It’s snowing! Way down here near the Gulf of Mexico that’s pretty rare, and I’m excited! I just hope there is a little accumulation for when the boys get out of school… I wish we had our tree up, and I wish I was playing some festive Christmas music and wrapping up gifts and baking yummy things, but instead I’m buckled down in front of the computer trudging through my edits… But the view out the window is so pretty!
December Book Review Club
Jingle bells, jingle bells! Jingle all the way…
Believe it or not, December is here, and along with it comes a flurry of activity: shopping, wrapping, baking, celebrating… For me, this is when my opportunities to read become few and far between. Actually, this has already started happening, and so I’ve gone back to a favorite author, whose books I own and have read many times.
I never get tired of re-reading them. So for this month’s meeting of Barrie Summy’s Book Review Club, I am reviewing Jennifer Crusie’s Fast Women.
Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy
My love for Jenny Crusie started in a Target in Austin, Texas. I was browsing through the paperbacks and spotted the bright red cover of Welcome to Temptation, with that appealing apple and catchy title, and I couldn’t help but pick it up. The blurb intrigued me, so into my basket it went, and the rest is history. I quickly tracked down her backlist and read them all and then, rabid fan that I was, I waited not-so-patiently for each new release.
Fast Women is the story of a detective agency, a decade-old murder, and a entire cast of characters starting over. Nell Dysart recently got a divorce, needed a job, and walked into McKenna Investigations intending to fill their need for a secretary. Pretty much from page two on, all hell breaks loose. As part of her recovery, Nell steals a dog, inspires a warrant sworn out for her arrest, performs some sketchy undercover work, falls for her boss, sleeps with her boss’s partner…you get they idea. And through it all, Crusie keeps it all whip fast, light, funny, and very appealing. And at the end, murder solved.
Crusie has a knack for developing smart, savvy characters who find themselves in really downright insane situations and still manage to keep their cool, not to mention their snarky senses of humor. As a writer (and a reader), it’s impossible not to be impressed. Even more impressive is the extensive mentoring work Crusie has done for authors wishing to hone their craft. Her website is full of essays, and eventually she will be publishing, with sometime collaborator Bob Mayer, a He Wrote, She Wrote compendium of their different takes on writing elements and strategies. For a while, the bulk of this material was available for free online, and I printed out pretty much all of it. Definitely a good investment.
But I digress.
If you’re looking for a snappy read with a little bit of everything, pick up Fast Women. Hmmm…that last sentence didn’t come out quite the way I’d intended. How about read Fast Women. Or take your pick–any Crusie will do. Happy Holidays! And be sure to click through to Barrie’s site to read some other great reviews.
Posted in book review club on 12/02/2009 11:00 am | 8 Comments
Holiday Spirit
I’m proud to say that I’ve added the ‘Followers’ tool to my blog. Given the spotty nature of my posts, I’m thrilled to have any one at all to include under the ‘My Peeps’ heading. My only excuse for this latest absence is the holidays…and being out of town. Pretty much nothing at all got accomplished except a tiny bit of Christmas shopping, which is something I guess. Instead, we decorated gingerbread men, played football in the park, went ice skating, and toasted marshmallows over a campfire at a Festival of Lights. It was lovely.
The ice skating in particular was very interesting. I haven’t been in years and was a little terrified that it wouldn’t be quite like riding a bike. I worried that I’d wobble and topple and come away with a bevy of bruises, aches and pains. But…I didn’t fall even a single time! The only close call was when my ten-year-old skated up and thumped his skate into mine. But I held on and kept my balance. It wasn’t skill, though, that impressed my brother-in-law. It was my gutsiness in wearing whatever I’d scrounged from my sister’s family’s collection of winter wear in order to keep myself warm. I’m going to try to upload a picture in a little bit, but I’m not sure even a photo will do this ensemble justice: sweatshirt jacket, pale green scarf, Elmo-esque gloves, long, tassled, goofy pale blue ski hat, and vivid red ear muffs. I was quite the sight, but as I told my sister…I was warm. Besides, I didn’t know any of those people, and they all looked cold.
The best part about the ice skating was that the place we went, the Ice Palace I think it was called, had these ‘walkers’ for new skaters. They were available (for a $3 fee) in varying heights, and we rented one for each of my two boys, neither of whom had ever been skating. They were made of PVC pipe, and with all those contraptions on the ice, it looked like a miniature geriatric convention–it was an awesome image. Plus, they seemed to help build the boys’ confidence quite a lot. By the end, they had both abandoned their walkers and launched off on their own. I must admit that my niece and I requisitioned a few walkers that had been left behind and raced each other around the rink–she won pretty easily.
Now I’m trying to get the boys to agree to go skate at the Houston Galleria over the holidays. There are no walkers, but it’s truly lovely at Christmas time.