AN EDUCATION IN RUIN by Alexis Bass

PUBLISHER: Tor Teen, 7/2020
GENRE: Young Adult Fiction/Suspense
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: D

SYNOPSIS: The Mahoney brothers are the golden boys of Rutherford Institute. Collins Pruitt is going to ruin them.

Theo Mahoney is well-connected and popular. He’s charming and beloved. But he’s hiding something.

Jasper Mahoney is lauded for his intellect and athleticism. He’s studious and focused. But he isn’t as impenetrable as he seems.

Collins will earn their trust—and then she’ll destroy them. But the closer she gets, the more she questions the reason she was sent to Rutherford in the first place…and if it’s possible to ruin the Mahoneys without also destroying herself.

MY THOUGHTS: This was awful and a lot longer than it should have been, by about 100 pages. I got real impatient with the story, which was going nowhere at all, then I got bored at around page 250 with still over 100 pages to go. There are so many characters, mostly classmates, to keep up with. I thought I was going to read a suspenseful story about a nasty, conniving teenage girl who's out to 'destroy' innocent people but that's not what we got. Collins is an extremely bland character, not unlikable at all. She is out to do some dirty work that her aunt Rose put her up to while away at a boarding high school in California. She actually transferred to that school just because her aunt wanted her to. Dirty deeds are usually done to the benefit of the one doing said deeds but Collins wouldn't have benefited from them so why do them? Collins is just poorly written. Speaking of her aunt, there's a secret Collins learned about her a week before going away to school. I cannot think of one reason why that was put into the story as it did nothing at all for it other than to add filler content. And the secrets she has on people aren't anything like what I was expecting. One nasty trick she pulled on Theo, he didn't even get mad at her for doing it which was so unrealistic. I didn't really feel like I was reading about children because they mostly acted too mature. In fact, they should have been in college, not high school. And the main secrets involved >>>> spoiler warning>>>> money investments among the parents and insider trading! Who wants to read about that? Certainly not the target audience of young adult readers, which consists of middle and highschoolers.

I received this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

THE SECRET PEARL by Mary Balogh

PUBLISHER: Signet, 9/1991
REISSUED: 12/2005
GENRE: Historical Romance
SETTING: England, 1822
AUTHOR SITE: link
MY GRADE: A+

SYNOPSIS: He first spies her in the shadows outside a London theatre, a ravishing creature forced to barter her body to survive.

To the woman known simply as Fleur, the well-dressed gentleman with the mesmerizing eyes is an unlikely savior. And when she takes the stranger to her bed, she never expects to see him again. But then Fleur accepts a position as governess to a young girl…and is stunned to discover that her midnight lover is a powerful nobleman. As two wary hearts ignite—and the threat of scandal hovers over them—one question remains: will she be mistress or wife?

MY THOUGHTS/SPOILERS: This is very dark, deep and well-written. A fiction novel has never made me cry, until this. The end of chapter 26, to be exact, a scene not involving hero or heroine. The story spans two years. Most of it takes place at Adam's estate.

Fleur Hamilton (Isabella Bradshaw) is on the run. She's twenty-three, with red hair and brown eyes. Her second cousin, Matthew Bradshaw, Lord Brocklehurst, is blackmailing her over something that has to do with why she's run away. He also wants to marry her but I don't think it's to get his hands on the money that she's due to inherit from her deceased parents.

The hero is Adam Kent, Duke of Ridgeway.  He's very likable but too beta. I'd have liked to have seen more passion from him. Instead he's pretty reserved. Adam is physically scarred on his face and body from fighting in the Battle of Waterloo and was even presumed dead at one point. He has dark hair and eyes and "hawkish" features. He's in his early thirties and has been married to twenty-six-year-old Sybil for six years. They have a daughter, five-year-old Pamela. He's fallen out of love with his wife, who hates his guts, and she's still in love with his younger half-brother, Thomas Kent, and has been since before they married. She's in bad health, is unfaithful, and is truly a miserable person and undeserving of a devoted husband and daughter, or a devoted anybody.

The romance between Isabella and Adam is a slow burn and I didn't feel much angst considering they couldn't be together for quite awhile. It took far too long for Isabella to even stop being scared of Adam. Her fear of him made no sense at all. There was a part near the end when Isabella received a letter from someone. I felt she should have sent a reply that expressed all she'd been feeling and how she feels about what was written in the letter, but she didn't and that bugs me.

I really like a bit of suspense in historical romance so I really enjoyed the subplot, if it can be called that, with Thomas/Sybil, and with Matthew/Isabella, though I wish more had been done with Matthew at the end. He deserved some sort of punishment. Though the book is long, 400 pages, I can't think of anything that should have been cut from it. The story never dragged and I never got bored.

The 2005 reissue is somehow longer in length from the 1991 original though no content has been changed.

BEAUTY by Robin McKinley, a Beauty and the Beast Retelling

PUBLISHER: HarperCollins, 10/1978
GENRE: Fiction/Fairy Tales
SETTING: Late 19th century, unknown location
MY GRADE: C

SYNOPSIS: Beauty has never liked her nickname. She is thin and awkward; it is her two sisters who are the beautiful ones. But what she lacks in looks, she can perhaps make up for in courage.

When her father comes home with the tale of an enchanted castle in the forest and the terrible promise he had to make to the Beast who lives there, Beauty knows she must go to the castle, a prisoner of her own free will. Her father protests that he will not let her go, but she answers, "Cannot a Beast be tamed?"

MY THOUGHTS: This was pretty boring. It's 247 pages and got better when Beauty met the Beast about 102 pages in during part three, but even then it was pretty uneventful. How the author made this differ from the original was she added a whole lot more to the beginning, giving Beauty and her family's backstory. She gave Beauty two sisters only, Hope and Grace, and gave each of them plot lines of their own, with finding spouses, but I wasn't at all interested in that. This was fleshed out in all the wrong places. All the added storyline should have happened later when Beauty met Beast.

I like that there was more magic in this than the original, with clothes and food appearing, and with the rose seeds she plated at her home in the beginning, and such. Beauty was sort of made to be the opposite of that word in this and in fact her real name here is Honour. Hair color wasn't mentioned in the original for either Beauty or Beast but in this her hair's 'mousy, neither blond nor brown' and has 'muddy hazel' eyes and she's eighteen. The Beast, before he turned into a beast and after he turned back into a human, has curly brown hair with gray, and brown eyes, age unknown, and is 'alarmingly handsome.'

The negatives about this novel: I wish the scene where Beauty returns to the Beast after having been away a short time had been more dramatic, though it was more so than in the original. The author is American but she spells words like she's British (colour, Honour, splendour, grey, sombre) and I don't understand why. I also don't like Beauty reading well-known authors and books (Sherlock Holmes, Sir Walter Scott, Bleak House) in this story. The Beast explains the reason for the curse that was put on him 200 years before but it's so lame and puzzling an explanation.

I read the original here and I do like it a lot because it's short and to the point, not dragged out. Pictured is the original 1978 hardcover book cover.

THE STORY OF THE ROOT-CHILDREN and MOTHER EARTH AND HER CHILDREN by Sibylle von Olfers

PUBLISHED: 1906, in German
READ FREE: link
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: A

SYNOPSIS: This is a classic story of the changing seasons. The root children spend the winter asleep. When spring comes, they wake, sew themselves new gowns, and clean and paint the beetles and bugs. All summer they play in fields, ponds and meadows before returning in the autumn to Mother Earth, who welcomes them home and puts them to bed once more.

MY THOUGHTS: This is slightly strange and creepy, with the children living underground in the dark and having to make their own clothing. They're overseen by the elderly Mother Earth. It's a very simple twenty-four page children's picture book showing their outdoor activities during each season of the year. I love the illustrations but wish more colors had been used. My favorite image is below.

PUBLISHER: Breckling Press, 10/2007
MY GRADE: A
READ FREE: link
PURCHASE: link

SYNOPSIS: The incredibly intricate and vivid illustrations in this book are details of a modern quilt inspired by Sibylle von Olfers' classic storybook Mother Earth and Her Children. This vibrant new translation, in turn inspired by the quilt, explores the changing of the seasons and delicately touches upon the circle of life.

MY THOUGHTS: This is a 2007 reworking of the 1906 version, but its illustrations come from the quilt a German woman named Sieglinde Schoen Smith made while living in the USA. She grew up loving the original book and was inspired in 2002 to make a quilt using the illustrations from it. The writing has been changed completely into rhyming verses. The colors in this are much more saturated than in the original and I like it better. The paperback version is still in print and I wish to own it.

AN ANONYMOUS GIRL by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

PUBLISHER: St. Martin's, January, 2019
GENRE: Fiction/Contemporary Thriller
SETTING: New York, USA
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: B

SYNOPSIS: Seeking women ages 18 - 32 to participate in a study on ethics and morality. Generous compensation. Anonymity guaranteed.

When Jessica Farris signs up for a psychology study conducted by the mysterious Dr. Shields, she thinks all she’ll have to do is answer a few questions, collect her money, and leave. But as the questions grow more and more intense and invasive and the sessions become outings where Jess is told what to wear and how to act, she begins to feel as though Dr. Shields may know what she’s thinking…and what she’s hiding. As Jess’s paranoia grows, it becomes clear that she can no longer trust what in her life is real, and what is one of Dr. Shields’ manipulative experiments. Caught in a web of deceit and jealousy, Jess quickly learns that some obsessions can be deadly.

MY THOUGHTS: This was good, different and interesting. The plot is about a doctor trying to get information on certain women so they can use it against them. I didn't get bored at all but thought a few unimportant scenes could have been left out, making the book a little shorter in length. The entire plot had a steady pace and there were really no peaks and valleys, even at the end, which fell a little flat. I wish it had been more suspenseful. The story is told from the alternating narration of both Jessica and Dr. Shields. The story spans just under six weeks, then the epilogue takes place three months later. There's three main characters and none are really likable and two are about ten years older than the main character.

Jessica's twenty-eight and a makeup artist. She's from Pennsylvania but moved to New York after college. She's not the most moral of people and I can't imagine any readers were rooting for her. I really don't like her harboring guilt over something from her childhood that's truly not her fault. Honestly, I don't know why that was put into the story, or the incident with a male theater actor years before, that's mentioned again in the epilogue. Or why her parents had to be in the story at all. Someone involves them in their scheme but why? Why? It just did nothing for the story.

The negatives: There's an abundance of brand name products, celebrities, and television shows mentioned, so much that it irritated me badly, and it started just a few pages in. If I had to put a number on it, I'd say at least twenty-five to thirty names were mentioned. A second negative is that two of the three characters are underdeveloped with no background information on them. How you can write a villain and not tell us about their childhood and everything leading up to the bad things they do if beyond me.

I'm also confused by the very last page, with someone wanting a lot of something from someone else and why they think the other person would give it. I don't understand what that person was thinking or why they were still in contact with the other person.

I received this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

DAMAGE by Josephine Hart, and Film

PUBLISHER: Alfred A. Knopf, 3/1991
GENRE: Contemporary Fiction
SETTING: England
WIKI: link
FILM: link
BOOK GRADE: D
FILM GRADE: C

SYNOPSIS: He was a married M.P. with two grown children. On the surface, his life was what he wanted it to be. She was his son's fiancee, a shattered woman who had only known forbidden love. When they meet, their attraction is instantaneous, their obsession complete. And nothing, it seems, can tear them away from each other and their dangerous, damaging, illicit passion....

MY THOUGHTS: This book was a snoozefest and comes in at only 198 pages. The story spans four months then in the last chapter, it's three years later. It had so much potential based on the very interesting synopsis but was lacking so much information. We don't even know how the fifty-year old main male protagonist, who isn't even given a name (but is named Stephen in the film) starts his affair with Anna, his twenty-five-year-old son Martyn's thirty-three-year-old girlfriend. How'd they go from meeting each other to a full-blown affair? It wasn't said. She's the only one who had any backstory but she's not the one I wanted any on. The whole story is poorly written and very condensed. Author seemed detached from the characters she created and gave them no personality.

Anna, a self-professed "damaged" person, was supposed to seem mysterious but wasn't. The one part of her background we learned was far-fetched and pointless. We didn't need her stepfather in the book either. Words spent on him should have been spent on developing Anna's character. Why were we given so much backstory on the main male character's father Tom but not on him? His daughter Sally was barely in this so why create her character at all? We're told the main character is obsessed with Anna but I never felt he was. And I never saw any obsession coming from Anna either.

Despite the subject matter, this novel isn't really explicit.

FILM: In the film, from 1992, Sally's a young teen while in the book she's an adult, just two years younger than Martyn. In the film Stephen tells Anna at one point that he doesn't want to see her anymore but that doesn't happen in the novel. In the novel Anna is a journalist who met Martyn at work but in the film, she works for a famous auction company, Sotheby's. There's a few other unimportant differences between book and film. The film isn't good but it's a little better than the novel. I like that you can actually see Stephen's emotions on his face when he's with Anna.

There's a couple brief scenes of bare breasts toward the end, and Jeremy Iron's butt and full frontal nudity with him. The version I saw didn't have his nude genitals in it.

There's a scene in the film when Stephen answers the phone and there's a book right next to it. It's Under the Net by Iris Murdoch, with this cover.

BILLY'S GOT A GUN by Def Leppard, Live 2018

A very dark song about a man who can't adjust to life after serving in a war and falls in with the wrong crowd. One of the band's superior songs from one of their best albums. 

LORD OF SCOUNDRELS by Loretta Chase

PUBLISHER: Avon, 1/1995
GENRE: Historical Romance
MY GRADE: D

SYNOPSIS: Tough-minded Jessica Trent's sole intention is to free her nitwit brother from the destructive influence of Sebastian Ballister, the notorious Marquess of Dain. She never expects to desire the arrogant, amoral cad. And when Dain's reciprocal passion places them in a scandalously compromising, and public, position, Jessica is left with no choice but to seek satisfaction...

Damn the minx for tempting him, kissing him... and then forcing him to salvage her reputation! Lord Dain can't wait to put the infuriating bluestocking in her place—and in some amorous position. And if that means marriage, so be it!—though Sebastian is less than certain he can continue to remain aloof... and steel his heart to the sensuous, headstrong lady's considerable charms.

MY THOUGHTS (from 2010): I didn’t care for this one bit and couldn’t stand the heroine. The hero was ordinary and didn't stand out in any way.

I found it unbelievable that she openly discussed sex with her grandmother like she did and told Dain she was a virgin out-of-the-blue. They weren’t even having an intimate discussion at all or anything. Also, she’s too mouthy and aggressive. The more I read, the less I like her. About the part where she got angry when Dain called his mother a ‘whore’, that she would defend a woman who ran off and left her very young son says something about her. I’m not even sure Jessica knew about that at the time she defended her though. She’s supposedly so intelligent yet we haven’t seen any evidence of it.

The book was alright up until Jessica shot Dain for really no reason. And it got more absurd when Dain married her. He didn’t seem to give a crap that she shot him. Totally unbelievable to me. Makes absolutely no sense at all why the author put that in the book in the first place. Jessica isn’t even that likable. I like Dain but he seems like all the other heroes we read about.

If I'm remembering right, in anticipation of liking this I sent my copy to the author to autograph sometime between May 2008 when I got it, used, and before reading it in early 2010. Since I really disliked the book, I got rid of it. If I'm remembering right, the author kept mentioning Dain's 'big' nose.

AFTERNOON OF THE ELVES by Janet Taylor Lisle

PUBLISHER: Scholastic, 9/1989
GENRE: Children's fiction
MY GRADE: C

SYNOPSIS: No fourth grader trusts Sara-Kate Connolly. Her boots are dirty, her clothes are weird, and she’s so maladjusted that the school had to hold her back a grade. But Hillary is her next-door neighbor, and can’t say no when the unusual loner invites her over to play. In Sara-Kate’s overgrown backyard, Hillary will find proof of a world of magic—the kind that can only blossom between true friends.

Among the rusted car parts and wild plants, a miniature village has sprung up. It has tiny houses made from string, sticks, and maple leaves; a well with a bottlecap for a bucket; and even a little playground with a Popsicle-stick Ferris wheel. But there’s absolutely no sign of who built this miniature world. To Sara-Kate, the answer is clear—only elves could be responsible for something so enchanted. As she and Hillary watch for their elusive new friends, they learn that friendship, like magic, springs up where you least expect it.

MY THOUGHTS/SPOILERS: This is actually a sad story, in fact it's quite depressing the more I think about it, and there's no moral to be learned. Sara-Kate Connolly is a very hostile eleven-year-old child. She's clearly poor and the kids at school don't like her. Hillary and her two friends, Jane and Alison, are nine years old and go to school with Sara-Kate, who was held back a year in school. There's a tiny village in Sara-Kate's back yard that she claims was built by elves. She and Hillary, being next door neighbors, become friends due to their common interest in the elf village. We never see any elves then common sense dawns on me. That's all the 122 page story consists of, two of Hillary's school friends yelling at her to not be friends with Sara-Kate and Hillary and Sara-Kate hanging out in the back yard. I don't understand the book's title because they spend many afternoons in the yard among the elves.

The synopsis makes this sound so much more interesting than it was. This story was short on elves (read between the lines) and I'm quite irritated by that and it's why it gets a C rating. When reading books in a contemporary setting that were published many years ago I like to look out for things that could make the book seem dated. There was one scene where three of the girls were wearing matching denim jackets and that screamed 1989, which was when this was published.

DADDY'S GIRL by Janet Inglis, also known as Daddy and Darling

PUBLISHER: Points, 2/1994
GENRE: Contemporary Fiction
SETTING: England
MY GRADE: B

SYNOPSIS: Olivia, almost fifteen, feels like a piece of unwanted baggage left over from her parents' broken marriage. Daddy is about to marry one of his former students, who is young enough to be his daughter; Mummy's men friends sometimes stay the night. Neither of them has room for her any more, and she feels a burden to everyone she loves.

Then Nick enters her life: Nick, her mother's new lover, an amoral, street-wise photographer with an insolent, assessing gaze. Nick violates the sanctuary of Olivia's home by moving in with her mother, and before long he has violated Olivia as well, teaching her the meaning of desire. Hopelessly addicted to him, she comes at last to a shocking solution which will change forever her life and the lives of those who have denied her love.

MY THOUGHTS/SPOILERS: Olivia, nicknamed Lia, is just about to turn fifteen when her thirty-five year old mother Emma starts dating thirty-two year old Nick Winter, of the blond hair and light blue eyes. She moves him right into the house with herself and Olivia and tries to pass him off as a boarder. She lives with her jewelry designer mother and is left to her own devices most of the time. Olivia feels unloved by both parents and we can feel it. She's basically forgotten about by her forty-one year old father, who's about to marry his much younger pregnant girlfriend who he's already living with.

Nick is an awful character with no redeeming qualities. He's the type I like in fiction but I was hoping he'd get killed off. He and Olivia begin a sexual relationship with each other a couple weeks after she turns fifteen. There's a lot of sex between them and the author went for quantity of quality. Outside of lusting after Olivia, he couldn't care less about her. He gets violent a couple times and rapes her, once repeatedly smacking her and ripping her dress off, and never once apologizing for it. She doesn't care that he's done that because she's in love with him, and even gets aroused despite it. See photo. I never felt the love she had for him despite her saying so several times.

Olivia gets a harebrained idea that involves pregnancy, twice. Once was fine but the story got less interesting and a bit boring when the author wouldn't let it go. The story ends very abruptly.

I enjoyed this though I don't think the writer, a Canadian woman writing British characters, is that great of a writer and doesn't really know how to write teen dialogue. Olivia and her friend Megan sounded too mature and never like the children they were. The story went on a little too long with not a whole lot happening, then it ended very abruptly. Total overuse of the expression "make love" and the word "terrific" in here too. Those words and expressions weren't true to the time this book was published. I don't quite understand the title, either. She's not a daddy's girl and Nick is seventeen-years older than her but he's only in his early thirties. She's not really his girl either.