Book Review - Sleeping with Anemone

As I'm reading right along, I almost forgot to share the latest installment the Flower Shop Mystery series by Kate Collins, Sleeping with Anemone. 

As usual, Abby finds herself in the middle of a mess.  Only this time though, there are three attempted kidnappings, vandalism and the issue of stolen merchandise to heat up the situation.  While Abby is hot on her soapbox of stopping animal cruelty, she ends up unknowingly in the possession of something someone wants pretty badly.  Badly enough to kill for.  Marco, her hot bar owning boyfriend, is there to serve as her 24/7 bodyguard until they can figure out who's determined to get their hands on her.  Loved it!  Fun, fast paced page turner. 

Happy Reading!
Mandy

How Well Read are You?

I saw this on A Room Without Books is Empty and thought it was interesting

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions:
Copy this list.
Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
Italicise the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
Tag other book nerds.

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen*
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The King James Bible
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) – George Orwell
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott *
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell*
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
Emma -Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold*
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Inferno – Dante
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Bolded titles, I have read.  The * books are the ones I hope to get to sometime. According to this list, I'm barely eligible to be considered well read.  I've only read 9 of them.  What do they know!  How about you?

Mandy

Book Catch Up

I don't know why I don't just talk about a book after I finish it, but I don't.  I might be missing one, but I think I just have three to share with you today from the past couple of weeks.  I did start The Zoo Keeper's Wife, but couldn't get into it...maybe that's the missing one!  I normally enjoy reading books that highlight the survivors and people that risked their lives to save others during the Holocaust.  This book read more like just give me the facts; please and only the facts"...it didn't grab me, so I finally put it down and moved on.  I've heard it's a really good book, so if you enjoy this type of book, you might give it a try.  If you read it, please feel free to scold me for not finishing and I might try it again!

What I have finished though were fun reads!  First, I read Shadows of Lancaster County by Mindy Starns Clark...loved it!!!  She's one of my favorite Christian mystery/suspense authors, and this one didn't disappoint!  The story intertwines with the Amish, and of course that grabbed me right away. Throw in mysterious jewls, DNA research and gene therapy and you're off on a fast paced raced to the end.  Family secrets and past tragedies can't help but give way to God's amazing mercy and grace in this book full of suspense and intrigue. 

Next up was another in the A Booktown Mystery series by Lorna Barrett, Bookplate Special.  These are fun, clean mysteries; did I mention really enjoyable.  They're based in a touristy town that caters to book lovers...oh, if I could only find such a place!  Tricia Miles seems to always find herself right in the middle of the towns mishaps.  She's stubborn, inquisitive and sometimes a little too determined for her own good, but that never stops her from trying to "help" out the local sheriff's department in solving crimes. 

I just finished Sarah's Garden by Kelly Long.  This was the first book I've read by this author, and I can't wait for the next one to come out in the A Patch of Heaven series.  The book is set in the Amish setting...you get that I really enjoy these, right!  When I read the back and it described how Sarah loves her garden, I had to have it.  Throughout the book, God's overwhelming love is shown not only through how the Amish live in forgiving others, but also how He truly does give us the desires of our hearts when we love Him with all of ours.  Sarah found herself falling for an English veterinarian that moved into the house next store and him for her.  So, while the book was a bit predictable and the ending maybe a bit unrealistic, it was the perfectly easy, enjoyable read.  Really cool with this one too...my mother didn't have it already!! 

I'm always on the lookout for new Christian authors or otherwise clean fiction/mysteries, so if you have a favorite author, please share!

Happy reading!
Mandy

Your Chariot Awaits...An Andi McConnell Mystery

I finished this book last week, but just realized that I never talked about it.  I think I found this one at my favorite Half Price Bookstore recently and am going to have to look out for more of Lorena McCourtney's work.  'Your Chariot Awaits' is the first in the Andi McConnell Mystery series.

From the back cover...In the course of one week Andi McConnell turns sixty, loses her job, breaks up with her boyfriend and receives an unezpected inheritance from an eccentric rich uncle - a sleek black stretch limousine with bulletproof windows.  She knows it's totally impractical - yet the limo has an allure that Andi can hardly resist.

A fast, fun read that had me laughing throughout! There was just enough mystery mixed in to keep it interesting to the end and enough humor to keep me giggling as I sit here and remember one scene where she chased her then ex-boyfriend from her porch to his car with a shovel that she thought was a broom! Through the various mishaps that she kept finding herself in, she was able to see how God had his hand on every situation and recognize that He was in fact, very real indeed!

Now I'm off to continue reading 'Firefly Lane'...

Happy Reading!
Mandy

Too Close To Home

Spent  Mother's Day reading a new novel called "Too Close To Home" by Lynette Eason.  I woke up rather sore from yesterday's adventure, so I pampered myself most of the day by sitting in my favorite chair with my new book.  Loved it!  If you enjoy suspense filled thrillers, this is a wonderful book.  What makes it even more enjoyable is that it is Christian fiction and so there was not one foul word or scene that left nothing to the imagination! The two books I previously tried reading, were both put down at the halfway point or sooner with, "Why am I reading this?".  It's not that I live in a bubble, but seriously, how many people use the "f" word or "gd" throughout their everyday conversations...get a better vocabulary!  Back to the book though, there was just enough of the romance angle to make you go "ahh..." at the end, but not enough to say, "Really, seriously now."  There's a serial killer on the loose, and as the title describes, they're hitting a little "too close to home".  Needless to say, I'll have the next one as soon as it's October debut gets here!

I have to say though, this morning when I walked into the kitchen, looked out my back window, an immediate smile took over...all my lovely little succulents were right there in plain view!  It was definitely worth the discomfort.