38. Simply Perfect

By Mary Balough
Rated: 5 Stars
From Library

Claudia Martin, headmistress and owner of Miss Martin's School for Girls, had no use for the ton, and reserved a special disdain for dukes. To Claudia's great consternation, Joseph, the Marquess of Attingsborough, refuses to succumb to her icy disapproval. Instead, he thaws Claudia into accepting his offer for her and two of her recently graduated students to travel with him to London. That trip turns out to be just the beginning of his campaign to win Claudia's affections, but she is certain she can resist the infinitely rakish Joseph. A prim and proper spinster discovers love is never sensible when she engages in a spirited battle of wits and wills with a nobleman with charm to spare. With her signature exquisite sense of characterization and subtle wit, Balogh brings her sweetly sensual, thoroughly romantic Simply quartet to a truly triumphant conclusion.

37. Twisted Creek

By Jodi Thomas
Rated 4.5 Stars
From Jani

Fortune smiles on Allie Daniels and her elderly Nana in the form of an unexpected West Texas inheritance from a mysterious Uncle Jefferson Platt, of whom Allie doesn't recall any talk. Raised by her grandparents, Allie quit college to take care of frail Nana at her grandfather's death, and, at 26, has held a variety of dead-end jobs. She and Nana are enchanted by the West Texas property on Twisted Creek and have soon reopened its rundown bait shop–cum–general store and cafe to serve the Nesters, an eccentric bunch who live lakeside year-round. Half-Navajo undercover ATF agent Luke Morgan is one of them, and he's intent on catching the killer of Uncle Jefferson, who was his own granddad's best friend—and to put some drug traffickers out of business in the process. Morgan tries to resist his feelings for Allie, but Thomas sketches a slow, sweet surrender, keeping the tension building to a rewarding resolution in this unsentimental, homespun romance.

36. The Darcy Connection

By Elizabeth Aston
Rated 4.7 Stars
From: Jani

This was a delightful surprise because I am not over fond of knock off books but this one has all new characters, the daughters of Mr. Collins and Charlotte. As knock off books go (all right - pastiche's if one wants to be fancy) this is one of the better ones I have read.

Amazon Blurb: "..... follows the children of Elizabeth Bennet's friend Mrs. Collins, who married the uninspired vicar Collins, now an uninspired bishop. Their eldest, Charlotte, has grown into rare beauty; Charlotte's sister, and our heroine, is Eliza—Mrs. Darcy's goddaughter. Eliza has ill-advisedly acquired a tendresse for Anthony Diggory, the son of the local squire, which is passionately returned. Sent off to London as companion for Charlotte, however, Eliza opens her eyes both to the possibilities of the larger world and her own place there, thence lessening the desirability of a Yorkshire life and of Anthony. Assisting this process is the handsome but proud banker, Bartholomew Bruton, with whom Eliza first becomes annoyed and then enamored. If she can save Charlotte from a cad and fend off Anthony, among other complications, Eliza may just find happiness. More development of Charlotte and one or two fewer complications would have helped, and some ends are simply too tidy. But the results are still utterly charming, with all the verve, humor and Austenian turns of plot one expects from Aston."

35. Getting Stoned with Savages

By J. Maarten Troost
Rated 4.8 Stars
From Library

Amazon Blurb: Using a format similar to that of his previous work, The Sex Lives of Cannibals, Troost creates another comical and touching travel memoir. Troost and his wife, Sylvia, move from busy Washington, D.C., to Vanuatu, a nation made up of 83 islands in the South Pacific. As Sylvia works for a regional nonprofit, Troost immerses himself in the islands' culture, an odd mix of the islanders' thousand-year-old "kastoms" along with imperialist British and French influences. This really means that Troost gets to live in a nice house while he gets drunk on kava; dodges "a long inferno of magma and a cascade of lava bombs" at the "world's most accessible volcano"; and checks out the "calcified" leftovers from one of Vanuatu's not-so-ancient traditions, cannibalism. At the end of the book, the couple move to Fiji so that Sylvia will have state-of-the-art medical care when she gives birth to their first baby. While modern-day Fiji provides little fodder for Troost's comic sensibilities, the birth of his son enables him to share some deeper thoughts and decide it is "time to stop looking for paradise." A funny travelogue with a sentimental heart, Troost's latest work genuinely captures the search for paradise as well as the need for home.

34. How the Irish Saved Cililization

By Thomas Cahil
Rated 4 Stars
From Library

While I enjoyed this book I had to read it in small increments to keep from getting bored with it. I did enjoy the writing style but thought that the author spent way too much time beating around the bush and rehashing the reasons why the Roman Empire failed. I kept wanting to shout "Get On With It, Dude." That should have been another book instead of rolled up into this one. Below is the blurb from amazon and once again I seem to be in the minority as far as critical comments. Oh well......

Amazon.com

In this delightful and illuminating look into a crucial but little-known "hinge" of history, Thomas Cahill takes us to the "island of saints and scholars," the Ireland of St. Patrick and the Book of Kells. Here, far from the barbarian despoliation of the continent, monks and scribes laboriously, lovingly, even playfully preserved the West's written treasury. When stability returned in Europe, these Irish scholars were instrumental in spreading learning, becoming not only the conservators of civilization, but also the shapers of the medieval mind, putting their unique stamp on Western culture.

33. Gone With the Windsors

By Laurie Graham
Rated 3 Stars
From Library

This book is certainly not complimentary to the Duke and Dutchess of Windsor but then I don't think there was very much either nice or admirable about either one of them. A perfect example of what happens when fame and money are not accompanied by brains and character.

AMAZON BLURB: "The diary entries of shallow and oblivious Baltimore socialite Maybell Brumby comprise Graham's fourth novel, which explores the fictional lives of intimates involved in the 1936 abdication of King Edward VIII. Maybell, widowed by her older husband, leaves for London in 1932 to join her sister Violet and falls in with her school friend Bessie Wallis "Wally" Simpson, the married woman (twice, in fact) who has set her sights on the then Prince of Wales. Through Maybell's American patricianism, Graham (The Future Homemakers of America) skewers the tedious royal family and their aristocratic hangers-on. Maybell's self-absorption and dim-wittedness make her endearing at odd moments (as when she learns that her other sister, "Doopie," is deaf rather than mentally handicapped); her chatty tone is grating when the action—primarily Wally's plotting, conquest and royal assumption—slows. Graham depicts the abdication as a kind of bedroom farce and uses Maybell's ignorance to add ambiguity to the controversial relationship of the duke (as he is known after abdication) and Wally to the Nazi regime. As WWII becomes imminent, the leisured friends must make a run for it, and the partings are not all amicable. This light romp through sordid territory is sly, gossipy fun."

32. The Sex Lives of Cannibals

By J. Maarten Troost
Rated 5 Stars
From Library

At the age of twenty-six, Maarten Troost—who had been pushing the snooze button on the alarm clock of life by racking up useless graduate degrees and muddling through a series of temp jobs—decided to pack up his flip-flops and move to Tarawa, a remote South Pacific island in the Republic of Kiribati. He was restless and lacked direction, and the idea of dropping everything and moving to the ends of the earth was irresistibly romantic. He should have known better.

The books tells the hilarious story of what happens when Troost discovers that Tarawa is not the island paradise he dreamed of. Falling into one amusing misadventure after another, Troost struggles through relentless, stifling heat, a variety of deadly bacteria, polluted seas, toxic fish—all in a country where the only music to be heard for miles around is “La Macarena.” He and his stalwart girlfriend Sylvia spend the next two years battling incompetent government officials, alarmingly large critters, erratic electricity, and a paucity of food options (including the Great Beer Crisis); and contending with a bizarre cast of local characters, including “Half-Dead Fred” and the self-proclaimed Poet Laureate of Tarawa (a British drunkard who’s never written a poem in his life).

31. Without a Map

By Meredith Hall
Rated 4 Stars
From Library

This is a beautifully written memoir and I could not help my heart from aching for what the author had to go through and how bravely she overcame such a traumatic event in her life.

But I was appalled by the way she was treated by her family and the community. I was a teenager in the 1950's, a full decade after Meredith and back then, as it always has been, girls got pregnant before they were married. I know, I was one of them myself. But the kind of treatment that she experienced was totally unknown to me. Maybe it happened here and I just ever knew about it. But mostly young people who found themselves in this kind of fix were supported by their families and most were rushed into an early marriage with the participating father of their child.

In Meredith's case she was only 16 while the father of the child was a senior at Boston U! This was against the law even back in the 1950's. It's just hard for me to believe that people can act the way they did. Perhaps her family were cold and unfeeling but surely the community couldn't have been that unfeeling. I am thinking that the author's memory of what happened were formed by how a sixteen year old girl interpreted events at the time and that we may have gotten a highly melodramatic version of what really happened. There must have been some decent people where she lived.

In any event, this was a well written, poignant book that made me think and feel. Isn't that what a good book is supposed to do?

FROM BOOK JACKET: "Meredith Hall grew up bonded to her insular New Hampshire community, comforted by the hallmarks of belonging: perfect attendance in Sunday school, classmates who seemed more like cousins, teachers who held her up as a model student, a mother who loved her unconditionally. Then, at sixteen, she became pregnant, and all at once those who had held her close and kept her safe turned their backs." "The same day in 1965 that Meredith was expelled from school, her mother told her "You can't stay here." Her father and stepmother reluctantly offered Meredith a cold sanctuary until she gave birth to the child she gave up for adoption. Then she was banned from her father's home forever. For the next decade she wandered, lost to society and to herself. Slowly, Meredith began stitching together a life that encircled her silenced and invisible grief." "When she was twenty-one years old, Meredith's lost son found her. She learned that he has grown up in gritty poverty with an abusive father - in her own father's hometown. Their reunion was tender and turbulent, a renaissance. Meredith's parents never asked for her forgiveness, yet as they aged, she offered them her love. Without a Map charts an extraordinary path in which loss and betrayal evolve into compassion, and compassion into wisdom."