Fine Cooking Appetizers
By: Editors of Fine Cooking Magazine
The Taunton Press, 2010

The editors of Fine Cooking magazine have compiled a terrific selection of appetizer recipes that are easy to understand, offer a variety of cold and hot selections, and are generously illustrated with mouth-watering photographs.

Fine Cooking Appetizers will not only inspire your next party, it is also a great choice as a holiday or special occasion gift.

If Rocks Could Sing: A Discovered Alphabet by Leslie McGuirk

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"A is for addition"..."g is for ghosts"...."T is for Toast." McGuirk spent over ten years collecting rocks that resemble letters of the alphabet as well as the accompanying objects that comprise her alphabet. While mixing lower and upper case letters would confuse young ones looking to reinforce their letter knowledge, this is a clever and imaginative alphabet book that inspires one's powers of observation.



View all my reviews

The House Baba Built: An Artist's Childhood in China by Ed Young

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This episodic journey into Ed Young's childhood memories will probably have more appeal to older kids familiar with his picture books or adults. The mixed media of the page design is fascinating in itself. Great to pair with Allen Say's DRAWING FROM MEMORY, another view into the development of a children's literature author/illustrator.



View all my reviews

Fun video of Elvis Costello on Sesame Street:

Lost in Lexicon: An Adventure in Words and Numbers by Pendred Noyce

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Noyce has created a delightful pair of characters who, bored with the lack of entertainment at their Aunt's house on a rainy day, explore a barn and find themselves in a magical world where the balance of language and numbers has become unhinged. Ivan and Daphne are set on a mission to find Lexicon's lost children who have been lured away by dancing lights in the sky. Along the way the survive a plague of punctuation, the fog of forgetting, feuding parts of speech, a panel of poets and illogical mathematicians in the town of Irrationality. This delightful story offers readers ample opportunities to solve the word and number puzzles along the way. I look forward to additional tales in the series. Recommended for grades 4 - 7.



View all my reviews

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Stockett takes a few liberties with history but still delivers an entertaining story mixing humor, dramatic tension, and stark facts. Not all the characters had adequate dimension for my taste, but I enjoyed the novel nevertheless.



View all my reviews

A Small Hotel: A Novel by Robert Olen Butler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Instead of showing up in Pensacola to finalize her divorce, Kelly Hays checks in to the Olivier Hotel in New Orleans, where she first met her husband Michael, with a bottle of Scotch and a bottle of pills. Unaware of this, Michael is driving to Oak Alley Plantation, an hour west of New Orleans, with Laurie, his new girlfriend. Through the alternating viewpoints of Kelly, Michael, and Laurie, Butler teases out incidents to show the fraying of a marriage. It is a poignant study of miscommunication in human relationships that will have readers holding their breath for the outcome. I wish I had started this while I was in New Orleans for ALA instead of on the plane home! Thanks to Grove Press and Publisher's Group West for the ARC of this novel.



View all my reviews

Live feed from NASA's last shuttle mission:

Video, chat, community by Ustream

As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto by Julia Child

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Fans of Julia Child will welcome the insights offered by this correspondence which began when Julia Child wrote Bernard DeVoto, responding to an article he wrote about knives. Avis DeVoto, his wife, replied and thus began a friendship. This is a fascinating collection of letters which not only covers the evolution of MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING, but also offers commentary on the political issues of the day, a peak into the life of Avis and Bernard DeVoto, and an insight into Julia's experiences living in various European postings through Paul Child's work for the government. Thank you to netgalley!







View all my reviews

Drawing Conclusions: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery by Donna Leon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


When a woman reports her neighbor's death, Commissario Brunetti can't resist investigating further, even though the cause of death is ruled a heart attack. There is a suspicious bruise on the woman's neck and a couple things about her apartment are odd. This is Donna Leon's 20th Brunetti mystery and here there is a mystery about whether there is something to investigate. A pleasant twist for Leon fans!



View all my reviews

A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It is 1932 and Maisie Dobbs is recruited by Scotland Yard's Special Branch to go undercover as a junior lecturer at a Cambridge college to observe activities “not in the interests of His Majesty’s Government.” And sure enough, the college President is found dead in his office, another professor is secretly skulking off to London, and whisps of communism and nazi gatherings are in the air.



Winspear skillfully evokes England at the fulcrum between the wars: Hitler's seductive nationalism, the desperate desire for peace among nations, the hope for a better tomorrow. Observant, beguiling, astute and humorous by turns, Maisie is a delightful and multi-layered character---the perfect companion to lead the reader through these events.



View all my reviews

The Attenbury Emeralds by Jill Paton Walsh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Lord Peter Wimsey sleuths again through the pen of Jill Paton Walsh. I thoroughly enjoyed this mystery which follows the Attenbury family emeralds as they are misplaced, stolen, swapped for paste copies, gambled away and recovered over several generations. I think Paton Walsh stays true to Dorothy L. Sayres' original characters and is adept at creating the witty repartee' and literary references so often found in the original Wimsey mysteries.



View all my reviews