I first read this story four years ago when I was teaching Speech Therapy at a Head Start program in Michigan City, Indiana. I have been looking for it ever since. I laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes as I read it to the class. My students were pre-school age and had all head the original tale numerous times and knew it by heart. They really enjoyed the new twist. I have told many people about this book since that time and will tell them that I finally found it on Amazon.com. If someone were to ask me I would say that this book should be on the best sellers list for originality.

Once again Pastor Boice manages to write and express himself in a way that the average person can understand. They way he applies the Bible to everyday real life situations is amazing.

This book is a must have in your library.

Living With Anxiety provides an important plan on how to cope with anxiety without medication: an explanation which helps readers form basic understanding on anxiety, from its sources and manifestation to methods of control. Exercises and specific strategies are outlined.

Edmund Crispin is not known as a writer who features animals in his mysteries. Yet in "Swan Song," he gave us the bald, pub parrot that recited Heine in the original German.

In "Love Lies Bleeding," Mr. Merrythought, the ancient, slovenly bloodhound thwarted a double murder.

"The Long Divorce" introduces Lavender, the cat who sees Martians. (Either you have a cat who sees Martians---there is one perched on my printer right now, staring off into what humans refer to as 'empty space'---or else you will have to take Mr. Crispin's word that such perceptive cats exist.) Lavender, the marmalade-colored tomcat with unusual visual powers is instrumental in the capture of a murderer.

Murder is really secondary to the story of a village plagued by an anonymous letter-writer. Some of the letters are merely obscene. Others are poisonously factual.

Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford is importuned by an old friend to expose the anonymous letter-writer. And so Fen, microscopically disguised under the name of 'Mr. Datchery' (borrowed from Charles Dickens's "The Mystery of Edmund Drood") takes himself off to his friend's bucolic village.

"To an obbligato of bird-song Mr Datchery marched beneath a bright sky towards Cotton Abbas. And he carolled lustily, to the distress of all animate nature, as he walked....The directions given him at Twelford had been explicit. But since he believed himself to possess an infallible bump of locality, he was soon tempted to modify them with a variety of short cuts, and after about three miles he discovered, much to his indignation, that he was lost."

Is that or is that not Fen to the life?

"The Long Divorce" (1952) is eighth in Crispin's series of mysteries starring his literate, cynical, sometimes bumptious amateur detective. It is also a comedy of rural, post-war England. The characters are dead-on: the army veteran who is trying to stop smoking; the female physician who is struggling to build a practice in a conservative backwater; the teenager who both loves and is ashamed of her obnoxious, money-grubbing father.

Many of the mystery writers of the 1940s and 1950s were guilty of creating one-dimensional female stereotypes, or going off on the occasional anti-feminist rant. Margery Allingham, Rex Stout, and John Dickson Carr come readily to mind as producing examples of this type of writing. Crispin also creates the occasional stereotype, especially in his early novels and some of his short stories, but the characters in "The Long Divorce" are fully and fascinatingly realized---especially the women (okay, okay---except for the innkeeper's wife and the sluttish barmaid. But they are very minor players).

Crispin also works in an ongoing and thoughtful dialogue on suicide, and there is a hair-raising scene where Fen just manages to prevent a young girl from killing herself.

"The Long Divorce" is a classical Golden-Age British mystery, a thoughtful essay on suicide, and a marvelous, occasionally hilarious study of the rural English character. I feel the same frustration that Fen felt, when at story's end he reveals his true name to a gathering of the book's characters---and very few of them have heard of him.

Why isn't Fen at least as well-known as Lord Peter or Miss Marple or Nero Wolfe? He certainly deserves to be.

Mollie Gillen's biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery for "The Canadians" series provides readers with an excellent introduction to the life of the author of "Anne of Green Gables." Readers will recognize some strong parallels between Montgomery's childhood and her literary creations like Anne, Emily of New Moon, and the Story Girl. Montgomery's mother died when the baby was only 21 months old and she was raised by her maternal grandparents in Cavendish, on Prince Edward Island. However, young readers who have been enchanted by Montgomery's novels might be surprised to learn that the author was quite unhappy as an adult. Gillen not only provides standard biographical detail regarding the author's publication history, she gets into her strong friendships with pen pals Ephraim Weber and George Boyd MacMillan, as well as her troubled marriage to the Reverend Ewan Macdonald. What emerges is a rough yet compelling psychological portrait of the author. This 64-page book is illustrated with a couple of dozen black & white photographs representing the people and places in Montgomery's life, many of which I saw last summer when I honeymooned on PEI. Many of the pages contain a question for readers to answer from the accompanying text (e.g., "What is blank verse?", "Why would the town need a taxidermist?"). Ultimately, Gillen's biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery will make young readers think about the relationship between the personal lives of an author and the stories they write about. I can imagine them making a point of finding out when a particular book was written and checking it against this biography to see what was happening in Montgomery's life at that point in time. However, I do not wish to suggest that this is strictly a juvenile biography, for despite its brevity it will prove insightful to adult readers as well as those who the age of Anne and her kindred spirits.

This is the perfect book for any true fan of Anne of Green Gables, Emily of New Moon or Pat of Silverbush. It is a 32 page book in the picture book format that is loaded with photos, articles, news clippings, history and little known facts about the life of the Canadian author, L.M. Montgomery, who created all of these wonderful characters and many more in her books and stories about life in Prince Edward Island. Unlike several of the longer biographies that have been written about Montgomery, this one can be read in an afternoon and combines plenty of visual fare along with the written details of this amazing woman's life. This is a book that adults who have loved Anne will find satisfyingly interesting as well as one that is suitably concise and brief. Older children will enjoy the breezy conversational style in which it is written. Photographs abound, including ones of Montgomery's various homes, her children and her husband, as well as youthful friends and "beaus" and even her favorite cat, Lucky. It traces her life from her earliest days, through growing up, her time as a teacher, a newspaper woman, a professional writer, as the author of Anne of Green Gables and the myriad other titles that followed, and as a wife and mother. Excerpts from her journals provide special insight into her heart and mind and I found these to be the most thrilling parts of all. A chronology of all her books is included as well as several websites that concern L.M. Montgomery and her books. Wonderful little tidbits are numerous and include the personal details about writing Anne of Green Gables, the starts and stops, the interruptions, the rejection slips and tears. We learn that Montgomery's secondhand typewriter didn't type capital letters very well and didn't type "w" at all! I really enjoyed this book and I believe any fan of this gifted author's work will delight in it, too. It is especially encouraging and cheering to young writers.

Marion Montgomery is a national treasure. He is consistently the most trenchant critic of literary and philosophical thought at work today.

Gerhart Niemeyer once wrote a piece called (if I remember correctly) "Why Marion Montgomery Has To Ramble", and he does (!) but what delightful places he rambles to.

If you want to see how "Thomism" can be a living philosophy, then you can do no better than begin with Montgomery's writings.

I never knew that there are man-eating tigers until I read this book.On an island off the coast of India where for some reason the tigers eat people. Scientists don't know why. This book is very interesting and I recomend it!

This book gives detailed maps of all marine areas from Olympia to Malcom Island. If you are boating these courses...these maps are a must! The book reports any dangerous obstacles that may lie in your path, as well as shows you the best course for your destination.

WARNING: Although this is the 4th book in "The Road to Avonlea" series, the story takes place AFTER the 5th book, "Quarantine at Alexander Abraham's." Since it does matter somewhat to the telling of this particular tale, you will want to read the next book first.

Early on with the television series "Avonlea" the idea was clearly to adapt some of Lucy Maud Montgomery's better stories from the two "Chronicles of Avonlea" collections. While something was lost in the translation of "Old Lady Lloyd" from story to television, "The Materializing of Duncan McTavish" and "Quarantine at Alexander Abraham's" are superb adaptations. What they both share in common is that they used familiar figures in Avonlea from Sullivan Production's classic "Anne of Green Gables" movies: Marilla Cuthbert and Rachel Lynde, respectively.

Sara Stanley is not sure she is going to enjoy her first time at the Avonlea sewing circle, since she really does not know how to snow. But then something quite interesting happens. When all the ladies are talking about who had how many beaux way back when, Sara asks Marilla Cuthbert "Did you ever have a beau?" Having endured a lifetime of slurs because she never had a beau, Marilla defiantly declares "I had one once." In for a penny, in for a pound, Marilla weaves a fantasy about her beau whom she named Duncan, because it is her favorite name, and McTavish, because she sees an advertisement for McTavish Porous Plasters. Everyone is suitable shocked and Marilla cannot imagine what came over her. But as Marilla knows all too well, "if you do wrong, you will be punished for it sometime, somehow or somewhere." Who should arrive in town but Duncan McTavish, to sell his Porous Plasters, and Sara Stanley knows Fate has brought the two former lovers together again. Of course, this is news to the amazed and confounded Duncan McTavish.

I usually do not give 5 stars to a novelization, but Heather Conkie wrote both the teleplay and this storybook and she did a marvelous job of taking Montgomery's short story "The Materializing of Cecil" in the "Further Chronicles of Avonlea" and working it into the "Avonlea" series. Furthermore, any opportunity to have Colleen Dewhurst play Marilla again is to be cherished. "The Materializing of Duncan McTavish" was a first rate episode and Conkie proves in this novelization how well she understands the characters and the story.