![]() The story of Joan has been told many times over the past six centuries, and it will continue to be told for many centuries more. Long before she arrived at court, Joan had embarked on a prolonged visionary experience that would end only at her death…. Joan’s attention was elsewhere, already beyond the chateau, galloping ahead of her. If she felt any awe in entering the castle of a king, she showed none to her companions… ![]() If Joan was daunted by her arrival in a world so unlike her own, where wealth had the power to banish the squalor of peasant life, she betrayed no discomfort. It was early March of 1429 when Joan, a 17-year-old girl from rural Domremy, arrived in the city of Chinon to tell the Dauphin - Charles VII, the uncrowned king of France - that she had been sent from God to lead his soldiers. ![]()
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![]() ![]() People line up for the shots, like they were concert tickets. In just days, hundreds of thousands of vaccinations are shipped all over the world and America. First, they didn’t test for side effects properly and second, they used a live virus. To try to speed things up the virologists make two mistakes. Pressure to get results had come from the highest office in all the land. The virus all started in the Center for Disease Control, where virologists were relieved to finally have one effective vaccination against the resilient swine flu. This influenza pandemic of 2010, while not nearly as bad as the one that was raging back in 1918 still gets citizens all over the world close to panic. Close to eighty thousand cases have been confirmed in clinics and hospitals all over the United States as well as the rest of the world, the World Health Organization reports. ![]() Estimates suggest that nearly three thousand people across the nation, and fifteen thousand around the world have died of Swine Flu (H1N1 virus). “Zombie Fallout” is the first novel in the “Zombie Fallout” series, which was released in the year 2010. The series is written from the Talbot family’s perspective, with Michael’s being the main voice to be heard from. The series began publication in the year 2010, when “Zombie Fallout” was released. Author Mark Tufo pens the “Zombie Fallout” series of zombie apocalypse and horror novels. ![]() ![]() ![]() The mystery has several red herrings and clues. I do like some of the supporting characters, but this is the kinda book where you really grow attached to the core characters and like to focus on them. Her characters are memorable, especially Grannie, Winona Mae, and Sheriff Colton. ![]() Her new love interest, though not much has happened, is the sheriff. And to make matters worse, the one person seen arguing with the groom before he's murdered is Winona Mae's ex-boyfriend, Hank. This time, it's someone at the wedding they're holding for the town. They're beginning to turn the family business around, but another murder happens on their property. In Pulp Friction, Winona Mae, our mid-20s heroine, runs an apple orchard and cider shop with her grandma in Virginia. Lindsey delivers a great story in the follow-up book, and today I'm sharing my thoughts on it. When this one became available via NetGalley, I requested it because I enjoyed the characters and wanted to revisit them. I've read a few other books by this author (published under pseudonyms) as well as the first in this series. Pulp Friction is the second book in the Cider Shop Mystery series written by Julie Anne Lindsey. ![]() 6/6/2023 0 Comments Second Place by Rachel Cusk![]() ![]() ![]() But he brings with him a younger, pretty companion Brett, and so too arrives Justine and Kurt, M’s daughter and her boyfriend, which overwhelms M’s fantasy of some private intimacy with the painter.Ĭusk loves to make metaphors out of a space’s vastness, where a landscape illuminates the drama of the narrator’s life: an unending sky that makes miniatures of airplanes, an ocean that drops its contents off at the horizon. To M, both the marsh and L’s landscapes hold “the quality of something remembered, that shares and is inextricable from the moment of being.” When he arrives during a global quarantine (making this one of our first COVID novels), M hopes that he will see it the way she does and capture the truth it stows. So she invites L to stay with her and her husband Tony at a second cottage on the land. It reminds the narrator, M, of a famous painter’s works, so much so that she imagines her very viewing of it as “half-creations”, paintings of his, created by her. ![]() ![]() Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Second Place, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is set by a marsh. Second Place by Rachel Cusk Farrar, Straus and Giroux ![]() 6/6/2023 0 Comments Frank dostoevsky![]() ![]() Written in a conversational style that combines literary analysis and cultural history, Lectures on Dostoevsky places the novels and their key characters and scenes in a rich context. Presented here for the first time, these illuminating lectures begin with an introduction to Dostoevsky's life and literary influences and go on to explore the breadth of his career-from Poor Folk, The Double, and The House of the Dead to Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. His never-before-published Stanford lectures on the Russian novelist's major works provide an unparalleled and accessible introduction to some of literature's greatest masterpieces. ![]() ![]() Joseph Frank (1918–2013) was perhaps the most important Dostoevsky biographer, scholar, and critic of his time. From the author of the definitive biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, never-before-published lectures that provide an accessible introduction to the Russian writer's major works ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. ![]() A breathtaking exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century. ![]() 6/5/2023 0 Comments Jagged kristen ashley online![]() ![]() “I’ve called him four times and, as you know, this breaks my golden rule of one call only. ![]() “And he doesn’t come back for seconds? He doesn’t ask me out? He doesn’t do anything?” she asked and kept ranting. Men, for obvious reasons, couldn’t fake it so I didn’t know why she felt the need to point this out and I didn’t ask. “Now, I know, I know, no one gave him that,” Sandrine informed me. I had to make a sandwich and get on the road so I didn’t miss class. ![]() I had a freak out about the possibility that Knight had roughed up my landlord and sent me an extortionately expensive cell phone to recommence and figure out my next move. She had to work this out and I had to let her even though I didn’t have time. “I gave him my best moves and four orgasms!” she shouted and I winced. ![]() I powered through the knowledge that Knight was Nick’s brother and reminded her, “Sandrine, this guy has jerk written all over him.” Player zone I get, it could take two days. “His brother came back, was a total, freaking asshole to both of us, and I took that, I cleaned and after that I gave him all my good moves which means he got off twice plus twice more on Sunday. Something she hadn’t yet shared in her two days of bitching about Nick Sebring. Then told me something that made my breath catch. “I helped him clean up for… like, three hours, in, like, the wee morning hours,” she reminded me of something she’d already shared several times. I pulled in a breath, tried to shake off what was happening all around me, who I figured was responsible for it and what that might mean and started, “Honey –” ![]() 6/5/2023 0 Comments Magpie murders book review![]() ![]() From the beginning of the book we are told that her decision to read this manuscript essentially changes her life. Susan takes it home to read it over the weekend – only she is frustrated to discover that the last chapter is missing from the manuscript. It is the ninth novel in his best-selling Atticus Pünd series of historical mysteries. They have just received the latest novel from their most popular author, Alan Conway. The current day story features Susan Ryeland, the editor of a small London publishing house called Cloverleaf Press. ![]() “ Magpie Murders” is a book within a book that bibliophiles, and lovers of Dame Agatha will enjoy. Anthony Horowitz delivers just such a book in “ Magpie Murders” which is an homage to the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie. It has been a while since I’ve read what I would consider to be a ‘traditional’ mystery. “Masterful, clever, and relentlessly suspenseful, Magpie Murders is a deviously dark take on vintage English crime fiction in which the reader becomes the detective.” ![]() 6/5/2023 0 Comments Chinese cinderella book![]() ![]() ![]() Although Adeline wins prizes at school, they are not enough to compensate for what she really yearns for - the love and understanding of her family. Adeline and her siblings are subjected to the disdain of her stepmother, while her stepbrother and stepsister are spoiled with gifts and attention. ![]() In her own courageous voice, Adeline Yen Mah returns to her roots to tell the story of her painful childhood and her ultimate triumph in the face of despair.Īdeline's affluent, powerful family considers her bad luck after her mother dies giving birth to her, and life does not get any easier when her father remarries. From the author of critically acclaimed and bestselling memoir Falling Leaves, this is a poignant and moving true account of her childhood, growing up as an unloved daughter in 1940s China.Ī Chinese proverb says, Falling leaves return to their roots. ![]() ![]() ![]() When Eric begins courting Annie through letters, they embark on a reckless, secret romance-a forbidden fantasy that neither imagines could ever be real…until early parole for Eric changes everything, and forces them both to face a past they can’t forget, and a desire they can’t deny.Ĭara McKenna takes us back to the Town of Darren, Michigan, but instead of the psychiatric ward of Larkhaven, we are going into the dangerous corridors of Cousins Correctional Facility. But meeting Annie makes him want to know more. In fact, he’d do it again if that’s what it took to keep his family safe. ![]() But when she steps into her new role as outreach librarian for Cousins Correctional Facility, no amount of good sense can keep her mind-or eyes-off inmate Eric Collier.Įric doesn’t claim to be innocent of the crime that landed him in prison. Annie Goodhouse doesn’t need to be warned about bad boys good sense and an abusive ex have given her plenty of reasons to play it safe. ![]() |