Book Review: Little Bo Peep and Her Bad, Bad Sheep

Katie February 5, 2016 0 Comments

Little Bo Peep and Her Bad Bad Sheep is a Mother Goose Hullabaloo.  You see, while the narrator is trying to tell the story of Little Bo Peep and how she has lost her sheep, there are something like 40 other nursery rhymes all going on at the same time and things get a little hectic.  See if you can spot the other rhymes throughout the illustrations. There’s a guide at the end of the book just in case you’re not able to spot them all, with the rhymes included!

I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review. I was not otherwise compensated.

About the Book

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep…as usual. What starts out as a simple nursery rhyme quickly derails into mayhem. Bo Peep can’t find her sheep, but readers will, and they’ll be coaching Bo from the sidelines as they watch her mischievous sheep swiping mittens from kittens, toppling Humpty Dumpty, and trampling Mary’s garden. Dozens of beloved Mother Goose characters have cameos…and all have run-ins with the sheep. Readers will giggle all the way to the end when at last they can finish the rhyme, as the sheep (sheepishly) come home, wagging their tails, of course.
For ages 4-8.
*Cameos from more than 20 traditional nursery rhymes make appearances and all rhymes are included at the end *Lots for young readers to seek and find on every page *Silly humor just right for readers who will spot Bo’s sheep before she does

Book Review: Ballpark Eats

Katie February 5, 2016 0 Comments

Ballpark Eats is put together by Sports Illustrated for Kids. It features a few items available at each of the major league ball parks – but unlike other books it also has recipes so you can make them yourself without having to go to the ballpark! This is great news for me because the Peanut Butter Cup Fudge at the Pittsburgh Pirates games looks delicious – but is about 8 hours from me so I’m not sure I’ll ever make it to a game there.

A great book to learn about the ballparks and what kinds of foods they have at the stadiums!

I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review. I was not otherwise compensated.

About the Book

Forget peanuts and Cracker Jacks! America’s Ballparks now offer a dizzying array of edible options. These make-like stadium recipes give young chefs and sports fans a culinary road trip at home. From the famous fish tacos at the Giants’s AT&T Park in San Francisco to the mouthwatering Cuban sandwich at the Tampa Bay Rays’s Tropicana Field, these diamond dishes are perfect for any seventh-inning stretch. Produced in partnership with Sports Illustrated Kids.
For ages 10-13.
*Written by Katrina Jorgensen, a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts *Make-like recipes from 30 Major League baseball stadiums, including famous fish tacos at the Giants’ AT&T Park in San Francisco to the mouthmateringCuban sandwich at the Tampa Bay Ray’s Tropicana Field *Created in collaboration with Sports Illustrated Kids *Perfect for baseball fans or food fans—or both! *Great family book for kids and parents to experience together

Book Review: The Girl On The Train

Katie February 3, 2016 0 Comments

The Girl On The Train seems to be the hot new book to read, several of my friends recommended it to me and I saw several others reading it while I was on vacation in January. So I finally took the time to stop reading my review books to read something for pleasure (and here I am reviewing it anyway!)

This book took me two tries to start – although the first time I was incredibly distracted so I’m not sure if I will count that against it. I did have trouble getting into it at first but was told by my friends to push through – after the first 50 or so pages things pick up, so keep that in mind if you start it and aren’t quite sure the book is going anywhere.

I feel like the write up for this book hypes it up a lot more than it really should. The book is good, it’s an easy read, it’s a bit of a thriller.  Some are comparing it to Gone Girl but I don’t think it really should be compared – except that I guess both have a missing person in them?  I did like how The Girl On The Train ended a lot more than I liked how Gone Girl ended and Gone Girl as a whole kind of pissed me off whereas The Girl On The Train didn’t really get a strong reaction out of me either way. It didn’t end how I thought it would or in a way that shocked me, but it didn’t end in a non-ending kind of way either. There’s closure.

I think it’s worth a read, or wait for the movie.  But don’t think about any of the hype when you go to read it and I think you’ll enjoy it more that way.

About the Book

A debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look at other people’s lives.

Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She’s even started to feel like she knows them. “Jess and Jason,” she calls them. Their life—as she sees it—is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost.

And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough. Now everything’s changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel offers what she knows to the police, and becomes inextricably entwined in what happens next, as well as in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?

Compulsively readable, The Girl on the Train is an emotionally immersive, Hitchcockian thriller and an electrifying debut.

Book Review: Smart Girl

Katie January 29, 2016 0 Comments

Smart Girl is the 3rd book in a series.  I have not read the other two but didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything, though I may go back to read them later. Smart Girl is about Miko Jin. (The previous 2 books are Party Girl about her friend Landon and Sweet Girl about her friend Max.)

I liked this book because it was about a girl who reads too many romance novels and that gives her a skewed view of romance. It reminded me of me, a bit.  Miko has had a crush on Max’s brother Liam since she first laid eyes on him.  She knows that they are absolutely meant to be but she has to figure out how to make Liam believe that too.

Liam seems to be with a new girl every time she sees him and he says he doesn’t do commitment. Miko ends up creating a list of how all the girls get the guy in her favorite romance novels and ends up going in to a work meeting with him and totally reading him the questions from 50 Shades of Grey!

Her plan seems to be working and she ends up at Liam’s house almost every night – which angers Landon because they are trying to run a business and Miko keeps slacking off her responsibilities – which is SO not like her.  Liam also acts like he doesn’t even know her when all their friends are out in a group even though Miko seems convinced they are “dating”.

Max ends up finding out about the two in a rather startling way and has a heart to heart with Miko about how Liam is not dating her and is keeping her a secret and she deserves more than that. Miko finally realizes what is going on she is forced to stop what she has going on with Liam, even though it breaks her heart.

However – every great romance novel has to have a grand gesture, right?  Well, you’ll have to read it to see if Liam just moves on with his life or does something big to win back Miko’s affection…

I really liked this book, it was a quick read and Miko was just “weird” enough that I felt connected to her.  She’s quirky, dresses kind of fun and colorful and is pretty smart when it comes to designing spaces. We certainly have our similarities and I was I was as successful and confident as she is!  All the characters were really great and while there were quite a few of them, they all brought their special pieces to the puzzle and their personalities were fun to see interact.

I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review,  I was not otherwise compensated.

About the Book

Brilliant designer Miko Jin is a hopeless romantic. She’s spent most of her life falling in love over and over again…with the men she finds in the pages of her favorite novels.

When Miko meets Liam Ashton, it’s love at first sight. At least, for her. Sure, the two of them are polar opposites, and yes, he seems to be dating someone new each week. But Miko knows what true love is and that you can’t rush it—after all, what she lacks in real-world experience, she makes up for in book smarts. With novels as her guide, and her best friends by her side, she knows she can get Liam to love her back. But just like any good romance novel, fate has a few plot twists in store. Will Miko get her own happy ending? Will she find the strength to stand up for what she deserves even if it means breaking her own heart?

Book Review: Destination Thailand

Katie January 29, 2016 0 Comments

I was looking for a good book to read while I was traveling and came across Destination Thailand. It is the first book in the Lonely Hearts Travel Club series and I have to say, I am hooked.  The main character is Georgia. She is supposed to be getting married to Alex, but he has called the wedding off.  To get her mind off things, Georgia and her best friend Marie take off to Turkey for a bit.  While there, Georgia makes a travel bucket list.  After getting fired from her job (what else can go wrong for this poor girl?) she makes the decision to go to Thailand on a 6 week tour.

A newbie to traveling on her own, she is easily targeted by scammers.  When things aren’t going like she had thought they would she leaves the tour and heads to the Blue Butterfly that her travel agent had recommended for her. While there she meets up with a few other travelers who are more like her.

After being forced to come home early, she needs to find a job.  But what is it that she really wants to do?  Create The Lonely Hearts Travel Club, of course!

While the book tied up most of the story line nicely, it did leave a bit of an opening for book #2 – but not a crazy cliffhanger where you’re dying for March to get here and the 2nd book.  I will certainly be looking into reading Destination India to see what happens with Georgia and her new job!

I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review. I was not otherwise compensated.

About the Book

What if you had a second chance… to find yourself?

Instead of slipping on her something borrowed and tripping up the aisle to wedded bliss, Georgia spends her big day crying into a warm Sex-on-the-Beach, wondering where it all went wrong.

Forced to make a bucket list of her new life goals by her best friend Marie, it’s not long before travel-virgin Georgia is packing her bags for a long-haul adventure to Thailand.

Yet, Georgia’s big adventure doesn’t seem to be going to plan. There’s strange sights, smells, and eating bugs. Plus she seems to fall for every traveller scam there is. Maybe her family is right and she really is too naive to do this alone.

But the good thing about falling apart is that you can put yourself back together any way you please. And new Georgia might just be someone she can finally be proud of…

The new favourite series for fans of The Curvy Girls Club, the Shopaholic series and Eat, Pray, Love.

This year it is time to find the place where you truly belong…

Book Review: Choose Your Own Misery: The Office Adventure

Katie January 29, 2016 0 Comments

As I think I’ve mentioned before, as a kid I loved the choose your own adventure books. I think because you could read them over and over with different outcomes and it seemed almost as if I was writing my own book even though someone else already had because I could pick the outcomes for myself.  When I saw there was a new series called “Choose Your Own Misery” and the first was “The Office Adventure” I knew I just had to check it out.  I wasn’t sure how it was going to work as an e-book since you couldn’t easily flip to the pages for the next part of your misery, but I quickly found out that the end of each chapter had links. So rather than flipping to page 94 or 32 depending on your scenario, you simply “click here”.

In our misery story we are a guy who is hung over and wants to sleep through his alarm.  Do you call in sick and use your LAST vacation day (and it’s only March) or figure out a way to get in to work late with no one noticing?  I ended up reading this I think 5 times – all reads went very, very quickly but each story had very different results – meetings with the boss, trying to set up the IT guy with a co-worker to get some of your vacation time back, catching a coworker having sex in a bathroom stall, a fight with a cabby… and basically if you think your life at the office is bad – you’ll feel a lot better about yourself and your situation after seeing the kind of scenarios the guy in this book gets himself into!

I hope that there will be more Choose Your Own Misery stories to read because reading this one was a lot of fun!

I received a free e-copy in order to write this review. I was not otherwise compensated.

About the book

Hungover and stuck at a job you hate, will you show up for your big presentation, or duck out with Debby, the HR rep with an FDR fetish? Play the weird lump on your back for office-wide sympathy, or dive into an internet spiral that can only end in “ten kinds of cancer”? Tell someone about the weird genital-fondling that’s happening at the crystal healer’s, or just accept that this is the best substitute you’ll find for love, today…or maybe ever?

From two comedy writers and past contributors to The Onion comes a modern-day tale of woe: the story of your soul-crushing existence. Choosing your own adventure is great when you’re a kid, but in the adult world, the only options on offer are endless varieties of misery. In your office adventure there are countless “options,” but they rarely end well. It’s okay, though. A life of adventure would require so many uncomfortable sleeping situations. Besides, you have dental. Keep reminding yourself about the dental.

Book Review: My DisOrganised Life

Katie January 29, 2016 0 Comments

My DisOrganised Life is about Eve.  We first meet Eve when she is getting arrested and trying to get out of it by dancing all up on a police officer after starting a fight with her cheating ex and his new girlfriend.  Of course, someone in the bar records the incident on video and she becomes a viral sensation on her college campus.

Eve is all about lists and ends up putting together a list of things to do in her twenties.  She has a new boyfriend, they are living together and she is on her way to working the things off of her list one by one.  When the TV show she is working on doesn’t do proper background checks on a couple that is supposed to be participating, somehow it ends up as Eve’s fault.  She thinks that her boyfriend, Adam (yes, Adam and Eve) is close to proposing and in an effort to save her job agrees that they will go on the show as the final pair of contestants. But when the proposal goes horribly wrong, Eve gives Adam the space he says he wants but then decides that she never really loved him.

The rest of the book kind of goes back and forth between the ridiculous reality TV show that Eve is working on and her personal life.  She seems to be crushing on one of her coworkers but isn’t sure if he is into her too or if she is just imagining it.

Eve is a fun character and I loved reading all her ridiculous lists and all the expectations she had for herself, as well as cheering her on when she was able to cross some items off the list.  This was a fun book to read because Eve got herself in some interesting predicaments.

I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review, I was not otherwise compensated.

About the Book

A viral video of drunkenness and vomiting over a policeman is the stuff of nightmares, and so is living back home with your religious, nutty parents. Fed up with life not going her way and turning quietly insane, Eve Poots comes up with a plan. Well more of a list of “things to do while she’s still twenty-something”.

Six months later, and the list is working its power: she is now living with her new boyfriend, junior doctor Adam, and working as an assistant to TV producer Alastair on a reality show – life really is on the up.

But then it all starts to crumble and she soon realises that what the list should have really said was:

1. An awful colleague hell-bent in making her life agonising – check
2. An unplanned engagement – check
3. Lusting for dashing TV director when she has a perfectly decent boyfriend at home – check
4. Seeking help from a sex therapist – check
5. Growing a back-bone – pending

Has her life suddenly turned into a TV melodrama of its own?

Book Review: The Time Chamber

Katie January 26, 2016 0 Comments

The Time Chamber is not only a coloring book, but also a magical story.  The story is about a fairy who lives inside the cuckoo clock, but decides to come out of her hiding spot to hang out in the room of a little girl.  She finds all sorts of magical treasures underneath the girls bed.  All of the items are featured on the pages and you can color them however you’d like.  I like that in addition to being a story it is a coloring book because you feel more immersed in the pages with the story to go along with it while you color, almost as if you are involved with making the story unique to you.  I haven’t started to color it yet, but am looking forward to going on another adventure with the red haired fairy – but this time coloring the pages instead of reading them.  The drawings are very cool – I was drawn to the book because of the gears on the front cover and they are throughout the book since she lives in a clock and I can’t wait to get started!

I received a free copy of this book in order to write this review, I was not otherwise compensated.

About the Book

Korean artist Daria Song’s sequel to The Time Garden takes readers on a visual journey into a magical nighttime world seen through the eyes of a fairy.

This second book in the bestselling Time coloring series features the voyage of a fairy who, when the cuckoo clock chimes midnight, enters the human world. To the tiny fairy, everything seems enormous and magical, from the curtains to the chandelier to a mystical rowboat that takes her further into an inky adventure. With her she packs her favorite items, which colorers can find throughout the book’s pages: an owl-feathered pen, a star-scented spray, a time tape measure…even the key to the time chamber itself!

Filled with the imaginative, intricately detailed illustrations Song’s readers have come to love, The Time Chamber presents a view of our world made new—and ready for coloring.

The Time Chamber features extra-thick craft paper, ideal for non bleed-through coloring, and the jacketed cover with flaps is removable and colorable. Special gold-foil stamping on the cover and spine and a To/From page make it perfect for gifting to adults and kids alike.

Book Review: Destroying the Tangible Illusion of Reality; Or, Searching for Andy Kaufman

Katie January 22, 2016 0 Comments

I’m not sure exactly what drew me to this book – maybe the colorful cover, maybe the mention of Andy Kaufman.  But this book was pretty much as weird and out there as I was expecting it to be.  I started reading this book twice.  The first time I couldn’t get into it and left it hoping it might expire before I got a chance to read it so I’d have an excuse not to.  The second time I was able to get about halfway through it before taking a break to catch up on some other books.  I did finally end up finishing it, though.

Most of the reviews I found say that it is a good book. But don’t say why.  I wondered why, at first. Then I finished the book and it’s kind of hard to describe it? It’s good. It’s interesting. It’s different. The book starts with Anthony storing his sperm as he is started treatment for cancer.  Anthony’s friend thinks that he kind of looks like Andy Kaufman and they end up finding out that Anthony’s mom was one of the women that Andy had wrestled.  Then they go on a bit of a journey to find Andy, since they now believe that Anthony is his son.  There are a lot of interesting characters that they meet along the way. The book ended up being just as colorful and wild as the front cover is.

I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review. I was not otherwise compensated.

About the Book

In this surreal road novel, Anthony searches for the father he’s never met: Andy Kaufman, the legendary song-and-dance man from the ‘70s. There’s a few problems here, of course. A) Andy Kaufman died in 1984, and B) Thanks to a recent cancer diagnosis, Anthony doesn’t have much longer to live, either. However, new evidence has come to light that questions whether or not Kaufman is actually dead. Could he be in hiding, after all these years? Anthony is determined to discover the truth before his own clock runs out. During his travels, he will encounter shameless medicine men, grifters, Walmart shoppers, the ghosts of Elvis and Warhol, and the Devil himself.

An introduction from T. Fox Dunham, author of Destroying the Tangible Illusion of Reality; or, Searching for Andy Kaufman

These are the most important words I’ve written, and if you don’t listen, your life is an illusion. I was the tenth person in the world to be diagnosed with composite lymphoma—a rare combination of large cell lymphoma and hodgkins. The survival rate didn’t exist. I came through it. I don’t know how. Friends tell me it’s amazing I did. No. It’s just some shit that happened to me. Chemo wrecked my body, then daily radiation for five months to my head, neck and chest devoured me slowly. People never ask me what dying was like. They don’t want to know. People live in the false pretense that they are immortal. Death happens to people on the news.

This book is what it felt like to die.

I bonded to Andy Kaufman in spirit because he shattered the illusion of reality, though losing himself as he did. Reality is a construct, created by humans to give value to a system, to provide meaning to their lives. When you’re dying, meaning drains out of much of it, and you realize you created and fed into forces like fear.

Love is real. When I was burned down to nothing, a stub of my life, all I had left was love.

This summer, I married the woman of my dreams, Allison, and she has given me a future. A few weeks ago, I was diagnosed with the return of my cancer, and anon I will need treatment again, probably surgery and radiation. It will never be gone.

Read this and understand death so you can know how to live.

Book Review: Over-Scheduled Andrew

Katie January 22, 2016 0 Comments

Over-Scheduled Andrew is about a Penguin named Andrew. He likes to act so he joins drama club. Then he joins a bunch of other clubs to help his performance in the drama club get better, like debate club, dance, karate, chess, etc.  But when he starts to fall asleep when he is hanging out with his best friend – in the 15 minutes he has managed to carve out for her in his week that doesn’t interfere with all his clubs he realizes he may be taking on too much.  And when his falling asleep ends up making something else terrible happen… Andrew decides to cut back on the clubs and involvement and add more time hanging out with his friends having fun!

A cute book that teaches you that even though you want to do it all, sometimes you just can’t. And spending time with your friends and having fun is important.

I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review. I was not otherwise compensated.

About the Book

Andrew loves putting on plays so he decides to join the drama club at school. Determined to make his performance the best it can be, he joins the debate club to practice his public speaking. He signs up for dance and karate to help with his coordination. Then he’s asked to play for the tennis team and edit the school newspaper. Before long he’s learning to play the bagpipes, attending Spanish classes and joining the French film club. Suddenly Andrew doesn’t have time for anything or anyone else, not even his best friend Edie. And he definitely doesn’t have time to sleep. Will Andrew figure out how to balance all his favorite activities and his best friend at the same time? A hilarious, over-the-top look at a common issue many kids today face.