You know it's good when it starts with "True Story"...

The other day I went to to visit my Nana. She is at the tail end of pancreatic cancer, so once a week I try to go and sit with her and visit. This week I thought I would bring her some candy. See's is her favorite, so I get in the car (waaaaaay later than I was planning on) and hop on the freeway. Why do I need to get on a freeway to get anywhere?! I mean come on. Then, I passed the exit I needed so I got off the freeway, got back on the freeway, got back off the freeway, and then maneuvered my way into the Mall. Unpack the stroller, drop a rock on my toe (THANK YOU MIDDLE SON) yadda yadda, get to the Sees store. I get her favorite, the 1 lb mixed box and a few things for the boys for Valentines day. Back on the freeway with said candy (and one in my mouth, but whatever). I tried to quickly get all the way over to the carpool lane, but then realized that I wouldn't make it in time for my freeway change, so I swerved all the way back over to the right, to merge onto the 405. I swear i'm a good driver.

Then it happened. Eric Estrada pulled up behind me. Solo. Aren't CHiPS supposed to always be in pairs?! Clearly he was already FAILING as a traffic cop.

Oh shit! Oh shit! Shut up I tell myself. Act natural! Why do we always say "shhhhhhhhhh" when we see a cop?! They're NOT librarians for Christs sake!

Then....the inevitable.....The lights and the "MERP MERP" soundy thing.

So I pull over and he approaches my passenger window.

Eric Estrada- "Ma'm, do you know why I pulled you over?"

Me- "I believe it would be safe to assume it was because I veered so quickly from the left to the right side of the freeway."

Eric - "You would be incorrect in that assumption."

This was gonna be great.

Then, Eric proceeds to tell me he pulled me over because.........of MY TIRE. It's low, and bald, and probably dangerous. But really?! My TIRE?!

Eric asks me for all my info, which I give him, after sorting through sippy cups, Manga novels, and a jumble of plastic body parts. Upon which he asks me THE golden question.

Eric - "And where are you headed young lady?" Oh now it's young lady?! I'm not the babysitter, dude.

And here it is- TRUE STORY...


So I say-"I'm bringing See's candies to my sick Nana who is dying of Pancreatic cancer."

At which point, Eric Estrada shits his pants, gives me all my info back, and wishes me a great day.

And then my Nana split her candy with me, while we watched soap operas and talked about Vampires.

Heaven.

xoxo,
J.Danger

In The Woods by Tana French

I know that I am horribly late with this review. It seems like I am the last person on the planet to read this book!

One of the downfalls of studying literature is that you study plot and narrative. This said, my husband hates watching movies with me because I always call the plot 20 minutes into the film. Not so with this book. There were so many twists and turns that I was honestly at a loss for most of the novel.

In 1984 three children go to play inside the woods of an estate in Ireland, Knocknaree. Three kids go in, but only one child comes out; in blood soaked tennis shoes and a shredded T-shirt, with no recollection of what occurred. He goes on to become a detective and is placed on a case in the same forest, a homicide. Are they related?

I liked the book a lot. HOWEVER, there are two things about this book that bothered me.

*****SPOILER ALERT************


1. Cassie and Rob sleep together! I mean, come on. Really? Although I do like that Sam and Cassie couple up at the end.

2. We never find out what happened to the other two kids. I heard that this is an actual myth in Ireland, and that supposedly these two kids still haunt the woods of Ireland. Who knows?


******SPOILER OVER************

I just checked out her second novel, The Likeness, which continues on with Cassie Maddox. I am excited to get started on it.

Also, I have a ton of really great reviews and giveaways coming up. Including, but not limited to (how much fun is it to say that?!) CoverYourHair.com, SkinMD Shielding Lotion, Admit One by Emmett James, Futureproof by N. Frank Daniels, and Now and Then by
Jacqueline Sheehan.

I am very excited!

Stay tuned!

xoxo,
J.Danger

Review- Home Repair, by Liz Rosenberg

Home Repair, by Liz Rosenberg
Harper Collins, 2009
328 pages

It occurred to me as I started to think about this review that I am going to have to post a review for a book that I DO NOT like. Otherwise, you all are going to start thinking that I am just full of fluff. Because I LOVED THIS BOOK!!!!!

I started this book one night while rocking the wee one to sleep. I only had the rocking time to read, and had I known what was coming, I would have waited to start it because once I started reading Home Repair, that was all I wanted to do!

Eve, Rosenberg's main character, decides to have a garage sale. She just needs a little space, some breathing room, just a tiny little wedge of space for herself. So she holds a garage sale. What she gets rid of in this garage sale, was her husband.

ANY mother that I know can identify with Eve, and her need for space. From Home Repair, "The inside of her car was messy with Marcus's old school papers, empty candy wrappers, and spring-water bottles or empty Gatorade. Both kids treated the car like a giant moving garbage can. She wished, not for the first time, that she could have one clear space she could claim her own." (160)

What we see after her husband, Chuck, abandons her in the middle of a garage sale is a story that strikes home with all of us. The characters are beautiful, round characters (you don't even really meet the husband until the latter part of the book, which is fantastic because all I did was daydream about what he was really like!) and a story that guides Eve right into her own independence, and no one elses.

You can find more about Liz Rosenberg's novel, Home Repair, here and here and here.

You can get it here and here. AND YOU SHOULD.

xoxo,
J.Danger

You want cement dust and chicken litter with that?

Most of you know already that I abhor fast food. I just can't stand it. I hardly ever touch it, and I think its gross that my husband is oddly cultish about the damn McRib. A few times during my pregnancies I craved really horrible fast food meal. With my oldest, I ate a Whopper once a day for nearly two weeks. These days I can't even look at them!

I have always tried to be educated and informed about the food that I feed my family. I have always made our baby food, instead of buying processed industrial baby food (plus its SO inexpensive! Try it!). I try to get what I can from the farmers market, and when I'm at the grocery store I read labels and not just prices. Sometimes we can't afford to eat the way I would REALLY like to, but I try to do the best I can with what we got. I thought I had it down pat...

Until I read The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan.

HOLY CHICKEN SHIT.

Has anyone else read this book?! OH MY GOD.

I knew about the influx of corn into nearly every food product we eat today, but did you know that there are, on average, 45,000 products in your supermarket? Did you know that of those 45,000 more than a quarter of them contain corn in one form or another?

From his book-

"American farmers produce 13 million bushels of corn a year. (That's up from 4 billion bushels in 1970." Of those 13 million bushels, 10% goes into processed foods.

Ew.

The same wet milled corn starch products that create industrial baby foods, instant puddings, custards, instant teas, low-cal sweeteners and salad dressings also create pastes, glues, fiberglass, insecticides, wallpaper, and leather products.

And we eat them...

The same native starch used to create precooked, frozen meals also creates dry-cell batteries, detergent, and charcoal briquettes.

And we eat them!

Chicken nuggets from McDonalds?! HORRIBLE. Chicken Nuggets, made by Tyson for McDonalds, contain, among other things, tertiary butylhydroquinone- a form of butane.

Pollan offers a list of possible ingredients in cattle feed- chicken manure, cattle manure, chocolate, cement dust, molasses, candy, urea, hooves, feathers, meat scraps, fish meal, pasta, peanut skins, brewery wastes, cardboard, feather meal, chicken litter (bedding, feces & discarded bits of feed from chicken farms) chicken, fish, and pig meal.

This is what we are intentionally ingesting?!

Not so fast you might say. But I eat organic you might say....get the book, read the chapter on Industrial Organic. It is eye opening.

I will leave with this quote- "The fast food meal seems cheap, but as we have seen, the costs are actually enormous. The industrial food chain costs each and every one of us: in government spending, in pollution, in global warming, and in our health."

He also leaves us with a bevy of resources and a list of ways to start changing how we view food, and how we view our natural surroundings.

I would STRONGLY suggest this book to EVERYONE.

Now, who's hungry?

xoxo,
J.Danger

a search that has gone into overdrive, MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE

Ok. Here's the thing. My nana watched us, all of us, every day forEVER when we were kids (but if a man in a suit ever came by, or a lady with a clipboard, we were all just coincidentally wound up at Nana's house at the same time....shhhhhh.....).This is in fact where I picked up reading I believe. My nana is a notorious reader! She loves mystery- King, Koontz, all of them, and all of the Anne Rice novels. The best part?

She would let me read them! At the ripe old age of like, 7, but whatever...

She would hide all the juicy books under her bed (The Joy of Sex anyone? I read it at like 9), with her big bag of chocolate chips, both of which I freely helped myself to.

This was where I watched, and re-watched, and re-watched, The Lost Boys.

.....AND......

MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE.

But, alas! I must have the raddest nana ever, because apparently I am the ONLY person on the entire freaking PLANET that has seen this movie!

Cory thinks that I have just plain made it up.

The rest just kind of stare at me. Blankly.

Hello?! EMILIO ESTEVEZ IS LIKE 2 YEARS OLD IN IT!

The joker? The Pepsi machine straight shot to the balls?! THE STEAM ROLLER?!

Anybody? Somebody?

Damn Santa clearly has not ever heard of it either because it wasn't in my stocking.

Bastard!

xoxo,
J.Danger

FLAWLESS; A Review

Flawless; Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History
By Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell

My literary companion, Iris Blasi, over at Sterling Publishers (HERE!) sent me an ARC copy of this little gem a few weeks ago. A true story- based on a man named Leonardo Notarbartolo (go ahead, say it out loud. It is SO MUCH FUN!) who planned and executed the largest diamond heist in history. He makes it sound so easy, it has led me to believe that perhaps I am traveling down the wrong career path. I kid, I kid....

Here's what others are saying about this diamond in the rough-

"Part whodunit, part mob tell-all, part diamond underworld reportage, FLAWLESS is simply too good to miss.”—Ulrich Boser, THE GARDNER HEIST

FLAWLESS "take[s] the genre of true crime to a new level."-- Douglas Preston & Mario Spezi, co-authors of THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE

"Handle with discretion—you might be up all night reading.”—Tom Zoellner, author of THE HEARTLESS STONE and URANIUM

My oldest son, who is 11, asked me this morning if I had finished the book. I told him I had, and he asked to borrow it! This amazes me. However, it also makes me wonder- should I be letting him read this book?

YES!

You can polish up your goods over on the FLAWLESS Facebook page (I can keep going with the diamond puns, I got allllll night). Or, read about it here, or here, and then buy it here.

XOXO,
J.Danger

Hummingbirds; A Review

Nope. Sorry, try again. But how rad would that be- if I really wrote a review of hummingbirds?!

"Yes, the quick moving little bird came up to my window and spoke to me in the early morning silence. But really, he was just hungry."

Awesome.


This is a review on Hummingbirds. THE NOVEL. By Joshua Gaylord.

COULD.NOT.PUT.IT.DOWN.

The end.

Loved it. Here are some quotes that I dog eared (but not really if the library asks, because I follow the library guidelines 100%!)

"They open a book to a page, and all they see are stupid little black ants marching across- until you begin to talk about it, and then you can hear the bombs going off in their heads. You make that writing dance. And their eyes get all lit up with burning."

"Adulthood feels like empty rooms with clocks ticking. It feels like being at home and suddenly becoming aware of the refrigerator when the motor shuts off. It feels like staring at the ceiling or straightening pictures or listening for the mailman."

This is the story of a man, Binhammer, English teacher/teen heartthrob extraordinaire, and a year in his life teaching at the Casey-Carmine School for Girls. Binhammer- who you can't help but love, and Ted Hughes, who you can't help but feel sorry for, meet their match with two young ladies- Dixie Doyle, who you just want to throttle, and Liz Warren, who I think I want to be friends with, or mother- I'm still not sure.

Gaylord's words kind of float along in your eyeballs, feeding you the story like fish food flakes- half dissolution, half absorption. His characters, even the annoying alliterative ones, stayed with me long after I closed the book, reminding me that they were there waiting for me to finish their story.

Ironically enough, Gaylord himself teaches at an Upper East Side Prep school. If teaching the elite is anything like this, I could happily work in this profession for the rest of my life.

His website states "Hummingbirds chronicles a year in the life of the Carmine-Casey School for Girls, a prep school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Part Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and part Virgin Suicides, the novel offers a dual perspective on the intimate, tempestuous and frequently incestuous private school community."

You can get it here or from your local library. And you should.

Now, if you'll excuse me....I have some page ironing to do.

XOXO,
J.Danger