Excellent Love Story!

Bettie Sharp’s Novella, EMBER is one of the best fairy tale retellings I’ve read. It keeps all of the original elements of the original Cinderella story and gives it a tantalizing magic in exchange for the former springtime grace and lace. This is not a story for little girls, this is an adult story. It’s still about true love, but more real love, hard to obtain love and harder to keep love once you get your hands on it.

Prince Charming is charming to everyone who meets him, except Ember who guards herself from him. She is the one person he can’t have and the one person he wants. Of course, she would rather cut out her soul. Ember’s actions in guarding herself are extreme, and these actions immediately made me like her. She’s a strong character, and not at all the Cinderella type I remember. She doesn’t wait on things to happen to her like Fairy Godmothers, and glass slippers. No, this Cinder Girl has a plan of her own. I love it! But I don’t want to discount Prince Charming’s strength of character.

He’s more than just a handsome face – really the thing that’s so beautiful about him isn’t his charm at all, go figure that one. This leaves the step sisters and mother, Sharpe does a witch’s curse on them, and those so called wicked wenches from before are nothing like you remember. I read this in two days, and plan to read everything Bettie Sharpe puts out, that’s how much I like EMBER. I highly recommend it and will have it on a must give list for Christmas.

Bettie Sharp’s Novella, EMBER is one of the best fairy tale retellings I’ve read. It keeps all of the original elements of the original Cinderella story and gives it a tantalizing magic in exchange for the former springtime grace and lace. This is not a story for little girls, this is an adult story. It’s still about true love, but more real love, hard to obtain love and harder to keep love once you get your hands on it.

Prince Charming is charming to everyone who meets him, except Ember who guards herself from him. She is the one person he can’t have and the one person he wants. Of course, she would rather cut out her soul. Ember’s actions in guarding herself are extreme, and these actions immediately made me like her. She’s a strong character, and not at all the Cinderella type I remember. She doesn’t wait on things to happen to her like Fairy Godmothers, and glass slippers. No, this Cinder Girl has a plan of her own. I love it! But I don’t want to discount Prince Charming’s strength of character.

He’s more than just a handsome face – really the thing that’s so beautiful about him isn’t his charm at all, go figure that one. This leaves the step sisters and mother, Sharpe does a witch’s curse on them, and those so called wicked wenches from before are nothing like you remember. I read this in two days, and plan to read everything Bettie Sharpe puts out, that’s how much I like EMBER. I highly recommend it and will have it on a must give list for Christmas.

Must Read Dark Inside by Jeyn Roberts

Jeyn Roberts is one of my favorite young adult writers, because her story Dark Inside is still inside my head and I read it two months ago. The concepts are large and foreboding and they question the frailty of goodness in mankind shuddering at an apocalyptic war. It’s very Cormac McCarthy, but more for the young adult world, so that they can dive right in and later expand into larger ideas of their own when it comes to human goodness.

In Dark Inside the end happens and four young people have to wrestle with evil outside and inside their skin. If they don’t, they become like the rest of humanity. The bleak descriptives of nothingness first drew me into this book, but the characters kept me in the pages. All of them were well-thought-out and one of them bordered on turning to the darkness of evil. In a book with four different perspectives, it is difficult to make a reader feel for your characters as quickly as Roberts made me feel for hers, but she did it. I fell for each one of her characters, Mason, Clementine, Aries, and Michael. And in addition, there was a mystery character named nothing who only kept me intrigued with the other four.

This person had short pieces and he or she seemed to know more about why everything happened as it did. I wasn’t attached to this person in the same way as the other four, but he/she did add to the other four, and certainly added to the mystery of the overall book. By the way, Clementine was my favorite character. She surprised me the most in the book. However, Michael did something not unusual to human nature, but certainly not exactly Clark Kent. I liked that plot move by Roberts. The move Michael made in it still clings to my mind’s memory like a freaking nightmare. It makes it worth reading, if nothing else but to ponder – what would you do?

            On the subject of plot, Roberts did a fantastic job everything moved together in the same way as say streams moving towards the same ocean. A little cliché’ sorry folks, but her book really came together at the end. It also left some loose strands, just enough to make me very intrigued to read book two, Rage Within. It’s out now, and I plan to read it, just as soon as I can afford to be addicted to yet another good book.

 

Great descriptives!

"...his head down, eyes popped, neck stretched like a rubber chicken's... "You sure this is the right guy?"
The quote comes from "The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living," and maybe one of the best books I've to read all year. I don't know yet. So far, it's a book to savor and I'm taking my time, like that first cup of coffee in the morning. This book reminds me of why I love words.