THE DOLL GRAVEYARD by Lois Ruby

PUBLISHER: Scholastic, 6/2014
GENRE: Children's Paranormal Fiction
SETTING: Connecticut, USA
MY GRADE: B

SYNOPSIS: The house at Cinder Creek hides many secrets. Shelby and Brian Tate have heard heated voices crying out in the night. They've noticed the unsettling way things move around on their own. But the most chilling thing about their new home is the cemetery someone's built out back. The graves are tiny, only big enough for dolls.

Soon Shelby's learning all about them. Betsy Anne's angelic appearance hides a raging fire behind her eyes, while Baby Daisy changes faces as quickly as she changes moods. And Miss Amelia's cracked porcelain skin and twisted lips only hint at the pain she once endured at the hands of a very angry girl. If Shelby can help the dolls find peace, she and her family might actually be happy at Cinder Creek. But if she can't--the dolls will have their revenge...

MY THOUGHTS: This story is told through almost twelve-year-old precocious Shelby. She lives with her nine-year-old brother, Brian. They move into an old manor with their divorced mother, Serena. It was left to them at the beginning of the story by Serena's aunt Amelia, who's dying. She leaves Shelby to figure out a mystery that she knows nothing about by giving her a doll named Isabella's hat.

Dolls are buried in graves outside and they're in a horseshoe shaped pattern. They end up back inside the house in their dollhouse multiple times even after being reburied. Shelby has to figure out where a doll named Lady is and why she wasn't in the graveyard with the other dolls, and to figure out what really happened to Sadie, a little girl who owned the dolls and lived in that house decades before. Was it murder or natural causes?

The target audience for this book is grades 4-6 but I think that's too young an age group for the subject matter, as it involves the supernatural and talk of the possible murder of a child who lived there years before. The main character sounds more like a teenager or adult, so it didn't seem like a sixth grader was talking, and she's very witty. There's also writings in a journal from an eleven-year-old girl named Emily and she too sounded too mature. Her grammar is perfect, as is her punctuation and spelling. That's not likely accurate for someone so young to be 100% perfect in their writing.

There were quite a lot of characters in this 246-page book, at least fifteen, unless I miscounted, and if an adult can have trouble keeping up with who's who, and they will, an elementary school child certainly will. The dark subject matter combined with Shelby's upbeat personality didn't really mesh well for me. This would have worked better if it had been a young adult book. And I don't think the plot fully made since. I'm a little confused by it but I did enjoy it more than not.

THEY ALL FALL DOWN by Rachel Howzell Hall

PUBLISHER: Forge, 7/2020
GENRE: Fiction/Thriller
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: F

SYNOPSIS: Delighted by a surprise invitation, Miriam Macy sails off to a luxurious private island off the coast of Mexico with six other strangers. Surrounded by miles of open water in the gloriously green Sea of Cortez, Miriam is soon shocked to discover that she and the rest of her companions have been brought to the remote island under false pretenses—and all seven strangers harbor a secret.

Danger lurks in the lush forest and in the halls and bedrooms of the lonely mansion. Sporadic cell-phone coverage and miles of ocean keeps the group trapped in paradise. And strange accidents stir suspicions, as one by one . . .

MY THOUGHTS: This story is a retelling of the 1939 Agatha Christie novel And Then There Were None. The plot of this book is this: someone has invited seven strangers in the USA, black, white, Hispanic, to live in a mansion called Artemis, on an island off the coast of Mexico, for three days. Each person was given a different reason for being invited there and they don't know it but they're there under false pretenses. They don't know either that the person who invited them has set out to punish each and every one of them for past sins. Each person represents one of the seven deadly sins and they're being taken out one by one.

Mimi is just an awful character. Every thought she has about the other six people is critical and superficial. She's a mess mentally based on things we learn about her towards the end and she certainly deserved to be on that island. The stuff going on with her before she leaves for her trip that involves her daughter is ridiculous and is another example of her issue with race, which I talk more about below. I just don't see any point in all that backstory. We're told by her ex-husband that she makes things up but aren't given any examples so we don't know if it's true or not.

I really like unlikable characters sometimes, and villains, but I didn't care for any in here, and all but one, Wallace, was unlikable to me. The dialogue was awful, the characters, uninteresting, there was no suspense, nothing.

The black author clearly has an issue with race. She mentioned about four or five times within the first thirty pages that the main character Miriam, aka Mimi, is black. The plot of the story has nothing to do with ethnicity. Nothing. Mimi has made some stupid comments like this, about educated black character Frank, from page 197, "But there he was, stuttering and sweating like a guilty son of a bitch from the ghetto, caught red-handed and flecked with the blood of a white woman, a Richard Wright character come to life." Another comment that bothered me was this, on page 221 of the paperback, about Frank and a white character named Eddie, "He was a big man, an angry man, who now stood over a naked , unmoving black man. 1717, 1817, 1917, today...This was a timeless American image." WTF is she talking about? The character was helping him out of the hot tub and the character's making a slavery comment/comparison? Get the fuck out of here with that, Rachel. While trying to figure out which of the seven deadly sins she represents, she says this, page 239, "Pride? Okay. A little. But that wasn't a problem-I needed a very healthy amount of self-esteem to be black and female in America." There's a few more comments at the beginning about her being a black woman, but I don't remember what they are. The author also made a white police officer the murderer of an innocent black man. Overkill, overkill, overkill. I'm surprised but at the same time not, that no one in any of the reviews I read, mentioned any of that.

The ending of this is different than And Then There Were None, so I give the author credit for that since I liked it. I liked Wallace too. But Agatha's laughing at you from her grave for your poor attempt at a remake of her classic. No way, no how would I ever read this author again.

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

BUT WHO WILL BELL THE CATS? and THE CAT WHO WOULDN'T COME INSIDE by Cynthia von Buhler

TITLE: But Who Will Bell the Cats?
PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin, 9/2009
GENRE: Children's Fiction
READ FREE: link
MY GRADE: B

SYNOPSIS: Finally, the solution to Aesop’s age-old question: But who will bell the cats?

Mouse and his friend Brown Bat are tired of watching the princess’s cats enjoy the life of luxury in the banquet hall of the castle, while they languish on crumbs and sleep in smelly socks.

They are determined to get out of the basement and join the fun and frolicking. But how to get past those spoiled cats who block their every effort?

It will take ingenuity, teamwork, and quite a bit of cunning for Mouse and Bat to succeed. If they can only figure out how to bell the cats . . .

MY THOUGHTS: I'm a little disappointed in this. I don't like how the cat's came to be belled. The mouse and bat could have just asked that person to do it in the first place. The mouse and bat weren't cunning either like the synopsis said. I do like the illustrations because they're very gothic.

TITLE: The Cat Who Wouldn't Come Inside
PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin, 9/2006
GENRE: Children's Fiction
READ FREE: link
MY GRADE: A+

SYNOPSIS: All tigers and tabbies, calicos and strays, kittens and cats, need love. And trust. They want things just so. And, sometimes, they do not want to come inside. But a little patience and a little attention can make all the difference.

MY THOUGHTS: This is a very sweet story with a very happy ending. A cat shows up at a woman's house often. The woman offers it something new in addition to the old stuff each time, be it food or a comfort item, then invites the cat in, but it runs away each and every time until one day it decides to stick around in the winter. The book's cover is beautiful. I really like the claymation images. I've never seen it in a children's book before. I do not like the cat's face, as it looks like that of a mouse.

BEING LOLITA by Alisson Wood

PUBLISHER: Flatiron, 8/2020
GENRE: Nonfiction/Memoir
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: B

SYNOPSIS: A dark romance evolves between a high schooler and her English teacher in this breathtakingly powerful memoir about a young woman who must learn to rewrite her own story.

“Have you ever read Lolita?” So begins seventeen-year-old Alisson’s metamorphosis from student to lover and then victim. A lonely and vulnerable high school senior, Alisson finds solace only in her writing—and in a young, charismatic English teacher, Mr. North.

Mr. North gives Alisson a copy of Lolita to read, telling her it is a beautiful story about love. The book soon becomes the backdrop to a connection that blooms from a simple crush into a forbidden romance. But as Mr. North’s hold on her tightens, Alisson is forced to evaluate how much of their narrative is actually a disturbing fiction.

In the wake of what becomes a deeply abusive relationship, Alisson is faced again and again with the story of her past, from rereading Lolita in college to working with teenage girls to becoming a professor of creative writing. It is only with that distance and perspective that she understands the ultimate power language has had on her—and how to harness that power to tell her own true story.

Being Lolita is a stunning coming-of-age memoir that shines a bright light on our shifting perceptions of consent, vulnerability, and power. This is the story of what happens when a young woman realizes her entire narrative must be rewritten—and then takes back the pen to rewrite it.

MY THOUGHTS: The twenty-six-year-old dark-haired and green-eyed English teacher, Nick North, was emotionally abusive and childish, throwing tantrums during arguments. Nothing sexual happened between them, not even kissing, until after she turned 18 and graduated high school, except one conversation about bra and penis size while she was seventeen. I don't feel like she took any responsibility for her part in their inappropriate two-year relationship that started in 2001, when she was less than four months away from her eighteenth birthday, and continued while she was away at college five hours away.

I'd have liked to have known more about her teenage depression, suicide and cutting but she basically just glossed over it as well as glossed over a later rape. How did you make your parents aware of your depression in middle school? When did the cutting start? We weren't made aware of any childhood abuse so I'd like to know what she thought brought on the cutting. I don't recall her mentioning depression while Nick was in her life so I'm assuming it didn't get worse.

She made a couple of comments that really bother me. She said, on page 143, that "for all intents and purposes" she was still "pubescent" and was a "child" when she was eighteen. No, ma'am, you're a legal adult at eighteen years of age. Seems like she's calling him a pedophile, which he wasn't, at least not in her situation. Who knows what he was doing with other underage girls. On page 147 she said that once during sex with Nick it was painful but she didn't tell him to stop and that she later told herself his not stopping was her fault. She's right; it is her fault he didn't stop because he didn't know she wanted him to, so why even make that comment? On page 190, she said that at a party her first weekend at college she was drunk and had sex with a guy. She said she "didn't understand" what she'd done. How could you not?

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

THE DEVIL'S WEB by Mary Balogh

PUBLISHER: Signet, 8/1990
REISSUED: 2008
GENRE: Fiction/Historical Romance
SETTING: England, early 1800s
SERIES: Web, #3
MY GRADE: D

SYNOPSIS: The last time Madeline Raine had seen James Purnell, she had been but a chit of a girl, and at his mercy. Purnell had held her helpless in his arms, but protectively, above the abyss of her own dangerous hunger for him. He had left her then, not taking her innocence but taking her heart, as he vanished from England. Since then Madeline had reigned as society's most dazzling and heartless beauty, making all men pay for one man's rebuff of her.

Now James was back, more handsome and arrogant than ever. And Madeline steeled herself not to fall under his spell again. But she soon discovered that the melting power of passion ignited by love would not easily die...

MY THOUGHTS: After owning this book for twelve years, I finally got around to reading it. The first half of this book was extremely boring. It involved so many characters, mostly relatives, parties, and conversations that had nothing to do with anything. That carried on throughout the book. It's truly at least 100 pages longer than it should have been and it was a real struggle to get though the first half. All the interesting things involving Madeline and James took place in the second half, so that made the story so much more tolerable.

James is thirty. He left England for Canada (where the author lives) four years previous. He works with fur traders. He sales home to England and brings along the daughter, Jean Cameron, of the man he works with. She ends up getting married to someone she meets there then disappears from the story. He's reacquainted with our heroine, twenty-five-year-old Madeline, which he met, to my understanding, in both previous book in this series. They have history together but we don't know about any of it.

James and his younger sister Alex grew up with very religious parents and weren't allowed to socialize much with other children. Alex is married to Madeline's twin brother, Dominic. Both of his parents are horrible and look down at James both for his career choice and for his past, which involved a girl they didn't approve of, Dora. That relationship has haunted him for ten years but he gets resolution after meeting up with her. Her brother, Carl Beasley, was a bad character who would have made one helluva villain.

He and Madeline are in love with each other but they don't know it. In love but can't stand one another. We aren't told why that is so it's very confusing. He's possessive and jealous because he knows how flirtatious she is. She's got a very smart mouth and is very immature and slightly antagonistic, even when he's being nice and trying hard to get along. Her attitude is common for heroines written at that time (1990) and before. We didn't get any background information on her at all or any about their history with each other from four years before.

Now about the "rape." There's a sex scene that happens after she tells him that if they have sex it will be rape, since she can't stand him. I've read that scene five times and don't see rape in it even though the hero admits to himself that it was rape. The heroine even thinks it was rape. Here are the pages for you to read that scene for yourself. In the last chapter, James realizes it wasn't rape and later in said chapter asks Madeline about it and she agrees that it wasn't. So why did they both say it was rape if an actual rape didn't happen? How could they have seen it that way? More importantly, why did the author write it that way?

This could have been a really good story if not for most of the first half and the excessive amount of characters in here, and the two weddings of secondary characters. No story needs three weddings in it. I love reading about tragic couples, which this one was, and I did enjoy most the second half. I probably only liked a total of 1/3 of the story. It's a shame it was bogged down with so much unnecessary dialogue.

The heroine's name, Madeline Raine, sounds like the 1986 Bruce Hornsby single Mandoline Rain. I wonder if that's a coincidence.

TWO CHILDREN'S BOOKS, FAIRIES and MONSTERS by John Malam

PUBLISHER: QED Publishing 1/2009
GENRE: Fiction/Children's Fantasy
READ FREE: link
MY GRADE: A+

SYNOPSIS: Learn about the legends and mysteries that surround mythical creatures with these enthralling guides. Hunt down the most fearsome dragons, explore the fairy world, follow the history of giants and discover the most famous monsters in the world. Prepare to enter a realm of amazing artwork, incredible tales and legendary encounters.












MY THOUGHTS: I love this. It's a British publication. Every one of the 32 pages is filled with full-color illustrations and text. It's about fairies, goblins, dwarfs, pixies, and elves. Where they come from and all that good stuff, and most are shape-shifters, didn't you know? This is done pretty much in the same style as the 1976 book Gnomes by Rien Poortvliet and Wil Huygen. I like this image and my favorite image is below and is of a hobgoblin causing mischief at night.

PUBLISHER: QED Publishing, 9/2009
GENRE: Fiction/Children's Fantasy
READ FREE: link
MY GRADE: A

SYNOPSIS: Learn about the legends and mysteries that surround mythical creatures with these enthralling guides. Hunt down the most fearsome dragons, explore the fairy world, follow the history of giants and discover the most famous monsters in the world. Prepare to enter a realm of amazing artwork, incredible tales and legendary encounters.












MY THOUGHTS: This 32 page book is part of the same 'Mythologies' series as 'Fairies'. What's talked about are the kraken, cerberus, harpy, hydra, great serpent, griffin, flying head, and vampires, among others, and include what I assume are well known stories about some of those creatures.

I like the 'monsters with wings' aka 'monsters of the sky' chapter best. I dislike the illustration of the Harpy because it looks very modern, unlike all the rest, which have a very old feel and look to me. There are quite a lot of stories packed into this one. Perhaps the freakiest chapter is 'humanoid monsters' and I'd be lying if I said this Minotaur didn't creep me out, or the flying head. My favorite image is from The Great Serpent and the Flood story, below.

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.