Let Your Kids Go Wild Outside: Creative Ways to Help Children Discover Nature and Enjoy the Great Outdoors
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Creative ways for children to spend time outdoors and discover nature. In an era when the iPad is...
A Software Engineering Approach to LabVIEW
Jon Conway, Steve Watts and E. Bryan Carne
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Create more robust, more flexible LabVIEW applications-through software design principles! Writing...
Spoonbenders
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Teddy Telemachus is a charming con man with a gift for sleight of hand and some shady underground...
Fantasy
Brown Sugar Kitchen: Recipes and Stories from Everyone's Favorite Soul Food Restaurant
Tanya Holland, Jan Newberry and Jody Horton
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Brown Sugar Kitchen is more than a restaurant. This soul-food outpost is a community gathering spot,...
Shigeru Ban
Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Claude Bruderlein and Shigeru Ban
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"Architects are not building temporary housing because we are too busy building for the privileged...
Farm Frenzy: Origins
Games and Entertainment
App
IMPORTANT: This application doesn't support iOS 8.0 ! Attention! This version may not be compatible...
Decked Builder
Games and Entertainment
App
Decked Builder is the premium deck building app for Magic the Gathering -- providing a sleek user...
Mark @ Carstairs Considers (2514 KP) rated Fashionably Late in Books
Sep 20, 2019
Having read the previous two books in this series, I knew what to expect, and I wasn’t disappointed. The plot starts off strongly. We don’t seem to be gathering any clues right off the bat, but there is still plenty happening to keep our interest. Naturally, much of that comes back into play as the book leads us to the logical conclusion. The climax was a tad rushed, but it was also fun and answered all of our questions. The characters range from fairly realistic, like Dorothy, to less so, like Summer, to outright wacky. The mix works for this book. We care enough to want to see justice done, but we also are having fun laughing and smiling as things go along. The book is set in December, but the holidays only color events a little. Instead, this is more about the fashion shows and the events happening in connection with them. If you are looking for a delightful book, this is definitely one to pick up.
graveyardgremlin (7194 KP) rated The Fruit of Her Hands: The Story of Shira of Ashkenaz in Books
Feb 15, 2019
Overall, the book was informative and easy entertainment, but it lacked depth. For the most part the characters were either good or bad, with no shades of grey, which made them unrealistic and led to my feeling of detachment. Shira was a sympathetic and capable main character during the first third of the book and looked to be an interesting Medieval wife. Unfortunately, after she became married, she lost her personality. I realize that it was an accurate portrayal of Jewish wives back then, but Shira had been scholarly, while still seeing to her duties, up until this point and then turned into a boring protagonist. What set her apart and made me want to read about her was her attitude about learning the Talmud like the men. What interested Meir in the first place was Shira, who he thought unusual; not that I was shown their love, I was just told about it. The chemistry was lacking between them, but that may be in part that I didn't get a good sense of who Meir was as a person, other than he was brilliant, a revered scholar, et cetera. No one felt real in this book and that's a shame.
What was perhaps done best were the details and information about the Jewish people and their faith. Generally, it was written into the story quite well, even if Shira was conveniently placed right in the way of big events. I learned much and am grateful for the history of that time. My one problem with it was that although I felt the pain and suffering the Jewish endured, it was just a little too clean. More realism and grit would have added much to the book.
Perhaps the scope of the book did a disservice to the story as a whole, and it might have benefited a few scenes taken out. As a whole, it's a decent book and a good debut, but it still lacks that something that makes me what to say "read it".