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Strength (Curse of the Gods, #4)
Strength (Curse of the Gods, #4)
7
7.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
3.5 stars

I think I lost interest somewhere in the middle for a short while as my week off started and I did things I've been wanting to do for a while but I jumped back in today and pretty much finished the last 45% in one sitting.

I'm liking the thing--well, romance, I'm assuming--between Neutral and Emmy, that could be interesting so I'm going to read book 4.5 next.

As for the rest of this one. We're getting more answers to the questions that have arisen over the last three books and the father of Willa is definitely an intriguing one if it is who was mentioned towards the end of this one.

Pica had me grinning like an idiot at the end. She LOVES everything! It was so funny to read the group's feelings towards her and her attitude to life.
  
Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals
Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals
Ahmadou Kourouma | 2001 | Contemporary, Fiction & Poetry, History & Politics
10.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"This is a humourous, irreverent and unabashedly political novel; it is an enraged lament about post-colonial Africa and how the leaders who inherited supposedly independent countries went on to fail their citizens. Some leaders are closely modelled on real characters – Mobutu of Zaire and Lumumba of the Congo are impossible to miss. The simplified summary of Kourouma: Colonialism has spawned monsters in the name of African leaders, and the West is the creator of these Frankensteins. The narrative is complex. There is a wonderfully oral quality to the telling, and many stories and anecdotes are laugh-aloud funny. Kourouma insists – and this underlies the narrative – that African dictators are mostly guided by their belief in the traditional, the supernatural, and that Islam or Christianity are mere window-dressing. This is a good example of an intelligent and important book that’s also genuinely interesting."

Source
  
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Hazel (1853 KP) rated Oh Dear Silvia in Books

Dec 14, 2018  
Oh Dear Silvia
Oh Dear Silvia
Dawn French | 2012 | Fiction & Poetry
6
5.5 (4 Ratings)
Book Rating
<i>Oh Dear Silvia</i> is a contemporary, somewhat humorous, novel by British comedian, Dawn French. Set in England it focuses on a sixty-year-old woman, Silvia Shute, who has fallen from a balcony, sustaining a serious head injury that has left her in a coma.

Knowing this you cannot help wondering how you do write a book where the main character is unconscious and how would this affect the narrative? This is how. Although Silvia is indeed the main character, the tale is actually told through observing family members and friends when they visit her in hospital. The entire book plays out in Silvia’s hospital room, Suite 5, but each character brings something else to story through their thoughts, feelings and actions.

Ed, Silvia’s ex husband, provides details of what has happened since their divorce. Jo, her older sister, reminisces about their childhood whist trying and failing to use a number of New Age ideas to wake Silvia up. There is Cat, her best friend, through who we discover what actually happened to Silvia, whilst, Tia, her cleaner is bringing in her favourite foods and updating her on the various goings on in the celebrity world. Cassie, her daughter however, portrays Silvia in a different light that makes us question what kind of person Silvia really was. And finally there is Winnie, a nurse at the hospital. Winnie’s accounts provide the reader with an extra storyline that is nothing to do with Silvia and her accident.

The story being told in this way gives the reader a chance to learn about who Silvia was which causes us to think different things about her which we would not have had the opportunity to feel had Silvia been able to tell the story herself. Firstly we feel worry for her, but then we begin to hate her particularly with the help of Cassie as well as Ed, who admits that had Silvia been conscious he would not have been visiting. Finally we get to a stage of understanding. Understanding who Silvia was, understanding why she did what she did, understanding what has happened to her.

The book takes on many themes: drama, mystery… and humour. Well, it is meant to be humour. I can understand the funny parts but personally it was not my type of humour. Too much swearing in my opinion. But then if you enjoy that type of thing, <i>Oh Dear Silvia</i> has the potential to be a really funny book.
  
13 Reasons Why  - Season 1
13 Reasons Why - Season 1
2017 | Drama
all the Memes " welcome to your tape" (0 more)
harsh scenes (6 more)
pretty predictable
annoying
some overall stupid things
LISTEN TO YOUR DAMN TAPE CLAY
was pretty slow
overly dramatic
Welcome to your tape
Now normally i do not watch a show if i know there is a book about it. i HAVE to read the book first but i choose to watch the show for the hell of it.

So this show is seriously overly dramatic with the hole highschool stuff. Yea they got some right but man some of it i literally had to skip through because i was just so annoyed at it.
One part i liked was the
" welcome to your tape" -- that will never get old for me
yea people may not like that i find that funny but hey everyone has there own opinion.
when the really bad stuff happened.. i couldn't watch it, it broke my heart. Coming from someone who has experienced stuff similar it brought up bad mojo.
I understand this is to warn people about suicide but how the hell is making tapes and having the people who did not help you get out of it learn from this?
stop looking for people to save you and save yourself
  
I wasn't quite sure what to expect from The Single Girl's Guide. At first I thought it was a memoir, then a novel, then a collection of stories. Turns out it is actually a guide book for meeting European men! Yes ladies, there is hope for all of you American women who are tired of American men and want someone foreign.

Because I wasn't quite sure what to expect from TSGG, I can't really say it met or fell below my expectations. It was interesting (some of the stories were pretty funny!), There was definitely some good advice… but keep in mind that I'm certainly not the dating professional to ask (It's me remember?… the one who is having her father arrange her marriage? yes, I'm serious.) so I can't really tell you how well the advice will work. I will say that most of the "attention grabbers" are somewhat familiar to what has happened to me in the past, and I will say that through reading the stories, Cahoon seems like she knows what she's talking about.

This book is also a great travel guide. There are places to go, hours and phone numbers, and specific people's names mentioned to enhance your European adventure.
  
Good Omens
Good Omens
Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett | 2015 | Fiction & Poetry
9
9.3 (42 Ratings)
Book Rating
Pros:
▪ Laugh out loud dark humour
▪ Footnotes
▪ Set in England
Cons:
▪ I didn't find it sooner?!
Why have I not known about this book until now? Please someone tell me! I picked this up in my local bookstore last week for £1 (mainly due to the intriguing cover) and I quickly found out it's actually very popular.
One thing I loved about this book was that it was set in England, reading such a classic with local town names and even roads and motorways that I know very well really made it for me.
The dark humour in it is absolutely laugh out loudable... some people have compared it to hitch hikers guide humour which is odd because I'm not actually a fan of the hitch hikers... but good omens just had me from page 1.
There are quite alot of characters which can make it a little tricky to keep track but I didn't have too much trouble with this as I took my time reading it.
The added footnotes I found really helpful, some funny and others were genuinely helpful with extra information.
I'm quite excited to hear that Amazon are currently making this into a show!
I 100% recommend GoOD OMeNs!
  
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Mariafrancesca (30 KP) rated Skyward in Books

Mar 30, 2019  
Skyward
Skyward
Brandon Sanderson | 2018 | Science Fiction/Fantasy
9
8.6 (5 Ratings)
Book Rating
Funny (2 more)
Character development
Unpredictable twists
Too many technical details (0 more)
It has been a long time since I was captivated by a book so badly I didn’t realised is was 3 am on a week night and I was still reading it. Brandon Sanderson is an amazing writer with a style the flows smoothly. However what I love about this writer is the way he depicts his characters. In a world where bravery is valued over everything (to the point that kids are thaught to blindly sacrifice themselves rather than be marked as a coward), Spensa grew up with the stigma of a coward father. But she is a fighter and she navigates life with the confidence of a hero from the past, only to find out - when faced with reality - that being an hero is not that easy. Skyward is a book about many things: spaceships, alien war, AI and human relations with them, post apocalypse society, and search for the truth. But mostly is the journey of a teenager who though she had everything figured it out only to discover that between black and white there are all the shades of colour and that everything in life comes at a price.
  
The Illumination Of Ursula Flight
The Illumination Of Ursula Flight
Anna-Marie Crowhurst | 2018 | Fiction & Poetry, Humor & Comedy
10
9.0 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
A bit of feminism in post Puritan England!
Ursula Flight's story takes us from her birth during the time of Charles II, all through her early years and her life as a married woman. She comes from an affluent family, is taught to read, write, speak classic and modern languages, and she loves the idea of writing plays and the theatre (although she has never been). She marries at a very young age, just after her beloved father dies, and her husband couldn't be more different to her own father and family. He is dull, Puritanical (in the true sense of the word), ugly and controlling. Ursula wants more from her life than sewing and bible study (which she shouldn't be reading either - it's not the done thing for a woman to be able to read). And she sets about getting it after she arrives in London.
I loved this book: a bit of feminism set in the latter half of the 1600s. Ursula grabs hold of life and makes it what she wants (partly it's thrust upon her, but she makes the best of it). It's very funny in places and also incredibly moving. A really well-rounded, excellent book, frankly!