More to come this week...

I hope everyone has been enjoying the holiday season!  I had quite a week.  Last Sunday I drove to Las Vegas with my husband for his sister's wedding.  We got back on Wednesday and by Christmas Eve I had come down with some cold/flu/nastiness that I am trying to get rid of right now.  Since I am currently in a cold drug induces haze I don't think I am going to be accomplishing much. 

I was hoping to have more posted about my outings but I'll try to get my act together by the end of the week just in time for my....wait for it...wait for it...

Harry Potter themed New Year's party!!

Yes I know I am totally geeking out right now and I love it.  I have cooked up some pretty awesome things for this party which I will be sharing later but in the mean time I will leave you with one picture from my sister-in-law's wedding. 

My nephew (who turns 5 tomorrow) was the ring bearer and looked so adorable in his tux but he did need something to distract his attention during part of the reception.  Well, I just so happened to have a random app on my phone that let you decorate a picture with Christmas decorations and he loved playing with this app but for some reason thought it was hilarious when he covered up his own face...

Me and my nephew, he thought I looked better with some sweet pink glasses and he looked better with an ornament over his face

The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman

The Graveyard Book
By Neil Gaiman

What is there to say except I HEART NEIL GAIMAN!! When I first heard of him I didn’t understand how people could be so obsessed. Then, I read Neverwhere and began to understand but I love him even more after The Graveyard Book. The funny thing is that when I think about the story I can’t even really place what makes me love him. It could be quotes like:

“You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Pg298

That may be part of it, I just know that every time I close one of his books, whether for a moment, or after the final page, I feel a giddy, delightful connection. You would think I would feel sad to let go of the characters, but I don’t. I think I said something similar at the end of Neverwhere.

One of the most interesting things to me was that while reading I kept thinking about Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Neffenegger. The graveyard and ghosts all felt familiar and my feelings while reading both were very similar. Then, I got to the end of the book and under the “acknowledgments” Gaiman talks about Neffenegger.

“A lot of what she told me crept into Chapters Six and Seven.”
Pg 311

This may seem like more of a review on Neil Gaiman than a review of the Graveyard Book but if you haven’t read him yet, DO! If you need a place to start, The Graveyard Book is wonderful. What more do you really need to know?

**Source: Much love to my local library for having this book available for me!

Mailbox Monday

Mailbox Monday was created by Marcia at The Printed Page.

Thank you Jenny Q at Let Them Read Books for hosting this month's Mailbox Monday blog tour.

Check out her blog and post all the new books you acquired last week.

 Across the Universe by Beth Revis (ARC from publisher)

From author's website:

Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awake on a new planet, three hundred years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end fifty years too soon and that she would be thrust into a brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules.
Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone—one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship—tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn’t do something soon, her parents will be next.
Now, Amy must race to unlock Godspeed’s hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there’s only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming.

 Wither (The Chemical Garden Trilogy) by Lauren DeStefano (ARC from publisher)

 From Good Reads:

What if you knew exactly when you would die?

Thanks to modern science, every human being has become a ticking genetic time bomb—males only live to age twenty-five, and females only live to age twenty. In this bleak landscape, young girls are kidnapped and forced into polygamous marriages to keep the population from dying out.

When sixteen-year-old Rhine Ellery is taken by the Gatherers to become a bride, she enters a world of wealth and privilege. Despite her husband Linden's genuine love for her, and a tenuous trust among her sister wives, Rhine has one purpose: to escape—to find her twin brother and go home.

But Rhine has more to contend with than losing her freedom. Linden's eccentric father is bent on finding an antidote to the genetic virus that is getting closer to taking his son, even if it means collecting corpses in order to test his experiments. With the help of Gabriel, a servant Rhine is growing dangerously attracted to, Rhine attempts to break free, in the limted time she has left.

Infinite Days - Rebecca Maizel

Infinite Days
By Rebecca Maizel


Lenah is a vampire, or at least she was a vampire, until her best friend turned her back into a human using some crazy old magic. As Lenah tries to adjust to her new life as a human, she has flashes back to her old life as a vampire and these were my favorite parts of the story.

As a vampire, Lenah’s power was intriguing. You could feel how she dominated all those around her, human and vampire alike. She was a queen of the vampire world but she still had the burning desire to be human. I really appreciated that this was a new way to write a vampire story. It wasn’t about the desire to be a vampire or the fear of vampires but instead, a true look at what it would be like to lose your humanity and have only vampire desires and no feelings at all. This is a book that shows the pain and torment of being a vampire.

The story, overall, is very predictable. I was really happy with Lenah’s “outcast” status and it annoyed me when that began to change. That is also when I began to feel disconnected with the story. There were two things that came up throughout the book and really bothered me. First of all, there wasn’t any consistency with many parts of the story. Lenah would be saying something can’t happen and then it would. The second thing that drove me nuts was that Lenah’s abilities were constantly over-explained and then re-explained. She could look at the sun and know what time it was, she knew the time by the placement of the sun in the sky, her vampire abilities allowed her to know the time from the placement to the sun. I get it! Lenah had various abilities from being a vampire and some of them took time to wear off after her transformation back into a human but once that was made clear, the constant explanation of them was unnecessary.

The end was, again, predictable, but I was still curious to get to the end and find out exactly how it would play out. This is the first book in a new series and I hope the next ones give more detail into Lenah’s past because, as I said before, I really enjoyed reading about Lenah as a powerful, evil vampire, knowing that she eventually desires nothing more than to be human again.


**Source: ARC from publisher

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Everyday, on my walk from my car to the building I work in, I pass turkeys!  There are about 20 turkeys living right outside our office and they fly from tree to tree or walk around in the bushes.  I tried to get a video of one flying because nobody believes that those giant things fly but I missed it, but this little guy is saying hi to you today.  Actually, yesterday when I took the picture, he was saying "I know tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I'm hiding out here now get out of my face and don't blow my cover." 

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Daughters of the Witching Hill - Mary Sharratt

Daughters of the Witching Hill
By Mary Sharratt

I have read many books about witch hunts in various countries and the similarities, as well as the differences, fascinate me. Daughters of the Witching Hill is based on the true story of the 1612 Pendle witch-hunt. As the story unfolds, it shows how seemingly innocent religious beliefs intertwined with and also were confused with witchcraft.

Mother Demdike was a woman with the power to heal and the people in her community embraced that power…until they didn’t. Sharratt tells a heartbreaking story with surprising redemption. The story is filled with questionable characters and lose-lose situations which bring it to life. A battle between “bad witch” and “good witch” turns loved ones against each other but what resonated with me most was Mother Demdike’s insistence that they must not cry witch because once a witch-hunt starts, no one is safe.

I loved the different relationships between all the women. The seemingly strong bonds that brought out so many joyous and heartbreaking moments, as well as some interesting conversations:

She rested her brow upon my shoulder.
‘It’s the virgin’s disease, so my father says. The only cure is marriage. The longer I’m a maid, the worse it will get.’
-pg 180

Although this comment comes in the middle of a discussion about being cursed, it paints an interesting picture about the way that women were viewed and treated.

**Source: contest win from Passages to the Past

Little Bee - Chris Cleave

Little Bee
By Chris Cleave

This book was difficult for me. I enjoyed the story – well, it’s not that I enjoyed it as much as I appreciated it. I was a powerful story with a huge message behind it and I think the story that unfolded did a great job of portraying that.

That said, I think the writing left something to be desired. I felt all the emotions were put into the wrong moments. I would be reading about a heartbreaking moment in the story and the only reason I had any idea that was going on was because it said “I was crying.” I have a specific example but I’m not going to put a quote because I don’t want to give part of the story away. On the other hand, so much of the minor details became lost in the in-depth descriptions. There would be a page about something so minor (for example the ocean, I understand, symbolism, blah, we’ve gone over this, can we move on already?) I found myself skipping over parts.

I really loved what Little Bee said about scars and that was something that I remembered throughout the book but I also felt disconnected because the story was told as if she were telling it to someone from England and there was a lot I didn’t connect with because of that. I think that part of the story I enjoyed the most was the inside view on journalism and even some politics in London. I was fascinating to me. Although this was not what the story was about, it helped bring it to life.

**Source: I bought this book with my own sweet loot.