2ND QUARTER UPDATE | 2015 AUDIOBOOK CHALLENGE

If you’re an audiobook fan and would like to take up the challenge, hop over to The Book Nympho or Hot Listens for the Reading Challenge details and levels. I’ve gone for the Marathoner (50+) The challenge runs from Jan 1st 2015 until Dec 31st 2015 and you can join in anytime.

Audiobooks are great for those times you can’t read a book for whatever reason and if you find a great narrator they can make the story so much better.  Here are the books that I've listened to from April - June 2015.

April:

The Nightingale By: Kristen Hannah

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything By: Steven Levitt

May: 

Super Freakonomics By: Steven Levitt

The Girls of Mischief Bay By: Susan Mallery

June:

The Beekeeper's Daughter By: Santa Montefiore

Garden of Lies By: Amanda Quick

A Spool of Blue Thread By: Anne Tyler

Brain on Fire: My month of Madness By: Susannah Cahalan

The Sound of Glass By: Karen White

Sign Up For The Challenge HERE

1ST QUARTER UPDATE | 2015 AUDIOBOOK CHALLENGE

If you’re an audiobook fan and would like to take up the challenge, hop over to The Book Nympho or Hot Listens for the Reading Challenge details and levels. I’ve gone for the Marathoner (50+) The challenge runs from Jan 1st 2015 until Dec 31st 2015 and you can join in anytime.

Audiobooks are great for those times you can’t read a book for whatever reason and if you find a great narrator they can make the story so much better.  Here are the books that I've listened to from April - June 2015.

January:

The Magician's Lie By: Greer MacCallister

Dragonfly in Amber #2: By: Diana Gabaldon

Room By: Emma Donoghue

Garden Spells #1 By: Sarah Addison Allen

Defending Jacob By: William Landry

February: 

The Paying Guests By: Sarah Walters

First Frost By: Sarah Addison Allen

Moriarty By: Anthony Horowitz

Station Eleven By: Emily St. John Mandel

The Boston Girl By: Anita Diamant

The Miniaturist By: Jessie Burton

March:

I Heart My Little A-Holes By: Karen Alpert

Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are By: Carlin Flora

The Fortune Hunter By: Daisy Goodwin

Red Queen By: Victoria Aveyard

The Kitchen House By: Kathleen Grissom

Sign Up For The Challenge HERE

The Kitchen House By: Kathleen Grissom Book Review

The Kitchen House

By: Kathleen Grissom

Good Reads Synopsis:

When a white servant girl violates the order of plantation society, she unleashes a tragedy that exposes the worst and best in the people she has come to call her family. Orphaned while onboard ship from Ireland, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives on the steps of a tobacco plantation where she is to live and work with the slaves of the kitchen house. Under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate daughter, Lavinia becomes deeply bonded to her adopted family, though she is set apart from them by her white skin. 

Eventually, Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. Lavinia finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds. When she is forced to make a choice, loyalties are brought into question, dangerous truths are laid bare, and lives are put at risk.

My Feelings on The Kitchen House:

The book started out strong with the premonition of what was to happen.  You kept thinking throughout the entire story that you seemed to know who would be hanging by the end of the story, which is a gruesome way to go throughout an entirety of a book, but I was captivated!  This book went through many different themes.   I liked the theme of family that this book conveyed.  I really felt like Lavinia although her life was rough through most of the book finally had her place at the end of the book.  However, I still felt that Lavinia ended up with Will in the very end, it just makes more sense that way, she deserves it! :)

My favorite quote from The kitchen House is:

 Find me on Goodreads:  Rachele Hirsch-Brooks

The Paying Guest by: Sarah Walters Book Review

The Paying Guests

By: Sarah Walters

Good Reads Synopsis:

It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa — a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants — life is about to be transformed as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.

With the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the “clerk class,” the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances’s life — or, as passions mount and frustration gathers, how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be.

My Feelings on The Paying Guests:

I absolutely LOVED this book to start out with!  I feel like this book was incredibly well written but I had a difficult time towards the end, because it just didn't hold up the way it started out at the beginning. Sometimes it just felt drawn out when it didn't have to be.   I normally do not like reading about same sex relationships but this book was definitely intriguing and kept my attention, it just seemed like after that was over everything else in the book seemed to fall apart. 

My favorite quote from The Paying Guests is:

 Find me on Goodreads:  Rachele Hirsch-Brooks

First Frost By: Sarah Addison Allen Book Review

First Frost

By: Sarah Addison Allen

Good Reads Synopsis:

From the New York Times bestselling author of Garden Spells comes a story of the Waverley family, in a novel as sparkling as the first dusting of frost on new-fallen leaves...

It's October in Bascom, North Carolina, and autumn will not go quietly. As temperatures drop and leaves begin to turn, the Waverley women are made restless by the whims of their mischievous apple tree... and all the magic that swirls around it. But this year, first frost has much more in store.

Claire Waverley has started a successful new venture, Waverley’s Candies. Though her handcrafted confections—rose to recall lost love, lavender to promote happiness and lemon verbena to soothe throats and minds—are singularly effective, the business of selling them is costing her the everyday joys of her family, and her belief in her own precious gifts.

Sydney Waverley, too, is losing her balance. With each passing day she longs more for a baby— a namesake for her wonderful Henry. Yet the longer she tries, the more her desire becomes an unquenchable thirst, stealing the pleasure out of the life she already has.

Sydney’s daughter, Bay, has lost her heart to the boy she knows it belongs to…if only he could see it, too. But how can he, when he is so far outside her grasp that he appears to her as little more than a puff of smoke?

When a mysterious stranger shows up and challenges the very heart of their family, each of them must make choices they have never confronted before. And through it all, the Waverley sisters must search for a way to hold their family together through their troublesome season of change, waiting for that extraordinary event that is First Frost.

Lose yourself in Sarah Addison Allen's enchanting world and fall for her charmed characters in this captivating story that proves that a happily-ever-after is never the real ending to a story. It’s where the real story begins.

My Feelings on First Frost:

So this is the second book about the Waverly Family.  I loved Garden Spells from the first page I opened it.  Come to think about it I have not disliked one book of Sarah Addison Allen's.  She is an amazing writer who is able to use magical elements to make her characters and the events they go through that much more special.  I love the fact that this story revolves around the magical apple tree that is in the back of Claire Waverly's property.  I am so glad the Waverly's story did not end with Garden Spells and I liked seeing how Claire evolved throughout the two books and completely came full circle in First Frost.  She finally because vulnerable and able to ask for help from her family.  I love this wonderful story and hope there will be more to come!

My favorite quote from First Frost is:

 Find me on Goodreads:  Rachele Hirsch-Brooks

Station Eleven By: Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven

By: Emily St. John Mandel

Good Reads Synopsis:

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur's chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them.

Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten's arm is a line from Star Trek: "Because survival is insufficient." But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave.

Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all. A novel of art, memory, and ambition, Station Eleven  tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.

My Feelings on Station Eleven:

Woah, AMAZING book.  Wonderfully written.  So I started reading this book in the midst of our Flu Outbreak that wasn't responding to the shot that had been administered at the start of the cold season.  So it was already so surreal that this was talking about the Georgian  Flu that caused the world to basically fall apart.  I was captivated with all of these characters throughout the book.  Even though the end of the world does not seem like a reasonable feat, but throughout the entire story line everything was believable and well thought out.  I liked the flashbacks that came throughout the book;  to go from the past to the present was a wonderful way to convey the story line.  I highly recommend this book!

My favorite quote from Station Eleven is:

 Find me on Goodreads:  Rachele Hirsch-Brooks

Dragonfly in Amber Book Review

Dragonfly in Amber

By: Diana Gabaldon

Good Reads Synopsis:

With her now-classic novel Outlander, Diana Gabaldon introduced two unforgettable characters — Claire Randall and Jamie Fraser—delighting readers with a story of adventure and love that spanned two centuries. Now Gabaldon returns to that extraordinary time and place in this vivid, powerful follow-up to Outlander....

For twenty years Claire Randall has kept her secrets. But now she is returning with her grown daughter to Scotland’s majestic mist-shrouded hills. Here Claire plans to reveal a truth as stunning as the events that gave it birth: about the mystery of an ancient circle of standing stones ... about a love that transcends the boundaries of time ... and about James Fraser, a Scottish warrior whose gallantry once drew a young Claire from the security of her century to the dangers of his....

Now a legacy of blood and desire will test her beautiful copper-haired daughter, Brianna, as Claire’s spellbinding journey of self-discovery continues in the intrigue-ridden Paris court of Charles Stuart ... in a race to thwart a doomed Highlands uprising ... and in a desperate fight to save both the child and the man she loves...

My Feelings on Dragonfly in Amber:

OMG , how does she do it!?!  I am in LOVE with this series after 2 books!  I cannot believe how one book can keep you on your toes, make you cry, smile, laugh and make you worried for the characters.  So I picked up the first book of the series, Outlander when the series started advertising.  So, it is somewhat nice having somebody to picture as these characters.

I gave this book 5 stars and am looking forward to reading the next installment to see what happens in the lives of Jamie and Clair and some other characters I met along the way!  I can honestly say each book has kept me on my toes till the very end and leaves me wanting to run straight to the library to get the next book in the series.  AHHHH-MAZING!  Here are my favorite quotes from the book!

 

I leave you with this!  I LOVE this card!  I know Mr. Bedford would completely think I was off my rocker if I did this!  I wish kilts were easier to find, and I would!  Oh so sexy is a man in a kilt!

Find me on Goodreads:  Rachele Hirsch-Brooks

Room Book Review

Room

By: Emma Donoghue

Good Reads Synopsis:

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough...not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.

Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, ROOM is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.

My Feelings on Room:

I liked this book, but I didn't LOVE this book.  It was touchingly sad and made me want to slit my wrists.  It was well wrote and well conceived.  I had a love hate relationship with Jack telling the story, I found him whiny most often, rightfully so, but it got on my nerves after a while.   Here is one of my favorite quotes from Room.

 
This was a touching tale of confinement and one that was well written to show how people might deal after this certain life predicament.  I gave this book 4 stars, and hope to read more from Emma Donoghue!

Find me on Goodreads:  Rachele Hirsch-Brooks

Garden Spells Book Review

Goodreads Synopsis: 
The women of the Waverley family -- whether they like it or not -- are heirs to an unusual legacy, one that grows in a fenced plot behind their Queen Anne home on Pendland Street in Bascom, North Carolina. There, an apple tree bearing fruit of magical properties looms over a garden filled with herbs and edible flowers that possess the power to affect in curious ways anyone who eats them. 

For nearly a decade, 34-year-old Claire Waverley, at peace with her family inheritance, has lived in the house alone, embracing the spirit of the grandmother who raised her, ruing her mother's unfortunate destiny and seemingly unconcerned about the fate of her rebellious sister, Sydney, who freed herself long ago from their small town's constraints. Using her grandmother's mystical culinary traditions, Claire has built a successful catering business -- and a carefully controlled, utterly predictable life -- upon the family's peculiar gift for making life-altering delicacies: lilac jelly to engender humility, for instance, or rose geranium wine to call up fond memories. Garden Spells reveals what happens when Sydney returns to Bascom with her young daughter, turning Claire's routine existence upside down. With Sydney's homecoming, the magic that the quiet caterer has measured into recipes to shape the thoughts and moods of others begins to influence Claire's own emotions in terrifying and delightful ways. 

As the sisters reconnect and learn to support one another, each finds romance where she least expects it, while Sydney's child, Bay, discovers both the safe home she has longed for and her own surprising gifts. With the help of their elderly cousin Evanelle, endowed with her own uncanny skills, the Waverley women redeem the past, embrace the present, and take a joyful leap into the future. 

My Feelings on Garden Spells:

So obviously from the Goodreads synopsis you can hear a little bit of practical magic floating through the words. Practical Magic is probably one of my FAVORITES of all time!  Even though I compare it is not a valid comparison both are wonderfully put together and I loved both equally as much!  I loved the magical aspects of all of Sarah Addison Allen's books.  It really just captures me right away and often these are a quick read since I want to get to the end to see what happens next.  Here is one of my favorite quotes from the book. 

Everything is beautifully written and now I am ready for her next book that again talks about the Waverley family, in First Frost!  

Here is a sneak peak into her newest book!

Find me on Goodreads:  Rachele Hirsch-Brooks

Defending Jacob Book Review

 Goodreads Synopsis:
Andy Barber has been an assistant district attorney in his suburban Massachusetts county for more than twenty years. He is respected in his community, tenacious in the courtroom, and happy at home with his wife, Laurie, and son, Jacob. But when a shocking crime shatters their New England town, Andy is blindsided by what happens next: His fourteen-year-old son is charged with the murder of a fellow student.

Every parental instinct Andy has rallies to protect his boy. Jacob insists that he is innocent, and Andy believes him. Andy must. He’s his father. But as damning facts and shocking revelations surface, as a marriage threatens to crumble and the trial intensifies, as the crisis reveals how little a father knows about his son, Andy will face a trial of his own—between loyalty and justice, between truth and allegation, between a past he’s tried to bury and a future he cannot conceive.

Award-winning author William Landay has written the consummate novel of an embattled family in crisis—a suspenseful, character-driven mystery that is also a spellbinding tale of guilt, betrayal, and the terrifying speed at which our lives can spin out of control.

My take on Defending Jacob:
This was a book club pick, and definitely not something I would pick for myself, but I read and ended up liking the book.  I did not think some parts were completely well throughout, so I ended up only giving it 4 stars on Goodreads.  I liked the murder/mystery aspect of this one, it just seemed more and more far fetched as the book went along.  I am sure if this book were to be made into a movie it would do rather well, with the Gone Girl phenomenon going on right about now.  It gives that twisted plot just like Gillian Fly is able to do.  This is my favorite quote from the story here.

An emotion is a thought yes, and idea but it is also a sensation, an ache in your body.  Desire, love, hate, fear repulsion, you feel these things in your muscle and bones not just in your mind.  

Very moving indeed.  I liked how this book went through the different emotions of a family who is struck with tragedy.  How they dealt with this tragedy really made the the book what it is!

Find me on Goodreads:  Rachele Hirsch-Brooks