A busy spring!

Wow, it has been a busy spring! I have recently started volunteering for BullyPaws Pitbull Rescue out of Fredericksburg Virginia and it has taken up a lot of my free time! I have also been spending a lot of time planning my daughters 4th Birthday Party that is coming up on April 16. I am hoping after Easter things will slow down a bit. I would like to have a little time to read, and in return be able to write some new reviews since I have seriously been slacking in the review department lately. I recently purchased a Kindle, so I am super excited about that! I am hoping this will help to speed up the time it takes for me to read a  book. I am a member of Netgalley, and I have requested a couple of titles that I am excited to read and review. I think this year will bring a lot of great books, and in return keep me quite satisfied with living in the fantasy world and out of reality as much as possible! :-)  Take care and Happy Reading!!!

Find Your Better Half Contest!

It's CONTEST time! The nice folks over at Norwood Unleashed have started a really unique contest and it's going to be for a great cause. 

Here's what you do:

 The purpose is to find your dogs doppelganger, a.k.a. a dog that looks similar to yours but is the opposite gender, on Pet Finder!

When you find the perfect match write a blog post about your findings.

Then, email the post to norwoodunleashed@gmail.com.

For every entry one dollar will be donated and whoever gets picked as the winner gets to choose which charity the money goes to!

So after searching Pet Finder for a very long time I have finally found matches for my two dogs.

Here is my Barley girl:

And here is her look alike from Pet Finder, his name is Atari :-).

                                                                                                                                                  

Here is my boy Jax:

And this is his look alike from Pet Finder, her name is Daisy! :-)

This was really fun to do! Everyone should try it..after all it is for a good cause! ^.~

Immanuel's Veins

After reading this book over a month ago I finally got my thoughts together and wrote a review. This was a difficult book to review, it was very oddly written and just a little bazaar to me. It has taken me forever to review this book mostly because I wasn't sure what I thought about it, and I definitely didn't know what to write about it. So I am sorry for the delay, and I hope you all enjoy! :-)

Immanuel's Veins

by

Ted Dekker

Immanuel’s Veins is the story of Toma Nicolescu, a warrior commissioned by Catherine the Great of Russia to protect the Cantemir family of Moldavia. Toma and his friend Alek are to protect this family, a women and her two twin daughters, from the threats of the encroaching war. Toma is a well known warrior and is a man who takes himself and his orders very seriously. However, very soon after meeting the eldest Cantemir daughter Lucine, Toma realizes he is in a situation he is desperately unprepared for. He has fallen in love with Lucine and he struggles with the love he carries for her and his loyalty to the empress. He hides his love from Lucine and in return Lucine begins a courtship with a Russian duke named Vlad van Valerik. Toma is instantly put on guard after meeting the duke, and is convinced Vlad is not what he seems. Toma is determined to reclaim the women he loves and expose Vlad for what he truly is, but what Toma finds will test not only his love for Lucine but his belief in a higher power.

There is a quote written on the back of this book and I find it to be very relevant to this story. “This story is for everyone but not everyone is for this story.” I can honestly say I was not for this story at all! This is the first book I have read by Ted Dekker and I am afraid it is probably my last. My major problem with this story was the inconsistency of the language. The story is set in the 1700s, but the conversations are mixed with colloquial phrases from centuries later. Phrases such as "hunk of a man" and "party pooper" seem out of place in the conversations. I also noted that early in the book there was a part that said “Toma showered and shaved”. Now, this just seemed odd to me, I cannot say with 100% accuracy that they did not have showers in the 1700’s, but I have never heard of this. Another issue that bothered me was the lack of character development. To me the characters were flat and boring. I felt nothing for the main character and on more than one occasion asked myself- should a warrior be this wimpy?

Now, this leads me to the love/Romance part of the story. There were a few uncomfortable moments for me in this department. For example, Toma’s love for Lucine. Yes, while sacrificial in that he would die for her, it was for the most part a purely physical attraction. I really wanted to see Toma learn what love really was, but in the end the love story was as shallow as the characters themselves. The redundancy of this book also made it difficult to read. There were multiple chapters that seemed to repeat themselves. It felt as though the author rehashed previous chapters but placed the characters in different roles and locations. All in all it really made the reading of this story drag on forever!

As a Christian I see what Mr. Dekker was trying to do with this story, and I did enjoy the message at the end, and for that I am happy I read this book. Having said that I do feel as though the spiritual lesson in the book was an after thought. I was two-thirds into the book before I felt like this was a Christian based story. This book was just an odd read, and frankly very difficult to finish. I guess when it comes right down to it, I was one of those people that just wasn’t for this story.

Sorry!

I just wanted to write and say sorry to all of my followers for not posting in a while. It has been a very busy Holiday Season and New Year.  I have gotten a lot of reading done recently and I have a couple of reviews  in my head that need to be put down on paper. I am working on my review for  Immanuel's Veins by Ted Dekker. Hopefully, I will complete that by the end of the week! I hope everyone has a wonderful Day!!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

REVOLUTION by Jennifer Donnelly

　

Andi Alpers is a teenage girl from Modern day Brooklyn. She is angry and on the verge of self-destruction after her younger brother is murdered in the streets of New York. She is angry that her father has left and angry that her mother cannot cope. Andi’s self destructive behavior has caused problems at school and she is at risk of being expelled from one of Brooklyn’s premier schools. That is until her father intervenes and takes Andi away to Paris with him. While in Paris Andi discovers a diary written by a teenage girl named Alexandrine Paradis that lived over two hundred years ago during the French Revolution.

Alexandrine has always wished for fame and has hopes of performing on the Paris stage. Unfortunately, she never gets the chance she so desperately pines for. On one fateful day while performing in the square with her family the Royal family stops to see her perform. The young prince is present and finds Alex quite entertaining. The King and Queen then summon Alex to the palace and ask that she become the personal companion to the young prince. This is the beginning of Alex’s tragic part in the French Revolution, a role she neither wants nor can escape from.

Two girls that live two Centuries apart and yet they are connected through struggles that transcends history and time. Andi has found distraction and comfort within the pages of Alex’s diary, something she hasn’t felt since before her brother died. Andi is intrigued by Alex’s world almost to the point of obsession, and finds her self-going to places Alex would have gone during the Revolution, including the Catacombs. One night while Andi is deep underground in the catacombs under Paris Alex’s diary becomes a little more that just words in a book; they become something much more real.

Let me just start off by saying I really, really enjoyed reading this book. The writing was well done and it was very similar to reading an adult historical fiction. The story telling and plot was fantastic, and really brought you into the story. The amount of research that was involved in bringing this story to life had to have been tremendous, and boy did it pay off. The descriptions and imagery used to describe the era of the French Revolution was both eye opening and sometimes quite nauseating. This was a brutal time in Paris’s history and I feel Ms. Donnelly did a stellar job of relaying that to the reader.

The Character development is also excellent. Andi and Alex really just take over your mind and heart, and you can’t help but to think about them and hope that everything works out the way it should in the end. The way Ms. Donnelly writes these characters you feel as though you know them, that they are friends of yours. You feel for both of them and sympathies with the burden each of them carry. The supporting characters are also well developed. Virgil is a nice offset to the rather intense Andi. I found that I really enjoyed reading his character and felt comfort in his ability to neutralize some of AndI’s more destructive behavior.

　

“Revolution” is a great read and I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys Young Adult fiction or historical fiction. However, I did feel that there were a lot of serious topics touched upon in this book. Some of the topics I felt may be of concern for parents of young adult readers were- depression, suicide, death, and of course violence. These topics however were necessary for the progression of the story and without them the story would not have been the same. I feel as though this book had a very positive ending and tells a great story of healing and forgiveness, and the strength one processes to over come difficult obstacles to live a good and happy life.

Teaser Tuesday

Teaser Tuesday is a Weekly Bookish Meme that I first saw posted by Lisa over at Bookworm Lisa. The Meme is hosted by MizB over at Should Be Reading. I thought this would be something fun to do on Tuesdays so this will be my first Teaser Tuesday. Anyone is welcome to participate! Just do the following.

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My Teasers:

" She listened hungrily for the voice of the spirit within, and was relieved each time it spoke to her, not with words but with an intuition in the blood, commands direct to the muscle and bone. She heard without ears the voice older than time."

~Page 39 " The Horse Goddess" by  Morgan Llywelyn

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT with either the link to your own Teaser Tuesdays post, or share your two ‘teasers’ in a comment here (if you don’t have a blog). Thanks!