While We Were Watching Downton Abbey - Wendy Wax (Audio)

Somewhere along my reading journey, I've become a Wendy Wax fan.  I think maybe it started when she opened her pocketbook and bought several of her own books and donated them to the Adult Literacy League auction, and continued to support the cause for years in a row.  But then I discovered that in addition to being a generous soul, she writes really enjoyable books!  Opening one of her books is like getting back in touch with an old friend.  Wendy's books come with a few givens...strong women, challenges, friendship and laughter.

But...hmm.  This new book mentions something about Downton Abbey.  And I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I have never watched this show.  I've heard of it, sure, but if you've known me for long, you know I'm not a TV-watcher.  But I knew I would see Wendy at the UCF Book Festival and really wanted to read her latest novel first.  

Synopsis:  The Alexander is a historic apartment building in downtown Atlanta, kept running smoothly by suave, British concierge Edward who excels at proficiency and discretion.  To build a better sense of community, Edward decides to offer weekly screenings of the first two seasons of Downton Abbey in preparation for the launch of the 3rd.  He particularly has his eye on three women, who seem a little lost and need his help.

Samantha Davis married young to old money in an effort to find security for herself and her two younger siblings recently orphaned.  Over twenty years later, she is questioning if gratitude is enough to sustain a marriage.  Claire Walker has recently moved to the Alexander from the suburbs, intending to work full-time on writing her third novel after sending her only daughter off to college.  Except she has a bad case of writer's block.  And Brooke MacKenzie continues to battle her plastic surgeon ex-husband on behalf of their two little girls, while watching he and his new girlfriend (a Barbie clone) make a new life under her (un-enhanced) nose.  These women find kindred spirits in each other, and learn the meaning of true friendship, all while they were watching Downton Abbey.

My thoughts:  I was so pleased with this novel, and highly entertained. This was classic Wendy.  It did not matter in the least that I have never watched Downton Abbey (even though I know it is inevitable that I will one day).  This show is such a phenomenon that I pretty much knew the characters anyway, through friends, Entertainment Weekly, and such.  Really, the story is more about girlfriends having each other's backs, and I think that resounds with just about everyone.

I honestly enjoyed all the characters.  They were authentic and flawed, which is exactly how I like my friends.  I liked how each of the three had initial perceptions of each other that were slowly proven incorrect.  There is always one character that clicks with a reader more than the others, though, and mine was Claire.  I am not a writer and I'm not an empty-nester, but I still felt like I knew her best, plus she made me laugh.  

And I'm not talking about a chuckle.  I'm talking about a big Sandy laugh, from the belly and loud.  These ladies do a little partaking of alcohol a couple of times, and the results are freaking hilarious.  As they often are when friends get together.

If you love the humor and the heart that Wendy brings to her stories, you won't want to miss this one.

A few words about the audio production:  I was pretty excited to see that the narrator was Orlagh Cassidy.  I'd heard her in Emily Giffin's "Where We Belong" and S.J. Watson's "Before I Go To Sleep", and I knew she had a pleasing voice.  What I didn't realize is that she is also pretty adept at accents, and that was displayed beautifully here.  She is turning into a voice I can count on for a pitch-perfect delivery.

Audiobook length:  10 hours and 24 minutes (384 pages)

I'd like to thank Penguin audio for the digital downloadable audio file (which I finally figured out how to get to my iPod!  Woo hoo!).


4 out of 5 stars
    

New on the iPod

 Just when I think I'm going to possibly run out of new audios to tell you about, I am buried in an avalanche of them.  Between library deliveries and a shipment from Penguin Audio, I've got my job cut out for me in loading them all.  Here are a few recent additions:

 Cooked - Michael Pollan (received from Penguin Audio)

Description from Amazon:  Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen.  Here, he discovers the enduring power of four classical elements - fire, water, air and earth - to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink.  Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, Pollan learns how to grill with fire, cook with liquid, back bread, and ferment everything from cheese to beer.  

Narrated by:  Michael Pollan
13 hours and 25 minutes

Shadow of Night - Deborah Harkness (received from Penguin Audio a long time ago, but just got it back after loaning it out)

Description from Amazon:  Installment #2 of All Souls Trilogy.  Book One, "A Discovery of Witches", introduced Diana Bishop, Oxford scholar and reluctant witch, and the handsome geneticist and vampire Matthew Clairmont.  Together they found themselves at the center of a supernatural battle over an enchanted manuscript known as Ashmole 782.  Now Diana and Matthew are plunged into Elizabethan London, a world of spies, subterfuge and a coterie of Matthew's old friends.  Here, Diana must locate a witch to tutor in magic, Matthew is forced to confront a past he thought he had put to rest, and the mystery of Ashmole 782 deepens.

Narrated by:  Jennifer Ikeda (same as Book One)
24 hours and 30 minutes  

 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (downloaded digital copy from library)

I don't think I need to post a summary here do I?  Because I really want to re-read this before I see the movie (which releases this coming weekend) I will be listening to this one next.  I think the last time I read it was in high school.  The audio isn't long.  I can knock it out with a solid house cleaning and a couple of trips to school and back.

Narrated by:  Jake Gyllenhaal 
4 hours and 52 minutes

The War at Ellsmere - Erin Faith Hicks

I so thoroughly enjoyed the graphic novel "Friends With Boys" (particularly Hicks' illustrations) that I immediately hopped on my library website to mine it's shelves for anything else Hicks had published.  And I came up with "The War at Ellsmere".  I needed a little break from the bizarro world of Murakami, and this was the perfect thing.  It took about an hour to read.

So who likes boarding schools?  For some reason, we literary folk seem to be drawn to them.  Is it because we were raised on "A Separate Peace"?  Or we fell under the spell of Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go"?  Or is it just the creepiness of it?  Who knows.  But Hicks takes full advantage of all that the setting has to offer here.

Synopsis:  Juniper is a tough 13 year-old who has received an academic scholarship to attend prestigious Ellsmere Academy after attending (and loathing) public school.  She has high expectations.  

Only as anyone might guess, it isn't all it is cracked up to be.  Although the Academy excels in its curriculum standards, the entire school knows that Juniper is there on scholarship, automatically setting her apart from the other girls, who are wealthy.  Her roommate seems to be a bit strange, and Juniper makes an immediate enemy in one of the mean girls.  Juniper takes her full-on.

  

Oh and there is a legend of something scary and mysterious in the nearby forest.  

For anyone who has fought for their identity and their place in high school as the new girl, who has sought friendship, and battled the bullies, this story is sure to ring a few bells.

My thoughts:  Hicks seems to have a solid grasp on the essence of being a teenage girl and the struggle to fit in.  We saw this in "Friends With Boys" and we see it here.  Her characters are surprisingly developed in few words due to her expressive illustrations.  I have found that reading her books are really easy on the brain and are comforting, despite any conflict in them.  Juniper and her roommate are admirable but make mistakes, are a little quirky but dear.

As with "Friends With Boys", she threw in a random shot of supernatural, creating something mysterious in the Ellsmere forest.  These injections feel haphazard, but since this is the second time I've seen it, perhaps it is her little trademark.  I don't really mind it.

I'd recommend Hicks to anyone who enjoys a light graphic novel and remembers what it is like to be a teenager.  I sincerely look forward to more of her work!

4 out of 5 stars    

Sunday Salon: Barometric Pressure Blahs

 The theme for this week was RAIN...over 6 inches according to my gauge.  And when it wasn't pouring, then it was grey and yucky.  I'm a fan of blaming the barometric pressure on the blahs...I swear there is something to it.  All I wanted to do this week was sleep.  Which did not happen but I did get out of the yard work.

Mostly I picked away at my short-range to do list.  Get audios loaded on my iPod (a sometimes tedious task), get my passport updated and ready for our Poland trip this summer, bribe my daughter to purge her closet then pack it up and send it all to a cousin, raise hell with All-Clad.  (Small digression:  I sent back the insert to my All-Clad slow cooker BEFORE CHRISTMAS because the non-stick coating was flaking off.  Sometime in January I called to check on the progress of its replacement and was informed that it was on back order.  For SIX MONTHS.  This week I called them for the fourth time and raised so much hell that they agreed to send me an entire new one if I sent in the electrical portion.  They should be ashamed.  I shall never buy something from them again.)

So I made a few trips to the post office, which inspired my son to show me these pictures which I had to share.  

   

So the Rush concert last Sunday night was awesome.  It is amazing to me that three 60 year-old dudes can kick so much butt.  They played a lot of songs from their new album, but ended the night with some classic stuff that made us very happy, including an encore of "2112".

We watched a couple of really good movies this week.  We rented "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (I will soon be doing an ode to David Fincher, the world's most awesome director) and bought and watched "Django Unchained" (I should probably do an ode to Tarantino as well).  Both highly recommended. I cried like a baby with Benjamin Button, similar to the "Les Mis" waterworks display.  Figured you deserved that warning, just so you had tissues at the ready.

We've had a busy weekend so far, with a few hours at the animal shelter yesterday, my son's last volleyball game of the regular season, and dinner with friends last night.  Today I owe my daughter a trip to the mall (urgh) and maybe, if I have my way, some Ironman 3 action in the afternoon.  

So I didn't really set the world on fire with my reading this week.  I did finish "The Rage", an Irish crime thriller that was really gritty and satisfying, plus I finished "Fire in the Ashes" by Jonathan Kozol.  I started "White Horse" by Alex Adams as well as "A Place Called Wiregrass" by Michael Morris (a gift from Mr. Morris since he learned that I love St. George Island and some of this book takes place there).  I was just informed as I was writing this post that my digital request for the audio of "The Great Gatsby" is ready, so I will download that and hopefully get to it soon.  

Happy Sunday to everyone! 

Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food From My Frontier - Ree Drummond

I've been hearing about the Pioneer Women forever, you guys.  So many of you out there have reviewed her books and cookbooks, and I guess she has a cooking show on now.  I have been feeling all left out and stuff.  

Granted, I've heard she is all gooey about her Marlboro Man husband, her idyllic life on the farm, having his young 'uns, and blessings and all that.  Gooey usually gets an eyeroll out of me, but I'm willing to suspend my cynicism if she helps me make good food!

So Heather (Raging Bibliomania) decided I had gone long enough without Pioneer Woman in my life so she loaned me this cookbook as well as one of her books.  If I had been organized and reading in a spritely fashion, I would have posted back-to-back reviews of the two, but that didn't happen.  It didn't take me long to dig into this cookbook however.

This is not one of those cookbooks that have a recipe for every day of the year (There are a little over a hundred recipes ranging from breakfast, appetizers, soups, supper, sides, desserts and canning).    It is more of a visual treat, with bright, beautiful pictures of every dish, step-by-step through the preparation.  Amazing.  I've never seen that and I love it.  No way you can screw up.  Plus the recipes are simple but hearty, for hungry cowboys.  And she also includes pictures of her kids, the hubby, the animals and the farm.  It really is a warm, friendly cookbook, which I guess is Ree's persona.

I had some leftover grilled flank steak in my fridge, so I knew immediately that my tester recipe would be Steakhouse Pizza.  Yeah baby!  

1 Skirt steak or flank steak, 1 1/2 to 2 pounds
Salt and black pepper to taste
2 red onions, halved and thinly sliced
1 TBL olive oil, plus more for drizzling
4 TBL balsamic vinegar
2 cups good marinara sauce (store-bought is fine)
1 recipe Pizza Dough
12 ounces fresh mozzarella cheese, thinly sliced
Steak sauce
Shaved Parmesan cheese

1.  Preheat oven to 500 degrees and arrange the oven rack to the very bottom position.

2.  Season the steak with salt and pepper.  Truth be told, you could put this on a plate in front of some dudes and just call it dinner.  Men like meat.

3.  Grill both sides of the steak over medium heat until medium rare, just about 2 minutes per side.  You want the steak to be nice and pinkish red in the middle, so don't overdo it!

4.  Remove it from the heat and set it aside.

5.  In a large skillet over medium heat, saute the red onion slices in 1 TBL olive oil and 2 TBL balsamic vinegar until soft, about 10 minutes.

6.  Mix the marinara sauce with the remaining 2 TBL balsamic vinegar.

7.  Roll out the pizza dough into a large oval and place it on a baking sheet.  

8.  Spread the sauce mixture all over the surface of the crust.

9.  Arrange the onion slices all over the sauce.

10.  Lay the mozzarella slices over the onions, then place the pan in the oven on the lower rack.  Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, or until the crust is golden and the cheese is bubbly and hot.

11.  While the pizza is baking, slice the grilled steak very thin.

12.  Pull the pizza from the oven and immediately lay the steak slices over the top.

13.  Transfer the pizza to a cutting board.

14.  Then grab some steak sauce...

15.  And drizzle it all over the steak.

16.  Sprinkle with the Parmesan shavings, then serve it with a big, green salad.  You and whatever dude's sitting at the table with you will love every bite.
  

The picture shown here to the left is Ree's picture.  As soon as my pizza was sliced up, it was gone.  There was no time for pictures.  So here are some changes I made to the recipe, to fit my needs.  

No onions.  Kids won't eat them.

My flank steak wasn't warm off the grill like Ree's was, so once I put it over the top of the pizza, I popped it back in the oven for another five to 7 minutes.

Not only did I sprinkle Parmesan on the pizza, but also a little blue cheese and a Balsamic Vinegar glaze (you can buy it in a little bottle at the grocery store).  

I didn't include the recipe for pizza dough because it is the same as any pizza dough.  

This pizza was so good.  So, SO good.  My son grabbed the one piece that was left and declared it for his lunch the next day.  Apparently the kids were distracting him and stealing pieces of steak.

I'm going to work my way through this cookbook.  Not all the recipes are things my family would eat, and some look like they have more calories than I could afford on a school night.  But I like what I am seeing!

***********

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. You do not have to post on the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page. For more information, see the welcome post at Beth Fish Reads.


  

Orphan Train - Christina Baker Kline

I knew a little bit about orphan trains before this novel was selected for the May She Reads book club.  In the book "The Chaperone", one of the characters was actually an orphan on one of these trains...but before reading that book I had never heard of such a thing!

Running from some of the larger cities in the US like New York and Boston, from the years of 1853 to 1929, these trains would transport homeless and parentless children across the Midwest in search of foster homes.  The children would be lined up at each stop and interested families would select one and agree to care for the child and send them to school.  Unfortunately, there wasn't much follow up and often these children would end up in worse situations than they started.  After reading "The Chaperone", I had to do a little Googling (sign of a good book) and the faces of these little children who were hoping for a new life just broke my heart.  I was elated when I learned I would be reading more about this topic. 

 

Orphans delivered to Bowling Green with their chaperones

Synopsis:  Our modern day story introduces us to Molly Ayer, a Penobscot Indian and a 17 year-old girl in the foster care system.  She has had a rough life, and it hasn't gotten any easier with her foster care family, who seem to only want her around for the government allowance.  Molly is caught trying to steal a book (Jane Eyre) from a local library, and must serve community service hours as a punishment.  Through Molly's boyfriend, she finds a wealthy elderly lady named Vivian who needs help cleaning her attic, and Molly soon finds common ground with her.

As Molly helps Vivian sort through her possessions, she learns that Vivian was an Irish immigrant and orphaned in New York City in 1929 at the age of 9.  She is placed on an orphan train, eventually is chosen by a couple with ulterior motives, and with the stock market crash, things go from bad to worse.  Vivian begins to question if this is better than being homeless?  Molly hears the story of her journey...the deplorable conditions, the abuse, the unforgiving Minnesota winters, but also the kindness of strangers, the fierce determination to survive, and the endurance of friendship.  As Molly and Vivian grow closer, Molly begins to see a way that she can help her new mentor get answers that will put her mind at ease and vanquish some of the ghosts that have haunted her for decades.

My thoughts:  Overall, I loved this book and found it very easy to prioritize time to read it (in fact it took only days).  Often I struggle with a book that goes back and forth in time...I usually prefer one story line to another.  But I was equally interested in both.  Molly was obviously troubled and prickly, but I totally understood where she was coming from and for crying out loud, how can I not love a girl that wanted to steal Jane Eyre????  (She even tried to take the most tattered of the three copies.)  I could immediately see the good in her, and was warmed by the image of her growing close to this much older lady who had walked in her shoes.  I did think that this portion of the story was underdeveloped though, and fell into place a little too smoothly.  

The sections that talked about Vivian's history was absolutely riveting and was much more developed.  Oh Lord, the squalor and the mistreatment of this child...it sickened me.  But I equally was warmed by those that reached out to her and ultimately gave her a good life, and found Vivian's spirit to be inspiring and hopeful.  It seems like in every book I read, there has to be tragedy and death and sorrow, and there is plenty in this book, but I turned the last page with a light heart.  

As most of you know, I tend to stay away from long books, but this is one of those times when I think it could have used another hundred pages.  The history and the material is rich, and I was left wanting more.

4 out of 5 stars

 

New on the iPod

So that was kinda fun last week.  I posted a few audios that I had recently loaded on my iPod, and I was impulsively convinced to start listening to one of them (Fire in the Ashes by Jonathon Kozol).  

Here are few more that I recently added, and coincidentally, they are all part of a series or trilogy (shocking I know.) 

 The Twelve by Justin Cronin (received from my local library):

Description from Amazon (sort of):  Book Two of The Passage Trilogy continues with the world transformed by a governmental experiment gone horribly wrong.  Now the scope widens and the intensity deepens as the epic story surges forward.    

Angelopolis by Danielle Trussoni (received from Penguin Audio):

Description from Amazon:  Book Two of the Angelology Trilogy.  In the first installment, Angelology unfurled a brilliant tapestry of myth and biblical lore on our present-day world and plunged two star-crossed heroes  into an ancient battle against mankind's greatest enemy:  the fatally-attractive angel-human hybrids known as the Nephilim.  With Angelopolis, the conflict deepens into an inferno of danger and passion unbound. 

 The Drop by Michael Connelly (received from Kathy at Bermudaonion):

Description from Amazon:  Harry Bosch has been given three years before he must retire from the LAPD, and he wants cases more fiercely than ever.  In one morning he gets two.

Relentlessly pursuing both cases, he makes two chilling discoveries:  a killer operating unknown in the city for as many as three decades, and a political conspiracy that goes back into the dark history of the police department.  



Do you have opinions on any of these three?  Do I need to stop in my tracks and listen to any of them?