Category: Kindle



What the River Knows (Secrets of the Nile #1)What the River Knows by Isabel Ibaรฑez
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

First of all, I never learned what the river knows. Second, I didn’t like any of the characters. It’s supposed to be a Young Adult, and I am three or four times the age of the prescribed reader. Still, I usually like YA books, so…

It is supposed to be about magick and fantasy, but it is not consistent or completely helpful. The history is enough that it might bring a young person to Google Cleopatra, Egypt, or Argentina. There is a smattering of very elementary Spanish, making a language student feel smart. But honestly, I felt I wasted time getting to an unsatisfying cliff. It didn’t make me want to continue.

Okay, it could be me. OR it could be that I listened to Text-to-Speech, and I could have used a live narrator who could read all the languages presented.

I hope others will read it and like it. It seems promising, but I don’t plan to read the next part of the series. Still, I’m grateful to Libby for the borrow of the Kindle version.

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This Is How You Lose The Time WarThis Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Time travel is interesting. Yeah, but here we have one more reason for war. The espionage is too much. I can’t handle more reasons to feel paranoid. I read to escape the heavy stuff or to study writing. But this didn’t do either job for me.

Cynthia Farrell’s (the Narrator) voice was good for the story, but sadly, I didn’t feel she saved it.

A friend recommended this to me. Time travel piqued my interest. Here, take a look at the blurb:

Goodreads Choice AwardNominee for Best Science Fiction (2019)
Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange lettersโ€”and fall in love in this thrilling and romantic book from award-winning authors Amal-El Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading.

Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. Thereโ€™s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war. Thatโ€™s how war works. Right?

Cowritten by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.

Maybe it was the COVID brain. Maybe I’ll try it again someday. Maybe you will love it. It just didn’t do it for me.

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Written in Red (The Others, #1)Written in Red by Anne Bishop
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After starting to read this in Kindle with text-to-speech from Libby, I decided to listen to the Audible version. I prefer the narrator, Alexandra Harris, to the TTS. It was a good read.

It has been a week or so since I finished the read. A little case of COVID got in the way of reviewing reads. Still, I do remember this fondly and look forward to more in the series as I can buy them. In the case of fantasy beings this was a different take. It was fun!

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The ChangeThe Change by Whoopi Goldberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well, this was fun. As a post-menopausal woman, before pre-menopausal was made popular by Oprah, I remembered my mother in her 60s talking about still getting hot flashes. My friend and I celebrated each other’s accomplishments in womanhood and crone with a talk about power surges. So it was nice years later to see our superpowers claimed and made real as all superhero actions work.

Still, it is nice that our younger sisters are finally getting the strength we were not awarded.

Again, the comic book was fun. But I have a huge problem. I hate cliffhangers! Obviously, this is to be a series. I may or may not fall for the next one.

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Review: The Sirens by Emilia Hart


The SirensThe Sirens by Emilia Hart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was brilliantly written. I loved the many tools that Emilia Hart used to tell this story. History, podcasts, journals, and dreams. My Kindle text-to-speech was perfect for this read.

This isn’t your average Young Adult fantasy mermaid story. This one has meat and history, and mysteries on different levels are presented throughout the book.

I was so grateful to get to read this through NetGalley. If you get the chance, it is well worth the time and money to buy and savor.

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The End of Alzheimer's: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive DeclineThe End of Alzheimer’s: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline by Dale E. Bredesen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I was in my forties, both of my grandmothers died of Alzheimer’s. As you can imagine, I am working hard to avoid what has been assumed to be my fate. Genetically, I seem to favor the heavier side of the family, so when 2020 warned us to lose weight or get hospitalized with COVID, I went on a fasting diet. After losing 30 pounds, I have kind of plateaued. Even still, in my 18/6 or sometimes 20/4 fast, I am trying to eat as healthy as I can: veggies and a little fruit. I don’t like meat, but I do eat salmon in my daily salad and minimize anything processed. Lots of water or tea. One or two cups of coffee. I have increased my exercise and am trying to get cardio and weights. I’m still not optimum on any of it. I try to get better and better.

Meanwhile I have increased learning a lot of new things. I have 11 languages I’m playing with on Duolingo. There’s a lot of knitting and diamond painting. And I am bringing back my piano playing, learning new songs while awakening old ones I had forgotten. I’ve since started playing recorders, soprano, alto, and tenor. Then I took up the ukulele, and now adding violin. I feel learning new things helps my brain. I work at my sleep hygiene aiming for 7 or 8 hours.

Imagine my surprise to see that I am doing a lot that Dale E. Bredesen recommends in his book. I was able to get the Kindle version through Libby. But now I have ordered the audiobook and my own copy of the paperback. The text-to-speech helped me read the book but I felt I could use a knowledgeable voice to read the technical terminology. And there are charts of the supplements and other aids that I want to be able to follow more closely. So, even after I return the library versions, I will have my own copy to refer to regularly.

I highly recommend this book. It’s quite user-friendly, not too sciency but you can follow the science if you like (I like).

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THE ADHD ARTIST: STAY FOCUSED, CREATE MORE, LIVE ABUNDANTLYTHE ADHD ARTIST: STAY FOCUSED, CREATE MORE, LIVE ABUNDANTLY by Earth West
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don’t know if it was the way the text sounds in text-to-speech as opposed to having narration or if, after a go-getter of a book about the same, this one was dull. Or could it just be that I had overloaded on the subject matter? But I couldn’t get into this book, and much of the information was a repeat of what I’d heard before.

But to give it a good chance I will try to find it on Audible and see if I like it better. I feel that, being a bit of a musician who enjoys artwork, I need more specific information about distraction and hyperfocus within those realms.

Still, I don’t want to discourage others from reading this. It may be just what you need. Or what I may need at another time.

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Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure EverythingQuackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Blurb from GoodReads:

What wonโ€™t we try in our quest for perfect health, beauty, and the fountain of youth? Well, just imagine a time when doctors prescribed morphine for crying infants. When liquefied gold was touted as immortality in a glass. And when strychnineโ€”yes, that strychnine, the one used in rat poisonโ€”was dosed like Viagra. Looking back with fascination, horror, and not a little dash of dark, knowing humor, Quackery recounts the lively, at times unbelievable, history of medical misfires and malpractices. Ranging from the merely weird to the outright dangerous, here are dozens of outlandish, morbidly hilarious โ€œtreatmentsโ€โ€”conceived by doctors and scientists, by spiritualists and snake oil salesmen (yes, they literally tried to sell snake oil)โ€”that were predicated on a range of cluelessness, trial and error, and straight-up scams. With vintage illustrations, photographs, and advertisements throughout, Quackery seamlessly combines macabre humor with science and storytelling to reveal an important and disturbing side of the ever-evolving field of medicine.

***

I felt it better if you read the blurb rather than if I explained it. After reading Deborah Harkness’s book about the history of science in the time of Elizabethan England, which, though interesting was more a textbook level of nonfiction, I thought this would be fun. Same topic, the history of science, but with more of a sense of humor.

Luckily, I was able to find the Kindle version on Libby. There were pictures of some of the medical quackery. It makes one think how good it is now. Yet, many things haven’t changed and one wonders what will look like quackery to us looking back from the future.

Anyway, I think you would enjoy learning about this history with a sense of humor.

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My Grape Christmas (The Grape Series #3)My Grape Christmas by Laura Bradbury
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This series is so sweet. It isn’t a mushy romance, but romance is there. It satisfies my travel bug, and I get to play with a little of my mini French-speaking. This series is the only one I am taking my time to actually read and not listen to. I have it on my old phone in the Kindle. It is a slower read than the Audiobooks, but I can stay with it as I love the characters and the story. Laura Bradbury writes her story well.

In this story, after a year in Quebec, Canada, Laura and her boyfriend return to France to visit his family for Christmas. It is a shorter book than others, but it made me love the family more.

By the way, if you know absolutely no French, you will not be lost in these books, as the little bits are used in context with the English. This series takes you from when Laura does an exchange year in France for high school through her adult life in France. I have already started the next book, in which the couple gets to go back to France for a college exchange program.

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The Blue Zones Secrets for Living Longer (Blue Zones, The)The Blue Zones Secrets for Living Longer by Dan Buettner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was quite interesting. I was lucky to get the Kindle from Libby. Now, I want to get the paper version to catch the pictures, recipes, and ideas to read more slowly and start bringing more of these ideas into my life. What I’d really like to do is travel to these countries myself. I look forward to watching this on Netflix.

I used to live near the Seventh Day Adventist communities, the one in Loma Linda and the one in La Sierra, California. My friends attended that church, so I had an early intro to the vegetarian diet. That fit quite well for me as I never liked meat. I got to have special dinners with those friends and was amazed at the variety and full flavor of everything offered. The only thing I would object to is the smog. It was very thick in those areas. I would bet that these people would live even longer elsewhere.

This wasn’t a long or engaging read. I used Text-to-Speech and was through it in a couple of nights. Like I said, I look forward to having the book.

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And the flounder is how to not hyperfocus on diamond painting and reading. I find there’s so much to do and read and so little time. I need at least 48 hours for my day!

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