Paper Girls vol 1 by Brian Vaughan

Sometimes it pays to grab a Kindle deal of the day. I had heard about Paper Girls on the now-defunct Books on the Nightstand podcast so I added it to my Goodreads To-Read list. Goodreads awesomely sends out deals based on your list and Paper Girls was a $1.99 deal. So I grabbed it. I actually thought I would hate graphic novels on my Kindle but it was pretty cool. I could zoom in on each section then back out to see the whole page.

I started and finished Paper Girls in one evening, probably less than an hour, and immediately bought Volumes 2 and 3, heck with the deals.

Essentially, we have four 12-year-old newspaper delivery girls who set out to deliver their papers on November 1st, 1988 (hell morning). They team up because apparently Halloweeners out past curfew are dicks and always harass the girls (color me surprised at teenage boys being assholes). Erin is new to the job and happily hangs with Mac, Tiff and KJ after she's harassed by a Freddy Krueger wannabe. Mac seems to be the toughest of the group and the first girl to get a paper route.

Things start getting really weird when a group of guys attack Tiff and KJ and steal the walkie talkie the girls are using to communicate. The guys don't speak English but we really don't know what they speak. The girls try to follow them and end up in an abandoned house and find a ..... what is that? No time to find out because shit starts happening.

People vanish, giant bird dinosaur things come out of the sky and strange strange people are out in the streets. The girls are on their own.

This flung itself out into a crazy weird time travel but not really kind of way and I LOVED IT.

Camino Island by John Grisham

I read an interview with John Grisham where he was talking about his new book, Camino Island. Now, I like his legal thrillers quite a bit but when he veers off of those (Painted House, etc.) my attention goes elsewhere.

Camino Island had a good premise that made me decide to grab it from the library. Five of F. Scott Fitzgerald's original manuscripts are stolen from Princeton and enter the black market. Is this a mystery involving books? I'm in. And a good deal of this takes place on an island in Florida at a book store? Yep yep!


I'm sad to say I didn't enjoy this as much as I hoped. I read til the end and was really not happy with the ending at all. It started well with the theft. The men involved in the theft could have really carried the book, but  *spoiler* the FBI stepped in way too quick and took nearly all of them out of play. What? Where is my mystery??

Enter a mysterious woman named Elaine who is trying to hire Mercer Mann, a "writer", to go to Camino Island and live in her dead grandma's house. Elaine wants Mercer to infiltrate Bruce Cable's life and bookstore to find the manuscripts.

WTF?

Mercer is barely a writer. I couldn't stand her character and, frankly, she spent too much time "admiring her body" in the mirror and whining about her inability to write. Cable was an interesting enough character to follow so that gave me something to hope for but in the end, I was very disappointed with him and his actions. Hardly the stuff of a shady book dealer. Denny, one of the thieves, was a violent asshole who never got to shine before a convenient FBI person arrested him and threw him out of the picture. Who were we supposed to be enticed by here? Surely not Mercer.

Alas, I think we were supposed to like the whiny wannabe writer (heeey, alliteration!). The end of the book wrapped everything up in one extremely tidy bow that I disliked.

If I hear Grisham is putting out a new legal thriller, I'm in. Everything else, I'm out.

Frozen Heat by Richard Castle

Another junk food book. I love these things. Number four in the Nikki Heat series, in this one, Heat is tasked with the homicide of a woman stabbed and stuffed into a suitcase.

A suitcase that belonged to Heat's murdered mother....


Dun dun dunnnnnn.


And we're off, investigating the current murder and Heat's mother's murder at the same time. Rook is back, annoying but there for bouncy sex and occasional insight, but mostly Heat is on her own.

This took some twisty turns that got slightly (more than slightly) unbelievable. LOTS of dead bodies pile up but Heat doesn't seem worse for the wear of it.

Super fast read. Just enough when you need to escape the world for a bit.

These Heroic, Happy Dead by Luke Mogelson

War stories and war movies bother me. So, when I got this book to read, I almost didn't read it. Since it was a collection of short stories, I went ahead and read it, hoping for the best.

Mogelson did a great job depicting how wars and combat affect soldiers, both in war and in peacetime. This is actually why I dislike war stories so much: it's just commonplace to throw these men and women into horrific conditions, instruct them to kill then toss them back in to reality without any help. I've always felt that war is played as a game by the people declaring it. It's easy to declare when you never have to fight.

The characters we meet actually intertwine throughout the stories, their past, their present. Veterans of Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq. Veterans who can't handle life after war, who give up, turn angry and violent.

All in all, each story made me sad and angry about how vets are treated, or in several cases, ignored and left alone, after they have been used by the bigwigs to win their wars. Don't get me wrong, some wars were justified. But just as many were not.

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

There'll be no butter in hell!!!!!!

I have never heard of this book before, let alone knew a movie existed, but I'm glad, once again, that I read outside of my comfort zone! Cold Comfort Farm turned out to be a very entertaining and funny book!

Written in 1932, Cold Comfort Farm is about Flora Poste, recently orphaned and looking for family to stay with. She does hate a mess and is determined to clean up the farm when she does to stay there. She wasn't quite prepared for the crazy side of her family and they weren't prepared for her. Flora does, in fact, come in and re-organizes in a way. In the end, everyone is much happier that she moved in with them.

At first I didn't care for Flora. When she spoke with Mary about not working but going to live off of family and "being a parasite", which doesn't sound good in any context. I felt at first that she was just a spoiled brat who refused to work. Gradually, I began to like her. She had grand plans for helping out her family at the farm and they were good plans, helpful to her family and not just herself. Somehow, all of her plans worked out perfectly.

It took a bit to get into the rhythm of the "country" talk but once I did, I moved right along. Don't let the language or age of the book dissuade you from reading. It's really a clever funny book!

I watched the movie as well and was pretty pleased that it was a faithful adaptation. I rarely ever say that!

The new Penguin cover cracked me up! I can't picture Seth as anything else now.

Cold Comfort Farm trailer

Y is for Yesterday by Sue Grafton

Can I say how much I LOVE Sue Grafton's books? Each book in the series is fresh and new and I'm so sad Z is coming up. I want these to last forever. I hope, in some way, Kinsey Millhone continues on somewhere.

Based in the late 80's, Kinsey is a private detective who is called about a job for Lauren McCabe. Lauren's son, Fritz, just got out of prison where he was sentenced for murder and released at age 25. Fritz, and some of his friends, killed Sloan Stevens 10 years prior. Fritz turned on his friends but had to serve a full sentence since he pulled the trigger. His friends, Troy, Baynard and Austin, didn't have as much punishment. Lauren hires Kinsey to find out who is blackmailing Fritz now for $25,000. Turns out, Fritz and friends made a sex tape where they sexually assault a passed out 14 year girl, Iris. Sloan was trying to negotiate Austin with the tape: he gets the tape, he calls off everyone shunning her.

Austin was not pleased that Sloan had the tape, she dies, tape goes missing. Until Fritz is blackmailed with it. Kinsey goes down one hell of a messed up rabbit hole to figure out what happened 10 years prior and who was blackmailing now.

As a side plot, Ned Lowe is back and stalking Kinsey (remember, he tried to kill her in a previous book).  Anna, Henry, Ed, Pearl all play a part in this side plot.

I sped right through this one. It was a a crazy case to work through and, even though I read the accounts of what happened really, I still didn't guess the WhoDunIt. Excellent job!

Each book in the series can stand on its own very well. Start wherever you like, just start!

Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

Look at me. I actually finished another IRL book club book. I had this one, bought from Half Price Books for 50 cents (what a deal!). It turned out to be a very quick read, and a pretty good one at that.

I've only read one other book by Tracy Chevalier - Remarkable Creatures - and really enjoyed her style of writing and the way she writes historical fiction.

For Girl, we learn the (fictitious) story of the girl who posed for the painting of the same name for Johannes Vermeer.

Very little is known about Vermeer except he left behind about 35 paintings and left his large family in debt when he died. Chevalier takes us to 1660's Holland so we can see how the painting came to be.

Griet is sixteen years old when she is told she is to live with the Vermeers and become their maid. Her parents are living in poverty due to her father losing his sight in a kiln explosion, causing him to lose his trade. Her brother, Frans, is apprenticing at the tile factory because their father saved up money to send him there to carry on the trade. Griet will be the one who brings in money for the family.

Vermeer's wife, Catharina, takes an instant dislike to Griet, as does the current maid,Tanneke. Griet tries to stay out of sight and trouble and do her job well. The children in the house, for the most part, are decent kids. Cornelia immediately starts out as a problem and Griet slaps her face on her first day there. Not a good start.

One of Griet's tasks is to clean Vermeer's studio but to leave everything exactly as it was. Griet comes up with a way to clean and make it appear nothing has moved. Vermeer happens to come in and see her cleaning the windows and is mesmerized by the light hitting her face. And thus, we start the somewhat downhill trek of Griet.

Griet meets a butcher and his son, both called Pieter. The son has eyes for Griet and soon pursues her. It's becoming apparent that Griet has eyes for Vermeer and that it's reciprocated.

Chevalier delves into Vermeer's techniques of painting which were very interesting to read. Using the camera obscura and painting "false" colors, it gave new insight (to me at least!) on Vermeer's technique.

Did this really happen? Doubtful. But it's a great story to put with the painting.

There is a movie based on the book, although I have not seen it. I might be curious about it, but, knowing myself, I probably won't watch.