Summer Island: A Novel by Kristin Hannah

rating: 5 of 5 stars

Summer Island is a very touching story about the power of love through healing and forgiveness. It gently reminds us that each story has three sides and how sometimes we need to look past our own hurt and anger to renew an old relationship.

Summer's Island is sold on it being a book about Mother/Daughter relationships but it is so much more. It is truths hidden behind masks; love lost yet still yearned for. It is pain from being apart from family; and resentment for losing so much time.

Kristen Hannah once again delivers a powerful story that anyone can relate too. Summer's Island is both sad and uplifting having you laugh and cry throughout the whole story and reaching for the phone to call someone you lost contact with when it is over.

Free Range Kids

rating: 5 of 5 stars

Throw away your children's educational toys , remove all your baby-proofing gear and let your kids go crazy!

Well, not really. But wouldn't it be great to not be so nervous and fearful of every little thing that could possibly happen to your kids? Is the world really that much worse than when we were kids? Were our parents bad parents for allowing us to play outside unsupervised and *gulp* letting us eat raw cookie dough?

Free Range Kids discusses the way we today have grown into a society full of fear. Children are no longer allowed the opportunities to explore, play, exercise and have fun. Society today would rather have educational toys that teach what is outside your front door rather than giving your child the hands-on experience.

Lenore Skenazy takes these horrible threats to our children and transforms them into her very own 14 Free Range Commandments. She lays them out there in black and white with the "real" statistics and shows us just how naive we are today. (Did you know no one has every died from poisoned Halloween candy?!? EVER!!)

No one wants to put their child in danger or be judged by the better than thou parents and Skenazy does an amazing (and humorous) job at showing us how ridiculous some of our fears really are.

This is the mother to all parenting books. Before you open up any other parenting book besides as a reference, read this one! Don't let the parenting book business, the baby-proofing business or the media scare you. Trust your instincts (and help your child acquire his/her own.) You know your child(ren) better than anyone. No child needs or has ever needed 24/7 supervision. Just like our parents, we need to lay out the foundation, teach them to be safe and then trust them (just like our parents did with us) to do so.

The Guardian by Nicholas Sparks

rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sparks enhances his regular romance writing style by bringing it to the next level by adding a thrilling curve to The Guardian.

This is one of those books that will grab your attention during the epilogue and keep you wanting more after the prologue. You will connect and/or relate with the characters and find yourself cheering at certain points, on the edge of your seat at others, and in tears by the ending. A very well rounded book.

My only complaint about the book (did you think I would go without complaining?)is the bad editing. Not only did a lot of grammar errors go unnoticed (no biggie I find them all the time); but at one point Sparks starts confusing the characters and their roles and the editor never picked it up. Not difficult for Sparks to do when the three important names in that part of the story are Julie, Jessica and Jennifer. Other than that, I loved this book. I hope they turn it into a movie (although I bite my tongue saying that); and I think this may have made it to my Top 5 books.

Say When: A Novel by Elizabeth Berg

rating: 1 of 5 stars

I don't know if it was Elizabeth Berg's writing style (childish) or the book itself, but i really did not like this book. I tried to like it but it was pretty bad. The writing was immature, the characters were whiny and where I could normally relate to or like at least one character -- I disliked everyone in this book. I'm happy to put it behind me.