Reviews – Page 12 – Mia The Reader

The Best Book of The Summer: The Truth According to Us

Posted on July 6, 2015

I’m adding a new book to my Favorites Page today after finishing Annie Barrows’s latest work, The Truth According to Us. This is hands down the best book I’ve read this summer and possibly this whole year. Seriously, it was so good, I’m in a book hangover right now because I just can’t move on.

You may remember Annie Barrows from her co-authorship of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, another book I dearly love. The Truth According to Us is only similar in the strength of character and setting. Otherwise, it has a whole ‘nother feel and plot to it. In fact, it rings more of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help in style and is almost as compelling, if not equally so.

The Truth According to Us is set in the small factory town of Macedonia, West Virginia in 1939. Layla Beck, a fiesty socialite, falls out of her father’s good graces and finds herself in the Federal Writer’s Project with the job of writing the history of Macedonia. Beck gets much more than the back country, backwards society she bargained for when she lands a boarding room in the house of the Romeyn family. As the book progresses, it turns out that the Romeyn family is the true heart of the book. There are secrets upon secrets that shape this family, but this isn’t a soap opera story. It’s more like a classic family saga in which the characters seem to live and breathe in your mind and the story is wrenching and gripping even though it’s not your own and has nothing much to do with your life at all.

Under it all is this idea that history and the course our lives take is always based on what we believe is true. Though definitely not a morality story meant to drive home a particular point, I couldn’t help but think of how important it is to surround ourselves with truly trustworthy people. Trusting the wrong person can change everything about a person’s life. I can’t say too much more or I’ll give it all away! I think this is the type of book that will span many genres and reader preferences. Grab a copy and get reading!

Reviews

Why I Like BookBub

Posted on June 9, 2015

Today is my very first product review on the blog! It’s unofficial, because Bookbub didn’t actually ask me to review their service. But I want my fellow readers to know about it. If you have an e-reader, you can get some cheap prices on quality books by signing up for Bookbub. What’s not to love?

Bookbub is a daily email that sends subscribers a short list of e-books on sale for $2.99 or less. The list often includes free books, as well. When you sign up for the emails, you enter information on what kind of books you like and the emails you get on a daily basis reflect your preferences. For example, I love some 1940s fiction and today I was thrilled to find that Listening Valley, which I read and raved about a few months ago, is on sale today for $0.99. Woohoo! I buy a book from the Bookbub list every month or two. Other titles I’ve gotten for $0.99 include 100 Days of Real Food (still only $0.99 today!) and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Bookbub emails usually include sales on Amazon e-books for Kindles and Nook books.

Another similar service is called Rifle but I find the two services are pretty redundant, and Bookbub features the books I like more.

For those of you who are horrified by ebooks and think paper is the only way to read, I have to tell you that I feel you. I prefer real books, too! But as an avid reader, I just can’t ignore the beauty of instant books at my finger tips, and as a minimalist it is really nice to not have to actually store paper copies of books I may or may not want to keep forever. And then there’s the fact that I don’t have to pack a whole suitcase of books on vacation…these are just a few reasons I am a fan of my Nook. If you’re a ebook fan, too, definitely try out Bookbub for yourself!

Nonfiction, Reading, Reviews

Love Books: Read This, Not That

Posted on May 1, 2015

Any book worth its salt has some love in it. Friendship, romantic love, sacrificial love, usually self-love whether glorified or not…humans are made to love and they will love something or someone as a default. In the last week, the two books I read actually had “love” in the title, but they were as different as night and day.

The Look of Love by Sarah Jio is classified as literary fiction, but it’s really not. The only literary thing about it is the premise. It had potential, in an O’Henry kind of way, but it falls severely short of the mark of good literature. And it doesn’t make me happy to say that because I loved Jio’s The Violets of March and enjoyed several of her other books. The Look of Love isn’t anywhere close to Jio’s best work. The book’s main character, Jane, has a gift: she can see true love. She’s just figuring out that she has this gift at age 29, and she also learns that she has to identify the six forms of love before her 30th birthday or she will never find true love herself.

Here’s where you start thinking, “Wuv. Twue Wove.” (Books and movies come and go, but The Princess Bride never fails). The definition of true love and the six types of love Jane defines are not love. They are chemistry, lust, the kind of stuff from songs like “Hooked On A Feeling.” In Jio’s book. people can have love and then just fall out of it, find it somewhere else, and it’s all mystical and inexplicable. I understand that elements of romantic love are kind of inexplicable, but love has reasons and choices and true love is selfless.

Enter the next book of the week with love in the title: Love Does. Bob Goff writes in memoir style about the kind of love that has transformed his life. The whole idea is real love doesn’t just feel or talk but it does stuff. It is action. It is being with people or giving to people, believing in people and telling them you’re for them. Real, perfect love is loving like Jesus. Now, before you roll your eyes, make sure you’re thinking about Jesus here and not the people who claim to follow Him. I’ve been a Christian my whole life, met some amazing and incredibly loving followers of Jesus, but I’ve still never seen anyone come close to Jesus. No one can love the unlovable like Jesus. And we’re all unlovable in some way. But Goff tells stories with humor and intelligence and, his favorite word, “whimsy” about how he has experienced love in his life. For example, when he was in high school, he decided to drop out and move to Yosemite. He packed his car, headed out of town, but stopped by a mentor’s house on the way to say goodbye. And this mentor answered the door in the early morning, and a few minutes later, was in the car with Goff, going on his journey not as a chaperon or a parent figure, but a loving friend who still let Goff hold the reigns but said, “I’m with you, Bob.” These and other stories will blows to bits the love presented in pop culture. Love Does is a challenge to trade in the watered down sensation of love in our movies and books for love that is soul satisfying and deeply changing. This book is also just a plain fun read and if nothing else you will laugh (Thanks to my friend, Mary, for lending it to me!).

So if you’re looking for some summer book love, read this, not that. And feel free to chime in with the books you think give a good picture of real love.

Reading, Reviews, Saturday Cooking

Saturday Cooking, Banana Muffins Edition

Posted on March 14, 2015

After reading What Alice Forgot a few weeks ago, I decided to catch up on Liane Moriarty’s other books. I read Big Little Lies and The Husband’s Secret one after the other, but they both pale in comparison to What Alice Forgot and I don’t really recommend either of them. Moriarty knows how to set down a good plot and mix in some really great characters, but the language gets a lot rougher in her latest two books. There are some great themes that add some redeeming value to these books, like working hard on making a good marriage and eschewing busyness and the performance driven life, but usually the conclusions drawn by the end of the book don’t line up with my values. Good discussion can come of it, though I wouldn’t say that redeems it enough for me to recommend these books to friends.

Banana Muffins II Recipe But I would recommend something else from Moriarty and that is this: make some banana muffins. They are mentioned in every single book I’ve read by her, and especially focused on in What Alice Forgot as the pinnacle of comfort food. When I saw some nearly rotten bananas in my kitchen last week, I decided to make banana muffins without even realizing why I wanted to until later. But really, it’s perfect because it takes so much less time than banana bread, which is my go-to course of action when I have expiring bananas.

If you decide to make some, this is the recipe you should make. It is delicious. It’s not a low fat recipe, though, so you may want to make some tweaks if you’re going for a healthified muffin. I followed the recipe exactly except for changing out the white flour for whole wheat and leaving out the nuts because half of our family would rather starve than eat a walnut. I think next time I’ll use less sugar. And by next time, I mean tomorrow. They are so good. Maybe I’ll enjoy them with some fun mugs to make the treat even more delightful.

What’s cooking in your kitchen this Saturday?

Reviews, Uncategorized

What Alice Forgot

Posted on March 2, 2015

If ever there is a time when you need some good books to loose yourself in, it’s early March. Where I live, the month of March is a split personality that looks something like this:

On those days when Grumpy Bear shows up, you need a good book to get you through. That book for me in the last few days was What Alice Forgot. It’s a great winter read. I suspect it could also be an awesome beach read as well, judging by the fact that the library copy I had was all gritty and there was a Damaged Noted sticker on the inside of the book that read “Type of damage: sand in cover.” It was strangely comforting to think I was holding a piece of someone else’s warm, sandy, summer vacation while I was wrapped up in warm pajamas, a bathrobe, two blankets.

What Alice Forgot had my from the first page. I read it in 27 hours and sacrificed a good bit of sleep for it. The story goes like this:

Alice Love is twenty-nine, crazy about her husband, and pregnant with her first child.

So imagine Alice’s surprise when she comes to on the floor of a gym and is whisked off to the hospital where she discovers the honeymoon is truly over — she’s getting divorced, she has three kids and she’s actually 39 years old. Alice must reconstruct the events of a lost decade, and find out whether it’s possible to reconstruct her life at the same time. She has to figure out why her sister hardly talks to her, and how is it that she’s become one of those super skinny moms with really expensive clothes.

Ultimately, Alice must discover whether forgetting is a blessing or a curse, and whether it’s possible to start over. (from Goodreads.com)

That plot line may not sound like anything special, it’s been done before, but it’s handled really well by Liane Moriarty in this novel. I’m still thinking about it a week later. Maybe because I could relate so much to Alice. I’m 30, I’ve been married for nearly ten years, I’ve had three kids in the last six years, I keep thinking what would my 20-year-old self think if she woke up in my life?

The character development is great, and the novel manages to deal with some pretty hard stuff like marriage problems and infertility while maintaining a joyful undertone all throughout. I found Moriarty’s writing style to be insightful, humorous, and easy to like.

What books have been getting you through the cabin fever?