#the richer woman book review

[bookreviewbabe]

What does it really mean to be the RICH-ER Woman?

I once pursued money. I focused on being a successful career woman at the expense of other areas of my life. Now, I realize that all I want is to live a life of purpose. I want to be successful in every single area of my life, and not just in one area.

I once pursued money.I focused on being a successful career woman at the expense of other areas of my life. Now, I realize that all I want is to live a life of purpose. I want to be successful in every single area of my life, and not just in one area. I want to excel at every gift & responsibility God has given me…Omilola Oshikoya – the RICHER WOMAN – PG 91. THE RICHER WOMAN (A woman’s guide to…

View On WordPress

#Africa&039;s premier wealth coach #blog #book review #book review blog #Book reviews by Tosan Alimi #Books #money discussions #money matters #Omilola Oshikoya #Personal finance #The Richer Woman #the richer woman book review #The RIcher Woman by Omilola Oshikoya #The Richer Woman review #Tosan Alimi #tosansreviews #tosansreviews blog #tosansreviews.com

[b-andherbooks]

2024 Historical Romance MUST READ

finally, finally a 2024 debut historical romance i am legit excited for! and with a clinch cover i'm obsessed with.

big persuasion meets poldark vibes!!

if you enjoyed the "oh shit he's back from the dead and his former affianced is married to someone else now" and "i'm so mad he picked her over me i'll never forgive him" angst & ennui, let me tell you this is delicious.

Lieutenant Eli Williams has his ~reasons~ and he'll grovel for each and every one of them, because Jane Bishop is ✨worth it✨. Even if Jane has calculated the odds, and they are BAD for our buttoned up sea-man.

also, i super duper appreciated discussions of money in this book. Eli's family spends all of his inheritance (because he's dead! at sea!) and Jane is a woman being supported (luckily) by an uncle who loves her, but has no guaranteed future and a brother I'd like to punch in the throat a bit. Jane's attempts to start a gambling ring amongst the richer ladies of the ton felt a bit florence of FYF fame (IYKYK) coded (hell yeah) but with more ~stakes~ because Jane has not much to fall back on if it fails.

there's also some unpacking of the horrors of war // military service.

Snap this up, histrom readers! You'll absolutely want it ASAP.

Cannot wait for more from Faye Delacour; you can preorder now for April 2024!

thank you to @sourcebooks for the early review copy

#romance books #historical romance #bookish #b.andherbooks review'

[moonshinemagpie]

Days 5 and 6 of learning Spanish:

I'm so glad I chose Spanish (I was also considering Arabic or Hebrew—I have relatives who speak all of these languages) because I just found out my aunt, who only speaks Spanish, is making a surprise trip to the US soon. I haven't seen her in ten years except through Facetime and I want to surprise her by not needing my cousins to interpret for us

Randomly met two cool ladies from Honduras who want to learn more English and could potentially be conversational partners (I can't practice Spanish with my family or neighbors until I get better because they just laugh at me lollll 😅)

The above book came in the mail today

Have also been listening to spanishpod101.com podcasts and finding them pretty useful

Listened to Coffee Break Spanish podcast and found them okay but a little less useful (language teachers: repeat yourself more than you think you need to when you have novice students!)

Am so far crazy impressed with the free Destinos videos. Will review in more detail later

Also enjoying the free Dreaming Spanish videos

And really loving FluentU, which shows you real native material videos in your target language and teaches you the vocabulary in them

Overall the abundance of high-quality, engaging materials for learning Spanish is so neat to see compared to the materials used for learning Japanese lolllll

VERY glad I opted to not go the DuoLingo route after seeing a YouTube video of a woman with a 300-day DuoLingo Spanish streak, and literally all she was able to do was translate simple, boring sentences from English into Spanish. Like it doesn't seem like DuoLingo even tries to teach you to be able to do anything else? It seems like it has the rhetoric of a 1940s-style Latin classroom dressed up in a sleek app

My favorite Spanish phrase so far is "quèdate conmigo, amigo," which I heard the boy from Coco say to his dog 🥰

I feel like living in the US will be a richer, more connected experience if I can become a proper Spanish speaker, and it makes me so happy that I settled on focusing on Spanish

#spanish #language learning #langblr

[horsesarecreatures]

Book Review: Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende

This is the third book in The House of the Spirits trilogy. It takes place earlier in time, with the historic backdrops being the American Civil War, the War of the Pacific between Chile and Peru - Bolivia, and the Chilean Revolution of 1891. The main characters are still members of the Del Valle family, primarily Paulina Del Valle and her illegitimate granddaughter Aurora Del Valle.

The story begins in San Francisco in 1880. Aurora Del Valle has just been born in Chinatown. Her father is Paulina Del Valle's son Matias, who denies paternity. Her mother Lynn Sommers is a model, but dies shortly after giving birth to her. Lynn Sommers is the daughter of Eliza Sommers, a British woman, and Tao Chi'en, a well-known Chinese doctor who was one of the few Chinese immigrants to be given America citizenship.

Although Matias denied paternity, Severo Del Valle, Paulina Del Valle's nephew, married Lynn Sommers and became Aurora's legal father. However, Aurora lives with her loving maternal grandparents for the first 5 years of her life, and Severo returns to Chile to marry his cousin Nivea, and they have 15 children in of their own (2 of those children are Rosa the Beautiful and Clara the Clairvoyant from House of the Spirits). Unfortunately, Tao Chi'en is killed after leading authorities to the houses of the Sing-song girls, who he had long tried to help.

Eliza Sommers had vowed to return Tao Chi'en's body to China, and that's what she does. She brings Aurora to the house of her paternal grandmother Paulina Del Valle. Paulina Del Valle had always wanted Aurora, but her first husband, Severo, and Aurora's maternal grandparents wouldn't allow it. But Paulina's first husband Feliciano had died, and due to the changed circumstances Eliza Sommers and Severo decided the child should stay with her.

Paulina Del Valle loves Aurora with her whole heart, but will tell her nothing of her past. Nonetheless, Aurora enjoys a fairly happy childhood after the initial trauma of being abandoned by her maternal family. Paulina Del Valle is rich, having been the strategic mind behind her husband's business ventures, which included importing fruit from Chile and buying land where there would soon be railroads built. She is also of gigantic proportions, and loves shocking people.

Paulina Del Valle decides to move back to Chile with Aurora. After her first husband died, she lost her social status in San Francisco's society. Furthermore, she would be even richer in Chile than she would be in America. Her long-time British butler, Williams, has an interesting proposal: marry him so he can improve his social status and she can have someone looking out for her and the family in Chile. Despite the differences in their ages and social status, Paulina accepts, enjoying the confusion their marriage causes in Chile.

In Chile, Aurora grows up and slowly begins to discover the truth about her past and her mother's family.

..............................................................................................................................

I liked this book. Isabel Allende always writes something a little different. Paulina Del Valle was a very amusing character in what was otherwise a very serious book.

#portrait in sepia #isabel allende #fiction #novel #historical fiction #bookblr #book review

[mermaidsirennikita]

ARC Review: The Dueling Duchess by Minerva Spencer

4.25/5. Releases 5/23/2023.

For when you're vibing with... Confident, mature heroines, adoring rakes, a bit of trick gunslinging, and situationships that turn into real relationships.

I like my first Minerva Spencer read, The Boxing Baroness. The follow-up was even better--sleeker, more romantic, with less focus on the history and more focus on the couple (and the fun lady circus!). There were a few bold takes with The Dueling Duchess, and I was into it.

Quick Takes:

--Cecile, our heroine, is French; and the book actually kicks off during the Revolution when she's a young teen. I loved this, just as I enjoyed the awareness of a world beyond England in the previous book. While most of this novel does take place in England, Cecile doesn't feel like an English heroine, and you get a sense of a wider, richer world than is often present in Regency historicals.

--Another thing about Cecile, a heroine I loved: she's 35-36 over the course of this novel, and she knows her shit. She knows what she likes, she knows what she doesn't like, and she suffers no fools. This doesn't mean she's cold or incapable of emotion (one of my favorite moments in the book lets us know just how much this isn't the case) but she's seen the world and she's both guarded and voracious enough be unable to resist Guy. Because Guy is Hot. And Guy is famous for his ability do sex things.

--So often--especially recently, I'm not gonna lie--I read about heroes who are presented as rakes, and as you read the book you're like... this is not a rake. Guy reads like an actual rake; he's charming, he's hot, his exploits are written about in newspapers, and he cucks randoms. We love him. Both Guy and Cecile are people who have slept with others. The book does not shy away from their experiences. It does not shame them for it. They get jealous, but they're also like.... fucking adults about it. The conflicts they do have are less about their mutual pasts, and more about their feelings for each other.

--One thing I felt like The Boxing Baroness suffered from was a somewhat slower feeling because of how much was going on outside of the central love story. Here, we're a lot more focused on Guy and Cecile's relationship and character development. There is external conflict and it matters, but the story is much tighter.

--I really enjoyed the lady circus in this go-around, as well as how much of Cecile's identity was tied up in it. A lot of this book was about Cecile having such a strong sense of independence... which is good! However, her journey involved recognizing that she hid behind her independence to avoid hard, risky emotions and relationships. It felt really authentic, and it transcended the historical setting.

--While this is definitely a heroine-forward book, Guy is such a good hero. He's a hero who basically spends most of the book groveling; but his faults are more down to a lack of understanding than true cruelty. He fucking looooves this woman, and the fact that this is a second chance romance (wherein we do flash back to the beginning of their first go) solidifies that.

The Sex Stuff:

Yeah, this one is hot. You get all the "good girl"-ing you could want (I have such a thing for when a hero is younger than the heroine and calls her a good girl), there's no worrying about virginal hesitance, Cecile! Likes! It! Rough! I absolutely loved the sex scenes in this book.

This was just such a solid historical romance. I would love to see more in this vein--rollicking, with just the right amount of emotion. It felt very old school meets new school.

Thanks to Netgalley and Kensington for providing me with a copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

#romance novel blogging #arc reviews #netgalley #book recs #books #book reviews

[whimsicaldragonette]

ARC Review: Mortal Follies by Alexis Hall

Order

Add to Goodreads

Publication Date: June 6, 2023

Synopsis:

A young noblewoman must pair up with a rumoured witch to ward off a curse. It is the year 1814 and life for a young lady of good breeding has many difficulties. There are balls to attend, fashions to follow, marriages to consider and, of course, the tiny complication of existing in a world swarming with fairy spirits, interfering deities, and actual straight-up sorcerers. Miss Maelys Mitchelmore finds her entry into high society hindered by an irritating curse. It begins innocuously enough with her dress slowly unmaking itself over the course of an evening at a high-profile ball, a scandal she narrowly manages to escape. However, as the curse progresses to more fatal proportions, Miss Mitchelmore must seek out aid, even if it means mixing with undesirable company. And there are few less desirable than Lady Georgianna Landrake—a brooding, alluring young woman sardonically nicknamed “the Duke of Annadale”—who may or may not have murdered her own father and brothers to inherit their fortune. If one is to believe the gossip, she might be some kind of malign enchantress. Then again, a malign enchantress might be exactly what Miss Mitchelmore needs. With the Duke’s help, Miss Mitchelmore delves into a world of angry gods and vindictive magic, keen to unmask the perpetrator of these otherworldly attacks. But Miss Mitchelmore’s reputation is not the only thing at risk in spending time with her new ally. For the rumoured witch has her own secrets that may prove dangerous to Miss Mitchelmore’s heart—not to mention her life.

My Rating:★★★

*My Review and Favorite Quotes below the cut.

My Review:

It pains me to give this three stars because I generally adore Alexis Hall's' books and can almost guarantee them to be 5-star reads. But this one fell flat. It suffered from a few problems that killed it for me. I liked the choice to have a capricious Puck narrate a story about a human cast of characters. It was at times amusing, but unfortunately it created so much distance between me and the characters that I felt like I didn't know them at all. It didn't help that the characters were dry, bland, and flat. Miss Bickle was occasionally amusing but in a distant, faint way. Another obstacle was the overly formal tone of the characters conversation and manner, which kept me even further from knowing the characters. Since I am, first and foremost, a character-driven reader, this feeling of being so far removed from the characters that I was watching them from about a mile away didn't give me the enjoyment I usually get from Alexis Hall's books. It was also incredibly awkward to have Puck narrating the sex scenes. I mean, I don't usually enjoy sex scenes anyway, but having everything filtered through Puck's gaze and narration felt weirdly intrusive. It also seriously dragged in the middle. I felt like I was reading it for weeks without getting anywhere, and it almost put me into a reading slump. There were some interesting bits and I did enjoy it enough to finish it, but not enough to really love it, no matter how much I wanted to or how beautiful the cover is. *Thanks to NetGalley and Del Rey for providing an early copy for review.

Favorite Quotes:

The works of my people have a wholly undeserved reputation for coming apart unexpectedly or transforming into leaves and cobwebs at the slightest provocation. In fact, such disasters tend to require considerable provocation. The problem is that mortals are exceedingly provoking.

---

And then Mr. Caesar, to my disappointment, left the house of dissolute gentlemen and, like the tiresome mortal that he was, went home. In punishment, I hid one of his shoes.

---

“It is vexing isn’t it?” Miss Mitchelmore’s tone acquired a musing edge. “If one is poor, one must marry a rich man in order that one might be provided for, and if one is wealthy one must marry a still richer man in order that one not spend the rest of one’s days providing for him.”

---

It was possible, of course, that Mr. Clitherowe had taken the opportunity to direct some hex against her during their brief conversation, but unless “what an unusual hat” was an incantation of ancient and unknowable power, it seemed improbable.

#alexis hall #mortal follies #regency romance #queer romance #historical romance #del rey #netgalley #arc review #shilo reads

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Title: In Praise of Shadows

Author: Jeff Vandermeer

Rating: 2/5 stars

[epistemic status: mostly a review of a short story and a novella. I'm not sure that I can rate both of them, because the story in particular is just kind of OK. Still, that's what I'll do.]

I'm just going to sum up my experiences with this book. Keep in mind that if I had to rate a thing I wouldn't be going in with all these caveats, but then again I don't have a coherent set of criteria for rating such a thing. I'm just taking stuff I liked or hated about it and trying to make an order out of it.

Anyway, the title refers to two different kinds of entities: shadows, and books. I don't really need to explain the distinction between the two, but let me just say that if you know what you're doing, a book will be more than a shadow -- that is, if you're using the book in a more sophisticated way than I did, but if you're not then you should feel free to take the book for what it is.

I loved the writing

This book was just so fun to read. One of the things I appreciated most about it is the sense that Vandermeer wanted to tell a story which was worth telling (even though he was doing so in a way that was almost definitely inadvisable), and he seemed to realize that if he didn't tell this story, someone else would. Thus he could let it have all the strange, off-putting qualities he wanted to explore, because he knew that someone would come along and try to make sense of it anyway.

I mean, Vandermeer is really good at building up a story in your head. Take his novel Annihilation, which was a huge nerdoutrage for people who liked science fiction (to say the least). But that story started out as one of his short stories and then ended up being a novel. Vandermeer has no such compunctions: he is good at building up a scene in your head by piling up little details that you might not have thought about at all. Here's a snippet of one such scene from a story called "The Other Mother":

As it turns out, there were a lot of people who did not know about the Other Mother. It didn't matter that I had a degree in biology. All the people who came into contact with her regarded her with the same bafflement they might show if they had met someone who wore mismatched socks, a bathrobe, and a fur coat into the grocery store, walked over to the fish section, and said, "I want to see something really unusual."

This is just one short scene, but it works so well because, just for an instant, we feel like we're inside a strange, complicated, alien mind. And we do this with all sorts of things in the story. (It's just one of a million things that Vandermeer does really well: his stories are full of little details like this, and it makes them a lot richer).

Now, the story itself is pretty different from Annihilation. The characters are less likeable, less likeable per se, less weird, less "real" -- but they're still recognizable as people, and they seem plausible in a way that the characters in Annihilation never did. This is because the story is so good at making you feel in control of the things in the story -- there's a sense that all these little scenes are coming together to make sense, to give you a story with a shape that you can understand.

A lot of that comes from the way the characters think -- they're not necessarily "right" in any way, but they come across as genuinely strange in the ways that Vandermeer wants you to find them weird. Take the two characters in "Other Mother": they talk like this:

They're in the wrong room.

Marybeth's voice was pitched an octave lower than usual, but the words were as loud and clear as any I'd heard from her since high school.

There's a certain amount of awkwardness in correcting someone's pronunciation. One has to try to ignore the fact that one is making a fool of oneself by trying to be a linguist.

"I'm not in the right room," I said.

They looked at me blankly. The woman's eyes were as dark as her son's, and her brow was a line of heavy shadow. Her face was a study in shadow, and in spite of myself I felt a chill steal over me.

"No," I said. "We're in the right room. Right... room."

There's not a word here that you wouldn't expect from a human being.

The story as a whole has its dark spots. I didn't really care for "The Drowned Girl," for instance, and this was one reason that I didn't really like the book itself, or rather, why I didn't like reading it and found it hard to focus. But the story is always moving forward, and it's moving in this direction despite the bleakness. It's very much in the vein of a lot of Vandermeer's earlier work, so if that stuff gives you pause, the book itself won't: you will just have a sense of unease in the story, which you can overcome by getting past it. (I'll talk more about the book once I'm finished, because I don't feel up to rating it).

One of the oddest (and, I suppose, most effective) things is the way Vandermeer makes you forget that there is a plot. I mean, I suppose there is one, but I've read far too many stories where there isn't really a plot but the characters feel like there is one. The characters talk about how the story is moving, but then it isn't actually moving there. But the plot is there, because it's in the characters. And it's not hard to feel like the characters are in control of it, because they come across as genuinely, plausibly strange. It's like a magic spell, which, in the end, the reader is powerless to resist.

A very small example here, but an example that stands out: one of the main characters is "Katharine" and her "family." Her father is a physicist with some sort of odd reputation. He is very old fashioned in the way that he thinks of the world around him, but he is also an honest person, and he doesn't really talk much about that world. Instead, he talks about something he called the breathplay, which involves getting a bunch of very drunk people to try and kiss each other.

It was a strange experience. The sensation was not sexual. It was

[redwolf17]

I posted 951 times in 2022

That's 839 more posts than 2021!

70 posts created (7%)

881 posts reblogged (93%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@dianaprinceownsmyass

@istumpysk

@ladyshinga

@esther-dot

@nonbinary-bosmer

I tagged 184 of my posts in 2022

#the weirwood queen - 58 posts

#asoiaf - 57 posts

#asoiaf fic - 36 posts

#sansa stark - 27 posts

#asoiaf meta - 11 posts

#asoiaf art - 9 posts

#jon snow - 7 posts

#arya stark - 7 posts

#olyvar sand - 7 posts

#dracula daily - 6 posts

Longest Tag: 121 characters

#war crimes! against children! so many slaughtered villages?! henry kissinger is only alive because he’s too evil for hell

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

Now for the Lannisters.

Fuck “pale flecks of gold”, Tywin gets green with hints of yellow. It is the green of dying grass, of bile, of envy.

Cersei and Jaime get a richer green; their vaunted beauty gets nothing from Tywin, but comes from Joanna.

Tyrion’s green eye has the same base yellow-green as Tywin, reflecting his place as Tywin’s true heir. His black eye was tricky, as I didn’t want the pupil and iris to blend together.

This batch of eyes really needs a second attempt when I have time, but I do like the overall colors.

See the full post

51 notes - Posted January 21, 2022

#4

Next up, the Martells. I need to do Doran and Ellaria later, as well as the sand snakes.

Elia has no canon eye color. I chose a rich brown, as bright as honey for her sweet disposition and as hard as amber for the strength hidden underneath. Hers are my favorite of all the eyes I drew.

Oberyn’s eyes are described as black “viper” eyes. I made them a very deep rich brown; solid and striking.

See the full post

54 notes - Posted January 21, 2022

#3

“It was the better part of an hour when the Count returned. "Aha!" he said; "still at your books? Good! But you must not work always. Come; I am informed that your supper is ready." He took my arm, and we went into the next room, where I found an excellent supper ready on the table.”

Hold up. I don’t remember if Dracula has any servants. Is he… cooking all Jonathan’s meals… himself?

I just. Dracula. In an apron? Spending an hour preparing an “excellent” supper?????

80 notes - Posted May 7, 2022

#2

My boyfriend and I are reading Dracula daily out loud to each other and discussing, and he has asked that I share these two theories because “tumblr loves that shit”

1) Theory the First

The three suitors, who are pals, deliberately agreed to all propose to Lucy on the same day, and whoever she accepted, wins

2) Theory the Second

Lucy’s three suitors track with the characters of Supernatural.

The neurotic mopey one who nearly sits on his hat, fiddles with a sharp object, and gets rejected: Sam

The cowboy gun nut whose response to rejection is to immediately try and get all of his buddies wasted: Dean

The one with no discernible personality (yet?) who apparently decided the best way to propose was to just fucking make out with a woman: Cas

104 notes - Posted May 25, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

ASoiaF Fic Writing Tools

Writing fanfic for A Song of Ice and Fire? Have I got some useful tools for you!

Fanmade timeline of book events; also includes distances and travel times

ASearchOfIceandFire allows you to search the full text of the books, by book and/or POV

Race For The Iron Throne has useful chapter recaps with historical analysis for AGOT through most of ASOS

Atlas of Ice and Fire has wonderful fanmade maps and population estimates

Happy writing!!! 💕

213 notes - Posted July 7, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

[beboped1]

Moving Pictures

One thing I'm really enjoying about this project is the opportunity to really consider each book. Most of these I've only read once, as part of one whirlwind hyperfocus dash or other, but the reviews force me to focus on each book one at a time.

Moving Pictures

First Read: High School

Verdict then: Good book, now where's the next one?

Verdict now: A funny, loving, and well executed parody/takedown/homage to Hollywood and movies. You can see a lot of growth as a writer since the conceptually similar Wyrd Sisters.

Despite having read it before, I didn't have any real expectations coming into Moving Pictures. It was one of those books that I read in my first dash through Discworld, borrowing from a couple friends who had them, and got lost in the middle of the dozen or so volumes I devoured in hyperfocus. But I really enjoyed Moving Pictures. Guards, Guards still stands as my favorite so far, but Moving Pictures gave it a run for its money.

I'm a terrible sucker for meta-narrative fuckery, and Moving Pictures has that in spades. The concept of movie reality leaking into the real world, and horrors from beyond being bound by the rules of that manufactures reality is basically catnip for me. Several of the characters are also amazing: Gaspode, Throat, Soll, Bursar, Ridcully all get some great lines and moments. The biggest weakness is ultimately the two leads: Victor is (intentionally, I think) that very bland kind of movie star archetype, and Ginger shows that he still hasn't quite figured out how to write women yet. They don't really seem to have chemistry outside of the set, Victor's attraction to Ginger doesn't seem to go any farther than skin deep, and Ginger has little agency for much of the story. I end up not really believing in their romance.

But oh man, this book is really funny. I mean, I did write a research paper on movies between sound and color in the 8th grade, and haven't lost my love for movies of all eras since, and so one could accuse me of being squarely in the center of the target audience for the humor. But so much of the humor transcends the subject matter. Did I get a good chuckle out of the twisted inversion of a giant woman carrying an ape up a tower and getting shot by two wizards on a broom? Yes, absolutely. But the visuals of the handleman, Ginger, and a dozen wizards frantically riding a giant wheelchair moving at the speed of travel montage? Pure comedy, no additional context needed.

The true heart of this book lies with Gaspode. He carries such human trauma, of one who has been rejected so much that he invites it, almost requires it of those around him. How he grows, learns, and ultimately chooses who he really is over the course of the story. The healing that his unlikely friendship with Laddie brings him. The climactic moment in the theater. He got me at the end too - I really thought Pratchett was going to go through with "the dog dies at the end", but I'm glad he didn't. It wouldn't have fit right with the rest of the story.

Moving Pictures is also a masterclass in how to be broad and focused at the same time. There's a lot that goes on in this book beside the A plot of Victor, Ginger, and Osric - Silverfish & Throat, Throat & Soll, Detritus & Ruby, Gaspode & Laddie, the wizard council, Bursar & Ridcully, the movie palace owners, the troll actors whose names escape me, more I'm sure that I'm forgetting. And yet, the singular frame of "speedrunning Hollywood history through Gone with the Wind" allows all of these pieces to come together into a greater whole. The side stories don't feel like diversions, they feel like valuable asides, painting a richer and more nuanced picture of the humanity & Trollanity behind the dreams of Holy Wood.

Speaking of Trolls, he starts here what I know will be a slow project over several more books, of taking Dwarves and Trolls and turning them into object lessons in the harm of stereotypes. Not by preaching, but by the route of giving them depth & humanity while retaining the pieces that caused them to be stereotyped in the first place. To my eye, his treatment of Trolls here has also maintained a useful distance from reality that the Tecumen in Eric or the Klatchians in Sourcery or Twoflower didn't - the Trolls aren't coded as a specific Earth culture, and so there's less baggage brought in by the reader. It lets the messages of complexity and variety slip under the defenses better.

Moving Pictures is a tremendously successful send up, homage, and skewering of Hollywood culture. With great characters, a breadth that lenses into a singular focus, and with the best physical comedy scenes yet in the series, it really feels like Pratchett is starting to hit his stride. Two decades after my first Discworld book, I'm still so excited to read the next one.

#book review #books #discworld #fantasy books #terry pratchett #long post #moving pictures

[hoursofreading]

Why aren’t we good at seeing one another? For starters, we’re egotistical. We don’t see others because we’re too busy presenting ourselves. And some people are so narcissistically locked into their own viewpoint that they can’t be bothered to see yours. Maybe you’ve heard the story about the guy standing by a river: A woman standing on the opposite shore shouts at him, “How do I get to the other side of the river?” He bellows back, “You are on the other side of the river!” But we can get better. How? Well, if you are a young person, take as many courses as you can in the humanities. That’s where you go to learn about people. If you can’t understand the people around you, not only will you be miserable but you will make them miserable, too. The humanities also train people to pay close attention to one another, the way actors do. “Actors walk through life so different because we have to be an observer,” the actor Viola Davis once told an interviewer. “The way someone puts their head down if you say a certain word. And you think, ‘Why did they do that? Is it something in their past?’” The actor Matthew McConaughey once told me something similar. When he’s trying to get into character, he said, he looks for some small gesture that epitomizes the character’s overall nature, and then he expands out from there. One character might be a “hands in his front pockets” kind of guy. He goes through life hunched over, closed in. When he takes his hands out of his pockets and tries to assert himself, he’s going to be unnatural, insecure, overly aggressive. McConaughey also tries to see every scene from his character’s point of view. A killer is not thinking, “I’m a killer.” He’s thinking, “I’m here to restore order.” The novelist Zadie Smith has been a consummate humanist since she was a little girl. A few years ago, she wrote a piece for The New York Review of Books in which she recalled that, as a child, she was constantly imagining what it would be like to grow up in the homes of her friends. “I rarely entered a friend’s house without wondering what it might be like to never leave,” she wrote. “That is, what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or hold those politics. I was an equal-opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody.” What a fantastic way to train yourself not just to be a novelist but to be capable of seeing others as well.

David Brooks

#quote

[mwsa-member]

Women of the Blue and Gray: Mothers, Medics, Soldiers, and Spies of the Civil War by Marianne Monson

MWSA Review Pending  

Author's Synopsis

Hidden amongst the photographs, uniforms, revolvers, and war medals of the Civil War are the remarkable stories of some of the most unlikely heroes—women.

North, South, black, white, Native American, immigrant—the women in these micro-drama biographies are wives, mothers, sisters, and friends whose purposes ranged from supporting husbands and sons during wartime to counseling President Lincoln on strategy, from tending to the wounded on the battlefield to spiriting away slaves through the Underground Railroad, from donning a uniform and fighting unrecognized alongside the men to working as spies for either side.

This book brings to light the incredible stories of women from the Civil War that remain relevant to our nation today. Each woman's experience helps us see a truer, fuller, richer version of what really happened in this country during this time period.

Format(s) for review: Paper and Kindle

Review Genre: Nonfiction—History

Number of Pages: 208

Word Count: 60,000

#MWSA Review Pending #2023 Season #History

[cathygeha]

REVIEW

Dark Victory by A.J. Adams

Trigger Cullen #1

 In Dark Victory, a prequel to No Mercy, we meet Trigger’s extended family and learn a bit about the business empire he grew up in. The grandfather, His Lordship, has recently stepped down to allow his grandchildren to run the business. What happens when Trigger’s cousin Alex decides to sell off some assets sets a situation in motion that is a bit like one of those domino setups triggered to fall one tile at a time till are flat on the ground.

 What I liked:

* Trigger: bright, lethal, protective, generous, thinks of the welfare of family and employees, works hard, has the ability to see what needs to be done then make it happen – no matter how brutal it might be though he has a moral compass that allows him to sleep at night.

* Getting to see the cousins and learn what they do in the family business

* The family that are united and strong together

* The plot, pacing, setting, writing and conclusion

* Trigger’s ability to put others first in spite of what he might want

* That though ruthless, Trigger didn’t let emotion interfere with business and made sure the punishment fit the crime

* The plan Trigger set up to take down the enemies and end the war

* Wondering if Trigger will settle down in the future and if he does, what kind of woman would he settle down with.

* Getting to live on the dark side for a bit

 What I didn’t like:

* Who and what I was meant not to like

* Knowing that there are people as evil, heartless, greedy, and amoral as those in this book

 Did I like this book? Yes

Would I read more in this series? Yes

 Thank you to the author for the ARC – This is my honest review.

 4-5 Stars

   BLURB

 Powerful, cunning Trigger Cullen is the enforcer for his family's crime empire. He handles security, debt collection, and elimination with brutal efficiency. He does what it takes. He never has regrets. But everything changes when his cousin Alex decides to go legit. He wants to turn their successful but bloody business into a respectable and even richer and more powerful one. Trigger is sceptical, but he sees the benefits: less violence, more money, and a chance to be with the seductive, fun-loving Emily Fielding. But Alex's plan backfires. A vicious psychopath with a taste for torture targets their family. He has an army of thugs behind him, ready to wipe them out. Trigger has no choice but to fight back. It's a war with no rules, no mercy, and no escape. Can he protect his family and his future? Or will he lose everything he holds dear? A hard-boiled tale full of twists and turns, Dark Victory is a noir thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Don't miss this exciting prequel to No Mercy by AJ Adams!

#AJ Adams #Trigger Cullen 1 #Thriller #Crime Fiction #Fiction #Enforcer #family

[kellysbookblog]

BOOK BLITZ Title: Arrogant Boss Series: A New York Night #2 Author: J.M. Stoneback Genre: Contemporary Romance Tropes: Office Romance/Billionaire Bosshole Release Date: November 9, 2022

My Amazon Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5448311243

My GR Review: https://www.amazon.com/review/R3I3GJSTEIEFRK/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

BLURB Atlas Conrad is hotter than the sun. To the world, he’s known to be richer than God. To the world, he’s known to rule the fashion world with an iron fist. To me, he’s my dad’s best friend’s son. To me, he’s my arrogant boss who thinks that the world revolves around him. He can have any woman he wants at the snap of his fingers. But he wants me. Only me. The woman with a scar stretched across her face. He calls me gorgeous. Society calls me ugly. He calls what he has for me an obsession. I call him crazy. He reminds me what he wants, he gets. And he won’t stop until I’m his. Mind, body, and broken soul. This book is a complete STANDALONE and part of The New York Night Series. Every book in the series will be a different characters in the same world. GOODREADS LINK: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63275794-arrogant-boss PURCHASE LINKS – FREE for a limited time! US: https://amzn.to/3lE4xfj UK: https://amzn.to/42tmXA8 CA: https://amzn.to/3TwWvBw AU: https://amzn.to/42wWemk Always free in Kindle Unlimited ALSO AVAILABLE #1 Heartless Boss US: https://amzn.to/3qhNKhX UK: https://amzn.to/33jCnN2 CA: https://amzn.to/3HKBiNm AU: https://amzn.to/3zGXKEh Free in Kindle Unlimited AUTHOR BIO J.M. writes contemporary and dark mafia romance. She lives in Georgia, with her three boys and her husband. Her hobbies consist of reading, playing video games, and spending time with her family. AUTHOR LINKS Newsletter: https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/p4w6o3 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/J.M.Stoneback Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/130770767638269 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/j.m.stoneback

[ijustkindalikebooks]

Review: The Bangalore Detective's Club by Harini Nagendra.

When clever, headstrong Kaveri moves to Bangalore to marry doctor Ramu, she's resigned herself to a quiet life.

But that all changes the night of the party at the Century Club, where she escapes to the garden for some peace - and instead spots an uninvited guest in the shadows. Half an hour later, the party turns into a murder scene.

When a vulnerable woman is connected to the crime, Kaveri becomes determined to save her and launches a private investigation to find the killer, tracing his steps from an illustrious brothel to an Englishman's mansion. She soon finds that sleuthing in a sari isn't as hard as it seems when you have a talent for maths, a head for logic and a doctor for a husband.

And she's going to need them all as the case leads her deeper into a hotbed of danger, sedition and intrigue in Bangalore's darkest alleyways . . .

As I currently am going through a mystery phase, I thought I'd request this book and I am so glad I did. With incredibly well-written settings that bring 1920's India to life and characters that just leap from the page, this book is a wonderful beginning to I hope a series that charts the detective work of Kaveri.

The plot moves quickly after we get a quick introduction to these characters, and it makes for a great start to a story that hooks you as soon as it really begins. Kaveri is smart, fun and interesting and exudes main character energy whenever she appears on the page as she goes looking for the murderer, the supporting characters well developed and adding to the story so much throughout.

Exploring every part of life under colonial rule, from the richer areas to the slums, this book is not shy about exploring India no matter where you are in it. The characters are well written, developed and really allow for the story to develop and grow - it's a fantastic book with a mystery that grips you until the very end.

I loved reading this book, thank you bank holidays for giving me time to finish this treat up!

(I received an ARC from Netgalley for honest review).

#books #booklr #bookblr #fiction #mystery #The Bangalore Detective's Club #book #book review #book reviews #Harina Nagendra

[brendamariesmith]

Some Ways to Write What You Know

People told me, “Write what you know,” and I thought, “Well, that sounds boring.”

But I’ve since discovered ways to follow that advice. We can put our personal emotions into our characters and use them for different purposes. We can pull bits from one facet of our lives, add pieces from other aspects, stir them up, and sprinkle them throughout a story to good effect.

After I self-published my first novel, a paranormal thriller called Something Radiates, friends who read it kept saying to me, “This book is about you and your ex-husband, isn’t it?”

“My exes were bad,” I would say, “but they weren’t supernatural stalkers.”

Still, the truth is that my two ex-husbands were abusive to me in different ways. One was controlling and tried to squelch my intellect. He burned my poetry, saying I was on an ego trip. The second ex had a serious mean streak that first emerged in increasingly cutting remarks. Then, he lost it and beat my kids. He came damned close to pushing me down a steep flight of stairs. I was frozen in fear, but he did me an enormous favor and dumped me.

Once I was free of these men, I got my revenge by taking the worst aspects of each of them, smooshing them together, adding supernatural abilities, and ramping them into overdrive to create a truly creepy villain for Something Radiates. It was healing for me to make my villain even worse than my exes, especially when the villain gets his comeuppance in the end.

I also used my experience of falling in love with a good man, my longtime current husband, to write a romance for my protagonist—the best kind of revenge. And I set the novel in Baton Rouge, where I once lived, with a trip to a cave near Boulder, where I’d camped out long ago. The novel is loaded with hippie spiritual lore and belief systems that have always fascinated me.

In my next novel, If Darkness Takes Us, and its standalone sequel, If the Light Escapes, a solar pulse destroys the U.S. grid, and the characters must survive with no power, cars, phones, or running water. Many reviews for If Darkness mentioned that I must have done a lot of research to describe the details of their lives so well. But when I was much younger, I’d lived off the grid for many years by choice, in a vegan hippie community where my sons were delivered by midwives. I didn’t have to research it. I lived it. And I set both novels in an altered version of my own Austin, Texas, neighborhood.

In If Darkness, which is narrated by a grandmother named Bea who’s raising her grandkids in an apocalypse, I was able to draw on my experiences with love and divorce as well as my twenty-eight years of raising five sons, plus several more years of being a grandmother. I also gave Bea some health issues I’m familiar with. While she is similar to me in certain ways, she’s her own woman with plenty of differences, too.

For If the Light, which is narrated by Bea’s eighteen-year-old grandson Keno, I believe his heroic nature and casual-cussing voice came straight from those sons of mine, tempered by the college students I worked with for fifteen years. Keno was waiting inside me to be let loose. It was astonishing how fast his words spewed out of me. And as I delved deeper into his character, he revealed even richer veins of heroism, intellect, and moral conviction. I have watched many young men come of age in my life, but seeing Keno do it in an apocalypse made my heart bleed.

I have a novel in development that will call on my experience living in the woods of the Ozark Mountains, on my attraction to Eastern religions, and on the time that I spent living communally. For all my fiction, I pull character emotions from the various ways I have felt them myself or have observed them in others.

The best advice I can give to any writer is to dive into life and live it to its fullest. Then you will have no shortage of tales to tell and experiences to draw from, whether your characters dwell in alternative worlds or come straight out of history. And your stories will never be boring.

#writing #fiction #writewhatyouknow #apocalypse #scifi #novels

[theglassfloor]

I posted 893 times in 2021

37 posts created (4%)

856 posts reblogged (96%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 23.1 posts.

I added 46 tags in 2021

#lol - 9 posts

#the hobbit - 6 posts

#bagginshield - 5 posts

#soy yo - 5 posts

#i'm dead - 4 posts

#lotr - 4 posts

#mall - 4 posts

#purdy - 3 posts

#colorful - 3 posts

#btvs - 3 posts

Longest Tag: 122 characters

#and it describes in great detail from his pov all the different parts of a woman's physical appearance he finds attractive

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

Rules: tag 9 people you want to know better.

Tagged by: @chokit-pyrus Thanks ;)

Favorite colors: Blue and red

Currently reading: The Given Day by Dennis Lehane. A novel, based on real historical events. I chose it because I wanted to read something set in the early 1900s, and I had no idea it would be this good! It’s 700 pages, and I’m about ⅔ of the way through it.

Last song: “Beneath a Moonless Sky” from Love Never Dies, the sequel to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera. That was yesterday. I also fell asleep listening to a YouTube video of Kingdom Hearts Traverse Town ambience.

Last series: That I finished? The new Saved by the Bell on Peacock. Before that it was Angel on Hulu, although that was already over a year ago I think. I’m not a big TV watcher.

Last movie: Not too long ago I watched the 1930s film adaptation of the novel Ramona, one of my favorite books. (That’s the one by Helen Hunt Jackson, not Beverly Cleary.)

More recently I watched the 25th anniversary performance of Phantom of the Opera at Royal Albert Hall because Lindsay Ellis talks about it so much. Does that really count as a movie? It’s not the movie, it’s a performance of the stage musical that was filmed.

Sweet, savory, or spicy: Why not all three? Actually, I love sweet stuff.

Currently working on: I have my own universe of interconnected stories that I like to work on from time to time, just as a little bit of self-indulgence, but I’m sort of at a loss as to where to go with it next.

Tagging: @bagginshieldhappiness @bespectacledbookworm @complicatedundertones @drszm @i-have-beards + anyone else who feels like doing it. I don’t have that many mutuals. I need to be more social.

5 notes • Posted 2021-10-28 21:13:16 GMT

#4

I'm watching the movie of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera, and exactly 22 minutes in, there's a scene of some of the audience members mingling with the cast and crew backstage, and in the foreground right, Meg passes an effeminate young man who appears to be flirting with an older, bald gentleman with a white mustache. I thought it was cute.

7 notes • Posted 2021-08-25 10:59:46 GMT

#3

So, I just watched Love Never Dies (Andrew Lloyd Webber's sequel to Phantom of the Opera) for the first time, and...I kinda liked it? I'm not saying it's "good", I think I'm just a sucker for any kind of Victorian/Edwardian era melodrama. Plus Lindsay Ellis has talked about it extensively, providing many laughs, and my local library had the DVD to borrow, one dollar for a week, and now I'm richer for having seen it.

14 notes • Posted 2021-11-03 23:34:26 GMT

#2

Addams Family Values, one of my all-time favorite comfort movies, is free with ads on YouTube right now. Even though I've seen it enough times to be able to quote the entire thing, I thought, what the heck, I'll give it fresh watch.

I really should own the damn thing. I used to have it on VHS, taped off of TV, which was how I watched it all the time back in the day.

32 notes • Posted 2021-09-17 21:49:56 GMT

#1

Words cannot describe how wonderful this show is.

36 notes • Posted 2021-04-16 22:52:52 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

#my 2021 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review