FAIRY TALES ADULT COLORING BOOK by Emelie Lidehäll Öberg

PUBLISHER: Gibbs Smith, 3/2017
PURCHASE: link 

IMAGES: link 

MY GRADE: C

SYNOPSIS: Reminiscent of classic Swedish fairy tales, Emelie Lidehäll Öberg’s debut coloring book fills 96 pages of sweetly sleeping animals, dolls come to life, and whimsical abodes. Color teacups, cuckoo clocks, birdhouses, peacocks, and fishbowls, and more. . . .

MY THOUGHTS: I'm not impressed with the illustrations in this at all. The faces on the females in here are ugly, with huge eyes and the faces are practically the same. I don't understand why this is called Fairy Tales. The original Swedish title is "Sagolikt", which online translators say means "fabulous", and I don't understand why it would be called that either. There are only a few images in here that look like what you read about in classic fairy tales. The paper is nice and thick but should be smoother. Sometimes the pencil didn't want to glide smoothly over certain areas. The pages aren't perforated near the spine so you cannot cleanly rip the pages out. You'll have to use a razor/box cutter (that's what I use) to cut them out. If  you just pull the pages out it will rip your paper and image. There's an image on each side of the paper. I used soft core colored pencils (Prismacolor Premier, AmazonBasics, Premium Art Supply) so I don't know if gel pens or markers will bleed through. 

The image on the cover is also in the book. You can see some of the images inside here, as well as the three I colored.

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

TWO CHILDREN'S BOOKS BY IRENE HAAS: A SUMMERTIME SONG and BESS AND BELLA

TITLE: A SUMMERTIME SONG
PUBLISHED: 1997
GENRE: Children's Fiction
READ FREE: link
MY GRADE: A

SYNOPSIS: Magic begins when a frog hops through Lucy's bedroom window with a party invitation. What follows is a delightful summer idyll, complete with cricket music, a baby bird, and a birthday cake, and ending in the happy reunion with an old lost doll.






MY THOUGHTS: Lucy puts on the magic hat that the frog gave her and she's shrunk down to a size not much bigger than an insect. On the way to the party in a air taxi driven by Baby Bird, who's scared to try flying, she meets Madame and Mr. Mouse, Inchworm, a Japanese doll, and Owl, for whom the party's for. She didn't know it but the doll she found is the one her grandmother lost as a child. The book's title comes from a song her grandmother sings at the end.

There are a couple words in here no young child, and some adults, would have ever heard of, chapeau and fete, so I don't think they should have been used. Some of the pages are very, very dark colorwise which doesn't look quite right in a children's book, but I personally love it. Though there's no moral, it's a very cute and innocent story. The illustrations are so beautiful. Some have a 1970s feel, which I love. My favorite is below.

TITLE: BESS AND BELLA
PUBLISHED: December 2006
READ FREE: link
MY GRADE: A

SYNOPSIS: On a cold winter afternoon Bess and her doll are having a tea party with melted snow and cookie crumbs, when -- falump! -- a little bird named Bella falls from the sky. Bella offers treats for a proper tea, and a new friendship begins. Little does Bess know that this is just the first of many delightful surprises to come during that afternoon.



MY THOUGHTS: This is a cute story about a lonely child who makes friends with a bird named Bella. Bess and her doll Rose are playing outside in the snow. Bella falls from the sky with her suitcase after attempting to fly south for the winter but it got to be too much for her so she made a crash landing on Bess' tea party. Bess invites a crew of firefighter dogs who were passing by to join them, then eats a meal with a mouse family, then Bess heads home. Bella stays with her and lives in her room until springtime. Another cute innocent story with beautiful illustrations by Irene Haas. My favorite image is below.

Sadly the author passed away in 2013 at the age of 83.

PRETTY MAIDS IN A ROW by Marilyn Campbell

PUBLISHER: Villard, 1995
GENRE: Suspense
AUTHOR SITE: link 

MY GRADE: B

SYNOPSIS: Years after five innocent young women are sexually exploited and humiliated by a group of fraternity brothers playing a cruel, macho game, someone sets out to take revenge by brutally murdering the men, one by one.

MY THOUGHTS: The e-book version of this was retitled Carnal Vengeance. I don't know if its been edited or rewritten in any way.

I first read this in 1995. I got it from Doubleday Book Club, read it multiple times and stupidly got rid of it in 2005, replaced it March 2022. I read it at least three times but not sure exactly how many.

This was pretty interesting but hard to reread already knowing who the killer is. When I first read it I didn't guess who it was. This is set mainly in Washington, D.C., and part in Florida. The women, who are in their early to mid 30s, are getting revenge on a specific group of former male college classmates who raped them at separate times/different years, by using their brains, not violence, and that's pretty damn clever. Their are six main women who are part of the Little Sister Society in the novel and more that aren't in it. That all changes when Holly enters the picture. Things take a very dark turn as far as revenge goes.

I don't like reporter David Wells at all. He's very arrogant and pushy, forceful, actually. He's a self-proclaimed "free-wheeling, unfaithful bachelor." I really disliked the Mick D'Angelo/Jerry Frampton snuff film subplot. It was too over the top. I guess the point in making one of the characters, Bobbi, have a split personality named Roberta was to show that that developed after her rape but we should have just heard about it, not heard from Roberta, as it did nothing at all for the plot. I also really disliked Holly traveling to visit her parents to tell her about her rape 13 years later. Again, it did nothing for the plot other than to give us another red herring character in her father. I do like when characters who aren't villians get away with bad deeds and one of the main charcters is said person.