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  GWENDY'S BUTTON BOX Twelve-year-old Gwendy Peterson lives in Castle Rock, Maine. Like many girls her age, she has confidence issues and concerns of her weight and fitting in with other students her age.  She will be going to middle school at the end of summer and she does not want her nickname - Goodyear - to follow her to school. One day a man (he introduces himself as Richard Farris) calls out to her and he gives her a special box ... he calls it a button box due to the buttons and levers around it. One lever dispenses chocolates, another issues rare Morgan Silver Dollars. Just as Mr. Farris has promised, the box has magical properties that are just right for a 12 year old girl, and Gwendy will discover that those chocolates themselves have magical properties.  And when Mr. Farris warns Gwendy that there are buttons that she should be wary of, and even a button she should never push, Gwendy comes to learn that as delightful the box can be, it is a burden to care for i...

 Lois Cairns is ... was ... a film history professor. She is currently out of a job and now in a deep depression after her son was diagnosed with autism. She retreats to where she is comfortable - film history - where she discovers the previous lost to the public, early 20th century Ontario filmmaker Mrs. A. Macalla Whitcomb (possibly Canada's first female filmmaker?) who disappeared. Lois throws herself into researching Whitcomb, her obsessions and her filmmaking (often one and the same), but the mysterious forces that may have been behind Whitcomb's disappearance are invading Lois's life, putting not only herself but her son and husband's lives in danger as well. This is billed as a contemporary ghost story, something which really interests me, and combined with the subject of films, this looked really appealing to me. So, we've got two great characters (Cairns and Whitcomb) with both a contemporary and historical setting (modern film researcher and 1900's fil...

 Ranger Sam Burrack is on his way south in search of a notorious gang of bandits. He's gotten a tip from Escalante - a prisoner in the Yuma Penitentiary - that the Cowboy Gang are holing up along Bad River. The mayor of the nearby village is as corrupt as the gang and if the rumors are true, they've even got a former Russian assassin among their gang, making their bank and train robberies that much more dangerous. Burrack knows he won't be able to just walk in and make arrests, he's going to have to be patient and then maybe he'll be able to pick them up one at a time. So this book wasn't quite what I was expecting and had me thinking about the "western" genre. Typically, when I choose to read a western - a classic style western - I'm looking for character, action, setting, and story, pretty much in that order. And when that order is changed up my first reaction is that I didn't like the story. Such is the case here. This is a slow-moving, thou...

 I was going to start this review with the comment that we've finally seen it all ... we've now got a Star Trek cookbook. But as I went to snag the cover image to post on my blog, I learned that we didn't finally get a Star Trek cookbook ... there have been a few of them over the years.  I wish I had been aware of them ... for the past twenty years I've been the primary cook in the house, and I think I would have tried more ST recipes for the family if I had known about them. But to this book... This is an interesting mix of cookbook and coffee-table book. While I read this from my computer, it appears to be a larger sized book with a lot of glossy photos of the various foods. You could definitely put this on your coffee table for your friends and visitors to pick up, thumb through, and create some conversation. But while it works as a coffee-table book, the primary purpose is as a cookbook and this works quite well. There are some nice variations of some traditional ...

WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS CONTAINED IN THIS REVIEW  Warning, reading this book is likely to raise your hackles and ignite your ire. In 1994, convenience store clerk, 18 year old Heidi Allen, was kidnapped from the store (she was working alone at the time). Her body has never been found. When local man Gary Thibodeau heard about Heidi's disappearance from the store, he went directly to the police to see if he could be of any help.  He knew he had been in the store and purchased something from Heidi shortly before she disappeared.  Little did Thibodeau realize what would happen next. Through circumstantial evidence, a failed justice system, and law enforcement and local judicial personnel who may have a stake in getting this resolved quickly, Gary Thibodeau and his brother are charged with kidnapping and murder. Gary's brother is acquitted for lack of any real evidence.  Gary, however, with the same evidence, is found guilty and sent to prison. Twenty years later...

 Take one fleabag motel and have three cozy mystery authors bring their regular characters into that motel and you get three novellas loosely tied together. In "Diners Keepers, Losers Weepers" by Terri L. Austin, it is just before Christmas and Rose Strickland and friends are planning a visit to Graceland. Their planned accommodations fall through and they are forced to take a room in the seedy "Heartache Motel." At this motel an Elvis impersonator is found dead and some missing jewels may hold the key to solving the murder.  But can Rose solve the murder, visit Graceland (a life-long desire) and still get home before Christmas? "Quick Sketch" by Larissa Reinhart is a Cherry Tucker mystery. Cherry and her boyfriend head to Memphis to help out a cousin who's been hustled and taken for his entire life savings just before Christmas.  Cherry isn't much of a gambler herself and her boyfriend Todd loves poker but isn't meant for the big-time. Because...

It is getting harder and harder to run an illegal empire what with cameras and drones everywhere. But Move-Easy - one of London's most notorious criminals - sends 'rat runners' (youngsters who move about 'the Void' to evade detection) to do his work. Now he has sent Scope, a teenage girl who spends most of her time creating false evidence and forensically cleaning up Move-Easy's messes, and a few other rat-runners to confront an old enemy.  But Scope suspects that the target is innocent and she looks for a way to spoil the kill without crossing or attracting unwanted attention from Move-Easy. This is a short story (called a novella on Goodreads) that is part of the author's Rat Runner series. I thought it was an interesting world and I it definitely had me curious to possibly read the first Rat Runner book.  Being a short work, we're focused a bit more on the action (nicely written here), but I definitely wanted to know more about Scope - what got her wo...

 When the entire world is bursting at the seems and not able to handle the stress, what is the answer? In The Offset , by Calder Szewczak, a special ceremony has been initiated.... When a child turns 18, if both parents are still alive, the child must choose one their parents to die in a special ceremony in order to offset the global effects of another  life on the planet.  This event is accepted, though not loved or embraced, because of its necessity. Jac Boltanski is a scientist who is working on a revolutionary project to replace radioactive trees in Greenland with genetically modified trees.  But someone may be messing with her data or the project itself. Meanwhile, Jac's daughter Miri, with whom Jac has not had a very good relationship, has run away from home and brought back after a run-in with the law shortly before the next Offset ceremony.  Miri has to decide if she will choose the parent she loves, or the parent she hates (Jac) who is actively working ...

Mr. Kong is a dedicated and concerned office worker whose job is to watch over the special Cabinet 13. Cabinet 13 looks like any other ordinary office cabinet full of folders stuffed with papers, but Cabinet 13 may contain some of the most precious information for the future of mankind. Cabinet 13 contains the stories of people who have strange abilities or have experienced unusual happenings in their lives.  Is humanity on the verge of becoming a new species? If so, Mr. Kong is the caretaker of the early portent to this metamorphosis. I love what we might call absurdist fiction - where someone or some situation is beyond all common expectations or reason, but no one bothers to explain it away ... that this unusualness is accepted by those living within the story. Gregor Samsa is a perfect example of this.  And Gregor Samsa would likely have a file buried somewhere in Cabinet 13. Cabinet 13 is both a novel, featuring Mr. Kong and his care and concern over the cabinet and its ...

Uhhhhhh... Huh? From the Goodreads description of the novel: This story precedes that of An Act of Faith [book #1 in the series] by focusing on events which occurred in the Valley, 1,700 years before. The Valley hosts the shrine of all the Lost Islands’ faiths and the cities of four Elvin peoples. It is the prize of kingdoms and the battlefield of many clashes of civilizations. From the war of Giants and Deities to the making of the fabled swords of the Bladesmiths; from the fall of a meteorite to the coming of Lon the Wise, the Valley is the epic history of millennia of creeds and coexistence, curses and slaughter, the cause of an all-pervading obsession which haunts the minds. How did this remote vale become the symbolic centre of the Lost Islands? How did the events of Year 1,000 LC irremediably influence the essence of Elvin mysticism? PRELUDE is the story of the three days when the Valley became the Nargrond Valley and the unique place that exists twice in the minds of all Elves, ...

"The art essay is at once not about the art and all about the art - the glance at the piece of art evolves into a meditation on something else entirely" writes editor Alexandra Kingston-Reese in her introduction to the collection Art Essays . This makes this volume a collection of essays very loosely themed around art.  The essay may be written because of a specific piece, but the author's meditation may then have absolutely nothing to do with art. Zadie Smith's essay, "Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's Imaginary Portraits," is mostly what I was expecting to find in these essays when I opened the book. Smith explores Yiadom-Boakye's art - the essay is specific to the artist and some of the art.  Smith writes: "Under-Song For a Cipher" is substantial. There is an owl-like virtuosity to it, silent, unassuming - but deadly. Not yet forty, Yiadom-Boakye is a long way down the path to "mastry," and you do not doubt she will reach her destination...