This is the second (after The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie) Flavia de Luce Mystery I have read and they are fast becoming my new favorite books.
Think precocious, english, eleven year old solves mystery’s with an ample dose of chemistry, while tormenting her sisters.
If that’s too difficult to imagine go find yourself The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. It’s excellent, and this one is just as good!
Would I recommend it? Yes!
I’m only including this book to say I’m no longer putting Parker’s Spencer novels on here. They are all good, I recommend them all. 
Well, I’m also including it because Storm is weird. Can anyone tell me why her foot is hovering in midair over the book?
Would I recommend it? Yes.
What do you recommend? I love the super quick reading, non-gruesome murder and humor of these books. Does anyone have any other suggestions of like books?
As I’ve said before I hate reading the back of the book, it always tells too much of what happens. Instead I like to read the first page. Standing in the library the first sentence in this book caught my attention, here it is for your enjoyment:
“Because this is ultimately a fairy tale, and because it is sacrilege not to begin all fairy tales with four simple words, and because I can think of no better words than these four to start off this particular fairy tale, because of all this we begin Once Upon a Time.”
Probably Jeremy had all his papers marked with big red R.O.’s in school too.
When the book took short funny and completly random tangents to explain things that didn’t need explaing I was hooked. Unfortunatly it got a bit long, while it made me laugh out loud at times it’s not something I can broadly recommend.
Unless you think things like this are funny:
“The Cabbie went red. He looks constipated, Sophie though. She was right, the Cabbie was constipated, he hadn’t had a constitutional in just under a week and though usually a pleasant man, one could understand why any mishap could cause him great rage.”
Then maybe you should try it.
Please excuse Piper, she was cuter than the book cover.
Would I recommend it? No
Do you have a long solo car trip coming up? Feeling kind of tired? Thinking you should cut back on the caffeinated beverages? Look no further, we have the solution to your problems.
For Rent: Two young girls to ride in the car and keep you awake on your long car trips.
Rent them separately!
Clara:
Clara will talk to you non-stop, but that’s not all! To keep you awake and make sure you are paying attention she requires a response, a real response, to everything. Keep your brain working by puzzling our her mispronounced and unclear phrases. Can’t figure out what she’s saying or getting to sleepy to respond with more than a mumbled “mmmmhhhmmm” to her query of “See Cow?”
She’ll wake you right up with:
“See cow?”
Until you finally say: “Yes I saw the cow!”
getting a response of :
that’ll shake any cobwebs that might have been in your brain right back out again.
Or Ivy:
Ivy will also talk, and talk and talk. She requires less responses for more talk time but you never know what you’ll get. It could be a discussion of her Disney princess friends and their pet lemurs. It could be a recital of the last story/movie/book/thing she saw. Or it could require a little more participation. For example a conversation could go like this:
“Mom, tell me about deer.”
“What would you like to know?”
“I want to know what they like to eat and what they like to do.”
Clearly there is no nodding off behind the wheel when you are racking your brains for any and all deer facts you’ve ever heard.
Just in case that isn’t enough Ivy comes with one more special feature to keep any driver awake.
Imagine quietly driving down the road and all of a sudden…
or
or her personal favorite and one I guarantee to keep any driver awake:
Think that’s not enough for you? Worried that one girl might fall asleep jeopardizing your ability to stay awake? Don’t worry if you rent one you can rent the second for half price!
On your road trip with both girls you can enjoy the benefits of each individuals keep-the-driver-awake-techniques, often at the same time! With both girls along if that’s not enough you can always resort to the oldest, most surefire technique. Get one new toy and throw it between them.
Say good bye to energy drinks and hello to your new backseat driving friends.
Serious inquiries only.
Not responsible for: Tickets incurred while swerving to pick up toys off the floor, hearing loss, potty breaks or temporary insanity.
A Friday ritual . A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week.
A simple, special, extraordinary moment.
A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.
And then…
Ivy cleaned up the sleeping room, Clara played nicely by herself, John came home and took them to the feed mill and I found this:
Ivy wrote it for me sometime last week, in case you can’t read four year old letters here is a translation:
“Mom, I’m very very sorry for yellin’ and bein’ naughty. Ivy”
Or so I was told.
Now me, a house that’s not too quiet, a Diet Coke and a good book are going to take a break.
A happy break.
You know how they always say that when you can’t hear your children, you should be worried. Well, that had never been too much of a problem for me.
Until today.
Today the girls are making up for months of playing quietly without getting into trouble.
The first mistake was when I let the girls watch part of a movie while I made lunch. I entered the office to get them, only to find the door of the dove cage broken and ripped off and dove seed scattered all over the office.
I was, shall we say… unhappy.
Not to be taken in by the same trouble twice, I did not let them return to their movie, and after lunch we got ready for naps. I can only blame my extreme sleep deprivation that I never thought twice about putting them to bed together.
I should have known better.
Over an hour later when it had been so quiet I actually thought they were either asleep or reading in their beds like they were supposed to be, I heard a huge crash and a scream. After ascertaining that everyone was alive and in no mortal danger I took in the situation. Clara’s bed (which is just a crib mattress) was stripped of blankets and sheets and on top of Ivy’s bed. Ivy was also on her bed, standing up and pushing Clara’s bed off the end. And Clara was crying on the floor as she extracted herself from the rocking chair that she had crashed into when Ivy shoved her off the bed with the mattress. Naked. Which is unfortunate because it’s a lot easier to get scratches all over your body while tangling with a rocking chair when you don’t have clothes on. In fact I’m pretty sure that’s why people started wearing clothes… so that when older siblings shoved them down they sustained less damage. Then I noticed the crayon across the walls and the books strewn everywhere.
Clearly it had been too quiet.
I continued to be… unhappy.
It’s about an hour later, my girls have not yet napped, Ivy is grumpy beyond belief and Clara has entered the stage of complete and utter over-tired-manic-crazy-girl. Unfortunately having tried all other solutions to get Clara to bed I have again put them down in their room together. But I’m not worried about them yet, I can still hear them jumping on the bed…
First off I’d like to take this opportunity to mention something that has irritated me for years.
Ahhem…
Why are science fiction and fantasy always grouped together?
They are not the same.
The end.
This book is science fiction but please don’t run away yet, I have a sci fi theory. Sci fi, has it’s good, it’s bad and it’s ugly when it comes to books, just like every other genre, it’s just that people have a low tolerance for the bad and the ugly when it involves science fiction and write the whole lot off. So here is my advice – do what I do, only read the ones people recommend. You get rid of just about all of the bad and the ugly and will hopefully end up with a book you may not otherwise have looked twice at that falls firmly into the good category.
P.S. Also never judge a science fiction book by it’s cover, I just finished this book and I’m not really sure what the deal is with the picture, please ignore it.
Would I recommend it? Yes. It was recommend to me, so following my own advice, I read it. I got sucked in, stayed up too late reading and by the end my head was reeling and I told John he needed to start it immediately.
It’s been months since I’ve posted a book review, but trust me I’ve still been reading. According to my calculations, otherwise known as the little notebook I write down all the books I’ve read in, I’ve read 36 books since Shanghai Girls. The problem is my book memory is so pitiful that some of the titles I read in June are already only vaguely familiar to me, only the very good and the very bad stick out. This is one of the reasons I write titles down when I’m done with them, I’d never remember what I have and haven’t read otherwise. That being said, I”m not going to break my brain attempting to give you a mini review of any of them but here is a list of the books that I remember being recommendable:
The Spencer books by Robert B Parker, Potshot and Cold Service were my favorites of the ones I’ve read recently.
Joanne Harris books, while they are all good my favorites of hers are Five Quarters of the Orange, Chocolat and The Girl With No Shadow.
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen by Syrie James
The one book that stands out of my list as my least favorite was, as I brace myself to make an enemy of my husband among others…
A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony. If you’ve never read fantasy, don’t start here. Unless you are an adolescent boy, then it’s probably great. Otherwise it’s every bad stereotype you’ve ever heard about fantasy books all rolled into one. Skip it!
How about you? Favorite books from the summer? Any horrible books none of us should read?
Watch it as smoothly grows.
Dream about the project.
It could be great, it could be fun, it could be perfect.
Or the bobbin could jam when you put it back in the sewing machine and create a mess… but you don’t know that yet.
You are just winding the bobbin and it’s beautiful.
Behind the Willows 