Will You Be My Best Friend Samantha Ellis?

       A complete turn around from my last book review I will start out by saying how much I absolutely loved How To Be A Heroine  or What I learned By Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis. Easily 5/5 stars. 

       The book is a memoir about the authors fascination with literatures greatest heroines and her connection with them. Samantha Ellis realizes that her whole life she has been trying to be a Cathy Earnshaw when maybe she should have been trying to be Jane Eyre.

I completely connected with everything the author had to say and though I hadn’t read every book the author described I loved every second of it. Samantha Ellis is the kind of friend every avid reader wants to have, a literary feminist. 

“ From Greer, I learned that there was a stereotype of female beauty and I didn’t have to conform to it-and that it might be fun and liberating to ‘undress with `eclate’. I learned to stop laughing at men’s bad jokes.”

From The Little Mermaid to Valley of the Dolls to Scheherazade Ellis covers that and everything in-between with a refreshing sense of humor and an interesting look at life and the things life throws at you.

George R.R Martin Can Be Wrong

     

     One of the fun things about moving to a new town is that everything is unexplored and waiting to be discovered. About a month ago I went to a book store that I had driven past many times passing through down town Corvallis but had never stopped in until that day. It was my favorite kind of book store…chaotic. There were piles of books along the isle ways and books crammed tightly on the shelves. The kind of book store where you have to work to discover the good finds.  After searching I finally thought I found THE book. It was buried among all the tacky science fiction covers…Pavane by Keith Roberts. It had such amazing reviews, and a GREAT review written by George R.R Martin about how this book is a masterpiece and a landmark in the history of the genre(science fiction and fantasy). 

Let me start off by telling you this…George R.R Martin can be WRONG. The book doesn’t quite reach 300 pages but I had to struggle to finish it and force myself to read till the end. Each chapter section is a new character and most characters aren’t interconnected. There were a few chapters where I thoroughly enjoyed reading the characters story line but those moments were far and few between. Most was a lot of finger tapping and waiting for the plot to thicken, the story line to develop more but it just didn’t happen. And not only did that not happen but the ending was just as disappointing as the whole rest of the book. 

     Overall, I would have to say I give it 0/5 stars!!!!!