Movie Review--Fun with Dick and Jane

This movie was more political than I expected. I went to see it just knowing that it was a comedy about a couple that had fallen on hard times and turned to a life a crime. That's accurate, but it's more than that. Dick (Jim Carrey) worked for a company called Globodyne. He had just been promoted to vice president and convinced his wife to quit her job when the company dramatically collapsed. The parallels to Enron were pretty clear. As with Enron, the employees' pension plans consisted of company stocks, so Dick and Jane (Tea Leoni) lost everything. Neither one could find another job. Jane took part in a cosmetic study to earn a whopping $14 and has a really bad reaction. Dick got a job at Kostmart, where he lasted about a day. In the employees' training room, there was a huge anti-union sign. As he was leaving after being fired, Dick yelled something about them not paying enough to support a family anyway. The parallels to Wal-Mart were pretty clear. Dick then tries to get work in jobs that mostly fall to illegal aliens and gets deported. His wife has to help sneak him back over the border.

Dick and Jane sell everything they can, but they don't sell their house. With the collapse of Globodyne, property values had fallen, and they would have actually ended up owing money if they sold. Nearing foreclosure, they turn to a life of crime out of desperation.

Anyway, all of this doesn't really sound like much of a comedy, but it's actually pretty funny. There is the physical comedy, of course. Dick and Jane also get themselves into some highly amusing situations, like trying to rob a bank and running into other former Globodyne employees trying to do the same thing. I really enjoyed this movie, but I would imagine politically conservative individuals would not.

Random Thought #12: Baking Cookies with your Cat

I just realized that it has been over three months since I have posted a random thought. This one isn't actually all that random. My mother showed me an email that she got and since it is absolutely hilarious and cat-related, I decided to post it here. Obviously I didn't make this up myself; I don't know who did. If anyone out there does know, let me know and I will be happy to give proper credit.

Baking Cookies with your Cat:

1. Look in cookbook for cookie recipe.
2. Get cup of coffee.
3. Get cat off cookbook.
4. Find that special recipe.
5. Get cat's nose out of coffee mug.
6. Go the fridge and get eggs.
7. Get dry ingredients from cupboard.
8. Break eggs in small bowl.
9. Sift dry ingredients in large bowl.
10. Answer the phone.
11. Cat ate eggs; get more from fridge.
12. Get cat out of flour bowl and dust cat off.
13. Get Band-Aids for scratches on hands.
14. Throw flour out and get more.
15. Preheat oven for cookies.
16. Looking at cat and wanting to bake cat now. Cat runs for cover into bathroom.
17. Flour the counter to roll out cookie dough.
18. Big crash in bathroom; run to see what happened.
19. Cat has TP all over floor, stuff spilled and knocked over on top of bathroom counter.
20. Yell at cat. Cat falls in toilet bowl.
21. Can sense cat is angry.
22. Take cat out of toilet to dry cat off.
23. Get bandages to cover more scratches on arms and legs.
24. Clean up bathroom.
25. Hear a thump in kitchen. . .oh golly, now what?
26. Get cat off floured counter in kitchen.
27. Try to pick out cat hairs from flour.
28. Step on cat's tail and get bitten.
29. Get coat, car keys, and go to store to buy cookies!!!

Book Review--Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld

I seem to be reading a lot of first novels lately, all good. Prep is about a middle-class girl's experience at a boarding school. Bored at her public junior high school in South Bend, Indiana, Lee Fiora takes it upon herself to send away for boarding school catalogues and apply. Both she and her parents were surprised when she got in. Her parents couldn't afford such luxury, but when the Ault School in Massachusetts offered her a scholarship that paid for three-quarters of her tuition, they let Lee go.

Lee finds the experience to be more than she bargained for. The teenagers at Ault are rich and sophisticated. As a scholarship student, Lee feels like an outsider. Furthermore, good grades don't come as easily to her at Ault as they did when she was in junior high in South Bend. Still, she never seems to seriously consider going home (I think I would have lasted about a week). She stays for her entire four years of high school.

It's unclear to me whether Lee was better off for the experience or not. It seems to me that the experiences of adolescence--massive insecurity, the intensity of her relationships, peer and academic pressure--are greatly amplified by her boarding school experience. I can so clearly remember thinking many of her thoughts when I was in high school, but being so far from home and among students of a different social class would have to make things so much harder. Plus, it didn't get her into a more prestigious college, and even if it had, I'm not sure it would have been worth it. As the character herself points out, you have your whole life to leave your parents.

I loved this book; as I mentioned, I can remember thinking many of Lee's same thoughts and thus really identified with her, though I never went to boarding school (actually, I entertained thoughts of boarding school for about a week in eighth grade; my parents correctly figured that it was just a phase and waited for it to pass). But the painful experience of adolesence is pretty much universal, and Sittenfeld does a wonderful job of capturing it.

Book Review--Twins, by Marcy Dermansky

Talk about a dysfunctional family. Neglectful, workaholic parents. Twin daughters, one of whom thinks she owns the other and acts like a jealous lover whenever the other makes a friend, and their older brother, who gives them a book on twin experiments conducted in Nazi Germany for their 13th birthday. The story is told from the point of view of the twins, in alternating first-person accounts. Sue, the jealous twin, truly scared me for quite awhile with her jealousy and violent tendencies. And I felt sorry for Chloe, who wanted friends and boyfriends and basically a normal adolescence, which was essentially denied her by Sue. Their largely absentee parents were no help at all. When they were present, they tended to use a tape recorder and note pad when talking to their kids, basically acting as though they were clients in their law firm.

Both girls had trouble with eating disorders, and Sue abused pills. Their choices for friends and lovers usually were not terribly wise. Their brother, Dan, took an interest in Sue and was somewhat of a source of support for her, but he didn't really know how to help her either. The books spans the ages of 13 to 18 for the girls, and their parents basically give up when they are 16 or 17. Sue runs away from home to stay with an ex-girlfriend of her brother's, and the parents pull back completely and give Dan money to give to her. They also pretty much abandon Chloe, leaving her to live in their house all alone while they spend their time in a Manhattan apartment (after which Chloe immediately chooses inappropriate housemates). Giving money is no problem, but forget about guidance and emotional support. They just amazed me with their incompetence. The twins struggle to find heir way, which only happens when they can forge their own separate identities.

The book is amazingly good. It pulls the reader in from the very beginning. This is Dermansky's first novel, and I hope to see many more from her.

Movie Review--The Family Stone

I expected to like this movie more than I did. I also expected it to be funnier. While it did have some very funny moments, in general, I would consider it more drama than comedy. Sarah Jessica Parker plays the part of Meredith, an uptight, conservative woman who comes to spend the Christmas holidays with her soon-to-be-fiance, Everett Stone (Dermot Mulroney) and his family. His family doesn't like her at all at first, and they are quite mean to her. Mean enough, in fact, that I had trouble reconciling the fact that they were supposed to be easy-going liberal sorts with how horribly they treated her. It is true that Meredith made an ass of herself at times. Her comments one night at dinner indicating that Everett's gay brother and his partner shouldn't adopt a child because becoming gay might be partly due to environment stand out most starkly to me. But, they'd already treated her pretty badly before that and never really gave her a chance or tried to help her feel more comfortable.

Meredith feels so uncomfortable that she invites her sister, Julie (Claire Danes) to spend the holidays with them. This is when things get really interesting. Everett had never met Julie before that and finds himself drawn to her. Meanwhile, his older brother Ben (Luke Wilson) tries to befriend Meredith.

Anyway, like I said, more drama than comedy. It would have been better the other way around. I'm not sure it was necessary to have the mother be terminally ill, either. I don't really think it made the story better, though it sure made it sadder. The movie does have its moments, though, as well as an impressive cast.

Book Review--What to Keep, by Rachel Cline

This book examines the life of protagonist Denny Roman at three different stages--ages 12, 26, and 36. The daughter of two divorced, remote neuroscientists, Denny is facing adolescence without a whole lot of guidance from them. Her parents are very busy with their careers, and several years previously, they hired Maureen to manage many of the details of their lives. Maureen is a 35-year-old agoraphobic who serves as a sort of surrogate parent to Denny. Besides her busy career, Denny's mother, Lily, is coping (poorly) with her 41st birthday and an unintended pregnancy.

At 26, Denny is an actress, wondering if her career is ever going to take off. She now has a stepfather named Phil. Phil and her mother are moving to New York, and Denny has two days to decide which of her childhood possessions to keep. Oh, and she and her stepfather kiss, on the lips.

At 36, Denny is a playwright living in New York, near her mother again. She is grieving the loss of Maureen, who died at age 59 from a stroke. Maureen's son, Luke, aged 13, shows up on her doorstep one day. Maureen had been a single parent, and when she died, Luke was sent to live with his grandmother in Phoenix. Feeling uncomfortable there, Luke saves his money and runs away to see Denny in New York, hoping he might find a place with her there.

I actually thought the most interesting character was Maureen. The book does get into what led up to her agoraphobia, and how she pulls herself out of it for Denny's sake. Despite having a debilitating anxiety disorder, she came across as the sane one of Denny's parents.

This is Cline's first novel, and pretty good, in my opinion. I look forward to seeing more from her.

Book Review--Devil's Corner, by Lisa Scottoline

This book begins with the protagonist, Vicki, an Assistant US Attorney, staring down the barrel of a gun. She had been going to visit a confidential informant on what she believed to be a minor case, that of a woman who had bought two guns at a gun shop and illegally resold them. But things turned really ugly really quickly. Vicki and her partner, Morty, a dedicated Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) agent, arrive upon the scene of a burglary in progress. Vicki narrowly escapes being shot to death, but Morty and the confidential informant aren't so lucky. Devastated, Vicki seeks justice for her murdered partner. Her search and her grief lead her into some problematic behavior, and she is suspended at work. She does have an ally at work, a fellow AUSA named Dan who agrees with her that Morty's killing was not simply a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Vicki is crazy about Dan, but unfortunately he's married. Furthermore, her search for Morty's killer becomes too dangerous for her to want to let Dan know what she's really doing. She teams up with an unlikely ally who helps her explore a dangerous drug underworld.

This is a great book for anyone who loves legal thrillers, as I do.

Movie Review--Just Friends

Lots and lots of physical comedy in this movie, but it was very funny. Ryan Reynolds stars in the role of Chris. In high school he was an overweight "loser" who was in love with Jamie (Amy Smart), a beautiful cheerleader. When he finally gets up the nerve to confess his feelings to her, she tells him she just wants to be friends.

Ten years later, Chris has transformed himself. He has lost weight and become a successful music executive in LA. Circumstances bring him back home to New Jersey (with an extremely self-absorbed musician, Samantha, in tow), and he encounters his high-school crush for the first time in ten years. So again he tries to win her over, and again it's not easy. Many obstacles present themselves. Samantha is anxious to get to Paris, and Chris keeps trying to distract her with the help of his younger brother, who is only too happy to spend time with the gorgeous Samantha. Chris also has competition, another would-be suitor from high school who has recently moved back to town. His rival, Dusty, is a paramedic who encounters Jamie and Chris when Chris injures himself playing ice hockey (he had wanted to show Jamie just how much his ice skating had improved, but it didn't quite work out like he had hoped). So Chris is in the ambulance with Dusty on one side and Jamie on the other, barely able to move or speak, while Dusty and Jamie are exchanging phone numbers. Talk about frustrating.

So like I said, there was lots of physical comedy, of which the injury on the ice is one example. Chris is generally a clutz, and then there are the regular pummelings he and his brother give each other. I don't always like physical comedy, but Reynolds makes it work. The movie isn't terribly deep, but funny enough to make up for that.

Book Review--Harvesting the Heart, by Jodi Picoult

This book, as Picoult's generally do, alternates between different points of view and periods in time. In this case, the story is told by Paige (in the first person) and from her husband, Nicholas's point of view, but in the third person. Since Paige's parts are told in the first person and Nicholas's in the third, I personally felt a lot closer to Paige's character. I also didn't like Nicholas particularly, and I'll get to why in just a minute.

Paige has some significant demons in her past to overcome. When she was five, her mother disappeared. An only child, she was raised by her father. When she was 18, she had an abortion. This led to a breakup with her boyfriend, and, worried that her father might somehow discover her secret, she chose to run away instead of waiting just a few months until leaving for college. I had a really hard time understanding that. She had been accepted by the Rhode Island School of Design and wanted to study art. Her interest didn't seem to have really waned, and I didn't think she was even having doubts about college. So, she'd had the abortion because she wasn't ready to handle motherhood and wanted to go to college, but then she didn't end up going to college anyway. She ran away to Massachusetts (from Chicago) and got a job in a seedy diner, where she worked as a waitress but also drew pictures of the customers. She was very good at drawing, and also had a uncanny ability to include things about the person in the drawing that she had no real way of knowing, as if drawing a person gave her a glimpse into their subconscious.

Paige met Nicholas at the diner. His life had been one of privilege. He and Paige hadn't known each other very long at all when he asked her to marry him. They got married and several years later had a kid, which was basically when Paige's life fell apart. She quickly became overwhelmed with the demands of motherhood, and Nicholas wasn't at all understanding. He didn't really help at all. In fairness, he worked very long hours as a heart surgeon, so he didn't have a whole lot of time to help, but his lack of understanding was basically why I didn't like him. He didn't understand that while he got few breaks, Paige got NO break, since mothering is a 24/7 job. He would play with the baby a little bit (maybe) and think it was easy and why was Paige bitching so much?

The other reason I didn't like him was that he would do things like insist she entertain a bunch of snobby people and say he was doing it for her, which was bullshit. He was doing it for himself, to further his own career, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I thought he should at least be honest about it. If he were really doing it just for her, he would have quit, since she didn't want to do it and would rather have had more of his time. She was not materialistic or hung up with status.

Anyway, Paige eventually couldn't take it anymore and ran off. I think post-partum depression was likely a major factor. She searches for her mother and tries to deal with her past. She does find her mother and spends some time with her. In the process learns more about herself and her own motives. In the meantime, Nicholas learns that it's not so easy trying to raise an infant. He ends up asking his estranged parents for help. Paige eventually returns, but Nicholas, understandably angry at her for leaving, isn't particularly inclined to forgive her. Even though anyone would be mad about that, I thought he was particularly unforgiving, but maybe that's just because I didn't like him in the first place. Interestingly, his parents are more understanding, especially his mother. His mother, while she had not left her family, had had her own rather difficult quest for her own identity, so she could empathize with Paige more than Nicholas could.

Don't get me wrong; I don't really think it was right for Paige to just leave her baby like that. I don't understand how she could. But I guess I really believe that she just couldn't take it anymore and didn't see another way out. She even believed that she was a bad mother and that her baby would be better off without her. It wasn't true, of course, but I do think she really believed that.

It's fair to say that the book is really gripping. It brought out strong emotions in me--anger toward Nicholas, for example, and identification with Paige. I am not sure why I identified with her since my life isn't like hers (I'm single with no kids), but I suppose I can relate to sometimes feeling overwhelmed by life. And the search for one's own identity is pretty much a universal theme.

Movie Review--Walk the Line

This was an awesome movie. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon were great as Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. I'm not really a Johnny Cash fan, so I hadn't read his autobiography and didn't know anything of his life story. However, one doesn't have to be a Johnny Cash fan to enjoy this movie. The movie begins with a turning point in Cash's life. When they were kids in Arkansas, an accident killed Cash's older brother. Cash's father never really forgave him for being the surviving son. From here, the story jumps ahead several years. After serving in the military, Cash marries his first wife and works briefly as a door-to-door salesman. His desire of course is to be a singer, and he forms a band. He manages to get them an audition, which doesn't go too well when they perform one of their gospel tunes. Things turn around when they perform a song that Cash wrote, and they get a record deal. From there they climb the charts.

His first wife isn't terribly supportive; in fact I read somewhere that one of Cash's daughters was not at all happy with how her mother was portrayed in this movie. It is true that she was angry at him, at first for being more interested in his music than in earning money as a door-to-door salesman, and then because she knew of his attraction to June Carter. But I felt that her anger was justified; I didn't think she was portrayed as being excessively bitchy or anything like that. Upon hearing the gospel tunes that Cash and his band were working on at first, I might have found it difficult to keep the faith as well in the beginning, and obviously he was in love with June Carter, so that was a threat to her.

Cash met June Carter, who along with her singing family had been famous since she was a child, while touring. Both were married to other people at the time, and it is awhile before they actually get together, years in fact. During this time, Carter goes through a bitter divorce, Cash's first wife finally leaves him, Carter briefly marries again, and Cash loses several years to pills and alcohol. But when they do get together, it is forever.

The actors actually sang rather than lip-synched; interestingly, those cast in the lead roles were not singers. The music was very good, though. Both Phoenix and Witherspoon were impressive in their roles, but Reese Witherspoon was especially good in the role of June Carter.

Happy Thanksgiving

I just want to wish everyone who reads this a happy Thanksgiving! If you're traveling, have a safe trip, and I wish everyone good times with family and/or friends.

Book Review--White Lies, Anna Salter

This is the third book in Salter's series featuring forensic psychologist Michael Stone, and probably my favorite.

Reginald Larsen is a noted anthesiologist who may have just made an important discovery regarding adverse reactions to anesthetics. He has been suspended from his hospital pending an investigation of claims of sexual impropriety. He is confident that he can fight the charges against him and wants Michael to do an evaluation as soon as possible. Michael has dealt with the lies of too many sexual offenders to be so sure of his ability to fight the charges.

While Michael is dealing with the Larsen case, a fellow psychologist, Marv, consults with Michael about a case of his where his client has recovered memories (unaided by him) of sexual abuse by her father. She wants to confront her father in a therapy session, which Michael is sure is a very bad idea, since it's unclear if the memories are real and the client has had mush time to work through this in any case. She tries to discourage Marv from allowing this to happen, but Marv says that his client is going to confront her father with or without Marv's help, and Marv feels that he needs to be there for his client. So Michael gets permission from all parties for her to observe behind a one-way mirror, so that at least she can be a witness for Marv if the family sues.

Michael's involvement in these two volatile cases proves to be quite dangerous. Michael has to protect not only herself, but those around her. Michael is brave to the point of being a little crazy, but maybe you'd have to be in her line of work.

Book Review--Fault Lines, by Anna Salter

In this second book featuring forensic psychologist Michael Stone, Michael's worst fears have come true. Alex B. Willy, sadistic child molester, has been released from prison. When Willy was still incarcerated, Michael had visited him to gain insights on child molesters. The insights were valuable, since much of Michael's work involves working with child molesters and victims. However, the information Willy provided may have come at far too high a price. When Willy and Michael had talked, neither had thought he'd ever get out of prison. He was in his early 60s and starting a 30-year sentence. He had spoken freely of how pedophiles operate and even boasted of his crimes on audiotape. Now he has been released on a technicality, and Michael is in possession of lots and lots of information Willy would rather she didn't have. Worse, Willy doesn't have anything resembling a conscience, and Michael shudders to think of the plans he might have for her.

Her friends--Adam, a police chief and Michael's sometime lover, and Carlotta, a lawyer, want her to hide, but Michael is too stubborn for that. So she keeps seeing therapy clients and gets a disturbing email from Willy suggesting that he knows who her clients are and what they are saying during their sessions. She has a friend, a former FBI agent, who educates her about bugs and gives her a bug detector, but it doesn't seem to help. Willy is always two steps ahead of her in a game she has to win. Her life depends on it.

Anna Salter's books are always gripping and hard to put down. She is herself a forensic psychologist and the cases portrayed in the books are chillingly realistic.

New Link for Cat Lovers

I just added a new link to my list of links: Sir Ryder of Cupp. It's a must read for any cat lover--lots of cute cat pictures, a long, distressing step by step account of giving a cat a pill (hilarious if you're not the one doing it), that type of thing. I can definitely relate to the pill thing. When I first got my cat Moonie from a shelter, she had lots of health problems. I had to give her lots of pills, and though we had had pets while I was growing up, I certainly hadn't had to do that kind of thing before and wasn't in fact known for having a great love of or skill with animals. It took awhile but now I am a pro at giving pills to cats.

Anyway, I love cat blogs, so when I saw this, I knew I had to add this link.

Movie Review-Prime

The first thing I am wondering is unrelated to the movie itself. Why is it that movie theaters are never a comfortable temperature? The movie theater in which I saw Prime was freezing. I had my winter coat on the whole entire time. It was like they had the air conditioning on or something.

Comfort aside, I did enjoy this movie. It was absolutely hilarious. Uma Thurman plays Rafi, a woman in her mid-30s who has just gone through a divorce and is seeing a therapist, Lisa (Meryl Streep). Rafi meets a great new guy, David (Bryan Greenberg) and they hit it off right away. Rafi is ecstatic in her new relationship, but at the same time a little unsure if he's the right person, as he is quite a bit younger than she is. Lisa encourages her to go for it and enjoy herself.

Neither therapist nor patient realize right away that Rafi is dating Lisa's son. I loved the moment of dawning horror when Lisa realized whom Rafi had been talking about (in intimate detail) in all those therapy sessions. It was far more than a mother would want to know about her son's sex life; that's for sure. And Lisa is far different as a parent than a therapist. Where she had encouraged Rafi to go for it and not worry about whether the relationship was going to go anywhere, she had strongly encouraged her son not to start something with someone who wasn't Jewish and was older than he (she didn't know at first that it was Rafi he was talking about).

Lisa goes to her own therapist and asks for advice on how to handle the situation. In my opinion, she gets some bad advice, although if she'd gotten better advice the movie wouldn't have been as good, I guess. Lisa's therapist said that if she thought this was just going to be a fling, then she wouldn't be serving her client's best interest by terminating therapy with her. The reason I thought this was bad advice was that it would only work if Lisa was right about it turning out to be a brief fling, and she had no way of knowing whether or not it would be. Hoping it would be a fling wasn't the same thing. And the longer the relationship continued, the harder it would be to tell Rafi that she needed to find another therapist and why. But anyway, Lisa follows the bad advice and ends up hearing more and more details that she really doesn't want to know.

Meryl Streep is great as the therapist and mother to David. Rafi and David are a great couple and the viewer really hopes they will be able to work things out. The movie did drag a little in spots, but mostly it was funny.

Book Review--Shiny Water, by Anna Salter

Anna's Salter's books are rather addictive to me. They just really sweep you along. Shiny Water is the first in a series featuring Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychologist (female, despite the man's name). I've actually read all of her books before, but I enjoy rereading them.

This book is about a nasty custody case. Michael is asked to testify because one of the children, aged six, told a teacher that his father was sexually abusing him and his younger sister. The children confirm this in Michael's office. Oddly, though their mother thinks her soon-to-be-ex is a horrible person, she does not believe that the children were sexually abused. She has some problems with paranoia (big problems, actually), and thinks that their father coached the children to say this, that the court would decide it wasn't true, blame the mother for encouraging her children to make up stories about their father, and award custody to the father. Michael is very experienced in sexual abuse cases and believes that the children really were molested, and says as much in court. However, the mother's fears about what the judge would think about the charges of sexual abuse turned out to be accurate, and Michael's testimony was ignored. The father was given full custody, the mother limited visitation.

But then the children are found murdered in their beds when visiting their mother, who is arrested for the crime. Though she knows that the children's mother has mental health problems, she doesn't believe for a second that she murdered her children. She embarks on her own personal quest to find the real killer. It is a quest that may threaten her life, as the killer is much closer than she expected, and someone she never suspected.

Anyway, this book wouldn't appeal to some people, since the subject matter is pretty upsetting. But I love Michael's determination to do what she can to right a wrong. Obviously whatever she does won't bring the children back to life, but she can at least help bring their real killer to justice, even if it's at great cost to herself.

Book Review--Dating is Murder, by Harley Jane Kozak

This is the second book in the series featuring Wollie Shelley, greeting card designer and amateur sleuth. Wollie is also a contestant on a cheesy reality show called Biological Clock, featuring three women in their 30s and three men. Each of the three women has on-camera dates with each of three men, and then the audience votes on which combination should produce a child (with or without romantic involvement). Like I said, cheesy. Wollie is more or less participating for the $500 per week, for only two nights worth of work.

Her main concern is her missing friend Annika, a college exchange student from Germany who is also Wollie's math tutor. Wollie becomes concerned when Annika misses a tutoring session and then Annika's mother calls from Germany, saying that she hadn't heard from Annika for awhile, that her host family wouldn't return her calls, and that she was sure something was wrong.

Annika frequently hangs out on the Biological Clock set, so Wollie asks others on the set if Annika had said anything recently that might shed light on her disappearance. Disturbingly, she finds out that Annika had wanted to know how she could get a gun. Upon visiting Annika's host family, Wollie learns that Annika may have been involved with drugs. Both pieces of information are shocking to Wollie; Annika had hardly seemed like the type of person to want a gun or be involved with drugs.

Reporting Annika's disappearance to the police doesn't really do much good, and in investigating on her own, Wollie finds herself being followed. Actually, she is being followed by more than one person, some of whom have to do with the television show and trying to fix the results. You might say that Wollie's life has become rather scary on several levels.

This book was a lot better than the first book in the series, as I mentioned in my last post. Wollie is a very likeable character. Despite her tendency to get involved in some rather ridiculous projects (the TV show in this one and the dating "research" in the first book), she is actually quite intelligent and creative. I actually rather enjoyed the Biological Clock angle just because the show was so bad it was funny. Anyway, I imagine that there will be another book about Wollie, and I will most likely read it.

Book Review--Dating Dead Men, by Harley Jane Kozak

This is the first book in a new series starring Wollie (short for Wollstonecraft, if you can believe it) Shelley, a greeting card designer and amateur sleuth. I actually read the second book in the series first, but decided to review them in order. It's a good thing I read the second book first, though, or I probably would not have read on.

In Dating Dead Men, Wollie is concerned about the card shop she manages. If her shop is upgraded she can buy it. The shop also carries some greeting cards she designs, as well as cards from many other sources. Wollie is also involved in a "research" project. A radio talk-show host is writing a book, How to Avoid Getting Dumped all the Time, and Wollie is helping out with the research by dating 40 men in 60 days.

After receiving an urgent call from her brother Wollie is driving to see him at the state mental hospital (he's paranoid schizophrenic) when she stumbles across a dead body. She gets to the hospital and sees that her brother is all right and in fact, fast asleep. So she leaves, but if briefly taken hostage by a "doctor" who is on the run from the mob. Fortunately his only desire was to escape and not to harm Wollie, and by the time they have driven together for a ways, they have become friends of sorts. Wollie is worried that her brother, who somehow knew about the corpse before she came across it, is involved in the crime, so she tries to solve it herself rather than going to the police. This involves encountering some rather sinister types, to say the least. The dead body and "Doc's" run from the mob are connected, and Doc keeps trying to keep Wollie out of harm's way, which doesn't work because she doesn't take his advice.

Anyway, I didn't like this book as much as I liked the second one (which I will review in a later post) because I thought this book was confusing. It was just hard to follow in spots, and I am not sure if this is because of the writing, or if I kept getting lost because it failed to hold my interest. But like I've said, the second book is better, so I do think there is hope for this particular series.

Movie Review--Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story

This was just a touching story. It's a tearjerker in spots and a great family movie. Kurt Russell plays a horse trainer, Ben Crane. His daughter, Cale (Dakota Fanning) loves horses. She accompanies her father to work one day when one of his favorite horses, Sonador (Spanish for Dreamer), breaks her leg during a race. The breeder, Ben's boss, wants the animal to be put down immediately, but Cale is there watching, and Ben argues with his boss and manages to save Sonador's life. He also manages to get fired, but he takes Sonador with him. He figures that he can nurse Sonador back to health, and though she'll never race again, he could breed her and sell the colt for a lot of money. And Cale is delighted to have the horse with them, the only horse on what was once a large horse farm. There is only one problem with Ben's plan: the horse is infertile.

Faced with financial ruin, Ben tells his wife that he would have let the vet put Sonador down the day she broke her leg if Cale hadn't been there that day and he'd still have his job. Cale overhears and plans to run away with the horse (a bold plan, to be sure). She gets on the horse, who gets spooked when Ben's truck pulls up. The horse runs out of open gate with Cale, who can't get her to stop. Ben manages to drive up alongside them, gets out of the truck, and gets Cale to jump off of the horse and into his arms. It was then that they realized the horse could run, and run fast. So they start training her to race again.

As one can surmise from the title, this is based on a true story. I read online (on the MSN movie info; the synopsis is by Mark Deming) that it's based on the story of Mariah's Storm, a horse who broke her leg in 1993, but who made an incredible comeback. In 1994 she won the Arlington Heights Oaks, and in 1995 won the Turfway Breeder's Cup.

Another New Link

I have added another new link to my list: The Rubin Review. Check it out, it's really funny.

Book Review--Better Read than Dead, by Victoria Laurie

This book is the second in the "Psychic Eye" mysteries. Very light reading, but lots of fun, in my opinion. Abby makes her living doing psychic readings for people. I guess one has to suspend disbelief if one doesn't believe in that sort of thing. However, her gift comes in handy outside of her work, especially since she tends to get into dangerous situations.

Abby is eagerly awaiting her reunion with her new boyfriend, Dutch, who is just getting back from FBI training when she gets a call from a fellow psychic, Kendal. Kendal's timing in calling in a favor that Abby owes him could not be worse, but she cancels her date with Dutch and reluctantly agrees to help Kendal do psychic readings at a wedding (interesting choice of reception entertainment, but then the wedding is on Halloween).

Kendal and Abby belatedly discover that the wedding is actually a mob wedding. They decide to leave early--and quickly--but not before Abby's psychic gifts catch the attention of a mob boss who wants her help. Abby tries to stand up to him, being way braver than I could probably be in those circumstances, but he doesn't exactly take no for an answer.

Meanwhile, the police recruit Abby to help out on a case involving a masked man who's attacking women. Her sister makes an unannounced visit, and Abby has prevent her from finding out about the mob boss and keep her out of harm's way. Dutch's new partner in the FBI makes it clear to Abby that she wants Dutch, despite rules against her dating a subordinate. You might say Abby's life has gotten rather difficult to manage, even with her psychic gifts, which can be impressive but seem to be rather selective (it's not like she saw this coming).

I really like Abby; she's very no-nonsense and straightforward, despite her unusual profession. The psychic angle is really interesting. Anyway, this is just a fun book, and a fun new series.

Movie Review--The Weatherman

This was a rather dark movie, but with an overlay of humor that kept it from being depressing. The story centers on a middle-aged divorced man, David Spritz (Nicholas Cage), who is a TV weather forecaster in Chicago. His father is a famous author who is terminally ill. Both of his kids are troubled. Feelings of inadequacy are definitely an issue for David. He can't measure up to his Pulitzer-prize-winning father, who gives him a hard time about getting divorced and about the kids. He doesn't have a degree in metereology and thus doesn't truly understand a lot of what he is saying on the air. Sometimes people who recognize him on the street throw things at him. Things are possibly looking up on the job front, though. David is in the running for a network job in New York. When he has to drive his dad to the doctor, David places a letter about the job where he thinks his dad is sure to see it and comment on it. First his dad sits on it, so when they get in the car after the appointment, David places the letter on the passenger side of the dashboard. His dad falls asleep without ever noticing it.

David contemplates his life, his career and his relationships. He's a likeable, sympathetic character. Who among us has not experienced at least some of these things--feelings of inadequacy or not feeling respected in our careers, worry about kids, grief over failed relationships, etc. It's easy to relate to his character.

The movie is kind of hard to characterize; I guess I'd call it a comic drama. David's character narrates his thoughts, and he has a kind of dark sense of humor. So if you like movies that are rather deep but with some humor to lighten things up, you'll probably like this.

Another New Link

I just wanted to draw everyone's attention to another new link that I just added: Bond Hunter's Guide to Internet Counseling. Lots of good resources and interesting entries to read. Check it out.

Book Review--The Wonder Spot, by Melissa Bank

This book begins when Sophie, the protagonist, is 12 years old. Then she is struggling in Hebrew school and trying to convince her parents that she doesn't want a bat mitzvah. In Hebrew school, she befriends a former enemy from school.

The book is in several sections, different slices of Sophie's life over a span of about 25 years. There is a section from when she is in college and critiquing her roommate's love life, a section from when she is just out of college and trying to teach herself to type (in the days of the typewriter). Attempting to find lasting love is a common theme of many of the sections, as is her career satisfaction (or lack thereof). All involve her search for identity in some way.

I liked the book, but it's kind of hard to review in that it's more character development than plot. One thing I didn't necessarily like was the way it jumped around to different parts of her life; sometimes I was wondering whatever happened with a certain person or situation, and then the book jumps ahead several years. But it was all quite interesting, and I liked how Sophie didn't let other people's warnings about how a certain guy might be her last chance (to get married and have a family) sway her into marrying someone she didn't want to marry. I just thought, You go, girl! I think if people were only in relationships because they truly wanted to be with that person, and not because they think they need the security or are afraid to be alone or are worried about missing their chance to have a family or whatever--well, I think there would be a lot more single people in this world.

New Links

I finally put some links on my blog. These are blogs that I enjoy; there's a little bit of everything. There are some other sites pertaining to books (I Love a Good Mystery, Gay and Lesbian Books); humor (Whoopity Doo, Digital Doorway, Wasted Blog); Personal Diaries (No Bravery, A Rich Tapestry of Barbara-isms, She Talks to Angels, All Things Jennifer, Championable: Fatherhood, Politics, Kids); politics (The Martian Anthropologist, Princess Wild Cow). Anyway, check them out.

Book Review--Case of Lies, by Perri O'Shaughnessy

Nina Reilly is one of my all-time favorite characters. I tend to like legal thrillers, and Reilly is an amazing lawyer who actually has a heart.

Nina's latest case comes her way when her massage therapist, Chelsi, asks Nina to talk to her uncle. Chelsi's aunt, Sarah had been murdered nearly two years previously while she and Chelsi's uncle Dave had been staying at a motel. It seemed to be a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sarah had been shot while some other motel guests were being robbed. Even more tragically, Sarah had been pregnant with her first child at the time.

The shooter has not been found, and the Dave's civil case against the motel for negligence, having languished for two years, is about to be thrown out. Dave is broke, but Chelsi and her father are willing to pay the bills so that the case can go forward.

Nina has to race against the clock to gather more evidence before the judge tosses the case out. She searches for the robbery victims who were also witnesses to Sarah's murder, three brilliant MIT students who came to Tahoe to gamble. The students, master card counters, had won a lot of money the night they were robbed. The IDs they had provided were fake, so Nina has to figure out who and where they are, as well as try to find the shooter.

The student most central to the story is Elliott, a brilliant but unstable mathematician who is working on solving the mystery of prime numbers (numbers that are divisible only by one and themselves, such as 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc. As yet, no one has discovered a formula for predicting the location of prime numbers. This means that really large composite numbers cannot be factored, due to the difficulty of finding the prime numbers of which they are composed. Interestingly, encryption based on this fact is the best method of encryption on the Internet at this point, thought there are other possibilities such as quantum encryption. These other possibilities will have to be further explored when someone does figure out the formula for locating prime numbers.

Anyway, that's what I like about O'Shaughnessy's books; they are highly readable, but I learn a lot. In reading this book, for example, I learned more about math, while in another I learned a more about Russian history. The only thing I regret is that they can't write and publish faster; I'm always so anxious to read their next book.

Book Review--Peach Cobbler Murder, by Joanne Fluke

I love books in a series that feature the same character/s. Once I've gotten to like a character, I want to read more about them. This book is Fluke's fifth Hannah Swenson mystery. Hannah owns a small bakery called the Cookie Jar and is an amateur sleuth.

I will admit, one does have to suspend disbelief with these amateur-sleuth-type mysteries. For one thing, amateur sleuths in these books tend to do things in the course of investigating that I would think a private citizen would have difficulty doing. Also, these books tend to take place in small towns, and if there is at least one murder per installment of the series--well, that would make the murder rate in a town of 5000 people or so alarmingly high.

It doesn't matter, though; I always really enjoy these types of books. In this book, Hannah faces a serious threat to her business when a new bakery opens up right across the street. The new bakery is operated by two sisters, one of whom, Shawna Lee, is after Mike, Hannah's sometime-boyfriend. Since Shawna Lee is a rival of Hannah's in both business and love, she is a prime suspect when Shawna is murdered. So let's just say Hannah has a strong incentive to solve this particular case.

I really like all the characters in this series, but my favorite is Hannah's cat. He is far more intelligent than I think a real-life cat could probably be (not that my own little darlings aren't brilliant :-), but he has the greatest personality (cat-ality?). This is a cat who doesn't like Hannah's mother and so will puff up like a porcupine and hisses when her mother calls, even before Hannah answers the telephone. He also refused to kill a mouse in Hannah's mother's house, as if he just couldn't stand doing her a favor. On the other hand, he loves Hannah's other sometime-boyfriend, Norman, and will do anything Norman asks, including allow Norman to put a harness on him. The cat has strong opinions about people.

Each installment also has lots of recipes to try, mostly desserts. I haven't tried any yet, but, well, they all look really good, so these are a bonus that you get with each book.

Movie Review--North Country

One thing I can definitely say about this movie is that it gives one perspective. Anytime that I think that I hate my job, I'll just think about what it would have been like to work in the hellhole portrayed in this movie. I think working in a mine would be bad enough, never mind working there when one is subjected to daily harrassment. I'm talking feces smeared on the walls of the women's locker room, sex toys in their lunch boxes, ugly rumors and name calling, and generally having to go to work every day in fear.

The movie is inspired by a true story involving a class-action sexual harrassment suit against a mine in 1989. It centers on a character named Josie (Charlize Theron) who moves back to her hometown with two kids in tow when she leaves her abusive husband. She moves in with her parents and gets a job washing hair in a beauty salon, but one can't exactly support oneself and two kids on those wages. A female mine worker and union representative suggests that Josie get a job working for the mine, which pays six times what she makes washing hair.

Josie's dad also works for the mine, but he is far from supportive. And from day one, Josie is subjected to an incredible amount of harrassment, as are the other women who work for the mine, who are outnumbered 30 to 1 by men. Most of the women try to brush it off, but Josie has a much harder time doing so. The final straw occurs when she is attacked by one of the men. She gets a lawyer (Woody Harrelson) and sues the mine.

Theron does a wonderful job as Josie. The character is an amazing person, someone who has really been through a lot and is amazingly strong. Since the movie is "inspired by" a true story, I am not sure how much of her character is based on an actual person, but the real life women in this case must have been incredibly courageous as well, to take on the mine like that and make history.

I'm glad I saw the movie, because it is really good and it portrays an important piece of history. However, it was really intense and hard to watch in places, so I'm not sure it's the kind of thing I'd want to see again. Not a good date movie, that's for sure. It's the type of movie to see with someone capable of providing good emotional support.

Book Review--Mercy, by Jodi Picoult

I've mentioned before that I love Jodi Picoult. I love the way she writes about pressing social issues and the way she treats them with such sensitivity and depth.

Mercy is about a mercy killing. A man, Jamie, kills his wife, whose body is riddled with cancer, by smothering her with a pillow. He confesses immediately to the police chief, who happens to be his cousin, Cam. Cam then has the difficult job of arresting his cousin, and then aiding in his prosecution.

Meanwhile, Cam's wife, Allie, is doing her best to help Jamie. She seems to feel a kinship with him in that they both have or had an extraordinary devotion to their spouses. Allie is impressed that Jamie loved his wife so much that he would go so far as to kill her when she asked. But while Allie helps Jamie and Cam helps the prosecution, the distance between them grows. Complicating matters further, Cam finds himself thinking about Allie's new assistant, Mia.

Did Jamie really agree to kill his wife because he loved her so much that he only wanted to end her suffering? Or was it because it had become too hard for him to watch her suffer? Or was it because she had changed from the person he had loved so much into one he no longer wanted to be around? These are the questions that the book raises. As with her other books, Picoult provides no easy answers, but compels the reader to consider the questions.

Book Review--Your Cat's Just Not That Into You, by Richard Smith (Illustrations by David Sipress)

I always thought my cats were pretty into me. They greet me at the door. They sleep with me at night. Sure, they're a little friendlier when I'm trying to eat dinner in peace, but for the most part, I thought they loved me unconditionally.

Clearly, I was living in a dream world.

Last night I was at Hastings, looking for an audiobook to rent, when I saw Your Cat's Just Not That Into You. Feeling sorry for people who clearly have settled for a less-than-optimal cat-human relationship, I picked it up and thumbed through it.

It's always a shock when you think everything is perfect in a relationship and then reality hits you in the face.

I was reading about myself and my cats.

Being all sweet and cuddly and then suddenly bolting away? My cats do that! Separation anxiety if I close the bathroom door and then ignoring me when I open it, clearly meaning that they are only into me when I am not there? My cats do that! And forget about coming to me when I call them. Then of course there is the physical abuse. They are always supposedly "just playing" when they scratch me, like they didn't realize their claws weren't retracted.

I sobbed for hours.

Dramatics aside, the book is hilarious. It is of course a take-off on He's Just Not That Into You, that book which helps women face the truth about their jerk boyfriends. From what little I've seen of that book, this one is laid out in the same way, with letter from people and advice. It's a must-have for any cat-lover.

Movie Review--In Her Shoes

Another great movie. In Her Shoes is about two sisters who are complete opposites. Rose is an uptight lawyer, very responsible and good at her job. Her younger sister Maggie (Cameron Diaz) is beautiful, irresponsible, can't hold a job, and mooches off of Rose. The sisters lost their mother when they were young. They don't always get along, but they are close.

However, their relationship is severely tested when Maggie sleeps with a man who is sort of Rose's boyfriend. Rose kicks Maggie out of her apartment. Fortunately for Maggie, she has a place to go. She has a tendency to snoop through other people's things, looking for cash to steal. It was when she was snooping through her father and stepmother's things that she discovered the whereabouts of her maternal grandmother, with whom their father had cut off contact years ago.

Maggie goes to visit her grandmother (Shirley MacLaine) in Florida for the first time in her life. Her grandmother is delighted to meet her granddaughter at long last, but less happy about her granddaughter's mooching tendencies. When she discovers Maggie looking through her things for cash, she strikes a deal with Maggie: Maggie can stay with her, but she needs to get a job. Maggie's grandmother promises she will match the money Maggie earns through her job in order to help Maggie go to New York so she can study acting.

In staying with her grandmother and developing a relationship with her, Maggie begins to gain a sense of responsibility. Meanwhile, back in Philadelphia, Rose is learning to loosen up. She takes a leave of absence from her job and takes a job walking dogs. She starts dating a new man (not the one who slept with her sister). But she and Maggie miss each other terribly. In Florida, their grandmother (whom Rose has still not met) encourages Maggie to contact Rose. Meanwhile, their father doesn't even know that Maggie is no longer in Philadephia.

The sisters have to come to terms with their relationship and their past. They are both lost in their own way and need to find themselves.

Anyway, as I've mentioned before, I love chick flicks. I also like movies about the relationship between sisters; the dynamics are really interesting to me. In this movie, Shirley MacLaine is great as the grandmother, but then I always like both her and Cameron Diaz. I highly recommend this movie.

Book Review--The Mystery of Breathing, by Perri Klass

Dr. Maggie Claymore is at the top of her profession. A neonatologist, she works with the smallest and sickest premature babies, ones so ill that other doctors might give up on them. She is fiercely devoted to the babies, sometimes to the point where others thinks she tries to save babies whose chance for any kind of decent quality of life is very small. However, she is a very talented and dedicated doctor, and she is in line for a promotion at work. Personally, she doesn't have kids, but she has a terrific husband, also a doctor. Life is pretty good.

But Maggie's life starts to unravel when she gets an anonymous letter, one saying, among other things, that she harms her patients and that the doctors she trains hate working with her. And the harassment doesn't stop with one letter. Maggie and some of her colleagues keep getting increasingly hateful letters, and finally the accuser goes public and puts up posters around the hospital, warning parents to avoid allowing Maggie to treat their child. Worst of all, the letters and posters blame her for the death of a toddler who died in the hospital the previous year.

You'd think someone would notice a person putting up posters around the hospital, but no one does. Investigator Donna Grey asks Maggie about any possible personal relationships with coworkers, talks to her husband, and investigates all aspects of her life, but the perpetrator leaves scant evidence.

The book alternates between what's happening in Maggie's life in the present and different times in her past. The interludes from the past are supposed to provide a deeper insight into Maggie's identity, but while they were usually interesting, I didn't always feel that they added a whole lot to the story. Also, I sometimes felt that they interrupted the flow of the story. Things would be getting really interesting in the present, and then the next chapter would abruptly switch to some time in Maggie's past.

The other thing that frustrated me about this book was that it simply left too many loose ends. I don't want to give too much away in explaining exactly how. It was probably more true-to-life than many other books in that regard, but I would have preferred a tidier resolution.

Book Review--Seizure, by Robin Cook

I have read most of Robin Cook's books, and really like them. I liked this one too, but not as much as I've liked some of his others. The main problem I had with Seizure was that there was simply too much clutter in it. It took around 400 pages to get to the part in which I was most interested.

Dr. Daniel Lowell has invented a new technique in stem-cell research, one that promises to save many lives. He and his partner (personal and professional) Stephanie D'Agostino, have their own biotechnology firm, and with it they hope they will save lives and reap huge financial benefits.

However, the biotechnology firm faces a serious threat. Senator Ashley Butler, an extremely conservative Southern Democrat (he seemed more like a right-wing Republican), has introduced legislation to ban Daniel's technique. Daniel and Stephanie go to Washington, D.C., to testify in a subcommittee meeting in which they attempt to explain the procedure and emphasize that it does not involve the dismemberment of human embryos. They fail to convince the senator, however, and are frustrated by the biased hearing.

A few days later, however, they are contacted by Butler's Chief of Staff for a top-secret meeting. The senator has a progressive form of Parkinson's disease, and he wants Daniel and Stephanie to treat him for it using Daniel's new technique, though they have yet to try it on a human. The senator demands absolute secrecy, as he doesn't want knowledge of his illness to threaten his political future, which he hopes will include someday becoming president. In exchange, Ashley promises that the bill he is sponsering banning the procedure will die in subcommittee. If the bill dies, the financing for Daniel's company would come through.

Ashley has one final demand. The procedure requires the DNA of someone who does not have Parkinson's disease. It doesn't matter who the person is, since there is no tissue matching involved, the way there would be for an organ transplant. He wants the DNA to be obtained from a blood sample taken from the Shroud of Turin, which is thought to be the burial shroud of Jesus Christ, though this is controversial. Ashley believes it to be real, and he wants this bit of "divine intervention."

Here is where it starts to get really "cluttered." Ashley greases the wheels so that Daniel and Stephanie are able to get a sample from the Shroud of Turin. They make a trip to Turin to obtain it and nearly get arrested. They get away but have to leave all their luggage. They then go to the Bahamas, where the procedure has to be done in order to avoid violating any FDA rules. They have to be there several weeks before Ashley, as there are things they have to do before they will be ready to do the procedurel. The clinic where the procedure is to be done, Wingate Clinic, was featured in a earlier novel of Cook's (Shock). The clinic was in Massachusetts, until the directors moved it rather suddenly to the Bahamas rather than face the consequences of being involved in the disappearance of two female Harvard students and unethical practices related to infertility treatments and illegally removing ovaries from women without their consent. Stephanie had to reluctant to go along with treating Ashley in the first place, and she is not happy about dealing with the Wingate Clinic and its directors, Dr. Spencer Wingate and Dr. Paul Saunders. She does some snooping, hoping to find evidence of wrongdoing which she can turn over to the authorities once they are done treating Ashley. She manages to get into their "egg room" and gets caught by their thug of a security guard, who puts her into an actual jail cell in the clinic's basement. To get her out, Daniel has to sign some sort of confidentiality agreement, basically stating that if he or Stephanie blows the whistle on the clinic, the clinic will blow the whistle on them.

An additional side plot is that Stephanie's family has mob connections, and her brother and some of his associates are not happy about their investments in Daniel and Stephanie's biotechnology firm being in jeopardy. They cannot understand how Daniel and Stephanie can be trying to save the firm in the Bahamas and send a thug down on two occasions to communicate their displeasure.

Now, the book is called Seizure because the procedure causes Ashley to have bizarre seizures. So, I figured that the procedure would be done relatively early on in the story, and that the story would focus on that more. But that's not what happens. Ashley doesn't have the procedure done until almost the end of the book, and very little time is devoted to actually dealing with the complications. The ending, by the way, is quite bizarre.

So anyway, the book was still pretty interesting, but it had too much clutter and too many side plots for my taste. Some side plots are fine; they make a book more interesting. And it wasn't that these subplots weren't interesting or even that they were hard to follow; it's just that there were too many.

Movie Review--Flight Plan

Another enjoyable movie. Jodie Foster is great in the role of Kyle Pratt, a recently widowed mother whose husband was killed in an accident. Kyle is traveling from Berlin to New York with her 6-year-old daughter when the unthinkable happens and her daughter disappears. She searches the plane (which is much bigger and more impressive than any plane on which I've flown) to no avail. She enlists the help of the flight crew. The only problem is that there's no record of her daughter ever being on board. None of the flight crew or passengers remember whether or not a little girl was ever with Kyle. They believe that maybe her recent loss has caused her to snap and imagine her daughter was with her. Kyle understandably gets more and more upset as more time passes and her daughter remains missing, but this only makes her look more unbalanced. She is on her own in trying to find her daughter.

The movie was a little slow to get started, but after that it was suspenseful and entertaining. In general, I like Jodie Foster; if you like her, you'll probably like this. One did have to suspend disbelief at times. I never thought anyone could be that hard to find on a plane, even though it was a much bigger plane than any I've flown on. I did enjoy it, however.

Movie Review--Just Like Heaven

I loved this movie. I really like Reese Witherspoon in pretty much anything she is in, and I like most romantic comedies. This romantic comedy was rather unique in that one member of the couple wasn't quite physically present.

Reese Witherspoon plays a doctor, Elizabeth, who is totally wrapped up in her work, to the exclusion of any kind of personal life. One night after an especially long shift, Elizabeth is driving to her sister's and gets in an accident.

David (Mark Ruffalo) is a widower who is still grieving the loss of his wife. He rents a furnished apartment in San Francisco largely based on the fact that he likes the couch. He then proceeds to veg out and make a mess of the place.

He then discovers he has a roommate, a bossy young woman who insists that he's in her apartment and is highly indignant about the mess he is making, especially his failure to use a coaster. At first he assumes that there is a misunderstanding, but then he realizes that his roommate can pass through solid objects. She also has a tendency to appear and disappear at will. David then believes she must be a ghost and tries to help her pass over to the other side. He checks out an occult bookstore and even has a priest do an exorcism, but nothing works.

Elizabeth realizes that her ability to pass through solid objects is rather odd, but still believes that she is alive somehow. Unfortunately, she cannot remember who she was before; at first she cannot even remember her name. So she enlists David's help to figure out who she was and what happened to her. They fall in love, but realize that they may never really be able to be together and that time is running out.

The movie is sweet and touching, as well as funny. Ruffalo and Witherspoon are great together. I also thought Jon Heder was hilarious as Darryl, a psychic and medium who works in a occult bookstore. I would definitely consider it a "chick flick" (the best kind of movie in my opinion). I highly recommend it.

Book Review--The Stupidest Angel, by Christopher Moore

Okay, it's not exactly the right season for this. I seem to have a habit of reading Christmas books out of season. But this isn't exactly a typical Christmas book anyway.

The story takes place in the small town of Pine Cove, California. There a seven-year-old boy, Josh, is distraught because he thinks he saw a woman kill Santa Claus. He prays that Santa will come back from the dead for Christmas.

In reality, Lena Marquez had just killed her hated ex-husband, who had been wearing a Santa suit. Josh doesn't know that, of course, so his one wish for Christmas is for Santa to come back to life.

Raziel is an archangel who has come to Earth to grant a Christmas wish for a small child. Raziel isn't too bright, however, and in attempting to bring "Santa" back to life, he casts too wide of a net. Long-dead residents of Pine Cove come back as zombies to terrorize a Christmas party.

The characters in this book are great. My favorite is Molly, a schizophrenic who went off her meds in order to be able to pay for a Christmas present for her husband. She's just such a colorful character.

This is the first book I have read by Christopher Moore, and it was a lot of fun. Apparently some of the characters, including Molly, have appeared in some of his other books. I will have to check those out.

Random Thought Number 11: Swimming Cats

Last night I had the strangest dream. In the dream, my cats were swimming in the pool in my apartment complex and just having a great time. I have had variations of this dream before, and I'm always amazed. "I didn't think cats could just automatically swim the way dogs do, but I guess they can," I always say to whomever is with me. This time, I was worried about the cats being in the pool, though I thought it was pretty amazing that they could swim, since cats aren't exactly allowed in my apartment complex swimming pool. It was hard to keep them out though, because somehow they kept escaping because they wanted to swim so much.

I looked this up in The Everything Dreams Book by Trish and Rob MacGregor. This is a pretty interesting book. Though it discusses the importance of determining what different dreams and dream symbols might mean to the reader personally, it does have some interpretations of common dream symbols. Anyway, not surprisingly, it doesn't have "swimming cats" so I looked up cats and swimming separately. Cats can be a postive or negative symbol, depending on the dreamer's association with cats and the other things happening in the dream. I love cats and it didn't seem like a bad-luck kind of dream. So, I don't think the cats should be interpreted in a negative light in this dream. (Cats can mean prosperity or represent independence, the feminine, or sexual prowess, according to this book). However, I did have mixed feelings: amazement that they could swim, and worry because they weren't supposed to be in that pool and I couldn't seem to keep them out of it.

A dream about swimming, on the other hand, "suggests the dreamer is immersed in an exploration of emotional matters or the unconscious. " (p. 270). This is interesting to me since I often have dreams about swimming with no cats involved, since I love to swim. However, I am not sure how to tie these two elements together. I don't think it was trying to tell me that my cats are deep in thought about emotional matters or the unconscious, for example. Does anyone out there in cyberland who is better at dream interpretation than I have any thoughts about this?

Movie Review--March of the Penguins

This movie wasn't what I was expecting. I guess I was expecting something more along the lines of Ice Age or something like that. I did enjoy March of the Penguins, however. It's a documentary, narrated by Morgan Freeman, about the lives of penguins. This may sound rather dry, but it was really interesting. If there really is such a thing as reincarnation (which I do believe in), I definitely don't want to come back as a penguin.

The movie starts with the penguins' march (they walk or slide on their stomachs) of some 70 miles. They do this to spawn. They have to get to a place where the ice is really thick and won't melt until summer, so their offspring don't fall through. When they get to the spawning place, they engage in a sort of "singles" ritual. It's unknown exactly what they are looking for, but they are looking (interesting, since they all look exactly the same). They only have one mate, but I think this only lasts for a season. The females lay the eggs (one egg apiece). Once they do, they have to pass it off to the male right away, and he protects the egg from the cold via a flap in the skin. But they have to be really careful in passing it off, because if the egg is exposed for any length of time, it will freeze and the chick will die. Then the females, having lost a third of their body weight from producing and laying the egg, have to eat, which requires trekking back to where they came from and diving into the ice-cold water to get food. They stuff themselves with food, enough so that they can regurgitate some later and feed their offspring, and make the trek back again. Once they come back, the chicks have hatched, and they take care of the offspring while the males, having lost half of their body weight, go to eat. Some of the chicks freeze to death, and the mothers grieve, sometimes so much that they try to steal another penguin's offspring, though the other penguins stop them from doing so. They have a strong bond even though they haven't been together that long. But once it's time to leave the spawning place, and the babies can care for themselves, the parents and offspring probably will never see each other again.

Anyway, I knew absolutely nothing about penguins before seeing this, and I found it all really interesting. Looks like a really miserable life, though. I guess it's not like they know of any other way to live, though.

Book Review--Twilight Children, by Torey Hayden

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, Torey Hayden is one of my favorite authors. Twilight's Children is her latest book, just out this year. Most of her books are about her experiences in the classroom, teaching emotionally disturbed children. This book is about her experiences working in the psychiatric ward of a children's hospital. The focus is on three people with whom she worked.

Cassandra was nine years old. At age five, she was abducted by her father. He kept her for two years. Finally Cassandra was found three states away, alone, starving, filthy, and forgaing for food in garbage cans. When she finally returned to her mother, she didn't speak, and even when she began speaking again, she refused to talk about anything that had happened during the time she had been abducted. She had post-traumatic stress disorder and had been sexually abused.

Drake was a happy, intelligent four-year-old. Yet he never spoke, except to his mother. His extremely overbearing grandfather brought him to Torey, knowing that her specialty was elective mutism, and expected her to get him to speak immediately. Was there something physically wrong with Drake, or had he suffered some horrible trauma that had caused him to stop speaking? The truth was actually quite shocking.

Gerda was an elderly woman in a rehabilitation unit close to the children's hospital. A stroke had robbed her of most of her speech. Torey usually only worked with children, but she agreed to see Gerda as a favor to a friend. She ends up learning interesting details about Gerda's past, though Gerda had a tendency to speak in monologues rather than actually being able to converse. The attitude of some of the people who worked with the elderly came as something of an unpleasant shock to Torey.

I always like Torey Hayden's books, but this one, though still good, wasn't necessarily one of my favorites. The three cases, though interesting, were disconnected, and there wasn't as much of a unified story as with her stories about teaching, and her other book about working as a therapist, Murphy's Boy . I wasn't even quite sure why she included Gerda's case, since it was so different from any of her other cases and though it was rather interesting (and sad), there didn't seem to me to be that much to say about it. I did feel bad for Gerda though; she had no family that really cared, and her cats were put to sleep since she couldn't take care of them anymore. That made me mad. She had a lot of cats and it would have been hard to find homes for them all, but it still made me mad; it was just so cold, getting rid of her loved ones.

Anyway, not quite as good as her other books, but still really enjoyable and thought-provoking.

Movie Review--Must Love Dogs

This one got so-so reviews, but I enjoyed it. It's about Sarah (Diane Lane), a preschool teacher, who is trying to move on with her life after a divorce. Well-meaning friends and family try to set her up at every turn. Her sister even puts her profile on perfectmatch.com, saying that Sarah's perfect match "must love dogs" even though Sarah doesn't own a dog and actually borrows one to meet a new man, Jake (John Cusack) at the dog park. Jake's dog was also borrowed, as it turns out. Jake really likes her, but she is less impressed by him. She is more enamored of Bob (Dermot Mulroney), the father of one of her preschool students, who is in the process of getting divorced and a bit of a womanizer. But when they get together, she is quickly disillusioned, and realizes she went for the wrong guy. So she is really happy when she runs into Jake, until she realizes that he is accompanied by another woman. So will Sarah and Jake finally get together? Oh, the suspense!

The movie isn't terribly original; it's a fairly standard romantic comedy, with the usual misunderstandings that get in the way of people getting together. However, it's funny and charming. Anyone who likes romantic comedies will probably like this.

Random Thought #10: Cats on a Leash

I am a cat person. I like cats better than dogs. Cats don't bark, they don't slobber all over you, and they don't have bad breath. Also, I'm scared of big dogs. These are just some of the advantages of cats as opposed to dogs.

It's very rare that I will admit to any advantages that dogs may have over cats. I will grudging admit to one, though.

The vet (see Random Thought #9) thought my cats were doing pretty well. The only thing is that they are a little bit overweight. So, I want to try to exercise them more. This would be easier if I could take them for a walk, like you can with a dog. I have heard that cats can be leash trained, but I am not sure I can do this with my cats--I wonder if you have to start when they are really young? I don't want to just drag them behind me. Also, I think they'd need harnesses, because they've always wiggled out of any collar I put on them, and I sure wouldn't want them to escape. I have been playing with them, but I am rather lazy. I do like to go for walks, though, so if I could just take them with me, it would be easier. It occurs to me that I have never seen anyone take a cat for a walk, whether or not they can be leash trained.

So, one advantage of dogs over cats--dogs like to go for walks. Personally, though, I think that's it. Hopefully I won't get hate mail over this :-). It's just a personal preference; I know that dog people love their dogs just as much as I love my cats. Pets are good, no matter what your preference.

Movie Review--The 40-Year-Old Virgin

Another fun movie. Steve Carell plays a man (Andy) who is still hasn't had his first sexual experience at age 40 (hence the title). His friends at work try to "help" him, which results in, for starters, an excruciating (and incomplete) chest-waxing experience, and an excursion to a bar, where Andy leaves with a woman who vomits on him before they can get down to business. After that, Andy wasn't really in the mood.

Andy meets a nice woman whom he wants to get to know better (played by Catherine Keener). For her first visit to his apartment, his friends convince him she cannot see it as it is, complete with a framed Asia poster and a very complete collection of action figures. They remove anything which might be regarded as "adolescent", after which the apartment is completely empty. Andy has to tell her he is having his carpet replaced. Then he has to deal with the complexities of condom usage, and his new girlfriend's hostile teenage daughter, who walks in at just the wrong moment.

The only thing I didn't like about this movie was that the emotionally stunted theme was taken a bit far. I mentioned the adolescent apartment. Also, Andy rode a bike to work every day because he'd never learned to drive a car. However, Andy is a genuinely nice and likeable guy, and the movie is genuinely funny.

Book Review--Murder of a Smart Cookie, by Denise Swanson

This is very light reading, but fun. It is the latest in a series of books about Skye Denison, a school psychologist and amateur sleuth. Skye's latest adventure occurs over summer vacation. Skye always gets another job during the summer for extra money, and this summer she is on job #3 when her boss from job #2 is found murdered.

Skye's normal summer job as a lifeguard hadn't worked out. The beach where she had worked had been closed for swimming due to an invasion of geese (apparently bird shit is very toxic). So she'd gotten a job in an antiques store, only to be fired when she told a customer that the vase she was trying to sell was worth far more than the store owner had offered to pay. Her third job, working for her uncle as the coordinator of the First Annual Route 66 Yard Sale. It's a huge event and made an even larger headache than it might otherwise be due to the difficulty of working for her uncle. But at least the pay is very good, enough for Skye to make a down payment on her cottage, which she has been renting for the past few years.

For a small town, Scumble River (the fictitious town which is the setting for all these books) seems to have an extremely high murder rate. This time the victim is Cookie Caldwell, Skye's former boss at the antique shop, and her body is found in Skye's family's booth at the yard sale. The sheriff thinks that Skye did it. Skye investigates on her own in an attempt to clear her name.

Anyway, I always really enjoy these books. I like books in a series; when I get to like a character I like to read more about them.

Vanishing Acts, by Jodi Picoult

Delia Hopkins has a great life. She has a wonderful daughter and a terrific fiance. She has a great career, helping police departments track down missing persons with her search and rescue bloodhound, Greta. But her life is shattered in an instant when her father is arrested for kidnapping her when she was only four.

Delia's father had told her that her mother was dead. Delia has no memory of her mother or of being Bethany Mathews, which was her name before she was kidnapped. She has no memory of visiting a Harlem crackhouse in the dead of night with her father, Andrew, to get new identities, those of a father and daughter killed in a car crash.

Andrew is extradited to Arizona, where they had lived before he kidnapped Delia. Delia's lawyer fiance, Eric, associates with an Arizona attorney and takes on the job of defending Andrew against the kidnapping charges. Fitz, a journalist and the best friend of both Eric and Delia since childhood, follows them all to Arizona, ostensibly to write a story, but really due to his deep and enduring feelings for Delia.

Delia meets her mother, Elise, for the first time since age four. She demands that her father tell her why he deprived her of her mother for all these years. When she learns the truth, she realizes that her idealized image of her mother never existed.

The book, as with all of Picoult's books, alternates between different points of view--Delia's, Eric's, Fitz's, Andrew's, and Elise's. Delia tries to cope with the fact that her whole life has been turned upside down. Andrew's defense takes its toll on Eric, an alcoholic who starts drinking again. Fitz tries to help Delia and has a harder and harder time dealing with his feelings for her. Andrew copes with life in prison as a 60-year-old first-time offender. Elise recalls the past--the baby she lost after Delia, her feelings that Delia's father could not love her as she loved him, and her downward spiral. With the alternating viewpoints, everyone tells their own story and you see how they might end up making choices that most of us would think were the wrong thing to do. Even if you still don't agree with the choices they made, you can see how they might have made them. The message here is that there are no moral absolutes.

Birthright, by Nora Roberts

This story begins in 1974. Three-month-old Jessica Cullen is out at the shopping mall with her big brother, Doug, 3, and her mother. They are waiting in line for Doug to see Santa Claus. But when it was his turn, Doug got scared, wriggled his way out of Santa's grasp, hit the ground, and wet his pants. His mother rushed forward to help, and when she turned back toward Jessica's stroller, it was empty.

Fast forward to 2003. Callie Dunbrook is an archaeologist. She is recruited to work on a dig in rural Maryland, where a worker at a construction site had unearthed a 5000-year-old human skull. The site had been slated for development, and many people are not happy (possibly murderously unhappy) about being out of work so that an archaeological dig can take place there instead. Furthermore, Callie has to work the site with her ex-husband. But Callie is completely shaken to the core when a strange woman approaches her, saying she believes Callie to be her long-lost daughter.

Callie doesn't believe her, but cannot rest until she checks out the woman's story. It turns out that Callie, who studies the past, has quite a lot to learn about her own past. However, someone very dangerous does not want her to learn the truth.

This book has a lot of intrigue. There is the mystery of Callie's past and a woman's missing daughter. The book is also part murder mystery and part romance. The archaelogical dig itself is more backdrop than central to the story, though the discussions about uncovering an ancient civilization are very interesting. Callie's profession as an archaeologist is a sort of metaphor; she works as obsessively to uncover the past in her personal life as she does in her professional one. All in all, it's a very interesting read.

Movie Review--Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

This movie was a lot of fun. I saw the 1971 version when it was on TV, and my second-grade teacher read the book to the class, but since both of these events occurred around 1978, I remember very little about either the book or the first movie. So I can't compare them with this latest movie version. I can say that Johnny Depp was very good as the eccentric Willy Wonka.

Most people probably know the basic premise of the story. Charlie is one of five children who gets a gold ticket in a chocolate bar. The prize is getting to visit Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Plus, one of the five kids will get another special prize.

Charlie is definitely the most needy of the five children. He lives in a tiny, rundown house with his parents and both sets of grandparents, and they eat cabbage soup every day. His dad has a job at the toothpaste factory, until his job is taken over by a machine. Charlie is also the only one of the kids who is not a brat. He manages to be sweet without being saccharine. The others are 1) a rich, extremely spoiled girl from England, whose father had his workers check candy bars by the boxload in search of a gold ticket, 2) an extremely overweight boy whose parents don't seem to feel it necessary to limit his chocolate intake, 3) a fiercely competitive little beauty queen from Atlanta who has been chewing the same piece of gum for months to try to set a record, and 4) an obnoxious little boy who watches TV and plays video games all the time.

The children, each with an adult guardian along, get a tour of the factory. But it isn't all pleasant for bratty, misbehaving children!

The humor is probably more for adults than kids. Also, the scene where Veruca (the spoiled rich girl) gets dragged away by squirrels would probably scare younger children. In general, though, it's a movie that appeals to both older kids and adults.

Random Thought #9: The Vet: An Essay in Three Voices

I didn't get the carriers out soon enough. Whenever I have to take the cats anywhere, I always take the carriers out early, usually a day in advance. The cats bolt when they first see them, but then they get over being suspicious, and it's easier to actually get them into the carriers when it's time to go. I forgot to set them out the night before, so I set them out at about 10 in the morning, when their appointment was at five. This was enough for Carmela to relax a little, but Moonie was still highly suspicious, enough so to hide not just under the bed, but up in a hole they've clawed in the foundation. I couldn't even see her. I had to take everything out from under the bed (I store things under there since I don't have all that much space), take off the mattress, and shake out the foundation until she kind of fell out. I felt like a monster since she was so scared, and my bedroom looks like a heroin addict ransacked it, searching desperately for a new stash.

Moonie: For some reason, my human doesn't seem to understand that when I hide under the bed, it means I don't want to go where she wants me to go. I knew, as always, that it was bad news when my human got out the carriers; two carriers, so I knew that meant both Carmela and I were going somewhere. Unless I could elude her. Carmela is way too trusting. She forgets about the carriers right away and plays right into our human's hands. So anyway, I thought I had the perfect hiding spot. Carmela and I have clawed holes into the foundation of the bed for just such a purpose. I couldn't believe that my human was able to even find me and then actually get to me. Now the bedroom looks like a tornado hit it. She has messed up my space.

Carmela: I always freak out when I see the pet carriers. Moonie tells me to stay away from them, and I do, at first. But I always forget, eventually. So our human puts me in a carrier and I have to wait forever while she tries to get Moonie into her carrier. It's not fair. Moonie is bad, so I have to suffer. But Moonie is so passive when we actually get to the vet. She just lets them do whatever they want without putting up a fight. Me, I won't let them weigh me without trying to wiggle out of their grasp. I try to keep them from giving me any shots or doing any tests, but then they give me drugs to make me sleepy. I go on hunger strikes if I have to stay over. I cannot believe that my human does not try to stop them from poking and prodding and drugging me. She is not a good mom. But I always forgive her, because I forget to stay mad at her. Moonie is a little better at holding a grudge.

Well, I would write more, but it's really late, and I still have to clean up the bedroom before I can go to sleep. Besides, vet day is rough on everyone.

Vector, by Robin Cook

Medical thrillers are among my favorites. I particularly liked Vector because it featured two characters, Laurie Montgomery and Jack Stapleton, that have been in some of Cook's other novels. Both are medical examiners that tend to go above and beyond the call of duty in investigating suspicious deaths. Some of their latest cases suggest biological warfare.

It begins when Jack conducts an autopsy on the body of a former rug merchant. He determines that the man died of anthrax. When he learns of the man's profession, he figures that the he might have contracted it through anthrax spores on some of the rugs he sold, since some were furs and hides imported from countries where the animal form of anthrax is a problem. So he figures the mystery is probably solved, but something doesn't quite feel right. Little does he know of the impending danger to thousands of people.

Yuri is a taxi driver who worked in a biotechnology lab in the USSR before the breakup of the Soviet Empire. He dislikes America and its government and particularly hates Jewish people. He gets involved with a skinhead militia called the People's Aryan Army, led by two men he considers friends, Curt and Steve. Curt and Steve don't necessarily trust people of Russian descent, but they befriend Yuri because of his anti-semitism, his hatred of the US government, and the fact that he has the knowledge to build a bioweapon of mass destruction. Yuri sets up a lab in his basement and begins growing anthrax and botulinum toxin.

On a personal level, Laurie dashes the hopes of two would-be suitors, Jack and Lou, a police detective, when she introduces them to her new boyfriend. Neither Lou nor Jack much care for Laurie's new flame, jealousy perhaps accounting for some of their dislike. However, it doesn't take long for Lou to uncover some very disturbing information about him.

Meanwhile, Jack gets another baffling case. It isn't a case that he is assigned to autopsy, but rather a case that a friend has asked him to look into. The friend's sister has just died, and he is convinced her husband killed her, though her doctors did not suspect foul play. Jack has to move fast and bend some rules to get some fluid and skin cells to test. He also discovers that part of the reason the doctors had not suspected foul play was that her husband had lied about some of her medical history. Initial lab results did not suggest anything out of the ordinary. Jack discusses the case with Laurie, who suggests botulism. Jack is astonished when lab tests confirm this.

The question is whether Laurie and Jack can figure out what is going on in time to prevent many more deaths.

This is a really interesting book, but pretty scary to think about, especially since much of what is said about bioweapons in this book is based in fact.

Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown

I read The Da Vinci Code about a year and a half ago and found it quite fascinating. Angels and Demons is a prequel to this; it is the first book featuring Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon.

The book begins with Robert receiving an early morning call. A physicist in a major Swiss reserach facility (CERN) has been murdered, and the center director wants Robert to analyze a symbol seared into the murdered man's chest. It is the word "Illuminati" written as an ambigram (the word looks the same both upside-down and rightside-up). The Illuminati were an ancient Italian brotherhood of learned men who objected to the teachings of the Catholic Church. Four of their members were brutally murdered by the church, and the others fled Italy. A new Illuminati emerged, one bent on revenge. And, despite all the academic evidence that the Illuminati no longer exists, it appears that they are exacting their revenge against the Catholic Church.

Whoever murdered the physicist also stole a vial of antimatter, a subtance identical to matter except that its particles' electrical charges are opposite to those found in matter. Antimatter is highly unstable, and a very small amount has a blast radius of nine city blocks. And it turns out that whoever stole it plans to blow up Vatican City. Furthermore, the Pope has recently died, and the four men who were the top choices to be the next Pope (the preferiti) were kidnapped. One will be killed each hour, until all are dead, and then Vatican City will be destroyed.

Robert teams up with Vittoria Vetra, the murdered physicist's adopted daughter and a physicist herself, and together they try to find the cardinals before it is too late. Meanwhile, members of the Swiss Guard try to find the canister of antimatter. In their search, Robert and Vittoria attempt to locate markers on an ancient path to the Illuminati lair.

I would have to say that I definitely learned a lot in reading both The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons. The Author's Note at the beginning of Angels and Demons states that the Illuminati actually did exist, and that the references to works of art, tombs, tunnels, and architecture in Rome, as well as their locations, is factual and that all of these things can still be seen today. Furthermore, it is very thought-provoking reading in terms of science and religion and how these can be intertwined (if they can be), ethics, and so on. For example, the murdered physicist, who was also a Catholic Priest, believed that he had scientifically proved that some of the occurances in Genesis were at least possible, but this was very upsetting to some religious people, who believed that trying to prove such things scientifically was actually demeaning to God. Definitely fascinating reading.

An Intimate Ghost, by Ellen Hart

This is one of a series of mysteries by Hart featuring Jane Lawless, a lesbian amateur sleuth and restaurant owner. I am always looking for good books that feature lesbians as main characters. They can be hard to come by ("good" being the operative word), which is why I particularly love the Jane Lawless series.

In this novel, Jane finds herself facing possible ruin careerwise. At a wedding she has catered, someone spikes the food with hallocenogenic mushrooms. As a result, the groom dives into an empty pool and has to be rushed to the emergency room, where he has surgery for a fractured skull. The bride, Lauren, seems to suffer some sort of emotional breakdown and stops speaking altogether.

Jane enlists the help of her friend Cordelia in clearing her name. Cordelia has some complications in her own life, however. Cordelia's sister, who lives in a distant state, drops by unexpectedly and disappears just as unexpectedly, leaving her 1 1/2 year-old daughter in Cordelia's care. (Cordelia is not the maternal type, by the way).

Jane figures out who must have been responsible for contaminating the food. She confronts this person, but it turns out that someone paid him to do it, and he has no idea why.

Several people might potentially want to hurt Alden, the groom's father. The previous spring, Alden, a high school teacher, had been a hero in a school shooting situation. A troubled teenaged boy held him and a classroom full of kids hostage. Alden managed to calm him down enough to let the kids go, but he was unable to stop the boy, Cullen, from shooting himself. A few days after Alden's son's wedding, a friend of Cullen's accuses Alden of sexually abusing him and Cullen. Cullen's father decides that this is what led to Cullen's suicide. Jane is left to wonder if this is true or if Cullen's friend might have some other reason for wanting to get Alden fired.

Everyone has secrets--Alden, his wife Mary, Lauren, the best man, whom many people think is in love with Lauren, and even Kenzie, the mysterious woman hired to help Alden and Mary take care of Lauren. Jane gets romantically involved with Kenzie, but even Jane wonders who this woman really is and whether or not she can be trusted.

This is a thoroughly engaging read. I read most of it in one sitting. Jane is a great character, so smart and independent, yet vulnerable and genuinely kind. Her friend Cordelia is so entertaining, an outrageous, opinionated theater type who hates getting up before noon. I am eagerly looking forward to the next Jane Lawless novel.

Book Review--The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

This is definitely one of the more original books I have ever read. It is told from the point of view of a 15-year-old autistic boy (the author used to work with autistic individuals). Christopher is very bright. He is a genius in math (he knows all his prime numbers up to 7057). He has a great memory and knows all of the countries of the world and their capitals. But like other autistic individuals, he cannot understand human emotions and cannot stand to be touched. He hates the color yellow and won't eat yellow food. The sight of a few yellow cars in a row on the street will ruin his whole day.

Christopher is trying to write a book for school. He wants it to be a murder mystery, so he writes about a neighbor's dog he found murdered. His teacher points out that murder mysteries are usually about people who are murdered, but Christopher says he has difficulty imagining things that didn't happen to him (also typical of people with autism) and that some dogs are more interesting and clever than some people (I'm a cat person, but I can see his point). Christopher canvasses the neighborhood, asking neighbors if they saw or heard anything unusual that night. This upsets his father quite a bit, disproportionately it seems, until more information is revealed. In the process of his investigation, Christopher learns quite a bit about his father and his deceased mother, things his father didn't want him to find out. This leads Christopher to go to London by himself (he lives in a small town in England). Traveling by himself is not an easy task for him. In the end, he is quite proud of himself for this and for solving the mystery of who killed the dog.

This is a really fun book to read. It is just so interesting to see how Christopher thinks. He says in the beginning that it will not be a funny book, since he doesn't understand jokes, but he is often unintentionally funny. The author's empathy and ability to tell a story in the first person from an autistic person's point of view is really amazing.

Book Review--The Story of My Life: An Afghan Girl on the Other Side of the Sky, by Farah Ahmedi with Tamim Ansary

This is an amazing book. It is the story of an Afghan girl, Farah, who overcame amazing hardships in her life. Born in Kabul in 1987 during the height of the war between the mujahideen and the Soviets, Farah nonetheless describes her early childhood as quite happy. She knew nothing about the war. Sure, rockets landed in distant neighborhoods and there was always the sound of distant gunfire, but everyone was used to that. She did not often leave the family compound on her own, and when she did, she didn't go far, just to relatives' houses if they lived close by, the bakery, or to her father's tailoring shop. She learned little about the city of Kabul itself.

When Farah was six, she started school. School was much less intense in Afghanistan; she started at 8 am and went until 10:30 am, and that included recess. They had no books, and not even enough benches for all the students (about 30 in a classroom). They just had a teacher and a chalkboard. Farah loved school because she learned about the world beyond her own family.
It was her love of school that led her to make a nearly fatal mistake. One morning she overslept, and in her rush to get to school, she took a shortcut and stepped on a landmine.

To get medical care, she had to go to Germany. A German organization came to Kabul every three months or so and took wounded Afghan children back to Germany for medical care. Her family wasn't permitted to come, though, so she had to go to a strange country alone at the age of 7. There one leg was amputated and she got a prosthetic leg. Her other leg was also injured, but it didn't have to be amputated. She did have to have surgery on it due to infection, though, and can no longer bend it at the knee. Her knee was removed, and her thighbone fused to her shinbone. Her injuries had also affected her digestive system, and she was unable to eat solid food for several months. Farah stayed in Germany for two years. She was well enough to go home after a year and a half, but she could not go home. The war in and around Kabul had intensified, and all flights were canceled. She was sent to a youth hostel to live with other children waiting to go home. There she got a sense of what it would be like to live in Germany, how free the women were and how modern the place was. She felt conflicted about returning to Afghanistan. Of course she missed her family terribly and wanted to see them, but she felt that life in Germany was much better.

At age nine, she returned to Afghanistan. The culture shock was hard. For starters, she wanted to wear her German clothes and had actually forgotten some Farsi, since no one spoke it to her in Germany. No one went to school much. When she had been in school before, it was sometimes closed due to a "bad rocket day"; now every day was like that. A few months after Farah had returned home, tragedy struck. Farah's sisters and father were killed when a rocket struck their family compound. Farah had been out shopping with her mother and brothers. It was only a few days later when the Taliban gained control over Kabul.

Farah notes that the Taliban had been "just another army" to them at first. When they gained control, they were just voices on the radio in the beginning, broadcasting their rules, since no one dared to leave their houses. One rule was that women weren't allowed in public without a chadari (what we call a burqa) and a male escort. Many didn't even own burqas anymore. Furthermore, the Taliban hated Farah's ethnic group, the Harzaras. Boys as young as 10 or 11 were being drafted for the Taliban army, but in the case of Farah's brothers, there was a real fear that they might be executed rather than drafted, due to their ethnicity. In the end, fearful for their sons, she and their Hazara neighbors sent their sons off together, to try and escape to Pakistan. They sent them all off together for protection, but they weren't even sure how to get to Pakistan or what the boys would do when they got there. Contact was also difficult. Kabul no longer had phone service, nor did the country have any real mail service anymore. Usually only hand-carried letters got through. Farah never saw or heard from her brothers again.

Several months later, Farah and her mother also escaped. They hadn't gone with her brothers for fear of slowing them down, with Farah's prosthetic leg and her mother's asthma. They managed to get into Pakistan despite difficulties in getting across the border. They stayed with her mother's cousin, but there really wasn't room. They tried to find a room on their own, but since there was no man with them and they had little money, it was difficult. They got evicted from one place and ended up in a refuge camp, where Farah's mother's asthma got worse. So Farah managed to find another place for them to stay, where they could get free room and board in exchange for doing housework for the family. It helped her mother's asthma, but Farah and her mother were treated more or less like slaves. Farah wasn't attending school, and there seemed to be little hope for getting out of their situation.

Then one day, they heard that 1000 Afghan refugees in Pakistan were going to be taken to America (through a private Christian organization called World Relief). Farah was overjoyed and determined to sign up. She had to convince her mother, though. Her mother was convinced that they would be sold into slavery--or worse. She had actually heard that old people in America were sent to the soap factory and made into soap! Farah convinced her that it was like Germany. There were so many other refugees that they had to fight their way to the front; there was no real line. On their third day of waiting, a man came out and said they were taking the wounded and disabled first, and he happened to see Farah. He asked what had happened to her, and she told him about stepping on the land mine as a child. Farah and her mother were allowed inside to apply to go to America.

They had gone through the entire long and arduous process and were set to go to America when September 11 happened. They were then told to forget it, that because of Osama Bin Laden, they might never be able to go to America. But several months later, the program was back on, and they were able to come here. They were placed in Chicago with an American family, because the organization had not been able to arrange housing for them yet. But this news was terrifying to Farah and her mother; they were convinced that their worst fears were coming true and they were going to be slaves. Even the Farsi translator could not convince them that things were going to be okay, that these were good people. It didn't help that the American family with whom they were placed did not speak Farsi. For example, when they showed Farah and her mother the bathroom and kitchen, they assumed the couple was showing them not so they could make themselves comfortable, but because they'd be expected to clean them. They would not eat any food they were offered, figuring that at best it broke the dietary rules of Islam and at worst might be laced with poison. The stress led to a severe asthma attack for Farah's mother. She was rushed to the hospital, where she had to stay for a week. Farah stayed with her and slept on a cot by her mother's bed every night.

Fortunately, World Relief had secured housing for them in that time. They were finally able to relax in their own apartment. Their first few months in America were spent securing refugee status, getting public aid, and so on. Farah started summer ESL classes, which exhausted her--four hours a day of having to concentrate really hard. A couple of volunteers came by to help them with their English, and Farah developed a close relationship with one, a woman named Alyce. Alyce also helped them get some things they needed, like American clothes. It was a relief not to stand out in their Afghan attire.

School has been difficult for Farah, though she has done well. She hadn't really gone to school since stepping on the land mine in the middle of second grade, so she didn't learn to read until coming to America, where she learned how to read and write in English. She basically skipped grades 2-8. Farah wants to go to college, though she is still deciding what she wants to study. She also hopes to see Afghanistan again to help people over there. She considers herself both Afghan and American. Her mother has had a harder time adjusting, but she has been doing better, too. She is taking an English class and socializing with some other Afghan women in her neighborhood. Finally, her mother has told Farah she is glad that Farah brought her to America.

One thing that made me sad is that Farah mentioned that she has no American friends her own age. Most of her classes are non-ESL classes now, but the other kids, though friendly enough, haven't really reached out to form friendships. She says she understands it is hard for the American kids to reach out, but it's harder for refugee kids, who are often ashamed of their poverty and relatively poor English skills and just generally being out of place. She wishes more American kids would take the first step in starting friendships. Maybe things will be better for her in college, where people are more open about making new friends.

This book was so inspiring to read. It was certainly one of the most interesting books I have read in awhile, since her experiences are obviously so different from mine, and my knowledge of Afghanistan was (and still is) quite limited. And Farah and her mother have overcome so much. It puts my relatively mundane concerns into perspective, that's for sure. It's something I think everyone should read, both for the learning experience and the inspirational message.