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The Longest Holiday
The Longest Holiday
Paige Toon | 2013 | Contemporary, Fiction & Poetry
7
7.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Paige Toon is an author I am diligently working my way through. I think I'm about 80% done with her catalogue now, though she has got a new release out which I haven't got my hands on yet.

So this one starts with Laura flying off to Miami for two weeks with her friend Marty and one of Marty's close friends, Bridget, as she tries to escape her life in London after finding out her new husband, Matthew, got another woman pregnant on his stag night. The girls head down to Key West to enjoy the sunshine and beaches and sign up for a SCUBA diving course where Laura meets Leo, an attractive man she caught sight of a few days earlier. There's an instant attraction between them but when Leo finds out she's married he keeps her at arms length and since Laura is pretty determined her marriage is over, she finally gets him to give in. What follows is a bit of a rollercoaster of emotions as Laura stays in Key West for longer than the two weeks in what becomes the Longest Holiday.

I was really into this until near the end when we started to see things from Leo's POV. The end bit got a little hard to read when Leo goes to London to see Laura and I didn't think that bit was drawn out enough, though I was crying like a baby at times. It hit me in the feels big time.

And then we got the epilogue and we see Laura happy for the first time in months.

I grew to like a lot of the characters in this: Laura, Leo, Bridget, Jorge and even Mike. Pretty much everyone else seemed to be pro-Matthew which annoyed (me and) Laura, which I totally understood.

I'll be reading more of this author's books soon I'm sure.
  
AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted by Ice Cube
AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted by Ice Cube
1990 | Hip-hop, Rhythm And Blues
6.0 (6 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"It's probably my third favourite rap album of all time. Again, I think it's a really overlooked record: I think it's so good because he was produced by The Bomb Squad. I remember being shocked by that at the time; for some reason I didn't think that Ice Cube and Public Enemy got on, so I was quite surprised that The Bomb Squad had produced it. But you could just tell that their production values were there straight away, and it would open up into some kind of expression, and then it would close back down, and you could hear all these things going on in the background. This was when Ice Cube was still kind of known as just being a rapper, and for me this was his peak. There are songs on there like 'The Nigga Ya Love To Hate' which is just amazing; the title track; and I think one of my favourite songs on there is 'Once Upon A Time In The Projects' which is just fucking brilliant. That was always the thing about Public Enemy: they always ruled because they had the best rapper in the world; Chuck D was the best rapper and everything bounced off that, and that's why this album is great - Ice Cube, here, is most connected and it feels so important that he gets his point across. He's not disconnected, he's not being arrogant, it's just pure aggression. I never see this listed as one of the best rap albums of all time, but for me it's just a brilliant record. It's up there with some of the Kool Keith stuff, it's up there with Public Enemy, it's up there with NWA. It's just brilliant. And it's really sad that he didn't go onto do more work with the Bomb Squad, because it was obviously a marriage made in the projects and it was fucking amazing. It's another lost classic that just doesn't get mentioned anymore."

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