Quick and Dirty Mini-Reviews {7}

I know it's been quiet on the blog recently but I'm trying to get some motivation to cross post my mini-reviews from Instagram and write longer reviews for the books I have more to say about. I've got a few reviews and ideas in the wings so stay tuned if you're still here! I've been reading so many incredible books lately so here's a roundup of mini-reviews of the books I've been reading and loving lately!

DEAR MRS BIRD by AJ Pearce | A few weeks ago I read DEAR MRS BIRD because Hannah had read and loved. She definitely nailed it with a historical Bridget Jones vibe and I had such a great time reading this book. A woman with goals to be a Female War Correspondent accidentally finds herself instead being an assistant to a crotchety, set-in-her-archaic-views advice columnist. I loved this book! It was so fun to read, I loved the heroine Emmy and her ambitions and her relationship with her best friend. While there are many moments of humor, there also was a surprising level of emotional depth that I wasn’t expecting. War time does not come without its costs and how Emmy navigated her own choices and the advice she gave was fantastic to read about. READ THIS IF...you love historical fiction, WWII London, and females with Ambition.

Quick and Dirty Mini-Reviews {6}

Back for another edition of Quick and Dirty Mini-Reviews! I fell into a huge blogging slump with less than zero motivation so here's a few highlights of some of my favorite reads over the past few months...and longer...Enjoy!

The Opposite of Love is one of Hannah's all-time favorite books and I knew at one point I had to give it a try...and I was SO happy I did! I loved this book. There are so many quiet elements to this book that had me thinking about it long after I shut the final page. At it's core, it truly is the making of a family. I loved reading about Emily's journey to the family she's always wanted and felt like she'd been missing. I adored her relationship with her grandfather. I loved that she was imperfect and had flaws and struggled to figure out what she wanted in life. I loved that it was about family. This book was a slow delve in Emily's life and being in her head and living her story was a fantastic journey. It's one of those beautiful books that doesn't shout at you to listen, it sits back and lets you absorb it's message slowly and long after the final page is turned. I was thinking about this book and certain moments from it for days after reading it. If you're looking for a story about family that takes a roundabout way to get there but is beautiful in its quiet moments...this book is for you. 

Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost

"Floating there I held onto faith. Because you can't know who might cross your path or who will take your breath away. You can't know what friends might actually become sisters because they stayed by your side. You can't know when there'll be an unexpected detour that'll take you to the place where you were always meant to be."

-- Jennifer Baggett, Holly Corbett, Amanda Pressner, The Lost Girls

Genre: Non-Fiction Travel Memoir

Publisher: Harper

Pages: 542

Publication Date: May 11th, 2010

Source: Bought

Find on Goodreads

Previous Books in Series: Standalone

Goodreads Description

Jen, Holly, and Amanda are at a crossroads. They're feeling the pressure to hit certain milestones—scoring a big promotion, finding a soul mate, having 2.2 kids—before they reach their early thirties. When personal challenges force them to reevaluate their lives, they decide it's now or never to do something daring. Unable to gain perspective in fast-paced Manhattan, the three twentysomethings quit their coveted media jobs and leave behind their friends, boyfriends, and everything familiar to travel the globe. Dubbing themselves the Lost Girls, they embark on an epic yearlong search for inspiration and direction.

As they journey 60,000 miles across four continents and more than a dozen countries, Jen, Holly, and Amanda step far outside of their comfort zones, embracing every adventure and experience the world has to offer—shooting blowguns with Yagua elders in the Amazon, learning capoeira on the beaches of Brazil, volunteering with preteen girls at a school in rural Kenya, hiking with Hmong villagers in Vietnam, and driving through Australia in a psychedelic camper van. Along the way, the Lost Girls find not only themselves but also a lifelong friendship. Ultimately, theirs is a story of true sisterhood—a bond forged by sharing beds and backpacks, enduring exotic illnesses, fending off aggressive street vendors, trekking across rivers and over mountains, and standing by one another through heartaches, whirlwind romances, and everything in the world in between.

This candid and compelling memoir will speak to anyone who has ever felt the desire to spread her wings and discover the world with her best friends by her side.

The Friendship

The story follows Amanda, Holly, and Jen as they leave behind their grown-up lives and jet off into the unknown of travel. OBVIOUSLY this story rings close to home for me and after Hannah recommended it to me, I had to give it a try. The story is told in alternating chapters with each girl getting their turn to tell their story through their eyes. I loved this. We get an unbiased and basically objective look into their life abroad. I liked getting to know each girl's inner voice and what they valued and what they were looking for in this year of traveling. I found myself connecting with Holly the most as she truly looked for and saw the beauty in simplicity in the world around her. I loved that she talked about faith and feeling a higher power with her when she saw sunrises in beautiful places. Not that I didn't love the other girls as well but Amanda seemed to have the most in common with me and I really looked forward to her voice and narration.

Overall, the three girls' personalities complemented each other perfectly. It is a theme throughout the book that the trip would never have worked out as it did had they not all been there. They balanced each other, they challenged each other, they were there for each other. I love this feeling of female camaraderie and it reeeeeeally made me wish I could kidnap two friends and make them travel with me for a year. YOLO!

The Adventures

The chronicles of their adventures (and misadventures) were amazing. What I loved, personally, was that they started off in South America (where I'm going or by the time this post goes live have been) and then Kenya where I've been. I felt a connection to these places already and reading about other peoples' experiences there made me fall more in love with the designations. I was yearning for my little tent in Africa and actually wishing I was back to being dirty and taking cold showers out in the bush. Le sigh. Who knew? While I would have loved more stories about their hangups and things that went wrong (because duh, it always happens) I loved reading about the good things they saw and people they met. It was a pretty good mix of good and bad with the positive outweighing the negative.

The Clarity

I love reading about different cultures and seeing different places through their eyes made me ache with wanting to go to the places they went, especially Southeast Asia. Vietname, even though their experience was negative, has been a place I've been wanting to go for a while, and now I've officially added a yoga retreat in Bali to my bucket list. They did theirs in India, but I digress. The best part of this book for me was how open-minded they were in regards to other cultures and their differences. I find it easy for Americans to judge the primitive ways of some cultures without appreciated a different way of life and the way these girls just jumped in and 'went native' for the most part was extremely enlightening to read about. Anybody wanna take a year off with me?

The Pacing

Like I said above, I loved the beginning of this book but I found the pacing towards the end to be really dragged out. The episodes in Southeast Asia were interesting in regards to culture but I felt like that entire section and their time in Australia really slowed down. I wasn't as inspired while reading and I just wanted to see where they all ended up after their trip. The books is long, over 500 pages, and some editing in the ending sections could have really helped this book become a favorite.

The Travel Breaks

So...I'm being a little judge-y about this but the girls, Amanda in particular, took breaks to go back home while traveling and this just kind of rubbed me the wrong way. One..why? I didn't see any reason for them to be gone for 8 weeks only to go back to New York for two weeks. I feel like that would break up my good vibes and mojo while being away. It felt like cheating in a way. I know I'm being unsympathetic about this but I can't help how I feel. And Holly actually went home twice. She was the most concerned about money and um, if you're that concerned about money I don't see how spending an extra approximately $1200 on an international flight home to and from Asia doesn't seem like the wisest investment. She had to borrow money from one of the friends to fund her flight home and well...it just irritated me to blow money on a flight home when the point of traveling for that long, to me, is to really get away from it all. That's just me though.

General Admission
If you love travel memoirs, books about friendships, and have an incessant case of wanderlust...this book is for you.

He Loves Me Not

"Obviously there are one trillion things that could be worse about my life.
Not having a boyfriend at any given moment bothers me very little.
Not having ever had one bothers me only slightly more, only because I want to know that I'll get to fall in love at least once, for real."

--Katie Heaney, Never Have I Ever

Genre: Adult Non-Fiction, Memoir
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Pages: 272
Publication Date: January 14th, 2014
Source: eARC provided by publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review
Find on Goodreads

Goodreads Description

 "I've been single for my entire life. Not one boyfriend. Not one short-term dating situation. Not one person with whom I regularly hung out and kissed on the face."

So begins Katie Heaney's memoir of her years spent looking for love, but never quite finding it. By age 25, equipped with a college degree, a load of friends, and a happy family life, she still has never had a boyfriend ... and she's barely even been on a second date.

Throughout this laugh-out-loud funny book, you will meet Katie's loyal group of girlfriends, including flirtatious and outgoing Rylee, the wild child to Katie's shrinking violet, as well as a whole roster of Katie's ill-fated crushes. And you will get to know Katie herself -- a smart, modern heroine relaying truths about everything from the subtleties of a Facebook message exchange to the fact that "Everybody who works in a coffee shop is at least a little bit hot."

Funny, relatable, and inspiring, this is a memoir for anyone who has ever struggled to find love, but has also had a lot of fun in the process.

The Idea. Reading the description I thought that book karma was going to come to me...funny how karma works, eh? You get it when you least expect it and when you expect it, it stays far, far away. The idea that another mid-20s woman has never had a boyfriend in her life spoke to me because...well...that opening quote of the description is my life. So needless to say, I thought I would be able to relate to this completely and I was so excited about it. However, after the first 10% or so it went downhill for me. BUT the idea of the novel is great. I wish it would have affected me a bit more...see below...

The Voice. Katie has a very distinct voice. She can be humorous at times. But overall, I found her narration to be irritating. I wasn't enjoying reading it. Her constant self-deprecating attitude grated on my nerves. While she did make some very amusing observations about the hierarchy of the social classes known as middle school were spot on, the rest of the book was not insightful. I anticipated a book filled with anecdotes that boiled down to really poor luck and asshole men. What I got was a socially awkward young woman who consistently blamed others for not having a relationship. I was annoyed! I'm sorry! There were guys that were interested in her and she ran the other way. We all had celebrity crushes but the extent she talked about them made me almost uncomfortable to the point of wondering if the author needed a little (major) dose of reality. I think she was in love with the infatuation and the unknown of having a crush. I'm not an expert on relationships (obviously) but I felt like somebody needed to tell her that men are simple creatures. At one point in the book she didn't know if this guy liked her after going out several times over the course of a few weeks but he never kissed her or made a move. Um, newsflash: men are easy. If they like you, they're gonna kiss you. If they want to date you exclusively, nothing short of you telling them flat out NO will stop them. Men are competitive, they don't want to lose a girl they are interested in to somebody else. They will claim you. Wise up. You need some better advice or some new friends to tell you this.

The Pacing. While it was overall a quick read, I felt that at the exact 50% point the book needed to wrap up. I think the second half dragged on and elaborated on things that didn't need to be elaborated on. It was a 272 page book that got real old, real fast for me. It felt like a lot of repetition and I was hearing the same story over and over again.

The Intention. What was the point of this? Is Katie looking for love? Or looking for a best friend to live with for the rest of her life? I was very confused by the overall intention of the book. It didn't feel like the author wanted to find love as much as she wanted to be in an exclusive BFF relationship with her friend Rylee. The book talked about her misadventures (or lack thereof) in dating and then all of the sudden she's talking about Rylee and how much she means as a best friend and how Rylee is her soulmate...huh? The obsession with keeping her friend single and all to herself was very odd to me. I think the author is looking for more acceptance as a human being in general rather than finding a partner in life.

The Excuses. Uh, we GET IT, you're a feminist. Congrats? Being a feminist and having a boyfriend are not mutually exclusive. I got the vibe that she was setting an underlying tone that no man could handle her and her independent woman attitude. Maybe I'm reading too much into it but I really didn't want to read the word feminist again when it came out of nowhere and was completely not in context with the situation at hand. It's not like there were any situations where every guy that was interested in her turned her away because she was the f-word. It's not a swear word. Being a feminist basically means you think women should have the same rights as men, not that you have to verbally castrate them to be legitimate equals.

No. I know a lot of people enjoyed this book so my expectations were probably a bit too high. But the lack of direction of the book and overall theme confused me and left me irritated. Maybe you'll get more of a laugh I did but this book wasn't for me. However, if you'd like to know some seriously depressing-but-the-story-funny-now-years-late pseudo-dating experiences, I could give you an earful. 

The How-To of Breakups

"Women who have gone to great lengths 

to raise themselves above the ordinary level of their sex 

are likely to believe, for a while at any rate, 

that they will be loved the more ardently 

and faithfully for their pains."

--Meghan Laslocky, The Little Book of Heartbreak, originally said by Claire Tomalin

Genre: Adult Nonfiction, History

Publisher: Plume, 272 pages

Publication Date: December 31st, 2012
Source: Copy provided via author in exchange for an honest review

Goodreads

Goodreads Description

What's the best way to mend a broken heart? Forget ice cream, wine, or weepy movies. Award-winning journalist Meghan Laslocky advises: read through the pain. From divorce cases in ancient Rome to the art of crafting the perfect “I'm over you” mix CD, The Little Book of Heartbreak is a whirlwind tour through love's most crushing moments, including:
• How Ernest Hemingway cheated on his wife and then stole her job
• Painter Oscar Kokoschka's attempt to win back an ex by creating (and having liaisons with!) her life-size replica
• Morrissey's personal creed about how sex is useless
• What to watch, listen to, and read to forget an ex faster than you can say “rebound”

My Thoughts

For anyone who has been through a heartbreak, so mostly everyone, this book is a definite pick-me-up in that time.  The Little Book of Heartbreak reads almost like an anthology of the most infamous breakups throughout history. It's great. Laslocky goes back as far as the ancient Greeks and their somewhat crazy concoctions to make love all the way up to pop culture today as seen in music, movies and books. 

The book is divided up into sections that include history, culture, art and music, and film and literature. My personal favorites (go figure) were the anecdotal true stories of the horrific breakups that occurred throughout history. And these stories are all true! The heinousness of bad breakups is not something new to the 21st century, men have pretty much been actin' a fool for hundreds of years...bastards...But further than that, my favorite stories dealt with the women who took love into their own hands. Most notably to me, the two nuns who snuck in their lovers to the convent...no, seriously, this happened. It was during this time that only one daughter of every family could marry so the rest were sent off to take the veil. Clearly frustrated they did what they had to do in order to feel loved by someone other than the Almighty. Pretty intense.

My other favorites were the breakdown of songs to listen to depending on which part of the breakup you are going through. Brilliant! Oh my gosh, I dog eared all these pages in order to be prepared for the next heartache. So clever! And yes, if you were wondering, Adele is mentioned :)

Delving into literature, of course, was another great addition. Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and a personal favorite book of mine Never Let Me Go was also mentioned. I loved how the author discussed the implications of technological and medical advancement in regards to love. Where does love fit in with all the scientific mumbo jumbo of today's advancements? There also is a section dedicated to the science of the brain behind love and heartache. Again, so interesting!

The book concludes with a helpful guide to the reader of what to do when heartbreak finds you. Songs to listen to, activities to partake in, and a heavy suggestion to let yourself wallow...at least for a little bit. This was such a fun and quick read that left me with so many fun facts about heartbreak throughout time as well as what to do with future heartbreak. Definite read for anyone who is going through a breakup. I think it is a really great book to empower you in times of heartache. We all go through it, we all feel bad about ourselves and this book helps us realize we are all together in this at one time or another. Very clever and fun and most definitely well-researched and unique :)