A very cute book, filled with a variety of hats to knit for the special baby in your life! The patterns span all of the holidays, and are suitable for advanced beginner to intermediate knitters. The details are what make the hats in this book special! Hats are great projects for beginner knitters to make (especially baby hats) because they are so easy and quick to make, and they make great gifts for baby showers!

The New Wizard of Oz is a light, cute, romp. Where would Dorothy be after she grows up? How would Dorothy act if she was in the 21st century, instead of the 20th century? This book looks at that. It's a very light, fast read. It's well written & edited, with only a couple of things that were worded funny (and maybe that's just me, I'm not exactly an English teacher or a professional editor). The plot moves along at a good pace, and you are introduced to a set of characters that are each crazier than the next.

Overall, I enjoyed the book & it's well worth the 99 cent price tag. My only real negative is I never fell in love with any of the characters, and I didn't really feel a lot of chemistry between Dorothy and her love interest.

I received a review copy of this book for my kindle, from the author.

This is another book I picked up for free on my kindle a while ago, & I only stumbled upon it while searching for another book. When I saw the title, however, I decided to pick it up because I figured there were tips about the kindle I didn't know about.

All in all, I felt this was a great little gem, & it's a book I'll actually keep on my kindle to refer to from time in time. Most of the first half was things I already knew, but I didn't know you could sort your books by title or author - I thought the way it comes was the only way to sort. I also had completely forgotten you could actually search for a book by you know, a search field - I always just paged through the books, page, after page, after page.

I think if you are a new kindle user - or like me, new technology doesn't always come easy to you - you'll enjoy this book & learn a new trick or two, but as most of the tips are pretty general, if you've had it for a while, you might not learn anything new.

ps - this book focuses on kindle 3 & the link to amazon is no longer working

I first heard about this book only a few days ago because of the author, Sarah Morris', blog tour - she blogged on several blogs I read avidly & as a result of the tour, I found a couple new ones to read as well. I immediately hunted down her published & asked if I could get a review copy of "Le Temps Viendra" and was floored when the very next morning a copy arrived in my in-box! I immediately started reading (as soon as I learned how to transfer the book to my nook) & was hooked & read about 100 pages that first night, keeping my poor husband awake!

My next day's reading, however, lead me to be a bit disappointed. The phrase "I later learned" was used an awful lot in the first section when the modern day Anne is transported to the Tudor Anne's body. I understand that Morris is trying to explain a fact to us that modern day Anne couldn't begin to know at that point, but some of those things we could have been led to discover on our own (for example, modern day Anne explains that she later learned that Tudor Anne was very close to her mother, and in the very next scene, she's taken a bath & there's a great scene between her mother & Anne. This is a good example of not needing to TELL us Anne was close to her mom, when we could have discovered it for ourselves in the next & following scenes).

Once we get through that bit, however, the story really gets going. This is such a different spin on the usual historical fiction books - not time travel, but being transplanted into another person's body. There's a lot of time spent on comparing modern day England to the Tudor day England (at times, honestly, too much so, as I really am not interested in the modern day stuff). I did throughly enjoy the parts where modern day Anne speculates that Tudor Anne was famed for her intelligence or sex appeal because of the modern day Anne living in her body.

All in all, however, I can't say I really loved this book. It only covers a very short span of time - leaving room for the rest of the series - but drags a good deal in parts, especially the middle and early second half of the book.

I'm a big, big fan of books like this - I'm fascinated by the Holocaust. I'm not very sure that's a PC thing to say, but it's also the truth. I'm fascinated & horrified & amazed by the Holocaust, the evil of it, and how anyone managed to survive it, and I'm always very, very honored to read anything written by someone who lived through those terrible dark days.

that being said, I really struggle to write reviews about this subject - I try very hard to point out the positive & the negative in reviews & I think I've gotten better about it lately, but how do you write anything negative about a biography, especially a biography about someone who lived through WWII?

That being said - I have nothing negative to say about this book. It's very well written, and the stories that are shared throughout really let us know what it was like to have lived through this time, something that I think is very very important in this type of book - not only to know, but to feel, what the author felt. There's a quick story in the beginning about a bombing, and how her and her friend discover her friend's father is dead under a pile of debris, and that just sets the tone for the rest of the book.

I received a review copy from ? (I think the author's family, but I'm ashamed to admit I don't remember, & I can't find the original emails)

This is a picture book written for young children that talks about baby animals. It's 23 pages, and explains the names of baby animals and a quick, fun fact about the animal young. It only took me a few minutes to read, and was very cute. It's exactly the type of book I'd buy for baby shower gifts!

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I received a free e-copy of the book in exchange for my honest review

Overall, I was very disappointed with this book.

Wallis is written very one-sided - she's a shallow gold-digger and not much else. No one has just one side to them. The book isn't well-researched at all, there are a lot of historical inaccuracies (that I looked up just to make sure it wasn't me who was wrong, and I don't mean I did my research on the internet). There are some details in the book about Edward the III that are fascinating, but I'm pretty sure they are entirely made up, but who's to know because there is no author's note informing us of this fact - perhaps acceptable when this book was first published, but not in today's book world.

I also found the book dragged throughout the first half - it was all I could do to read the long, long pages of Wallis' childhood and the drama she lived through. There is no doubt Wallis led an interesting life, but we aren't reviewing Wallis' life here, we are reviewing a historical fiction book that had too much imagination, not enough facts, and definitely was lacking in setting the scene so you felt like you were in another world.

Omega Plague: Collapse by P.R. Principe, is first and foremost, about Bruno Ricasso. Ricasso is a guy's guy, a cop, a Carabiniere, a man who wants to defend the people, help them, and most importantly, to keep them safe. When everyone in the world begins to get sick from an airborne version of AIDS, and society starts to crumble around him, and the other cops are bailing on the small island he works and lives on, he is still trying to keep everyone safe. When the world really starts to go to pieces, he just wants to keep his sister safe - and I think all of us can understand how we just want to keep our families safe. For much of the book, Ricasso is trying to survive by myself - and does so rather well, under the circumstances, though he does meet a few interesting characters along the way. In the end, the book wraps up the major story lines, including meeting up with the re-occurring bad guy, but leaves us hanging just enough to make us wonder if there is going to be a sequel.

The author, Principe, does a great job throughout building and keeping the suspense of the story. The reader can't help but continue to turn the pages, wondering how Bruno is going to get out of the latest disaster and hoping he'll manage to keep his sister alive. Bruno does not show a lot of emotion throughout the book, keeping his feelings tightly in check in order to survive. Omega Plague: Collapse is a book that will keep you up at night.

From My Cold Undead Hand (Where the Vampires Are), by Marie Marshall, is the first book in what promises to be a thrilling, interesting take on vampire legend and lore. Chevonne Kusnetsov is a teenager living in the near-distant future, a world that you will recognize but is subtly different from our own. Chevonne is like any other normal teenager - she goes to school, has friends, has a mother who worries about her, stays home alone after school reading books, but she her "job" is not the job of normal teenagers - she researches and kills vampires. This isn't a Buffy the Vampire Slayer world, where the vampires are all beautiful, but our world where the vampires just want you dead. Chevonne is a Resistance fighter, and she's out to save mankind.

Marshall does a fantastic job with setting an alternate world for us, where the action happens at a breath neck pace. From using technology that isn't developed yet, to using weapons not designed yet, to using language and phrases not spoken yet, she creates a universe that is strangely familiar to us, yet it's a place where you have to watch your back, or you'll be dead. Vampires aren't glamorous, it isn't romantic to meet a vampire in the alley way behind the school, and they most certainly don't sparkle. Marshall also does a remarkable job of tying in the classic vampire novel, Dracula, but makes you believe that it's all real. This is a book that will leave you breathless for more!

What a great collection of novellas!

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of stories about our wounded veterans, and the physical and invisible scars our soldiers sometimes bring home with them.

The three stories are all interwoven, though each individual tale revolves around one main soldier and how he comes to heal and to fall in love. I have to admit, I was not expecting the love / romance bits in each story and was definitely not expecting the ahem, detailed love scenes, but I ended up bawling at the end of each of the three stories because I was so happy at the happy endings. And if you know me, you know I hate to read romance, even small bits of it, so if I'm applauding this book, then you know it's good!

I enjoyed the middle story "Justifying Jack" the most, and "Making Mike", the last story of the collection, the least.