That Just Happened!

Pearlman, Ann.  The Christmas Cookie Club.  Atria Books (2009).

Mark your calendar. It’s the Christmas Cookie Club! Every year on the first Monday of December, Marnie and her twelve closest girlfriends gather in the evening with batches of beautifully wrapped homemade cookies. Everyone brings a dish, a bottle of wine and their stories. This year, the stories are especially important. Marnie’s oldest daughter has a risky pregnancy. Will she find out tonight how that story might end? Jeannie’s father is having an affair with her best friend. Who else knew about the betrayal, and how can that be forgiven or forgotten, even among old friends such as these? Rosie’s husband doesn’t want children, and she has to decide whether that’s a deal breaker for the marriage. Taylor’s life is in financial freefall. Each woman, each friend has a story to tell, and they are all interwoven, just as their lives are. On this evening, at least, they can feel as a group the impulses of sisterly love and conflict, the passion and hopefulness of a new romance, the betrayal and disillusionment some relationships bring, the joys and fears of motherhood, the agony of losing a child and above all, the love they have for one another. As Marnie says, the Christmas Cookie Club, if it’s anything, is a reminder of delight. The Christmas Cookie Club is about the paths Marnie and her friends have taken, the absolute joy they take in life. Ultimately, The Christmas Cookie Club is every woman’s story. Celebrating courage and joy in spite of hard times and honoring the importance of women’s friendships and the embracing bonds of community, you’ll see yourself and some of the ingredients of your own story.

The Christmas Cookie Club.com

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  Each chapter begins with a recipe and a different woman’s story as told by the head “cookie b*tch” Marnie.  I must say, by the end of the book I was ready to go and make dozens and dozens of different Christmas cookies.  It really brought to mind how each year there are four of us who meet to celebrate Christmas, and no matter where we are or what we are doing we get together to spend a Girl’s Christmas.  It is a time to spend with the family you have and the family you create around you, and that is just what these women have done.  There is a real cookie club, but the author swears none of them have gone through the same things as the characters in the book…well, not exactly.  I liked the stories because it further cemented that you are never alone in your experiences and sometimes you just need the warmth of friends (and sugar and wine) to make things seem okay.  This was a heart-warming read and I think a lot of women can relate to at least one or more characters in the book.  I would recommend this one to anyone who is looking for a story about friendship, family, and life…and a good cookie recipe.

The only thing I didn’t enjoy about this book is that there were little blurbs in between all the chapters that tells you where one of the main cookie ingredients comes from.  I felt it didn’t quite fit in with the story and it kind of broke the flow.  However, these sections are easily skipped and returned to at the end, or skipped altogether.  I give this book Five Golden Rings.

Schoemperlen, Diane.  Forms of Devotion.  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. (1998).

…Forms of Devotion contains eleven stories, each one a brilliant interplay of words and images. The illustrations, selected by Schoemperlen and depicting almost every subject imaginable, are wood engravings and line drawings from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In some cases, she was inspired to write the story after studying the illustrations; in other cases, she wrote the story first, then chose or constructed the pictures to accompany it. The result is a playful, sometimes surreal and often mysterious juxtaposition of a historical fascination with anatomy and classical themes with the author’s contemporary exploration of everyday people, places and things.

Each story is a creative delight, perfectly formed and rich in mischievous wit, irony and multi-layered meaning. The title story, “Forms of Devotion,” is a wonderful literary cataloguing of the traits and qualities of the faithful, those who “sail off to work, perfect confident that they will indeed get there: on time, intact. It does not occur to them that they could just as well be broadsided by a Coca-Cola delivery truck running the red light at the corner of Johnson and Main.” “Five Small Rooms” is an intriguing, spectral journey into the narrator’s imagination, with the reader left wondering, “Is it madness or a murder mystery?” In “How Deep is the River,” the author offers an innovative, completely compelling take on the ubiquitous high school math problem that begins “Train A and Train B are traveling toward the same bridge from opposite directions…”

Quite different in form, yet alike in their ability to entertain and provoke, the stories in Forms of Devotion show once again that Diane Schoemperlen’s voice is as intriguing, fresh and electric as ever.

HarperCollins.ca

I guess people will say anything when they have to sell a book.  Much like the book Bear,  this description doesn’t accurately portray what’s inside.  I did not understand how each of these stories was “rich in mischievous wit, irony and multi-layered meaning”.  I found myself reading this just because I have to as part of my personal Governor General Literary Awards Challenge.  I hardly ever abandon a book and I have only done so a few times in my life, but this is one that I would have put down after the first 30 pages.  Each story was hardly interesting and superfluous in its descriptive words.  The only redeeming story was “Count Your Blessings (A Fairy Tale)”.  It explores the feelings of inadequacy women sometimes have, even when living the “perfect life”.  Why women feel that they are not doing enough, not challenged enough, not contributing enough, not loving enough, not loved enough, not listened to enough…why it’s sometimes just. not. enough.   That story really resonated with me and it called to mind Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. 

Other than that story, this book was painful to get through.  It took a lot of will-power and multiple attempts to finally finish it.  Her stories were written in such a way that I could not relate to the story lines, characters (of which there are few), or ideas presented.  When I first read the publisher’s description I read the last sentence as “…intriguing, fresh and eclectic  as ever,” and I couldn’t agree more.  When I re-read it I realized it said “electric” and they lost me again.

I gave this one “eh” because there was one story I liked and the illustrations she chose accompanied the stories well.  That’s about all I can say about that.

Higgins Clark, Mary & Carol Higgins Clark.  The Christmas Thief.  Simon & Schuster Inc.  New York (2004).

Mother and daughter Clark, each a bestseller in her own right, have produced a singularly slight and unmemorable tale with their third holiday suspense novel (after 2001′s He Sees You When You’re Sleeping). This time the villainy centers on an 80-foot Vermont spruce earmarked for the traditional Christmas tree lighting at Rockefeller Center. Unbeknownst to the tree’s owners, its branches contain millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds, secreted there more than a decade earlier by con man Packy Noonan to conceal the proceeds of an investment scam. One of the scam’s victims happens to be vacationing near the site of the planned tree-cutting, along with Alvirah and Willy Meehan, who successfully resolved a kidnapping in their previous caper. When Packy is finally paroled, he heads straight for the treasure, enmeshing him, his confederates, the Meehans and a bevy of other characters in vandalism, abduction and other crimes…

Amazon.com

This is the first book in the Holiday Reading Challenge 2010  hosted by Nely @ All About {n}.   I read a Clark collaboration last year   and this book was similar.  Lots of fluff and not a lot of mystery, but it was a fun read nonetheless.  For the holiday season I’m looking for a fun, easy read about the season and there are a few books that have been tear-jerkers, so I was glad this one was just fun.  The characters are the same as in other books, so if you have read another Alvira mystery, this one is comparable.  I could comment on the plot and character development, but it really isn’t worth it.  If you are looking for a good mystery, this is not the book for you.  If you are looking for a fun, fast read, this is perfect.  It’s a quick holiday read that helps you to get in the holiday mood.  I give this one Four Calling Birds.