Book Review: Please Excuse My Daughter by Julie Klam

Allow me to preface this review by stating the fact that typically, I enjoy memoirs. Memoirs, in my opinion, mark the struggles, triumphs, courage and stamina of a person. They signify a life that has truly been lived and allow a person to share their lives with others who may benefit from reading their story.

Julie Klam was born and raised in a Jewish family where her mother and many other Jewish wives and women in general believed that women did not work. Instead, they married rich men, spent their husband’s money on luxuries that purely benefit the way they look and eat and nothing else and have a few children before they are expected to get a job and contribute to their families. Julie was not only raised in this lifestyle, she inhabited …

Book Review: All About Vee by C. Leigh Purtill

Veronica May is a pretty standard teenager. At eighteen years old, she is bubbly, caring and has a few great friends known as ‘The Vees,’ named simply after the first letter in all of their first names. She is a confident actress, star of her school and city theater in her hometown of Chester, Arizona and she is absolutely gorgeous–All 217 pounds of her.

While Veronica loves her life in Chester, she loves the spotlight even more and craves the success that as a big city actor, she knows she could achieve.

Once her father, a widower librarian, decides to finally marry his girlfriend of ten years and the city theater casting a play in which there are no female lead roles, Veronica feels as if she is being replaced not only in her household, but …

Book Review: A Survival Guide for Landlocked Mermaids by Margot Datz

Margot Datz is a self-taught painter, sculptor, interior designer and prolific writer whose imagery and beautifully crafted metaphors whisk those who read her words away, almost immediately.

As a woman who lives by the sea and spends her life creating genius pieces of art, including a spectacular eighty-five-foot mural and bas-relief installation for the Arkansas Children’s Hospital and illustrations for four children’s books for friend Carly Simon, her talent is apparent and defined in her book, A Survival Guide for Landlocked Mermaids.

Her book, while it may first look like a typical children’s book, is filled with the wisdom a woman learns through years of life experience. She advises that in order to even think about a man in your life, you must first not only accept, but truly love yourself, faults and all. She …

Book Review: Hex Education by Emily Gould and Zareen Jaffery

I recently read this book on a whim and to tame the inner fifteen year old girl in me with a love for young adult books. I am a firm believer that while you can read any subject of book that interests you, sometimes you just need a little ‘cute;’ and that is exactly what this book brings to the table.

Hex Education is about a young teenage girl, Sophie Stone, who is reluctant (to say the least) to leave her home in LA and move to her father’s home town of Mythic, Massachusetts in order to save the town from odd . Mythic, most likely inspired by Salem, Massachusetts, is a city whose history is based on the occult and witchcraft. She is a shoe in to not fit in, her parents being …

Book Review: Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

I had never heard of Joe Hill, the offspring of Stephen King who wrote this novel under a pen name because he did not want to gain attention to his work for the sole reason that he is Stephen King’s son, until my grandmother, a Stephen King fanatic, told me a little about the book when she was a quarter of the way through it. After she had finished she lent me the book and I wearily took it and began my journey into the life of Judas Coyne, an ex-rocker with a wicked taste for paranormal items and much younger women.

Heart-Shaped Box opens with a run of the mill, usual day of a retired rock star, Judas Coyne, his clerk and annoying friend by business-association and his goth fan-girl girlfriend whom he refers to …