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Hey, friends! It is almost time for the 3rd annual Book Blogger Appreciation Week! Amy and her helpers are working busily to bring us an awesome event, and I thought I would go ahead and throw my name in the hat for consideration for a couple of categories.
As far as niche categories, I’m going to be entering in the Best Eclectic Book Blog category (perhaps if I get better about writing my audiobook reviews I’ll enter in the Audiobook category next year). Here are my posts for your expert judgement:
Ansley Waller is the perfect – but mean – Dallas sorority girl, kind of like a bitchy version of Elle Woods from Legally Blonde. Then her fiance, Parish, dumps her. He has finally seen her mean streak and he doesn’t like it. Now Ansley’s world has collapsed. She’s going to graduate without a man and, horror of horrors, have to get a job. She’ll never live this down in rich Dallas society. After a good deal of moping with her mother who is allegedly her best friend, she decides to get away from the people in Dallas who know her humiliation. To achieve this, she’s moving to New York to live with her rich grandmother who she’s never met because Ansley’s mother and grandmother are estranged.
Wow, “The Icing on the Cupcake” has one of the least likeable protagonists of any book I’ve read in recent memory. Ansley was a whiny, bitchy spoiled brat. Beyond that, the plot was fun, but far fetched and much too easy. Ansley wants to open a cupcake shop? Sure! She’s got her hugetrust fund from her father that was supposed to help fund her first year of marriage. Easy peasey! There also seemed to be a gigantic plot hole around Ansley’s mother. The two of them are supposedly best friends who need to talk on the phone multiple times per day, but weeks and weeks seem to pass without them ever speaking with one another. Also, Ansley, if your feet hurt walking around New York in your impossibly high heels, maybe you should consider buying some damn new shoes.
Even with all of this, the inventive and delicious-sounding cupcake recipes almost made it worth it to want to slap Ansley for 2/3 of the book. Yum. I’d buy cupcakes from Ansley, even if I would never want to have any other interaction with her.
If you aren’t bothered by spoiled rotten protagonists, this book could definitely be fun (plot hole around the mother aside), but it won’t be good for a relaxing day around the pool if Ansley’s ridiculousness annoys you enough to cause your blood pressure to shoot up.
This review was done with a book received for review.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.
Winnie McClelland and Jerry Trevis’s families aren’t particularly happy when they marry in their 70s. Jerry’s daughter in particular feels that she is being abandoned – or that her family’s fortune is going to abandon her, she doesn’t seem to have fully admitted to herself what her motivations are. This, of course, makes things slightly awkward for her son Avery who ends up between Annette and Jerry. The tension with Annette doesn’t just affect Jerry’s side of the family, though, but Winnie’s family too. And, really, Winnie’s daughter Rachel has enough drama going on in her life already. Her husband had a debilitating accident that left him unable to work full time, putting a huge strain on the family’s finances and their marriage.
This was an admirable debut novel. Tedrowe had three narrators of varying ages, genders, and circumstances: Avery, Rachel, and Winnie. The three of them were not even related by blood, although they did all have a connection through Jerry. Tedrowe was able to keep the three narrators distinct and yet interwoven. All of the characters were well-written and realistic, as well as relate-able.
Although the novel was well-written and well-crafted, something about it failed to absolutely wow me. It may have just been me, since I really can’t place my finger on it, but it just didn’t grab me in the way I was hoping it would. It was a character-driven novel, rather than a plot-driven novel and I was interested in the characters, but I didn’t love them enough to get completely caught up in their lives.
I liked this well enough that I will be on the lookout for Tedrowe’s next book and I would recommend this to people looking for a well-written, character-driven novel, but it isn’t my favorite thing I read this year.
I read this book as part of a TLC Book Tour. Check out some of the other tour hosts for more reviews. Links go to the host’s site, not to their specific review.
Annie O’Sullivan is a real estate agent who was just closing up at an open house when THE FREAK abducted her. He took her to a specially fortified cabin in the woods and proceeded to abuse her in a myriad of ways. Perhaps even scarier than the abduction and abuse, though, is how much he knew about her. This was clearly not a random abduction.
We know from the beginning of the book that Annie somehow escapes THE FREAK, because the entire story is basically the monologue of her recounting her ordeal to her therapist, beginning from the time she was abducted and moving more or less chronologically to what is happening in her life in the aftermath of her abduction.
I had a difficult time getting into the style of storytelling initially. For one thing, Annie’s voice bothered me a bit at the beginning of each chapter when she is directly addressing her therapist. I can’t put my finger on the exact problem, but something didn’t quite ring true for me. Then there was the fact that we clearly knew she was alive and had managed to walk away from her abduction. I was fairly certain that this setup was going to kill for me any suspense the book might have otherwise held, although I thought I would still like the book overall.
Boy was I wrong. About 50 pages into the book I decided to tell myself it was not a thriller, per se, and read it just as more general fiction. I still think that is a wise choice, but around page 100 “Still Missing” grabbed me and absolutely would not let me go. I thought I couldn’t become invested in Annie’s life as an abductee because I knew she would survive, no matter what horrendous things were done to her, but a situation arose during her captivity that left me breathless in fear and anticipation as I turned the pages, both wanting and not wanting to know what happened. Even once that situation was over, I was left incredibly invested in Annie, her ordeal, and her attempts to cope after the fact.
If you want a book that will suck you in despite a slightly slow beginning, “Still Missing” is a great choice. Recommended.
“Still Missing” is on sale in the US Tuesday, July 6th, 2010, but I have 3 copies to give away right now!
This review was done with a book received from Sarah at St. Martin’s Press.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.
Octavia Frost is a very successful novelist, but she’s not entirely happy with all of her books. In fact, she would change the endings of many or most of them if she could. And, in fact, she’s reasonably certain that she can; in fact, Octavia’s latest book is not so much a story in and of itself, but a reworking of the endings of all of her previous novels. She is on her way to deliver this very work to her publisher in New York when she learns that her estranged son has been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend.
“The Nobodies Album” alternates between Octavia’s journey to find out what happened with her son Milo, a famous rock star in his own right, and her manuscript with the new endings to her old books. I was very hesitant about the idea of rewritten endings of imaginary books at first, but oh my gosh, did it ever work. Parkhurst deftly wove them together with Octavia’s story, exploring the Frost’s painful past and the reason for Milo and Octavia’s estrangement as well as the question of what happened between Milo and his girlfriend. Somehow Parkhurst managed to write and re-write endings to books that provided the reader with enlightenment as to Octavia’s own story while also making them into snippets of stories that pulled me in completely. I really, really wish that some of these were real books.
I loved “The Nobodies Album.” It just had so much going for it: family strife, murder, writing and publishing, a mother’s love and guilt, and mystery. All of these elements worked together to create book that I was able to completely lose myself in. If you liked Parkhurst’s first novel, “The Dogs of Babel,” “The Nobodies Album” is just as creative and an even better book. Highly recommended
This review was done with a book received from the publisher via Shelf Awareness.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.
Beth F
Sandy
Jennifer
Michelle
Staci
Hey, friends! It is almost time for the 3rd annual Book Blogger Appreciation Week! Amy and her helpers are working busily to bring us an awesome event, and I thought I would go ahead and throw my name in the hat for consideration for a couple of categories.
Commuters
I read this book as part of a 
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