Your Roots Are Showing

By Elisa Chidley

Published By 5 Spot

Paperback: 384 pages

Buy it at Amazon for $11.19

Reviewed by Cricket

Just reading the back cover of this book had me sympathizing with it's leading lady Lizzie Buckley. I can certainly relate to that overwhlemed feeling of life after baby. Even with a great husband and nice home. Healthy children and a lifestyle most would envy, Lizzie feels frustrated and depressed. She sends an email venting her frustrations that inadvertantly gets read by her husband James and sets her life on a truly different course. (If you are like me and share a family email it will make you more diligent to delete sent messages!)

Lizzie finds herself moving out of her country estate into a small and less than perfect cottage, complete with a raggedy garden and no conveniences of the home to which she was accustomed. The transition in her physical surroundings are similar to the transition she is going through inside. In an effort to rediscover the part of her that was missing she explores new interests like gardening, running and writing. A very true-to-life tale of what happens when happily-ever-after doesn't turn out that way, Lizzie Buckley faces what many women face and comes up strong.

In dealing with an unexpected crisis with her sister, Lizzie must go out of town to be by her side and needs to leave her twins with her soon to be ex-husband James. Upon dropping them off, she sees that his assistant and new girlfriend is with him. In a scene that friends of mine have to deal with in real life, Lizzie must tell James not to "have any woman stay over" while the children are there. I could feel the nervousness Lizzie felt as she had to approach a tense subject with James.

This is a good romance and heartfelt effort at real life issues like postpartum depression, divorce and life after marriage. A good choice for a summer read or if you need to escape into your own garden cottage!

 7 Binkies!

Liza Palmer

REVIEWED BY CPA MOM

Conversations with the Fat Girl

List Price: $12.95

Paperback: 328 pages

Publisher: 5 Spot (September 13, 2005)

Publisher Comments: In this witty debut, 27-year-old Maggie learns that sometimes a person does outgrow her favorite pair of old jeans and her oldest, thin-by-gastric-bypass-surgery friend.

From Publishers Weekly: Palmer debuts with the latest sprightly entry in the ever-expanding category of light romantic comedies starring plus-sized heroines. Maggie has been best friends with fellow fat girl Olivia since they were 12. Following gastric bypass surgery at 22, however, Olivia grows increasingly unrecognizable. Now 27, she's engaged to Adam, a fat-phobic Ken doll, and although Maggie is to be the maid of honor, she feels less and less a part of Olivia's skinny new life. After Olivia disappoints her old friend again and again, Maggie sets in motion a long-overdue and explosive confrontation and walks into the arms of the colleague—busboy to her barista—whom she's had a crush on for ages. By that time, in true chick-lit style, Maggie is both earnestly at work improving herself and being loved for her true, unimproved self. And though Palmer doesn't moralize, it's when Maggie starts to make her own, more realistic wishes come true—by taking a better job and signing up with a trainer instead of a surgeon—that she sees her love requited. It turns out her instincts were good—as are Palmer's.

 Seeing Me Naked

List Price: $13.99

Paperback: 320 pages

Publisher: 5 Spot (January 8, 2008)

Back cover: Elisabeth Page has big shoes to fill. She's the daughter of living legend novelist Ben Page, and the sister of literary wunderkind Rascal Page, and her career as a pastry chef is decidedly not up to her family's snooty standards-even if she works at the hottest restaurant in L.A. Elisabeth hopes no one will notice that her five-year plan to run her own patisserie has morphed into an eleven-year plan to nowhere. Her personal life is also frozen in time: she's still involved with her family-approved childhood sweetheart, a journalist whose constant jaunts leave her lonely. Enter an exciting career opportunity and even more terrifying, Daniel Sullivan, a beer-drinking basketball coach who is everything her family is not. Addicted to control and bred to criticize, can Elisabeth finally embrace happiness? Only if she has the guts to let others see her naked…and let them love her, warts and all. (read excerpt from chapter one here)

My take: What can I tell you about these books? I am not a professional book reviewer. I don't write things like "consider it haute chick lit; Palmer's prose is sharp, her characters are solid and her narrative is laced with moments of graceful sentiment" (from a review of Seeing Me Naked by Publishers Weekly). To be honest, I'm not even sure what that means and I have two college degrees! So for these books, I'm going to take the advice of the ab-fab founders of Mother-Talk who I've done some book reviews for - their guidelines for book reviews says: "we don’t want reviews that sound professional or worthy of the New York Times. We’re just a bunch of moms talking to other moms — that’s why we’re called “MotherTalk”!".

I just really liked reading Ms. Palmer's books. Why? Mainly because I could relate to the characters. Now I may be staring 40 in the face these days but I still remember what it's like to be in my 20's with all the accompanying angst about live, love and career. About trying to live up to impossibly high paternal expectations like Elisabeth in Seeing Me Naked (and being just as anal as she is). And Maggie from Conversations with the Fat Girl, well, let's just say I've been "the fat girl" my entire life. Ms. Palmer is such a gifted writer that I felt like she popped inside my head from those early days of adulthood and then wrote books about it. Her characters are very honest and real - I found myself really caring about what happened next while reading and not wanting to put the books down. Do I recommend them? Hell YES! And I can't wait for her next book either. 5 out of 5 binkies.

About the Author: Liza Palmer was born and bred in Pasadena, California. After dropping out of college, she held every degrading job imaginable until she finally realized the only talent she had was writing. Her debut novel, Conversations with the Fat Girl, launched Warner's 5Spot line in September, 2005 and went on to become an international bestseller. Conversations with the Fat Girl has also recently been optioned by HBO for a series. Her second novel, Seeing Me Naked, was released in January, 2008 in the US and April, 2008 in the UK. Her latest novel, A Field Guide to Burying Your Parents, will be published in 2009.

A Tale Out of Luck

Reviewed by Cricket Hater

"A Tale Out of Luck"

By Willie Nelson with Mike Blakely

Hardcover: 256 pages

Publisher: Center Street

Buy at Amazon: $14.95

I reviewed this book in tribute to my Dad who recentlypassed away and who was a big Willie Nelson fan. (And there are many!) Affectionately called "Uncle Willie" in our household since we share the same last name (My maiden name, but no real relation) my Dad loved to listen to his music.

A natural storyteller through his lyrics, Nelson took a not so surprising turn into literatre and stayed true to his Country Western roots in this tale of cowboys and indians, muder and suspense.

From Publishers Weekly
Country music legend Nelson and novelist Blakely (Come Sundown) collaborate for this predictable western. When a rustler's body turns up on the open range outside Luck, Tex., with ghost arrows embedded in his chest, local rancher and retired Texas Ranger Hank Tomlinson's past returns to haunt him. Years earlier, three Rangers were killed by similar arrows, and many suspected Tomlinson at the time. News of the rustler's murder brings the son of one of the late Rangers, now a state police investigator, to Luck with an eye to avenging his father's death. Staying one step ahead of the law, Tomlinson races to solve the mystery and cheat the hangman. There's a wagonload of subplots (an Indian war, a prized mare's disappearance, an orphan searching out his parents, a barmaid's love story), and while rookie novelist Nelson and veteran Blakely write convincingly of the Old West, the plotting is cumbersome, the characters familiar and the dialogue strained. Nelson's legions of fans probably won't mind, though.

 I'm not really a western fan and parts of this were not so great. It was a little slow for me but the combination of Commanche Indians and Kentucky Horses is a great tribute to this adored folk spinner who has kept his fans satisfied with similar stories for decades.

If you like Uncle Willie...you'll like "A Tale Out Of Luck".

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

"An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination"

by Elizabeth McCracken

Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

Pub. Date: September 2008

184 pages

Reviewed by Cricket Hater

A memoir is personal. A personal recollection of an event or occasion, written down for all the world to see. Like opening up your journal pages to let everyone read your mind. Elizabeth McCracken chooses to write this memoir about a painful, personal loss and shares it with the world in this touching book.

From the opening sentence you immediately like McCracken's wit as a writer and then embrace her sorrow as she shares the painful experience of losing her first born child whom she had to deliver still born in the ninth month of pregnancy.

From Amazon:

"This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending," writes Elizabeth McCracken in her powerful, inspiring memoir. A prize-winning, successful novelist in her 30s, McCracken was happy to be an itinerant writer and self-proclaimed spinster. But suddenly she fell in love, got married, and two years ago was living in a remote part of France, working on her novel, and waiting for the birth of her first child.
This book is about what happened next. In her ninth month of pregnancy, she learned that her baby boy had died. How do you deal with and recover from this kind of loss? Of course you don't--but you go on. And if you have ever experienced loss or love someone who has, the company of this remarkable book will help you go on.
With humor and warmth and unfailing generosity, McCracken considers the nature of love and grief. She opens her heart and leaves all of ours the richer for it."

From Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon ) "In AN EXACT REPLICA OF A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION, Elizabeth McCracken does not howl out her loss. She is devastatingly calm and in this matches measure for measure her own fine writing. By the end of this memoir you will have held a beautiful child in your hands and you will have acknowledged him. This book is an extraordinary gift to us all."

In writing this review a comment I found from Mark Doty, author of Dog Years, sums up the feelings of this book so well..."A child dies in this book: a baby,'" Elizabeth McCracken tell us early on, so that we we might not hope too much, as she has, for the beautiful child who would grace her life. Alert to every nuance of feeling, McCracken writes with such clarity and immediacy that we hope anyway. 'It's a happy life,' she says, 'and someone is missing.' That these statements can both be true is the mark of great emotional maturity, and of a writer who rises to the human complexity of grief with all her powers, and all her heart."

Somehow she makes it o.k. to move onto happiness and hold onto sadness, just in the distances of our minds. It's o.k. to be happy and still have that dull ache of loss from time to time.

I love what she says when talking about caring for her son Gus, "Every piece of hope was tinged with sadness; every moment of relief was lit on the edges with worry." I can feel what she is saying because for different reasons than hers, I feel it too. This is a profound little piece of a personal pain that in it's own unique way left me feeling hope.

Bravo!

The Incomparable Megan Crane

Frenemies

List Price: $13.99 Paperback: 304 pages Publisher: 5 Spot (June 20, 2007)

Just a few months shy of her 30th birthday, Gus Curtis finally feels like she has it all: a strong career, great friends, and a wonderful boyfriend. But all of this comes crashing down when Gus discovers Nate, her "Mr. Right," hooking up behind her back with her so-called "friend" Helen. Soon it seems like the life Gus has worked to make so adult looks a lot like the one she already had as a teenager, and Gus is left with more questions than answers: Can she win Nate back before she turns 30 alone? (And if so, does she really want him?) Is Helen really as devious and manipulative as she seems, or, worse, is Gus more like her frenemy than she ever imagined? And is she ever going to grow up? With the clock ticking down to her birthday, Gus discovers that sometimes the best thing about best-laid plans is trashing them altogether.

Everyone Else's Girl List Price: $12.95 Paperback: 264 pages Publisher: 5 Spot (October 21, 2005)

Meredith McKay has gone to a lot of trouble to create the picture-perfect life for herself—far away from her troublesome family, thank you. When her father's car accident forces her back to her hometown, however, she soon discovers that there's no running away from family issues—there's only delaying the inevitable. Can anyone sort out a lifetime of family drama in one hot summer? Throw in a hot guy from back in high school with an axe to grind, a best-friend turned enemy turned soon-to-be-sister-in-law, and, of course, the sometimes irritating/sometimes delightful members of her own family, and Meredith is on her way to figuring out that sometimes a little trip through the past is the best way to move forward.

Names My Sisters Call Me List Price: $13.99 Paperback: 336 pages Publisher: 5 Spot (April 11, 2008)

Courtney, Norah and Raine Cassel are about as different as three sisters can get. Norah, the oldest, is a typical Type A obsessive who believes there is a right way and a wrong way to do everything. She maintains a constantly-updated spreadsheet of slights and alliances, and six years later has not forgiven Raine, their middle sister, for ruining her wedding day. Raine is Norah’s opposite – wild child, performance artist, follow-your-bliss hippie chick who fled to California after the wedding fiasco. The only thing the two sisters have in common is their ability to drive Courtney, their youngest sister, crazy. When Courtney’s long time boyfriend proposes, she decides it’s finally time to call a family truce and bring the three sisters together. After all, they’re all grown ups now, right? But it turns out that family ghosts aren’t easily vanquished, and neither are first loves. Reconnecting the sisters also means re-examining every choice Courtney has made in the last six years, right down to the man she’s about to marry.

"Chick lit" is defined by Wikipedia as "a term used to denote genre fiction within women's fiction written for and marketed to young women, especially single, working women in their twenties and thirties." Under that definition, I definitely do NOT qualify for the target audience for Chick Lit as I am not single and I'm closer to 40 than 20 or 30! However, I'm not a big fan of slapping some label on a good book either - good literature can be enjoyed by a wide spectrum audience. So don't be put off by the Chick Lit label often put on Megan Crane's prose...you'd definitely be missing out on some good reads!

I was sent all three of the above books to read and began with Names My Sisters Call Me because the core issue of the book - sisterly discord - is something I can definitely relate to. I found myself riveted to each page, seeking answers for my own dysfunctional sister relationship. Alas, the solution was not to be found within the pages of this engaging novel but it was an excellent read. Same for Frenemies (who needs enemies with friends like that, right?!) - so well written I seriously wanted to reach in and bitch slap that Helen, she was so real to me! And in Everyone Else's Girl, I wanted to shake some sense into Meredith quite often...and it got me to thinking just how much like Meredith I really am...that's probably why she infuriated me so...ha! Anyway, I can highly recommend ANY of these books and can't wait to get my hands on Ms. Crane's first novel, "English as a Second Language." Read them for yourself and find out what I'm talking about!

 5 out of 5 binkies.

 Bonus: read excerpts from all three of these books, and Megan Crane's premier novel "English as a Second Language" here!

About the Author: Megan Crane is a New Jersey native who had great plans to star on Broadway, preferably in Evita, just like Patti LuPone. Sadly, her inability to wow audiences with her singing voice required a back up plan. Accordingly, she graduated from Vassar College and got her MA and PhD in literature from the University of York in England. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on AIDS literature, mostly so she could wallow in her obsession with the remarkable multi-media artist David Wojnarowicz and her idol, the bitter and hilarious David Feinberg. After many years in the rain and subject to the whim of seasons, she followed the sun to Los Angeles, where she lives with a dog, a cat, two crazy kittens, and an artist named Jeff. She is still plotting her Broadway debut.