6/12/2023 0 Comments Tress of the emerald sea![]() ![]() ![]() The seas on Tress’ world are dangerous because they’re not made of water-they’re made of colorful spores that pour down from the world’s 12 stationary moons. To do that, she’ll have to get off the barren island she’s forbidden to leave, cross the dangerous Verdant Sea, the even more dangerous Crimson Sea, and the totally deadly Midnight Sea, and somehow defeat the unbeatable Sorceress. Charlie, meanwhile, has been captured by the mysterious Sorceress who rules the Midnight Sea, which leaves Tress with no choice but to go rescue him. When the duke realizes the two teenagers are falling in love, he takes Charlie away to find a suitable wife-and returns with a different young man as his heir. Charlie is the son of the local duke, but he likes stories more than fencing. Tress is an ordinary girl with no thirst to see the world. A fantasy adventure with a sometimes-biting wit. ![]()
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6/12/2023 0 Comments John jakes north and south books![]() There was fiery rhetoric on both sides of the Mason/Dixon, and it was kind of scandalous for a Yankee and a Southron to be hanging out. ![]() ![]() Even prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War, tensions ran high between the North and the South. Their friendship isn’t without struggle though. Though Orry hails from a slave-owning plantation in South Carolina and George’s family owns an iron company in Pennsylvania, the two strike a fast friendship. Orry Main and George Hazard meet as cadets at West Point in the 1840s. (I love you, vacation days!) North and South begins a trilogy of books that tell the epic tale of the Mains and the Hazards. Family scandal and treachery will do that to you… As well as vacation days. ![]() Weighing in at 812 pages, I was shocked to get through it in less than a week. ![]() She was all, “Katie, it’s like if The Pillars of the Earth was set during the Civil War.” And I was all, “Ooooooh, that sounds wonderful.” Technically, I finished this after midnight on New Year’s Eve, so I’m going to say it counts as my first official read of 2014. My friend Lauren from Filing Jointly demanded that I read North and South by John Jakes. JanuKatie Words for Worms Civil War, Coming of Age, Historical Fiction 31 ![]() 6/12/2023 0 Comments To the Survivors by Robert Uttaro![]() ![]() ![]() Uttaro then asked the audience members to stand, listing a series of questions regarding their knowledge of people who have been sexually assaulted. If something makes you uncomfortable, take off.” ![]() “Sexual assault and rape is a very difficult conversation to have,” he said. Uttaro began by urging the audience to keep the atmosphere inviting and comfortable. The talk was the second installment in a newly introduced Speaker Series held by Sawyer Library, and featured Uttaro and a friend of his, Rebecca, whom he only referred to by first name and brought to share her personal story. As students slowly started filing in, he shook hands with everyone, introducing himself in his thick Boston accent and thanking them for attending his talk, “Voices Against Sexual Assault.” At the center of a semicircle of chairs on the ninth floor of 73 Tremont sat Suffolk alumnus and rape counselor Robert Uttaro, with legs crossed, gripping a coffee. ![]() 6/12/2023 0 Comments Young mungo book review![]() ![]() Their relationship is evocative and tender, and the dovecote becomes a sanctuary, and they dream of escaping Glasgow. The heart of this book is Mungo’s friendship with a local Catholic boy, James, who looks after pigeons. Sectarian violence plays a big part in the schemes. ![]() Also featuring in Mungo’s life is his psychopathic brother Hamish, leader of the local billy boys, who put me in mind of Begbie from transporting. It’s sister Jodie who mostly cares for him, a smart girl whowants away from Agnes, who she largely despises as a bad mother. ![]() Mungo lives in a tenement with his mother ‘mo maw’ (who he loves) and her drunken alter ego ‘Tattie-bogle,’ a shambolic and occasionally pathetic figure, some of whose drunken antics put me in mind of Agnes from Shuggie Bain. In many ways ‘Young Mungo’ feels like a sequel to the authors previous Booker prize winning title, as it picks up in the nineties, just where we left Shuggie. Perhaps he had mined so much of that setting that it would feel overly familiar. Before I started ‘Young Mungo’ I wondered if Douglas Stuart could use the same world as ‘ Shuggie Bain’ and make it feel like a different book. ![]() 6/12/2023 0 Comments Nathan frome![]() For so long people have been hiding mistakes, singers using auto tune to make them sound perfect, double tracking to make it sound bigger and using click to play in time. “The air movement from a bass drum, that same excitement you get when you perform, and that's exactly how I wanted the albums to feel. “Not only in rock but in Motown and even classical music they tracked everyone in the room at the same time,” adds Nathan. ![]() Nathan thought to himself, “Why are those classic albums so awesome?” He realised it was because “the musicians were recording in an organic way they could track it live and capture amazing energy." This is the music inspired by bands in the classic rock genre as diverse as Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Whitesnake, Bad Company, Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones, to name a few.įormed in February 2014, the band is fronted by Nathan James, who made a name for himself having sung for the multi-platinum selling Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and Scorpions guitar legend Uli Jon Roth. ![]() The same albums that have inspired generations of musicians and performers are noticeably evident when you listen to the first Inglorious album. Inglorious, a band with a mutual love and respect of the classics of Hard Rock music, big guitar riffs, and soulful vocals, with influences stemming from iconic rock and roll shrine of Rock albums from the 1970s – many years before band members were born. ![]() 6/11/2023 0 Comments The lynburn legacy![]() ![]() The key to it all just might be the boy in her head. Now Kami can see that the town she has known and loved all her life is hiding a multitude of secrets-and a murderer. ![]() The Lynburn family, who ruled the town a generation ago and who all left without warning, have returned. There has been screaming in the woods and the manor overlooking the town has lit up for the first time in 10 years. ![]() Her life seems to be in order, until disturbing events begin to occur. This has made her an outsider in the sleepy English town of Sorry-in-the-Vale, but she has learned ways to turn that to her advantage. Worlds apart.Kami Glass is in love with someone she's never met-a boy she's talked to in her head since she was born. Reviewers have praised the take-charge heroine and the spellbinding romance.Bound together. Annotation: A modern, magical twist on the Gothic Romance and Girl Detective genres, this book will appeal to fans of both Beautiful Creatures and the Mortal Instruments series. ![]() 6/11/2023 0 Comments Storm Cursed by Patricia Briggs![]() ![]() ![]() There was so much action squeezed into the book that the pacing and character development that I enjoyed so much in the previous books was pretty much missing. Patricia grew up reading fairy tales and books about horses, and later developed an interest in folklore and history. If Briggs attempted to show the affects of this (incredibly common) type of racism it did not come through, it just felt like a gross "racists can be good guys too" sort of moral. Patricia Briggs was born in Butte, Montana, to a children’s librarian who passed on to her kids a love of reading and books. Afterwards it is explained to Mercy that the officer is really a great guy with trauma cases and will hopefully be promoted out of the field soon. He reacts badly to Mercy's skin color and she backs him down, she is protected by her status in the community. The officer openly harrases the Hispanic community to the point were they are reluctant to call for help. ![]() There is a scene where Mercy has a run in with a racist local police officer that just made me cringe. Mercy is an Native American woman who is written by a White woman and it shows. I currently caught up with the series to get ready for this one and I started to notice some issues. ![]() ![]() ![]() It’s something you practice and almost at a daily basis if you’re going through a tough time and you’re going through things that keep reminding you of what happened. Thordis: Forgiveness is like a lifestyle. Q: Can you describe some of the bumps along the road to forgiving Tom? I can’t possibly know what another person’s heart is like or what they need to move on from something. And honestly, I think that’s impossible and arrogant at the same time. Thordis: I actually entirely reject that notion because that would imply that other people could decide for you what’s forgivable or not forgivable. I think it was Desmond Tutu the former Archbishop of South Africa, who said that if you are in a state of anger toward your perpetrator, it’s a form of being chained to them. ![]() But letting go of the past and cutting ties with your perpetrator, I think, is also very relevant. Thordis: For some people the anger itself and the distance is a form of healing. Q: What’s the role of anger in the forgiveness process? At the core of it, I see it as an act of self-healing. Thordis: it’s one of those incredibly personal concepts that I know looks different for each individual, but I would say that I feel it’s an emotional process that you only have so much control of. The following is a taste of my conversation with Thordis. If you like this podcast, please give us a review. ![]() 6/10/2023 0 Comments Obama by Pete Souza![]() ![]() They also reveal the spirit of the extraordinary man who became our President. Souza’s photographs, with the behind-the-scenes captions and stories that accompany them, communicate the pace and power of our nation’s highest office. Together they document the most consequential hours of the Presidency - including the historic image of President Obama and his advisors in the Situation Room during the bin Laden mission - alongside unguarded moments with the President’s family, his encounters with children, interactions with world leaders and cultural figures, and more. Obama: An Intimate Portrait reproduces more than 300 of Souza’s most iconic photographs with fine-art print quality in an oversize collectible format. Souza captured nearly two million photographs of President Obama, in moments highly classified and disarmingly candid. Relive the extraordinary Presidency of Barack Obama through White House photographer Pete Souza’s behind-the-scenes images and stories in this #1 New York Times bestseller - with a foreword from the President himself.ĭuring Barack Obama’s two terms, Pete Souza was with the President during more crucial moments than anyone else - and he photographed them all. ![]() 6/10/2023 0 Comments Paternus war of gods![]() ![]() While it took me a while to get used to the perspective, I found Paternus to be a swift-paced, fascinating story, written in vibrant prose. That said, I’ve never been accused of being fair. ![]() ![]() Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the gold standard in executing the latter brilliantly and since nothing quite compares to Douglas Adam’s masterpiece, it would be unfair to compare Paternus to it. Dipping into many characters’ thoughts in quick succession. From my personal preferences of fantasy fiction, two aspects, one after the other, dug Paternus into a deep hole: Third Person Present Tense. It sat in my queue a few weeks while I finished Orconomics and then Sufficiently Advanced Magic, and by the time I downloaded Paternus, I still knew nothing about it. Dyrk Ashton stepped up to the plate with Paternus, a title I’d heard lauded enough times that I couldn’t turn it down-that, despite having only guesses what it was about (a father figure, right? I know my Latin roots!). Likewise, Sigil offered ebooks, but I wielded the might of Fantasy-Faction’s name to ask for audiobooks. Offered a mini Hershey’s Bar, I would seize a handful of full-sized ones. When Sigil Independent offered me free books to review, I felt like a kid going out on Halloween. ![]() |