At the Movies - The Gift (2015)

The Gift

August - 2015

STX Entertainment

In the mood for an edge of your seat thriller in a nice air conditioned theatre this summer? If so you MUST try The Gift.  It's a terrific psychological thriller that we both enjoyed a lot. Jason Bateman (Simon), Joel Edgerton (Gordo) and Rebecca Hall (Robyn). Joel Edgerton, wrote, directed and starred in the movie and he was terrific.

In this movie Simon and Robyn are a young married couple who just moved from Chicago to California,  One day soon after purchasing their new home, the couple is out shopping when an old classmate of Simon's from high school recognizes him and takes the time to stop and reintroduce himself. Simon says he does not remember him, but Gordo is persistent, and it isn't the last the couple will see of him.

This movie has it all: great cast, terrific story and unexpected twists. It kept us guessing and on the edge of our seats throughout. It's one of those stories that will make you wonder about how well we know the people we think we know.

SEE IT!! 

Trapped: A Whale's Rescue; Robert Burleigh and Wendell Minor

Trapped: A Whale's Rescue

Robert Burleigh and Wendell Minor

Charlesbridge Publishing - 2015

Trapped: A Whale's Rescue, is based on a true event which occurred in the icy waters near San Francisco on December 11, 2005.

After a crabber's fishing net was left in the waters of the Pacific ocean, a humpback whale, swimming and feeding on krill became wrapped in the large nets. The ropes were cutting into her mouth and wrapped around her fins making it impossible for her to swim free and breathe normally.

Despite the fact that mammals such as these can be unpredictable when they feel threatened or frightened, a team of rescuers and divers worked tirelessly to free the frightened whale.  More than 20 ropes were wrapped around the frightened whale.  When all was said and done, no divers were injured and before the freed whale swam off, she circled the divers and gently nudged each one as if to show her appreciation.

I really enjoyed this story and felt it would make a great addition to school and public library collections. The painting-like illustrations seem to come alive on each page so that you can almost feel the leathery skin of the whale. The illustrations help to show just how scared the whale must have been when the nets restricted her ability to swim and even breathe.

In the back of the book there is lots of interesting information on the humpback whale --for example, the humpback has lungs the size of a small car; females weigh around 50 tons; life span 40-50 years and the heart weighs 400+pounds.

5/5 stars
(sent by illustrator)

Max the Brave; Ed Vere

Max the Brave; Ed Vere

Sourcebooks - Jabberwocky 

Sept-2015

Max is one brave kitty. People think he is cute and some try to pretty him up with bows etc, but Max is determined to show how brave and to prove what a great mouse hunter he is....if only he know what a mouse looked like!

At the turn of each page we see Max mistake birds for mice and even wonders whether an elephant might be a mouse.  When he encounters finally encounters a real mouse, the mouse tells him he is a monster and sends him off on his way in the direction of a real monster who is fast asleep.  Max quickly learns that chasing and catching mice isn't all that much fun and can even prove dangerous, but fortunately all works out well in the end.

Simple, but bold drawings on brightly colored pages and just the right amount of fun text for young children make this book a fun read.  The cat & mouse hunt is a style that is fun to read again and again to small children.

4.5/5 stars
(review copy)

Coming Soon to a Book Store Near You; The Hand That Feeds You; A.J. Rich

Here's a book that just got added to my wish list. It sounds deliciously creepy to me, and I think cover adds even more of a creep factor.  It was released last month here in the US.

The Hand That Feeds You; A.J. Rich

Simon & Schuster - July - 2015

(Description) ----From celebrated authors Amy Hempel and Jill Ciment writing as A.J. Rich, a smart, thrilling, sexy, and emotionally riveting novel of psychological suspense about an accomplished woman involved with a man who proves to be an imposter.

Morgan Prager, at age thirty, is completing her thesis on victim psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. She is newly engaged to Bennett, a seductive but possessive and secretive man. She returns from class one day to find Bennett mauled to death, and her dogs—a Great Pyrenees and two pit bulls she has rescued—covered in blood. Bewildered and devastated that her dogs could have committed such violence, she worries that she might suffer from one of the syndromes she studies: pathological altruism, when selfless acts do more damage than good.

When Morgan tries to locate Bennett’s parents to tell them about their son’s hideous death, she discovers he was not the man he said he was. Everything he has told her—where he was born, where he lives and works—was a lie. In fact, he has several fiancées, and fits the clinical definition of a sociopath. And then, one by one, these other women are murdered. Suddenly Morgan’s research into Bennett takes on the urgency of survival: to stay alive, she must find out who is killing the women Bennett was closest to.

Unsettling and highly suspenseful, this is a brilliant collaboration between two outstanding writers.

What I Remember Most; Cathy Lamb

What I Remember Most; Cathy Lamb

Kensington - 2014

What I Remember Most was a terrific story and one that kept me wondering as I eagerly turned each page.  Part mystery, part contemporary fiction, the only thing that the reader knows for sure is that the protagonist, Grenadine Scotch Wild, had a horrible childhood and as an adult her life is still unsettled.

Something happened to both of Grenadine's parents when she was only six years old, She became lost in a failed foster care system with numerous placements -- some more horrible than the one before. The one comfort through all her turmoil was her love and talent for art. As an adult she married a user who implicated her in a white-collar scheme.  With bank accounts frozen, she flees a comfortable lifestyle with just a few hundred dollars and her car full of clothes and a few personal items, desperate to start a new life even if it means living in her car for a while.

As the story progresses the reader learns pieces of her past through DCYF case worker reports, and also more about her marriage and her reasons for fleeing.  There is also brief references to some crazed individual who writes short, disturbing nursery rhymes. Grenadine is such a well developed character. She is a strong woman who was easy to root for based on her resilience and what she had been through. Even the minor characters in this novel were interesting.

At first I thought the cover did not seem to fit the story, but as I read and saw how important painting and drawing was to the protagonist's life, it made perfect sense.  This book is definitely worth reading, if you don't mind a little sadness your fiction, especially when you read some of the case worker's notes.  I liked how the story came together at the end as well.

4.5/5 stars

(kindle purchase)

A few quotes I jotted down ---

• "We laughed the type of laugh you laugh when you want to cry and fear has its claws in you and is pulling you down but your keeping your chin up and holding it together because if you don't, you'll be flat wiped out."
• "It was one of those moments in life where you have to stop. You have to put aside the problems, all the stress, all the worries, and be in the moment.  Be happy. Be grateful. Be glad to be alive."
• "You don't know how much you need a mother nagging over you until you don't have it."

First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros - Smoke Get's in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory; Caitlin Doughty

Every Tuesday I host First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros where I share the first paragraph sometimes two from a book I am reading or thinking about reading soon.  Here's my pick for this week, I've already started this one and the writing is terrific.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

Caitlin Doughty - W.W. Norton 2014

Shaving Byron

"A girl always remembers the first corpse she shaves.  It is the only event in her life more awkward than her first kiss or the loss of her virginity.  The hands of time will never move quite so slowly as when you are standing over the dead body of an elderly man with a pink plastic razor in your hand."

What do you think -- keep reading or pass?  (I'm at the 30% mark and so far this book is fantastic.)

(Feel free to join in this week by posting your intro  link below)

Sunday Blatherings and New Books

 This past week has been super busy with not much time for reading.  We spent time in Saratoga, NY. My husband at one time was involved in the racing industry and has always wanted to check out this racetrack which is only open about (7) weeks each year.  The area is beautiful and the weather was gorgeous. It was a wonderful place for a people-watcher like me to have plenty of entertainment, even though I'm not really into horse racing.

The rest of the week was spent with lots of outdoor activity since the humidity was way down, time with all 3 granddaughters, and lunch with friends that we haven't seen in (6) months. It was a great week.  I can't believe you use to work 35 hours a week (1) month ago.

Books (current reads) - I have (3) books going, but as I mentioned I wasn't able to get much reading done.  Reading -- Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory; Caitlin Doughy (NF) excellent; What I Remember Most; Cathy Lamb so good -- and The Sunken Cathedral; Kate Walbert -- just okay.

(new books that arrived by mail last week & a description of each)

• The Beautiful Bureaucrat; Helen Phillips - (sent by Henry Holt & Co) --

A young wife's new job pits her against the unfeeling machinations of the universe in this dazzling first novel Ursula K. Le Guin hails as "funny, sad, scary, beautiful. I love it."

• In a windowless building in a remote part of town, the newly employed Josephine inputs an endless string of numbers into something known only as The Database. After a long period of joblessness, she's not inclined to question her fortune, but as the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings-the office's scarred pinkish walls take on a living quality, the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls. When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread.
  As other strange events build to a crescendo, the haunting truth about Josephine's work begins to take shape in her mind, even as something powerful is gathering its own form within her. She realizes that in order to save those she holds most dear, she must penetrate an institution whose tentacles seem to extend to every corner of the city and beyond. Both chilling and poignant, The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a novel of rare restraint and imagination. With it, Helen Phillips enters the company of Murakami, Bender, and Atwood as she twists the world we know and shows it back to us full of meaning and wonder-luminous and new.
• Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking); Christian Rudder (Crown) sent by Paperback Swap member  -----An audacious, irreverent investigation of human behavior—and a first look at a revolution in the making
   
  Our personal data has been used to spy on us, hire and fire us, and sell us stuff we don’t need. InDataclysm, Christian Rudder uses it to show us who we truly are. 
   
  For centuries, we’ve relied on polling or small-scale lab experiments to study human behavior. Today, a new approach is possible. As we live more of our lives online, researchers can finally observe us directly, in vast numbers, and without filters. Data scientists have become the new demographers.
   
  In this daring and original book, Rudder explains how Facebook "likes" can predict, with surprising accuracy, a person’s sexual orientation and even intelligence; how attractive women receive exponentially more interview requests; and why you must have haters to be hot. He charts the rise and fall of America’s most reviled word through Google Search and examines the new dynamics of collaborative rage on Twitter. He shows how people express themselves, both privately and publicly. What is the least Asian thing you can say? Do people bathe more in Vermont or New Jersey? What do black women think about Simon & Garfunkel? (Hint: they don’t think about Simon & Garfunkel.) Rudder also traces human migration over time, showing how groups of people move from certain small towns to the same big cities across the globe. And he grapples with the challenge of maintaining privacy in a world where these explorations are possible.
   
  Visually arresting and full of wit and insight, Dataclysm is a new way of seeing ourselves—a brilliant alchemy, in which math is made human and numbers become the narrative of our time.
• Autobiography of a Corpse; S. Krzhizhanovsky (NYRB Classics-purchase) ---An NYRB Classics Original
  
  The stakes are wildly high in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s fantastic and blackly comic philosophical fables, which abound in nested narratives and wild paradoxes. This new collection of eleven mind-bending and spellbinding tales includes some of Krzhizhanovsky’s most dazzling conceits: a provincial journalist who moves to Moscow finds his existence consumed by the autobiography of his room’s previous occupant; the fingers of a celebrated pianist’s right hand run away to spend a night alone on the city streets; a man’s lifelong quest to bite his own elbow inspires both a hugely popular circus act and a new refutation of Kant. Ordinary reality cracks open before our eyes in the pages of Autobiography of a Corpse, and the extraordinary spills out.
• Becoming Ellen; Shari Shattuck --(sent by G.P Putnam & Sons) ---Returning in the bestselling tradition of Jennifer Weiner, Shattuck brilliantly illustrates the deep friendship between two absolutely unforgettable women in this touching yet funny novel.
  
  Ellen Homes is done being invisible. Well, sort of. 
   
  Living with her closest friends, Temerity and Justice, has helped her step out of the shell of invisibility she once hid away in. She still seeks refuge in solitary time and observing from afar, but she has pushed herself to open up to others in ways that bring her unexpected happiness.
   
  But when a terrible bus crash upends her normal routine, Ellen finds herself on a whirlwind crusade for the unseen and downtrodden. Only this time, helping others—including two young children with no one else to turn to—will mean facing a pain from her past that she’s long tucked away.
   
  Picking up where Invisible Ellen left off, Becoming Ellen returns us to the touching, poignant, and compassionate world of Ellen Homes as she learns how to navigate the world she has decided to become a part of.
• All That Followed; Gabriel Urza -- (sent by Henry Holt & Co.)  ----A psychologically twisting novel about a politically-charged act of violence that echoes through a small Spanish town; a dazzling debut in the tradition of Daniel Alarcón and Mohsin Hamid
  It's 2004 in Muriga, a quiet town in Spain's northern Basque Country, a place with more secrets than inhabitants. Five years have passed since the kidnapping and murder of a young local politician--a family man and father--and the town's rhythms have almost returned to normal. But in the aftermath of the Atocha train bombings in Madrid, an act of terrorism that rocked a nation and a world, the townspeople want a reckoning of Muriga's own troubled past: Everyone knows who pulled the trigger five years ago, but is the young man now behind bars the only one to blame? All That Followed peels away the layers of a crime complicated by history, love, and betrayal. The accounts of three townspeople in particular--the councilman's beautiful young widow, the teenage radical now in jail for the crime, and an aging American teacher hiding a traumatic past of his own--hold the key to what really happened. And for these three, it's finally time to confront what they can find of the truth.
  Inspired by a true story, All That Followed is a powerful, multifaceted novel about a nefarious kind of violence that can take hold when we least expect. Urgent, elegant, and gorgeously atmospheric, Urza's debut is a book for the world we live in now, and it marks the arrival of a brilliant new writer to watch.
• Confusion; Stefan Zweig (NYRB Classics - purchase) --- Stefan Zweig was particularly drawn to the novella, and Confusion, a rigorous and yet transporting dramatization of the conflict between the heart and the mind, is among his supreme achievements in the form.
  
  A young man who is rapidly going to the dogs in Berlin is packed off by his father to a university in a sleepy provincial town. There a brilliant lecture awakens in him a wild passion for learning—as well as a peculiarly intense fascination with the graying professor who gave the talk. The student grows close to the professor, be­coming a regular visitor to the apartment he shares with his much younger wife. He takes it upon himself to urge his teacher to finish the great work of scholarship that he has been laboring at for years and even offers to help him in any way he can. The professor welcomes the young man’s attentions, at least on some days. On others, he rages without apparent reason or turns away from his disciple with cold scorn. The young man is baffled, wounded. He cannot understand. 
  
  But the wife understands. She understands perfectly. And one way or another she will help him to understand too.

Hope all of my readers have a wonderful week.