Cid
An excellent book – entertaining and heartbreaking at the same time. I enjoyed getting a peek inside the daily lives of Afghani citizens during Taliban rule, even if much of it was hard to stomach. But I love seeing the sides of Afghani live that are ignored by Islamophobic North American culture, like the importance of family.
I'm just glad this was fiction, because I fear a true story wouldn't have had such a satisfying ending.
I love the way Rubin writes about her experiences with happiness and encourages others to find their own happys. I came away from reading this book with a lot to think about, despite having a completely different life than hers. Or possibly BECAUSE I have a completely different life... I was never tempted to take her happiness resolutions and shoehorn them into my life, but rather to think about what worked in MY life.
[Some days my reviews are more influenced by other Goodreads reviews than the actual book I read...]
A fascinating look at an arena of history that I didn't know well! Very well researched, but I found it a little disjointed, jumping in time and place a lot. Plus VERY England-centric for a book supposedly about a German prince in the Low Countries.
Not really a spoiler, but... this book has one of the most honest discussions about why a person would not want to become a parent I have ever read. In fact, it uses a couple of different characters to show MORE THAN ONE REASON. And no one is treated as broken or unfeeling, and for that reason alone I love Meg Cabot more than I ever thought I would.
Oh, and there's lots more to the book than that. But that's what I came away from it caring about, so that's what I'm writing about.
Read the first two books in this series on the recommendation of a lot of my regulars at the store. About what I was expecting – cute, small-town, Christian fic. I liked the main character (though I do have a soft spot for fictional priests) and I really enjoyed the quirkiness of all the minor characters. I don't think I'll read any more in the series, but I would recommend them to some of my customers. On the downside, they are very overtly Christian, which didn't bother me (I just had a lot of flashbacks to when I used to go to church and people actually DID talk like that) but would turn off some people who would otherwise like the small-town feel.
I liked it, it was Pratchett. It just wasn't Pratchett at his finest – both Going Postal and Making Money were far superior Moist von Lipwig books, and the dwarven politics were much better dealt with in The Fifth Elephant and Thud. Also some spoilery bits at the end annoyed me greatly. Probably not a reread book, which is strange for a Discworld book.