Jenny Reviews: The Shadowy Horses

The Vitals

The Shadowy Horses by Susanna Kearsley
Release Date: 2nd October 2012
Page Count: 432
Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Gothic, Mystery
Target Audience: Adult
Series: No
Source and Format: Purchased; Paperback

Summary (From Goodreads)
Archaeologist Verity Grey has been drawn to the dark legends of the Scottish Borderlands in search of the truth buried in a rocky field by the sea.

Her eccentric boss has spent his whole life searching for the resting place of the lost Ninth Roman Legion and is convinced he's finally found it--not because of any scientific evidence, but because a local boy has "seen" a Roman soldier walking in the fields, a ghostly sentinel who guards the bodies of his long-dead comrades.

Here on the windswept shores, Verity may find the answer to one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time. Or she may uncover secrets someone buried for a reason.

Notes on The Shadowy Horses
This book is so deliciously gothic. It is set in a wonderful old house on the Scottish coast AND it has a ghost. You almost don't even need anything else to make it a solid gothic novel, really. But then Kearsley goes and populates said house and the nearby town with really wonderful characters. The kind that make you wish you could be friends with them. The best is Robbie, the local boy who can see the ghost. He has the second sight and is almost unbearably cute. It is a wonderful blend of science and the unknown (or perhaps, the unknowable) that will have you flipping pages faster than you realize. If this book doesn't make you want to visit Scotland then I will think less of you. So don't tell me if you still don't want to visit after reading this. Also, I now want the Sentinel to be patrolling my backyard. I need to learn Latin ASAP. (If you haven't read the book you have no idea what I'm talking about. You should remedy that soon.)

Chief Complaint
The reason this book got 4 stars instead of 5 is the "climax" at the end of the book. It was pretty lame, in my opinion. Everything else up to that point was wonderful and you truly had no idea how the book was going to end. I know that sounds like a deal breaker, but I promise it is not. The book is still worth the read!

Overall Diagnosis

Get a Second Opinion

• Jessica from Laugh Love Write -"Kearsley pulls off a beautiful mystery, keeping the reader enthralled with what’s going to happen, is it or isn’t it kind of stuff."  
• Denise from So Many Books, So Little Time - "The characters in this story were great.  There were likable, and not so likable, characters but they all brought something different to the story."

Kitchen Renovation

My house is a 1960's ranch. This means it has lots of... quirks. The front porch steps are slightly perilous in that they are  very narrow and very steep. The guest bedroom closet is strangely long and narrow. The guest bathroom came with NO electric outlets. (You didn't really want to dry your hair in front of a mirror, did you?) Eccentricities aside, it is a great little house and Matt and I have spent a lot of time and effort into making it our own. When Matt first bought the house it had poop brown long shag carpet in EVERY room but the kitchen. Yes, that means it was in the bathrooms too. The walls were brown wood paneling. The furniture was the heavy, Mediterranean style that takes up lots of room and was not comfy in the least. It was the closest one could come to living in a cave without actually doing so.

Then I came along. We now have ZERO shag carpet. Not one single wall is unpainted. Our furniture is super comfy, if not quite fashionable. There has been, however, one last hold out- the kitchen. My mom and sister helped me paint the walls a bright yellow and I changed out the old dirty hardware for some more colorful, Anthropologie-esque knobs in hopes of brightening up the kitchen. It worked pretty well, for a while. There is only so much you can do when your cabinets are chocolate brown and the natural lighting throws weird shadows everywhere. This summer I had finally had enough. Even though I knew (in theory) that painting the entire kitchen was going to be a beast, it had to be done. I could not live with my dreary, dirty looking kitchen any longer. Here are my before pictures, so you can see how dated and dank it was.

                        

(I must admit, I am thankful that my oven and hood are Harvest Gold and not Avacado Green.)

(Please note the terrible red light fixture. It gave my friend fits when trying to help me pick out colors. She told me it belonged in a red-light district.)

(Yes, the handle for the fridge is missing.)

As you can see, it needed a lot of work. A lot. After sitting down with my very gifted friend, Ashley, and talking about colors, we finally decided on wall and cabinet color. I was ready to go! I will skip over how hard it was to paint the windows (excruciating) and how many coats I had to do on the trim (more than 2) and all that boring stuff. I will say it was hard work. Painting the whole kitchen is not for the faint of heart. Luckily, I had my very amazing mother-in-law there to help me. I seriously could not have done it without her. She painted my walls in, no lie, about an hour- 15 minutes of painting, 30 minutes of drying, 15 minutes of painting (my mom and sister popped in for a couple hours one day, too, so it was a family affair). I could not be more pleased with how it turned out. Ready for the after pictures?

(I don't think the Harvest Gold looks too bad with this color haha)

(I love how much lighter and cleaner this area looks!)

(Our fridge ended up dying right before we started painting, so that was an unintentional renovation.)

There were two surprises during this renovation (aren't there always at least two?!), one that worked out surprisingly well and the other that made my year. The first had to do with the color of my walls. It is a bit hard to tell in the picture, but they are a light gray, not white. Ashely and I (but let's be real, mainly Ashley) spent a long tine picking out the right gray to go with the cabinets and with the poor lighting in the room. Well, I got an ocular migraine in Home Depot while I was in the middle of talking to the paint guy and I told him the wrong paint color. Yep, you read that right. I told him the gray that was one shade lighter than the one we had picked out. But as I said, it actually worked out really well. My house tries its best to be dark and cave-like, so the lighter gray really helped fight that. 

The second, more amazing surprise? My hardware. I had kept the original hardware when I replaced it with the colorful knobs because I liked the pattern but they were too dark for my dark, dark cabinets (I am so tired of writing that word!). I pulled them out of Matt's shed and spent 5 hours polishing them by hand. My fingertips, no lie, lost feeling and I might not have had any fingerprints until my skin started to regenerate, but it was so worth it.

                                 

If we ever move, you better believe I am taking my hardware with me! I am in love with these knobs.

So, there it is. This has been my life for the past 2 weeks. I have no fingertips, have developed carpal tunnel, and my legs are bruised to the point I look like I don't know how to walk, but I would do it all again in a heartbeat for the results that I got. I love being in my kitchen now. I still have to redo my counter tops and back splash, but we recently purchased a new car so those have been put on the back burner. I am now able to be content with that because of how wonderful my kitchen looks now.

What does this have to do with books? Admittedly, nothing. I do, however, want y'all's suggestions for my one wall that completely blank. I am wanting to do a gallery of picture frames that have quotes about food in them. Do you know any great food quotes? Here is one I have found that I plan on using-

"If more of us valued food and cheer and song over hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world" - J.R.R. Tolkien

If any of you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them! I have quite a large space to fill and I want to fill it with beautiful words. Words nourish the soul the way food nourishes the body. My soul and body are being even more nourished in my new kitchen :)

Jenny Reviews: Possession

The Vitals
Possession by A.S. Byatt
Release Date: 1st October 1991
Page Count: 555
Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
Target Audience: Adult
Series: No
Source and Format: Purchased; Paperback

Summary (From Goodreads)
Winner of England’s Booker Prize and the literary sensation of the year, Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany—what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.

Notes on Possession
This book. I adore this book. I am also in awe of this author. Not only has she written a novel, she has written a novel about two Victorian poets and included poetry from said poets. Who both have distinctive writing styles. She is a literary genius, as far as I'm concerned. This is not a book that you sit down and read in two days. If you read it with the sole purpose of figuring out the mystery of the relationship between the two poets you will miss out on so much. Her witty observations about the world of academia, postmodern literary theory vs. reality, psychoanalysis and sexuality, and human nature are wonderful but in danger of being lost if the reader does not take the time to really read this book.

The heart of the plot is the search for a connection between Henry Randolph Ash and Cristabel Lamotte. Ash and Lamotte were two poets who wrote in Victorian England but have not had any reason to be linked together until Roland Mitchell stumbles on a draft of a letter from Ash to Lamotte in a book of Ash's. From there is it a race to stay one step ahead of everyone else as Mitchell and Dr. Maud Bailey try and piece together what the nature of the relationship between the poets was and if it influenced their respective works. The book flips back and forth from the present day to Victorian England. We are introduced to Ash and Lamotte through their letters first, both to one another and others of their acquaintance. It is an interesting dynamic as the reader is able to hear first what the "modern" scholarship says of the authors and then gets to discover their hidden depths as Mitchell and Bailey put together the pieces of the puzzle scattered throughout England and Brittany.

This book is not for everyone. I fully recognize this. It is very much a work of literary fiction. Those who have not studied literary theory or are unfamiliar with Freud and psychoanalysis will not get some of the jokes and allusions, but it should not deter one from enjoying this novel. The story and storytelling are superb.

Memorable Quotes
“I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.”

“I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?”

“How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one's own existence.”

Overall Diagnosis

Top Ten Tuesday - Jenny's Top Ten Favorite Movies

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week we are taking a break from lists of books in favor of movies! I (Jenny) don't know about y'all, but it is nice sometimes to talk about something other than books on here - hence all my tea posts :). The topic for this week is Top Ten favorite movies and/or TV shows. I am a movie person myself, so that is what this list is going to be. I would love to hear your Top Ten; I am always looking for new stuff to watch!

1. Gladiator <featuring Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix> This. Movie. I will always watch it if it comes on t.v. If I am in the mood to watch a movie and don't know what I want to watch, I will end up watching this. The story is so, so good.

2. Braveheart <featuring Mel Gibson> This movie makes me wish I was Scottish so badly. The sacrifice, the uncompromising force of nature that is William Wallace, the humor- this is the total package as far as I am concerned.

3. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade <featuring Harrison Ford and Sean Connery> I love all of these movies (with the exception of The Crystal Skull) but this one is, hands down, the best. The only way it could be more perfect is if they had managed to work Short Round into the movie.

4. LOTR Trilogy  <featuring lots of popular actors> This one does not need an explanation.

5. The Last of the Mohicans  <featuring Daniel Day-Lewis> Movies set in the colonial period are normally not my favorite but the story of this movie is beautiful. When Major Heyward mistranslates Hawkeye's offer.... there are no words.

6. The Princess Bride <featuring Cary Elwes and Robin Wright> One of the all-time funniest and most quotable movies out there. Every time I watch it I catch some subtle joke or reference I had never noticed before.

7. 300 <featuring Gerard Butler> The special effects. The costumes. The storyline. The bad guy. This movie is as beautiful as it is defiantly sad.

8. Despicable Me <featuring Steve Carell and Jason Segel> I'm a huge fan of animated movies and this is one of the funniest. You cannot lose with Steve Carell as a lonely, quasi-Eastern European (?) super villain who adopts three little girls. Oh, and MINIONS.

9. The Goonies <featuring Sean Astin and Josh Brolin> Lesley Anne and I had the requisite group of friends to go on a treasure hunt but were, sadly, lacking the perfectly preserved pirate ship in which to find said treasure. This is another movie that I will always watch if it is on t.v. I hope Gladiator never comes on at the same time. I do not know what I would do.

10. King Arthur <featuring Clive Owen> The reason I love this movie is because it is about my area of interest- early medieval Britain. This one is more of a guilty pleasure. Most of my love is wrapped up in the time period and not the story, though I like it as well.

Jenny Reviews: Moon Called by Patricia Briggs

The Vitals

Moon Called by Patricia Briggs
Release Date: 31 January 2006
Page Count: 288
Genre: Paranormal Fantasy
Target Audience: Adult
Series: Mercy Thompson #1
Source and Format: Purchased; e-book

Summary (From Goodreads)
Mercedes "Mercy" Thompson is a talented Volkswagen mechanic living in the Tri-Cities area of Washington. She also happens to be a walker, a magical being with the power to shift into a coyote at will. Mercy's next-door neighbor is a werewolf. Her former boss is a gremlin. And she's fixing a bus for a vampire. This is the world of Mercy Thompson, one that looks a lot like ours but is populated by those things that go bump in the night. And Mercy's connection to those things is about to get her into some serious hot water...

Notes on Moon Called
(This review is actually going to focus on the series as a whole, rather than me reviewing all 8 books that are currently out. You're welcome.)

This series is so refreshing. I am a big fantasy fan and I enjoy paranormal fantasy, but it is so blasted hard to find stories that don't rely on sex and foul language and characters who think very highly of themselves to capture your attention. Patricia Briggs is a breath of fresh air. Mercy & Co. are down to earth and relatable. I mean, think about it for a minute- it's a bit difficult to make werewolves relatable while still retaining their other-ness. Mercy is a mechanic who does not really care what she looks like. She is comfortable in her own (and her coyote) skin. She does not like cursing and often gets onto the other characters when they slip up. Speaking of other characters, secondary characters are fabulous. As a matter of fact, the secondary characters are actually my favorite part of the later books in the series. If you do not want to be best friends with Warren after the first book then something is wrong in with your head. As I've said before, I am a big fan of solid, well-written characters and this series delivers.

The world building and conflicts are also well planned. Most of the otherworldly creatures coexist with humanity just fine, so Briggs had to focus on culture building rather than world building. She balances the line between too much information and not enough information nicely. There are no rambling info dumps in an effort to tell a lot about the culture in a short amount of time. You are also not left to wonder how the heck these creatures work. The conflict she lays out in the first book has consequences that reverberate through the other books, which gives the series a sense of continuity that is sometimes lacking in long running series. You don't feel like each book is a vignette in a character's life; the events of one book carry over into the other books, as our decisions and circumstances do in our own lives. Briggs has another series- Alpha & Omega- which is also set in the Mercy Thompson world and ties into the plot at large nicely. (I love it too, though the first book was not my fave. I'm glad I stuck with the series though!)

Chief Complaint

I have two complaints and both are relatively minor. The first is that the covers of the books are a bit misleading. It makes the heroine out to be a bit more... flamboyant than she really is. The Mercy in the books does not dress like the Mercy on the covers of the books and does not want to dress like that. The second complaint is that the series is starting to drag. Some of the conflict in the later books is a bit flat, though I believe she is setting up plot lines for later books. Don't get me wrong. I like all of the books, I just don't like them all equally well. Where (for me) Alpha & Omega starts out slow and gets better and better, Mercy Thompson starts out good, slows down, hits a high note with #5, and then slows back down again.

 
Memorable Quotes
“Love thy enemies, it says in the scriptures. My foster mother always added, "At the very least, you will be polite to them.”

“Happiness is German engineering, Italian cooking, and Belgian chocolate.”

“I have a degree in history, which is one of the reasons I’m an auto mechanic.”

Overall Diagnosis
                        

Get a Second Opinion

• Jess from Gone with the Words - "Mercy, a strong heroine. Adam, the alpha who completely intrigued me from the get go. The world building, which I’m guessing we’ve only seen a bit of, was totally magical. The plot was mysterious and exciting. The secondary characters had so much character, they completely cemented my feelings on how much I will enjoy the rest of this series." 
• Daniela at Lit Snit- "At times, I forgot I was reading fiction and caught myself thinking how cool it would be if the History Channel did a doc on these werewolves."

Newest Tea Obsession

I (Jenny) have discovered a new brand of tea and I am IN LOVE. I want all other tea drinkers to be in love too.

Allow me to introduce you to Paromi Tea. I myself am only familiar with two of their teas (at the moment) so it is, I admit, a new friend for me as well. I discovered it at Fresh Market in Athens one day. I was immediately drawn to the packaging:

Gorgeous, right? They are packaged in beautiful gray glass jars. You know something is good if it is packaged in glass. Plastic is for the every day tea; glass indicates that this tea is something special. Of course I had to pick up a jar to study the label more closely. The jar is smooth and cool and feels lovely in your hand. These people know how to draw you in without even having tasted the tea! You just want to own tea that comes packaged in these special jars.

Moving on. The next step to falling in love with these teas was this little beauty on the lid:

It might be a little hard to see in the picture, but the top says "Mug-Size Tea Sachets". Just think on that for a sec. These sachets are potent enough for a mug of tea, not just a cup! I don't know about y'all, but that is something special. There are tons of times when I want a huge cup of tea, not just the dainty Victorian sized cup. Often that means that my tea is a little more diluted than I would like, but I suffer through. No need to suffer now! Paromi has solved that problem.

The final step to falling in love was the taste of the tea itself. The first one I bought was the Chamomile Lavender. I was out of chamomile tea and decided to be good and buy only what I needed. When I opened the tea at home I was blown away by the smell alone. I could have left the jar open and used it as potpourri in my kitchen. This tea is so smooth. The chamomile and lavender pair nicely to create a tea that does not need any sugar added. Sometimes chamomile tastes overwhelmingly of apples, but not this chamomile. The lavender tempers it so it is more well-balanced.

The second one I bought was the Cinnamon Chai. As you all know, I am a huge fan of chai. Most chais already have cinnamon in them, but you cannot taste it like you taste it here. Cinnamon can be too spicy if it is not tempered with other flavors and this tea does that beautifully. It is not made with black tea, as is most common in chai, but with African rooibos, which helps to calm the spiciness of the cinnamon. This tea is, hands down, my new favorite chai (from the store).

(Cup vs. Mug)

This tea is on the pricy side- about $10 per jar, but I cannot emphasize enough how much it is worth it. You are really getting your money's worth because of the quality of the ingredients and the fact that you can get at least 2 cups from each sachet, depending on how robust you like your tea. I hope you will branch out and try these wonderful teas. If you live near me, contact me and I will get you a sachet so you can try it before buying it. I can promise that you won't be sorry!

Baby You're So Classic

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week's topic is your Top Ten Favorite Classics or Top Ten Classics You Want to Read. Basically I (Lesley Anne) had to jump up and down and do a little happy dance when I saw this topic. I don't know what it is, but classics get me so fired up about reading! I'll be the first to say I didn't always feel this way about classics, though, and I know they aren't all fun and games. I definitely get that. I mentioned this exact struggle yesterday when I talked about my Jane Austen goal and Mansfield Park. But classics are really the building blocks for the books we enjoy today, and they deserve to be read! So here are the top ten classics Jenny and I hope to tackle next.  

1. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell | 2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy | 3. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo | 4. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett | 5. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas | 6. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë | 7. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier | 8. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens | 9. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray | 10. A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

1. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer | 2. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky | 3. Ulysses by James Joyce | 4. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway | 5. 1984 by George Orwell | 6. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton | 7. Paradise Lost by John Milton | 8. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck | 9. The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan | 10. The Mabinogion by Unknown

If you've read any of the above, let us know where you think we should start! And tell us: Which classics are your favorites, or which classics do you hope to read soon?