We go all out for Halloween, so when Oriental Trading Company’s blogger outreach program invited me to have a mini shopping spree and blog about how I used their Halloween products to decorate for this year, of course I said yes! So this week and next I’ll be posting room by room decorating pictures, along with some simple crafts, starting with this haul/unboxing video!
So big thanks to the folks over at Oriental Trading (and, yes, I see now that I misspelled Trading in the title card–doh!) for the opportunity to have fun with some of their products, again. If you want to check out their Halloween shop, head over here:Â http://www.orientaltrading.com/holidays/halloween-a1-550760.fltr
Make sure you come back on Wednesday to see our outdoor decor, Friday for the big staircase reveal (trust me, you want to see this!), Next week we’ll show you our photo booth set-up for our upcoming Halloween party on Tuesday, and how we’re sprucing up the living and dining rooms on Thursday. We’ll also be doing a new Halloween House Tour once we’ve got everything set-up. If you want to check out last year’s, click here: Gingerbread Diaries 1.6: Halloween House Tour.
Also, they have a contest going on now through October 17, 2015!
Visit www.spooktaculargiveaway.com today and enter to win our weekly prize — $250 in Halloween products of your choice from Oriental Trading. Plus, we’re giving away a $25 Oriental Trading gift card every day! Contest ends October 17, 2015.
I switched to catching up on my YouTube subscriptions during lunch breaks (and some nights before bed), so I didn’t read quite as much as previous months. But look at that:
I generally have no problem reading multiple books at a time BUT I did find it a little disconcerting when I was reading The One I Was and listening to Pastel Orphans at the same time. (Well, not at the same time exactly, but reading one at bedtime and listening to the other in the car–you know what I mean!)
Pastel Orphans is a story of a woman’s flight from Berlin with her 2 half-Jewish children to the countryside in Poland and all that follows. When the daughter, Greta, is kidnapped by German officers to be raised by a good German family (owing to her Aryan appearance), Henrik is determined to find where they’ve taken her and bring her home. The story is told mostly from his point of view, later we shift to narration from Rebekkah, one of the Partisans he meets with early on in his journey, and then they trade off for a while.
At first the formal style of Henrik’s thoughts and language had me thinking he was a sociopath in the making. But I got used to it and it’s sort of like listening to Data (the android from Star Trek: The Next Generation) tell a story–to the point, no contractions, matter of fact. Seeing the war through a teenagers eyes, especially their take on the concentration camps from the outside looking in as they searched for signs of Greta, is somewhat novel. I’d read Night by Elie Wiesel back in school and even though he was a teen when he was taken to the camps, that he was telling the story as an adult, with an adult’s hindsight, gave it a different flavor. It was interesting.
Meanwhile, The One I Was, has two concurrent storylines: the main character, Rosamond, is a nurse who returns to her former home, an English manor house at Fairfleet, to care for a man who lived there even before she did, as one of the Kindertransport refugees taken in by her grandmother during the war. Both have secrets they’ve been holding onto for decades, and now that Benny is in his last days, he’s ready to tell his story.
We skip from past to present, following the two narratives, until both secrets are finally revealed. I admit that I guessed Benny’s secret long before it was spelled out. Rose’s was less a secret and more a child’s misplaced guilt, the way children often assume responsibility for the actions of the grown-ups around them. Especially when said grown-ups are despicable human beings with a good grasp on manipulating others.
To say that I liked either of the books doesn’t feel quite right. It’s more that I appreciated the story they had to tell and was grateful for hearing it. If that even makes sense.
Finally, The Girl From Krakow was a bit harder to get into. I think I might be getting over my renewed fascination with WWII era Europe, so it could just be subject-fatigue. But Rita as a main character was not a compelling character at the beginning. She redeemed herself, in my eyes, by the end, but it was a long process.
Also set in Poland, Rita starts off as a co-ed in 1935, but takes the more traditional path of marriage and family, but not without some dalliances along the way. The book descriptions claims…
When the war arrives, Rita is armed with a secret so enormous that it could cost the Allies everything, even as it gives her the will to live.She must find a way both to keep her secret and to survive amid the chaos of Europe at war. Living by her wits among the Germans as their conquests turn to defeat, she seeks a way to prevent the inevitable doom of Nazism from making her one of its last victims. Can her passion and resolve outlast the most powerful evil that Europe has ever seen?
Makes it sound like a fast-paced novel of espionage and such, right? Right?! Not so much…
The secret she’s entrusted with is a non-starter. Oh, it’s big and all that, but it has very little bearing on the bulk of the story, though I can see where the author was trying to go with it, it just didn’t happen. She does have to rely on her wits, yes, but she also relies on luck that she looks more Aryan than Jewish and the help of many other people along the way. She does some truly questionable things over the course of the story, and has the requisite existential crisis along the way. And I got far less passion from her than the description would have me expect.
The character living by their wits moreso was Tadeusz/Gil, whom we follow through Poland, Spain, and Russia in between Rita’s parts. He has absolutely nothing to do with this big secret, but I found his story far more interesting.
Again, it’s not that I disliked the book, but I also didn’t appreciate the story it was telling in the same way I did the first two. It is, sadly, another signal to me to avoid books with “A Novel” tacked onto the title, as I found with All the Light We Cannot See.
FBI Meets State Police, Sparks Fly (but not the way you expect)
It’s a trope in law enforcement stories that the local police don’t appreciate the state troopers involvement, and neither like it when the FBI steps in. Turf wars and all that. But when a child goes missing, the local cops aren’t upset to have the FBI’s help in finding her. The state police come in when the missing child happens to be the stepdaughter of Detective Callahan’s ex-wife.
Side-eye at the sister’s brother’s cousin’s roommate’s uncle sort of tie-in, but, okay, sure, we needed a way to get everyone involved and here we go. Callahan appoints himself as the family’s spokesperson for the media bits, as a way to help without being officially involved, and Ava McLane takes the role of in-house support for the family.
I did like the sort of twist that the higher-ranking official of the two was the woman of the story. I was less interested in the eventual romance angle (and listening to sex scenes in an audiobook is incredibly awkward, I ended up swiping past them in each book). I thought the character interaction was good, I think the author did a great job of keeping all the moving parts going forward, and overall enjoyed the series.
Again, it’s a little tough to talk specifics in a series because it gives earlier bits away.
One thing I flat-out did not like was that Ava became a target two books in a row (I don’t think I’m giving away too much, here), even if both were matters of chance, especially since the three books all take place within a 12-month span. That’s a lot to dump on a character, you know? There are other ways of making a good story besides putting the same character in peril. In this way, the procedural side of books 2 & 3 really served as a backdrop for the romance between McLane and Callahan and those aren’t the type of stories I’m drawn to.
If there’s another book in the series I would hope it would center more on crime aspect, but seeing as author Kendra Elliot’s other books are often classified as Romance first, Mystery & Suspense next, it’s probably not to be. But if you like romance with a side of thrilled, these might be the books for you.
Hoo, boy! You wanna talk about dysfunctional family drama? The Book of James is just that. After her husband’s death in a car accident, Mackenzie learns that not only is his mother still alive, that his family is filthy rich. Why had they been just barely scraping by all these years? Because the money came with strings, a whole family’s sordid history of strings.
This story was a bit trippy, but in a good way. A way that would make me sit up late at night with a bucket of popcorn and watch it on Lifetime. (That’s not a dis, by the way, Lifetime movies are very entertaining!)
The James of the title is the mystery at hand. It’s part of Nick’s last words to Mackenzie, “find James,” and what prompts her to accept her mother-in-law’s invitation to stay at the family home for a while. She investigates (badly) with the help of the son of the family lawyer who is surprisingly okay with the odd requests Mackenzie makes of him. There’s the neighbor who shows up at any given time and who seems pretty senile and her older brother who, it is revealed early on, is tied to the matriarch in many ways, most of which not so good.
There are Psycho-level mother-son issues here, folks. Again, I go back to the popcorn. While I mostly listened to the audiobook, the story was compelling enough that I also switched to reading it at other times.
Finally, A Wilder Rose was recommended after last month’s book round up and I’m so glad it was!
The biggest takeway for me was how much her relationship with her mother, the famous Laura Ingalls Wilder of the Little House books, is a lot like my own relationship with my mom (minus the literary accomplishments, of course). I remember listening to this particular passage while preparing dinner and was so struck  by how perfect the words were, not only did I stop the narration so I could highlight them, but I read them to Todd at the dinner table a little later.
I heard a barb buried in every sentence, an expectation in every offer, a demand in every smiling invitation. She and I were like neighboring states with a long and problematic history, with shared and very porous boundaries, she constantly invading, I continually repelling. A part of me wanted to be closer to my mother, but if I were to allow her invasions, I would be overrun, smothered, swallowed up. If I were ever to pursue my own goals, I had to push her away. When I did, she felt rejected and abandoned and stepped up her demands, These periodic sallies and skirmishes intensified my despair about the situation in which I had been trapped, without hope of release, since I was a child. My sense of guilty obligation was born of those terrible days when I could never do what she asked fast enough or well enough to meet her expectations or her demands, yet I had to try and try again. Here I was at midlife, still trying to meet her expectations–and the trying was making me sick.
Mothers and daughters frequently butt heads, that’s not exactly news, but I’d recently come to a particular bit of insight about my own mother after a truly unfortunate incident at work and, well, this hit home with incredible accuracy.
Those personal applications aside, I found A Wilder Rose to be fascinating on so many levels and now I want track down Rose Lane’s books to see how she wrote when she wasn’t ghostwriting her mother’s Little House books.
Because that’s what this book revolves around, how much did Rose Lane really have to do with the success of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books. Building the story from Rose’s diaries, letters, and other references, the author strings together a narrative (you could almost call it narrative non-fiction) that clearly indicates the amount of work Rose did but was never credited for. Granted, by all accounts she didn’t want the credit, though I can only imagine too well how she might have wanted genuine thanks from her mother.
Throughout the pieces of how and why the arrangement came to be, we also learn about Rose’s work in journalism, her living abroad in Albania with friends, her fascination with houses–buying, building, decorating–and her fondness for the people around her. Despite “A Novel” being part of the title, this book had me pretty much enthralled throughout and has me wanting to read more work set in the 30s and about the men and women who weren’t the displaced farmers of the Depression and Dust Bowl years. I feel like we always get so much about the Roaring 20s and the early 40s, but aside from the headlines the 30s aren’t as common a setting.
(* denotes audiobooks; all Amazon links are affiliate links)
In setting up the shopping cart for the Crafty Branch, I had the unenviable task of designating tax rates by county in the shopping cart (since Georgia requires sales tax reporting by county) and the only way to really do that was by zipcode. Now, let me just say that while some states assign zip codes in reasoned batches, it looks like someone threw all the available codes up in the air and where they landed on the map of Georgia is where they were assigned. And Georgia has 159 counties.
It was a bit of a slog to sort all the codes out and by the time I’d checked and double-checked everything, I might have been a bit punchy. I was also making up little punny phrases with the county names, and that’s where today’s post comes from. I decided (in that same punchy state) that it would be a fun, creative writing exercise to take this list of counties and use as many of them as possible in a story.
This sounded like a better idea when I was in that punchy state of manic productivity. But I’m both stubborn and enjoy a challenge, so here we go! (And if this isn’t your cup of tea, feel free to scroll down to the video at the end of this post.)
# # #
“Call Dekalb company so we can head downtown,” Grady Pulaski said to his cousin, Thomas Screven, as he came downstairs.
“Downtown,” the man replied, “I thought were heading to the Rockdale and roll show at the county line?”
“You’ll have to dance the Catoosa with Carroll Wilkes another night, I’m afraid. We’ve been called into a Chattahoochee at City Hall!”
Though Thomas questioned his cousin about the nature of the Early-evening meeting in their sleepy town of Habersham, Grady was not at Liberty to Cherloee any more information as he had none himself.
“Just what the Effingham is going on, here, Elbert?” asked Thomas when they arrived.
“It’s Fayette Irwin and Glynn Randolph, Tom,” the older man replied, “They were out Appling and Peach Pickens on the Banks of the Ben Hill and there were Twiggs all around.They looked Upson into the branches and some Hart-hearted Sumter-other had stripped the trees positive-Lee Berrien!”
“That’s a-Spalding,” Thomas said.
“Isn’t it just?”
“Who would do such a thing?”
“Don’t rightly, know, but they took the Barrow, too, so I doubt they’re from around here.”
“Well, if they’ve gone on a Wheeler, we should be able to catch their Butts before the Hancock crows! Let’s call up the boys!”
Grady called Gwinnett Talbot, Gwinnett called Bryan Rabun, and Bryan called the Clarke twins, Chatham and Dougherty (you always had to call both, because no one could Terrell them apart). Meanwhile, Thomas assembled flashlights, Coffee, and an ample supply of shotguns and shells.
The night air was Crisp and the Fulton moon provided some light between cloud banks as they headed towards the orchard. Under the leaves of the partially-denuded trees was a Warren of limbs and debris. Leaves that were turning from Greene to yellow and red littered the ground. Devastation reigned. The nine people had never seen such devastation in their sleepy little town.
“Don’t Murray, we’ll find ’em,” Grady said, patting Fayette’s shoulder. He Newton that she was worried about Harvest Home, the one time of year people went out of their Clay to head to Habersham instead of the larger cities closer to the Interstate. The fruit that grew in this particular orchard was always a centerpiece of the Harvest Home communal supper, plus raised funds for community improvements through the sale of jams, jellies, butters, and candies. No one owned the orchard, but the entire town took their turns looking out for and after it, in their own way.
“If the Meriwether holds we might still–” Fayette was interrupted by Elbert’s raised hand.
“I thought I Heard something. Everybody be quiet!” Elbert said, his voice a hoarse stage-whisper.
* * *
Across the Ben Hill, Brantley Lanier had a problem and her name was Bleckley Candler. Brantley and Bleckley had been sweethearts since grade school, so no one in Taliaferro was surprised when the couple announced their engagement this summer when Brantley returned from college to run the family farm and “settle down.” It was expected.
It didn’t take Long to plan the wedding, either, as Bleckley and her mama had been storing up goods and favors among their friends for years; the whole thing had come together in a matter of weeks and the wedding day was looming. One week, Brantley thought, just seven days and all this madness will be over.
It wasn’t that he didn’t love her, he’d always loved her, it was, well, it was hard to put into words. Bleckley was, as an only child of the small town’s bank owner is prone to be, a bit spoiled. Still, she had a sweet nature that made up for it, most of the time, but the wedding was bringing out more of the spoilt and less of the sweet. So close to the date, the burner was up on high and the pot had overflowed this evening.
“Franklin, Brantley, I don’t give a Camden why it happened, I just want to know how you intend to make it right!” Bleckley, for her part, was entirely ex-Jasper-ated with her fiancee over this latest hitch in their plans. She smoothed her hands down the Bibb of her cupcake-emblazoned apron and and stood as tall as her mere 5 feet would allow her.
“This pains me Morgan you know,” she said, “but you must fix this tonight or don’t expect to come Crawford back to me!” And with that, she turned on her heel and left him stunned, staring after her.
Brantley had been in a hurry to make it to the Candler’s for lunch that day and had, in his haste, forgotten to check that all the outbuildings on the farm were shut up tight. Not only that, but a calf got away from the hands and, that’s how he found himself, now, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing for, he hoped, the right reasons. Never before in his life had he wanted so badly to just pack up and get out of Dodge.
* * *
Nothing but silence Echols in the woods as the search party stood stock still and listened for a long, tense moment. The distant cry of a CalhounPierce’d the quiet.
“Maybe we should split up,” Chatham (or was it Dougherty) suggested. “Town’s east and we know no one there did it, so if three of us each go north, west, and south we’ll cover more ground and find the Dooly that did this and get to go home.”
Everyone agreed this sounded like a sensible thing to do, and everyone also agreed that they’d prefer to be doing whatever they usually did on Saturday night instead of being out in the half-dark searching for a fruit thief. So Grady, Thomas, and Early headed north towards Chattooga, a town known for its Polk-a Troup, while the twins and Bryan headed south in the direction of Muscogee with it’s Seminole museum.
Fayette, Glynn, and Gwinnett took the Houston road towards Whitfield and several other towns beyond it, hoping the wouldn’t have to go farther than their own town before someone signaled the search was over. Glynn softly hummed a Treutlan melody–he just couldn’t stand the quiet.
Even though it was the dead of night by now, Fayette and company were not exactly surprised to see Gordon Lumpkin out in his front yard.
“Evenin’ Gordon,” Gwinnett said to his neighbor. “How’re the stars doing tonight?”
“Oh, you know, revolving in their heavens as per the usual.” The man said from behind his telescope lens, Gordon was what the town considered a bit eccentric, with his head in the clouds and stars more than on the ground. Popping up from behind the large piece of equipment, a puzzled look on his face, “Gwinnett? Is that you? What are you doing out so late?”
They explained their mission and asked if he’d seen anyone suspicious that day or evening come by.
“Oh, well, the telescope doesn’t Burke as well pointed at the road, you know. Schley, have you talked to Floyd Henry? He was awful Madison ran off with that Monroe girl from Mitchell, last Harvest Home, and vowed revenge. He’s the type to hold a grudge you know.”
They nodded, reminded of the scene at last year’s festival. Floyd’s son, Oglethorpe, Oggie for short, has made a fuss over his father pushing him to propose to Columbia Clayton, the girl he’d been sorta courtin’ over the last year. But Oggie was having none of it, claiming he and Laurens Monroe were headed off to Vegas that very night, and if he didn’t see another apple pie or peach cobbler in his life it would be too soon! Can you imagine? No one ever thought Columbia was the Marion kind.
Bryan and the twins had, predictably, run into no one on their road, and saw no signs that anyone had been this way in quite a while. They were debating turning around and heading home when a voice boomed out of the darkness.
“Just Ware do you think you’re goin’?”
Lamar Oconee, White moonlight bounced off his Baldwin pate, was leveling his own shotgun at the backs of the three. “Turner around slowly and let me see who dares disturb my peace and quiet!”
Knowning not to take any chances with trigger-happy Lamar, the boys slowly turned around and smiled sheepishly at the older man. They’d plum forgot that Oconee patrolled his boundaries in the middle of the night to discourage cow-tipping teens. Used to be he could trust Forsyth to sound the alarm, but he’d been watch-Douglas since the hound had passed last spring.
“Oh it’s just you. What in the Tattnall are you doing out here at this hour.” A disgusted “Harumph” had been Lamar’s only response after the twins told the story of the missing orchard bounty. The four stood around awkwardly, one shotgun still raised, before Lamar relented.
“No one’s been through here for a while, I’ve been watching. You go get back home, now.”
They didn’t argue.
That left Grady, Thomas, and Elbert. They were just coming upon the Union bridge which connected Taliaferro with Habersham.
It was an old joke to some and a sore spot to many, that bridge, but all agreed the irony in the name was not lost on them. The two Towns on either side of the river could never agree who really had rights to the fertile ground on its banks, resulting in a decades-old Tift between former friends and neighbors. The official records were a tangle of handwritten back-and-forths and oral agreements. It was like a game of telephone that had been going on for decades and the messages were, indeed, garbled.
Grady was the first one to spot it. A shiny red apple at the foot of the bridge.
They picked up their pace as they came the bridge and small a small trail of peaches and apples leading across to the other side in the Wayne-ing light of the moon. They hurried along,
“Stop!” Grady hollered as a man crossed the beam of a street lamp and froze in place. Brantley looked over his shoulder, saw the unfamiliar men (with guns!) charging after him and picked up his own pace! From a dead stop he sprinted towards the nearest home, jostling the wheelbarrow of fruit, his spoils thudding to the ground, and banged on the front door of the home.
“Help! Help! Call the Cobbs!” Brantley shouted.
“No need, gentlemen, I’m already here! Jefferson “Jeff” Davis, sheriff and would-be feudal lord of Taliaferro emerged from the shadows. A porch swing with a haze of tobacco smoke was now visible as it swung gently as the man rose. “What’s this, Habershams in my town, Haralson our good people?”
“That’s Bulloch, and you know it! If anyone, it’s us who’s Harrised” Elbert wheezed, bending over to rest his hands (and shotgun) on his knees. “That man’s a Brooks, took almost all the fruit from the orchard on the other side of the Ben Hill. Our side.”
“Your side, you say,” the sheriff said. “You know as well as anyone, Elbert Atkinson, that both sides of the Ben Hill belong to Taliaferro.”
A Gilmer of hope shone in the Colquitt‘s eyes.
“I know no such thing. The river devides our towns, we take care of that orchard, and you know we harvest it for our fall festival every year!”
“That you care for the land may be true, but you know good an well there’s no enforceable deed on it. But if you insist on thundering around our town armed and dangerous, you’ll find yourself before Judge Glascock on Monday morning.”
“The Jones you say,” Thomas thundered. “Lowndes sakes, man! We’re Putnam in the pokey! He’ll be in front of our Judge on Monday. Not the other way around. What do you have to say for yourself”
Brantley, who’d been watching the exchange like a tennis match, was once again the center of the attention. He should have run while the strangers and the sheriff were sparring.
His mother’s words rang in his head: what a Webster we weave, when first we practice to deceive. The man sighed and tried to explain, “See, my Coweta bunch of the Dade-gum McIntosh apples and Decatur-er said she needed all this fruit or there wouldn’t be a party Worth having! And if I don’t fix this, well, instead of a wedding they’ll be laying me in my Toombs!”
Elbert eyed the young man up and down. “Ain’t you ever heard of a grocery store?”
* * *
The smell of frying Bacon wafted in through the window from Emanuel‘s diner a block away, and the smell of yeasty bread came from the Bakery across the street. Once the rest of the search party had arrived in front of Davis’ home, with their own Deputy Stephens McDuffie in tow, the two officers had a terse conversation and agreed that, at the very least, Brantley was probably guilty of theft of the wheelbarrow, though the fruit was another matter.
So he sat, feeling like a Pike was running through his head from a restless night, on a slightly padded cot in the Habersham jail.
I don’t think I’m going to be able to Bartow my way out of this one, he thought.
Wilkinson Candler walked into the small sheriff’s station of Habersham and made a beeline for the single cell with Brantley in it, Bleckley close on his heels. “Well, son, what do you have to say for yourself?”
The bride-to-be pushed by her father to reach through the bars. “Thank ‘Evans you’re all right, honey! What ever possessed you to steel a wheelbarrow? What were you Lincoln?!” The switch from elation to berating gave the young man a case of mental whiplash.
The door opened again, this time it was Sheriff Charlton Montgomery along with Fayette, Glynn, Grady, Thomas, and Elbert.
“Gentlemen” Wilkinson voice ricocheted around the small room, “and ma’am” he nodded at Fayette, “this is all just a little misunderstanding. Don’t you think the poor boy’s been punished enough, spending the day and night in jail. Quaint though it may be.”
Early eyed him warily, “Nothing wrong with some time in the Clinch to Stewart over what he done.”
The sheriff held up a hand to each party, “Now, now, Wilcox out the truth of the situation just as soon as we get everyone’s statements taken.”
“What’s there to take statements on? The boy borrowed a wheelbarrow to transport so wild produce, the wheelbarrow has been returned, why can’t we simple Washington our hands of the whole silly thing?”
“Sheriff,” Bleckley spoke up, “Brantley was just trying to please me and I may have been a little insistent on the subject after that unfortunate incident with the barn door on Saturday was discovered. My Cook needs this week to prepare the pies and pastries for our wedding on Friday, and I need my groom for his final tuxedo fitting at noon at the Taylors. We’ve got people coming in from three cities for this wedding and I simply don’t know what I’ll do if word gets out Brantley spent the night in jail. Over fruit!” She started sniffing into a lace-edged handkerchief that appeared as if by magic.”
Everyone knew that, of the three cities the Taliaferro daughter referred to, none of the guests were from Habersham and felt less sympathy for the girl than she’d obviously hoped to engender.
Wilkinson rocked back on his heels a bit, hands in pockets, looking expectantly at the local lawman expecting to get his was as many a Richmond was used to doing.
Finally the sheriff spoke. “There’s still the matter of the apples and peaches to settle.”
“Really, you’ve got to stop Jenkins people around about that orchard. It belongs to no one so how can anyone steal from it?”
“But what about Harvest Home,” Fayette said, “What about our town? You can’t just Walker in here and pretend like that doesn’t mean anything.” Her face was red from frustration, and Glynn was Fannin her with a nearby flyer, trying to keep her from expiring then and there. “It’s just not Telfair!”
At least the banker had the decency to look a little chagrinned at her outburst.
The telephone on the Sheriff’s desk broke the tension in the room. After a brief, conversation, he hung up and addressed the room.
“Okay, folks, this is how it’s gonna all go down. Glynn, Jackson his way with the county records, including what Quitman claims we have regarding the land the orchard stands on. Now, we all know there’s a Miller paperwork Walton on the one key to figure it out. That might not happen today, so, Brantley, I’m going to let you out of here but you are not to leave town.”
“But our honeymoon!” Bleckley said, “We’re leaving for two week’s at Johnson falls on Sunday.”
“Wilkinson, unless you want an outlaw for a Dawson-in-law, I suggest you make other arrangements for her.”
# # #
Okay then! That was… a bit tougher than I expected (it was those last 25 counties, man, they were brutal to shoehorn in!) and, yes, it’s a bit nebulous there at the ending. Who knows, maybe I’ll write a version without the county names littered throughout and actually figure out where it goes from there. But not today.
I hope if you actually read this far that you enjoyed the silliness of it all. I also hope you’ll consider taking up this challenge yourself!
Do you know how many counties (parishes for our Louisiana friends) are in your state? Could you use all of them in a story? If you do, please, please, please let me know that you did and if you have it posted anywhere send me a link. Madness, like misery, loves company.
And speaking of county fun, last week we headed to a neighboring town in our own county to check out the 3rd Annual Witches Night Out in Boston, Georgia. Here, have a vlog about it:
Because when so many are audiobooks these days, “reading” doesn’t seem like quite the right word, you know?
August book covers | snagged from Goodreads
Even I’m a bit impressed: that’s an average of a book every 2 days. Of course, that’s not how I generally read, but some, like Storm Clouds Rolling In, were an all-day read, so that certainly helps. But mostly it was me being spoiled by the audiobook options and even taking to listening to them while I cook dinner some nights, that helped quite a bit.
The Series-es (or however you pluralize that)
The Source*
The Void*
The first book in the Witching Savannah series, The Line, I read a while back, probably free via Kindle First or Kindle Select, and either the next book wasn’t available yet or I wasn’t compelled enough to buy it, but when I saw the rest of the trilogy when I was looking for new car “reads”, I remembered the first one fondly enough to give them a whirl.
It’s tough to talk about a series like this because it’s almost impossible to talk about events in books 2 or 3 that would ultimately be spoilers for the previous works. I will say that it deals with a family of supernatural witches in Savannah (my second favorite story locale) and the theory that said magic has it’s source or tether in something called the Line. Ley lines and key lines are common enough concepts, and this one starts off along the same vein (hah!) before turning it on its ear a bit. Book 1, from a year ago or more, was good–typical southern dysfunctional family with the added kapow of magic–and Book 2 (Source) was my favorite of the trilogy. Book 3? Well, again, without giving too much away, the author does something I disagree with quite a bit in tying up the main characters’ loose ends. Then he undoes it, sorta, in a semi-clever but nonetheless clunky manner.
Timebound*
Time’s Echo
Time’s Edge*
Time’s Mirror
I really hate when I start a series that hooks me in and then isn’t finished yet. Noooooooo! Seriously, I was horrified to find that the 3rd (Edge and Mirror are supplemetnal novellas, but still worth reading) book in the series won’t be out until mid-October. But that aside…
This is, as you might have guessed, a time-travel series with the protagonist as a 16 year old girl. Again, being that it’s a series it’s tough to talk about specifics, but I found the story captivating and the main character just snarky enough to be believable as a teenager, just obtuse enough to be human, and just stubborn enough to be relatable. If books that deal with multimple timelines or realities make your head hurt (like Crichton’s Timeline or the Matrix movies), this might not be the series for you, but otherwise I recommend it heartily.
And while very much dependent on future technology, a lot of it takes place in the recognizable past. Had I read something like this in middle school, for instance, it would have spurred so many independent study sessions I can’t even tell you. And history is totally not my thing.
Oh, and if you’re a fan of AHS and looking forward to the upcoming Hotel season, Timebound has some verrrry interesting plot points (based in fact) that I was reminded of as the Hotel trailers have started to air.
Storm Clouds Rolling In
A series with just one book read, what mischief is this?! Well, next to the rest of the series not being available, I dislike the bait and switch of the first book being available on Kindle Unlimited but the rest of the series (of which there are 7, so far, I think) I’d have to buy. And I’m still debating but, yeah, I’ll be picking them up, too. Once some of my backlog is read through.
At any rate! If you liked Gone With the Wind but, like me, really wanted more of the pre-war part, the Bregdan Chronicles might be worth looking into. Instead of the Deep South where many an antebellum story is set, this book revolves around Virginia, both on a remote tobacco plantation as well as in Richmond. The daughter of the family is certainly no Scarlett, though she does have a certain willful streak and is not interested in becoming the sort of lady her mother has in mind. No, our heroine actually turns out to be a budding abolitionist (not giving away much, the story leads you there from pretty early on), but it’s not as simple as freeing the plantations slaves and moving north, not when her father becomes important to the governor and is trying to reason peace over war.
Apparently this book is based on actual events and people in the area, though is still firmly planted (hah!) in fiction.
Speaking of HistoryÂ
Yellow Crocus*
Daughters of the Witching Hill*
Melissa Explains it All
Paris Time Capsule*
Upon a reader’s recommendation I picked up Yellow Crocus, which starts off in the first person by stating it is a true story before switching to third person not-exactly-omniscient for the main narration. This was a bit disconcerting at first, but we rolled with it, only to have it handle the epilogue back in first person and, of course, it’s not true at all but a complete work of fiction. That’s a sort of mechanical review of the book, I realize, but I didn’t like the misdirection.
The story itself, though, was quite good, despite the early confusion, and also deals with a daughter of a plantation, her relationship and dependence on her nurse, and how the two women’s lives paralleled each other as time went on. I pretty much saw where the story was going to end up, and the main character took an awfully long time to come into her own, but I don’t think that’s actually wrong for the era the story is set in, just a character annoyance I’ve mentioned before.
On the other hand, Daughters of the Witching Hill is, we find, based closely on actual trial reports from the pre-Inquisition Witch Trials of Pendel Forest, though you’d swear from the story itself that everything was made up from whole cloth. It wasn’t a highly active story, but it spread over 3 generations and included the sort of little touches that really made these women very real to the reader. That it was read by someone (audiobook, again) with a very good handle of the vernacular made it all the more pleasant to listen to.
In more recent history, and far lighter, I switched to Melissa Joan Hart’s autobiography and, while a lot of reviews I saw were negative, I really enjoyed reading about her early years in television and thought the anecdotes about her Sabrina years were more than adequate: I didn’t need some sleazy tell-all. Some criticize her insistence that she’s normal as can be considering to be a false front and took offense at her name dropping, but what else can you do when you work with other stars?! I found it refreshing, honest, and down to earth.
And then–do you remember several years ago (2010ish) when the apartment was discovered in Paris that hadn’t been touched since WWII??? I vaguely did, so when I stumbled upon Paris Time Capsule I was curious how the writer would spin the story. According to the notes, the book is based upon that same discovery, the owner was, in fact, a French courtesan of the era, and the painting that was found in the real apartment and in the book was painted by Bouldini, a painter of the era known for painting the fringes of society.
Seeing as this was a bit of a romance, it has a predictable ending in that respect, though it does take quite a while for the main character, Kat, to find her ever-lovin’ spine! Sheesh! As to the bigger question of the story–why was Kat left the Paris apartment and not the family that was, apparently, the woman’s descendant? That one I figured out pretty early on, though not all the details, of course. It didn’t take away from the reading since it was more a passing thought towards the beginning and not something more in-your-face. Hearing about the French countryside and the path a refugee from Paris, escaping on the eve of the Nazi invasion, was quite interesting was very entertaining as they uncovered each piece of the puzzle.
And the Rest…
The Mermaid’s Sister*
Dead Secret
We Were Liars
The Rose Girls*
These last four books were just sort of all over the place, thematically.
The Mermaid’s Sister is set in turn-of-the-century America with it’s peddlers and traveling medicine shows, and a woman on a hill who adopts two girls–one left for her in a sea shell, the other brought by the stork. The shell child starts to transform into a mermaid at age 16 and a plan is formed to bring her to the sea before she wastes away to nothing. While first her sister and then their family friend are, in turn, committed to breaking this “curse” the continue on and I began to wonder how we were only halfway through the book when we were so close to the obvious ending?
And then something happens to completely change the story and then I knew how we were only halfway through. I was also suddenly more interested in the story at this point, as the first half was sweet, but not exactly gripping. The second half was far more entertaining and satisfactory as far as character growth went. The ending was exactly as I suspected, but there were some nice twists in there that made it that much better.
Fast forward a few centuries to modern-day England and you’ve got the setting of a typical whodunnit that was a bit sluggish throughout, really. I set it down several times in favor of other books throughout the first half of the month.
We Were Liars was the book club pick. Not too far in there’s a starling passage that turns out to be nothing more than a teenage melodramatic metaphor, something that is a bit of a hallmark of the book. With a definite poor-little-rich-girl vibe (I mean, really, broken home notwithstanding, her family owns a private island near Martha’s Vineyard where they all summer, the whole clan, and the kids run rampant and unsupervised), the teenage narrator dines out on metaphors like they’re candy. Seriously, it was a bit much. Despite all of this I was actually enjoying the book after it got going and as the main character struggles to regain her memory after an accident 2 years prior, and then…
I swear I’ve seen a someecard or similar that says something to the effect of you can kill any character you want, just don’t kill the dog? I can’t find it, but I wanted to use that as a virtual bookmark for We Were Liars. Yeah. Forewarned and all that.
Still, the ending was not exactly what I expected it to be, but I got to the correct conclusion several pages before the “protagonist” and at least she then has the decency to cut out all the melodrama in the face of true tragedy.
Ending the month was something decidedly lighter, with The Rose Girls telling the story of three girls recovering after the death of their mother, secrets revealed, lives set right, and a big old manor house (complete with moat!) saved from ruin. I was just a sweet story, overall, with some laugh-out-loud moments here and there and an ultimately satisfying ending. It was exactly what I needed as I packed kits and dealt with website stuff at the end of the month.
At the beginning of the year I set my reading goal at 75 books, figuring that if I was mainly reading at night before bed, two books a week (for 100 books/year) might be pushing it. Obviously that was before several things changed and before I joined Kindle Unlimited. Now I’m at 66 books for the year, so will likely reach my goal in September. Maybe I’ll make 100 my stretch goal or, maybe, I’ll switch things up and not read as much? Yeah, okay, I don’t see that really happening, but even I have to admit my book consumption tops even my summer reading mania during my school years.
Read anything good lately? I’m obviously open to suggestions!
Week after week I keep saving these video prompts, fully intending to do more that let them collect virtual dust in feedly’s “Saved for Later” folder. How many videos have I posted? Oh, right, none.
Until today, that is (or, well, technically a combination of Monday and Tuesday for filming, editing, and uploading… yes, this is the edited version. I’ll work on my brevity for future videos).
5. What is one thing you do that you hate to admit?
Do you mean bad habit-wise? Again, I’m pretty honest with my faults, so “hate to admit” doesn’t really bring anything to mind.
6. Do you really brush your teeth in the morning and at night? Be honest.
In the morning, absolutely! I hate the feeling of morning mouth, yech! At night, though, that’s a little hit or miss. I try to remember but, no, I can’t even say it’s most of the time.
And thank goodness I decided to go ahead and film this Monday night after work for today’s post! Not only did I have to retrain myself how to use Premier Pro (I found a much better tutorial video this time, though, from Trice Designs), first I had to remember which program I downloaded last year to convert the videos from my recorder.
Yes, my laptop has a webcam, but I’m not a fan of how it records (allow me a bit of vanity, here, the lighting and everything always looks so weird on the webcam, though I’m sure it has just as much to do with the amber light in my office at the moment). So I set up my JVC video camera and used that. Only JVC uses a proprietary format that pretty much no one but JVC thinks is neat, so conversions have to happen. When we started doing the Gingerbread Diaries updates I could use the video as-is, but I realized it was cutting off part of the frame. I knew I’d downloaded something to fix that, but couldn’t remember the name for the life of me.
So I spent a good little bit opening random programs from the “All Programs” list trying to find something that was vaguely familiar. Of course the company started with a W, so it was the next to last folder I opened. But I found it and even remembered how to use it.
All that to say: yay, I did a video for you guys! Hope you found it entertaining and I’m looking forward to doing more (shorter!) videos in the future!