Linda reads : Wind Chime Point and Sea Glass Island by Sherryl Woods

July 27, 2013August 27, 2014 / Linda / Leave a comment

Wind Chime Point is book two of the Ocean Breeze Trilogy. It would be helpful to read the first book, Sand Castle Bay, although the author does a wonderful job of tying in book one’s story.

Hardworking, ambitious, and independent Gabriella Castle is facing personal and professional challenges that prove too daunting for her to handle alone. She retreats to her grandmother’s home in Sand Castle Bay, NC. and the welcoming arms of her family.

Wade Johnson is a cabinet-maker and wood-carver with a tragic and secret past. He’s been intrigued by Gabriella whenever she’s visited and is happy when she returns to town. He’s also a friend of Emily’s finance, Boone.

Gabi is having a lot of trouble deciding what to do about her future. For the first time in her life, she is plagued with doubts and uncertainty. She finds a friend in Wade and his easy-going style and good listening skills are both helpful and comforting. She didn’t expect or plan for her feelings for Wade to blossom into love. Wade knew he had strong feelings for Gabi, but he is unsure if he’s ready to take the next step.

Although this book focuses mainly on Gabi and Wade, the secondary characters play an important part in the story. Gabi’s sister Emily is busy planning her wedding and her other sister, Samantha is facing her own crisis about her career. Grandmother Cora Jane is still playing matchmaker and the sister’s father, Sam, has an expanded role in this book.

Sea Glass Island is the third and final book of the trilogy. Samantha has been living in New York City pursuing her dream of being an actress. But lately, the parts she auditions for are all going to younger actresses. She goes home to North Carolina for her sister’s wedding and to reflect on what to do with her life.

Ethan Cole is a doctor at the local clinic in town. He lost a leg while serving in Afghanistan, and his fiance dumped him shortly thereafter. He’s having a hard time overcoming the hurt caused by his finance. He doesn’t know that Samantha has had a crush on him since high school, or that her family is relentless on their determination to get them together.

There are several interesting subplots in this book and plot lines from the previous two books are tied up quite nicely.

These are captivating, realistic, heartwarming romances. The setting is a place you want to visit and the characters are people you want to know. This is a character-driven trilogy with witty dialogue, beautifully descriptive scenes, warm and loving family interactions, and sweet love stories. This trilogy is Ms. Woods best work yet.

Jenn Reads: Slaughterhouse Five

July 23, 2013July 20, 2013 / Jenn / Leave a comment

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut is our July pick for the Cheshire Cats Classics Club. It was chosen largely to appeal to men and to those who like more modern classics. This is not my typical fare, necessarily, and was not even on my to-read list. Far from it, actually.

I’m not sure what I thought Slaughterhouse Five was going to be, but whatever notions I had where quickly dispelled. I think I heard that it included a fictional planet, and time-travel and thought “Not for me…” First impressions are often wrong, prejudiced, and just down right stupid.

Slaughterhouse Five is a crisp 275 pages, easily read, and likely easily misunderstood. Some may find the scenes of Tralfamadore ridiculous, the war depictions brutal, the episodes of sex raunchy, but they unfortunately have missed the essence of the book. And don’t let the ease of reading the book fool you: Vonnegut is trying to send an important message on the destructiveness of war, finding happiness, and mental illness.

Slaughterhouse Five, to me, is an anti-war novel on the surface. The subtitle, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death alludes to the fact that so many of the men who bravely fight our wars are merely boys. They are dancing with death in a way many of us will never experience.

What Billy Pilgrim experiences and views at the bombing of Dresden forever changes him and shapes the novel. Billy’s “strange” behavior of time traveling and episodes on Tralfamadore are manifestations of his PTSD. Knowing that Vonnegut himself saw the bombing of Dresden makes you wonder how much of this was truly Billy Pilgrim’s story and how much of it was autobiographical. Anyone who has seen actual warfare is never the same.

I listened to this book, as I try to do with all of the classics we read for the club. Ethan Hawk was the reader for this version, which included an interview with Vonnegut. All in all, I was pleasantly surprised with this book, having gone in with low expectations. Hawk’s reading of it was admirable, although the mixing on the recording was very low and he was often difficult to hear, and the story moved.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars (but it’s a hearty 3 stars)

Escape With A Cozy Mystery – take a journey, enjoy an adventure, learn something new…

July 21, 2013June 5, 2014 / Linda / Leave a comment

Julie Hyzy

One of cozy mystery’s premier authors, Julie Hyzy, recently wrote a very interesting article for the Huffington Post about cozy mysteries. Her new book, Grace Takes Off, was published July 2.

Here are some other cozy mysteries out this month:

1. Tarnished and Torn (A Witchcraft Mystery) by Juliet Blackwell

2. Tulle Death Do Us Part (A Vintage Magic Mystery) by Annette Blair

3. A Custom-Fit Crime (A Magical Dressmaking Mystery) by Melissa Bourbon

4. Woof at the Door (A Call of the Wilde Mystery) by Laura Morrigan

5. Final Sentence (A Cookbook Nook Mystery) by Daryl Wood Gerber

6. Laced With Poison (A Sweet Nothings Lingerie Mystery) by Meg London

7. Dyeing Wishes (A Haunted Yarn Shop Mystery) by Molly MacRae

8. Yarn To Go (A Yarn Retreat Mystery) by Betty Hechtman

9. One Dead Cookie (A Cookie Cutter Shop Mystery) by Virginia Lowell

To view a previously published post about Cozy Mysteries, click here.

Anticipated Erotic Literature – My Education by Susan Choi

July 18, 2013August 27, 2014 / Linda / Leave a comment

Susan Choi

One of the most anticipated books of 2013 is My Education by Susan Choi. Susan is the author of three previous novels. Her first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award. American Woman was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and A Person of Interest was a finalist for the PEN/Faulker Award.

My Education is a steamy, but very well-written book. It’s about Regina, a graduate student, who is warned about a notorious professor who sleeps with students. She becomes his teaching assistant and, in a surprising twist, has an affair with the professor’s wife. The story spans fifteen years of Regina’s misadventures that are both erotic and catastrophic.

This novel is Amazon’s best book of the month – July 2013. It has received rave reviews from many sources, including Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, the Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.

Available at the Cheshire Library.

Note: For sensitive readers, this book contains profanity, sexual references and overt sexual scenes.

Top Ten Classics For Book Clubs

July 16, 2013July 15, 2013 / Jenn / Leave a comment

Classics are classic for a reason. Whether it be because they have timeless stories, epic characters, or are just classically awful (and that does happen!), we continue to read the “classics”. They have something to tell us about ourselves, because really, we’re still the same people at heart that our ancestors were one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago.

I run the classics book club here at the Cheshire Public Library, and from the moment it started, it was an instant hit. To this day, almost three years later, it’s still my most popular book group. If you run a book club, consider adding in a classic once a year. Just about anyone can read Gone Girl (and let me tell you – they have, ad nauseum), but it’s more of a challenge to read classics. And you sound smarter, too.

So here’s a list of my top ten classics for book club:

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. See my post about why this is my favorite book – it explains everything!
Persuasion by Jane Austen. Some people will argue with me about this, but Persuasion is my favorite Jane Austen book. Austen is at her best in her final completed
Persuasion by Jane Austen

novel with a story of love lost and love regained. Second chances are possible in this memorable book. And while you’re at it, watch the recent Masterpiece Classics movie they did several years back. All I can say is: yummy!
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. I read this book first in high school and thought it was *ok*. Both of my parents loved this book, and at the time, as a junior in high school, I couldn’t appreciate it. Having a little more life experience as a sophomore in college, re-reading it, I could finally see why they loved this book so much.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. During this 50th anniversary of Plath’s death, this book is especially appropriate for book clubs to entertain. I heard grumblings from some members about how “depressing” they thought this book was, but as a group we had excellent conversations on mental illness, gender roles, and the 1950’s Read my review of the book.
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. I read this for the mystery book club I used to run here at the library and it
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

would definitely count as a classic. If you’re looking for something that’s full of ambiance, setting, and great characters, Maltese Falcon is perfect. Short, easy to read, and a good mystery to boot. Hammett set the standard for noir fiction and mysteries. And how can you think of Sam Spade without thinking of Humphrey Bogart???
My Antonia by Willa Cather. For everyone who has ever read or watched Little House on the Prairie before, you’ll love this book. My Antonia is beautiful in its descriptions of the people, the time, and especially the land. A majority of Americans can say that somewhere in their history is an immigrant story, and My Antonia speaks to our shared history on being newcomers in the “New World.”
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Now, this is an ambitious book for a book club, not meant to be read over a period of just one month. You’d have to
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

give this at least three months or meetings for everyone to get through this lengthy, but well worth-it epic. This is the ultimate read on revenge. Dumas weaves an intricate story that by the end, will leave you going, “Holy smokes!”. For being a book written in the 1800’s, The Count of Monte Cristo is readable, especially compared to some of his other works. Like the show Revenge? It’s the Count of Monte Cristo updated.
1984 by George Orwell. It’s been years (10!) since I read this for senior year summer reading in high school, and I can still remember the impact this book had on me. Who hasn’t heard of the term “Big Brother”? Yup, it came from 1984. Orwell was a man ahead of his time, correctly guessing how we as a society would develop, as well as the implications of Communism. This book has garnered a lot of press time recently with the whole Snowden/NSA episode, so if just for curiosity, this book is well worth your time.
Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë
Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte. Ok, so you’re probably wondering, “What about Wuthering Heights? Or Jane Eyre?”. Wuthering Heights, frankly, is terrible. And Jane Eyre is scores better, and would definitely make another “Top 10 Classics List” were I to write another. Agnes Grey is a gem, a diamond in the rough. So much time is spent reading her sister’s books, that Anne is often overlooked. And I would argue that she is the true heroine of the Bronte sisters. What takes Emily and Charlotte more than 400 pages to describe, Anne takes less than 300 hundred to tell a fabulous story of perseverance and responsibility.
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. Ok, so admittedly I’m not a Hemingway fan. He, along with so many other male writers of his time, writes women one dimensionally and usually with obvious disdain and dislike. However… of the three Hemingway books I’ve read is the most tolerable, and therefore, the only one I’d recommend. Some of the comments in classics club were that it was just a bunch of people sitting around, doing nothing with their lives. And in truth, yes, that’s what they were doing. However, I thought The Sun Also Rises had a lot more to say about the period and the consequences of World War I than anything else. With the 100th anniversary of WWI next year, The Sun Also Rises is a treatise on how war changes everything.