T.V And Book Addict: March 2010

Rating: 3.5/5; Liked it but not necessarily re-readable. Still it was quite entertaining.

Age R: 13+/PG-13

Release Date: February 2009

Synopsis:
Nina was beautiful, wild, and adored by her younger sister, Ellie. But one day, Nina disappeared. 2 years later, everyone has given up hope that Nina will return, but Ellie knows her sister is out there. If only Ellie had a clue where to look.Then she gets one, in the form of a mysterious drawing. Determined to find Nina, Ellie takes off on a crazy, sexy cross-country road trip with the only person who believes she's got a chance - her hot, adventurous new crush. Along the way, Ellie finds a few things she wasn't planning on. Like love. Lies. And the most shocking thing of all: the truth.
The book contains interior black-and-white illustrations, since the sister's drawings play a crucial role in the story.

Thoughts:
As I began reading this book I kept getting more and more engrossed in it and just wanted to know what was going to happen. Thing is, after a while, maybe half way through the book, I started getting this weird feeling. I felt as if I was going to hate the ending. I did. That feeling was the fact that it seemed as if the last part of the book was done quickly and not well thought out like the first half. I didn't just hate the other half of the book for the crappy mystery but also because everything was wrapped up to quickly and messily. The story was getting predicatble to me and I hate that in a story. I did not find the mystery angle to be that interesting since it wasn't done that well. I've seen that storyline before and it was done so much better and it was much more convincing.
I still hugely enjoyed the part involving the road trip and everything leading up to it. Like I said, the beginning of the book started out great and was extremely adorable in some parts so at least that was worth it. Another thing I actually loved about the book was the sisters and their relationship. Nina was such a great character and so fun to read about! I felt so sad for the poor little sister Ellie. I did hate the reason for why Nina left without saying anything. I just can't get over that. I'm really close to my sister and if something like that happened to me I would tell her and not run away. Or if anything let her know what happened then run away if I feel the need to do so. I despised the ending for many reasons some of which include many of the characters' actions but I shant say anything for fear of giving out spoilers.

By the way, the illustrations did nothing for me. I know I'm awful, but I like art a lot and... anyway. Ignore me.

My favorite part in the book includes the following quote:
(they just met and these are part of their first words to each other)

"You're here"-him
"Do I know you?" -her
"Well...no"- him
(a few lines later)
"...it was fated that we should meet, written in the stars...Clearly I was right in deciding to come, although now that I'm here talking to you I'm really wishing I'd gotten you that sixty-four ounce travel mug, or at the very least that classy lighter that was shaped like a pair or legs. Sorry, I promise I'll make it up to you." -him

It's much, much cuter when you read the whole scene going on but I don't want to give away all that cuteness. You'll have to read it for yourself.

Related:
-Lynn Weingarten ----really cute site
-mystery
-psychology
-charming guys
-Wherever Nina Lies -- buy it!

Yeah I said louve.Thanks to The Story Siren and Alea for IMM! Go to TSS to check out the rest!

I bought all these books for a DOLLAR! I had a gift card so I ended up spending $6 bucks and change.

Here they are (click on the covers for more info):

Animal Crackers by Hannah Tinti

RD: 2005

With bravura storytelling, daring imagination, and fierce narrative control, this dazzling debut introduces that rare writer who finds humanity in our most unconventional behavior, and the humor beneath our darkest impulses.

In these strange, funny, and unnerving stories, animals become the litmus test of our deepest fears and longings. In the title story, an elephant keeper courts danger from his gentle charge; in “Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus,” a headstrong young woman in Africa is lured by the freedom of the monkeys in the trees; in “Talk Turkey,” a boy has secret conversations with the turkeys on his friend’s family’s farm; in “Slim’s Last Ride,” a child plays chilling games with his pet rabbit; in “Gallus Gallus,” a pompous husband projects his anger at his wife onto her prized rooster.

This fresh, inventive debut will introduce Hannah Tinti as one of the most gifted writers of her generation. Enter her world at your own risk, and you will come away bewitched.

A Sort of Homecoming by Robert Cremins

RD: 2000

Smug, "post-literary" hipster Tom Iremonger cuts a dashing, pathetic figure as the kind of loathsome slug Bret Easton Ellis would invent, but with the maddening charm of the wittiest of Dubliners. Iremonger is a 22-year-old Trinity graduate who squandered his entire inheritance during a six-month international binge that he calls an "anti-odyssey," a project to "make the present moment a work of art." Now coming home to Dublin to see his family at Christmas, he learns the hard way that his excesses have not only left him flat broke, but also reflect a radical denial of his own past and a self-destructive evasion of the future. With nothing to go on except an inflated ego, Iremonger suffers shock after shock as he stumbles through a holiday nightmare of tight-lipped relatives, college chums turned gangsters and his lost love Mainie, Doyle now engaged to his old grammar school rival. The failed jet-setter copes with these blows by snuggling deeper into his security blanket of drugs, self-worship and ever-changing "First Rules of Cool," but even the Iremonger ego crumbles before the ghosts of his unhappy past, revealing the shy boy he once was, in love with books and Irish history. Cremins uses his protagonist's delusion as a kind of warped prism through which to view larger issues facing contemporary Ireland: the constant exodus of its youth, troubled Catholic/Protestant relations and the erosion of Irish culture by the nouveau-riches' fad-conscious consumerism. The Iremonger project itself is Cremins's illuminating, ruggedly textured parable for wayward modern youth who turn from tradition in favor of glitzy instant-gratification, and who end up, as the hero does, as so much human jetsam in the airports of the world. This is a gratifying, subtly stylized tale of hard-won humility, told with bracing humor.

Captain Freedom by G. Xavier Robillard

RD: 2009

Software pirates! Mostly extinct dinosaurs! Giant barbarians! Crooning criminals! Captain Freedom's beat them all, saved the world, and looked fantastic doing it—but he couldn't fend off middle management.
The Superhero lifestyle is all that Captain Freedom has ever known. What's he suppose to do now? Enter politics? Write a children's book?
Freedom's in a bad way and he's only a stint in rehab away from a lifetime of celebrity reality shows. But with the guidance of his new life coach, maybe Freedom can stumble in a new direction—even if it means having to make peace with his parents . . . or finally commit to a single long-term archenemy.

Some Dream For Fools by Faiza Guene

RD: 2009

When Ahlème’s mother was killed in a village massacre, she left Algeria for France with her father and brother and never returned. Now, more than a decade later, she is practically French, yet in many ways she remains an outsider. Her dreams for a better life have been displaced by the harsh realities she faces every day. Her father is unable to work after an accident at his construction site. Her brother boils over with adolescent energy and teeters dangerously close to choosing a life of crime. And as a temporary resident, Ahlème could at any moment be sent back to a village and a life that are now more foreign than Paris.
In Some Dream for Fools, Faïza Guène explores the disparity between the expectations and limitations of immigrant life in the West and tells a remarkable story of one woman’s courage to dream.

The Secret of Lost Things by Sheridan Hay

RD: 2007

A missing manuscript
A young woman's voyage of discovery
And the curious bookshop where it all begins...

In this charming novel about the eccentricities and passions of booksellers and collectors, a captivating young Australian woman takes a job at a vast, chaotic emporium of used and rare books in New York City and finds herself caught up in the search for a lost Melville manuscript.

Eighteen years old and completely alone, Rosemary arrives in New York from Tasmania with little more than her love of books and an eagerness to explore the city she’s read so much about. She begins her memorable search for independence with appealing enthusiasm, and the moment she steps into the Arcade bookstore, she knows she has found a home. The gruff owner, Mr. Pike, gives her a job sorting through huge piles of books and helping the rest of the staff—a group as odd and idiosyncratic as the characters in a Dickens novel. There’s Pearl, the loving, motherly transsexual who runs the cash register; Oscar, who organizes the nonfiction section and shares his extensive, eclectic knowledge with Rosemary, but furiously rejects her attempts at a more personal relationship; and Arthur Pick, who supervises the art section and demonstrates a particular interest in photography books featuring naked men.

The store manager, Walter Geist, is an albino, a lonely figure even within the world of the Arcade. When Walter’s eyesight begins to fail, Rosemary becomes his assistant. And so it is Rosemary who first reads the letter from someone seeking to “place” a lost manuscript by Herman Melville. Mentioned in Melville’s personal correspondence butnever published, the work is of inestimable value, and proof of its existence brings the simmering ambitions and rivalries of the Arcade staff to a boiling point.

Including actual correspondence by Melville, The Secret of Lost Things is at once a literary adventure that captures the excitement of discovering a long-lost manuscript by a towering American writer and an evocative portrait of life in a surprisingly colorful bookstore.

As Always, Jack by Emma Sweeney

RD: 2003

A touching, true love story that captures the spirit of a generation and a love that endures, as a daughter learns about her lost father through the love letters he wrote her mother while at war.

The Last Summer of You and Me by Ann Brashares

RD: 2007

From the author of the multimillion-copy, #1 bestselling series The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants comes a heartbreaking first adult novel that will resonate as clearly with readers in their forties as it does with readers in their twenties.

Sunrise with Sea Monster by Neil Jordan

RD: 2004

Imprisoned in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, Donal Gore is sustained by memories of setting fishing lines on the beach with his father, back home in Ireland. Released from the Spanish prison by a German officer who expects political intelligence in return, Donal goes back to the family home on the rainswept promenade-to find his once powerful father dramatically changed. The moving and magical heart of the novel explores the hopeless inability of this father and son to express their feelings for each other, until the father is literally beyond language. And at the same time it centers on the poignant, fumbling, triangular relationship between father, son, and Rose, the beautiful young stepmother. Weaving together love and politics, sex and treachery, unsettling humor and vivid layers of memory, Sunrise with Sea Monster is a tour de force, back in print for the first time in years.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

RD: 1993

With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal,and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.

I saw part of this movie on netflix I think it was but I want to read the book first and since it was a dollar...

How to Make an American Quilt by Whitney Otto

RD: 1994

"Remarkable...An affirmation of the strength and power of individual lives, and the way they cannot help fitting together."
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinay and moving reading experience, HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT is an exploration of women of yesterday and today, who join together in a uniquely female experience. As they gather year after year, their stories, their wisdom, their lives, form the pattern from which all of us draw warmth and comfort for ourselves.

I saw part of the movie and loved what I saw. I want to read the book before watching the rest.

Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisters by Ann Brashares

RD: 2008

Some friends just fit together.

With unraveled embroidery and fraying hems, the Traveling Pants are back for one last, glorious summer.

Join Ann Brashares’s beloved sisterhood once again in a dazzling, fearless novel about a summer that will forever change the lives of Lena, Carmen, Bee, and Tibby, here and now, past and future, together and apart.

The Weight of Silence by Heather Gudenkauf

RD: 2009

It happens quietly one August morning. As dawn's shimmering light drenches the humid Iowa air, two families awaken to find their little girls have gone missing in the night.
Seven-year-old Calli Clark is sweet, gentle, a dreamer who suffers from selective mutism brought on by tragedy that pulled her deep into silence as a toddler.
Calli's mother, Antonia, tried to be the best mother she could within the confines of marriage to a mostly absent, often angry husband. Now, though she denies that her husband could be involved in the possible abductions, she fears her decision to stay in her marriage has cost her more than her daughter's voice.
Petra Gregory is Calli's best friend, her soul mate and her voice. But neither Petra nor Calli has been heard from since their disappearance was discovered. Desperate to find his child, Martin Gregory is forced to confront a side of himself he did not know existed beneath his intellectual, professorial demeanor.
Now these families are tied by the question of what happened to their children. And the answer is trapped in the silence of unspoken family secrets.

Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas by James Patterson

RD: 2003

Katie Wilkinson has found the perfect man at last—but one day he disappears from her life, leaving behind only a diary for her to read.
The diary is written by a woman named Suzanne and is addressed to her new baby boy, Nicholas. In it she pours out her heart about the joy he has brought her.

A Density of Souls by Christopher Rice

RD: 2001

A stunning debut novel that reveals the darker side of coming-of-age in modern-day America
A Density Of Souls is the story of four high school friends in present-day New Orleans who are torn apart by envy, passion, and a secret murder. Meredith, Brandon, Greg, and Stephen quickly discover the fragile boundaries between friendship and betrayal as they enter high school and form new allegiances. Brandon and Greg gain popularity as football jocks and Meredith joins the bulimic in-crowd, while Stephen is treated as an outcast and is the target of homophobia. Then two violent deaths disrupt the core of what they once shared.
Five years later the friends are drawn back together and what was held to be a tragic accident is discovered to be murder. Other secrets begin to unravel and the casual cruelties of high school develop into acts of violence that threaten an entire city.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

RD: 1997

Emilio Sandoz is a remarkable man, a living saint and Jesuit priest who undergoes an experience so harrowing and profound that it makes him question the existence of God. This experience - the first contact between human beings and intelligent extraterrestrial life - begins with a small mistake and ends in a horrible catastrophe.

Sandoz is a part of the crew sent to explore a new planet. What they find is a civilization so alien and incomprehensible that they feel compelled to wonder what it means to be human.

The priest is the only surviving member of the crew and upon his return he is confronted by public inquisition and accusations of the most heinous crimes imaginable. His faith utterly destroyed, crippled and defenseless, his only hope is to tell his tale. Father John Candotti has been charged with discovering the truth, but the truth may be more than Earth is willing to accept.

The Reader by Bernhard Schilink

RD: 2008

Set in postwar Germany, The Reader is a provocative, morally challenging, and deeply moving novel about a young boy's erotic awakening in a clandestine love affair with a mysterious older woman. Falling ill on his way home from school, 15-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. For a time, the two become passionate lovers. Then, one day, Hanna disappears without a word. Years later, as a law student observing a trial in Germany, Michael recognizes his former lover on the stand, accused of a hideous crime. And as he watches Hanna refuse to defend herself against the charges, Michael gradually realizes that she may be guarding a secret more shameful than murder.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

RD: 2008

In 1962, Florence and Edward celebrate their wedding in a hotel on the Dorset coast. Yet as they dine, the expectation of their marital duties weighs over them. And unbeknownst to both, the decisions they make this night will resonate throughout their lives. With exquisite prose, Ian McEwan creates in On Chesil Beach a story of lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Diddion

RD: 2007

Didion's journalistic skills are displayed as never before in this story of a year in her life that began with her daughter in a medically induced coma and her husband unexpectedly dead due to a heart attack. This powerful and moving work is Didion's "attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself." With vulnerability and passion, Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience of love and loss. THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING will speak directly to anyone who has ever loved a husband, wife, or child.

After You'd Gone by Maggie O' Farrell

RD: 2002

Alice Raikes takes a train from London to Scotland to visit her family, but when she gets there she witnesses something so shocking that she insists on returning to London immediately. A few hours later, Alice is lying in a coma after an accident that may or may not have been a suicide attempt. Alice's family gathers at her bedside and as they wait, argue, and remember, long-buried tensions emerge. The more they talk, the more they seem to conceal. Alice, meanwhile, slides between varying levels of consciousness, recalling her past and a love affair that recently ended. A riveting story that skips through time and interweaves multiple points of view, After You'd Gone is a novel of stunning psychological depth and marks the debut of a major literary talent.
"It's the depiction of . . . deceptively small moments that is O'Farrell's winning gift. . . . Her absorbing characters gracefully circle one another 'round the room like moths at the light bulb,' grazing their wings against life's raw heat instead of being consumed by it." (The New York Times Book Review)
"After You'd Gone is beautifully written contemporary fiction." (Edna O'Brien, The Sunday Times)

Last Night at the Lobster by Steward O'Nan

RD: 2007

No American novelist loves the dead-end town quite like Stewart O'Nan. In the 15 books that have poured out of him since 1994, he has visited the snowy, forgotten hamlets of upstate New York, and the bombed-out streets of East Liberty, Pittsburgh. He has twice set novels in those most forgotten metropolises, our prisons. Now O'Nan peers into a suburban Connecticut Red Lobster restaurant on the last night of its operation. Who knew an all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet could evoke such mournful, Edward Hopper–ish pathos?

Also I bought Street: A Novel by Jack Cady. I can't find the freakin' picture! It's really pretty though.

For Review:

Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok

RD: April 29, 2010

Introducing a fresh, exciting Chinese-American voice, an inspiring debut about an immigrant girl forced to choose between two worlds and two futures.
When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life-like the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family's future resting on her shoulders, or her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition-Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles.
Through Kimberly's story, author Jean Kwok, who also emigrated from Hong Kong as a young girl, brings to the page the lives of countless immigrants who are caught between the pressure to succeed in America, their duty to their family, and their own personal desires, exposing a world that we rarely hear about. Written in an indelible voice that dramatizes the tensions of an immigrant girl growing up between two cultures, surrounded by a language and world only half understood, Girl in Translation is an unforgettable and classic novel of an American immigrant-a moving tale of hardship and triumph, heartbreak and love, and all that gets lost in translation.

Link to your IMM if you want so I can check it out! I try going through all the IMM's but there are just so many...

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