So I saw the new Aladdin and liked it far more than I thought I would from the previews to be honest. It wasn’t great but having never seen the original I can’t compare it to anything. The new film did shoot Jasmine up into my top three Disney Princesses.
And not just because she’s so stylish although that did play a big part.
It also got me thinking about what the best Disney Princess (official and unofficial) looks actually are…
The Dinner List
By: Rebecca Serle
Grade: C
I picked up The Dinner List from Book of the Month. The story is about a girl whose birthday dinner actually becomes a living answer to that whole make a list of the 5 People You’d Most Want to Dine with. Audrey Hepburn included.
Honestly, the book was okay. Pretty meh. It’s got a love story and says some nice things about life and loss by the end. But I was just hoping for so much more. It does however give me a perfect excuse to the The Dinner Party Tag! Which I naturally couldn’t keep just literary.
Continue reading “My Weird (Possibly Deadly) Dinner Party List”
A friend of mine recently asked what books I’d recommend for her niece to get into science-fiction and I thought, “Hey there’s an idea! I read enough and I love the idea of telling people what to read!” 🙂
Some of these books were literally gazing at me from my shelf. So anyway below are the books I think would help people launch themselves into the sci-fi genre. While I don’t believe in age limits on what books people should read (no one is to old for YA for instance) I tried to pick a good spectrum of books.
Continue reading “Science-Fiction Book Suggestions for Newbies”
“I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.”
I love reading all the quote posts that go around so I wanted to participate. Reading The Princess Diarist made me remember how much I loved Carrie Fisher’s writing and how easy it is to connect with her. So below are some of my all time favorites and like a lot of great quotes many of them have found me just when I needed to hear them.
Star Wars: Bloodline
Author: Claudia Gray
Genre: Sci-Fi
Grade: B
This was a good book but personally I had a hard time connecting with the story.
Bloodline takes place a couple of years before the movie and deals with Princess Leia, the gridlock in the Senate, her fear that a new enemy is gathering strength and most interestingly… What happens when knowledge of who her daddy is falls into the hands of political enemies!
I have always loved Princess Leia and been fascinated by how she would have responded to the news of Darth Vader. I mean let’s be honest in Jedi there wasn’t much time and she was kind of like, “Oh hey, I kind of knew that… moving on…” Her thoughts on that and the way people respond to the information is very interesting. Everything she did (or didn’t do) regarding Vader made sense to me.
I mean if my biological father took pleasure in torturing me and blowing up the entire planet that I grew up on I would probably compartmentalize as well.
Still a lot of the political stuff was easy to see coming. There’s a Centrist Senator she befriends that is definitely the stand out of the new characters. Honestly, all of the other characters could have been background in the movies which I suppose is the point. Han makes a couple of appearances here and there. Luke and Ben are mentioned but completely incommunicado.
Makes sense. Whatever went down there is for the movies though I still couldn’t help be disappointed that he still hasn’t had a scene with his mother. I think part of my disappoint was that I was hoping for something more (or anything at all) with Leia, Luke and Ben.
I also rather enjoyed the fact that parts of the book are almost tinted with longing for the good old war days. There was a sense of nostalgia, if that makes any sense, Leia misses the feeling of being alive that she had even while being terrified which also felt realistic and human to me.
So long story short this is a good serviceable Star Wars book with character insight into Leia and some (not very surprising perhaps) insight into how the First Order came to be. But I just didn’t connect with the story overall  and it took me longer to get through then I would have imagined.
Recommend: Yes/No I would definitely say this is one of the stronger Star Wars books that I’ve read and if you’re a fan of Leia of course but otherwise you can probably just wait for the next movie.
