Reviews

REVIEWS


Sheer Abandon- Penny Vincenzi

Martha, Clio, and Jocasta meet by chance at Heathrow airport in 1985 as they are starting off on separate backpacking adventures, and they decide to spend the first few days of their trips together in Thailand. When they go their separate ways, they vow to get together in London the following year. But many years pass before the three cross paths again, and the once-capricious, carefree girls now all have thriving careers. One of them, however, harbors a terrible secret: On her return from her pre-college excursion, she abandoned her just-born daughter at Heathrow.

Clio has fulfilled her ambition of becoming a doctor, only to find herself trapped in a marriage to an arrogant surgeon who belittles her and her professional achievements. Martha is a highly paid corporate lawyer, just embarking on a political career. Dedicated to her job, she has had little time for personal relationships and lives a busy, but lonely life. Jocasta, a tabloid newspaper reporter with an infallible instinct for the big story, is in love with a charming colleague who can’t make the permanent commitment she longs for. The infant abandoned at Heathrow has grown up under the loving care of her adoptive family. Now a beautiful teenager named Kate, she sets out to find her birth mother—a quest that unexpectedly brings the women together and exposes the secret buried so many years before.


This book was nothing like I thought it was going to be. For starters, I thought we would find out more about what happen to each of the girls on their backpacking trip, but no instead we get alot of political crap. This book had so much potential to be a really great read instead it got boggled with unnecessary subjects that got boring really fast. I kept waiting for something to happen, but alas nothing ever really did, even the whole who's baby was it, and why did she do something so drastic was uninteresting. I felt nothing for the characters, including the abandon child(of course, we get introduced to her as a teenager). Not worth the read in my opinion.

PRODUCT DETAILS

Paperback: 656 pages
Publisher: Anchor (April 8, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0767926250
ISBN-13: 978-0767926256

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Lust for Life- Adele Parks

If the shoe fits...

Here's what the Evergreen sisters have in common: jealousy. Eliza longs for the stability of Martha's picture-perfect marriage; Martha craves the spontaneity of Eliza's life with her sexy musician boyfriend. Now one of the sisters has dumped her mate, and the other one just got dumped. Suddenly single-minded, they are about to get what they think they've always wanted -- a chance to walk in the other woman's shoes.

...buy a pair in every color.

Here's what the Evergreen sisters found out: trading placescan be a complicated affair. With new lovers in their lives, Eliza's partaking in sensible discourse at upscale dinner parties, while Martha's having great, no-strings-attached sex. But love is full of surprises...and dream lovers can be full of hot air. No longer green with envy, can the Evergreen sisters each find a perfectly imperfect man to make their lives -- their real lives -- truly satisfying?


Two sisters totally different, that become discontent with how their life has turned out.
Martha the responsible one has two kids, and is married to a wonderful husband, so she thinks, until her husband out of the blue says he isn't happy, and wants a divorce. This is where the story begins for Martha. Some of the things that she does to get her husband back made me cringe, really can someone be anymore pathetic, but things do change for her for the better in the end. The other sister Eliza is thirty going on twenty one, she feels she has to grow up, and become responsible, and decides to dump her boyfriend who she feels also needs to grow up, but feels won't. This book is predictable, but a okay book. Somethings in this book made me smile like Jack. Have to read the book to find out about Jack.

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback: 416 pages
Publisher: Pocket (November 1, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0743496493
ISBN-13: 978-0743496490
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Masquerade- Melissa De La Cruz

Schuyler Van Alen is starting to get more comfortable with her newfound vampire powers, but she still has many unanswered questions. A trip to Italy in search of her grandfather only serves to make things more confusing. What secrets are the leaders of The Committee hiding? Meanwhile, back in New York, preparations are feverishly underway for the famous Four Hundred Ball. In true Blue Blood fashion, the ball is totally fab, complete with masks, and hidden behind this masquerade is a revelation that will change the course of a young vampire's destiny.

The thrilling sequel in Melissa de la Cruz's vampire mythology has all the glamour, attitude, and vampire lore that made the first book a hit.


The second book in the Blue Bloods trilogy, I thought this book was better than the first. In this book we find out more about the powers of the Silver Bloods, and what they are capable of doing. The connection between Schuyler and Jack is still there, though they both can't explain it. A new guy in town brings in new drama, and makes things alittle bit messy. Looking forward to reading the next book, Revelations.

PRODUCT DETAILS
Reading level: Young Adult
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Hyperion Book CH (July 1, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1423101278

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Body of Knowledge- Carol Dawson

Carol Dawson's outrageous second novel chronicles the decline and fall of a strange dynasty--from post-frontier Texas to the present day. It's the story of a secret war, of obsession, fear, loathing, and betrayal. But most of all, BODY OF KNOWLEDGE is the story of Victoria Grace Ransom, the story's 600-pound narrator, whose engrossing secret gradually reveals itself in a novel as big as all Texas.


This book was not very interesting, and quite boring. It had alittle bit of everything in it, revenge, adultry, and secrets, but I just couldn't get into it. Nevertheless I finished it, but only because I was reading it for the Paperback Challenge i'm in.
Even the ending didn't save this book for me.

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback: 480 pages
Publisher: Washington Square Press; Reprint edition (May 1, 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0671535722
ISBN-13: 978-0671535728

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Paint It Black- Janet Fitch
Following the huge success of White Oleander, where Janet Fitch portrayed the coming-of-age of Astrid, a young girl placed in foster care after her mother murders a former lover and goes to prison for life, she has once again created an indelible portrait of a young woman in Paint it Black. Josie Tyrell is a teenage runaway, an artist's model, and an habitué of the '80s LA punk rock scene. She is a white trash escapee from Bakersfield, having left a going nowhere life there. Now, sex, drugs and rock n' roll inform her days and nights. Paint it Black is the perfect title choice because Josie's lover is never coming back, as the song says.
Josie meets Michael Faraday, son of concert pianist Meredith Loewy and writer Calvin Faraday, long divorced. He is everything that she is not: refined, wealthy, well-traveled, brilliant by fits and starts. He is also a Harvard dropout, leaving school so he can paint; his new obsession. He refuses help from his mother, who is furious about his decision to leave school, but it doesn't bother him to have Josie working three jobs to support them. He is given to black moods, frozen in amber by his perfectionism, contemptuous of those who do not agree with him about art and life. Josie adores him. One day much like any other, he leaves their house, saying that he is going to his mother's so that he can paint in solitude. Instead, he goes to a motel in 29 Palms and shoots himself in the head.

What follows is days of watching Josie in a near fugue state from grief, drugs, booze, and going over and over her love for Michael, trying to grasp how he could do what he did. After all, didn't they share the "true world," Michael's characterization of their cocoon of love and exclusivity?

Meredith calls her and says, "Why are you alive? What is the excuse for Josie Tyrell? I ask you." Ultimately, they form a tenuous relationship, because all that is left of Michael lives in the two women. Josie even lives with Meredith for a while. When Meredith is ready to go on tour again, she asks Josie to go to Europe with her. Before she can do that, she must go to 29 Palms and try to understand, finally, why Michael's depression pushed him over the edge. That puzzle is not solved, nor can it be, but the end of the story is a hopeful, upbeat, new beginning. Janet Fitch has beaten the curse of the sophomore slump with this dynamite second novel.

Another disappointment I read this week. I've never read White Oleander, but I had heard good things about it, so I picked this up with hopes that after a couple of not so good reads I finally get a winner....wishful thinking. I knew it was about a suicide, but jeez this novel was so depressing, and dark. The story takes place in the seedy parts of L.A. and deals with drugs, depression, drinking and more drugs, with like I mentioned before a suicide. The relationship between Josie, and Meredith is wierd, and didn't feel realistic to me. Another one I don't recommend, and one I only finished because of the contest i'm in.

PRODUCT DETAIL
Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: Back Bay Books (October 3, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0316067148
ISBN-13: 978-0316067140

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I still have 4 more books to review that I read this week. Luckily my luck turned around and they were all good reads. Laters..