5/24/2023 0 Comments The peach keeperI always look forward to Sarah Addison Allen’s books~ I had pre-ordered it, anxious for its arrival. I’m long overdue in sharing this book that I read back in April~ “The New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Chased the Moon welcomes you to her newest locale: Walls of Water, North Carolina, where the secrets are thicker than the fog from the town’s famous waterfalls, and the stuff of superstition is just as real as you want it to be.” The Peach Keeper **** by Sarah Addison AllenĪn Edible Book Review inspired by Jain at Food for Thought, a delicious blog for readers with an appetite for the written word.
0 Comments
5/24/2023 0 Comments Elvira yours cruelly signedRun-ins with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Tom Jones helped her grow up fast. While her sisters played with Barbie dolls, Cassandra built model kits of Frankenstein and Dracula, and idolized Vincent Price.ĭue to a complicated relationship with her mother, Cassandra left home at 14, and by age 17 she was performing at the famed Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas. Feeling like a misfit led to her love of horror. Burned and scarred, the impact stayed with her and became an obstacle she was determined to overcome. Third-degree burns covered 35% of her body, and the prognosis wasn’t good. On Good Friday in 1953, at only 18 months old, 25 miles from the nearest hospital in Manhattan, Kansas, Cassandra Peterson reached for a pot on the stove and doused herself in boiling water. The woman behind the icon known as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, the undisputed Queen of Halloween, reveals her full story filled with intimate bombshells–told by the bombshell herself. 5/24/2023 0 Comments War Child by Emmanuel JalHe began the journey that would lead him to change his name and to music: recording and releasing his own album, which produced the number one hip-hop single in Kenya, and from there went on to perform with Moby, Bono, Peter Gabriel, and other international music stars. But, remarkably, Jal survived, and his life began to change when he was adopted by a British aid worker. Soon, Jal was conscripted into that army, one of 10,000 child soldiers, and fought through two separate civil wars over nearly a decade. Then, on one terrible day, Jal was separated from his mother, and later learned she had been killed his father Simon rose to become a powerful commander in the Christian Sudanese Liberation Army, fighting for the freedom of Sudan. But as Sudan's civil war moved closer-with the Islamic government seizing tribal lands for water, oil, and other resources-Jal's family moved again and again, seeking peace. In the mid-1980s, Emmanuel Jal was a seven year old Sudanese boy, living in a small village with his parents, aunts, uncles, and siblings. 5/24/2023 0 Comments Reasons to stay alive pagesI want, for as much of the time as possible in this blink-of-an-eye existence we have, to feel all that can be felt. I want to read it and write it and feel it and live it. This is also going to be a long one, I’d suggest grabbing a cup of tea, maybe a custard cream, a comfy seat, or a dog to cuddle. I’m going to try and do this book as much justice as I can, bear with me. This review/ discussion on Reasons to Stay Alive may be more of a nonsensical stream of thoughts opposed to a review, because every time I think about this book my mind becomes full of all the different points I want to raise and all the different aspects of this book that I love and I don’t think I can summarise it well. Anyway, I digress. Sunday is also book review day, with today’s special subject being Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig. It’s Sunday! A day for long lies, fry ups, roast dinners…just kidding, I’m working instead. 5/24/2023 0 Comments The underground railroad colsonThe 10-part series’ director, Barry Jenkins, whose credits include the Oscar-winning film Moonlight, recalled at a virtual press conference: “I told Mark Friedberg, our production designer: ‘This can’t be fake. But along with cotton fields, plantations and woods, it is equally persuasive in its depiction of underground steam trains that offer light at the end of the tunnel. The gap between the literal and the metaphorical was explored by The Underground Railroad, a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel by Colson Whitehead, which reimagined actual trains thundering beneath the soil.Ī big-budget-small-screen adaptation, which is now available on Amazon Prime, delivers a combination of ravishing cinematography and elemental suffering (there was a therapist on set) reminiscent of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. “The underground railroad was just a metaphor for a movement of people to be able to organise a network of abolitionists and freedom seekers.” “When people hear ‘railroad’, they automatically think it was a train,” Jones adds. It was, in fact, a network of secret routes and safe houses used by thousands of enslaved people to flee from the south to free states and Canada in the early to mid-19th century. Jones notes that the first thing people tend to get wrong about the underground railroad is assuming that a series of subterranean trains, tunnels and platforms branched out like the London Underground or New York subway. But while her fellow colonists grudgingly anticipate a difficult readjustment on some distant world, Ofelia savors the promise of a golden opportunity. And it is here that she fully expects to finish out her days-until the shifting corporate fortunes of the Sims Bancorp Company dictates that Colony 3245.12 is to be disbanded, its residents shipped off, deep in cryo-sleep, to somewhere new and strange and not of their choosing. On this planet far away in space and time from the world of her youth, she has lived and loved, weathered the death of her husband, raised her one surviving child, lovingly tended her garden, and grown placidly old. Le Guinįor forty years, Colony 3245.12 has been Ofelia’s home. “Ofelia-tough, kind, wise and unwise, fond of food, tired of foolish people-is one of the most probable heroines science fiction has ever known.”-Ursula K. Many were originally written for American magazines such as Ladies Home Journal, Harper's, Playboy and The New Yorker, then subsequently collected by Dahl into anthologies, gaining world-wide acclaim. He also had a successful parallel career as the writer of macabre adult short stories, usually with a dark sense of humour and a surprise ending. Dahl went on to create some of the best-loved children's stories of the 20th century, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach. The book was commissioned by Walt Disney for a film that was never made, and published in 1943. His first children's book was The Gremlins, about mischievous little creatures that were part of RAF folklore. Its title was inspired by a highly inaccurate and sensationalized article about the crash that blinded him, which claimed he had been shot down instead of simply having to land because of low fuel. The story, about his wartime adventures, was bought by the Saturday Evening Post for $900, and propelled him into a career as a writer. Today the story is published as A Piece of Cake. Roald Dahl was a British novelist, short story writer and screenwriter of Norwegian descent, who rose to prominence in the 1940's with works for both children and adults, and became one of the world's bestselling authors.ĭahl's first published work, inspired by a meeting with C. There she meets Dima, a tempestuous female jinni who's been banished from her tribe. Park Avenue heiress Sophia Winston, whose brief encounter with Ahmad left her with a strange illness that makes her shiver with cold, travels to the Middle East to seek a cure. Brought together under calamitous circumstances, their lives are now entwined-but they're not yet certain of what they mean to each other.īoth Chava and Ahmad have changed the lives of the people around them. Fearing they'll be exposed as monsters, these magical beings hide their true selves and try to pass as human-just two more immigrants in the bustling world of 1900s Manhattan. Ahmad is a jinni, a restless creature of fire, once free to roam the desert but now imprisoned in the shape of a man. In this enthralling historical epic, set in New York City and the Middle East in the years leading to World War I- the long-awaited follow-up to the acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Golem and the Jinni-Helene Wecker revisits her beloved characters Chava and Ahmad as they confront unexpected new challenges in a rapidly changing human world.Ĭhava is a golem, a woman made of clay, who can hear the thoughts and longings of those around her and feels compelled by her nature to help them. Holding Fire (2001), and The Secret Lives of Married Women (2013). As one sister prepares for the thorniest trial of her career and the other fends off ominous advances from a construction worker labouring on the house next door, both find themselves pushed to the edge, and confronted by discoveries about themselves and their lovers that shock and disturb them. Elissa Wald is a writer, ex-stripper, and long distance runner living in New York. Two identical twin sisters - one a sexually repressed defence attorney, the other a former libertine now living a respectable life in suburbia - are about to have their darkest secrets revealed, to the men in their lives and to themselves. The book comprises twenty-four essays split into four sections ("Losses", "Excesses", "Transports", and "The World of the Simple"), each dealing with a particular aspect of brain function. The book became the basis of an opera of the same name by Michael Nyman, which premiered in 1986. Sacks chose the title of the book from the case study of one of his patients who has visual agnosia, a neurological condition that leaves him unable to recognize faces and objects. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales is a 1985 book by neurologist Oliver Sacks describing the case histories of some of his patients. |