Sunday Salon – Home

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Hello everyone.  It’s been quiet here the last week or so thanks to my being far, far away from a computer.  We made it back to the US mid-last week but I was too tired to do anything useful besides unpack the suitcase which was made easy by the fact it was all dirty clothes.  Since it’s Sunday, I thought this would be a good time to get back at it.

And since I didn’t read much while on vacation or write a word either — I finished The Map of Time by Felix J. Palma (very good), The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (not bad), and started Before Versailles by Karleen Koen (so far good) — I thought I would share photos from our trip to Ecuador instead.  I hope to get back to my regular posting schedule sometime this week but while I get myself used to sitting in front of a computer again, I will blind you with photos.  Oh, and by the way, it’s better if you look at them backwards.  I started to post them and realized about halfway through I was doing it first to last instead of last to first so it would make more sense and then decided I didn’t feel like doing it all over again. So if you’re interested in flow, start at the bottom.  🙂

Happy Sunday.

Overlooking Quito at night.

The elevation sign at the Cotopaxi parking lot --- over 14,000 feet above sea level. Crazy feeling.

Cotopaxi Volcano. At the base of the mountain, we couldn't see anything but clouds. It didn't clear completely but we did get to see most of the volcano.

Butterflies of Mindo.

Hummingbird in Mindo.

Monument to the true equator. Ignore the compass, it means nothing at the equator. It was our Flat Stanley. We borrowed it from a friend and didn't have a use for it so we began taking photos of it everywhere.

The monument to the equator. It's not the true equator though...

Relaxing in the hot springs in Papallacta. Yep, my toes.

View from Pinchincha Volcano. You can see a view of Quito between the peaks.

Mary that looks over Quito; blessing or judging, your choice.

The Golden Church in Quito's Old Town. You can't take pictures inside but the name is very appropriate --- everything in the church is covered in gold leaf.

Time Off

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I’m taking time off to re-group.  I’ll be back with new posts in about a week or so.  I tried to find an interesting picture of a clock of something like that and I couldn’t so here’s a photo I took on a recent trip to the National Arboretum. I’m obsessed with taking pics of flowers lately…

If you’re going to BEA this year, leave me a note about it and I’ll stop by and read.  I’m missing it once again but I’m sure you’ll all keep me informed!

 

Review – Witch Woman

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Witch Woman

By Jeanette Baker

Self-Published/Brio Press

ISBN-13: 978-0671017347

3 stars

Annie McBride, newly widowed, is trying to find her way without her husband.  Venturing out to visit the cemetery, she finds a small child sitting on the bench near his grave, naked and alone.  She takes the child home with her but the child doesn’t speak for days although she warms to Annie’s kindness.  Annie, a witch who gave up practicing when she married her husband, goes to a fellow witch to ask for help.  Answers are not as forthcoming as Annie would like so she packs up the little girl, now named Margaret, and the two leave town.

Maggie McBride, now an adult caring for her aging mother Annie, finds out she adopted.  After her mother’s death, she decides to return to her mother’s hometown of Salem, Massachusetts to open a holistic store in the old house left to her and possibly learn more about her mother in the process.  Giving up her job as a police profiler, she finds roots she never knew she had which includes a talent for witchcraft.  Tapping into the past through a spinning wheel inherited from her mother, Maggie finds herself drawn to the story she is witnessing and in particular a woman named Abigail March whose life she is seeing in the visions brought on by touching the spinning wheel.  Her forays into the past come a halt when the neighbor’s daughter goes missing and her skills as a police profiler are needed.  Maggie suddenly finds past and present combining in a way she never imagined possible.

This is a self-published book which I tend not to review but considering this year I’ve read several, I seemed to have broken my own rule.  One of the reasons I tend not to read self-published is because I feel the books need a tad more editing.  This one felt fairly comfortable and I didn’t have problems with it.

I thought the time travel aspect was good and I particularly enjoyed those bits where we see Abigail’s life and her witchcraft abilities growing through her children.  Those parts of the story felt genuine and I was easily entertained with this story line, in fact, I wished there had been more of it.  Maggie, I felt was a tad hard to get attached to but there’s a reason for this and not wanting to give too much away in terms of plot, I won’t mention it but it became clear as the story went on.

I wasn’t sure what to think of this book going in but I wanted to keep an open mind.  I wasn’t completely impressed or completely underwhelmed either.  Somewhere in the middle on this one I guess.  The witchcraft element was well-done and the historical time travel/visions were good.  I just wish there had been fewer intrusions from the present on that story line though.

More information about Witch Woman can be found on Jeanette Baker’s website.

The Sunday Salon

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All this week I kept hearing about BEA, and once more, I’ll be missing it.  It’s been years since I’ve been there and I would love to go again but unfortunately for BEA, it lands around the same time as my anniversary.  Each year we try to get away and spend a few quiet days and this year is no different.  If you’re going, I look forward to your posts and the books you’ve found.  Don’t skimp on the descriptions please.  How else will my already unmanageable list get any longer?! 🙂

Thanks to the necessity of having to buy bug spray and pack all that I can in a suitcase, it will be a rather short post so on with the links.

Critics vs. reviewers.  This is a topic that’s come up on blogs and one I’m sure will never be resolved.  I planned to do a longer post about this today and then started and stopped it several times.  I need to sit down and finish soon.  Here are some thoughts to ponder.

Literary terms you should know.

And grammatical errors to go with the literary terms.

Women and why we love fantasy.  This is another topic I have several thoughts on that I plan to write about in the future.

The book club I want to be part of.

JK Rowling admits favorites.  And, you can vote for your favorite too.

Ahhh, books.  I could sit here all day looking at these pics.

Books covers that spark thoughts.

Happy Sunday.

Review – The Restorer

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The Restorer

By Amanda Stevens

Mira

ISBN: 978-0778329817

4.5 stars

I saw a few mentions of this book around and thought it looked interesting — a woman who restores cemeteries for a living and sees ghosts.  I love characters with odd jobs and well, ghost stories are always for me.  After a slight bit of wrangling between NetGalley and my Nook, I found myself tied to the book until the last page.

Amelia Gray has spent her life in cemeteries.  Her father was a caretaker of several cemeteries in South Carolina outside of Charleston and she would spend her days with him helping to clean, restore, and appreciate the calmness that came with hallowed ground.  When she is still quite young, she sees her first ghost which prompts her father to give her the rules: never look at them, never make eye contact, and never let them in.  Amelia follows these rules closely which leads to a lonely life but one that isn’t plagued by ghosts.  As an adult, she adheres to the rules until the day she meets Devlin — a local police detective working a murder that just happened to take place in the cemetery Amelia is currently restoring.  Unable to pull herself away from Devlin, a man haunted in too many ways, Amelia finds herself breaking one rule after the other until the ghosts begin to close in on her.

There was something so intriguing about Amelia.  She wasn’t a character who made rash decisions but when she can’t pull herself away from Devlin the story starts to get good.  She’s not a trusting person by nature, and even if she can’t say for certain that she trusts Devlin, she can’t reason with herself to stay away.  As for Devlin, there are too many things wrong with him that in some ways you don’t want the two to get together but they have a good chemistry which adds to the story.  Although, this is far from a love story and the love element itself if really narrow which I liked.  Amelia has too much baggage to get involved and frankly a cemetery restorer seems to have more appeal as a lone character and if you read this, you’ll see what I mean by that statement.  Her baggage consists of ghosts and some odd family history which perplexed me when it wasn’t revealed but this is a series so I knew that was going to happen at some point and was all right with it.

The ghosts.  I have to give props to Stevens here because I think she did a fine job in making ghosts creepy again.  I love a good ghost story but sometimes I feel as if every description of a ghost is cold — and yes, she did follow some standards here, icy fingers, hair standing up on the back of the neck — but what got me was the way they looked at her knowing full well she could see them.  Each time Amelia encounters a ghost there is a stare down moment when they wait for her to acknowledge them which she doesn’t do making it all the more tense as she forces herself to look through and purposely not fall into their gaze.

Several loose ends are left hanging by the end but I was ok with it as I usually am with a book in a series.  Although I do think the book can stand on its own which is a plus.  The Restorer is the first book in the Graveyard Queen series and I will be waiting for the others.  I do feel I need to give a fair warning out though — if you’re not a lover of ghost stories, this book can be creepy and may induce wanting to sleep with the lights on if you’re easily freaked out about things like ghosts.  Although, that’s part of the fun isn’t it?  🙂  For those on the creepy side, I recommend this one.

I downloaded an ebook copy of this book from NetGalley.

Review – The Hypnotist

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The Hypnotist

By MJ Rose

Mira Books

ISBN: 978-1-4268-5469-9

4 stars

Lucian Glass is an FBI agent with the Art Crime Team, a long suffering artist, and a man damaged by not only his past but his job.  Working though a recent head injury, headaches plague him along with dreams of unknown women and the love of his life — a woman murdered at 19 years of age.  Attacked in the same robbery where his girlfriend lost her life, Lucian lives with guilt over not being able to save her and surviving.  That guilt pours over into his job tracking and retrieving stolen art.  When he is pulled into a case involving his dead girlfriend’s family, his life takes one stumble after the other pulling him into a game with too many players all wanting the same thing.

The Hypnotist is the third book in The Reincarnationist series.  I haven’t read the two previous books:  The Reincarnationist and The Memorist.  As a standalone book, The Hypnotist worked but as a person who loves a series, I wished I had read the two earlier ones but was already into this one when I realized that was the case.

Lucian is a tortured person and one who doesn’t seem to want much help either.  As a character, he can be frustrating but it also lends him the sad artist persona, sketching away in his notebook trying to ease headaches that only cease when he’s frantically drawing women he doesn’t know.  A sculpture with a mythical power that no one understands fully is at the center of the story but the focus is on its heist, however, I wanted to know more about what it could do.  It was a part of the story I started to get into when it ended.  In fact, a few of the story lines ended abruptly for me but also left me wondering if another book is in the works.

I liked this book and moved through it fast.  I’m a lover of museums and staring at art for no other reason than to admire its simple beauty and I found myself getting entranced by that aspect of the story.  I haven’t been to the MET in years (much of the story takes places there) and this book made me want to go back.  It also made me want to pick up the other two books to get the back story

I won this book through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program.  The book was downloaded as an ebook from NetGalley.

Teaser Tuesdays – Poison

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.  The idea is to give everyone a look inside the book you’re reading.

Play along: Grab your current read; Open to a random page; Share two teaser sentences from that page; Share the title and author so other participants know what you’re reading.

This week I’m reading Poison: A Novel of the Renaissance by Sara Poole.

Beyond the city, spies were at work in the markets, brothels, trading houses, the Vatican itself, ferreting out whatever morsels might be useful to Borgia.  All this in service to the one great goal: Tte preservation and advancement of La Famiglia. (page 85)

Review – The Mistress of Nothing

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The Mistress of Nothing

By Kate Pullinger

A Touchstone Book

Simon & Schuster

ISBN: 978-1-4391-9386-0

4 stars

I love historical fiction and the longer the better which is why I was surprised by this little book and how much I did like it even if I did feel as though there could have been more in terms of the historical.  In the end, it was about the characters more than the place and I came to terms with that over the course of 250+ pages.

When Lady Duff Gordon makes the decision to move to Egypt permanently for the sake of her health, her maid, Sally Naldrett, is excited, joyous even at the prospect of a new life.  Always a woman of low means, Sally is happy with the idea of being her Lady’s mistress but when they finally arrive at their destination in Luxor, the formalness of England begins to dissipate and she finds herself more a friend and confident than a servant.  Her relationship with Lady Duff Gordon is not the only thing in her life to dramatically change — she falls in love with Omar Abu Halaweh, the dragoman brought on to assist Lady Duff Gordon.  Unfortunately, he is already married with children.  Their relationship becomes too much for Lady Duff Gordon and Sally finds herself alone and abandoned in a country not her own but one she loves as if it were.

As I said, this is a very short book and oddly, when I finished, I found myself furious.  Lady Duff Gordon ruins Sally for what she considers a betrayal.  But the irony in that is she has helped servants in the past who have been in the same position as Sally so after being fascinated by this person and the way she defined her role as woman, mother, and wife, I found her intolerance towards Sally hateful.  I want to say she ruined the story for me but she didn’t (although I would have liked to have seen more about Egypt itself and what was happening at the time — it’s hinted at but not discussed).  These two women, how their lives changed and how they were in many ways forced to not only accept but manufacture their own endings is really what this story is.  My annoyance with Lady Duff Gordon quickly turned to a sort of understanding.  I say sort because her treatment of Sally was truly hateful and a way to transfer her pain to another without having to deal with it.

Lady Duff Gordon was a real person and while I know nothing of her, she was an interesting person to revolve this story around.  What it also gave me was an interest in more historical fiction about Egypt which I will be looking for in the near future.