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MusicCritics (472 KP) created a video about track Encore Un Soir by Celine Dion in Encore un Soir by Celine Dion in Music

Jun 29, 2017  
Video

Encore Un Soir - Céline Dion

  
SO
Secrets of a Fangirl
10
10.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
<b><i>I received this book for free from Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.</i></b>
Hello, my name is Sophia, and I am a fangirl of many forms. A book with the word "fangirl" on it? YES PLEASE. You know you have my attention.

<h2><em><strong>Secrets of a Fangirl </strong></em><strong>is a book about a fangirl.</strong></h2>
AKA ME! And you, because you've got to be obsessed with something here. Maybe it's over a book or a show or even a movie.

(Are there secrets? Yes, but not deep, dark secrets.)

But namely, <em>Secrets of a Fangirl</em> is about Sarah Anne and her obsession with the MK Nightshade fandom, something she's been a fan of since she first discovered it. While her best friend Roxy has grown out of the series, Sarah Anne remains a fan secretly. She keeps her identity under wraps with a set of rules and continues to do so as she wins a place on a panel for a contest. But during the panel, she finds out her competition disregards her completely, and she wants to prove them wrong by winning the next part of the contest.

<h3><strong>Sarah Anne's parents are with her and I am all for it.</strong></h3>
I love how Sarah Anne's parents are with her the entire time. They show their support and they help her navigate the digital world as she makes her way through the contest. It's something that's important in a world of media, and I'm happy Dionne includes this in the novel.

<h2><strong>Dionne's latest novel is full of moods.</strong></h2>
I opened <em>Secrets of a Fangirl</em> and got swallowed up by the book (maybe it's the other way around). Dionne creates a protagonist all of us can relate to in some way. Throughout the book, Sarah Anne struggles with who she is and who she wants to be: does she embrace her inner nerd or continue stifling it? How can she continue to be who she is while not hiding a vital part of herself?

<em><strong>Secrets of a Fangirl</strong></em><strong> is a fun and quick read from Erin Dionne, with a protagonist that I cheered from the beginning of the novel to the end.</strong>

<a href="http://bookwyrmingthoughts.com/secrets-of-a-fangirl-by-erin-dionne-were-all-sarah-anne/"; target="_blank">This review was originally posted on Bookwyrming Thoughts</a>
  
The Marsh King&#039;s Daughter
The Marsh King's Daughter
Karen Dionne | 2017 | Fiction & Poetry, Thriller
8
8.0 (4 Ratings)
Book Rating
The Marsh King’s Daughter was huge before and around the time of its release. People were raving about the novel for a long time and they still are, so I was really excited to read it. While I did love it, I think all the hype made me expect something different to what I got, hence a 4 star rating, not a 5.

What I loved about this book was that it didn’t hold back on some more contraversial opinions and thoughts that came from Helena. For instance, that she still adored her father even after everything, and that she had trouble caring about her mother at times. I think it was nice Dionne didn’t write things that would please all readers. There were definitely some uncomfortable moments for me.

The writing in this book is stuff of dark fairytales. It’s so dark and disturbing but you can’t stop reading becasue the way in which it’s written is beautiful and flows perfectly. Dionne’s writing takes you away, whether it’s into the marsh or trekking through the forest, you are planted directly into the scene, you lose your real surroundings.

One thing that I found disappointing about this novel was that most of it is set in the past, not in the present. From the way the synopsis writes the story, I was expecting this to be a lot more about a life and death chase between daughter and father. And OK, while it is technically about a life and death chase, it’s far more about Helena’s life growing up in the marsh, all that she was taught and all that she learnt. While this is essential to the way the plot plays out, I think the book could have been marketed differently so I didn’t have such a clear idea on how I expected the story to go.

This novel is a gripping, sometimes shocking, sometimes emotional fast paced action thriller with a lot to offer any reader. If you’re not so much a thriller fan, this one could still be a terrifc read for you, as at times this novels feels more literary fiction than anything else.

Will I read Karen Dionne’s work again? Oh sure, most definitely. I just wish this book was the one I’d imagined in my head.
  

"My mom used to play this and it's funny because recently she told me that she didn't even like it very much. But I liked it a lot. It's not like this is the definitive girl group compilation, it's just that I grew up with it. And it means something to me, I guess, because I've covered two of the songs [Dionne Warwick's 'Don't Make Me Over' and Barbara Lewis' 'Hello Stranger']. I probably didn't realise just how important it was to me back then, but the songs have stuck to me over time and so I've come to understand its importance. All these playful and soulful performances, they're still very inspiring to me even though I was five or six when I was listening to it a lot. There wasn't a lot of music my parents played that I enjoyed at that age, so it's in there pretty deep. It's very 1950s, very glittery, very Phil Spector-y. It was pretty formative."

Source
  
The Marsh King&#039;s Daughter
The Marsh King's Daughter
Karen Dionne | 2017 | Fiction & Poetry, Thriller
8
8.0 (4 Ratings)
Book Rating
Riveting
Arc Reviewed By Beckie Bookworm
https://www.beckiebookworm.com/

So Where to start with this review, The Marsh Kings Daughter by Karen Dionne is one of those books where not a lot happens in terms of plotline, this actually doesn't seem to matter as we spend most of the book looking backwards as this is where the main action lies. This story Immerses you in a past that though horrific, is so deeply ingrained in tradition and culture that it sucks you into the pages fully as we experience through a child's eyes life on the marsh.
So Basically, Helena is the daughter of the Marsh King Jacob and his abducted bride, who is hardly more than her child herself.
Unaware of her mother's captivity she is raised on the marsh as her father's shadow.
eagerly Learning all that he knows.
Despite her father's sometimes cruel ways Helena adores him.
At the age of twelve upon realising the secret of her birth and her mother's imprisonment at the hands of her sadistic father and yearning for change Helena manages to escape to civilisation.
But The outside world is a lot different to what she imagined and her grandparents can barely tolerate her presence.
So when she turns eighteen she sets off into the world to forge her own path, cutting herself off from her family and changing her name to escape the notoriety of being the marsh king's daughter.
This is really where we come in Helena is married with two little girls. The secret of her birth is still hidden, that is until her father escapes from Prison engaging Helena in a deadly game of cat and mouse with her family the prize at stake.
This was such an easy and interesting read, I loved the vivid descriptions and also the ongoing Fairytale of the stories namesake.
The Marsh Kings daughter kept my attention till the end.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a free advanced readers copy this is my own personal opinion of the marsh king's daughter by Karen Dionne.

ARC Reviewed by BeckieBookworm
https://www.beckiebookworm.com/
https://www.facebook.com/beckiebookworm/
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/9460945-bex-beckie-bookworm
  
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Caribou recommended Donuts by J Dilla in Music (curated)

 
Donuts by J Dilla
Donuts by J Dilla
2006 | Hip-hop, Rhythm And Blues
4.3 (3 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"I'm pretty good friends with Egon who was the A&R guy for Stones Throw. Maybe it's no wonder the albums leaked in unfinished form because he'd send me beat tapes that J Dilla and Madlib would make. You'd get his CD with hundreds of tracks from J Dilla - they're all online now - and the same kind of thing for Madlib. You got the sense that those guys were always making beats. And when Donuts got released, it basically had all the best stuff from those beat tapes. But it's amazing to me how coherent they are and how well they work as an album - from what were seemingly unrelated two-minute snippets of instrumental hip-hop loops. It resonates with me as an album. It's turned me on to so much of the music that he sampled. At the time I was really into finding records with drum breaks and records with samples - that's how I made a lot of my music back then, was out of those records. He got me into that Dionne Warwick track 'You're Gonna Need Me' that he samples on Donuts. That's such an amazing track and he turned me on to that. He turned me on to the Eddie Kendricks record, People… Hold On, which is another one of my absolutely favourite records. He got me back into 10cc. It's also that aspect, of being a doorway into other things. We were on tour loads that year and we never, ever listened to music as a band. There was either silence, or people working on their own music on headphones or listening to stuff or doing whatever. But those two records [Donuts and Madvillainy] we could agree upon, and we'd listen to them over and over."

Source
  
The Marsh King&#039;s Daughter
The Marsh King's Daughter
Karen Dionne | 2017 | Fiction & Poetry, Thriller
9
8.0 (4 Ratings)
Book Rating
Originally reviewed on http://www.frommybookshelf.com

Helena Pelletier's life is more or less exactly what she wants: a husband and two daughters she loves deeply, a home business that keeps her busy during the days, her past a secret that she keeps hidden from everyone. Helena has worked hard for these things and she prides herself in her accomplishments, until the day her father escapes from prison and she immediately understands that her past is going to catch up to her, whether she wants it to or not. She also knows that the only way to keep her family safe and put her father back in prison is to find and deal with her father herself, since he was the one who trained her to live in the marshes of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where he was keeping her mother captive after he had kidnapped her as a young girl.

With the main part of the story taking place over 24 hours "real time" with Helena tracking her father, the actual meat of the story all takes place in flashbacks as Helena thinks back on her childhood in the marshes of the UP and how her father treated her and her mother, who her father kidnapped as a young girl and made his wife. As she closes in on her father, she goes over various aspects of the only life she knew as a child, until her mother's past starts to catch up to her and Helena realizes that much of her life has been a lie perpetrated by both her father and mother and isn't exactly what they told her it was. As she grows older and finally starts to understand that even though this is the only life she's ever known, it may not be the life that either she or her mother deserves, and when she finally escapes her father's control she discovers that there is in fact an entire world she never knew about outside the marsh.

To be honest, the story of Helena's childhood is what really makes this book. Personally, I felt the entire portion of the book that is taking place in "real time" where Helena knows that she's the only one who can find her father, regardless of the large police force searching for him, and that she knows exactly where to look for him in the entire area surrounding her home and the prison he escaped from all seemed far to convenient, and only plausible in order to make this portion of the story move forward. Helena's memories of her childhood and the psychological aspects of being a child who has been raised in an extreme situation, but one that seems normal to her only because it's all that she knows, was fascinating. Her recollections of her father teaching her how to hunt and live in the wilderness, and her childhood idolization of him in this respect juxtaposed against her later feeling towards him as she starts to mature and gain some sense of adolescent independence, and her eventual discovery that her whole life has been based on lies and the kidnapping of her mother, was remarkable storytelling, and Karen Dionne delivers this entire sequence of events deftly and with sharp storytelling. While the "real time" story requires quite a hefty amount of suspension of disbelief, the background story well makes up for this and creates a truly mesmerizing and atmospheric story that will keep you up late into the night, turning the page for more.