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Sabriel (Abhorsen, #1)
Sabriel (Abhorsen, #1)
Garth Nix | 1995 | Fiction & Poetry
8
8.3 (12 Ratings)
Book Rating
This was an interesting read for me. I would not say it was my favorite high fantasy novel in the world. That't mainly because this is one of my favorite genres to read, so I have read quite a few as of late.

This book took me a while to get into. There was a lot going on in the beginning, and it being a relatively short beginning of a story, it was hard to follow along. I am not saying I didn't like it, not by a long shot. Overall, it was a generally interesting and fun read. It just took a little longer than I had hoped to get into.

This book has been on my to be read list for over two years now, ever since a classmate of mine told me about it after our French class one day. I thought I would finally give it a read.

I do like Sabriel. She is pretty cool. I think I started liking her more in the second half of the book because she was growing into her role of the Abhorsen. She didn't shy away from her duties or try and get rid of them as she had more in the first half of the book. I like that she started taking charge of the situation.

Touchstone is interesting because I don't know how I feel about him. Honestly, I have no opinion of him at all, which is weird. We spend almost three hundred pages with him, and I can't find a connection with him. I do love the cat though. He's a demon, in cat form. So, a cat. (Don't get me wrong, cats are one of my favorite animals.) I am just not sure about Touchstone.

I still don't quite know what happened at the end of the book. It felt like it was wrapped up really fast and I didn't have time to process it.

I hope that if I get the next book, I will have a better understanding of how I feel about the characters and the story than I do right now.
  
Balloons for Tiger
Balloons for Tiger
Lori Orlinsky | 2021 | Children
I am sure most, if not everyone as lost a pet or two in their lifetime. Whether you were a child yourself or you are a parent of one. I am sure it has been hard to tell your child or children about pet loss. Well, this book is called "Balloons for Tiger" is a book about pet loss.

It can show you how to deal with pet loss with your child or children. It is a good one for children to understand a pet's death, but that their pet's love is continual with them; It may help open your child or children to talk about their loss of their favorite pet.

You never know, maybe your child will want to send balloons to their lovely pet in haven. They will show it back in another way. You may find another way to show your child grief for their precious pet. It is suitable for adults as well.

This book reminded me of my loving cat that has passed away. I loved Pumpkin dearly, and I still miss him today, And it has been two or three years since the cat passed. I keep him and his brother. We couldn't own one and let the other one go. His name is Pumpkin, and I still love him, and his brother Patches is still around somewhere in the neighborhood.

I miss my little boy. He was just so cuddly and my reading buddy. This book reminded me to keep those memories alive, and I will send my love for him. I hope to see him on the rainbow bridge when coming home to be with him.

Children will love this book. Parents will like it as well. It got some good tips in the back of the book to help guide or guide children with talking about pet loss or ideas to deal with the loss of a pet. The book is good even if you lose a pet that is not a cat. You can change the pet to a fish if you so wish. Or even a dog. The pet can signify adjusted to whatever pet you want it to be for your family. Pets are family members too.
  
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Joe Dante recommended The Black Cat (1941) in Movies (curated)

 
The Black Cat (1941)
The Black Cat (1941)
1941 | Classics, Comedy, Horror
(0 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"Growing up on movies on TV, part of the Universal package was a very, very weird and creepy movie called The Black Cat. Which is ostensibly based on Edgar Allen Poe’s story, but wasn’t. It’s a devil-worshiping movie with Karloff and Lugosi, and it’s directed by a guy named Edgar Ulmer, who was a very promising European director whose career ran afoul of the fact that he slept with the boss’s niece or something like that and got, basically, blackballed by the major studios. But before he did that, he was able to make this very, very dark and very dreamlike horror movie, which only runs about 65 minutes. It’s an art deco nightmare, and it’s got all these very perverse ideas and concepts running through it. It’s like watching somebody else’s bad dream. It’s really a wonderful picture. I mean, Karloff has given better performances. The Body Snatcher is probably his best performance outside of Frankenstein, and that was on my list, but between The Body Snatcher and The Black Cat, I have to go with The Black Cat, because it’s so off-beat and kind of unique. There aren’t a lot of other movies like it. The interesting thing is, now these movies are actually available to see. When I was growing up, you had to wait until two o’clock in the morning on Friday; they were going to run some movie, and if you didn’t watch it then, they weren’t gonna run it again for another year and a half or more. And you’d fall asleep anyway, you know. It was so hard to see these things. You had to really seek them out. The Mario Bava movies, I had to go to the lowest dives, the crappiest grindhouses, to see these things, and often the prints were all beat up. But now, all this stuff is available, and it looks great. I just don’t think film lovers realize what a paradise they’re living in right now. [laughs] For those of us who really had to go the distance to seek these things out, it was really quite arduous."

Source
  
Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (Red Dwarf #1)
Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (Red Dwarf #1)
Grant Naylor | 1992 | Humor & Comedy, Science Fiction/Fantasy
6
7.0 (4 Ratings)
Book Rating
Back in the late 80s/early 90s, there was a TV show on British terrestial channles, that gained a bit of a cult following: 'Red Dwarf'.

Set on a 6-mile long mining ship in deep space, the early years of Red Dwarf were centred around the odd-couple pairing of Dave Lister (the last known Human alive, who was in a stasis booth - released thousands of years later - when a radiation leak wiped out the crew of the eponymous ship) and Arnold J Rimmer: a hologram of his dead bunk-mate, and perhaps the most annoying man in existence. Added to this are the ships now-senile computer Holly and the Cat: a creature evolved from a cat that Lister had smuggle aboard (and why he was in the stasis booth in the first place).

To this, and round about season 3 (although he first made an appearance in season 2), was added Kryten: a mechanoid with an overactive guilt chip.

Some novels based on a TV show seem to pretty much just repeat the episode scene for scene; others seem to share nothing in common with hteir source material except the name. This, I felt, falls somewhere in the middle: while certain segments of the novel do indeed follow (very) closely to their source, others only use that as their starting-off point. It aslo does a better job of tying the episodes together than the TV show ever could!
  
Pet Sematary (2019)
Pet Sematary (2019)
2019 | Horror
Dead on Arrival
Doctor and Family man Louis and his wife Rachel decide to move to Maine with their 2 kids Ellie and Gage, so that Louis can work at a University Hospital and Rachel can have more time with the kids. Whilst running around the large property, Ellie literally stumbles into a large wall of trees, which she unsuccessfully tries to climb and thus meets Judd, an elderly neighbour who tends to her injury and advises her not to play around the area. When Judd meets Louis, he advises that the Pet Sematary near their property where Ellie was playing is actually their land also. However when the family Cat, Church, is fatally injured; Judd shows Louis what is behind the wall of Trees, and advises him to bury Church there. The next morning, Church is miraculously back... and he's acting vicious and erratic. Is Church really the family cat? Or has something else altogether possessed Church? And when tragedy befalls this family yet again, what lengths will Louis go to to keep his family?

I've read the Pet Sematary Book (by Stephen King) and it's an absolute page turner so I was really excited to see this Remake. However, the whole thing fell flat for me. It wasn't remotely scary or interesting, even. It was just bland and made you feel a bit "meh" about the whole thing. Such a shame as the Book is excellent.