Author Archives

Melissahttp://www.missmeliss.comWriter, voice actor, dog-lover, and bathtub mermaid, Melissa is the Associate Editor-in-Chief at All Things Girl. To learn more about her, visit her website, or follow her on Twitter (@Melysse) or Facebook. You can also listen to her podcast, "Bathtub Mermaid: Tales from the Tub" at Bathtub Mermaid or on iTunes.

Gringos in Paradise

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Gringos in Paradise: An American Couple Builds Their Retirement Dream House in a Seaside Village in Mexico

by Barry Golson

I found this book in the new fiction section at my local B&N, and brought it home even though it’s not fiction, because my parents also did the cash-out and move to Mexico thing. You would think I’d therefore be predisposed to like it, and while it wasn’t a bad read, the truth is that I spent more time being pissed because I feel my mother could tell her, similar story, with more humor and less of a patronizing tone.

Granted, Golson’s mission is NOT to be patronizing, and I’m sure any other reader probably wouldn’t see it as such. He relays slice-of-life stories about how difficult it really is to adjust to the Mexican culture, and provides an appendix with useful information.

It’s interesting how our own experiences color even the most innocuous books.

Freedom Writers Diary

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by The Freedom Writers and Erin Gruwell

It is rare when a book moves me to tears. It’s not that I’m not sentimental about things that have meaning to me, but that I can generally separate myself from what I’m reading enough to retain necessary distance. So when I say that The Freedom Writers Diary, made me cry, that’s saying a lot.

If you’re one of the five people in the country who hasn’t seen the film, read the book first, then rent the DVD. The book has 150 or so diary entries, designated solely by number, by the students in Erin Gruwell’s English classes from Wilson High School in Long Beach, CA, during the late nineties. They are frank, often brutal, glimpses into the lives of real kids living in a city that MTV dubbed “the gangsta rap capital of the world,” and they will tear at your heart strings.

Bookending the kids’ diaries are journal entries from Erin herself, the young teacher who manages to turn a bunch of disenfranchised teenagers into first a class, and then a family, teaching them about tolerance by using the diaries of Anne Frank and Zlata Filipovic as well as other works she finds relevant to their lives.

It’s a moving book, made more so by the knowledge that these kids, now college graduates, have turned around and continued to teach the lessons Gruwell taught them.

The Martian Chronicles

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by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury is one of the icons of Science Fiction, which shouldn’t be surprising since he’s published something like 500 works, so when I added The Martian Chronicles to my list for the decades challenge, I did it in honor of his contribution to the field, as well as because I vaguely remember reading part of it as a child, and not really appreciating it.

Re-reading it was sort of disappointing. I’d forgotten about the sexism and racism – products of the time – that were in the various short stories, and that colored my appreciation of Bradbury’s version of Mars. On his Mars the canals actually hold water and the atmosphere is breathable. In addition, there are actual Martians, though, as in another iconic work of science fiction War of the Worlds a mundane human disease destroys the entire population quite accidentally.

Dated notions of society aside, I enjoyed revisiting this version of the Red Planet, especially because of the last tale in the book, in which a picnicking family boats down a canal, and their son asks where the Martians are, only to be told to look over the edge. What he sees is his own reflection.

True Believer

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by Nicholas Sparks

Jeremy Marsh is a skeptic whose had some success with the media, and when he goes to a small town in North Carolina to debunk some graveyard ghost-lights, it’s pretty clear he intends to solve the mystery and beat a hasty retreat to his home in New York. Instead he finds himself falling in love with town librarian Lexie Darnell.

As with many of Sparks’s novels, True Believer is a gentle tale with earthy three-dimensional characters that seem like people any of us might know. Character is as vital as plot with him, and that’s good, because to be honest, I found the plot of this offering to be a bit predictable. I won’t outline it here, because I don’t like to offer spoilers, I’ll just say that it’s best to read this novel because you want to visit a cozy small town and meet interesting people, and not because you’re looking for a great surprise ending or plot twist.

As a cozy novel, True Believer goes well with a rainy day and hot tea, and in that light, it’s an enjoyable read.

Forever in Blue

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by Ann Brashares

The fourth and final installment in the stories of the Sisterhood was the least juvenile of a series that really is universal, and shouldn’t be ignored just because of it’s YA label. In this novel, the girls are separate more than not, and the Pants are shared throughout their first year of college, not just during the summer. While not every story ends up completely happy, each of these young women grows and changes and sets the stage for what her life will become, and it’s great to watch them all deal with real issues, that real college freshman often encounter, and triumph over their personal obstacles.

I loved this series because the girls were so real.
I wanted to hate this book because it meant saying goodbye to old friends, but the beauty of books is that you can always re-read them.

Comfort Food

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Comfort Food: A Novel (IPPY Award Winner for Best Regional Fiction, West–Pacific) by Noah Ashenhurst

When I posted my list of planned reading for the 11 Decades challenge, I included Comfort Food because I liked the title, and because I like reading new authors. Imagine my surprise when the author contacted me and offered a review copy – of course I said yes.

I’m glad I did.

This novel is the story of six Gen-X college students, and the way their lives interweave. We are introduced to all of them in the initial chapter, and then each section gives us a significant moment in each of their lives, finally coming full circle to connect the first person we met to the woman he loves. Because of this structure, Comfort Food reminds me very much of the improv game “Four Square” or “Pan Left” in which there are four players who form different intersecting pairs of relationships.

What I loved most about the novel, however, was the language. Ashenhurst’s descriptions of the Pacific Northwest let you feel the misty air. Whether he’s talking about the pot-stench floating in a cheap off-campus apartment, or the visceral moment when one character realizes his wife is cheating on him, the words chosen give a vivid picture of place, and of the people existing in that place at that time.

I’d love to read more from this author.

Summers of the Sisterhood

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Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants / Second Summer of the Sisterhood / Girls in Pants (3 Book Set) by Ann Brashares

Despite the fact that a very kind author sent me a review copy of his book, and despite the fact that I’ve read the first fifty pages and found it gripping, having been burned to a crisp put me in the mood for light, fluffy reading.

Since I’ve seen The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants on cable many times at this point, and even rented the dvd when it was first available, and since my friend Erin had mentioned them several weeks ago (months, really) when the fourth book had just come out, AND since YA books are less expensive than general fiction, I ordered them all.

I’m glad I did. Like J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Brashares’s novels are not all all “kiddie lit” but well-written, interesting coming-of-age novels that happen to have teenaged protagonists. The four girls who make up the Sisterhood are all three-dimensional. None of them are perfect. All of them are unique. Their stories are every bit as interesting as any more grown up chick-lit characters, and the writing is considerably less fluffy than many. Bookstores and publishers may classify these books as YA, but to me, they’re comfort reading. You know there will ultimately be a mostly-happy ending, but you also know the characters will progress, and that not everything will be sunshine and roses.

I’m a fast reader. I received these on Wednesday evening, and am now a bit more than half way through the third book. Is it too early for me to recommend them? No. Because everyone has gone through adolescence, and that makes these novels (which, at around 300 pages each, are a satisfying length) truly universal.

If you have daughters. If you are a daughter. If you are remotely in touch with your inner teen-aged girl, you must read these books.

All the Finest Girls

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by Alexandra Styron

I found this novel, the story of Adelaide “Addy” Abraham, to be an extremely difficult read, and as I’ve analyzed it, I’ve realized it was because I found the main character annoying. Addy is the daughter of an actress and an artist who are both too self-absorbed to have any clue of how to be parents, so they hire Lou, recently arrived from the Caribbean island of St. Clair, to be her nanny. As the novel opens, however, we are introduced to an adult Addy, a broken, sour person, who has come for Lou’s funeral.

The novel flips between Addy’s present – the funeral and her interactions with Lou’s family, who are polite, but don’t hail her as the visiting dignitary she imagined herself to be – and two different parts of Addy’s past, her adulthood including a sort of influenza-induced breakdown, and her childhood, which often found her pitting Lou and her parents against each other.

By the time a fragile, broken Addy makes peace with her even more broken parents, the novel has ended, and while the language used within it was vivid, the places realistic, and the characters plausible, I found the whole book to be…somehow missing something.

Or maybe I was missing something.

Sunshine

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Sunshine by Robin McKinley

First, I don’t usually take ten days to finish a book – any book – and admittedly, I finished this a couple days ago, but it was our anniversary, and then I was jazzed from workshop so I couldn’t focus. But, it did take me longer than usual to finish Sunshine, and I’m not sure why. Something about the book lulled me into a weird moody place where I just couldn’t zip through the words the way I usually do. I think it was that Robin McKinley did such a great job of setting the scene, and letting us see the characters.

In any case, I picked up Sunshine because I couldn’t resist the notion of a vampire novel with that name, and I generally like vampire novels. This one was wonderfully rich in detail – set in an alternative present in which police forces have supernatural ops forces to guard against the Others – weres, demons, and vampires.

Lest this sound at all like the worlds of Tanya Huff, Laurell K. Hamilton, or the BuffyVerse, let me assure you that McKinley’s supernatural “now” is much grittier, much creepier, and much darker, with the backstory of Voodoo Wars and the knowledge that humanity is losing its war against the Others.

Brightening up the darkness, is Sunshine, a plucky baker and dessert pusher at the local coffee bar. She has a slightly crazy family, a tattooed bike-riding boyfriend, and a great apartment, and then she drives out to the lake cottage her family once owned, and is kidnapped – not fed upon – by vampires, and thrown into a cell with another vampire, Constantine, who is chained in the corner opposite hers.

To tell more would destroy the plot. While it does have predictable elements – Sunshine and Constantine eventually team up and escape and there are inevitable repercussions – the story never seems old or stale, and while it is complete in and of itself, it feels like the beginning of a series.

If anything, I’d have liked to see more of Constantine – he’s very present in the entire novel but doesn’t have much page count – and a little more of Sunshine and Mel.

Also, recipes for the desserts would be cool. But maybe that’s just my inner chocoholic talking.

11 Decades, 22 Books

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I saw a challenge on a fellow bookblogger’s sidebar that intrigued me, and so I’m joining. The original challenge is 15 books/15 decades, but I couldn’t pick just one book per decade, so I’m doing 22 books spanning 11 decades.

In selecting my titles, I chose books from only years ending in 00 and 05, listed on Wikipedia’s novels by year search results pages, that I hadn’t read, but had been meaning to, or felt that I should, or just interested me in some way. I used a narrow field of choices because otherwise I’d have been picking novels for days.

This, then, is my list, by year of original publication:
1900 – Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
1905 – The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World, Jules Verne
1910 – Howard’s End, E.M. Forster
1915 – The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
1920 – The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie
1925 – The Wind, Dorothy Scarborough
1930 – East Wind, West Wind, Pearl S. Buck
1935 – The African Queen, by C.S. Forester
1940 – For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
1945 – The Small Rain, Madeleine L’Engle
1950 – The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
1955 – A Charmed Life, Mary McCarthy
1960 – The Light in the Piazza, Elizabeth Spencer
1965 – Desolation Angels, Jack Kerouac
1970 – Jonathon Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach
1975 – Crocodile on the Sandbank, Elizabeth Peters
1980 – A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
1985 – The Sand Child, Tahar Ben Jelloun
1990 – The Ghost from the Grand Banks, Arthur C. Clarke
1995 – Northern Lights, Phillip Pullman
2000 – Drowning Ruth, Christina Schwarz
2005 – Comfort Food, Noah Ashenhurst – – Review

I may not read them in order, but reviews will be posted here after each book is finished.