Forgiveness: Wisdom from Around the World

by

Forgiveness: Wisdom from Around the World

Gillian Stokes

My friend Sky sent me this beautiful little book, and it’s quickly become a personal treasure. It’s not the sort of thing I’d ever have picked up on my own (I’d have looked at it, been intrigued, and then moved on to the fiction section), but as a gift, I appreciate it immensely.

While the text is helpful, both in a common-sense advice sort of way, and as the subject of many meditations, the quotations and art are what hooked me first, and what I love about this book is that I can pick it up anywhere, re-read it, leave it for a while, and then come back, and still get something new from it.

Thank you, Sky, for sharing this treasure.

STT: Taking Wing

by

Titan, Book One : Taking Wing (Star Trek: The Next Generation)

Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels

Opening very soon after the end of Star Trek: Nemesis, this novel is the first in a subseries of Pocket’s Star Trek: The Next Generation series, and is set in the first mission of the U.S.S. Titan, under the command of William T. Riker.

It includes a mix of characters from TNG, DS9 and Voyager, as well as some familiar faces from the A Time To… series, and was surprisingly interesting, though it was difficult to read a novel with TNG characters that didn’t include Picard or Data.

Definitely worth reading.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

by

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Lynne Truss

Much fuss was made about this book a couple of years ago when it was freshly printed. It’s billed as a “zero tolerance approach to punctuation,” but the American version, at least, spends fully half the text discussing the apostrophe.

For a grammar book, it’s amusing, and author Truss has a readable, if sometimes snobbish, voice.
Grammar mavens should definitely check it out, but real writers are probably better off sticking with Strunk and White.

Blue Plate Special

by

Blue Plate Special : A Novel of Love, Loss, and Food

Frances Norris

Julia Daniel is a food-stylist who really wants to be a photographer, and who has recently lost her father and stepmother in a plane crash (her mother had died years before), which event spurs her to examine her life. She hates her boss, she’s not dating, and she’s unsatisfied with her career, all of which are fairly typical for fictional characters in their thirties.

But while Blue Plate Special does include the usual chick-lit standards of the perfect guy and the supportive friend, as well as the mother-surrogate from childhood friend, it strays from the genre in that the happy ending is still a bit out of reach at the end of the novel – it will come, but not instantly.

While I enjoyed the book, I’m really bored with women in books who are only happy when in a relationship, not just happy in themselves.

The Child Goddess

by

The Child Goddess

Louise Marley

In The Child Goddess Louise Marley introduces us to a future in which the Catholic Church, bowing to peer pressure, and the need for clergy to serve on Earth and various other worlds, has allowed an order of female priests, the Magdalenes, celebate Enquirers who have accepted Mary of Magdala as Christ’s first disciple.

Despite that, it’s not a religious novel, as much as it is a good first contact story. A power company on an obscure, mostly-oceanic world discovers an island of lost children, remnants of a 300 year old colony. There’s the inevitable skirmish, and one child is brought home to Earth, where Isabel, the Magdalene priest who is the lead character, is assigned as guardian, and with the help of a friend (which backstory, I’m hoping, is in one of the other books in this series) discovers the truth of the girl’s life and culture.

It’s an excellent novel as a stand-alone, and I enjoyed it as much for the plot as for Marley’s feminist sensibilities with regard to Catholocism.

I look forward to visiting her work again, in the future.

Peach Cobbler Murder

by

Peach Cobbler Murder: A Hannah Swensen Mystery with Recipes (Hannah Swansen Mysteries)

Joanne Fluke

Hannah Swenson owns a bakery called The Cookie Jar in a fictional town in Minnesota, and when she’s not pushing sugar, she solves crimes. The formula for a Culinary Mystery is not new: cozy murder mystery combined with a cookbook, but unlike Diane Mott Davidson’s tales, the mystery here is predictable, and the text is desperate for a good editor.

I confess that the book did inspire the need to make cobbler (mine was strawberry), and the recipe worked, for the most part, but I find it jarring to have the recipes within the chapters, and not grouped together at the end.

A Garden in Paris

by

A Garden In Paris

Stephanie Grace Whitson

I have to be honest. If I’d realized at the library that this book was marked as Christian fiction, I wouldn’t have taken it home, because I find most overtly Christian fiction to be smarmy and insincere and I dislike being preached at.

This is a case, though, where that would have meant missing a great novel, a fictional travelogue about a woman who returns to Paris, where she’d been a foreign exchange student as a young girl, after losing her husband, and rediscovers not only romance, but her pre-marital adventuresome self.

Yes, there’s relationship angst between the main character and her daughter, but there’s also music, and dashing French men, and cute cafes.

And yes, there is talk of god and religion, but it’s organic, and true to the characters, and didn’t strike me as being preachy or smarmy at all.

I’m not sure I’m willing to read the sequel, but I quite enjoyed this book.

One For Sorrow, Two for Joy

by

One for Sorrow, Two for Joy

Clive Woodall

If you enjoyed Watership Down chances are good that you’ll like One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, as well.

Set solely among the denizens of Birddom (the world of birds that co-exists with our own), this is an epic tale of politics, romance, and the courage of a young robin named Kirrik. Pretty typically the magpies are evil, the owls are wise and ancient, and the birds in between are all, well, in between.

Enjoyable, if a little tiresome.

The Third Witch

by

The Third Witch: A Novel

Rebecca Reisert

It’s The Scottish Play from the point of view of the youngest of the weird sisters, a young woman who shocks her elders by bathing twice a week, and doesn’t care for robbing the dead on the battlefield. Has all the requisite romance and heroism, as well as a fairy-tale ending. Cute, but unsubstantial.

Off Balance

by

Off Balance

Mary Sheepshanks

Mary Sheepshanks usually writes manor house stories laced with humor. In Off Balance, however, the humor is sadly lacking, and it ends up being an unexceptional story of relationships (mainly dysfunctional) in a country house in Scotland. Lovely scenery, depressing story.