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.

Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas

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Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

James Patterson
Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And you’re keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls – family, health, friends, integrity – are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered. And once you truly understand the lesson of the five balls, you will have the beginnings of balance in your life.
–from Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas, by James Patterson
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Catching Alice

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Catching Alice

Clare Naylor

Sometimes chick-lit can be completely engaging and entertaining. A perfect example of this is Catching Alice, the story of a young woman who loses her boyfriend and her job, and is dragged to LA for a life-makeover.

While some of the situations stretch the envelope of plausability, the dialogue is good, and the depiction of the Hollywood publicity game is completely believable.

The Right Address

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The Right Address

Carrie Karasyov & Jill Kargman

I picked this up as an impulse buy because I’d seen a blurb about it in some magazine that compared it to The Nanny Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada both of which I enjoyed for the guilty pleasure froth they are.

Alas, this book is nothing like either of those. Yes, it’s about a similar segment of society, but the characters in Prada and Nanny Diaries were at least reasonably three-dimensional, and there were some moments of normalcy.

The characters in this book are total cartoons, and there are no real moments of connection. It’s better, I suppose, than reading the back of the tampon box, but not by much.

Sushi for Beginners

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Sushi for Beginners

Marian Keyes

When I want to read a good story that includes not just a plot, but also fashion and other girly stuff, I pick chick-lit books. Marian Keyes’ Sushi for Beginners is just such a book. I finished it last night, and wanted more.

It’s fairly typical for the genre – women protagonists in their late twenties and early thirties, seeking better jobs and stable relationships, while wearing fabulous clothes and getting manicures. This time, the story is set in Ireland, and involves starting a new women’s magazine.

The characters were fairly realistic, and there were some sections that were moving, albeit in a predictably pc sort of way.

Islands

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Islands

Anne Rivers Siddons

We all have “guilty pleasure” authors – Anne Rivers Siddons is one of mine.

I’ve just finished her most recent novel, Islands, and while I have to agree that it’s not her best work, it was still an enjoyable read. She’s returned to the South Carolina Low Country she loves so much, which means that even when you hate the characters, you love the houses they live in, and even when the plot gets rather cheesey, you can still feel the sea breezes and smell the sand, and feel the humidity.

People are often surprised that I read Siddons’ work, because her target demographic is really my mother’s generations, but there’s something compelling about her tragic heroines in their weathered beach houses. Though, admittedly, my favorite of her novels didn’t take place anywhere near a beach.

This novel tells the story of a group of friends – doctors and their wives – who own a Low Country beach house together. It’s fairly typical beach reading: entangled relationships, personal tragedy, a dash of romance. It’s not as meaty as, say, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, but I’d still recommended it.

Ladies with Prospects

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Ladies With Prospects

Cynthia Hartwick

I picked this up about a week ago in Barnes and Noble, not because it grabbed me, but because the woman standing next to me said, “That was a really great read. I always wonder if things are any good, so I’ve decided to tell people when I see them looking for new things to read.”

I thought that was delightful, and I recommended The Red Tentin return, since it was sitting on the same table.

In any case, Ladies With Prospects is the second book to feature the Larksdale Ladies Investment Club, a group on Minnesota women who formed an investement club back in book one, and since then have made it big, and are now controlling stockholders of a company in the midst of the tech boom from a few years back.

It was a fast novel, well written, and funny in spots, and the characters were believable, especially if you’ve ever spent time in the midwest. I definitely recommend it as a summer novel, because it’s light without being stupid. And I liked it enough to go back and find the first book.

Bee Season

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Bee Season: A Novel

Myla Goldberg

I picked up Bee Season not long after I’d finished reading The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd, but, as happens, I didn’t read it for a long while later.

It’s a stark story about a young girl who is looking for something to excel at, something to pull her away from a rather tragic, and extremely dysfunctional home life. She finds it in the form of a spelling bee, which she wins on a fluke.

I had a hard time reading this book, because the lack of communication among the family members made me want to throttle them, and because the depression in it is completely unrelenting.