Jane Jarvis and her best friend Allison are true blue friends ’till the end who always have each other’s backs and who can confide anything in each other. Attending Saint Teresa’s Preparatory School for Girls, the two are used to sticking out in a crowd, but now in the most positive way, being quirky in both their attitudes, as well as in their looks, so when the school holds their annual Big-Little celebration where Bigs (upper classmen) pair up with Littles (lower classmen) with the means to be more or less mentors to these younger girls, super confident Jane is immediately fearful for her less-confident friend, who she knows gets very nervous in any situation, not to mention an entire school event that, in essence, is based on your popularity.
During the Big-Little celebration, Allison seems to have it all together after showing Jane that she had received a cupcake in her locker with a note asking her to be a Big to an unnamed freshman. But Jane’s initial fears for her friend are reassured after Allison, waiting for her Little to come up and introduce herself fails to show, she throws up all over one of the freshman girls coming in her direction after nearly every other senior girl had obtained a Little. After Allison runs to the bathroom, Jane runs after to be there for her best friend, giving up any chance of getting a Little of her own. While trying to console Allison, who has barricaded herself inside a stall, a new sophomore student named Lanalee asks about Allison and after Jane tells her that Allison did not get a Little, Lanalee offers herself up, saying that she wasn’t able to get a Big anyway.
Lanalee seems to have appeared on the scene at Saint Teresa’s Preparatory School for Girls just in time. She is cool, calm and collected and even the most popular of girls in the school are fascinated with her, after she tells them a story of coming from another school primarily made up of rich socialites. She instantly becomes a great friend to Allison and to Jane alike, but Allison is spending less and less time with Jane and Allison starts to worry about this girl who she thought she had known so well; especially after Allison comes to school with her usual unruly hair cut into a short, dyed-red bob and is rocking an entirely new, obviously expensive wardrobe with matching, equally expensive accessories. Allison’s entire situation becomes even hairier to Jane when she follows Allison out of a small cafe, to see her go directly to Jane’s ex-boyfriend’s Elton’s house, who is now Allison’s new boyfriend.
As a series of weird and random events take place, Jane is left wondering what has happened to her friend to have made her become this completely new person she hardly recognizes (or sees) anymore. As her curiosity grows, she meets a very strange and at first, even somewhat stalker-like freshman named Owen and after ignoring him for a while, she realizes quickly that she needs Owen–because he happens to know exactly what has happened to Allison and is one of very few links Jane has to piece everything together. It is with Owen’s help that Jane comes to find out that Allison has made a deal with the devil–literally and it all started with that single cupcake in Allison’s locker on Big-Little Day. Now, it’s up to Jane to save the best friend she knows is still hidden inside of this new, but not-so-improved Allison, even if it means sacrificing herself.
I had Devilish sitting on my bookshelf for a little while before picking it up to read. I thought it was yet another young adult beach read; something that I would read through in a few sittings and be done with, it not really leaving such a lasting impression. Needless to say, I was wrong. The cover of the book is superb, especially since it does hold a great deal of meaning for the story itself, but you don’t know that when you first pick it, giving it that intriguing feel before you read it and a much more complex, full-circle feeling after.
It is an intelligent, fast-paced, thrilling read that will keep you turning the page again and again. This is the first book I have read by Maureen Johnson, but I am beyond intrigued and very excited to pick up another one of her books. She truly has a gift for playing with suspense and keeps you thinking and laughing throughout the entire book. Johnson’s characters, even her evil, do-no-gooders, are fun and will keep you switching sides on who to root for because you really like these diverse and very well-rounded characters.
Devilish was very much aptly-timed for me, just finishing it right after Valentine’s Day and not knowing exactly why I was craving cupcakes so much; it took my partner asking me what I expected from reading a book every day with a delicious cupcake pictured on the cover. While Devilish did initially present itself to be a not-so-remarkable read that I’ve read a thousand times before, it was anything but. I surprised even myself with how much I truly enjoyed this book.
Rating: 
Although Dream Life is a sequel to Lauren Mechling’s first book, Dream Girl, Dream Life is the first book I have read in the supernatural journey that is Claire Voyante’s world. That being said, Mechling first and foremost succeeded in creating a book that you can pick up and jump right into, without needing any back story from the first publication in the series.
Claire is a typical high school girl with a not-so-typical gift; ever since her grandmother, Kiki, gave her an onyx and ivory cameo necklace, Claire has been having black and white dreams that are major tips in solving some pretty influential mysteries. To make Dream Life even more intriguing, Claire isn’t just solving mysteries around New York, she (albeit, mistakenly) aligns herself with a secret society of do-gooders called the Blue Moons, who give her quite the mystery to solve–find a missing pink iPod that holds the secrets of a new and absolutely huge project to save the Brooklyn Bridge from real estate developer slimeball, Sink Landon.
Admittedly, Dream Life was a little slow to start for me, which I attribute to not reading the first book and really not knowing the who knew each other so well. However, the book surprised me with its ability to catch–and keep–my attention to the end. Claire is a remarkable and rememberable heroine that you find yourself rooting for in her entire series of problems, not just with solving mysteries, but also rifts with her friends, her complicated boy troubles and dealing with her eccentric parents. Through reading so many young adult books and seeing the amount of quirkiness young adult authors portray in their parental characters, it is my belief that YA authors write parents with the exaggerated qualities they had in parents growing up, with a myriad of additional attributes they wished their parents had and Dream Life had that ten-fold with a Paris-crazed mother with a love of the Zodiac and her parents’ insane Paris-themed house parties. But most of all, I fell in absolute love with Claire’s grandmother, Kiki, who reminds me of every genuinely close friend I have ever had that I could divulge anything to without feeling a hint of judgment.
Lauren Mechling not only presents a fabulous mystery novel that captures the attention of young adults and older adults alike, but also is the first author since the creators of Sex and the City to turn New York City into a character in itself. Being the wannabe-fashionista that I am (read: If I had money, oh the clothes, shoes and accessories I would buy), I really enjoyed the fashion appearances in this book as well. Kiki’s hand-me-down vintage dresses Claire wears and the footwear described in her best friend Becca’s wardrobe are enough to make even the savviest of fashionistas swoon.
I loved being given the opportunity to be a fly on the wall in Claire’s life; from her stance as a Half Moon in the Blue Moon society, solving a mystery that proved me wrong when I thought I had everything figured out, to finally figuring out who she is as a person and knowing her own level of morality, which makes Claire completely and utterly real.
I would recommend this book to anyone craving a serving of hilarious, page-turning, on-the-edge-of-your-seat read that lets you breathe a sigh of relief when you think things can’t get much worse.
Rating:
I must preface this by saying that I know very little when it comes to cooking, never mind French cooking. I know enough to prepare something with very simple instructions, but for the most part my partner does the majority of any cooking that involves more than boil water, add noodles, wait until noodles are tender and cover with sauce. In addition to my lack of culinary expertise, I also knew very little about Julia Child when starting this book, so one could assume that this would not be a book that I would be interested in, if not having to force myself through. However, I surprisingly took to this book very well because you don’t have to know pretty much anything about cooking, French cooking or Julia Child to enjoy the humor and biting cynicism of Julie Powell and her ability to bring you on the journey, the upheaval, the frustrations and the victories that became her life.
Julie Powell was just a temp secretary working at a government office full of Republicans in a post-9/11 era where, among other things like filing, she answered phone calls about people’s ideas for the September 11th memorial that had not yet been placed where the World Trade Center towers once stood. Living with her husband, three cats and what one could assume to be a minor drinking and chain-smoking problem, she worked a thankless job and lived a mundane life in a crappy apartment. She lived the life so many people are currently and will continue to live–getting by without doing much of significance.
But that’s where we get Julie Powell’s life all wrong. Of course she did not mean to do something of so much significance, but she did strive to do something. While being told she had a condition that would make it difficult to impossible to have a child after the age of thirty, and being twenty-nine, she set out on a mission to restore her ambition, change her life and save her soul… by cooking all 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I.
As she details her way through dish after dish, through long and excruciatingly-detailed pages on the insides of marrow bones and how to really go about stealing the lives of lobsters before turning them into delectable French cuisine, Julie & Julia is the kind of book you pick up on a rainy day when you don’t want to get out of bed in the morning, so you don’t and allow yourself to relax the morning and early-afternoon away in bed with a good book.
A memoir was the perfect thing for Julie Powell to write, being an honest and often self-deprecating woman who bears it all and isn’t ashamed of it. However, on this same note she did write in the author’s note that throughout the book she did just make things up but of course, does not touch on what is made up and what is true-to-life. That did not necessarily have a negative impact on my overall enjoyment of this book because as I found myself laughing during certain passages and then wondering if that had really happened or not, I realized that if it had, well, that would have been hilarious and if not, then Julie Powell is equipped with a great and witty imagination–And she is.
Her blog that inspired the book, the Julie/Julia Project gained a great deal of media attention towards the ending months of her project. She prepared dinner for newspaper columnists she had admired and even missed the last episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to do it. Her blog garnered a great deal of attention from people whom she called bleeders that cheered her on and also pleaded with her not to make aspic-and-anything ever again.
More-so than the art of French cooking, I was more intrigued by Julie Powell the woman. I enjoyed her anecdotes and expletive-filled tangents about her boring and thankless job, her varied and equally satisfying and satisfied friends and of course, a husband in which she portrays to be the textbook definition of perfect. While I had seen the trailer for the movie before picking up the book, I was actually quite thrilled to see that the real Julie Powell was not as wholesome as Amy Adams portrays on the silver screen.
Julie & Julia is a satisfying journey of discovery full of laugh-out-loud tales and lists of foods I am certain I will never let grace my dinner plate.
Rating: 
C. Leigh Purtill, the author of both Love, Meg and All About Vee (both of which we absolutely loved!) has just kicked off a bookish experiment that we couldn’t be happier about. Purtill’s novel, All About Vee was not written to be it’s own short novel, Vee was actually just another character in a bigger book entitled Fat Girls in L.A. and it goes without saying that while we did appearances of the other characters throughout All About Vee, the book itself was just what you could assume from the title–All about Veronica May.
But now we get to hear the stories of all of the girls we were introduced to in All About Vee with Purtill’s bookish experiment which will release a part of the sequel, The Rise of Ginny Cooper every Monday in January. Best of all, especially for people who already spend way too much money on books, The Rise of Ginny Cooper is completely free and is available for download exclusively at The Story Siren, a huge website dedicated to young adult books, reviews, author interviews, contests and more.
Download your free copy of The Rise of Ginny Cooper part 1
The Story Siren is also giving you an opportunity to win a signed copy of the first book in the series, All About Vee. From now until January 25th, anyone 13 years of age or older can enter to win the signed copy of the book here.
Laurie Sandell’s The Imposter’s Daughter is very much unlike any memoir I have read before. Firstly, it is a graphic novel, which I hadn’t expected, having not read a thing about the book before opening to the first page, and secondly, her story speaks so honestly that quite a few times I re-read a page thinking ‘Did she really just say that?’
A great deal of daughters have complete and utter adoration for their fathers; coming from an unconventional, single-father home myself, I know the feeling very well. Laurie grew up hanging on every syllable her father told her about his life; from being a former green beret, to having studied law at NYU and receiving his PhD from Columbia University to serving as an economist and adviser to Henry Kissinger. To say the least, Laurie’s father was an entirely and completely important man; she obviously stemmed from pure greatness! But it wasn’t until Laurie was in college and when applying for her first credit card, she realized she already had one… she soon found out that her father had taken out several loans and credit cards in her name, ruining her credit when she realized maybe all of her father’s stories of grand achievements and a life lived hard wasn’t all he said it was.
While her father was the essence of the word ‘con man,’ Laurie’s life was indeed full of excitement. She spent four years exploring the world, traveling to Israel, Japan, Jordan, Paris, Mexico, Egypt and Thailand. She took on many roles including being a stripper in Tokyo, seducing a woman in Israel and she grew addicted to Ambien and found herself in a downward spiral which included passing out in the bathtub night after night after an Ambien/wine cocktail. She, understandably, also had many man troubles.
Sandell started working for the very famous women’s magazine Glamour interviewing celebrities and it was in Ashley Judd where she found a wonderful friend who also ended up saving her life, suggesting she enter rehab. And so she did. It was in rehab where she had the opportunity to address the problems in her life that stemmed from her father and his lies, figuratively and then personally and she has also been sober for some years now. She slowly but surely pieces her father’s life together, meeting with members of his family with whom he had alienated himself from years prior and seeing as much of his big picture as she could.
I could not stop reading The Imposter’s Daughter. I opened it, started reading and did not put it down until the next morning, when I was completely finished. I have read the book twice, both times taking me no more than two sittings and during the first time, I actually carried it with me to the bathroom a few times. It is a story that has yet to get old and I definitely foresee myself reading it again–It is that good. I really respect the course that Laurie Sandell has taken in her life, whether it be good, bad or destructive because she did wind up on her feet and rebuilding an impressive professional career. She had the nerve to air her family’s dirty laundry not because she wanted to have something over her father, but because her story is one that needed to be told and was a pleasure to experience however briefly and she did it successfully, with wit and honesty.
Rating:
Buy the Book!
Powell’s Books, the absolutely amazing independent bookstore spread throughout Oregon, turned 15 years old, but they aren’t getting any presents, instead, they are spreading the book-loving joy and giving out the presents to the people who have helped them make it 15 years–YOU!
To celebrate their 15th birthday, they are having a 15-day bash (October 15-30), giving away great prizes every day and also entering everyone who signs up to win a prize into a grand prize sweepstakes for $1500 to spend at Powell’s.com
This is such a great change to win prizes, not to mention a whopping $1500 to spend on books, books, books! Join Powell’s in celebrating their 15th birthday and enter every day up until October 30th for some awesome prizes and also check out 15 things that makes Powell’s…Powell’s.
Sherri Shepherd of The View fame and also star of her own multi-camera comedy series on Lifetime, Sherri, can now add ‘author’ to her resume.
In celebration of her new release, Permission Slips, Grand Central Publishing will be interviewing Sherri Shepherd live on Blog Talk Radio on October 29th at 1PM EST. You can listen in and/or chat with other people listening to the interview on the Grand Central Publishing’s Blog Talk Radio page and you can also call in with any questions you have for Sherri by calling during the show at 646-378-0039.
Mark your calendars and make sure to tune in!
[Image via INF Daily]
Stacey Joiner is a Licensed Massage Therapist and Certified Yoga Instructor, but she only entered that line of work after realizing what her path in life was and what she, in her heart, truly wanted for her life. She wanted to help people and with the release of her book You Deserve The Royal Treatment, she gives the people who have the pleasure of reading her book the inspiration to do the same.
Women have this natural instinct to nurture those around us, whether it’s our husbands or partners, our children, our parents or other loved ones we surround ourselves with, although we often don’t make time to nurture ourselves. We make sure the people around us happy, fed, clothed, that our houses are clean and decorated, we bake cookies for our children’s bake sales and we strive to perform above-par in our careers and satisfy our managers and bosses. We lead very hectic lives and if there’s one thought that crosses our minds the most often, it’s that days need to include more hours so we can do more every day. Women are keen to putting more pressure on ourselves than we are often able to deal with. When I had first started to read Stacey Joiner’s book, I had felt this way. I was working for a person who did not appreciate the hard work that I put in day after day, many more hours than I had first agreed to work, and all of this was at the expense of what I truly wanted to do with my life career-wise.
Stacey Joiner cuts through every excuse every woman has ever used to not treat herself like royalty; to not make time for themselves, to not relax with a mug of coffee or tea and enjoy the fall leaves that are changing color and falling from the trees in your backyard, to not take a relaxing bath, to not take an hour before bed and read a book, to not treat yourself to a massage that could save your sanity. While living in New York City after September 11th and in the transition from corporate citizen to owner of a massage and Yoga practice, Stacey Joiner experienced first hand what chaos ensuing around you could do to your stress levels and overall to your life; she also distinctly experienced what women think when they see another woman taking the initiative to take care of themselves, their well-beings and their mental stability; she knew that what the doctor ordered for her at that time was a massage to relax herself while all of her problems, obstacles and impending triumphs stayed exactly where they were. When she told her mother that she was going for a massage, she thought she was crazy, but Stacey knew exactly what she needed–and she was right; that self-care made it possible for her to perform greatly in her practice and tend to the other priorities in her life.
At the end of every chapter of You Deserve The Royal Treatment is a section entitled ‘Your Royal Duty;’ at the end of the first chapter are instructions to log onto YouDeserveTheRoyalTreatment.com for a free, two-minute audio meditation, which I strongly recommend you do. As for the rest of the Your Royal Duty Sections, she gives a yoga pose–it’s name, what doing the yoga pose will do for your body and for your mind, and bullet points instructing you how to perform the pose. However, even if you currently don’t do yoga or aren’t familiar with it, reading this book is still, as far as I’m concerned, a royal duty in itself.
Stacey Joiner hits the nail on the head again and again, but if you only take one thing away from her book, let it be that if you don’t take care of yourself first, how would you ever have successfully tend to all of the priorities in your life? When you neglect your own needs, illness, anger, resentment, disappointment and frustration invite themselves into your life. Joiner is changing the mindset and in turn, the lives of women for the better just by giving them sound advice that Joiner herself had learned throughout her life and is now spreading the good word to women everywhere. She stresses the truth in the fact that it does not matter how much or how little money you have in your bank account, if you live in an extravagant house or a studio apartment, if you’re single or married, if you have no children or have nine, nothing can stop you from making the most of your life and truly living royally. In case you were wondering, from the time I finished Stacey Joiner’s book, I have since ceased working for a person who does not appreciate the hard work that I put in to their business and I have begun working, albeit a little too much, but doing what I truly want and love to do.
Rating:
Buy the Book!
Seth Godin is the most popular business blogger in the world. He has authored several books, one in particular, The Dip, was a New York Times bestseller. His books have been translated into more than 25 languages. He is the founder and CEO of the social network Squidoo.com. Seth Godin is a real leader and up until a few weeks ago I had never heard of him. Sure, I had heard about Squidoo.com a few times within the past two years or so, but after looking at the social networking site I dismissed it almost immediately, as did a great deal of social media strategists. However, when someone is a true leader they are not going to reach each and every single person instantly; it takes time to build a fan base and eventually, when you create or come up with an idea that appeals to people in their own, personal lives, your fan base will continue to grow well after your book hits the New York Times best seller list.
Tribes was recommended to me by a business colleague of mine and the day I heard about it and about how inspired and motivated it made her feel after reading it, I ordered it that same day. After a mere to days I, just like my colleague, felt an immense sense of motivation to continue on the path I have been paving for myself in my business and also, I felt the validation that home-based businesspeople sometimes need in order to keep doing what they’re doing. When people start to think outside of the box and start to initiate radical change within any field, those people are often greeted not with the support that they deserve for being creative and industrialist minds from the people around them, most often they are greeted with criticism that emerges from people when they think that the ideas of others are worthless or won’t work or are too obscure and out of the box. It is these people who often stop the people with remarkable and out of the box ideas. As Godin pointed out in the book, people are not afraid that their ideas are worthless or won’t work, they are not afraid of the so-called unknown of their future; they are afraid of the criticism they will receive from the people who doubt them.
Tribes is not laid out like your standard usually boring business book; it is more fluid and laid out in chunky prose. It is to the point, highlighting an assortment of advice, admonitions, case studies, experiments, quotations and anecdotal stories. It gives you snippets of absolutely remarkable achievements of people who have proved to be true leaders and in Godin’s terms, they are leading a tribe of people who all see one person (the leader) doing something right, something that inspires, motivates and resonates with them and they begin to follow that person and support that person in whichever way they deem appropriate.
Tribes successfully reveals the entrepreneurial mindset and what is needed in order to succeed in a market that is against you; determination, motivation and the positivity that you can truly and successfully build your ideas into something remarkable. It includes case studies and short stories about people who have truly made an impact on social networks like Twitter and how the amount of people they reach with social networks is impressive, but in actuality, they had built that tribe of people throughout the past months and even years.
If you are an entrepreneur of any kind, a blogger, a person with a different take on something or a new, completely radical idea that you think no one believes in or could believe in, I could not recommend a better book to get you thinking and feeling like the leader you know deep down that you truly are.
Rating:
Buy the Book!
This is a guest post by Allen VanWert, professional musician, author of technical guitar and songwriting books, and student of NLP.
Law of Connection: The Science of Using NLP to Create Ideal Personal and Professional Relationships is from the author Michael J. Losier, the same person who wrote Law of Attraction. He is an NLP practitioner and attempts to simplify verbal communication between humans into four types of speakers/listeners. The neuro linguistic programming (NLP) portions of this book consist of the authors own use of NLP to get you to believe in his system, tell friends about it and get you to “love all of the white space as well as childish illustrations in the book”. He is basically using as many NLP tactics or “tricks” as he can to get you to “buy” his idea and feel like you are in fact part of it. While NLP practitioners are amazing at selling people on ideas or thoughts. I, being a student of NLP, found the tricks contained in this book at first to be quite comical because they are applied in such a blatant fashion, and then quickly off putting. I was hoping the NLP was based around the system itself to gain skill in communication. This however, was not true. The NLP is used as a method to trick you into thinking it will work and that it is based around a valid judgment system for communication.
The only NLP within the system itself is the idea of making a conscious decision to use certain wording to best appeal to a specific audience. The rest of it is common sense that boils down to people liking someone who “mirrors” them verbally. While I can see how this does work, there are some problems with the theory.
Here is an example: Just because someone says “see you tomorrow” Does NOT mean they are a visual type of communicator. They will most likely also often say things like “talk to you soon”, “have a good one” or “we will touch base again soon”. This implies various communicator types at any given moment. Basically, there are very few people who use the indicator statements consistently enough in one “style” that would even allow an accurate judgment on their communicator type.
The second issue I have with this theory is that if you were able to analyze someone and decide what communicator type they are, you would end up being a false representation of yourself just to “get what you want”. This has a bunch of big red flags with the words “malicious, opportunistic, control freak” written all over them to me. Using tricks to make someone else feel at ease with you or tricking them to feel like you are just like them is on the shady side and is why I tend to personally not use NLP or social engineering for the most part.
He gives a very short run through about physical cues and rapport building via mirroring but it lacks the real in depth substance I was expecting.
The book and its ideas are NOT going to make you a better communicator. However, the simple fact that you will have to become more careful in listening to other people and how you word yourself WILL make you a better communicator. If you take time to listen to people in general it will make them like you more anyway, people love to talk about or hear about themselves more than any other topic in the world. When you take more deliberate care in anything you do, including speaking, you will often yield a better result anyway.
The book would be interesting for someone who has no knowledge of neuro linguistic programming. They may “love the white space in the book”, or “tell their friends to also buy it”. I, being someone who already happened to study NLP can see right through the trickery and feel that the content of the book itself is a little shallow and misguided. There are many parts of the short book that are basically copied and pasted over and over and then there were slight modifications to each section for each “communicator type.” There is even a test right after all of the authors own NLP tricks to get you to love his work. This test left me thinking that I may either have a multiple personality disorder or that the authors theory about communication falls flat.
I am led to believe that this work was solely an attempt to generate income and had nothing to do with helping people communicate. It feels rushed, copy-pasted, redundant as a children’s book (see Johnny run, see Johnny play) and above all, the beginning of the book itself being used as one big NLP tactic against the reader was the biggest indicator of greed.
This book could have been summarized in to this short paragraph and would hold the same merit:
Act physically how other people you are communicating with are acting, use the same types of phrases they do, speak at the same speed and really listen to what they are saying before speaking back.
Rating:
Buy the Book!
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