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December 2016 Book Review

I didn’t read very much in December for the same reason that I didn’t read much in November…..Hallmark Christmas movies!  I read two books in December and they were very different from one another.  One was another suspenseful thriller like Gone Girl (which I love) and the other was a cookbook!  I’m totally counting it on my book review because I literally read the entire thing!


Amazon.com says…In this tightly wound, enthralling story reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s works, Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: a week on a luxury cruise with only a handful of cabins. The sky is clear, the waters calm, and the veneered, select guests jovial as the exclusive cruise ship, the Aurora, begins her voyage in the picturesque North Sea. At first, Lo’s stay is nothing but pleasant: the cabins are plush, the dinner parties are sparkling, and the guests are elegant. But as the week wears on, frigid winds whip the deck, gray skies fall, and Lo witnesses what she can only describe as a dark and terrifying nightmare: a woman being thrown overboard. The problem? All passengers remain accounted for—and so, the ship sails on as if nothing has happened, despite Lo’s desperate attempts to convey that something (or someone) has gone terribly, terribly wrong…


This book was enjoyable to read and did get suspenseful, but it wasn’t my absolute favorite. I felt frustrated along with the main character when no one would believe her story about the woman being thrown overboard.  This book got creepy at the end and when I thought it was over…it wasn’t and kept on going.  I would recommend this book for anyone to read as long as they’ve read Gone Girl and Girl on the Train first.  Gone Girl is my favorite suspense-thriller novel, and I keep comparing everything else to it.  This novel doesn’t hold up, but it’s still not a bad story!




Amazon.com says..Maybe she’s on a photo shoot in Zanzibar. Maybe she’s making people laugh on TV. But all Chrissy Teigen really wants to do is talk about dinner. Or breakfast. Lunch gets some love, too. For years, she’s been collecting, cooking, and Instagramming her favorite recipes, and here they are: from breakfast all day to John’s famous fried chicken with spicy honey butter to her mom’s Thai classics. 


Salty, spicy, saucy, and fun as sin (that’s the food, but that’s Chrissy, too), these dishes are for family, for date night at home, for party time, and for a few life-sucks moments (salads). You’ll learn the importance of chili peppers, the secret to cheesy-cheeseless eggs, and life tips like how to use bacon as a home fragrance, the single best way to wake up in the morning, and how not to overthink men or Brussels sprouts. Because for Chrissy Teigen, cooking, eating, life, and love are one and the same.
I finally got this book at Christmas and could not put it down.  Y’all, I LOVE it!  Chrissy’s humor is fantastic–a mix of sarcasm and wit–and I love that she has a humorous story for every recipe.  Plus, how can you not want to eat the food that she makes?  I actually made a recipe from this last night and it got Dustin’s approval.  He liked it enough to make sure there were leftovers for his lunch today.  The pictures in Cravings are both of the food (which looks amazing) and of Chrissy and her husband, John Legend.  Now if she’d come out with a book on how she keeps such a good and fit body….

November 2016 Reads

This post is coming at you early Wednesday morning after spending the majority of the night listening to tornado warnings in my area……which means I’m tired!  Please keep north Alabama in your prayers.  There were many tornadoes in the middle of the night and a some fatalities.  

Today’s post will be short and sweet because I only read one book in the month of November, and the rest of my time was spent watching Hallmark Christmas movies 😉


Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.

This book wasn’t my favorite (over 500 pages!!), but I’m glad I can say that I’ve read it.  It was told mainly from the point of view of Werner, a young German boy who ends up joining the Nazi regime, and Marie-Laure, a blind French girl.  I knew their paths would cross at some point in the book, and I think that’s what kept me reading.  One thing I really did enjoy about this book was the ending.  Doerr wrapped up everything, and his ending made me wonder what it was like to live in Europe after the horrors of Hitler–what was it like to live 20-30 years after and to be a Jew interacting with a former Nazi.  Very interesting.  I would recommend this book if you really enjoy historical fiction!

October 2016 Reads (on a Monday)

Yep, you read that correctly–no weekend recap here today!  My weekend wasn’t anything spectacular…lots of cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, and Hallmark Christmas movies.  So basically nothing picture worthy 😉

Since it’s the last day of the month and I realized I hadn’t done my book review yet, today seemed like a perfect day for that!

I read five books this month and started on a sixth and seventh.  None of the books I finished were too impressive except one, so I’m hoping my November books are better to me!

As always, I will post the summary from Amazon.com and I’ll post my own thoughts in italics below.

The Couple Next Door
Anne and Marco Conti seem to have it all—a loving relationship, a wonderful home, and their beautiful baby, Cora. But one night when they are at a dinner party next door, a terrible crime is committed. Suspicion immediately focuses on the parents. But the truth is a much more complicated story.

Inside the curtained house, an unsettling account of what actually happened unfolds. Detective Rasbach knows that the panicked couple is hiding something. Both Anne and Marco  soon discover that the other is keeping secrets, secrets they’ve kept for years. 

What follows is the nerve-racking unraveling of a family—a chilling tale of  deception, duplicity, and unfaithfulness that will keep you breathless until the final shocking twist.

This book wasn’t as sick and twisted as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train.  Unlike those two, this one was semi-predictable to me (and I never usually can predict endings).  I honestly have nothing good to say about this book–don’t read it!

Ugly Love
When Tate Collins meets airline pilot Miles Archer, she doesn’t think it’s love at first sight. They wouldn’t even go so far as to consider themselves friends. The only thing Tate and Miles have in common is an undeniable mutual attraction. Once their desires are out in the open, they realize they have the perfect set-up. He doesn’t want love; she doesn’t have time for love. Their arrangement could be surprisingly seamless, as long as Tate can stick to the only two rules Miles has for her.

This was another one of those okay books.  I read the book below first and enjoyed it enough to read another of her books.  After this one, I’m done reading her books.  I need something with substance.  Again, don’t read this one.  

It Ends With Us
Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up – she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life suddenly seems almost too good to be true.
  
Ryle is assertive, stubborn, and maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily, but Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing.
  
As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan – her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.
  
With this bold and deeply personal novel, Colleen Hoover delivers a heart-wrenching story that breaks exciting new ground for her as a writer. It Ends With Us is an unforgettable tale of love that comes at the ultimate price.

I read this book before reading Ugly Love.  It has some pretty heavy material in it that I wasn’t expecting.  You usually don’t see anything like that in chick lit.  I enjoyed it–especially after reading the author’s note at the end and learning how her life inspired this book.  I recommend this of you need something fast and easy to read.  (I got this recommendation from the Mix and Match Mama September book review.)

Truly Madly Guilty
Sam and Clementine have a wonderful, albeit, busy life: they have two little girls, Sam has just started a new dream job and Clementine, a cellist, is busy preparing for the audition of a lifetime. If there’s anything they can count on, it’s each other.
Clementine and Erika are each other’s oldest friends. A single look between them can convey an entire conversation. But theirs is a complicated relationship, so when Erika mentions a last minute invitation to a barbecue with her neighbors, Tiffany and Vid, Clementine and Sam don’t hesitate. Having Tiffany and Vid’s larger than life personalities there will be a welcome respite.
Two months later, it won’t stop raining, and Clementine and Sam can’t stop asking themselves the question: What if we hadn’t gone? 
In Truly Madly Guilty, Liane Moriarty takes on the foundations our lives: marriage, sex, parenthood, and friendship. She shows how guilt can expose the fault lines in the most seemingly strong relationships, how what we don’t say can be more powerful than what we do, and how sometimes it is the most innocent of moments that can do the greatest harm.
Ugh.  That’s what I thought about this book.  I like Liane Moriarty, and last month I read The Last Anniversary by her.  This was my October book club book and that’s they only reason why I actually finished this book.  Otherwise I would have quit about 50 pages in.
After I Do
When Lauren and Ryan’s marriage reaches the breaking point, they come up with an unconventional plan. They decide to take a year off in the hopes of finding a way to fall in love again. One year apart, and only one rule: they cannot contact each other. Aside from that, anything goes.

Lauren embarks on a journey of self-discovery, quickly finding that her friends and family have their own ideas about the meaning of marriage. These influences, as well as her own healing process and the challenges of living apart from Ryan, begin to change Lauren’s ideas about monogamy and marriage. She starts to question: When you can have romance without loyalty and commitment without marriage, when love and lust are no longer tied together, what do you value? What are you willing to fight for?

This is a love story about what happens when the love fades. It’s about staying in love, seizing love, forsaking love, and committing to love with everything you’ve got. And above all, After I Do is the story of a couple caught up in an old game—and searching for a new road to happily ever after.

Even though I don’t agree with the view on marriage this book presented, I still really enjoyed reading it!  I absolutely love reading books by Taylor Jenkins Reid (I loved Maybe in Another Life and One True Loves), so I had high hopes for this one–and it delivered!  I read this in one day while Dustin was in ICU.  I have one more of her books left to read, Forever, Interrupted, and I’m putting it off because it looks so sad!  Has anyone read it?

Right now I’m reading both The Good Girl and Knowing God.  After I finish these two in November, I’ll need another good book to read.  Any recommendations?

P.S. Happy Reformation Day! 
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