Day 77: To the Tower Born

I finished my first Goodwill book for my book review!

I read the book
To the Tower Born by Robin Maxwell. And you know what?? I *liked* it! It was fun, entertaining, and had the right dose of suspense in it. It is the story of the two princes who disappeared from the Tower of London in 1483, and speculates what might have happened to them.

According to Amazon reviews, several people felt that Ms. Maxwell could've done more research for this book. I'm not an expert on this time period in history by any means, so maybe that's why it didn't bother me. (Really, my only other forays into it are either from Shakespeare or The Other Boleyn Girl. While The Other Boleyn Girl seemed to be better researched, sometimes even painfully so, this account was just better reading.) I found the characters to be engaging, the storyline to be interesting--even if not totally plausible. The end left me hoping for a sequel; a pretty high compliment in my book.

4 out of 5 stars for enjoyability. If you come across it at Goodwill for 50 cents, definitely worth the money.

Still Day 75: "The Differently-Abled Economy"

YAY! New followers!!!!!! But none of you said what you wanted in return??? Thank you for making my whole day!

I was listening to NPR the other day and they were debating on what to call the current economic recession. To quote "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" on their January 31st show:

Pandemic, contagion, crisis, catastrophe, disaster, fiasco, I'm not a big crunch fan, it's not a scary enough word. But what are we gonna call this current trouble? Will children 40 years from now say, "Grandma, what did you do during the post-millenial cluster-bleep"? A good name should reflect at the depth of the crisis, and perhaps hint at it's cause, perhaps The Great National Binge and Purge, The Differently-abled Economy, and The United States and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Investment Return." We should call it, instead of the Great Depression, The Severe Depression and then the stimulus package can include Zoloft and Ben n' Jerrys--the Clinical Depression.

(These people are funny, I tell you.)

So, because of this Clincial Depression our country has going on, I'm going to start a new segment on my blog. It's called: The Goodwill Book Review.

Have you ever taken a good, long look at the bookshelves at a Goodwill, Deseret Industries, Salvation Army, or--really--any high class thrift store? It is a veritable smorgasbord of high end literature. You can find, amongst the stacks, self-help, comedy, romance, cookbook, and welding instruction. So what if that edition of What Color Is Your Parachute 1997 is a bit, oh, 12 years ago. A true principle is a true principle, my friends.

Now, I happen to be a book fiend who could easily plop down hundreds of dollars at my local bookstores. I like libraries. They're great. But libraries have a general "shush" policy that doesn't happen to mesh well with my children's "tornado siren" volume settings. So, whenever I go to the library, I find myself frantically pulling books off the shelf that aren't really good and I never read, all because I am carrying three wiggling, giggling children. By the time I get the books home, actually get the books out of the car three days later, read the first chapter or two of any of them, they're already overdue and I might as well have bought a good book to begin with.

Here is where Goodwill comes in. You can buy any paperback--ANY PAPERBACK--for 50 cents to $1.00. Hardbacks will cost $2.00. So, since I love books, but I also love my children and don't want to put us on food stamps just to satisfy my thirst for the written word, I'll now be reviewing my latest pre-loved find here.

First up? To the Tower Born by Robin Maxwell. I'm only 100 pages in, but I can already tell you one thing: I like it a darn sight better than that punishing novel, The Other Boleyn Girl, that I read last year. Stay tuned for this and other exciting titles which may or may not include PRUNING YOUR GARDEN, The Rise and Fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, and The Spaniard's Defiant Virgin: A Harlequin Romance.