Ripple Effect Novella--RIGHTING A WRONG Review

Number three Ripple Effect book is RIGHTING A WRONG by Rachael Anderson.

As soon as Jace kisses Cambri, his best friend, she bolts for parts unknown, never to return for years on end. While she's gone, she gets her degree in landscape design and builds a successful business.

Jace can never replace her, however. He tries with other girls, but it never works. He can't forget the girl who kissed and bailed.

Cambri's curmudgeonly father develops health problems and she temporarily returns to Bridger to take care of him. He refuses to be grateful for anything she does, which includes re-designing his whole yard. He stubbornly undermines everything she wants to do.

Her secondary goal is to avoid Jace Sutton, out of shear embarrassment because she never called or wrote after her headlong race to get away. His goal is to avoid her and to keep his family hardware business afloat.

But Bridger is a tiny town. You're bound to meet even the people you want most to stay away from.

Jace just can't seem to stay away, even though she has crushed his heart. He's  there to do everything she needs, just like the great best friend he was before. Finally she starts to realize just what she's lost, but fears it's too late to begin again.

I enjoyed this second chance book. It's a sweet thought to be able to go back and fix the mistakes you made with your first love. I would have liked a little more spice, but was glad not to have to deal with sex or bad language. I give this sweet romance four out of five shrubberies.

You can buy RIGHTING A WRONG here.

Ripple Effects--SILVER LININGS Review

The second Ripple Effect romance is SILVER LININGS by Kaylee Baldwin.

Eden Torresi has major stuck-in-the-mud karma. Because of her mother's cancer bills, she finds she has to drop out of college, sell her house, and get a job at Silver Linings, an old folks home. Her life seems to be caught in a holding pattern like the old folks at work.

Drew Westfall has family problems. They want to control everything about him. He takes off, getting rid of his trust fund to a charity. He makes his way to Bridger, Colorado, arriving in a snowstorm. The nearest place to find a haven is with Silver Linings and its cute young caregiver.

The wonderful old people of Silver Linings have nothing other to do than matchmake, and no one to do that for than Drew and Eden, who never stood a chance.

I found this story charming, full of heart and...well...silver linings. The writing was fresh and the characters likeable. I give it four out of five happy faces. I'd have loved to hear more about that sizzling kiss. I'd also have liked to have the whole story fleshed out a bit more. I'd like to have known the old people's stories a little better. Clearly, though, it's a novella, which means it's exactly right for its size. Can you fault me for wanting more? Thank you, Kaylee. I loved your book.

You can purchase SILVER LININGS here.

GALDONI Review

My back log of reviews is staggering. I guess I'll chop into it today along with writing another less mysterious ending for SUMMERHOUSE.

My review today is for GALDONI by Cheree Alsop.

Kale is a Galdoni, genetically engineered by the government as one of its multi-species gladiators forced to fight to the death in an arena while massive amounts of betting cash change hands. It's enough money to keep the Academy pumping out warriors forever. The problem is that the Galdoni have no freedom, no ability ever to leave the Arena alive. Fighters are bred to viciously attack, without mercy, and ask for none in return. They are told it's a matter of honor.

 Kale, however, escapes when the Arena is temporarily closed (a slight plot hole I wish had been better explained). He is beaten and scarred and near death when friends find and hide him, nursing him back to health. He hides his massive wings and, for the first time, gets to go to school and learn something other than killing tactics.

We find that Kale isn't as much of an animal as some of his classmates, even. His choices ennoble him. He begins to let himself bask in the life-giving affection of his new friends--especially of Brie, while still asking the question, "Do I really have a soul?"

His time in the sun is short, however, because Galdoni are "vicious animals" to be rounded up and systematically slaughtered or returned to the Academy and their old non-lives. He knows he's going to have to go back in, if only to break the system. Kale and his friends devise the best plan they can think of. You'll have to read the book to see if they were successful.

I really "got" this story. For decades I fought in armour with sword and shield in a re-creative setting. I fought through the pain of massive welts, bruises, and sometimes cuts, feeling the life course through me as I plunged through the line of men, whacking as many as I could. The main difference being that I didn't kill anyone permanently. That would have ended the game for me. I also wasn't forced to fight. I did it for the camaraderie and fun of it. There was a certain rush in knowing you'd bested a man several inches taller and pounds heavier. It gave me a confidence I hadn't had as a child.

I give it one out of five daggers for violence (it's not a Disney movie, but it's also not going to wake me up screaming at night). I'll call it a one alarm fire in the romance section, mainly because the love sprang up seemingly from almost nowhere, but it's sweet--mostly giving Kale something to live for. I give Kale major kudos for having morals and standards despite being raised without any.

My reservations are these:

1. How did Kale learn early on to have compassion if he'd never seen any?
2. Why didn't they always target the guy's wings? That would grounded the fighter, making it easier to kill him.
3. Why didn't the unlucky Galdoni, after they banded together, overpower their guards and escape? They could have done it without even killing the losers.
4. What other animal characteristics did their makers use?
5. Armour weighs a ton--especially chain-mail. Plate, which is what these guys were wearing, weighs only slightly less. It's why castles had moats--because it sank straight to the bottom. Armour is difficult to run and fight all day in, let alone fly in. How did they get off the ground?
6. I wish there had been a little more initial fear when Brie met this hulking bird monster who had been trained to kill from infancy. He's more like a demon than loveable boyfriend material. That would have made it all the sweeter when she finally fell for him.

This book was well-written, interesting, and engaging. I liked the characters. I wept for David and worried over Kale, a little like Brie did.

GALDONI by Cheree Alsop is a great book to curl up with your husband or boyfriend with. He won't gag over it because of the fighting, and you won't because of the sweet sense of hope they weave together.

Ripple Effects--HOME MATTERS Review

More after I pick up the boys. Actually picked up the boys and had two days worth of fun. So now on to the Ripple Effect books.

The first book in the Ripple Effects series is HOME MATTERS by Julie N. Ford.

Olivia Pembroke knows the drill but thinks she'll never make it as an actor. When she tacks down a sweet job at Home Matters, it's a dream come true. She gets to act the part of a designer but someone else does all the lumbering around.
The show's premise is based on giving homeowners a choice. They can choose to move into a new house they saw with William Blaine, handsome realtor. Or they can go nuts over having their old home renovated using Olivia's "designing expertise" and Pete's finesse.
Unknown to the raspy producers, Olivia really can design and has great taste. She just can't get anyone to take her seriously, least of all William, who she has the hots for. When the real designer tries to chisel her legs out from under her, it's Pete standing by to screw things up for her. Or so she thinks.
Pete finally hammers home the idea that Olivia has something to spring for joy about. Unfortunately it's almost too late and Olivia's plumb job is nearly wrenched away from her. She bolts for home, only to find things aren't quite as they seem.
Julie nailed this clean and sweet romance. I give it a lug wrench up.

You can find this book here.

RIP Roberto

Roberto has passed away. The details of his death are at best shadowy and may or may not have included a dose of Benedryl.

I first met Roberto at the same time I met my Aunt Nita. Both of them had come up from Uruguay to marry (and live with) my Uncle Ray. Nita is tiny and fiery as a ghost pepper but also extremely generous. She loves animals and her daily tea party of matte and soapapillas, and has a delightful sense of humour. I really miss Aunt Nita. (I don't get up to Utah to see her very often.) She always provided the leavening in the house between Uncle Ray and the kids.

For years Nita was a labour and delivery nurse at Utah Valley Hospital. In fact, she was both my mother's nurse when I was born, and mine when my daughter was born. She made that whole process much easier to bear.
She always fed us until we passed out from bloating when we went to her house. Sometimes she didn't really have the means to, but she always fed people. And her food was great. She made some of the best chicken ever. (I'll provide the recipe later.) And her ka-ka dip was to die for, despite the name.

Roberto was colorful, irascible, and could mimic a thousand different voices and laughs. He'd also peck your ear off if he had the chance, since he was a grumpy old parrot. Their stories are bound together.

Roberto's entry into this country was, if anything, questionable. He's actually an illegal alien. My sweet Aunt Nita didn't want to quarantine him for months, so she got him drunk on tequila and carried him over the border in a shoe box. At least that's what she always told us. I believe her. She's fully capable of lawful circumvention in the pursuit of caring for those she loves.

For years that bird sat in his cage or in a tree in the back yard, taunting people with possible ear loss and cracking nuts with his big beak. Sunflower seeds always littered the ground wherever he was. He'd call my cousin Erika in precisely Nita's voice and accent. "Eighty-kaaaaa!" Or it was Uncle Ray (Harold Ray, sometimes called Hal). "Hald Drey!" or "Hal!" The bird also mysteriously swore in Spanish. I couldn't figure out how that happened, since Nita was always very careful never to say "sheets" as it was too close to a swear word. It was always "leenens." That was her favourite joke.

Once I stayed with them during the break-up of my first marriage. I was alone in the house. Nita and Ray were away at work and the kids were off living their own lives. The house was tomb-silent except for...

Maniacal laughter. Gales of it.

Already freaked out of my head at what I thought my ex might do to me, I was pretty squirrelly. I grabbed up a bat and went charging through all the rooms to see who was skulking around in a locked house. Bedrooms? Check. Living room? Check. Kitchen? Check. Ba...Basement? Check. Phew.

Then I heard it outside the front door.

Muhahahahahahahaha!

That bat nearly took the head off of...

Roberto as he sat on the front porch in his cage, "laughing" at the children walking past on their way home from school. I swear he sounded like an axe murderer.

Nita also kept horses, llamas (one once spat in my sister's hair) and dogs. The dogs ranged from Piquola, a beagle so ancient he leaked when he sat down, to Schnausers, to a phalanx of fairy-like miniature greyhounds, like rats on chopstick stilts, who had few teeth and would go absolutely bananas when she announced an S.N.A.C.K. Those dogs were hilarious. We'd play with their little flippety tongues and vie for the chance to test their spelling skills.

Once we visited them at Thanksgiving. We loved to play with Erika, who was between me and my sister Janelle in age. We three musketeers were entrapped at the table, long after everyone else had choked down my mum's gag*dressing*gag. (Disclaimer #1: My mum is a FABULOUS cook of everything but turkey dressing. And egg plant. And turnips. But everything else is absolutely delicious. Okay wait. Her cattail pancakes are pretty wretched too.)

We couldn't leave, caught in a Sisyphean dilemma. It was either eat, and thus die of an exploded stomach, or sit there and petrify into glum-looking gargoyles. I thought we were all well on our way to stone when Erika got up and left the table. Janelle and I exchanged looks of utter disbelief. How had she gotten a reprieve? And how could we get a similar stay of execution?
It wasn't until we heard the dogs in the back room, projectile barfing, that we knew the truth. But how could we, then, get those dogs to come back to the kitchen and do the same thing for us?
Clearly we were eventually sprung from the trap. The funny thing is, I don't remember how. It may be that the statute of limitations on dreadful dressing simply ran out.

A couple of years ago my mountainous Uncle Ray headed off to the Electronics Lab in the sky. He and Nita had always, inexplicably, shared a water bed. To this day I don't know how she managed to do it without getting bounced right back out or rolling towards him the second she got in.
When he died, the house seemed to echo with his ghost, puttering around in his workshop downstairs, sighing from his chair near the TV. By that time, I had my own family and lived in a different state. It was difficult to get up there to see them very often.

The last time I went to visit, Nita was still the pint-sized dog-whisperer and purveyor of matte and dinner. She plied me with stories of her travels, tales of her doggies, and titbits about her friends and children. I got reacquainted with her dogs, took some casserole to the llamas, and petted the horses.

At one point I strayed too close to the big beautiful tree in her back yard. Before I could turn around, Roberto nearly beaked me in the head. Only fancy ducking saved my ear from extinction. That thing was probably well over fifty five years old and still trying to send people to the hospital.

As per my daughter's news at her last visit, things have changed slightly. Nita no longer lives in the house she shared with Uncle Ray and her children for longer than thirty years. The animals are gone, and she has been remanded to a care facility. Which she apparently hates. She has escaped on numerous occasions with a purloined knife stuffed down her cleavage. They're not certain how she keeps finding those. She bemoans the fact that someone has swiped her car and dogs, and tries to get people to spring her, with that same Nita sense of humour.

I think it'll be time, soon, to go visit her. If I don't hurry, she might actually get away. There is still also the questionable demise of Roberto. I wonder if I'll ever really know the details of that story.

RIP, Roberto.

&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*&*

Nita's Fabulous Chicken Wings Recipe 
 --5 lbs chicken wings (broken in half and de-tipped)
--1 C. soy sauce
--1 C. brown sugar (can be white if you don't have brown)
--2 T. vinegar
Optional:
--1/2 C. chicken broth
--1 tsp. ginger
--2 crushed garlic cloves 

Marinate chicken in the sauce. Place chicken in baking pan with lid (or foil). Bake at 375 degrees for 1 1/2 hrs. Baste occasionally. Sauce may be frozen and thawed for more batches.

*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*(*

(Disclaimer #2: This computer is, for some reason, a picky old British hag. To cut down on the vast number of jagged red lines, I have bowed to her nagging and written in English English.)

Eating the Elephant

You know those times when you're played out, there are tire tracks across your face, and you just can't seem to reach the itch in the middle of your back where the silverware is poking out? Yeah. That time.

It's the middle of the American Ninja finals. You're reaching up to grab the next ring to heave yourself up. It's raining and your energy is flagging. Your muscles are discussing a mutiny. The announcer has given you a vote of no confidence and a dorky nickname. You know if you don't get moving, you'll plunge into the giant vat of ice water and your dreams will be over.

Your kid has just told you he doesn't plan on making any of your dreams for him come true. He's got his own life to live. You have no information he can use and he wants you out of his purple dreadlocked hair. He's taking his stuff and finding an apartment with three of his loser buddies. Oh but you can hold onto the junk he doesn't want right now.

You've just come from a particularly difficult class, the one you're teaching that contains all the delinquents in the school, somehow. The one you have to teach or you don't get to keep your job. You can't do a thing about their insolence, and they know it. They've taken the ship and cast you adrift in the dingy.

Your dog has decided she no longer thinks you're her sun, moon, and stars. She wouldn't come running to you if you tied a steak around your neck and slathered it in gravy. You tried to clip her toenails and she detests you for it. You thought she was the one being on earth who would love you through the Last Big Bang. Sadly, your happy partnership barely made it past the fourth season of Big Bang Theory.

You've auditioned for the most cherry role of your life--the part you've been dying to play since the womb. You, with your spiffy new wardrobe, whitened teeth, pasted on smile, and your stomach in Gordian knots, check the boards after an entire night of hopeful pacing. You are (wait for it. Drum roll...) the understudy's understudy.

I could go on ad infinitum, but you've got ten stories just as discouraging boiling around in your gut at this moment. Everyone does. There are always going to be disappointments and mistakes, foibles and fallacies, misunderstandings and shortfalls. It's life.

How many times do we look at others and only see the part where they hit the finish button to become the fastest, the brightest, the strongest, the most beautiful, the best? Look, there goes Suzie Homemaker with her ten perfect children all lined up in their matching self-sewn outfits to take the widows in their neighborhood loaves of homemade bread and chokecherry jelly? We don't see the long line of failures in their wake.

We don't see that she actually has twelve kids, but one of the boys ran off with a pole dancer and the middle daughter is pregnant with twins with no daddy in sight. We don't see the umpteen previous drafts before Jane Austen got Pride and Prejudice right. We miss the part where Shaq started playing basketball and couldn't hit the hoop to save his life.

So what's the difference between Shaq and Suzie and the rest of us losers (besides the six extra kids I'm not willing to have and a penchant for dribbling)?

Maybe it's vision. And drive. And a will to pay the price with years of hard work and sweat and tears. It's telling yourself, "I'm not that person. I'm more. I'm not going to settle for mediocrity. I'm worth the trouble." It's time to shake off the dust of other people's false impressions. It's time to break the mold, endure gracefully the polishing, and emerge shiny and new-made. It's what we really are.

Yeah. It's that time. Here's a spoon.

LONGBOURN by the Apron Strings (a review)

I'm always on the hunt for fresh takes on Austen books. I have to say the playing field is about level between decent and pathetic. I've never found an Austen-ic book of her exquisite quality before, though some come close.

Recently I read LONGBOURN by Jo Baker. Because of a few problems, I have filed it in about the middle of the pack.

Pluses:

+This is Pride and Prejudice told from a servant's point of view.
+I enjoy the fresh take on the story. It's like looking at one of Queen Elizabeth's massive court dresses from the inside. Interesting.
+Hearing how the lower half lived and worked made me glad to be a modern woman with real choices. I'm more grateful for modern medicines and creams.
+I enjoyed knowing the otherwise invisible servant's thoughts and dreams and hopes.  I wanted to see things work out well for her. I wanted her to be able to find her love, get married, and have children.
+The book answered the same questions often running through my mind when I thought about Elizabeth's hems dragging 6 inches deep in mud or who would watch the children when the little nieces and nephews came to visit.
+The book was well-written and nicely edited.

Minuses:

--It's a very democratic, modern treatment. Jane didn't really concern herself with the below stairs people at all--nor did many of that time, Dickens excepting. We hear of the rich and the nearly rich. Servants were to be seen and not heard.
--There were several modern topics which took me completely out of the story because they were topics Austen would NEVER have broached (homosexuality, graphic violence, illegitimacy, and sex to name a few). I'm not saying the sex was discussed graphically, but the mention was there, as it was not in Austen.
--There was some bad language.  There is a way to write  without resorting to swearing because Jane herself did it, and I have done it, as have many other authors. It isn't needed. We have extremely well-developed imaginations when it comes to inserting bad language.
--At times I found myself echoing Jemima Rooper in LOST IN AUSTEN when she says, "Jane Austen would have been surprised to know she had written that."
--I felt at the end of the book Jo gave up on the story. She nearly flung Sarah down the road to hunt for James and catapulted them both back, as if the story was now in the point of view of someone else altogether. And she shows up with a baby. Where's the rest of the story, my friend?

I think one reason Austen never wrote about servants is that they are on the bottom of the social pond. There is very little lateral for bobbing around, down on the bottom. The Bennets are closer to the middle. They can marry up. They can make mistakes (such as Lydia's) which sink them to the bottom. It's a much more dynamic story.
Jo tells a story based on someone who really couldn't have married much further up without causing a massive scandal. And there isn't very far Sarah can fall, either.

For me, the language and adult themes really battered the story. I'm sure Ms. Baker could have found a way to introduce interest into her work without them, if her aim had truly been to .

My grade? A solid three out of five bonnets.