Hah. I thought I was getting tired of the Origami Yoda series, Surprise Attack of Jabba the Puppett changed my mind. All of the kids and their origami characters! The Ewoks! The FunTime Menace! What will happen next?! I don’t know but I can’t wait ’til the next #readathon day when I plan to read the next book.
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Yawp!
From the Cybils shortlist, Dr Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets was awesome. I loved it. Didn’t want to put it down and I’m not even a very big Walt Whitman fan.
What I loved is that it’s just different enough from every other book about kids and depression/anxiety but familiar enough and true enough to keep me nodding my head.
Excellent. Really. I’d like to read it again (and maybe Yawp a little.)
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From the Cybils shortlist, Sex & Violence has a lot of both and it was surprisingly good. Troubling, as sex and violence (particularly teen sex and teen violence) can be. The characters were all very likable and I wanted nothing more than for Evan to come through it all — at least partially intact.
We finished listening to Maisie Dobbs: A Lesson In Secrets last night… another excellent book.
I kept wanting to yell LISTEN TO MAISIE because the men are dumb for not worrying about that whole Hitler, Nazi, fascist thing. Gah.
Also, I’m surprised she never figured out where Sandra went… maybe because she didn’t have time to really think about it? It was obvious to me.
I’m anxious to find out what happens next but we’re taking a little Maisie break to listen to a YA novel instead… then we’ll be back to Maisie again. I think.
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Oy.
TW picked up The Last Original Wife at the same time that she picked up the Fannie Flagg novel. If we’re going to be on a novels about Charleston kick, we might as well go all out, right?
Except, I’m not really a very big fan of Dorothea Benton Frank. I don’t HATE her books but I don’t generally love them, either. She does write well about Sullivan’s Island, and I appreciate that but… no. I just don’t love her books. And, anything called The Last Original Wife should have been a clue that I was not going to be in love, right?
Right. I wasn’t in love.
I appreciated that Leslie finally figured out that her marriage was crap. Her husband was an ass. And Atlanta wasn’t where she belonged. I laughed out loud twice — once when she bought the red Benz and I can’t actually remember the other time (probably something about the damn dog or the interesting gay brother) but hell. I just didn’t love the book.
I appreciated the Josephine Pinckney story thread but that was about it. I’d have been happier with a book about the gay guy in Charleston than I was about this one. Ho hum.
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I sent Michelle a copy of Curtsies & Conspiracies for her birthday so I decided to read it in celebration of her birthday. Seemed fitting, right?
I enjoyed it — still not as much as I liked the Parasol Protectorate but I definitely enjoyed it. Like Michelle, I really like Vieve and wish she had more of a primary role. I’m kind of hoping we see a third series spin off for her… or something… Not that I don’t like Sophronia and the other girls, I just like Vieve more. I also wish Carriger wrote faster, darn it.
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I’m on a Karen White roll and finished The Strangers on Montagu Street last night. I liked it. I really liked the dollhouse story line, that was excellent. But I’m dreading the next book because I accidentally saw a spoiler. Not a spoiler I wanted to know about (or wanted to happen.) Gah.
NOT happy about what comes next at all. So not happy that I’m considering not reading the next book… that’s crazy, right? Yea, it’s crazy so I’ll probably just go ahead and reserve the book and get it over with. Maybe I’ll end up liking it more than I think I will?
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I’ve pretty much lost the “I’d love to own an old Charleston house someday” desire. Or I thought I had. Last night, while reading The Girl on Legare St I found myself surfing zillow to see how much a house on Legare St costs right about now… hah.
TW and I realized we are very picky about our Charleston houses. There was one, which I won’t message, that has had horrible things done to its kitchen. Not horrible like the house on Legare St in this book but horrible enough. Anyway, back to the book…
It was excellent. Again. It’s not so much the mystery but the characters and location for me. (Melanie ate at Blossoms again, lucky woman.) And I absolutely did NOT see that ending coming. Not at all.
I am a little confused about the gifts Melanie’s mom has… she seemed to know something was going to happen along those lines — but how? Did the spirits tell her? I didn’t know she could predict the future? I thought that was Rebecca’s gift? Hmmm. That’s the only part that left me puzzled and it’s a very small thing since it was one sentence toward the end and the last paragraph of the book to set up the next book, (which I will be reading).
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For a minute there, I thought this was the end of the #1 Ladies Detective Agency… but no, it seems like everything’s going to work out ok. Thank goodness Mma Makutse is a modern woman. Sheesh.
I really enjoyed The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon. It was odd though because the two cases didn’t quite end the way the cases normally end. We know what happened but the people involved in the cases… not so much. Interesting. I would have liked to hear how things were resolved with the copy shop chick and with the lawyer/boy/aunt/mother. We usually get at least a small scene with Mma Ramotswe getting things straightened out. Interesting.
The best part… Charlie. Charlie and the baby. Awesome.
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If you have read all of Sarah Addison Allen’s previous works and LOVE HER and LOVE them then you might want to consider not reading Lost Lake. Or at least reading it with the understanding that it’s not quite the same. The magical element(s) are there, but it is not so magical as the others. Some of the reviews I read indicate there was NO magic. Or they pointed out one bit of magical storyline and completely missed the other. All very interesting — people tend to think of magic, particular Addison-Allen’s brand of magic as light, fluffy, shimmery, happy, good things…. people should look again and think a little harder, shouldn’t they?
In some ways I liked this book more than her other books (which puts me in the minority from what I can tell from the few reviews I surfed.) There’s a lot of sadness in this book, even when the characters are happy — or when they were happy, the sadness just kind of leaks out all over the place. I liked that.
The characters and location are well written and described, as usual. I’d like to go visit Lost Lake but only if those characters are there, too.