I requested this book to read & review from netgalley (in exchange for my honest review) because I am a beginner canner - or at least, I consider myself a beginner canner, as this is only my second year. The photos are inspiring & beautiful; the directions are clear, and the recipes well laid out & I would have no problem in following any of them.

The book, however, is a little artsy for me - well, it is in the title after all! I can simple foods, and cook even simpler, so the chutneys, sauces, and cordials are wasted on me. I live in a tiny apartment (my garden is elsewhere) so even if I wanted to cure my own meat & fish, I have no space to do so, so that section is all wasted on me.

Unfortunately, there's not really a single recipe in this book that I think I'd ever actually make ;/.

An extremely disappointing crochet book.

The designs are extremely simple - most are 4 or 5 rounds, use only a few basic stitches, and most of the ornaments are variants of one another, with only one or two rounds different from each other. The photographs are very simple (each ornament photographed on a plain background) but what got me about the photography is that clearly the ornaments were not properly blocked & / or stiffened, like all thread ornaments should be. I got the impression that perhaps the designer is not as experienced as one would like, to make such a rookie mistake (the only other book I can find by the author is another crochet ornament book, with equally badly photographed & unblocked ornaments).

Another thing I found really unaccepted for a thread crochet book are that none of the ornaments are charted.

Edie does it again in this modern collection of crochet projects designed for the holidays. They are all designed in Edie's characteristic style of easy, modern, simple enough for a beginner (for most designs) but not boring in any way. Most Christmas craft books are filled with things that are only OK - but not anything you'd ever actually MAKE - but this one is different.

All designs are well photographed, special stitches are explained within the pattern itself, and some of the patterns include charts - a must in today's pattern books.

There's no shortable of books like this on the market nowadays - everyone wants to capitalize on their hobbies & make a buck or two - I don't blame anyone for that, because I started doing that myself four years ago!

Having a "hobby" business - aka a business that a lot of people do for "fun" or as a "hobby" has its own unique challenges not seen with other business models - like a restaurant, for example. If you own a restaurant, you don't have to worry about competing with the restaurant down the street who's doing it for "fun" and isn't really interested in making a profit, just to have fun. Crafters are different - we have to fight sterotypes and crafters who are selling their products for "fun", undermining those of us who do this for a living - like me.

I'm a full time professional knit and crochet designer - I don't do this for fun (though I love it), I do it to pay the bills. I always read books like this hoping to learn a thing or two, but unfortunately this is another book that's marketed more towards someone selling physical goods, i.e. the finished hat, not the hat pattern. There are some good ideas here, making it worth reading, but if you are established like I am, then don't expect to learn a lot as this book is geared towards beginners.

This book is part memoir & part cookbook.

It has beautiful, full color photographs and recipes strewn throughout the book. Middleton is obviously an accomplished writer & her recipes look delicious -

Unfortunately, there was ONE - count them folks, just ONE - recipe I'd actually make, and unfortunately, I already make something pretty similar (her recipe used mustard greens; mine uses kale). I have a lot of food issues/allergies, so I have this problem with most cookbooks anyway - though it doesn't stop me from buying them all! Most of the recipes include way too many things I can't eat, and by the time I substitute everything, nothing of the original recipe is left. There's way too many fancy things in here, too - things my family just wouldn't eat, things I'm just not interested in making - I'm too much of a simple, meat & potatoes gal at heart.

That being said - the chatty, "memoir" half of the book was fabulous, and I greatly enjoyed reading Susie's tales, and that made the book worth the 4 stars to me (that and the photography).

An unbelievably cute knitting book, well written, the designs are amazing, the photographs are inspiring. I just wish I had the patience to actually, you know, knit the zombies!

I was really excited to get this book in from the library, but unfortunately the book really fell short in my opinion. The photography is well done, the patterns are chatty but seem clear enough, but the designs are a little uninspiring. The toys are not really cute, the granny square designs are the same as the ones we saw in the 60s, there's even a plain, scrap garter stitch afghan, the kind your grandmother made. The only nifty things were how they made the butterflies, but they weren't actually butterflies I would knit.

I enjoyed the final book in the series overall.

Most of the book is set in the 60's - and most of that is spent talking about Civil Rights - which unfortunately, is what I know the most about during the time period. I was really hoping for more about Vietnam - even though one of the characters goes & fights in Vietnam, there's not a lot of time spent in Vietnam & I didn't really "learn" anything or "get" any new impressions.

I was also disappointed that there was so little that took place during the 80's, and other than literally ONE sentence, nothing was mentioned about the space race / going to the moon. I knew there wasn't going to be much mentioned about it, but I thought there'd be more than one sentence, too.

I didn't like the characters as much this time around - most of them just seemed very one sided, and none of them really grew, changed, or had any character development as time went on.

Bad things of course did happen to the characters throughout the book, but overall everything just seemed to work out a little too perfectly - I would have liked to have seen at least one truly horrific thing happen to one of the characters during the course of the 1200 + page book. Yes, there's things like violence, drug abuse, etc., but you'd think in a book revolving around Civil Rights, at least one of the Civil Rights characters would have died. I don't know; maybe I'm just too negative in general this go round.

I read these books as a kid - one of my uncles actually gave me the "complete" Carroll works, so I've read them all. As a kid, I remember thinking "Boy, this is weird" and as adult, I kept thinking "Boy, this is weird". Honestly I kept wondering what drugs Carroll was on when writing these two books. I understand that these books are supposed to be nonsensical, and they are certainly that, but I really couldn't make heads or tails out of Through the Looking Glass. I give Alice 3 stars & TLG 1 star.

I originally got this book from the library when it first came out, but only read the first few chapters before I had to return it, and I finally got around to re-requesting & reading it over the last couple of weeks.

Overall, I did enjoy the book, but definitely not as much as the first one.

There are too many characters to keep track of, and that was a huge turn off for me. Yes, there's a cheat sheet, but if there are so many characters in the book that the author feels there's a need for a cheat sheet, then that should have been his first clue that there are TOO many characters! Because there were so many "main" characters in the book, I felt like I didn't really get to know any of them & really didn't upset when any of them would get killed off (instead I felt relief that it was one less character). The book jumps from character to character (and as such, from different parts of the world) and was just one more thing to keep track of in this large volume (which for the record, I'm a HUGE fan of big books / big series).

Another turn off for me is that WWII events that the average American knows about - such as Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust - are barely mentioned in the book. This actually wasn't as big a turn off for me once I thought about it - I wouldn't have wanted to read a book that spent 100 pages on Pearl Harbor when I know a decent amount about Pearl Harbor. Instead Follett does a great job writing about the world's involvement in the war in general - which is exactly the point of this series, isn't it? So what started as a turn off ended up a positive.

A "neutral" point I'd like to make is that Follett does NOT do a lot of rehashing of the first book like most series books do. Usually there's a little brief mention of a plot point or a little reminder of who the character is, and he doesn't do this. Usually that's a good thing, but again see my first point - there's a LOT of characters to keep track of, and a little bit of reminding would have helped. Not that you can't figure out who everyone is fast enough - the first mention of Maud made me go "who?" but within a sentence or two I remembered who she was, who she married & why she was living in a country that wasn't her own.

So what's good about the book? Well... this book quite neatly talks about so so many events & ties them together realistically. Yes, a few plot points you are going to see happening - which I won't give an example of for spoiling the book. But it's a historical fiction book & anyone who knows their history is going to see some of these plots happening. Follett is such an excellent author - and quite frankly one of my top ten favorite authors - that you want to read the next page, and the next, and the next.