“Coming Home Patricia Scanlan - femalefirst.co.uk” plus 2 more |
- Coming Home Patricia Scanlan - femalefirst.co.uk
- Not the Booker prize: vote for the winner - The Guardian
- 'The Vampire Diaries' Recap: Older Sexy Danger Guy Rules - Buddytv.com
| Coming Home Patricia Scanlan - femalefirst.co.uk Posted: 02 Oct 2009 07:24 AM PDT Today 15:26 Book Review - Coming Home Patricia Scanlan Two sisters - two very different lives. Alison's American dream is in tatters. Her highflying career is on the skids in the financial meltdown. Her Upper East Side apartment is now way beyond her means . But pride prevents her from telling her family back home just how bad things are. Olivia is fraught trying to juggle family, career, preparations for Christmas and organize a surprise party for their mother's seventieth birthday. How she envies, and sometimes resents, her sister Alison and her life of excitement and affluence in New York. Coming home is the last thing Alison wants to do, especially now that she's met a rather attractive, sexy, down to earth neighbour who doesn't believe in 'non exclusive dating' unlike her wealthy boyfriend, Jonathan. But family ties are strong. Alison and Olivia sort their differences, the party throws up a few surprises and Christmas brings changes for Alison that she could never have imagined before coming home Gritty family drama that turns up quit a few unexpected surprises, The Author: Patricia Scanlan Patricia scanlan was born in dublin, where she still lives. Her bestsellers are Apartment 3b; Finishing Touches; Foreign Affairs; Promises, Promises; Mirror, Mirror; City Girl; City Woman; City Lives; Francesca's Party; Two For Joy; Double Wedding; Divided Loyalties, Forgive And Forget and Winter Blessings, A Collection Of Quotes, Blessings, Poems and Reminiscences. What we think Alison Dunwoody, now jobless banking high flier, down on her luck moving out of her expensive uptown New York apartment to a fourth-floor studio on the wrong side of town not wanting to tell her family of her circumstances, will she be able to keep the secret when she returns home for her mother's surprise 70th birthday. Her sister - Olivia Hammond, harassed wife and mother of three, put upon daughter and sister-in-law, is trying to organise her mother's party, do her Christmas shopping and clear out the guest room for Kristy's return. Her mother - Esther Dunwoody, not relishing the thought of her pending birthday, hoping there won't be a fuss. Ester would rather get on with making the Christmas puddings while planning decorating the tree with her precious grandchildren. Little does she know there's a big celebration in store ...and certainly a few surprises. Gritty family drama that turns up quit a few unexpected surprises, Patricia Scanlan always manages to get the reader to empethise with her characters, an excellent read - Roslyn Manners Literature critic FemaleFirst |
| Not the Booker prize: vote for the winner - The Guardian Posted: 02 Oct 2009 03:27 AM PDT  The end is in sight for the six Not the Booker prize finalists. Photograph: Odd Andersen/AP It only seems like a few days ago that it was the height of summer and we were just starting out on the Not The Booker prize. Yet I woke up this morning in darkness. When I went outside the wind was lazily playing with the first few fallen leaves as well as the usual food wrappings, and it brought with it a fine misty rain. It was gone time I stopped pretending it wasn't autumn and bought a new coat. I also realised (with a jolt, since I made an error about timing on the last Not The Booker blog) that our competition was almost at a close. I had to hand things back over to you – the readers – and ask you to vote. And I will, after a few thoughts on the experiment so far. I'd say it's been a qualified success. Reading through the shortlisted novels has been a largely rewarding process. A poster called emilyanne said she nominated The Tin-Kin because she thought it was "interesting, well-written and worthy of wider attention". That's certainly true of the majority of the books. Five of them were a great pleasure to read and seemed to meet the approval of most posters, sparking lively debates about anything and everything from subjectivity in book reviews to unreliable narrators to the members of Led Zeppelin being killed when frozen blood falls from the sky. It's been fun. But (to paraphrase a point raised early on by MaxCairnduff) I didn't really think any of the books on the list had been unfairly missed off the Booker proper. Five of them were better than plenty of Booker-shortlisted books I've read in the past. (One was far better – but was written too late to make the list anyway.) But I've also liked other Booker-shortlisted books more than plenty of the nominees on our Not The Booker list. (And although I haven't managed to read the six in contention for this year's Booker, I have a sneaking suspicion I might have found a few of them more interesting.) Indeed, I also feel there were quite a few books on our very long longlist which were more worthy of attention than a few on the shortlist. I'm still smarting about the fact China Mieville's The City and the City and Peter Murphy's John the Revelator didn't get through. And the way they were knocked out still rankles. Clearly, there was a lot of vote ... rigging is the wrong word, but it's obvious that people who haven't read any of the books in question have been voting and encouraged to vote by vested interests. To an extent, that's all part of the fun. People often complain about the closed-shop elitism of the Booker, but the democratic alternative obviously has its faults too – as has been demonstrated here. The process has also increased my respect for large democratic awards like the Hugos, which manage to keep thousands of ardent SF fans (reasonably) happy year in, year out. Furthermore, the anarchic, free-wheeling nature of the voting system has revealed plenty about book PR – and the important role writers' and publishers' friends play in it. It would be a remarkably restrained publisher who didn't take advantage of such an opportunity to push a product they believe in. It would be an astonishingly relaxed author who didn't vote and/or encourage everyone he or she knows to vote, too. If I had a book on this list, I know I'd be plugging it mercilessly. All the same, some votes appear to have been more sincere than others. When I labelled Tomas as – to use the technical literary term – a bag of shite, not one voter came to its defence. Plenty came to agree that it is "truly awful", and "completely and utterly dreadful". Contrast that with Rana Dasgupta's Solo, where numerous posts were made registering (heavily capitalised) RAGE at my failure to declare the book a masterpiece. Even though I said I quite liked it. Indeed, judging by the heat of the comments, I'd be tempted to say Dasgupta is the favourite at this stage – although the fact more than one poster professed to have liked Simon Crump's Neverland gives me hope my own favourite might be in with a chance. But the decision is now in the hands not of the gods, but you. And voting couldn't be easier. All you have to do is type the name of your chosen book in the comments below (after reading the terms and conditions first, of course). In case you need help deciding, you can find reviews, comments and extracts relating to every nominee here. And in case you can't remember the names of the books, they are: Jenn Ashworth's A Kind Of Intimacy So who will win the Guardian mug? You have until midday on 6 October – the day of the Man Booker prize announcement – to decide. |
| 'The Vampire Diaries' Recap: Older Sexy Danger Guy Rules - Buddytv.com Posted: 01 Oct 2009 09:22 PM PDT In this episode of The Vampire Diaries, Damon is back to the business at hand, trying to ruin Stefan and Elena's romance with the help of his helpless puppet, Caroline. Sadly, Stefan spends the whole episode trying to kill his brother by poisoning him with a magical anti-vampire herb. See, it's Stefan who's being sneaky and underhanded, he's the true villain. At least Damon is upfront about how naughty he is. He's also honest when it comes to book reviews, as he bitches about how unbelievable the crappy second Twilight book is. Caroline insists he needs to read the first one, but Damon insists that Bella isn't so special and Edward is a pathetic whipped vampire. He's 100 percent right, only you can easily swap out Elena for Bella and Stefan for Edward. The brotherly feud leads up to the Founder's Party, some generic high society party where everything goes down. Elena notices the guest list from the original Founder's Party in 1864 and is confused to see the names Stefan and Damon Salvatore. The cover story is weak and thin, that their ancestors were also brothers fighting over a girl. Is Elena really that stupid? How can she not realize there's something seriously wrong with these two guys? However, Damon's mind games actually work this time, as he finally succeeds in giving Elena enough reason not to trust Stefan, since he won't actually tell her anything about himself. That all comes to an end when Elena sees the bruises and bite marks on Caroline. Now she doesn't trust Damon and runs back to Stefan. But she's still way too stupid to figure out that these guys are vampires. Damon managed to steal back some magic crystal, but he's unhappy that his plans fell apart, decides to finally eat and kill Caroline, but as you probably saw coming, Stefan spiked her drink, so when Damon bites her, he gets infected with the anti-vampire herb and goes down, allowing Stefan to grab him and lock him in the basement. But the magic crystal is left behind, and Caroline takes it. There's also an interesting subplot where Bonnie becomes a firestarter and another dull installment of the Vicki-Jeremy-Tyler love triangle. This time, it involved Jeremy guilting his sister into letting him keep a family watch. But the most important revelation in this episode of The Vampire Diaries is that the adults are far more interesting than I thought. Wacky Aunt Jenna reconnects with an old flame and we learn Caroline's mom is a cop while Tyler's dad is the mayor and his mom is a raging bitch. It's trickier than that, because the episode ends with a shocking and fantastic twist: Caroline's mom, Jenna's ex and Tyler's parents are all part of some secret Mystic Falls society that knows all about the vampires and is trying to stop them by finding and using the same watch Jeremy now has. Hey, The Vampire Diaries has a Watcher's Council! Now if only they'd let their witch become a lesbian, I could pretend I'm watching Buffy all over again.
-John Kubicek, BuddyTV Senior Writer
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