Archive for October, 2009
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
Pros: Wow. Delightful, hard-working recipes that showcase the best of chocolate.
Cons: Sugar, calories, fat, calories…
Rating: 5 out of 5
Review copy courtesy of The Taunton Press.
Also posted on Epinions.com.
Hi, my name is Heather, and I’m addicted to chocolate. I prefer dark to milk, although the new “deep milk” is good, and I’m picky about my whites (most brands taste chalky, but that’s why I stay stocked up on Green & Black’s). I love trying out new and wacky flavor combos like bacon-chocolate, or chocolate with almonds and sea salt (Vosges makes an awesome bar of the latter); or good old-fashioned pairings like chocolate and coconut. Above all, I like to cook with it. My husband and I always keep a few bars around to break up and whisk into a hot mixture of milk and half-and-half, maybe with a dash of liqueur, for hot chocolate, but it’s fun to go wild sometimes instead. And believe me, if you want to go wild with chocolate, this cookbook put together by the editors of Fine Cooking magazine, Absolutely Chocolate: Irresistible Excuses to Indulge
, is perfect.
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Tags: Chocolate, Cookbooks, cooking, desserts, Fine Cooking, recipes, sweets
Posted in Chocolate, Desserts and Sweets | Permalink | 10 Comments »
Monday, October 19th, 2009
Pros: Delightful range of wonderful recipes; incredible feast of tips and tricks
Cons: None that we could find
Rating: 5 out of 5
Review copy courtesy of The Taunton Press.
Thanksgiving dinner is a tradition for my husband and I. Normally we don’t worry that much about holidays, but when we lived in Boston it was fun to collect up those friends who couldn’t make it home for “turkey day” and feed them at our apartment. We tended to bring together about 5-10 people and made waaay too much food, but that was kind of the point. Now we might not have the huge numbers of people to feed, but we still enjoy finding creative ways to enjoy turkey and the trimmings. Only this year, we’re trying out the latest book to cross our field of vision a bit early, so you’ll be able to pick it up in time for your own feasting if you like the sound of it. It’s a great sacrifice, dear readers, but we’re prepared to make it—for your sakes.
I’m totally failing at sounding serious, aren’t I? Ah well, I never did have a good poker face! Read on for the details of our pre-Thanksgiving experiment with How to Cook a Turkey: And All the Other Trimmings
from the editors & contributors of Fine Cooking.
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Tags: Cookbooks, cooking, Fine Cooking magazine, recipes, Thanksgiving, trimmings, turkey
Posted in Special Occasion | Permalink | 4 Comments »
Saturday, October 17th, 2009
Pros: Strong medical mystery; intense dark thriller material; plenty of personal drama
Cons: Personal drama is a little less focused than in “Warning Signs”
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Review copy courtesy of Penguin Group.
Also posted on Epinions.com.
I absolutely loved author CJ Lyons’s Warning Signs, and Urgent Care
is nearly as wonderful.
Nora Halloran is a charge nurse at Angels of Mercy Medical Center. One of her coworkers was just brutally attacked and killed—and Nora is accused of losing key evidence in the investigation. Worse, Nora recognizes the handiwork of the killer, and is having more than a little trouble coping. She wants to turn to her ex, Seth, for comfort, but she can’t forgive him for his betrayal, and he comes under suspicion as the investigation continues.
Helping Nora are her friends: Lydia is an ER doc who’s hiding from the people who killed her mother when she was a child. Amanda is a med student who’s engaged to be married, trying to save a girl’s life (when she doesn’t even know what’s wrong with her), and in danger of ruining her career by following her conscience. And Gina is struggling to figure out whether she’s happy with the man she wants to marry, and how she can balance her parents’ demands with her job.
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Tags: Angels of Mercy, C.J. Lyons, medical drama, romance, suspense, thriller
Posted in Romance & Erotica, Thriller, Adventure & Mystery | Permalink | No Comments »
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
Pros: Original; touching; incredibly creative; tragic; wonderful!
Cons: None
Rating: 5 out of 5
Review copy courtesy of Penguin Group.
Also posted on Epinions.com.
In his “Princess Novels,” author Jim C. Hines explores the truth behind the fairy tale, and what comes after the “happily ever after.” The Stepsister Scheme followed Sleeping Beauty (Talia), Snow White (known simply as Snow), and Cinderella (Danielle) when Danielle’s husband, Armand, was kidnapped. In order to get him back, the three princesses were forced to face some truly perilous foes. What ensued was a wild blend of both the gripping and the hilarious—Hines has a wonderful grasp of the ridiculous without having to sacrifice either beauty or tragedy to achieve it.
In The Mermaid’s Madness
, it’s time for Queen Beatrice to welcome the undine (mer-folk) home from their migration, and Danielle must accompany her in order to start learning her future duties. It all goes horribly wrong, however, when it turns out that there’s a new leader of the undine—and Lirea has a serious grudge against the queen. Beatrice has a habit of taking in princesses with problems, and this time is no different—she’s been sheltering a young undine princess named Lannadae.
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Tags: fairy tales, Fantasy, Humor, Jim C. Hines, Jim Hines
Posted in Fantasy, Humor | Permalink | 3 Comments »
Friday, October 9th, 2009
Pros:Catherine’s world is well-developed; magic is balanced well with the other aspects of Catherine’s life
Cons: There is one instance where a character’s motivation remains unclear
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Review book courtesy of Macmillan Group
Catrinna de’ Medici’s life seems to be on the fast track to power; even though her parents have died and she’s still a young girl, she is going to be the ruler of Florence when she becomes of age. Unrest and rebellion, however, will separate her from her family, but she has an unlikely ally—an astrologer named Cosimo Ruggieri, who through the use of his knowledge tries to protect her for the future he sees mapped out for her in the stars. When Catrinna finds herself under the protective wing of the Pope, she begins to look forward to the day when she will marry and take her place as the ruler of Florence. But the Pope has other plans. She finds herself married to Henry, Duke of Orleans, and her name becomes Catherine. Battling her husband’s seeming indifference and hostile court factions, she seeks to prevent visions of blood and death that she sees. When Henry is crowned King of France, it seems that she may finally have the means of preventing bloodshed. But the more she fights her visions, the closer they seem to come. Will she be able to avert the tide, or will blood spill over the land of France?
(more…)
Tags: astrology, Catherine de' Medici, France, Jeanne Kalogridis
Posted in Historical | Permalink | 2 Comments »
Friday, October 9th, 2009
Pros: Wonderful & unusual world-building; captivatingly sexy & emotional
Cons: Perhaps the beginning was a little slow
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Review copy (ebook/novella) courtesy of the author.
Available from Samhain Publishing.
Visit Shiloh Walker online.
Greta is on the hunt. She can feel her quarry pulling at her: Mandy, a young woman in trouble—or perhaps a young woman who is trouble. Sometimes it can be hard to tell which until it’s too late. Greta’s job is to keep Mandy from falling prey to evil, and to kill Mandy otherwise. That’s the part of her job that sucks the most. At least she has a few gifts to help her with that job: a bit of an edge in the strength & speed department, not to mention immortality. Oh yeah, and she also has Rip. Rip is like Greta, only he’s in town on his own job. He’s been longing to spend more time with Greta for the last hundred years, however, so he’ll do whatever it takes to make time to help her out. And it’s a good thing, too, because the forces lined up to trap Mandy are awfully tough ones.
Greta and Rip are just two of many—guardian angels who call themselves the Grimm. They’ve covered up their existence by turning their stories into fairy tales, fiction, such as the story of Hansel and Gretel. Only of course, the reality behind the fairy tale is often much, much grimmer than the story.
(more…)
Tags: ebook, erotica, novella, paranormal, romance, Shiloh Walker
Posted in Horror & Paranormal, Romance & Erotica | Permalink | 6 Comments »
Friday, October 9th, 2009
Pros: Funny, hysterical, and lots of other synonyms for hilarious; plenty to make it valuable beyond the website
Cons: Obviously it would be cool if all the photos could be pro-quality, but by nature they can’t, and this has its own sort of charm
Rating: 5 out of 5
[This is one of those rare books that is not a review copy.]
Also posted on Epinions.com.
The Cake Wrecks Blog began when Jen Yates decided to post, for the amusement of herself and a few friends, photos of professional cakes gone “hilariously wrong.” Of course, as occasionally happens on the internet, she’d hit on something that had a far wider audience than she’d imagined. Soon she was getting thousands of hits a day and submissions of “cake wreck” photos from all over the globe—and eventually she even got a book deal. The result of that deal is Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong
, a wonderful organized collection of both best-of-the-blog photos (with snarky commentary) and additional material that never made it into the blog.
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Tags: cake decorating, cake wrecks, cakes, Humor, Jen Yates
Posted in Other Nonfiction | Permalink | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
Pros: Wonderful characters & mystery; fascinating legendry
Cons: Identity of killer insufficiently foreshadowed; too many similarities between heroine of this book and heroine of last one
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Review book courtesy of Penguin Group.
Also posted on Epinions.com.
Ramsey Clark is a forensic investigator working with the infamous group dubbed the “mindhunters” by the media. She’s called in to help when a woman is found dead in Buffalo Springs, Tennessee. It seems the locals believe in a legend involving red mist and a curse, and the authorities are anxious to solve the brutal crime quickly before it becomes more of a media circus than it already has.
Ramsey has no interest whatsoever in paranormal explanations, and is nothing but irritated by handsome Devlin Stryker, a writer and parapsychologist determined to follow along as she conducts her investigation. It hardly helps her irritation that the locals don’t like talking to outsiders, and she ends up needing Devlin’s help to get them to open up to her. And she’d better hurry—historically the deaths have always come in threes, and another girl is about to disappear!
(more…)
Tags: Kylie Brant, Mindhunters, paranormal, Psychology, romance, suspense
Posted in Horror & Paranormal, Romance & Erotica, Thriller, Adventure & Mystery | Permalink | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
Jane over at Dear Author has written a fantastic piece about the new FTC rules regarding bloggers & “compensation.” I thought I’d take a moment to give you an idea where we stand with respect to the review items we receive, so you’ll know in no uncertain terms what to expect from us.
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Tags: blogging, book reviews, FTC, reviewing
Posted in Book Blogging | Permalink | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
Pros: Wonderful psych material; great characters; interesting mystery
Cons: Identity of killer insufficiently foreshadowed
Rating: 4 out of 5
Review book courtesy of Penguin Group.
Also posted on Epinions.com.
There’s a serial rapist loose in Savannah, and detective Ryne Robel is determined to catch him—but he’s going to need help to do it. Enter criminologist Abbie Philips, a member of a famous group of forensic experts nicknamed the “mindhunters” by the media. She’s a brilliant profiler, but of course Robel doesn’t put much stock in profiles, and he finds Abbie herself distracting. Add to that some personal problems that both of the investigators face, as well as a wily and seemingly unstoppable criminal determined to bring women’s worst fears to life, and things will get a lot messier before they get better.
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Tags: Kylie Brant, Mindhunters, mystery, profiler, Psychology, romance, suspense
Posted in Romance & Erotica, Thriller, Adventure & Mystery | Permalink | No Comments »
