Tag: Audio

Nell Channing finally did what was long over due.  She found a way to escape her abusive marriage.  Feeling free for the first time since she can remember, she changes her look, and finds herself stepping off a ferry on to a quaint place called Three Sisters Island.  Nell was drawn to the stories around the island, the folklore that said the island was created by ancient witches in 1692 and still to this day carried the magic of years gone by.

Nell felt like she had found a home in this touristy island, and quickly secured a job at the local Book Store, Cafe Books, owned by the mysterious, Mia Devlin.  Mia had many island rumors circling around herself as well.. she owned the beautiful house on the cliff that could be seen from the ferry and was believed to have powers handed down from the generations of powerful women of the island before her.

And then there is Ripley, sister to the handsome sheriff, Zak.  Ripley, as Mia knows, is the second of the”three sisters” on the island that still carry magical powers, yet as much as Mia embraces her powers, Ripley rejects them, hates that this is a gift handed down to her from the island, and does everything she can to deny it.

But Mia, and with her pulse on the island itself is well aware of the power the island has given her.  She is also well aware that the island is called Three Sisters Island, and to complete the circle, there is to be a third.  Mia has a strong feeling the third part of the sisterhood just came to the island in the form of a small woman who is currently in her employment and seems to be running from something.  And that something, seems to be coming towards the island like a dark cloud that Mia can see and feel clearly, and she knows it will take the power of three to ensure the survival of all involved.

Two things are true:  1.  This is not your typical Nora Roberts book.   2.  This is one on my all time favorite reads.

I first read Dance Upon The Air in August of 2001.  I know this for a fact because it was the first book our book club read together and because the book touched me so much that it graces my book shelf in triplicate, so I can always have a spare to give out to someone.

I LOVE books that have to do with strong, independent women, and if these women have powers… all the better.  Dance Upon The Air covers all this well, I often refer to this book as paranormal, before paranormal was cool.

There is so much I love about this book and the two that follow it, Heaven and Earth, and then Face The Fire – all written in typical Nora Roberts fashion with her trilogies, each book features one of the three women.  All equally awesome – which is rare in trilogies.

I have wanted to read this one again for a long time, but as book lovers know – its hard to get back to the ones you have read before when so many awesome reads are waiting to still be read…

I think I have found the secret to the re-read, try it in a different format.  In this case, I listened to this book on audio and I am so over the top thrilled that I did.  It is narrated beautifully by Sandra Burr  and I cant even tell you how relieved I was that this older read was delightful as well in audio.

Do yourself a favor and give this book (or audio) a try.  I think you will be pleasantly surprised and this is definitely a do not judge a book by its author.  (and yes, watch this weekend for a post on that!)

Goodreads Review

Here are a few other awesome book reviews and their thoughts on this book:

Irregular Tammie

The Best Reviews

Belle Wong

World According To Books

I purchased this audio from audible.com

22 year-old Grace Winters never dreamed her life would turn out so well.  Newly married to the rich and handsome Henry Winters, she is now on a big beautiful ocean liner crossing the Atlantic on her way to meet his family and on her way to a new and better life.

When a mysterious explosion causes the ship to sink, Grace is placed in a lifeboat secured by her husband along with 39 other people.  She can only believe that Henry certainly found a way off the boat as well and they will meet again once they are safely back on dry land, wherever that may be. 

For three weeks they are adrift, and a lot can happen when you are in a small boat that long with no privacy.  Slowly as every once of dignity is stripped away, the little food and water they have is gone, one must look for other ways to survive.

A little over two years after the Titanic, comes The Lifeboat.

Sound a little familiar?  Perhaps.  I will admit, on this the 100th anniversary since the Titanic sunk I was intrigued by a book that took on a similar story line, around the same time frame as Titanic.  While Titanic was in 1912, this is 1914. 

The story line starts after they are rescued.  In the first opening lines you learn that Grace is now in New York, she has just survived this major trauma, and she is on trial for murder.

Interesting plot line?  You bet!

I listened to this on audio, and enjoyed the retelling by Grace as she looked back over what had happened the weeks before, from the time she was placed into the lifeboat alongside an assortment of men and women of various backgrounds, status, and age, including one man, Mr. Hardie, who is the only member of the ship’s crew. 

What ensues over the three weeks is what I can only describe as the slow breaking down of the human mind.  Three weeks is a long time to be in any kind of boat let alone a life boat designed for 40 people and as time goes on everyone involved would agree… 40 people was way too many. 

So what does happen in three weeks?  That I can not tell you.  I can tell you that Grace’s narration is sometimes vague, sometimes left me feeling that there were more holes in her story than in the ship… this could be credited to either poor character development, or the brilliance of an author who has decided that over developing characters in this situation would have come across as false. 

I will let you be the judge of that. 

Would I recommend The Lifeboat?  Fans (ugh.. that seems like  a harsh word) of Titanic like tales I believe will walk away with something positive out of this book, but don’t expect to be blown away.  While a good story, I personally was looking for something more.

Amazon Rating

Goodreads Review

Want to see some other thoughts on this one?

Jenn’s Bookshelves

Rhapsody In Books

Book Monkey

A Musing Reviews

I purchased The Lifeboat from audible.com

It’s the summer of 1950 and twelve-year-old Flavia de Luce is tinkering away in her chemical lab inside the once great house of Buckshaw, in a sleepy English village.  The lab is an inheritance from her passed on mother and eccentric uncle.  And Flavia loves it, after all she has a gifted mind for mixing chemicals and the study of poisons. 

One morning Flavia left the comforts of the lab for a stroll around the acreage she calls home and after finding a dead bird on the doorstep with a postage stamp stuck on its beak,, to her surprise (and delight) she discovers a body among the cucumber patch.  While the police seem to be taking their own sweet time making error after error in trying to solve the crime, Flavia decided to solve the crime herself. 

Welcome to Flavia de Luce’s world. 
For Flavia, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”

Finally I find myself exploring Alan Bradleys books.  I knew nothing going in.  I did not know that The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie was the first in a series of Flavia De Luce novels… see…. out of loop…. 

I went into this one on audio and my first initial thought was I thought it sounded a bit like the Bloody Jack audio books (stories of a wild and smart tom boyish young girl), and the narration of Jayne Entwistle gave it that feel, which excited me as the Bloody Jack audio are fantastic!

The story line of our young detective Flavia, is fun.  She it witty.  She is smart beyond her years.  She has siblings that do not play strong enough parts (at least in this book) for me to even remember their names, but she being the youngest, and seemingly the smartest, has a bit of fun with them that makes their back seat roles in this read favorable and “smile worthy”.

While I found the writing rich, the narration with the strong accent delightful, I can not say I loved it.  I think for starters I could not wrap my head around Flavia being twelve and working in a chemical lab and being as smart and as able to get around the way she did …

it just didn’t mesh for me – and yeah, I know I am in the minority on this one.

So my thoughts are if you enjoy well written (and well read) books that may be a bit far-fetched but certainly fun… you will want to give the Flavia de Luce mysteries a try.  The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is the first of the books. #2 – The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag,#3- A Red Herring Without Mustard and #4, I am Half-Sick of Shadows.

See some other reviews from bloggers that I trust:

Beth Fish Reads

Rhapsody In Books

Book Lover Book Reviews

Amy Reads

I borrowed this audio from our awesome library

Imagine… you are a single, attractive, woman in your early 30’s, you are a Realtor and you do ok for yourself.  At this time in your life your biggest concerns are selling a house, practicing patience with your quirky mother, and being on time for dinner with your boyfriend.

You are spending a gorgeous Saturday afternoon stuck at an Open House showing that is extremely slow.  As you are packing up your things and calling it a day a van pulls into the driveway.  A well dressed man gets out of the vehicle and you can tell he is really interested in seeing the house.  Maybe this day wont be such a loss after all.  As you take him through the house and start into the back yard you feel something blunt and cold press against the middle of your back.

A gun.

Suddenly you find yourself in a cabin, God only knows where.  Your abductor, soon to be known as “The Freak” in your mind, certainly never said out loud, has thought of everything and you have no escape.  You are put on a strict schedule of when you can eat, and when you can use the bathroom.  Any changes to this resulted in being hit or having to drink out of the toilet.  And honestly, this was not even the worst part.  There were the scheduled baths…

Certainly someone will find you.  Certainly it is only a matter of time.  Yet days turn into weeks, and weeks into months. And survival is your only thought.

The book, Still Missing, is the story I described above.  This is a thriller told about Annie O’Sullivan and her abduction, eventually her escape.  Much of the book is Annie talking to her Therapist, reliving the past and sharing the present.  Annie still lives in fear of sounds in the dark, strangers, and being alone.  Of course, its hard to be with people when you have trust issues. 

I have read books where the flash backs and present time chapters do not work.  They are confusing.  This is not one of those books.  I listened to this on audio and the book flowed smoothly.  I never felt lost in the story, instead I found myself right from the start thinking “this is good, this is really really good.”

I have become a little gun-shy of thrillers as I find they are either gory or over the top unbelievable.  Again, author Chevy Stevens knocked that chip off my shoulder.  Well told, very believable (maybe a little too believable!) and kept me listening.  I wanted to know, HAD TO KNOW what was going to happen.

Extremely well done I give high marks to a very talented author who blew me away with the story line and kept me guessing all the way through. 

I cant wait to read Chevy Stevens again!  Make sure you do as well!

Need more convincing?  Check out these great reviews:

Alison’s Book Marks

Presenting Lenore

Life With Books

Devourer Of Books

Amazon Rating

Goodreads Review

Purchased from audible.com and an excellent selection!

It is the mid 1930’s in Shanghai and May and Pearl are beautiful, sophisticated, and well educated.  When their father gambles away all the family owns, they are on the verge of losing everything.  In order to save their home, May and Pearl’s father arranges for his daughters to be married to two brothers who live in Los Angeles and within a few days of making this decision the girls are shocked, horrified… and married.
When the girls went on the boat to be delivered to their new home in the states, they are detained, interrogated, and humiliated for months along with many other women trying to get to the US.  It is as thought the lives they once knew had crumbled right before their eyes.  When May discovers she is pregnant the girls make a pact that no one can ever EVER know.

Once in the states they find that life is not as they had been told, their father in law is not the rich man that he portrayed himself to be in Shanghai.  Instead he is close to poverty, relying on what his sons, and now his daughter in laws can provide him by working and giving him the money.  Together May and Pearl learn to survive in a new world, in new ways.

My first experience with Lisa See was Snowflower and The Secret Fan.  I devoured that book and knew I wanted to read more of her work.  That time has come with Shanghai Girls which has turned out not only to be an incredible fiction experience. 

What at first I thought was going to be mainly about their new lives and how they adjusted to this new life (much like A Buddha In The Attic), I was surprised to find that Lisa See winds a much deeper story within the story and when I caught on to what she was doing, I was really thrilled.  As this book is about two sisters from Shanghai and their lives, it is really about the sisters Pearl and May.  While Pearl narrates what she sees and how things are, you get a very strong feeling of who they are.  Here in lies the beauty of Lisa See’s writing.

I also learned a few things I did not know before.

Like what?

Have you ever heard of paper sons?  It really is a fascinating (and sad) topic of how during the Chinese Exclusion Act (read more about that here on Wikepedia) immigration to the US was restricted.  That being told, false papers were being drawn up where US citizens would claim children and even adults  as their own and these papers could create access to the states for these people.  The people would then live with the American families under their US family name to ensure they were not found out, forever giving up their true ancestors and name.  Thus the term paper sons came to be as they were truly only sons on paper. 

The experience the girls, May and Pearl have on the boat the states is heart wrenching.  Not only as I listened to this on audio, but also as I suspect this is actually what happened when women traveled alone to get to the states on these boats.  They were raped repeatedly.  They were beaten and starved. 

One moment that sticks out for me is later in the book May refers to some women she sees as FOB’s.  I kept wondering if she was swearing at them, only soon to figure out that FOB meant “fresh off the boat”.  LOL…. I am going to use that some day in a sentence…. 😀

Shanghai Girls is a look into two girls lives from their youth as beautiful girls to their experiences lives, marriages, and more in the United States.  Lisa See does a wonderful job of making this book feel more fact than fiction.

Check out a few other reviews from awesome bloggers:

Devourer Of Books

She Is Too Fond Of Books

Books On The Brain

Always With A Book

Amazon Rating

Goodreads Review

Borrowed from my local library

How does one describe The Buddha In The Attic?  It is a narration of the collected voices of young women brought over from Japan to San Fransisco as brides nearly a century ago. 

The Buddha In The Attic traces their lives as they travel by boat (I wonder what it will be like to live in the states?), meet their husbands (he is not rich as I was believed he would be!), face uncertain futures (what will become of us?), becoming new wives (what does he expect of me?), working the fields (other men will not leave us alone), mastering a new language (do I pretend still not to understand?), child birth (what if my child is born under the wrong sign?) and eventually to war.

It really is hard to explain The Buddha In The Attic, which is really why prior to listening to this on audio… I still did not fully get what it was about even by the synopsis.  What I did know:

1.  The title made me want to know more

2.  The cover led me to think of things hiding, secrets of the unknown…

So here I am after listening to this short audio book (4 cd’s) and now kind of basking in the experience. 

The Buddha in the Attic as narrated by Samantha Quan and Carrington MacDuffie is told as a collective “we” and never an “I”.  There is no sole character.  In 8 chapters a different aspect of Japanese immigrant life is unfolded for us to view in the raw:

“Home was a bed of straw in John Lyman’s barn alongside his prize horses and cows. Home was a corner of the washhouse at Stockton’s Cannery Ranch. Home was a bunk in a rusty boxcar in Lompoc. Home was an old chicken coop in Willows that the Chinese had lived in before us. Home was a flea-ridden mattress in a corner of a packing shed in Dixon. Home was a bed of hay atop three apple crates beneath an apple tree.”

and so on… each chapter reading out like that, a description of their life in this new world and then told in 20 or more different ways.  Yes, at first it was a little hard to follow, my bookish mind kept waiting for the story, but the sharing of information, IS the story. And as this went on, from having children, to losing children, to what they did with the children, and so on….

I found a rhythm. 

It is safe to say this is poetry.

It is raw.  It is real.  At times it is painful.  At times it will make you mad. In the end… I find that I am better for having listened to it and I an appreciate the collective whole. 

No I would not seek out this style of writing, but a sampling of it like I just had is good.  I am glad I listened to it over reading it.  The narration is beautiful, the words, and the undertones, I thought were brilliantly read. 

Side note:  It is interesting that I am also listening to Shanghai Girls at this time and the stories and time frames are similar.

Here are a few other reviews from great bloggers:

nomadreader

Fizzy Thoughts

Take Me Away Reading

Reading On A Rainy Day

Amazon Rating

Goodreads Review

Borrowed from my library!

The Andreas sisters were raised on books – their family motto might as well be, ‘There’s no problem a library card can’t solve.’  (this line alone made me want to read this one!)

Their father, a renowned, eccentric professor of Shakespearean studies, named them after three of the Bard’s most famous characters: Rose (Rosalind – As You Like It), Bean (Bianca – The Taming of the Shrew), and Cordy (Cordelia – King Lear), but they have inherited those characters’ failures along with their strengths.

Now the three sisters have returned home to the small college town in Barnwell Ohio where they grew up – under the guise on their mothers battle with cancer… but also because their lives are a mess that even Shakespeare would be stumped over.  .

Rose, a staid mathematics professor, has the chance to break away from her quiet life and join her devoted fiance in England, if she could only summon up the courage to do more than she’s thought she could. Bean left home as soon as she could, running to the glamour of New York City, only to come back ashamed of the person she has become. And Cordy, who has been wandering the country for years, has been brought back to earth with a resounding thud, realizing it’s finally time for her to grow up.

The sisters never thought they would find the answers to their problems in each other, but over the course of one long summer, they find that everything they’ve been running from – each other, their histories, and their small hometown – might offer more than they ever expected.

Weird Sisters.  I love the title.  It makes me think of witches or women with magical powers.  I have no idea why. 

I had seen a lot about this book in past months, gloriously showing up on blog after blog making me curious about it.  When it showed up on audible.com for 4.95 I pulled the trigger (or the credit card) and bought the book.

Hmmmm….

You get the gist of the story in the synopsis.  Yet for some reason I connected with none of the characters.  It basically went on and on about the sisters, their lives, the mom (who is ill) and the dad who oddly quotes Shakespeare at random times in the book and me, not knowing much Shakespeare (ok… knowing ANY Shakespeare at all) is left scratching my head and thinking, “wha…?”

I could not put my finger on what I was not finding appealing about the book until the very end.  Seriously I was starting to think I was ruined for books forever as I recently had a similar experience with Carry The One (which is also about family living through tragedy… or something…).  Neither book (IMO) have a strong plot.

What do you mean Sheila?  Of course there is a plot!

Yes, both books do have a plot…. but it is one that the cards are shown in the early pages of the book and then…. nothing, nothing really big happens… like nothing carries the story.  I am hoping this makes sense but in Weird Sisters (and in Carry the One for that matter) the books are just about every day family life, what they are doing, eating, saying,….  day to day life.  I am basically, as the reader, along for the ride.

I have given a lot of thought to this as now in just a matter of two weeks I have stumbled on to this twice in my reading.  I guess, and maybe its just me… but I like more plot, more happenings, more emotion….

and I just did not feel it.

Does the book have its moments?

I think so, but here is the clincher.  Usually in a book or audio as I am going along, I pick up on something I love about the book or something that made me want to know more and  I can not wait to chat with you all about that in the review…. Yet, today, as I type this… I am clinging to nothing.  No point of the book is standing out to me, and that right there is why I leave this book (audio) with no connections.

I purchased this audio book on audible.com

It started with a wedding.  And then there was a reception.  There was a lot of drinking, and a lot of drugs.  In hindsight, it probably was not the best idea they had ever had to drive that night in a drunken drug induced haze but they did.

And that is when they hit the girl.

For Carmen, Alice, and Nick, the accident is carried with them wherever they go, far into the future.  The girl shows up in Alice’s paintings in the gallery…. a girl, wearing the same clothes she wore that fateful night…. a girl who Alice can not find closure for.  Casey has memories of the girl she never knew and Nick all these years later still tries to hide inside a bottle.

How… in the flash of a wrong choice, that alters lives forever… HOW do you move on with out carrying the one?

When I first read the synopsis of Carry The One I could not wait to get my hands on it.  A tragedy… an accident… and how a family moves on from something so terrible, so senseless, so their fault….

and so I listened to this on audio and…

let’s just say Carry The One was not what I had thought it would be.  I was expecting a deeply involved novel that did carry the victim throughout the pages.  That was not the case.  In fact, the book is really more about the three siblings, Alice, Carmen, and Nick… and their lives.  Alice paints and searches for love, but that is no different from what was happening prior to the accident.  Carmen’s choices may have an underlying hint of the accident and a need for closure, but mostly she is just doing life, and Nick… well Nick was in trouble before the accident with his drug use and alcohol abuse and that remains the same throughout the book.

I hate to use the word disappointed, but that is what sums this one up for me.  I really thought this book was going to show how one struggles to move on when the unthinkable happens and I really thought the center of the book was going to be about the little girl, Casey.  To me, it was just a book about the lives of three people and day after day how they tried to get it right.  The girl, is not mentioned much, but occasionally, yes.

Maybe I set myself up for failure on this one by having an entirely different idea of how this would play out.  I wanted to like this, shoot… I wanted to love this. 

I did not.

There are some interesting reviews going around about this book.  Quite a few loved it.  I think a few more found it an average read.  Be sure to check out other opinions on Carry The One and if you have read this, please let me know in the comments and I will be happy to link up your review to mine.

Amazon Rating

Goodreads Review