So Many Books, So Little Time

The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich This is one of my favorite books of the year.  Pevear and Volokhonsky (the best Russian translators!) have created a wonderful translation of Ms. Alexievich's amazing oral history.  The author interviewed Soviet women who fought in World War II and recorded their stories.  These stories were beautiful and heart-breaking and such an eye-opening look at the Soviet experience in World War II.  The translators did such a good job and making it seem as thought the book was written in English; it wasn't choppy or weird, it flowed exactly as it should.  I would highly encourage anyone interested in this part of history to read this book.  I will definitely be buying a copy for my home library.  5 stars. The Last Tudor by Philippa Gregory I have such a love/hate relationship with this author but I can't turn down a book on the Grey sisters.  I find them to be so fascinating!  Tha...

See Me For Who I Am edited by David Chrisinger I stumbled across this book when I was just messing around on Amazon and I am so glad that I found it.  I work in higher education and in my role, I'm working with more student veterans so this was a must read.  My brother is also an Iraq war vet so this hit close to home.  It was absolutely fascinating.  It is a book of essays written by student veterans in a first seminar course and the stories are so profound.  Some of the essays go into detail about deployments while others discuss reintegrating into civilian life and some are just about major moments in the student veterans' lives.  Each essay is very different as each veteran had a different experience during their time in the military.  I feel like I learned a lot from this book and I really think that it's a must read for anyone in higher ed and for anyone who is interested in the veteran experience. 5 stars. A Court of Thorns a...

  The Obsession by Nora Roberts I really like Nora Roberts; her books are a little cheesy but they're nice, light, fun reads.  However, this one didn't really do it for me.  It had a creepy mystery at the beginning but the story kind of fell flat from there.  The middle was slow and full of non-stop home renovation descriptions and the big mystery was SO obvious.  I figured it out at the very beginning and I never figure that kind of stuff out.  And it felt like I was watching an episode of Criminal Minds complete with the BAU agents (I love that show but it just made the big seem unoriginal).  I did love the characters and the setting; I really want to live in that town and have everyone be my friend.   3 stars. The Sound of Gravel by Ruth Wariner I have been wanting to read this book for a long time and I'm so glad I finally got around it to it.  It was riveting and heart-breaking and made me so mad all at the sa...

The Tsarina's Legacy by Jennifer Laam This book is the sequel to The Secret Daughter of the Tsar (which I really liked) and follows Veronica as she travels to Russia to claim the role as the heir to the Romanovs.  The story flashes back and forth between Veronica's story and the story of Grigory Potemkin who was one of Catherine the Great's lovers.  I really enjoyed the Potemkin story line; it was unique and intriguing.  The rest of the story was just okay; Veronica's story was slow and I had a hard time staying interested in what was happening to her.  I also found the past and present stories to be poorly connected so it almost seemed like they were two separate books.  3 stars. I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The Crown's Game by Evelyn Skye This was a fun read and I loved the combination of historical fiction and fantasy!  The magical aspects were neat and I really enjoyed the descriptions ...

From Goodreads:  At 8:46 am on September 11, 2001, 14,000 people were inside the twin towers-reading e-mails, making trades, eating croissants at Windows on the World. Over the next 102 minutes, each would become part of a drama for the ages, one witnessed only by the people who lived it-until now. Of the millions of words written about this wrenching day, most were told from the outside looking in. New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn have taken the opposite-and far more revealing-approach. Reported from the perspectives of those inside the towers, 102 Minutes captures the little-known stories of ordinary people who took extraordinary steps to save themselves and others. Beyond this stirring panorama stands investigative reporting of the first rank. An astounding number of people actually survived the plane impacts but were unable to escape, and the authors raise hard questions about building safety and tragic flaws in New York's emergency preparedn...

From Goodreads:  World War I and the Russian Revolution together shaped the twentieth century in profound ways. In The End of Tsarist Russia, acclaimed scholar Dominic Lieven connects for the first time the two events, providing both a history of the First World War’s origins from a Russian perspective and an international history of why the revolution happened. Based on exhaustive work in seven Russian archives as well as many non-Russian sources, Dominic Lieven’s work is about far more than just Russia. By placing the crisis of empire at its core, Lieven links World War I to the sweep of twentieth-century global history. He shows how contemporary hot issues such as the struggle for Ukraine were already crucial elements in the run-up to 1914. By incorporating into his book new approaches and comparisons, Lieven tells the story of war and revolution in a way that is truly original and thought-provoking. My Thoughts:  The End of Tsarist Russia is an incred...

Silver Shadows by Richelle Mead Okay, let me start by saying I really love this series and the Vampire Academy series.  I did enjoy this book but I don't think it was as good as the previous ones in the series.  I know the whole point of this books is to set the stage for the final book so I'm cutting it some slack.  The story was really slow for the first three quarters of the book and then it felt like a million things were shoved into the last bit of the book.  There were some big surprises that I was pretty excited about so that helped my opinion of it a lot.  Of course, there was a very crazy cliffhanger so now I have to read the last book!  Silver Shadows is definitely the weakest of the series but still a must-read for fans.  3 stars.   You'd Be So Pretty If...Teaching Our Daughters to Love Their Bodies-Even When We Don't Love Our Own by Dara Chadwick I have had a lot of body issues over the years and I'm terrified of p...

From Goodreads:  Although parenting approaches change, attitudes about only children remain stuck in the past. The negative stereotypes lonely, selfish, bossy, spoiled, socially maladjusted make parents think their child will be at a disadvantage when compared to those who grow up with siblings. The Case for the Only Child debunks the myths, taking into account the many chang-es the nuclear family has experienced in the face of two-family incomes, women who have children later, and the economic reality of raising children in our modern world. Combining often-surprising findings with real-life stories, compassionate in-sight, and thought-provoking questions, Dr. Susan Newman provides a guide to help you decide for yourself how to best plan your family and raise a single child. My Thoughts: I saw this book on a blog a few years ago before I had Julia and thought it sounded intriguing.  Since the hubs and I are considering being 'one and done', I thought it might b...

Synopsis:   Why does it seem that the marriages of so many monarchs are often made in hell? And yet we can’t stop reading about them! To satisfy your schadenfreude, INGLORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES offers a panoply of the most spectacular mismatches in five hundred years of royal history….some of which are mentioned below. When her monkish husband, England’s Lancastrian Henry VI, became completely catatonic, the unpopular French-born Margaret of Anjou led his army against the troops of their enemy, the Duke of York. Margaret Tudor, her niece Mary I, and Catherine of Braganza were desperately in love with chronically unfaithful husbands—but at least they weren’t murdered by them, as were two of the Medici princesses. King Charles II’s beautiful, high-spirited sister “Minette” wed Louis XIV’s younger brother, who wore more makeup and perfume than she did. Compelled by her mother to wed her boring, jug-eared cousin Ferdinand, Marie of Roumania—a granddaughter of Queen Vic...

From Goodreads:  Welcome to the world of collapsing Communism. It is the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall when people are still willing to risk all to cross the Iron Curtain to the West. In this adventure-packed memoir Susan Viets, a student turned journalist, arrives in Communist Hungary in 1988 and begins reporting for the Guardian, not at all prepared for what lies ahead. She helps East Germans escape to the West at a picnic, moves to the Soviet Union where she battles authorities for accreditation as the first foreign journalist in Ukraine and then watches, amazed, as the entire political system collapses. Lured by new travel opportunities, Viets shops her way across Central Asia, stumbling into a tank attack in Tajikistan and the start of the Tajik civil war. "Picnic at the Iron Curtain" shows every day people at the centre of dramatic events from Budapest to Bishkek and Chernobyl to Chechnya. It is a memoir that spans a period of momentous historical...

From Goodreads:  In this delightful and very personal book, the four oldest Duggar girls share their hearts and their core beliefs, explaining that it's all about relationships! Relationship with self: The girls share their own personal journeys to self-acceptance and navigating the difficult stage of adolescence. Relationship with parents: You'll find revelations about how Jim Bob and Michelle keep the lines of communication open with their children. Relationships with siblings: Here, you'll get a peek into the Buddy system, how the siblings handle conflict, and how the loss of little Jubilee (their sister) affected their relationships with each other. Relationships with friends: You'll find principles on how the Duggar kids deal with peer pressure and how they interact with friends outside their family. Relationships with boys: You'll learn the Duggar view of dating and courtship, and these four sisters will address the often-asked question o...

From Goodreads:  Many are familiar with the story of the much-married King Henry VIII of England and the celebrated reign of his daughter, Elizabeth I. But it is often forgotten that the life of the first Tudor queen, Elizabeth of York, Henry’s mother and Elizabeth’s grandmother, spanned one of England’s most dramatic and perilous periods. Now New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed historian Alison Weir presents the first modern biography of this extraordinary woman, whose very existence united the realm and ensured the survival of the Plantagenet bloodline. My Thoughts:  Let me preface this by saying, I love Alison Weir and will read anything she writes.  However, I struggled to get through this book.  I think Elizabeth of York is a fascinating historical figure so I was really hoping for an enjoyable read but I got a kind of dry, slow read instead.  This definitely wasn't one of those works of non-fiction that read as easily as fiction doe...

    Synopsis:  From an early age, Margaret Fuller dazzled New England’s intelligent elite. Her famous Conversations changed women’s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimed The Peabody Sisters “discovered” three fascinating women, has done it again: no biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving. Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeley’s offer to be the New York Tribune’s front-page columnist. The move unleashed a crusading concern for the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes, and a hunger for passionate experience. In Italy as a foreign correspondent, Fuller took a secret lover; wrote dispatches on the brutal 1849 Siege of Rome; and gave birth to a son. When all three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island shortly after Fuller’s 40th birthday, the sense and passion of her life’s work wer...

From Goodreads: In 1911 two wealthy British heiresses, Claire and Dora Williamson, came to a sanitorium in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to undergo the revolutionary “fasting treatment” of Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard. It was supposed to be a holiday for the two sisters. But within a month of arriving at what the locals called Starvation Heights, the women were emaciated shadows of their former selves, waiting for death. They were not the first victims of Linda Hazzard, a quack doctor of extraordinary evil and greed who would stop at nothing short of murder to achieve her ambitions. As their jewelry disappeared and forged bank drafts began transferring their wealth to Hazzard’s accounts, Dora Williamson sent a last desperate plea to a friend in Australia, begging her to save them from the brutal treatments and lonely isolation of Starvation Heights. My Thoughts:  I found this book by accident at Half Price Books about a year ago and finally got around to readin...

F rom Goodreads:  ... In this completely original book, acclaimed author Sarah Gristwood sheds light on a neglected dimension of English history: the impact of Tudor women on the Wars of the Roses. She examines Cecily Neville, the wife of Richard Duke of York, who was deprived of being queen when her husband died at the Battle of Wakefield; Elizabeth Woodville, a widow with several children who married Edward IV in secret and was crowned queen consort; Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, whose ambitions centred on her son and whose persuasions are likely to have lead her husband Lord Stanley, previously allied with the Yorkists, to play his part in Henry's victory. Until now, the lives of these women have remained little known to the general public. Sarah Gristwood tells their stories in detail for the first time. Captivating and original, this is historical writing of the most important kind. My Thoughts:  I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest r...

From Goodreads:  In many ways, the Browns are like any other middle-American family. They eat, play, and pray together, squabble and hug, striving to raise happy, well-adjusted children while keeping their relationship loving and strong. The difference is, there are five adults in the openly polygamous Brown marriage—Kody and his four wives—who among them have seventeen children. Since TLC first launched its popular reality program Sister Wives, the Browns have become one of the most famous families in the country. Now Kody, Meri, Janelle, Christine, and Robyn reveal in their own words exactly how their special relationship works—the love and faith that drew them together, the plusses and pitfalls of having sister wives, and the practical and emotional complications of a lifestyle viewed by many with distrust, prejudice, even fear. With the candor and frankness that have drawn millions to their show, they talk about what makes their fascinating family work, addressing the top...