Frustrated with this Blog

I have been updating this blog after I read books and it is not saving my reviews or publishing them.  I am currently done with book 39, even though it only shows 35 on here.  Books missed were The BFG, Ready Player One, and Summer Sisters.  Now that Goodreads has a reading challenge I think I will just do reviews on there after this year.

#35: One Breath Away

Last night I finished One Breath Away by Heather Gudenkauf.  I have really enjoyed her other books and I liked this one as well.  It's the story of a gunman in a school during the middle of a snow storm the day before spring break.  It's broken out as each chapter being from a different person's point of view, so we learn a lot about the characters this way.  One character was a child in the school looking for her brother, one was the grandpa, one was the mother, and one was the police officer.
I felt that I really liked learning about the characters, with the exception of Holly (the mom) I really liked them.  The story seemed to have some suspense as we didn't know who the gunman was until the very end.  There were lots of twists to get you to guess who it was, but it wasn't until the police finally were going in that I could guess who it was.
At times it was a little cheesy, but overall it was a good read.  I definitely like Gudenkauf's writing.

#34: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

I just finished the book Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg.  I remember loving this movie, but had never read the book.  It was on the eating themed table at the library, so I decided to read it for book club.  We are doing a "potluck" theme next week.

I really liked this book.  There were a lot of extra details in the book that I didn't remember from the movie.  I really enjoyed all the characters as well.

#33: Brown Girl Dreaming

I recently read the book Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson.  This was the story of Jacqueline's childhood told through poems and songs.  It was beautifully written.  I loved learning how she started writing and found the history and her childhood very interesting.

#32: The Secret Keeper

Yesterday I finished The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton.  This was a story about a group of sibling coming home to visit their mother Dorothy who is dying.  While talking to her mom ,the oldest daughter, Laurel keeps remembering something that happened in their childhood.  She feels her mother is hiding a huge secret and starts her research to find out more about her mother's life during the war years.

Laurel works quickly and ends up finding a lot of information about her mother.  She also has her brother Gerry help to find out more.  I loved hearing the war time story of Dorothy, Vivien, Jimmy, and all the others.  This was a great story with a perfect secret/twist that I loved.

#31: The Dinner

I recently read The Dinner by Herman Koch.  It's a story of 2 brothers going out to a fancy dinner with their wives.  One of the brother's is famous and running for a political office, so he keeps getting recognized everywhere and gets "fancy" treatment.  The whole point of the dinner is the discuss something horrible that their sons have done and how they are going to handle it.

I really hated all the characters in this book.  I also felt the book was written in a slow tone for such an important subject.  Look back, I think that maybe the slow tone was to go along with how horrible and unemotional the characters seem.

This book was both boring and disgusting at the same time.

#30: On the Island

On the Island by Tracey Garvis Graves has been recommended to me by several people.  My SIL loved it and recommended it a while back because the author lives in Des Moines, a co-worker loves any books with romance, and a friend in my book club read it as her "tropical" themed book.  I finally decided to grab it from the library to read as a back up to my other summer read.

This is the story of a teacher named Anna who is supposed to be tutoring a boy named TJ during the summer.  TJ missed a lot of school due to having cancer and needs to catch up during the summer holiday by having a tutor come on summer break with his family to the Maldive Islands.  Instead of TJ traveling with his family.  He waits and travels with Anna who wasn't done with work yet.  On the way to their final destination, the sea plane they are on crashes and they end up stranded on an uninhabited island.

We can all guess what will happen, even though Anna is way older, they are the only 2 there so they fall in love.  This story is not a new idea.  Some of the things that happened on the island were unique.  I really liked the stories of how they learned to survive on the island, but for me the "love story" felt forced.  I can see when TJ loved Anna, but for me Anna's love for TJ was a little lacking.

This was a really fast read and a good guilty pleasure read.  While I liked it, I don't feel it was one of the greatest books I've read recently.  I do think I will read the sequel to this just to learn a little more about the island they were on.

Up Next:  The Dinner