Review: The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan

by Carol12 Comments
(Suggested reading level: Grades 4-8) I actually borrowed The Red Pyramid from my daughter, and I definitely enjoyed it. The story centers around a pair of siblings, Carter and Sadie, whose world is thrown upside down the night they watch their father blow up the Rosetta Stone and be captured by an ancient Egyptian god. Cater and Sadie learn the secret of their family history, discover they can perform magic and have to save the world from Set. It's a great combination. Fascinating Egyptian gods, siblings who learn to work together, magic, fight scenes. The book has everything to appeal to its middle school audience, even if it felt a little long. Sadie and Carter take turns narrating the chapters, which mean we get to see the events and characters from both points of view, and they are quite different from each other. Carter had been raised by his Egyptologist father, traveling around the world after their mother's death, while Sadie had been...
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Short Story Monday: “When God Opens a Door” by Tim Waggoner

by Carol5 Comments
Tim Waggoner was on a panel discussion I attended at the Ohioana Book Festival on Saturday. He's a horror and fantasy writer who has published over twenty novels and one hundred short stories, but I had never read anything by him, so I found one of his short stories today to feature. It is available to read on his website here. "When God Opens a Door" features a man named Darrell who feels like his seemingly perfect life is missing something, some spark. He becomes fascinated by a door at the local strip mall. It's  a plain metal door, but there's no indication what's behind the door and it's always locked. Darrell hears screams and moans coming through it, but they're a mixture of pain and pleasure that haunt him, maybe a better phrase is he becomes obsessed with them. Finally late one night he meets a woman he knows casually coming from behind the door, the chest of her shirt...
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Chicken Vegetable Soup

by Carol9 Comments
I don't make soups very often, even though we really like them. I actually made this one night after Amber went to bed and reheated it for dinner the next day. While it was simmering that night, I kept thinking how delicious it smelled. And it ended up tasting really yummy. It is a thick soup, more of a stew, and I did add extra broth and crushed tomatoes and used frozen okra. Ingredients 4 baked chicken breasts, diced into small chunks 1 1/2 cups cabbage, chopped 1 large carrot, chopped 1 cup okra, sliced 1 large onion, chopped 2 large celery stalks with leaves, chopped 1 15-oz. can of crushed tomatoes 1 14-oz. can fat-free chicken broth 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Directions Place all ingredients, except chicken, in a large pan and simmer for one hour or until vegetables are soft. Add in chicken and heat thoroughly. The recipe is from The 17-Day Diet by Dr. Mike Moreno. Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads and is open to anyone...
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Ohioana Book Festival

by Carol12 Comments
My Mother's Day present this year is perfect. I get to spend today at the Ohioana Book Festival in Columbus, and yes my family is coming with me. I'm sure I'll have some pictures to share with you later this week. I enjoyed it last year and have been looking forward to it. Looking at the schedule, I'm planning on attending at least two of the panels. Thrillers, Murders, Mystery, and Suspense True confessions about these perennially popular genres from the authors who write in them. Panelists: Chris Berhalter, Don Bruns, Amanda Flower, Barbara Levinson, Noam Sphancer From Another Realm An earthbound look at the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. Panelists: Casey Daniels, Linda Robertson, Denise Verrico, Tim Waggoner I'm also hoping to meet Lisa Black and Andrea Cheng. I bet Amber will enjoy talking to Mary Kay Carson, who writes books for kids about science and nature. Her newest one, The Bat Scientist, is part of the Scientists in the Field series we really like. If you're...
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Back Home (Flash Fiction)

by Carol6 Comments
Image credit: unknown Back Home by Carol 382 words So, it’s true, Casey thought as she drove past the old Cagney place, seeing the light in the window. Jake is back. Inside the house, Jake surveyed the progress he had made. It wasn’t much. He’d have to stay at a hotel tonight, probably the next week, maybe more, until he could get at least one room livable. The house would require so much time, work and love, but he was committed. He remembered being a child, walking down the street, fascinated and frightened by the haunted house. Even then, the house seemed to be waiting for him. As a kid, he had never dared break-in, and although plenty of his friends had boasted about being inside, he never believed them. He left Miller’s Creek immediately after he graduated high school, knowing that there were few opportunities in the small town. He and a friend had started a security agency that became very successful. They provided all...
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