are adults living with their younger sibling Carrie (who is in her mid teens). Chris is learning to be a doctor, and Cathy is performing in the ballet. In the movie we are missing how they got from point A to point B, which is that they were discovered while on the run by a maid who took them to where she was employed and after the children shared their true story with her employer, he took them all in. He was a doctor, and put Chris in medical school, Cathy in ballet school, and Carrie in a private school. At the opening of this movie, the man who took them in has passed away. There is much straying from the book at this point so from here I will go with the movie version…
Chris and Cathy are still very fond of each other, and while Chris does not want any other woman, Cathy knows she needs to move on from her improper love of her brother. She meets a man in the ballet who promises her advancement, and she moves in with him. Hurt, Chris meets a girl at the hospital he in interning at (his bosses daughter), and begins to date her.
Oh if only things could have remained that way…. Cathy finds herself in an abusive relationship as her new man in jealous and a drinker. When her younger sister Carrie asks to move in with them, things get worse. Chris meanwhile feeling pressured, has asked his girlfriend to marry him, although he knows he is still in love with his sister.
Think all that is twisted? You haven’t heard nothin’ yet…
SO the movie. I was impressed. I have not reread this book so had little recollection of all the details of the book to go on. (I read a synopsis today to remind me of the book, and then I picked up on all the differences between book and movie). While it is not accurate to the book, it has the same bones. I found myself totally engaged with the story line. The acting was wonderful, I actually found this movie to be better than Flowers In The Attic (although you really do need to watch both to get the full story).
I have to say I loved these books as a teenager but do not remember them being so uhhh…. graphic. It is funny now to think that I read these books all those years ago when even by today’s standards they would be considered… risky.
I do recommend the movie to those of us who know the books. I think they are a wonderful compliment to the original story and add a whole new twist of creepy when you see it played out on the screen. If you have not read the book… I recommend them. There are 5 books in the series and I do not recall if I went beyond the third, If There Be Thorns or not. Perhaps someday I will need to look at this series again.
Good morning! The last official Morning Meandering before I head out to catch my flight this afternoon for Australia. Crazy wild sentence there. Even I am like… WHAT?
About a week ago I sent an email to several of the bloggers who frequent this space and/or I know from years of blogging and asked them if they would possibly be able to take a little time out of their already packed schedules and write a Morning Meandering for me. The criteria was: I would love for it to be something from my archives, and maybe something on how we “met”. Or they could choose their own topic. My timing was horrible. Fresh off the busy holiday season I did not think many would say yes, and in my email I let them know that I totally understood if they were too busy and on such short notice…
and then almost all said yes.
*humbled blogger here*
So… starting tomorrow some of my blogger friends are going to take over the Morning Meanderings. You will probably know them and if you don’t, you should. They are AWESOME. They wrote some pretty interesting and informative posts and a few are quite funny. I hope you will check in on them and I hope you will visit their blogs as well.
As for what will be “read worthy” in my carry on for this trip…
I will be gone 17 days. Yup. My flight from LA to Sydney Australia is 15 hours. Yup. I will be getting on a cruise ship on the 10th – 22nd. My reading is:
Walking The Bible – Book Club Read for Harper Collins
Belong To Me – Book Club read for Harper Collins
13 Things Mentally Strong People Do
Harry Potter – Goblets Of Fire (Re-Read along… continues, no matter where I am 🙂 )
and on Kindle I have loaded:
Ticker (ooh I love that cover!)
Night School: Genesis
Lane Changes
Doctor Death
Murder At The Book Club (finishing)
The Aviators Wife (finishing)
There is more, but you get it… I am ready for reading. 🙂
In real life real-time… I am up early. I still have a list of things to do. I left too much to yesterday. Everywhere I went I ran into people I knew and that added an additional 30+ minutes to each stop. By the time I got home after lunch with my son, pedicure/manicure, picking up medication, shopping for house, shopping for trip, pants for Al, picking up dinner, picking up make up… it was 5:30 pm. Now I am doing laundry, writing out checks that need to go out, emails, notes for the house sitter, prepping posts, run up town, bank stop,call vet, and verify my cell phone for international…
yeah.
I do plan on posting reviews if I have internet and I will pop in as I can. Thanks everyone for reading Book Journey!
Hello! Welcome to It’s Monday What Are You Reading? The meme that we use to share what we read this past week and what our plans are for the upcoming week. It’s a great way to see what others are reading and add to your own To Be Read list. 😀 You never know where that next great read may come from!
Happy First Monday of the New Year!!! Can you believe it? I was just thinking that I took over this meme in February 2010. That is a LOT of Mondays. 🙂
This week has been cra-zay. New Years came and went and I am preparing (still) to leave tomorrow morning for Australia. Yup. Australia. Yeah… I am freaking out too. So here is what I posted this week:
What a week! SO this is what I have been doing instead of packing! As for the next week, tomorrow morning I will post what I am taking with me for books but I have no idea at this point what I will be reading. I still need to download audio books to my phone… gah… how did time get away from me?
I have posts planned for while I am away so please pop in… some fellow blogger buddies have agreed to pop in with a post and I have read what they have written and it is pretty good stuff. I will post reviews as I can, not sure if I will always have internet service but we will see. *whew* I feel like I need one more day to prepare 🙂
Please add your It’s Monday! Post below where it says click here.
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On a snowy night, an actor collapses during a play. A man rushes from the audience to help him. A young girl witnesses it all. A caregiver weeps because she is so much more. A relationship is ending it just doesn’t know how. And around the world a flu is rushing through the air like pollen and the next 48 hours are the end of the world as we know it.
There are no phones. No television. No cars or buses or planes. No internet. No Facebook. No updated status. All communication to the rest of the world, if there is a rest of the world, has
stopped.
Whew. Station Eleven was the book I chose for my first book to read in 2015. I had read reviews, seen this book on the best of the year lists, and honestly could hardy wait to dive into the book.
Station Eleven is an extremely entwined dystopian novel of the world taken out by a flu virus that leaves only 1% of the population in its wake. The book focuses around the actor, his life, his wives, and the people who surrounded him. As the book goes on, you see that our main characters have all been connected to the actor in some way. The book flashes back to before the flu, and then to present time, where the years started over to One after the epidemic. It is now year Twenty. At times I do not like flash backs, but it works here. Kirsten, who was the little girl in the play, is now part of a Traveling Symphony that travels to areas where people are and the group performs Shakespeare. She is obsessed with all things about the actor who died the night before the flu outbreak, collecting whenever she can find them – magazine articles, newspaper clippings, and she has copies of the two graphic comic books that the actors first wife had created, the first one called Station Eleven.
Sound complicated? It is and it isn’t. There is much to love about this book. The threat of a world-wide flu obviously works and puts the fear factor in the novel. It is written in a unique way which I love, centered around a Traveling Symphony that merely plays for their passion for Shakespeare and music (and really… what else are you going to do in this new world?), there is also a group at an airport that have been there since their plane emergency landed there that twenty years ago. There is a group at a hotel that have taken over rooms as their homes and live as normal a life as they can. And there is a Prophet. A scary man who believes that those who survived the virus are chosen by God and he takes whatever he wants… whenever he wants… food, ammunition, women, and lives.
There is a moment towards the end… an “aha moment” that impressed me when I put a key plot together. I did not see it coming. I was impressed.
But… and I do hate but’s…
There are things I did not enjoy. After the beginning and the big flu scare… the rest of the book is fairly mellow. Any “crisis” is wrapped up too quickly and too neatly. The fear of this new world… is not much. There is also the fact that as you read you have to wonder why some of these groups did not do more… why did the group stay at the airport all that time? I get that they were scared at first to venture out, but after a few months/years wouldn’t you go out and see what is happening? And the book left me feeling there should have been more. I knew as I was reaching the final pages that there was no way this book could wrap up all the loose ends. I then thought that since this book had the same title at the first graphic novel in Kirsten’s possession that surely there must be a plan for a follow-up novel with the title of the second one…. but as of this writing, I seen no signs that the author has plans for a second book.
Hmmmm.
This review is longer than I had planned because there was much to say. I did like the book. Very much. I do think it needed more action. More scare. Yet I did devourer it as it is unique and I do love unique reads. I am glad I chose it for my first book of the year. If there is no more to this story, then it is one that leaves you with a lot to think about as far as what happened next, and maybe, that is the way the author intended it to be.
Dystopian lovers will enjoy this read and I do recommend it.
Ok, I think we need a spoiler page on this one. I want to talk about the book 🙂
Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (September 9, 2014)
I am a little late to this party, but really felt I wanted to put in my own thoughts on the past year and what I hope is to come. I already posted about my favorite books of this past year, this post is a bit more personal.
On the blog front 2014 was one of renewal. The first part of the year I was wondering if my blogging days were over. I was reading, but not taking the time to review. When I though about writing a post or visiting other blogs I found I really didn’t have the desire or ambition. I was not ready to give up on Book Journey, but suddenly understood why some blogs and bloggers just disappear from the online world. Honestly, I was scared I was losing my mojo. Then, I went to the Book Expo in New York in May and it was like my battery was recharged. Hanging out with friends, fellow bloggers who I chat with here on line is something amazing. Something MAGICAL. Spending time with authors and publishers, and of course the books; the incredible books that I wanted to read, I wanted to talk about… I knew Book Journey was not over, not by a long shot. (*cue the Rocky theme*)
And honestly, thank goodness for that because in July my personal life changed drastically. I made the decision to leave the job that I worked at for 10 years to work more consistently on my writing. It was a big step… a scary step… and honestly it is still scary. It has been a big adjustment and family and friends have been supportive in this decision. The road has not been smooth since that decision… honestly it has been a wee bit bumpy. I am working hard to believe that in all of this God has a plan and He is directing me into something amazing. But really, I have never been a very patient person. 😉
2014… not a favorite of mine. 🙂 I am so thankful that my desire to write at Book Journey returned as the connections I have made on line here since 2009 are ones that I cherish, connections that have helped me through these changes in my life. There are so many of you I feel that I know… I know where many of you work, what states you live in, about your families, about your dreams… and not in a creepy stalker way – but in a way that we share on line. When one of you comment I love being able to think, “oh good, _____________ must be over the flu” or “______________ is back from vacation!” It is like another world out there and those of us who do this know what I mean.
So… 2015. YAY. I mean seriously, YAY. I love the idea of a fresh slate. And right now, my slate does not get much cleaner than this. When I return after our trip I have lots of plans to implement in my life, in my home, and here on Book Journey. I hope you will notice the changes… I can not wait to get started! 🙂
Last year I chose a word to represent the year. Some of you may remember the One Little Word post. My word for last year was embrace. I wanted to embrace whatever came my way, and well… I think I forgot about my word about 4 months into the year. For 2015, my word for the year is: Emerge
Jonah lives in a society of contentment. Emotions are a thing of the past and words like love, and emotions like tears do not exist. Memories of the past do not exist.
When Jonah reaches the age of 16 he and his classmates now graduate and receive their positions in society – not like the sorting hat in Harry Potter (darn!) ( a little like what happens in Divergent except in The Giver they do not have a say as to where they will wind up). Jonah is given the rare position of the Receiver, a highly regarded position only held by one person at a time and he becomes the holder of all the memories.
When Jonah experiences for the first time feelings and emotion and memories of what the past was like with happiness and love and dancing he is confused. Why would this ever be blocked? As the Receiver, we is having the memories passed to him by (you guessed it…) The Giver.
The more Jonah sees what is missing from life the more dissatisfied he becomes with the ways things are. He learns there is a boundary that surrounds the community that keeps everyone form their memories. If Jonah can just get beyond the boundary with the memories he can release them back to everyone. Of course, the powers that be do not want that to happen and will do everything they can to make sure it doesn’t.
I read the book, The Giver, for banned book week in 2012. I enjoyed the book and I enjoyed the movie. Its a scary scenario to think of a society that represses all memories and emotions for the sale of feeling well…
nothing.
Sorry but if pain is the price to pay to also feel happiness…
A couple of nights ago I was folding up the blankets downstairs before I went to bed and I sniffled. As soon as I did it I felt that little twinge in my throat, a little soreness. “No!” I thought… not now.
But yes now.
Yesterday I felt it when I woke up… the light sinus pressure, headache, runny nose… I sound like a walking advertisement for some powerful drug (which by the way if you know the name of. I may need it STAT!) I took some aspirin and tried to carry on with my day, a few errands up town lunch with girlfriends, and then I was going to go shopping for the upcoming trip on Monday.
As the lunch went on with my friends I knew I was not going shopping. I was fading into the booth and I was longing for my comfy chair and blanket. So yeah… home I came and I curled up with said blanket… ate dinner with my husband and then was in bed by 9 pm.
For the record… going to bed at 9 for me leads to me up at 3:30 am, cleaning out leftovers out of the fridge so I can fill the dish washer and start it… I read a few emails… thought “this is nuts” and went back to bed until 7.
Today… still sniffly, light headache. sore throat. I am pretty sure it is sinus’s from our funky no snow in Minnesota weather that has been in the 20’s and 30’s and not the temp is dropping and we should not see above zero for a while now.
Any hoo… I ramble. My list of things to do must be worked on today. I need to go and change out the Library window from Christmas to something just wintery… I need to start packing…
and eventually this afternoon I hope to sit down and enjoy my book.
Searcy Roberts grew up in small town Alabama and when she married her high school sweetheart, Alton, moved to Atlanta and enjoyed the unlimited funds that his successful career brought them, she swore she would never go back. Living the dream of having a personal shopper, a doorman to carry her bags, and expensive lunches out, you can imagine Searcy’s surprise when Alton says he wants out.
Out?
Suddenly Alton seems to be having a midlife crisis. He decides he does not want his job anymore, is cancelling credit cards, and filing for divorce. He tells Searcy that their apartment will be leased out within the month and he will help her relocate wherever she decides, within means. And then he leaves.
Searcy is shell-shocked. Her beautiful clothes! Her unlimited credit. Her husband who she does truly love!
Unsure of what her next move should be, a timely phone call from her mother asking her to come home and help out with the family business, Pie Girls, is what normally Searcy would say no to, however considering the circumstances, maybe a get away is exactly what she needs.
Pie Girls is a sweet (pun intended) chick lit read that I really enjoyed. Ceecee is an interesting protagonist with a high-class attitude that changes throughout the book as her life as she knows it crumbles before her eyes. I absolutely loved the southern twang of narrator Mary Hollis Inboden, she made the audio fun to listen to! Jobe Cerny is also on this audio as the voices for the men, an interesting fact about Jobe is that he is most known for his role as the voice of the Pillsbury Dough Boy (although there were no “Dough Boy” voices in this book 😉 )
Book Journey 