Monday, September 12, 2011

Missing CD - In Zanesville

In Zanesville
by Jo Ann Beard

There are of course different writing styles an author can use for a novel.  People have their favorites and sometimes one style will satisfy more than another.  "In Zanesville"  is the story of a family as seen through the eyes of a 14 year old girl.  Now I have read books like this before and they generally do keep my interest, just because people are all different and it is amazing to look into others lives.

On the other hand, this book had no real plot or purpose to carry the reader along.  Rather, it is the timeline of life that carries the reader along - going from day to day, from one life incident to the next.  Since there is no definite story to complete by the end of the book, one wonders how the book will end.  (Keep wondering!)  Certainly no offense intended for the author. I am certainly not educated enough to be a literary critic.

I write this perspective after the fact, so let me tell you what happened.  When I started the seventh and last CD, I discovered that I had heard it before.  The seventh CD, although labelled correctly, was actually a duplicate of the fifth CD.  Ordinarily this would have bothered me, but in this case, I was content to let the story end there and was not overly concerned with the contents of CD 7.  This attitude kind of surprised me.  With many other books there is still a lot of plot to resolve on the last CD and you would be scrambling hard to find another copy.

Oh well, just an observation.



Not those cowboys!

Not those cowboys, the other ones!  Recently, I discovered that I had mixed up my cowboys!  What in the world am I talking about?   Author Linda Lael Miller writes about cowboys in a number of her books.  I was reading 'Garrett'.  I had already read the books on his brothers - Tate and Austin, but it had been awhile.  As I was hearing about the McKettrick family in Garret's story I was trying to put together what I was hearing with what I was remembering, and somethings just did not fit.  Had Miller really changed some of the family history and character descriptions from book to book?

Turns out that I was confused.  Linda Lael Miller wrote another series about three cowboy brothers, named the Creeds - Logan, Dylan and Tyler.  There are plenty of similarities between the McKettrick's and the Creed's and it is not hard to mix some of the details up, especially if your memory is not as good as it used to be.  Just the same, Linda Lael Miller is an author of the quality that could pull this off and keep every one of the six books interesting.  There are more than three books in each of the series, so you best get started.

McKettricks of Texas - Garrett

Garrett - McKettricks of Texas

by Linda Lael Miller
 


If you have ever read books by this author, you have probably experience how well she can write about people and relationships, about cowboys and careers, about men and women - all the way from dislike and awkwardness to passionate romance.  This books will not disappoint and I do recommend it.  Miller knows how to make the characters live a real life and you will not want the book to end.

Garrett is a man of fast politics, fast women and fast cars.  But not for long.  His life is suddenly changed and he lands in the arms of school teacher and single mom, Julie.







Friday, September 09, 2011

Tea Party Knows the Status Quo is No Longer Sustainable

One of the reasons there is a TEA party is because there are people willing to speak the truth about obama and the democrats, even if it is not politically correct to do so.  Some of the establishment Republicans are not much better.  Rush Limbaugh captures nicely the cancer that is obama, and to think obama is the president?

Obama is:
  • taking money out of Medicare to spend on obamacare
  • destroying jobs
  • destroying home ownership
  • destroying the value of pensions and investments
  • driving healthcare costs out of control (this will be more evident in a year or two)
There is little evidence that this keeps obama up at night.  More likely, it is what pleases the African socialist.

Tea Party Knows the Status Quo is No Longer Sustainable