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Review Date: 4/3/2007
There's a reason it's a classic. An excellent book.
Review Date: 11/25/2015
Helpful Score: 2
This was a very enjoyable, but highly predictable, read. The main character and narrator, Don, has Aspergers Syndrome, which made the voice of the narrator and story-telling unique, and I was engaged in the story-line from the beginning. I liked quirky Don, and I, like his only friends, Claudia and Gene, wanted to see him find a woman that was right for him. This is the main plot point: whether or not Don will find a woman that is a good fit for him, since his Aspergers makes him awkward in social situations and very regimented in his daily life. I knew from the beginning, as I'm sure pretty much anyone can figure out from the title, who the object of Don's affection would end up being, and the entire plot is pretty predictable, including who is Rosie's biological father. The predictability did not detract from my enjoyment of the book though, and I would definitely recommend it for someone looking for a cute love story with an unconventional main character.
Review Date: 2/9/2013
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was a quick read, kept my interest throughout, and had characters that, although unrelatable at times, were always sympathetic. Written by the same author as Gone Girl, which I also liked, Sharp Objects is the better novel in my opinion.
Review Date: 5/18/2009
I bought the book because it has a lot of cute recipes, and I thought my five-year-old daughter and I could make them together. However, I didn't look at the book very closely before purchasing it. I saw all the pictures of foods that would appeal to my kids and bought it. After I got it home and started to look at the recipes, I realized I probably wouldn't be able to make very many of the recipes with my daughter. That's when I realized the title said, "Cooking FOR Kids," not WITH kids. The recipes are not difficult...for an adult. I'm not so sure that a child would be able to follow some of the recipes. The author put in recipes that have a finished product that kids will like, but not recipes that the kids can necessarily participate in making. Overall, it's a cute book, and I love that every recipe has a photo. If you're looking for a cookbook with foods that kids will love to eat, this is it. If you're looking for a cookbook with recipes to make with kids, this is not it.
Review Date: 1/7/2009
Helpful Score: 1
This book, while marketed as a children's book, seems more suited for adults who have children. It is nicely written, with a cute, sentimental story line that I enjoyed, but it did not hold my children's interest.
Review Date: 2/9/2013
Helpful Score: 1
I really enjoyed this book, but was not so fond of the ending, even though the ending is probably the only realistic one. Any other ending wouldn't have fit, even though as the reader I wanted something else, something happier, I guess. A couple twists towards the end that made it interesting...I had figured out one, but the other took me a little by surprise. Overall, a heart-wrenching, poignant novel that I would highly recommend.
Review Date: 1/6/2014
I read this book for the first time when my I was twelve and my mother gave me her grandmother's copy. It was the first book I truly fell in love with and I have loved it ever since. That being said, when my book club chose it as our next read, I was both excited and worried. Even though I read it several times between the ages of twelve and fifteen, I had not read it in alomost 20 years. What if it wasn't as good as I remembered? What if I didn't like it as much now as I did as a young teen? What if I didn't like it at all? Some books are better remembered in the past than revisited in the present (Flowers in the Attic comes immediately to mind), so even though I was thrilled to have an excuse to read it again, I was a little apprehensive. I didn't want my favorite book of all time to be ruined for me.
My worrying was for nothing because this is truly one of the greatest novels ever written.
Oh, how I love this book. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn makes me in love with life, in love with living. It's one of the few books I've ever read that when I got to the end, I was so incredibly sad it was over and I just wanted it to keep going, even though it was already 500 pages! I wanted to follow Francie and the Nolan family forever and I felt as if I was losing a dear friend.
The story takes place in Brooklyn, New York during the early 1900's, up until about 1920, and centers around the impoverished Nolan family, and specifically Francie Nolan, a shy, bookish misfit. Francie's mother works as a janitress, cleaning several tenement buildings in their poor neighborhood to support Francie and her brother Neely because Francie's father is a drunk. It's a heart-wrenching story with many ups and downs and I don't want to give anything away, so I'll just say READ IT!
This book makes me want to be poor. Not because the book makes being poor seem great, because it makes plain the pain and suffering poverty causes, particularly at the beginning of the 20th century, but you really got a sense of how not having anything really made the Nolan's have each other, to help each other, to love each other, and to need each other in a way that they wouldn't have if they'd had enough. By the end of the book the Nolan's seem to be finally making their way out of the hard scrabble life and onto something easier and more comfortable than the poverty and grief they have endured, but you get a sense that they will never be ashappy close as they were when they had only each other, when they really needed each other and could be there for one another in a way they won't need to be anymore. And to me one of the themes of this book is change. Change is obviously an inevitability and possibly even a necessity, but change is often sad. And even though change can be good, there is almost always a nostalgia for the way things were and even a mourning for what used to be, and so when I reach the end of this book, I feel a certain sadness even though I know the Nolans will be better off.
My worrying was for nothing because this is truly one of the greatest novels ever written.
Oh, how I love this book. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn makes me in love with life, in love with living. It's one of the few books I've ever read that when I got to the end, I was so incredibly sad it was over and I just wanted it to keep going, even though it was already 500 pages! I wanted to follow Francie and the Nolan family forever and I felt as if I was losing a dear friend.
The story takes place in Brooklyn, New York during the early 1900's, up until about 1920, and centers around the impoverished Nolan family, and specifically Francie Nolan, a shy, bookish misfit. Francie's mother works as a janitress, cleaning several tenement buildings in their poor neighborhood to support Francie and her brother Neely because Francie's father is a drunk. It's a heart-wrenching story with many ups and downs and I don't want to give anything away, so I'll just say READ IT!
This book makes me want to be poor. Not because the book makes being poor seem great, because it makes plain the pain and suffering poverty causes, particularly at the beginning of the 20th century, but you really got a sense of how not having anything really made the Nolan's have each other, to help each other, to love each other, and to need each other in a way that they wouldn't have if they'd had enough. By the end of the book the Nolan's seem to be finally making their way out of the hard scrabble life and onto something easier and more comfortable than the poverty and grief they have endured, but you get a sense that they will never be as
Review Date: 2/9/2013
I don't really know how to say this nicely, so I'm just going to come out and say it: I don't really like Carole Radziwill. I did not enjoy her narrative voice at all. The whole time I was reading her memoir, I kept thinking to myself, I don't like you. She seems self-centered and definitely has a case of "poor me". Poor me, nobody in my husband's family likes me...poor me, my husband won't admit he's sick and take care of himself, so I have to do it...poor me, poor me, poor me. I'm not diminishing what she went through, because I'm sure it was hard, but she tries so hard to make herself relate-able, and I couldn't relate to her at all. She speaks of everyone in her husband's family in such a derogatory manner, it really turned me off. And the name dropping...ugh! It drove me nuts. Then a friend told me Ms. Radziwill stars on the Real Housewives of New York, and I REALLY didn't like her after that.
Review Date: 4/28/2007
Helpful Score: 1
I thought this book was only okay. It was a best-seller and was made into a movie, so I thought it was going to be really good, but I was rather disappointed. Maybe I missed the nuances or it was over my head, but I thout it was neither "compelling" nor "brilliant" as some of the reviews put it. It wasn't terrible, just not as good as I was expecting. I think amusing is a better description, and it was well written, just not the "literary page turner" it was touted to be on the cover.
Review Date: 3/31/2014
Helpful Score: 8
A lot of people I know like this book. Every time I told someone I was reading it, I got basically the same response, "Oh, I loved that book!" Everyone in my book club liked it. Most of my friends on Goodreads who have read it gave it 4 or more stars. So I tried, I REALLY tried to like this book, and while I didn't hate it, and even enjoyed it at times, I think it is an overrated memoir written by a self-absorbed woman who makes terrible decisions.
So, I don't think it is giving anything away to say that the book starts out and you learn that Cheryl's life has taken a sharp turn for the worse after her mom dies from cancer at the young age of 45. Super sad, of course, and you feel bad for her, of course. But at a certain point, and I'm not sure when that point was, I stopped feeling bad for her and started feeling like she was completely unsympathetic as a narrator and unrelatable as a person. It might have been when I learned she didn't do any real research before starting out on her trek and was going to whine the whole book about how much her shoes/backpack/wallet hurt. Or it might have been when I found out she lectured her brother about smoking pot while she was doing heroin! But it was probably when she cheated on her husband and explained it away by saying, "I could only be who it seemed I had to be." (Um, what? New Flash: No one HAS to cheat.)
So, yeah, the chick annoyed me. She made stupid decisions and then liked to brag about how, because she was a beautiful woman hiking solo on the trail, people would come to her rescue. Repack her backpack for her. Give her a place to sleep. Pick her up on the side of the road. Buy her a drink. Blah, blah. It got kind of boring.
I feel like at the beginning of the book, she has all these problems because she couldn't cope with her mother's death, like doing drugs and sleeping with strangers, and by the end of the book, even though she has changed on the outside with a toned and tanned body, on the inside she is still the same exact person. I mean, she sleeps with a virtual stranger within the last 50 pages of the book. Is that supposed to be empowering? I didn't really get it and I don't think she did either.
Which brings me to my final point. What the hell did she learn on the trail?? I couldn't figure it out. At the end she says she is enlightened, but I didn't get it. She says when she returned to the Bridge of the Gods fifteen years later, the meaning of her hike unfolded inside her, a secret finally revealed, but she doesn't really share the secret, at least not with me.
I give it 2 stars because Cheryl writes well enough that I wanted to find out what would happen to her, although the end is somewhat anti-climactic. My advice is to skip this one.
So, I don't think it is giving anything away to say that the book starts out and you learn that Cheryl's life has taken a sharp turn for the worse after her mom dies from cancer at the young age of 45. Super sad, of course, and you feel bad for her, of course. But at a certain point, and I'm not sure when that point was, I stopped feeling bad for her and started feeling like she was completely unsympathetic as a narrator and unrelatable as a person. It might have been when I learned she didn't do any real research before starting out on her trek and was going to whine the whole book about how much her shoes/backpack/wallet hurt. Or it might have been when I found out she lectured her brother about smoking pot while she was doing heroin! But it was probably when she cheated on her husband and explained it away by saying, "I could only be who it seemed I had to be." (Um, what? New Flash: No one HAS to cheat.)
So, yeah, the chick annoyed me. She made stupid decisions and then liked to brag about how, because she was a beautiful woman hiking solo on the trail, people would come to her rescue. Repack her backpack for her. Give her a place to sleep. Pick her up on the side of the road. Buy her a drink. Blah, blah. It got kind of boring.
I feel like at the beginning of the book, she has all these problems because she couldn't cope with her mother's death, like doing drugs and sleeping with strangers, and by the end of the book, even though she has changed on the outside with a toned and tanned body, on the inside she is still the same exact person. I mean, she sleeps with a virtual stranger within the last 50 pages of the book. Is that supposed to be empowering? I didn't really get it and I don't think she did either.
Which brings me to my final point. What the hell did she learn on the trail?? I couldn't figure it out. At the end she says she is enlightened, but I didn't get it. She says when she returned to the Bridge of the Gods fifteen years later, the meaning of her hike unfolded inside her, a secret finally revealed, but she doesn't really share the secret, at least not with me.
I give it 2 stars because Cheryl writes well enough that I wanted to find out what would happen to her, although the end is somewhat anti-climactic. My advice is to skip this one.
Review Date: 3/27/2007
A unique mystery book.
World War Z (Mass Market Movie Tie-In Edition): An Oral History of the Zombie War
Author:
Book Type: Mass Market Paperback
40
Author:
Book Type: Mass Market Paperback
40
Review Date: 8/21/2013
This was my first foray into an apocalyptic zombie world and overall I liked the book and would recommend it as a good read. For me, the first half of the book was definitely more interesting and a faster read than the second half. The book is not really a novel in the traditional sense, as there are no real characters that the reader becomes attached to. If it were a movie, it would be a documentary (even though the content is fiction, obviously). Every chapter, some as short as a few paragraphs and few longer than 10 pages, is told by a different person in interview format. Although I initially enjoyed this narrative technique, by the end of the book I was over it and wishing for a traditional narrator to just tell the story chronologically, but the book still kept my interest to the end.
With that said, the author, Max Brooks, is an amazing story teller. He covered how the zombie apocalypse affected the world on every level: social, economic, and civic repercussions. I'm not even sure how one person could have such a good understanding of the people and governments of so many different countries to be able to tell this story so realistically. In short, I think Max Brooks may be a genius.
With that said, the author, Max Brooks, is an amazing story teller. He covered how the zombie apocalypse affected the world on every level: social, economic, and civic repercussions. I'm not even sure how one person could have such a good understanding of the people and governments of so many different countries to be able to tell this story so realistically. In short, I think Max Brooks may be a genius.
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