A Garden in Paris

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Vamped

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Vamped : A Novel

David Sosnowski

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I always enjoy a good vampire story, so when I saw Vamped staring at me from the library shelf, I had to take it home.

In this alternate future, the only humans left are farm-raised for uber-rich vampires (all the others have been vamped already), and a single box of Count Chocula goes for several hundred dollars on ebay. Then Marty, an eighty year old vampire, and the person who was responsible for the vamping of the world, finds a five year old mortal child on the run from one of the farms, and instead of killing her, or vamping her into a Screamer (as other child-vamps are called), he decides to raise her as his daughter.

Plot twists and romance are woven through the story, but the parts that I enjoyed most were the descriptions of societal changes – grocery stores selling mainly bleach and laundry detergent, and apartments built without toilets, for example.

Leap of Faith

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Leap of Faith : Memoirs of an Unexpected Life

Queen Noor

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I borrowed this from a friend about a month ago because she seemed to really enjoy it, and I wasn’t disappointed in the least, though I did take forever to really begin reading it, which is rare for me.

In most respects, this is a fairly straightforward tale of the way an American girl named Lisa ends up being Queen Noor of Jordan, and that part of the book was interesting enough. But the first-hand explanations of the political, cultural, and social climate in that part of the world, from the early seventies to today, was really what gripped me.

The events are all well-known to most of us.
The perspective is new, and interesting.

Velocity

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Velocity

Dean Koontz

In all honesty, I didn’t choose this book. It was a monthly selection from some book club and I forgot to fill out the reply box OR visit the website. Still, when a book shows up at your door, you may as well read it.

I began reading it the day before Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince arrived, and finished it a couple days after, and am finally posting it now, because I’ve been reading fanfic for a week.

Anyway, it’s a thriller, in which an average guy finds a note on his windshield after his shift as a bartender. If he goes to the police, someone will be killed, but if he doesn’t go, someone ELSE will die. As the book moves forward, the notes come with increasing frequency, and our average guy must find the murderer and stop him before he himself is arrested for the vari0us killings.

Typical of Koontz, the characters are people any of us could know, and live in situations that are completely familiar, and it is this familiarity that sucked me in, and kept me reading. It was a fast-paced story, and totally gripping.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6)

J. K. Rowling

After waiting two years for this installment, the second to last in the Harry Potter series, it seems a shame that I finished it in about four hours, not including the nap I took around page 204, and the ninety minutes I was out of the house for dinner with my husband.

I think at this point people need to get beyond the “children’s book” label for this series. EVERYONE is reading them, not just children. This book was both more and less dark than it’s immediate predessor (less CapsLock!Harry, but with a major character death, and many many shades of grey) , but it still was heavy on exposition, as seems to be typical with the middle books in ANY series.

I can’t write any more about it without giving away the details. It’s enough to say that the next two years (the minimum duration we must wait for book seven) will crawl by, at least in the Potterverse, and many of us who dabble in fanfic have to restructure our versions of Rowling’s sandbox.

The Map of Love

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The Map of Love : A Novel

by Ahdaf Soueif

Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love is a multi-generational story that takes place in both New York and Cairo.

A woman named Isabel meets a famous Egyptian conductor at a party in Manhattan, and he offers to give her names of friends in Cairo, knowing she’s headed there to research a project. She’s found some old letters from her grandmother, and wants to trace them, and learn her family’s story.

The conductor sends her to his sister, and together the woman piece together the story of Lady Winterbourne, and her romance with Sharif Pasha al Barudi in turn-of-the-century (19th to 20th) Egypt.

It’s a great love story, as well as an interesting portrait of modern Egypt.

STTNG: Immortal Coil

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Star Trek: The Next Generation #64: Immortal Coil

Jeffrey Lang

I bought the eBook version of this because I was desperate for instant-gratification in the form of mind-candy, and Trek books always qualify. This one is the only novel that features EmotionChip!Data, and it’s also the only full-fledged Data-romance.

A fanfic author I respect once said that she didn’t think it was possible to write a credible romance for Data. I disagreed at the time, but after reading this, and finding that many of the scenarios were more than a bit contrived, I’ve changed my mind.

Still, it was enjoyable, in a guilty-pleasure sort of way.