A Gaggle of Book Reviews

This review is part of a ParentBloggers book tour. Visit ParentBloggers for a chance to win a copy of The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here: Scenes from a Life!

To learn more about Felicia and her book, be sure to listen to the Motherhood Uncensored show featuring Felicia, I have a cameo as a caller.

The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here: Scenes from a Life is the newly released memoir by Felicia Sullivan, creator of the Writers Revealed podcast, among other projects. I have been lucky enough to work with on Writers Revealed, and which piqued my interest in her memoir. This is a book about Felicia living through her mother’s addictions and relationships, surviving a very difficult childhood, and then struggling with her own addictions. I have seen friends and family members struggle with addictions, and it was amazing to look into Felicia’s life and read a brutally honest account of living with addiction.

The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here: Scenes from a Life is a particularly apt title. Felicia uses scenes from her childhood mixed together with chapters that follow her adult life through her addiction and into her recovery. In doing so, the book gains depth, as we know some of the “why” behind Felicia’s troubles and addiction. We also see her incredible honesty as she bares her life and soul to the readers, displaying to the world her own wrongs and embarrassing times, which many people would bury. Felicia gives us a window into her world, and then pulls us through the window as we are caught between the memories and her current life.

Felicia worked hard to separate herself from her mother (at the time the book was written, she hadn’t been in contact for in 11 years), and at first I couldn’t grasp why she became an addict. My thoughts are mirrored in the discussions between Felicia and her friends as she is struggling with her own addictions. Felicia is determined not to become like her mother, but the cocaine calls to her:

you wonder how it is you got to this point. Because you told yourself in your bathroom that first time in December … with two rolled bills and neatly cut lines that you’d never be an addict like your mother because you survived the war that was her, because you convinced yourself you were stronger than she was. And then, there go the lines.

Felicia follows this quote a page later with a description of her feelings about cocaine. First, she describes it for her friend, and then she completes the description for the reader:

“It’s like Broadway up my nose,” I say.
What I fail to tell Emily is how many times I’ve tried it since. And although I savored my first glass of red wine and the many that followed, cocaine is different. I like — no, I love cocaine. I tolerate the nausea, the constant swallowing, the teeth grinding — anything for that rush when the world seems simple, beautiful, and large enough to fit me in.

When she is on cocaine, Felicia is able to escape “the awkward, stammering girl who never feels smart enough, white enough, pretty enough.” After struggling to fit in as a child, first alcohol and then cocaine give her the confidence to change her self-image. The change between shy, bullied child and self-confident writer and executive is so well written and well examed that the reader can truly grasp the impact addiction can have. If you are suddenly feeling a sense of self-worth, how do you give that up?

Felicia bares her soul, giving us a good long look at her life. She chronicles her own fight with addiction and mixes in childhood memories. The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here is not an easy read by any means – Felicia’s childhood experiences were not like those of the children of addicts I knew, well-fed and sheltered in the suburbs. These are vignettes of a year eating only potatoes, of shielding her eyes so she wouldn’t see cockroaches scurrying in the floor in front of her, of seeing her friend’s mother unconscious for 36 hours, and of taking her mother to the Emergency Room over and over. I have never read a book that pulled me so far into the real world of addiction; Felicia uses such intense detail when recounting the horrors she survived that I feel as if I was walking in her shoes beside her.

While Felicia has cut off contact with her mother, The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here isn’t a psychobabble “blame the mother for everything” book. It’s an intense look into the dark world of addiction. Readers will walk away from this book with a much deeper understanding of what it is like to be caught in the life of an addict, or caught in an addiction. I highly recommend The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here, to everyone, but especially for anyone who knows addicts or those recovering from addiction.

This book review is part of a PBN blog tour, and was received from the publisher

I remember the personalized books that some of my friends had when I was younger. They had all the type in a plain text, and then the child’s name was in bold, and a bit out of sync with the other text. The people in the books never quite matched my friends, either – the hair/eye/skin color would be different, and the pronouns never completely matched up.

I had read other Parent Bloggers’ positive reviews of the new personalized books for children, but I quite honestly didn’t quite believe them. The Print-a-Kid website says they have text designed for preschoolers, and some for grade-schoolers, but I figured I was best off getting a preschool version one for LG (4), as she would like it no matter what – her older sisters are a bit fussier about books.

LG’s book arrived very quickly after placing the order, which was a pleasant surprise. I had chosen the Wacky Christmas Journey, and I was very impressed at how well-made and well-designed it is. I also belatedly realized that I should have bought two more in the grade-school version, as BG (9) and MG (7) were both very disappointed that they are only side characters in the story.

The book says it is “A Book for [LG]” on the cover, and has a dedication (”To our Gaggle of Girls, Love Mommy and Daddy”) that are personalized before you even get to the story. I skipped those the first time to make it a surprise, and it took a moment of reading before LG realized the book was about her – and then her grin spread across her face. The story is personalized for LG’s blonde hair and blue eyes, uses pronouns correctly, and uses our family members’ names throughout the story. Having your name in any story is enchanting (even if it has nothing to do with you!), but having a story that is clearly about you and your family means that your parents can’t read anything else at bedtime for weeks. *ahem* Thankfully, because her sisters’ names were in the story, everyone enjoyed having it read to them over and over and over… The storyline was fun, too, with a few unexpected twists – who knew that reindeer could pull you through an ornament and on to the North Pole?

The book itself is well made: a sturdy binding, good quality paper, text that flows nicely, and images that have your child’s eye, hair, and skin tone – and with girls the hair length, too. The side-characters are only visible in such a way that you can’t identify them. BG, MG, and I discussed this, and how much more difficult (and therefore more expensive) it would be to make all the characters have the right hair, eye, and skin color. Suddenly it made sense to them why you only see someone as they are carrying ornaments, or their back going up a ladder.

What was particularly endearing is that the lines given to my children actually fit their personalities! That was a wonderful surprise. While the storyline is not Caldecott Award material, it is infinitely better than the storylines of the personalized books when I was a child, and therefore exceeded my expectations. I’m going to have to buy the older versions for my other two daughters soon, and I’ll see how the story holds up for older kids. We are also very curious about some of the other personalized books, there’s a lot of interest in the space robots book and the princess’ kingdom book especially! My daughters and I spent quite a lot of time on the website researching which other books we could have chosen. Right now, they all look great – er, except that we homeschool, so the school book might not be the best fit for us!

The one thing that was disappointing for my daughters is that you couldn’t include your pets in the story. One of our pets has a human name (Jack), but it wouldn’t quite work to say he was their brother or friend… That’s really a minor complaint, but we suggest that if they add another story to their selection that they choose one that involves kids and their pets. The one other minor complaint is from the “Designated Reader” – now LG tries to say she is any blonde haired/blue-eyed girl in any other story, and it becomes frustrating by the 12th time per book…

We highly recommend the Print-a-Kid personalized children’s books, and think they would make a wonderful holiday, birthday, or “just because” gift. Some kids are lucky enough to have entire series of books with main characters who share their name, while other kids look in vain for characters that share their name. The Print-a-Kid books even the playing field and make all the kids feel special.

I love it when I get the opportunity to review books by authors whose books I have already enjoyed! This is a first for me, on two counts: this is my first time reviewing for Parent Bloggers Network; as well as my first time reviewing a novel after previously reviewing a picture book by the same author. I wrote a review about Jane O’Connor’s wonderful picture book Fancy Nancy, and now I’m writing a review for her first novel – Dangerous Admissions: Secrets of a Closet Sleuth. The simply fabulous Fancy Nancy has become a staple in our house – even my husband has read it often enough to remember it. My daughters were disappointed that Dangerous Admissions doesn’t take place in a posh place like Paris, and that the characters don’t dress fancy. However, the world of the exclusive prep school in New York City is decidedly fancy, as well as potentially lethal. I grew up in a small wealthy town, and have seen the world of “I’ll do anything to get into xxx college” – it’s a world that is prime material for a murder mystery!

Dangerous Admissions is a wonderful mystery with a touch of chick-lit. This mystery set in an elite NYC private school (The Chapel School, aka Chaps), where a few special words from teacher and adviser Mr. Tutwiler can get you into (or keep you out of) an Ivy or other elite college/university. When “Tut” is found dead by a student, questions start about his cause of death – murder? old age? suicide? stress? Rannie Bookman is the divorced mom of a “lifer” (a Senior who has been at Chaps since kindergarten), a freelance copy-editor, and a tour guide for the Chapel School (since she lost her full-time publishing gig). Rannie is motivated to add “closet sleuth” to her other jobs when her son Nate was the last person on Mr. Tut’s calendar before he was killed. (One un-intentional slip on the part of the publishers, though – the back of the book says that the mystery is at the school Rannie’s children attend. At the time of the novel, one child has graduated, so she only has one child at Chaps. Slightly ironic following the description of Rannie losing her job over a copy-editing mistake, though hers is funnier – leaving off the last L in The Secret of the Old Clock.)

I have written before about an author’s choice to use first person or third person, and how it can affect the reader’s experience of the novel. Dangerous Admissions is a great example of third person done right – you see the mystery primarily from Rannie’s point of view, but you also see Nate’s point of view and that of Olivia (the girl who found Mr. Tut). In addition, memos, phone calls, and text messages are also used to convey another character’s opinion. O’Connor shows us so much about each character through these different points of view, as we peer into their thoughts and lives. These little tidbits held in the minds of each character help us start gathering clues about the murder(s), and the other sub-plots within the story.

O’Connor throws out some wonderful red herrings in her mystery; there are so many people with motives, so many hidden secrets within the world of the wealthy in NYC, and so many people with the opportunity to have committed the murder. As each little clue is uncovered, we start building a theory, and then the theory changes when another clue is uncovered. The chick-lit part of the novel also keeps you hooked – the relationship between Rannie and a new beau, teenage lust and longing, as well as Rannie’s search for a permanent job. In Dangerous Admissions, O’Connor even makes Rannie’s freelance copy-editing horribly fascinating – a book about Dr. Mengele’s Nazi experiments.

The ending of Dangerous Admissions is a delicious surprise – a twist that you can see foreshadowed when you look back at the book after finishing it, but one I didn’t see coming. This is very different from some mystery authors who throw in a twist that isn’t linked to anything in the book, so you couldn’t see it coming. In addition, most novels with a chick-lit feel tie up every loose end when the book is finished. O’Connor didn’t do that in her novel, so the story felt even more real to me. The characters developed into people I could imagine meeting for a cup of coffee, and now it feels like I am ready to meet them for coffee again soon to find out what happens next. I hope that O’Connor is considering a sequel!

A definite thumbs up here for Dangerous Admissions. This novel succeeds with multi-faceted characters that are easy to like, a mystery that is surprising, intriguing sub-plots, plus some romance. Fancy Nancy would call it fabulous, darling! (However, most of the topics in Dangerous Admissions would not be appropriate for Nancy!). Win a copy by leaving a comment over at the Parent Bloggers Network, and see links to other reviews of Dangerous Admissions this week!