Kathrine
Cute in a predictable, I've read this kind of story before but I don't want to read anything I have to think about sort of way.
Terrible. With a capital ‘T'. I wasn't expecting fabulously fantastic, but this didn't even meet the Hallmark movie bar. The author needs to learn to actually do research when she doesn't know something, not just make things up to fit whatever fantasy she has in her head. Things she should have researched at a library or at least googled: the city of Phoenix. Adoption, abandonment and the termination of parental rights (yes they can be terminated without a parent signing paperwork). Asbestos (most likely it wasn't the floor tile that had asbestos, but the black mastik glue used to adhere the tile to the floor. It's not an issue unless it's disturbed - meaning someone has to pry the tile off the floor. The same goes for anything above the ceiling - just don't disturb it).
As for everything else, the story was thin. (Who takes a job in a far away small town without researching anything about it?) Insta!Love always annoys me. The main character was a cross between bland and obnoxious. Her precocious daughter was over the top (for the longest time I thought she had to be 4 maybe 5. Turned out she was 8.). The villain was the written equivalent to the evil magician in the Frosty the Snowman animated Christmas special.
I'm usually willing to give holiday themed stories a lot of leeway and forgive a lot of things, but where this book is concerned, you'd be better off leaving it on the shelf.
A beautiful, charming, sweet, heartfelt book with beautiful illustrations. Maybe a little cloying and simplistic at moments, but sometimes “that's what you need.
Mole may be my spirit animal. “If at first you don't succeed, have some cake.”
And I feel like i need to repeat that the drawings are gorgeous. So if you get a chance to even just glance through this one, do so.
One of these days I'm going to finish a book I actually, honestly like. Today is not that day.
I had hopes. That first paragraph? That first chapter? Wow. Fantastic. From there though? The timeline rolled back 3 months and it was all downhill. My curiosity while initially piqued, turned into boredom, scoffing and page counting. At first I thought Erin could be (and should have been) an empathetic character. She has a good job. She's engaged, planning wedding to the man she loved. A man who looses his job (which always seemed sketchy, but the author never does anything more than skim over that). And then something goes so horribly wrong that she's googling how to dig a grave. The problem is that somewhere between her crying about only getting a 2 week honeymoon in Bora Bora instead of 3 and her drunkenly opening a bag she had already decided they shouldn't be opening (twice), my brain went “OMG. She's dumber than a box of hair.” So yeah, there went any semblance of empathy.
Yet the hope from the beginning persisted. It had to get better. Right? Yeah. No. Instead the reader was treated to overly detailed EVERYTHING. Don't bother opening Google, just pick up your copy of Something In the Water the next time you want to know anything - and I mean anything - about a Glock. Or selling diamonds. Or how to choose the menu for your wedding reception. None of that mattered all that much in the end. Heck - there are characters - Caro, Alexis - that I still don't know why they're even present. The twist as predictable as it was might have worked if the author had spent a little time making Mark into something other than a 2 dimensional cardboard cut out. Instead if felt rushed and incoherent as the author spent pages explaining (imagine that. More explaining) everything that actually happened and was perpetrated by the real bad guys in order to hand wave all the plot holes.
This one could have been great. Instead I'm left with knowing that 36 cubic feet of soil weighs roughly the same as your average hippopotamus.
Maybe a little bit of a sophomore slump going on with this particular Cole novel. Still like his brand of humor but at times it felt pushy, like Crais was trying too hard. There were a couple of times when I wanted to turn to Elvis and tell him to shut up already. And normally I like Pike, but this time around he felt a little too two dimensional, a little too there just to allow for some blood splatter.
Enjoyed the major mystery with the Hagakure, but would have enjoyed it more if the thief hadn't been staring me in the face from the moment the character was introduced.
Overall not a bad story, but it could have been better.
Well then. That only took 2 library renewals (with a few weeks wait in between because borrowing ebooks is like that) and a lot of sighs and eye rolls to get through. At least with this one, the not-in-the-least-bit-subtle foreshadowing was less. Only slightly less, but still an improvement. The bigger problem this time is the insipid, naive main character - Girl/Daughter/Millie/Emalyn or whatever she's going by this week. PICK. A. NAME. (rant: this author seems to love naming characters what she thinks are romantic, fairy tale-esque exceptionally purple sobriquets. After 2 books of this, it's bordering on overindulgent).
In the beginning, I liked Merlin and Millie's friendship. Even if I didn't like all the blinking neon signs that Merlin is supposed to be THE Merlin (stop trying to squash fairy tales and legends together. They are different.), at least this sole friendship was decent basis for story and gave a way to fill time pre-straw to gold tasks. I liked Merlin so of course he was banished from the story for a good number of pages. When he returned, Millie was already fully into her my normal life sucks so I want to be princess state and therefore became the unrequited love portion of the story. I also liked Kirkin, the guard, even if he seemed like the unknown twin brother of Matteus from End of Ever After. Liking those two as much as I did, left me rather disappointed with Rainn. He was vague and flat as Millie's love interest. Of course by that time, I was becoming bored with Millie, herself. She had no purpose, no life, aside from fretting about an imp and missing her bestest friend in the world (and then stomping on his heart). So really her and Rainn were probably perfect for each other - both being able to fade into the background. Fading into the background is the best way to describe the ending. Once the big what's my name mystery was solved and Merlin finally decided he deserved more and left, the story fizzled on for too many pages. A quick couple of paragraphs epilogue could easily have filled in for those last 30 pages that I think were only there to link this book to the first one.
Side note: I narrowed my eyes at the whole name the children Jacob and Wilhelm thing (apparently someone is unaware that the Grimm brother's name was Jakob with a K. He was German after all). I guess when you're already squeezing more than 3 fairy tales into one book, there's more than enough room to include the men who actually collected some of those original tales.
As much as I love a fairy tale retelling, I had told myself I was done with this series with this book. And then I saw that the preview is for her version of The Little Mermaid. Sigh. That particular story has always fascinated me because people never seem to actually know how Hans Christian Andersen actually ended it. But now? I kinda what to see how Disney-fied PLUS (she even used the Disney name) Tenenbaum's version is.
I liked this one. Which would be great, except that I wanted to love it. I enjoy a good fairy tale retelling (Beauty by Robin McKinley is by far my favorite). I like when the author gives a typical, heard it a million times story a new spin, especially if that means that the main characters are given some agency or you get a previously unknown point of view. Now granted, Cinderella is not my favorite tale. And really, as far as retellings go, Cinderella has been tugged and stretched and melted down and reformed too many times to count. But this one sounded like maybe Ella had a backbone (like in the movie Ever After, which I love). And she did. Sort of. Mostly. Though not at the beginning and not when her grandmere wandered into the story and certainly not when she was all naivete and forgiving of things she shouldn't have been. Skepticism is not a bad thing, dear Ella. When she did finally shed those rose-colored glasses (the ones over her lavender eyes...purple eyes seem to be thing with this author. I'm not a fan), gathered her fancy tulle and silk and stood up for herself and the people, then I liked her. I admit I cheered when she turned the tables on her would be Prince (not-so) Charming.
My biggest problem and the main reason for only 3 stars was the author's extreme over use of foreshadowing. It's fine if you want to hint that things aren't going to get better before they get worse or that your heroine is going to realize that hindsight is 20/20 a couple of times in your story. It's a whole other issue when you're doing all that every couple of pages. Nothing in the story surprised me because I was well informed that SOMETHING BAD was going to happen. After a while, I just wanted the author get on with the story already.
This sounded like a fun, easy read. The problem was this book couldn't decide what it was supposed to be. A romance? Family drama? Magical realism? Food centered story? It was all too much and as such the story suffered. No one part was able to establish any footing. Instead it felt like a series of story fragments and events that just followed one after the other. And the ending felt too “tie it up with a happy rainbow”. There were some glimmers of good story telling - I enjoyed Vanessa's relationship with Evelyn - but it was covered up by all the over the top foodie meal descriptions. And I'm never a fan of insta-love stories (never mind the taking back the guy with the huge gambling problem because he might go to counseling). Basically, while it wasn't bad, it could have been a whole lot better.
Spenser books usually make me smile - the mystery, the humor and yes even the fact that they show their age. Sometimes that's what makes me smile the most.
Not quite up to Sedaris's other books, but the first essay - The SantaLand Diaries - is absolutely, beyond a doubt hilarious. If you stop reading after that, you won't miss a thing.
Once again, Patterson/Paetro went on storyline overload. Why have one mystery when you can have two, right? Why have one side story when you can have three. Not they were hard to follow or keep track of. (Though I got rather bored with the Bagman Jesus story which at the beginning felt like it was to be the “A” story but quickly turned into the “B” story.) No the problem with so many storylines is that none of them really get the focus or depth they deserve. And because of that they aren't memorable.
And geez. Lindsay's continued dithering over Joe's proposal is enough to drive a reader insane.
OMG. Finally. I thought my eyeballs were never going to get to the last page.
I really don't get all the hype and the gazillion star ratings with this one. Well, I think I kinda get why people would be so head over heals, I-need-all-the-heart-emojis-possible in love with the unrequited love story part. I didn't like it, but I get why some would.
Where this book really fell apart for me was the narration/style. It felt like one of those old VH1 Behind the Music shows only the subject matter wasn't invested in the story being told. Going with the transcript format the author used sucked the emotion out of everything. It was like reading a list you'd take to the grocery store. Take some drugs. Take a bus to (insert city of choice). Write a song. Argue with coworkers. Fly to Europe. Get married. Take drugs. Be drunk. Be sober. Etc. Etc. I kept hoping something in the writing would spark to life. Unfortunately the only thing that sparked to life was my irritation with the characters and why they were even bothering to sit through an interview - especially the self-entitled, all attitude, no substance Daisy.
Maybe the audio version would be better with multiple voices, however I'm not willing to sit through it to find out.
I will admit there were a few really good one liners and a couple of great quotes, but those alone do not make up for everything else.
Better than 10, 11, and 12. That's an improvement. Just not a big improvement. At times I thought I saw a glimmer of growth in Stephanie but then she'd do something stupid and we'd be back at square one.
Really this 2.5 rounded up to 3 stars, because wow did that feel like it took forever to get through.
I wanted to love this book. So much. From the moment I read a review months ago (before it was named any book club's pick). I even specifically made a trip to the book store to pick a hard copy when I saw that not only did they have only 1 in stock at the time, but it was also a signed copy. I mean it's a a book about books and libraries. Why wouldn't I want to love it.
Unfortunately, love is not the word I'd use to describe my reading experience. Sure there were points that I really liked it and there were parts that I enjoyed. But the meandering path that the narrative took to get from beginning to end was excruciating. It felt like one of those Family Circus comics where Billy takes the longest, most out of the way routes to get from A to B. Part of that I blame on the PR and dust jacket descriptions that made it sound like this books mostly focused on the 1986 fire at Los Angeles' Central Library. Made it sound like this was a cold case, an unsolvable mystery with some other anecdotal information thrown in. Starting out that's what it was. The focus was on the fire and what happened that day; how it was buried in the news cycle because bigger news happened a world away. And then the author made a hard left turn into tangent-ville. There's a section on the history of book burning (which, ok I can kind of see that connection, but there was too much). Then there's all the stuff on the history of the LA library system and how it's changed and how it all works today. So much so that we went huge section of the book without even a side mention of the fire, Harry Peak, the investigation, the lawsuits etc. But I also put some of the blame on the author. I know she loves using note cards to organize her thoughts/narrative order, but it seemed there was no order. One page she's talking about the fire, 3 pages later she's talking about interviewing a current librarian about their new social program and 10 pages after that she's babbling in great detail about what happened in 1923. It was that minutia on things that didn't matter to the over all story that left me not feeling bad about putting the book down.
While I appreciate the vast amount of research the author accumulated and I understand wanting to use as much of it as possible, I feel this was really two books that shouldn't have been squished into one.
Not terrible, but that long road was a meandering one. The first couple of chapters had tension and intrigue and then things got simplistically messy - both plot and writing wise. The revealed conspiracy was a bit too over the top for my liking, but at least it was wrapped up. I did like Atlee and I adored Bloom so I'm willing to pick up the next book in the series.
Every time I pick up an author who leans toward (or is firmly planted) the romance genre, I think maybe this one will click. Maybe I won't hate every character. Maybe I won't need to bring the sarcasm when doing updates or writing a review. Most of the time - probably good 95% - my optimism plummets and the sarcasm knows no bounds. Such is the case with All Your Perfects. I had a feeling I wasn't going to be a fan just from skimming through all the reviews that were all “I'm crying” “went through a whole box of tissues” and “this one crushed my soul and than ran over it with a mac truck.” mmmhmmm. Yep. Look at all those red flags waving in the wind. But I tried to keep an open mind. And at first I admit I was doing ok with it. Particularly the early meet cute for Quinn and Graham. And then whiny, should be talking to a psychologist about her depression Quinn showed up in the present day. After that it was struggle for me to get through all the suffering done by Quinn, because why give your heroine one problem when you can give her five horrible, awful things she doesn't want to deal with (and don't get me started on the polar opposite support characters used to prop up and tear down the main couple). All this seemed to go on and on until the last 30 or so pages, where suddenly glittery rainbows and oozy cheesiness dripped all over everything in order to wrap up every story thread in a cute, happy little bow.
This one just wasn't for me.
This one was just meh. Three authors, each writing a different character. You have to expect things to be a little disjointed. Reminding myself of that didn't help me get through those little bumps in the road any better.
Overall, I liked the book but it's a good thing I believe in reading beyond the first 25 pages because at that point I was ready to toss the book aside. Definitely got better after that. Reminded me a little of the earlier Stephanie Plum books - a nice mix of mystery and romance.
Interesting twist to the usual tried and true kidnapping plot even if the ending left me a bit meh. Probably helped that the female sidekick/assistant who was fairly likable (and better drawn than others Child had written).
Enjoyable, fast read. The ending was a bit abrupt - not sure if that was because I was enjoying the characters enough not to notice the build up or because there wasn't much of a build up. Either way I liked this one enough to want to read more in the series.
On a side note - nice to read something set on the shores of Lake Erie.
Not quite sure how I feel about this one. It had its moments. Cute, sweet, funny moments. There were even a couple of moments that made me get a little bit sniffle-y. And I actually liked Laurie and Sarah and Jack. Oscar not so much, but whatever. My biggest problem was that it dragged on for way too many pages. Like say 75 pages too many. This should have been 300 (give or take 10 pages) page count book. Because you get to the point that Sara figures out the bus boy mystery and you know exactly what is going happen. (Which is fine, I knew going in what this book was.) But then the story time line sloooooowwwwwsssss to an absolute crawl. The reader is left to turn pages, hoping that the two daft idiots with the encouragement of their mutual friend will suddenly be sharing the same space just so the reader can stop turning pages. Yep, less pages would have been fantastic.
Other than that, it wasn't bad. But it wasn't yell about it from the rooftops great either. I'd be willing to give another book by this author a chance.
I should have read a few reviews before I opened this one....Logically, you would think you should start with book 1 in a long series. I have a habit of accidentally picking up say book 4 in a series, liking it, and then having to go back and start at the beginning. So here I was thinking starting with book 1 was a good thing. Should have read the reviews because then I would have known NOT to start with book 1. Skip it. For now. Read a few others and then come back. Because this one? Was kinda boring. And it didn't do the best job at world building. There were characters that flit through a few pages and then disappear. I assume in a later book they'll be important but not this one. I did like the characters, (well most of them). Rincewind too a little bit to get used to and Twoflower seesawed back and forth between idiocy and haplessness. So I'm willing to try another Discworld book....I just need to read a few more reviews to figure out which one.
I went into this book hoping it would be good (because I've read a lot of positive reviews) but prepared to not be impressed at all (that seems to be an issue with large percentage of books for me lately). With all that, my immediate inclination to give this 4 stars was a bit of a surprise.
This is not a fast moving story. Instead it smolders (pun intended), occasionally ignites and then dies back down. It's about characters and emotion. It's not only about how we see ourselves but how others change and color how we see ourselves. There isn't one character who doesn't color themselves in varying forms of grey through out this story, even Elena who like to think in terms of black and white and flawless, perfectly planned outward appearances.
While the overarching story is that of Elena and Mia and their children and what happens to all of them, the secondary story of Bebe and her daughter is really what drives the narrative forward. It's the lit match ready to set so many fires flaring.
If you're looking for high drama and outbursts and racing toward a finish line, you won't find it here. But if you want well written, deep character studies with emotion and true to real life messiness, then give this one a chance.