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Book of the Month: Gone with the Wind
Ah yes, the book that has lived for almost a hundred years and it makes one feel like they’ve lived through a hundred years. Yes, I’m talking about Margaret Mitchell’s decade-spanning work, Gone with the Wind, covering before, during and after the Civil War from the POV of one stubborn hellion, Scarlet O’Hara.
There’s not much to say about the work that hasn’t been said before but it’s a very engaging book. The characters may not always be likable, Scarlet in particular after she steals Sue Ellen’s man, but they’re gritty and real during a hellish time.
Scarlet in particular. I already mentioned the whole man stealing thing but you got to admire her strength like shooting the Yankee and building up her business. As my friend said, she’s like the grown-up of the house and is able to hold Tara together but very emotionally immature when it comes to relationships.
Ashley is so not worth her love. She’s just chasing the image of a man that she thinks she wants simply because she’s unavailable. Also probably out of jealousy that Melanie is a naturally feminine, angel archtype that she can’t achieve. You just want to shake her to get with Rhett already. They remind me of two wolverines because whenever they’re in the same space you don’t know if they’re fighting each other or fighting with intense sexual passion.
But despite Scarlet’s jealousy, you must also admire Melanie’s strength in trying to lift the family sword to defend the home right after giving birth. Although I didn’t get attached enough to her to cry at her death like my friend did at apparently 2:30 in the morning.
Rhett is also cool in his own right by choosing to serve. Even though he knows the South won’t win, and the cause is worthless, he has to do it out of patriotic fervor and so that he can get rid of his near’do well reputation for his future daughter.
Sidenote, I know Bonnie died but just imagined if she lived long enough to date. No way would Scarlet believe anyone’s worthy of Bonnie but then Bonnie would have probably inherited Rhett and Scarlet’s stubbornness, whew boy that family might have killed each other.
Anyway, back to the actual story, one cannot deny that it does glamorize the South and gloss over the less pleasant aspects like the fact that everyone is part of the KKK and slavery is seen as perfectly normal with no insight to the lives of Mammy or Prissy etc. but then it would be less realistic if they considered them equals. It would be less historical. Also wouldn’t it make it whitewashing it if we portrayed the slave-owners as caring about their slaves as more than permenant servants?
If you want to add to this semi-philosphical discussion, comment below.
Overall, it was a riveting book that grips you and doesn’t let go despite the old-timey language because it speaks to the human spirit and its resiliency in times of war.
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Ranking Hundred Oaks
After vicariously reading the Pretty Tough series, I was in the mood for more girls in sports narratives. Again, of which there are surprisingly few series dedicated to the premise. The only other one I remembered was this. I wanted to read it when it was first coming out but I never got round to it.
Well the time has come. Despite the catchy sports phrases, it’s more romance and coming of age than sports but it’s still a great series. It’s all set in the titular Hundred Oaks, Tennessee. A small town where everyone vaguely knows each other so there are plenty of cameos of previous protagonists popping up in later books.
A really cool thing about the series is that time barrels on. It was first published in 2010 and continues on to 2017, so cute kid sisters become protagonists in later books, computers and Facebook become mainstream, acceptance of homosexuality and female sexuality become more commonplace, people become more secular. I wonder if it was a reflection of the author, or simply the switch from early 2000s to 2010s but it’s cool to see like a novel time capsule.
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America’s First Daughter Review
After thoroughly enjoying Dray and Kamoie’s book on the Hamiltos, I had to go read their first book together about Jefferson’s eldest daughter, Martha “Patsy’ Jefferson and how she shaped the founding father we know today.
It is always said that behind every great man, there was a great woman and this is especially prominant in the 1700s as it seems the wives and daughters often survived their famous male relatives. What, with the dueling and the wars it makes sense. They were often the executors of the personal belongings and in an effort to cement their legacies, edited and collected the reams of documents, letters, etc. They also burned more scandelous papers, all to shape the men we know today.
That’s exactly what happened here after Jefferson died where Patsy and her daughters spent a decade organizing and editing his work to publish even though it is published under her son’s name.
Patsy, of all people, had the greatest right to do so as she was her father’s guardian and as one will read, present during many of his historic and infamous turning points.
It is that love for her father that defines Patsy.
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Nov Books
Private Label by Kelly Yang
A perfect title for the private things that Serene and Lian hide from their peers and their family in this moving, coming of age romance. Serene is the daughter of single mom and major fashion designer, Lily Lee. Her real name is Liu but her mother’s Board of Trustees thought they’d better reach their WASP demographic with an American last name.
These same shareholders are the ones that are trying to get her mother to sell the company when she is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the most difficult and fatal one to be diagnosed with. Serene never liked how her mom seems beholden to the shareholders as if the made the company and not her mother’s genius and talent, but now she has the added pressure of being her mom’s chosen heir to protect the company while caring for her mother as she undergoes chemo.
Lian has recently moved to California from Beijiing in pursuit of the perfect SAT scores according to his mom. But his real dream is to do stand-up, not that his parents would ever understand. Between his parents puttig on pressure, constant microaggressions and no one even knowing his name (everyonen calls him Liam), his new friendship with Serene is the only thing keeping him sane.
Both of them have secrets and they try their best ot manuever into the adult world they are suddenly thrust into. But secrets are not always a good thing, Lian believes he’s doing the best he can by pursuing his own dream while pretending to study in order not to disappoint his parents. Serene’s attempts to help her mother are in conflict with the emotional upheveal where she’s the caretaker to her Mother and the real fear she’s going to be alone in the world. Especially since her mother won’t tell Serene about her father.
It’s good they have each other because they offer each other space, alternative perspective and challenge each other when they’re afriad. While some parts may be predictable like Serene’s jerkish boyfriend and her choice to send him nudes. Same with Lian’s decision to blow off his SATs and constant lying to his parents. The nuance and honesty afforded to the characters making it a evocative read.
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Book of the Month: Crocodile on the Sandbank
A bit of The Mummy, a bit of a stand-alone Agatha Christie, the adventures of Amelia Peabody feature a plain, spinster along the lines of Jane Eyre. Albeit a more sprightly Jane Eyre what with the shooting, escavating and mummy-hunting.
Let me back up a bit with the death of Amelia’s father, she decides to use her share of inheritance to go on a whirlwind tour of ancient ruins in honor of her and her father’s shared love of archeology. It’s there that she saves the fallen English-girl, Evelyn Forbes, whose lost her virtue and her fortune. Luckily, Amelia has no concerns for high society concern of virtue and invites her to be her companion in Egypt.
From there, they come upon the Emerson brothers who are digging up a new royal tomb and Evelyn’s amorous cousin, Lucas, who wants Evelyn’s hand in marriage. Also the mummy that is following them around and impervious to bullets.
This was a fun novel as you cna tell by the other book franchises I name-dropped in the beginning. Even though it was written in the 70s, Peters does an excellent job of writing in the 20th century vernacular with the focus on ladies’ virtue, the white saviorism among the British towards the Egyptians where they feel bad about how they’ve been abused by “bad” British people while also dismissing their ways as uneducated and superstitious, and the disdain towards Italians (so if you are in doubt of who the villains are, there’s a big clue).
Yet it is also quite funny like the slap-slap-kiss between the elder Emerson brother (called Emerson because Amelia refuses to call him by his first name) where they clearly like each other under the antagonism such as Amelia admiring his broad shoulders under the guise of being a student of anatomy. While Emerson blusters that she’s the most unladylike lady ever, it’s clear he loves the way she acts as his equal and fights his gruffness. It has entertaining quips between them that add levity.
The younger Emerson, Walter, and Evelyn form a cute beta couple while her amarous cousin, Lucas, adds potential will-they-won’t-they conflict. The reveal of the who the mummy is and why he’s “haunting” the escavation plot is predictable but Peters’ strength lies in her real-knowledge as an Egyptianologist and archeologist that lend real imagery and feeling to her prose.
Nice book
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Ranking The Secrets of Charlotte Street
This was really, really hard. In fact, I almost considered not ranking the series because each of them were so well-written that the minor flaws made it impossible to rank one above the other because they were insurmountable compared to what Peckham did right in subverting tropes and creating three-dimensional characters of complexities and layers. So take these rankings with a grain of salt knowing that each are so good in their own way. Just read the whole series.
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Book of the Month: The Great Alone
Ah the great Alaskan wilderness, a place to reconnect to nature.
Or in Hannah’s novel, a place where family demons come to tear them apart with no chance for help in the middle of a blizzard. Aka a nightmare in my thinking.
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Finished Nancy Drew!
It only took over a year and browsing through Internet archives to get to the final two Nancy Drew books that escaped my grasp-The Clue of the Whistling Bapipes and The Strange Message in the Parchment.
Oddly enough, they both involve a lot of sheep.
The Bagpipes have Nancy heading to her ancestral Scotland homeland after witnessing a carjacking back in the US. It’s suspicous, but she hasn’t cracked the case yet. She figures she can save it for after her Scottish trip, but being Nancy, these rouguish characters assume that she’s followed them overseas to foil their plans and with their bumbling and attempted murder, she does!
I always enjoy the travel books and this was no different even though I felt the whole mystery aspect to be convoluted. Let’s say it involves sheep smuggling which makes sense because Scotland is famous for its wool but it also feels very Scooby-Doo. I was complaining about the constant missing treasures and jewels so I should be happy with the change but it all strikes me as comically out there.
Still, it did give me another reminder of why Ned Nickerson makes a good BF for Nancy. I always forget how helpful he is. I know Nancy wouldn’t want to date an idiot but he was actually a vital part to the mission.
I also love how ride or die George is when she offers to plow down the carjackers on Nancy’s behalf. She doesn’t play.
The other mystery was convoluted in a confusing way. First we’re introduced to another of Nancy’s never-before mentioned (and will probably be forgotten) friends, Junie. Her father, a shepard (I told you there was a lot of sheep in these two books) recently bough a parchment with pretty pictures but then he gets a creepy phone call instructing him to decipher the message and that’s when all the trouble starts.
A flock of birds is sent to attack Nancy and Junie. A random girl tries to steal Nancy’s bag. Someone tries to rob Junie’s home, obviously on the hunt for the parchment. One of the fellow shepards is framed for the robbery, and there’s a sad little Italian boy whose uncle won’t allow him to talk to anyone.
So much was happening yet it did not speed up the story, it felt longer than other books in the series for some reason like she was dragging this out with the sheer number of things happening to the girls. Although the bird thing was really crazy, it made me wonder if she wanted to get a Hitchcock reference in there even though I can’t imagine a robber would spend all his time training a flock of attack birds on short notice.
Plus at the very last three chapters, the author shoves Bess, George and Ned into the story to blot the cast and provide some humorous meta jokes about how do they manage to get into another one of Nancy’s crazy cases in less than a minute.
It was like Keene was trying to make it more mysterious parchment to the little Italian boy but it just mae it last longer and I wanted Nancy to wrap it up and reveal how she figured everything out. So not my favorite.
And yep, I finally finished!! The OG series at least. I know it continued onwards but I think I feel satisfied for now in getting to know the wild and convoluted mysteries of the first girl detective. Moreover, the creative mind of the ghostwriter that showed that no plot or locale was too big for Nancy to get her nose in.
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Ranking Pretty Tough
I’m not a sports person as any of my friends would attest. Not watching and not doing. I’m not athletic and even if I were, my 4 foot nothing size would make me an easy tackle or block or whatever the term is.
But sometimes I get struck by a vicarious need to read a sports book to get the adreneline and passion I do not feel in real life when I see a ball.
The Pretty Tough series started as a brand I believe to encourage high school girls to pursue sports and spawn off into a webseries, and books, and the books certainly fit into their mantra.While romance is part of it as it’s in any YA book, it doesn’t take away from how important the sport is to the protagonist. I think it was most surprising that sometimes the protagonist didn’t end up with a love interest in the end. Which may be saying more about YA as a genre than the series itself.
There’s also a strange thing regarding the authorship as the books’ rebrand name only one author-Nicole Leigh Shepard. But the first two books is supposedly written by Liz Legelaar and the third by Keri Mikulski (who was nice enough to sign my book so many years ago). Then goodreads makes it more confusing by implying Shepard wrote #1 and 5, Mikulski wrote all of them. I definately think the first two was written by someone else as the tone is radically different from the other four but I’m not sure the definitive authorship and why the brand would try to rebrand the whole series under one pen name.
Anyway, here’s my ranking. Or bracket. Or whatever sports term you want to use.
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Author Highlight: Coco Simon
Get ready for this one, with 58 books spreading across 4 different series, this prolific author has terrific taste.
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