
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Giveaway: The Gate House by Nelson DeMille!

Monday, November 9, 2009
Memoir Mondays... The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Young Marjane Satrapi came from a well off, loving, modern family. She went to a non-religious french school. Her father drove a cadillac and her family had a maid. All that changed in 1980, when Marjane turned 10 years old... because Marjane lived in Tehran... During the cultural revolution... and 'the veil'.
The book opens with Marjane showing us how a 10 year old perceives the sudden requirement to wear the veil... The little girls didn't understand the need to wear one. One day you don't have to, and the next day you do? Her bilingual school was closed down because it was a symbol of capitalism and decadence... And soon Marjane was being indoctrinated into the political fray. First she is taught that the Shah was chosen by God, then when he is overthrown she is taught to tear his pictures out of all the school books. People were being persecuted, executed, tortured. And Marjane's parents did not protect her from the truth because it seemed the only way to save her from becoming one of the persecutors...
Her parents protested, there were raids & bombs, and patrols... Relatives are murdered, friends of the family disappear, a friend dies is a bombing. How is a 1o year old suppose to deal with all this? Honestly... Unfortunately her honesty was perceived as blasphemy... Marjane called her teacher a liar when she taught that there were no more political prisoners and recited the facts, she wore a simple bracelet under her garment and was expelled... It was then decided that a little girl with a penchant for rebellion and a sharp tongue would be safer growing up away from Iran... So, Marjane next goes to Austria to live with a friend of her mother's... and as if things couldn't get worse, they do.
What is so interesting and compelling in this story is that Marjane is the same as all young girls- she likes music, and posters, jewelry and wearing jeans. But because of where she is born she is forced to grow up faster and learn to survive. Her "slips" are mostly from her acting like a 10 year old. How she deals with all this conflict, even the conflict within herself as she grapples with what is going on around her and what is in her heart, is written and drawn wonderfully.
This coming of age story, The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, is a tender, heartfelt story of a girl growing up in a world of conflict. The relationship she has with her mother and grandmother are loving and volatile. But what she takes from each of them and tucks away into her soul shows us glimpses of a girl growing up. How she deals with the war & revolution are important, but how she deals with the injustices imposed on her just because she is a female is even more important. The wearing of the veil, the cut of her clothes, the wearing of make-up, a strand of hair out of place, moral etiquette, dating, divorce... these are all things we learn how a young Iranian girl deals with. All of this is why I thought this book would easily fit into the Women Unbound Reading Challenge... This book shows how this young woman deals with the social and political issues present as she grows up in Iran. Marjane is candid, honest, funny and angry. The book will tug at your heart at moments and infuriate you other times. The book spans 14 years, and it is well worth your time cracking the spin!
I really enjoyed reading this book. The Black & White drawings were so expressive and the story flowed easily from the page. I read it in one sitting because I became absorbed in the Marjane's story. If you're not exactly a graphic novel reader, I hope you'll open this book anyway, it is a wonderful read and would be a great start to reading graphic novels!
*P.S. Philadelphia, PA. has chosen Persepolis as their One Book, One Philadelphia pick for 2010 with the distribution of 5000 copies city wide! Read more HERE.
Women Unbound Reading Challenge


Sunday, November 8, 2009
The Sunday Salon... Readers celebrate The Tree with The Green Book reading challenge, Balancing Out Your Books, and The Tree Museum
What is the Sunday Salon? Imagine some university library's vast reading room. It's filled with people--students and faculty and strangers who've wandered in. They're seated at great oaken desks, books piled all around them, and they're all feverishly reading and jotting notes in their leather-bound journals as they go. Later they'll mill around the open dictionaries and compare their thoughts on the afternoon's literary intake...
Saturday, November 7, 2009
The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist... A Review

Thursday, November 5, 2009
The Maze Runner by James Dashner... A Review

Tuesday, November 3, 2009
The Giver by Lois Lowry... A Review

Imagine a “perfect” world... perfect because it is filled with sameness... There is no sunshine, no cold, no color... each family has 2 children, a boy and a girl, and everything, and I mean everything, is planned out and accounted for. Who you marry, what your profession shall be, what clothes you can wear growing up... There is no fear or pain, or feelings what so ever...
Set in a futuristic world, the story centers around Jonas, who at age 12 is singled out to train to become the new Receiver of Memory. There is only one Receiver, and this person holds all the memories of the pain and pleasures of life from way way back, before there was sameness. And so, Jonas is to receive all the memories one at a time from The Giver...
Up to the point where Jonas is named the new Receiver we learn about the community where Jonas lives... Everyone is extremely polite, no one is ostracized or highly praised, people can apply for a spouse and are assigned a person deemed compatible by a panel. Then the couple is assigned a boy and a girl from a pool of "newchildren", born from birthmothers who have exactly 3 births, never see their birth children and then are assigned heavy labor for the rest of their lives. Children at the age of 12 are assigned a job in the community based on their skills and interests that have been carefully observed as they volunteer in different community areas.
When the children are grown, the family unit dissolves and the adults live out there lives with other childless adults until they are too old to function in society and then go to "The House of Old". From there they are eventually "released" from society.
Of course none of this sounds too bad, until you see the glimpses of the rules in black & white. When people (children included) don't measure up to the rest of society, such as not learning proper behavior, they are given a few chances to correct their ways, but if they don't conform they are "released". Babies that don't develop at a measured rate are "released". If twins are born, one is "released" based on weight, because you simply can't have 2 of the same people walking around. The community seems pretty normal until some of these quirks start popping up. But this is all the community has known, until Jonas starts receiving the memories...
The red of an apple, the blue of the sky, the coldness of a snowflake against your face, the feeling of love... these are the memories Jonas starts to receive and it changes his world forever. What follows is heartbreaking at times, such as when Jonas asks his father "Do you love me?", and is given a lecture on a love being a generalized and meaningless word. But Jonas is changed by these new feelings and in a final act of desperation and love breaks out of his "mold" and becomes a loving, caring, individual...
The Giver is haunting... Even 15 years later, the writing is fresh and contemporary. Words used such as newchildren instead of newborns, "releasing" versus murdering, Assignments, Precision of Language, The House of Old, are subtle phrasing with very serious connotations. The Giver has been on the banned books list almost since it's publication in 1993. Some of the themes found objectionable are suicide, sexuality, and euthanasia. The theme of euthanasia was disturbing... But watching Jonas bloom as an individual was wonderful. It is a powerful novel, deceptively wrapped in a small 179 page package with simple language, but sometimes good things come in small packages and this is one of those times....
Have you read The Giver yet? I'd love to hear what you thought about the book! Instead of banning this book, why not take the opportunity to discuss the topic of suicide or euthanasia? How about the value of individuality? Dealing with peer pressures? Let me know how you feel!
This book is part of the DystopYA Reading Challenge! Dystopian fiction is generally fiction about a world that is attempting to be perfect but contains a fatal flaw. It's the opposite of a utopia. This can take the form of a fascist government, a failing environment, corporate rule - anything. In it, life is miserable and people have to strive to rise above. This book certainly fits that bill!
*P.S. This Book is Kindle Ready!
Monday, November 2, 2009
Memoir Mondays... Confections of a Closet Master Baker by Gesine Bullock-Prado

Roll up your sleeves and crack the spine to enter the world of flour, puff pastry, and Hollywood! Gesine shares the perfect recipe on how to follow your passions and her secret Golden Eggs recipe!
I want to thank Catherine P. of Broadway Publishing, a division of Random House, for sending me a review copy! This book was a delight to read! And my baking will never be the same!
Sunday, November 1, 2009
The Sunday Salon... Reading Adventures and "Books with Buzz"

All week long I've lived inside a dystopian world. First I took this strange elevator to this place called The Glade avoiding these mechanical blobs that were trying to kill me and everyone else there and finally entered the maze surrounding the Glade in an attempt to escape... Then once I was out of there I wound up in another futuristic world where I had to think fast as I approached age 5o without children to avoid "Paradise" and the use of my vital body parts... Watch for my reviews for the places I've been this week... The Maze Runner by James Dashner and The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist. The Maze Runner was part of my reading for The DystopYA reading challenge. The Unit is another Dystopian selection, but it's not YA, and it's one of the Reading Group Selections for National Reading Group Month... But I didn't just have my head in books this week, I was also on the lookout for Books with Buzz and here's what I found...

An fun release this week was Grave Secret by Charlaine Harris. Charlaine Harris is well known for her Sookie Stackhouse southern vampire books, but Charlaine Harris has a few other series going on too! One of those other series is the Harper Connelly mysteries. This past tuesday Grave Secret, the fourth book in that series, was released. Grave Secret is the continued story of Harper Connelly and her stepbrother Tolliver as they venture out of their normal story line of hunting dead people for a bit of a family reunion. In the first book in the series, Grave Sight, we are introduced to Harper Connelly who has the uncanny ability to find dead people and live the last moments of the dead person's life. Tolliver is her manager and bodyguard. This series is a fun enjoyable series, with likeable characters. If you're looking for something a little less serious to read try Harper on for size. And if you like her, there are 3 more books to read!

Another book that grabbed my attention because it's gotten some interesting buzz is Waiting For Columbus by Thomas Trofimuk. A man arrives at an insane asylum in contemporary Spain claiming to be the legendary navigator Christopher Columbus. Who he really is, and the events that led him to break with reality, lie at the center of this captivating, romantic, and stunningly written novel. Found in the treacherous Strait of Gibraltar, the mysterious man who calls himself Columbus appears to be just another delirious mental patient, until he begins to tell the “true” story of how he famously obtained three ships from Spanish royalty. Time shifts back and forth between modern day and the time of Columbus, which some people may not like, but I find stories like that fascinating. Described as part adventure, romance and tragedy, I bought this book this weekend after glancing thru the pages to read some of Thomas Trofimuk's writing and enjoyed what I read. Another book I thoroughly enjoyed that shifted in time similar to this book, in the telling of "stories", was The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson. Here's my review of The Gargoyle from this past summer. If you haven't read The Gargoyle yet, put that on your TBR list!

Finally for this weeks Books with Buzz, a book that was shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers and helped the author win a Whiting Award, Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun. In Mun's debut novel, we read the electrifying and heartbreaking story of a teenage runaway on the streets of 1980s New York. Teenage Joon is a Korean immigrant living in the Bronx of the 1980s. Her parents have crumbled under the weight of her father’s infidelity; he has left the family, and mental illness has rendered her mother nearly catatonic. So Joon, at the age of thirteen, decides she would be better off on her own, a choice that commences a harrowing and often tragic journey that exposes the painful difficulties of a life lived on the margins. Joon’s adolescent years take her from a homeless shelter to an escort club, through struggles with addiction, to jobs selling newspapers and cosmetics, committing petty crimes, and, finally, toward something resembling hope. In raw and beautiful prose, Nami Mun delivers the story of a young woman who is at once tough and vulnerable, world-weary and naive, faced with insurmountable odds and yet fiercely determined to survive. Nami Mun's writing is sparse and direct, but there is a kind of beauty in her writing that has gotten a lot of attention. It is a odd size book, not quite a trade paperback and a bit larger than a mass market pb, with large margins surrounding the text on all 4 sides that seem to draw your attention into the words and what you are reading...
Hope you've found something to put on your reading list! Have anything I should put on mine?! What books have you been reading?! Share the books that kept you up all night turning pages!
Happy reading... Suzanne






