Fict.it.ious

Like mother, like daughter? – Bel Mooney

Maree — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:07:48 +0000

Like mother, like daughter? Not necessarily! Fourteen superb stories explore the mother-daughter relationship in a variety of different ways in this fantastic collection. Bel Mooney has chosen stories by the very best contemporary writers from the UK and US, including Adele Geras, Candice Ransom, Linda Newbery, Jean Ure, Cathy Hopkins and Shirley Klock. Heartwarming, funny, challenging and tragic, the stories in this collection reflect the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship. Some will make you laugh, others will make you cry. But whether you are a daughter or the mother of one, you will find much to recognise, think about and enjoy in all fourteen.

Amazon
tbpcontrol

Little women – Louisa May Alcott

Maree — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:01:42 +0000

Little Women is the story of The Marches, a family used to hard toil and suffering. Although Father March is away with the Union armies, the sisters Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth keep in high spirits with their mother, affectionately named Marmee. Their friendly gift of a Christmas holiday breakfast to a neighbouring family is an act of generosity rewarded with wealthy Mr. Laurence’s gift of a surprise Christmas feast. However, despite their efforts to be good, the girls show faults: the pretty Meg becomes discontented with the children she teaches; boyish Jo loses her temper regularly; while the golden-haired schoolgirl Amy is inclined towards affectation. However, Beth, who keeps the house is always kind and gentle. After certain happy times winning over the Laurences, dark times arrive as Marmee finds out about her husband’s illness. Worse is to come as Beth contracts scarlet fever in her Samaritan efforts for a sick neighbour and becomes more or less an invalid. The novel tells of their progress into young womanhood with the additional strains of romance, Beth’s terminal illness, the pressures of marriage and the outside world.

Answers.com
Fantastic Fiction

3 willows (Sisterhood of the travelling pants) – Ann Brashares

Maree — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:58:17 +0000

Summer is a time to grow
Seeds
Polly has an idea that she can’t stop thinking about, one that involves changing a few things about herself. She’s setting her sights on a more glamorous life, but it’s going to take all of her focus. At least that way she won’t have to watch her friends moving so far ahead.
roots
Jo is spending the summer at her family’s beach house, working as a busgirl and bonding with the older, cooler girls she’ll see at high school come September. She didn’t count on a brief fling with a cute boy changing her entire summer. Or feeling embarrassed by her middle school friends. And she didn’t count on her family at all.

Leaves
Ama is not an outdoorsy girl. She wanted to be at an academic camp, doing research in an air-conditioned library, earning A’s. Instead her summer scholarship lands her on a wilderness trip full of flirting teenagers, blisters, impossible hiking trails, and a sad lack of hair products.
It is a new summer. And a new sisterhood.

Fantastic Fiction
Random House

The watchmaker who saved Christmas – Bruce Whately

Maree — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:39:24 +0000

This magical story focuses on a gentle and expert watchmaker, whose challenge is to repair an extraordinary pocket watch, given to him by a mysterious old gentleman. His task is complicated by the intricacies of the workings of the watch, and the need to have it fixed by Christmas Eve.

Caught up in the challenge and the puzzle of the watch is a young deaf boy, Peter, who lives with his mother in the rooms above the shop. Themes of friendship, sacrifice and loyalty are apparent when Peter offers the earpiece from his hearing aid to substitute a mysterious broken wheel within the pocket watch. On Christmas Eve, the owner of the watch returns and it becomes evident that he is indeed Santa Claus and that he uses the watch to suspend time as he delivers presents across the world.

MC Reviews

Mangos reviews

Perfect you – Elizabeth Scott

Maree — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:47:22 +0000

Kate Brown’s life has gone downhill fast. Her father has quit his job to sell vitamins at the mall, and Kate is forced to work with him. Her best friend has become popular, and now she acts like Kate’s invisible.

And then there’s Will. Gorgeous, unattainable Will, whom Kate acts like she can’t stand even though she can’t stop thinking about him. When Will starts acting interested, Kate hates herself for wanting him when she’s sure she’s just his latest conquest.

Kate figures that the only way things will ever stop hurting so much is if she keeps to herself and stops caring about anyone or anything. What she doesn’t realize is that while life may not always be perfect, good things can happen – but only if she lets them….

Fantastic Fiction

How to ditch your fairy – Justine Larbalestier

Maree — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:41:23 +0000

‘Rochelle gets a clothes-shopping fairy and is always well attired; I get a parking fairy and always smell faintly of petrol. How fair is that?’

Welcome to New Avalon, where everyone has a personal fairy. Though invisible to the naked eye, a personal fairy, like a specialized good luck charm, is vital to success. And in the case of the students at New Avalon Sports High, it might just determine whether you make the team, pass a class, or find that perfect outfit. But for 14-year-old Charlie, having a Parking Fairy is worse than having nothing at all – especially when the school bully carts her around like his own personal parking pass. Enter: The Plan. At first, teaming up with arch-enemy Fiorenza (who has an All-The-Boys-Like-You Fairy) seems like a great idea. But when Charlie unexpectedly gets her heart’s desire, it isn’t at all what she thought it would be like, and she’ll have resort to extraordinary measures to ditch her fairy. The question is: will Charlie herself survive the fairy ditching experiment?

Fantastic Fiction

The scarlet macaw scandal (Nancy Drew) – Carolyn Keene

Maree — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:22:28 +0000

Bess, George, and I volunteered to go to Costa Rica for some R&R: rest and research.

See, Corcovado Ecologica, a popular resort and preserve, isn’t only a beautiful getaway; it’s also a great place to study three species of monkeys.

Or so we thought.

When we arrived on the scene, we found the place in a shambles, and the monkeys were few and far between.

And if the problem gets worse, the resort’s going to be in trouble.

Clearly my friends and I won’t have much time for “monkeying around” on this trip – we’ve got a case to crack!

Amazon
Simon & Schuster

Creature of the night – Kate Thompson

Maree — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:13:44 +0000

I could hear Dennis talking to my ma.

‘She was little,’ he said. ‘Little like me. But old. Older than you’.

Those words gave me a cold shock. I could see Dennis imagining fairies, but old ones?

When Bobby’s mother moves the family into a rented house in the country, a neighbour tells him that a child was once murdered there.

Bobby doesn’t care. All he wants is to get back to Dublin and to resume his wild life there, stealing from the crowded shopping streets and racing stolen cars at night.

But getting his old life back doesn’t turn out to be so easy, and the longer he spends in the old cottage, the more convinced he becomes that something very strange is going on there.

Was there really a murder? And if so, was it the one he has been told about?

Amazon

Random House

White is for magic – Laurie Stolarz

Maree — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:05:37 +0000

I’m watching you . . .
A year has passed since Stacey Brown saved her best friend from a horrible death.
Now she’s having nightmares again, haunted by ghosts of the brutally murdered . . . and by a crazed stalker.
As she desperately casts healing spells, a new student named Jacob enters her world.
Beautiful and mysterious, he reveals that he is also having dreams.
To stop a killer, they must join together.
But can Jacob be trusted?
Or will this new love cause her darkest dreams to come true?

Amazon
bluefiedlsagl

The last thing I remember (Homelander series) – Andrew Klavan

Maree — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:28:27 +0000

Charlie West just woke up in someone else’s nightmare.

He’s strapped to a chair. He’s covered in blood and bruises.

He hurts all over. And a strange voice outside the door just ordered his death.

The last thing he can remember, he was a normal high-school kid doing normal things-working on his homework, practicing karate, daydreaming of becoming an air force pilot, writing a pretty girl’s number on his hand.

How long ago was that? Where is he now? Who is he really?

And more to the point . . . how is he going to get out of this room alive?

Barnes & Noble

Fantastic Fiction