Review: The Wedding Date
I do, however, think this is just more evidence that I’ve been cursed when it comes to this wedding.
Sometimes I want to read a big book that makes me think. Sometimes I want to read a fast-paced adventure that makes my heart race. Sometimes I want to read something happy that just makes me smile. The Wedding Date
Alexa Monroe is on the way to see her sister in her hotel room when the elevator gets stuck. With a very cute boy in it with her. Drew Nichols is getting ready to go a wedding. The wedding of his ex-girlfriend and best friend. Oh, and he’s a groomsman. When he laments that he doesn’t have a date to this disaster of a situation, Alexa agrees to go with him. From then on, they are inseparable. They hit it off, to say the least. After the wedding, Drew flies back to Los Angeles and his job as a pediatric surgeon, and Alexa goes back to Berkley and her job as the mayor’s chief of staff. They can’t stop thinking about each other, and each one has to confront their own feelings to figure out if they’re in lust or true love.
This is a really cute book, and I think it would make a good movie. It is obviously predictable, but I don’t think this is the kind of book anyone goes into for a surprise ending. It’s well written, the pace is fast, and the characters are likable. It is also very different from most romance novels in a few important ways. The plot itself falls in line with most romances, but the details are significant. Drew is a white, good-looking doctor who is incredibly thoughtful. But Alexa. Oh, Alexa. She is African American, short, curvy, and loves to eat. I LOVE HER. Guillory manages to write about the important topics of powerful working women, body positivity, and interracial relationships in a light manner. None of it gets too heavy, but she makes her point very clearly. Drew loves Alexa’s body, and while she is uncomfortable around tall, skinny girls sometimes, she doesn’t let that stop her from eating, and she never speaks about her body negatively. That is so important, and I really appreciate the author writing a book like this.
That being said, while I did like the main characters, I really wanted more from them. To be frank, all they did was have sex for most of the book, and when they finally started getting to know in each other in the small, less sexy moments of life, it was only briefly mentioned in a few throwaway lines. I would have loved to see more character development in those moments.
The Wedding Date
⭐⭐⭐
Review: Castle of Water
I usually start my reviews with a quote from the book. I couldn’t this time, for two reasons. One, I read the book so voraciously that I hardly took any notes because I didn’t want to stop reading. Two, I would really like to quote the entire book. It is that good.
Castle of Water
Barry, a New Yorker who has just quite his job in finance, and Sophie, a French architect on her honeymoon, are both on the same tiny plane to visit the small island of Hiva-Oa in the Marquesas, for very different reasons. When the plane crashes and everyone, including Sophie’s new husband, except Sophie and Barry perishes, the two survivors must find a way to live together on a small deserted island. They have to not only survive the island, but each other. Stranded on an island with very little hope of rescue, Barry and Sophie must learn to trust each other in order to persevere and survive the island, and everything it throws at them.
Huckelbridge has an almost journalistic style of storytelling, and I had to keep reminding myself that I was reading fiction. He manages to put two characters into an almost unbelievable situation and make all of it very believable. I really knew Barry and Sophie, and understood why they made certain choices. (Even if I didn’t always agree with them.) Watching them get to know each other, and to see who they really are at the core, was an amazing experience. The level of detail included in the story was absolutely wonderful. I won’t give it all away, but one detail that Huckelbridge included throughout was Barry’s contacts, one of the few things to survive the crash. Here he is, on an island, with nothing, but he still has his routine of putting his contacts in in the morning and taking them out at night. It was so interesting to see what normal routines were included in the story, and how they would play out in this situation. The author is also just plain funny, and I laughed out loud several times throughout the novel. (Except for the last ten pages, which I won’t talk about, but you’ll understand once you read it.)
I don’t want to give any spoilers, but I will say that romance is definitely not at the heart of this novel, and I really appreciated that. It would have been so easy to have them be romantically involved early on, but the author portrayed them accurately-they really aren’t huge fans of each other at the beginning, and they have to work around that. It made the book more interesting, more honest, and more heartfelt in the end. (In which my heart was ripped out.) This is no Gilligan’s Island with a bar, tikki huts, and romance around every palm tree. This is about real people, and how they would really act.
Dane Huckelbridge has said that his intention for this book was to write “literary fiction that’s actually enjoyable to read.” Castle of Water
Review: Educated
You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them . . . You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.
I have been struggling to write this review, not because I didn’t like the book but because I loved it so much that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. I want to get the words exactly right, because I think everyone should read Educated
Tara Westover grew up in the mountains of Idaho. Her parents, radical survivalists, kept her and her siblings out of school for most of their lives, did not believe in doctors or modern medicine, and taught their children to prepare for the end of the world. When Tara decides that she does want to be educated, she begins to read as many books as she can in order to prepare for college entrance exams, despite never having attended school. When she gets into and begins classes at Brigham Young University, she is in for a shock when she learns, for the first time, about events such as the Holocaust, civil rights movements, and that Advil will cure a headache, not kill her. Even though she has willingly escaped an isolated and violent life, she struggles with her choices and the choices her parents wish she had made. Tara has to choose what’s best for her and her future, even if it means going against her family.
This book is startlingly personal, and I think it’s because she wrote it very soon after going through all of the events. I could really feel Tara’s struggle with what amounts to choosing between her family and the “real” world. Reading it as someone who has never been in her situation, the choice for me seemed clear (There is a scene in which someone is burned very badly, and they still refuse to go to a doctor. It is truly unbelievable and shocking.), but seeing it through her eyes, I understand why she was in an impossible position. She was choosing to leave her family in order to receive an education, and it was clearly not an easy choice.
Educated
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
EXTRA!
The Guardian has a great interview with Tara!
[Top]What My Kids Are Reading: March 23, 2018
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Thank you to Blue Slip Media for the copy of The Boo-Boos That Changed the World! All opinions are my (and my kids’) own!
This week’s post is a little bit different. There are only two books, and they are books that I’ve been reading to my kids AND that they read a little bit of on their own. We’ve all been pretty tired getting back into our routine after spring break, so they both want me to read to them more often than reading on their own. (Outside of the reading they do at school. They’ve been checking out Big Nate and Captain Underpants from the school library, and my 9-year-old’s class is still reading Charlotte’s Web. So they do quite a bit of reading on their own in the classroom.) On to the books!
The 9-Year-Old
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
I debated on whether or not to go ahead and read this book with my 9-year-old, but I decided it would be fine. And he also said he could just check it out at the school library. SO. We are mostly reading it together, but he is taking it to school and reading a bit on his own as well. There have been a lot more questions with this book than the others, and I suspect they will continue, given just how dark this one gets. I haven’t re-read this one in years, and I’m really liking getting into the story again! Harry Potter is one of my all-time favorite series, and I love bonding with my son over it!
The 6-Year-Old
The 78-Story Treehouse
This was just released in the states, and my son found the last copy at the bookstore we visited! He loves this silly series, and I’m glad that the next one will be published here this summer. (They are published in Australia first!) This one involves a movie, a crazy movie director, and a huge fight between Andy and Terry, the main characters. As usual, it’s ridiculous, funny, and my 6-year-old LOVES it!
BONUS!
The Boo-Boos That Changed the World: A True Story About an Accidental Invention (Really!)
We really enjoy non-fiction books that make learning interesting, and this is one of the best ones we’ve read. I have honestly never thought about how Band-Aids were invented, but it’s a truly interesting story. Earle Dickson, and employee of Johnson & Johnson in the 1920s, had an accident-prone wife. When he tried to devise something to cover her many cuts and scrapes, it led to the invention of the modern day Band-Aid! The illustrations are great, the story is unexpected, and the writer throws in plenty of jokes. I think most kids will find this interesting-mine loved it, and we all wanted to look up more information about the inventors. The book also includes a timeline at the end of other inventions, and encourages kids to do their own research to learn about more inventions.
[Top]Review: The Swans of Fifth Avenue
This, this moment, was real, but more precious, more golden, than any fairy tale.
My mom saw Truman Capote once. She lived in New Jersey at the time and had gone into NYC for dinner. She saw him through the window of the restaurant she was eating in, walking past in his signature white suit and white hat. There was no doubt it was him. He was glam, mysterious, and popular, and always surrounded by scandal. In Melanie Benjamin’s The Swans of Fifth Avenue
Truman Capote and Babe Paley (a popular, perfect socialite married to CBS founder William Paley) were best friends, and saw each other more as family. Babe was at the top of the social food chain in 1950s New York City, and she brought Truman along with her. Her upper-crust friends, dazzled by the gossipy, famous Truman, trusted him with their more scandalous secrets. When he started his fall from grace after publishing his self-proclaimed masterpiece In Cold Blood, he decides to use his friends’ stories as the basis for a new book. The fallout from that decision is, in some cases, truly life-ending.
This was my first Melanie Benjamin book, and I definitely want to read more. She does historical fiction so well, and I love being entertained while I’m learning something about an interesting time in history. I don’t know a lot about Capote’s history, but I want to know everything about it now! This is like a crash course in this particular society and time; after every chapter I found myself saying, “Did that really happen?” And then Googling the event to find out the entire backstory. (Which is why it took me longer than usual to finish this book!)
While this book is reminiscent of a fairy tale, it’s more like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, with dark secrets and broken trust throughout. Capote’s world of socialite swans was gossipy and glittering, but at its heart is a sad story. Given Truman’s background and personality, he should never have been able to fit in with that high society group in NYC. He was built to be an outcast, and he absolutely knew it. He also knew enough to take advantage of every opportunity. Babe Paley, beautiful, popular, and Truman’s darling, was unhappy in her platinum cage, and tried to seek happiness in her friendship with Capote.
The Swans of Fifth Avenue
⭐⭐⭐.5
EXTRA!
The author’s website has great resources if you want to read more about the real people who inspired this book!
Following in the Footsteps of the Swans
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