Do you like murder stories? Or do you prefer mysteries? Well this new book Twisted Summer, is a mix of both murder and mystery. Don't worry though, it isn't scary for those of you who aren't into scary stories. I know what you're thinking right now what is the book about? And what kind of murder? If I read on will it give the book away? No, I hate when people give away a good story. When fourteen-year-old Cici comes back to Crystal lake after two years everything seems fine at first. Then the new maid tells Cici of a murder that a boy named Brian committed. Cici can't believe that Brian would murder anybody, so she and Brian's brother Jack get together and make a list. This list contains suspects, their opportunity, and why they would desire to murder a mischievous girl in her teens. When they find the list is gone, things start to seem more serious. Cici's grandmother died, the list is gone, and things were definently twisted. This book brings you to a stomach turning ending of truth. Since Cici and Jack had made the list everybody seemed to be a suspect. When Cici snuck into the judges office she found something very peculiar. In the Judge's ( the owner of the house) recordings of cash, she finds that each month for about one and a half years, the judge has been paying one thousand dollars cash to somebody for something. Then she hears the screen door open and hurries out of the office. The next day she remembers in horror that she left the list in the judge's office and hurries to get it only to find it was gone. Did the judge find it? Or was it the maid? This was my favorite scene in the book because it left me on a cliff hanger, and I like cliff hangers. I'm afraid I can't give away anymore because it would give the book away. Believe me the ending is a real surprise.

I have tried several of the receipes and my favorites are the Cruncy Pecan Chicken, Blueberry Banana Pancakes and several of the delicious deserts. However, I must say that the majority of the recipes would be enjoyed more if you lived in a seashore area where a lot of the fresh seafood was readily available. The chowders and seafood recipes are very good. This is probably not a cookbook you would use for your everyday cooking. What I enjoyed most about this cookbook was the commentary and the beautiful photos and a reminder of my many enjoyable times on the Vineyard.

I have friends who recently dined at the Black Dog and they said they enjoyed the food but did not enjoy the long wait to be seated. However, they did come back with yet another T-shirt and mug with the Black Dog.

Anyway, contemptuous of the restaurant as I am, I sneered when my friend came home from college with this cookbook. Even the recipes sound snotty-- lots of heavy sauces, and expensive, obscure ingredients. But I agreed to make the clam chowder in the book just as the recipe called for, and it was amazing. We made a few others, and they were all at least very good. There are lots of neat ideas for omlettes.

My advice is to consider getting the cookbook, but avoid Martha's Vineyard at all costs.

Sissy Leblanc is a funny, sexy, wild, charming, Southern Bell of a character that you just can't help but like. She's the friend that you can call in the middle of the night that would come running.

Having been married to her husband since she was 17, Sissy's real love of her life comes back to town 14 years later and thus the "Scandalous Summer" begins.

The authors style of writing is wonderful - fast paced but the characters and story have depth.

"A girl has to find out if there's life before death", "When making a life decision you can't trust your head" are just two of the "rules" from the Southern Belle's Handbook that Sissy lives by throughout her life.

This is SO MUCH BETTER then "Ya Ya Sisterhood".

A funny, touching, warm story. Highly recommended!!

But one does not have to be a Francophile also to find it gorgeous. The narrator of this seemingly autobiographical novel is a young Russian reminiscing about his remarkable French grandmother, a woman who, after her marriage to a Russian, lived nearly all her adult life in Siberia and whom he visited summers as a teenager. And it is also the story of the importance of dreams, how they meld imagination and recollection and how they infuse our lives, giving meaning and joy, especially in times of want or sorrow.

The narrator's dreams, sparked by the stories his grandmother tells of turn-of-the-century Paris/Atlantis, are not limited by real-life privations, or limited to his own era, country, social circle, or family. Instead, they allow him to roam through an earlier Paris, to know presidents, to banquet at sumptuous dinners of innumerable courses, to experience romantic love, to share a culture and language with Proust, to see the Paris opera or the circus. Though he admires the "tempestuous streets" of Paris, so different from the "perfect social calm" and "somnolent tranquility" of Siberia, he discovers, not surprisingly, that his peers resent his inner life-it is "a provocation in the eyes of those who live...in the present."

While the narrator tries to reconcile this constant emotional tension with the simultaneous pressures of adolescence, we come to know his grandmother as an extraordinary woman, a woman who chooses to remain in Siberia where she has suffered greatly and where her husband lies buried, and we can ache for her grandson, whose desire to learn firsthand what she already knows causes him turmoil. To call this a coming-of-age novel would be to do it a great disservice-the narrator's journey to self-awareness is absolutely unique and provides a thrilling new perspective from which the reader can contemplate his/her own life

The Russian summers of the title are those the narrator and his sister spent visiting their grandmother, Charlotte, in the town of Saranza on the eastern edge of the steppes.

Charlotte was born in France in 1903 and was subsequently trapped in Russia in 1921 at the outbreak of the revolution. She has lived an outwardly harrowing life, surviving famine, civil war, a rape by a band of thieves in the desert as well as the seemingly endless cold and snows of the Siberian winter.

When she finally marries a Russian soldier, he is twice reported dead at the Front and Charlotte escapes the German air raid with her two children, working as a nurse in army field hospitals. She is a woman who embraces the vastness of Russia, yet manages to keep her Frenchness alive.

And it is this Frenchness, this essence of all things French, that she wishes to pass on to her grandchildren. Apparently she succeeds. Standing on Grandmother Charlotte's balcony, young Makine looks out over the steppes as he comes to believe that he has found the secret of "being French." He says, "The countless facets of this elusive identity had formed themselves into a living whole." He finds this elusive identity of the living whole in stark contrast to his native Russia and longs for France and its "well ordered mode of existence."

Grandmother Charlotte's tales of her years in France are triggered by a suitcase full of crumbling family photos and yellowed newspaper clippings. Miraculously, this suitcase has survived the Russian Civil War, famines and purges, Stalin's prison camps and Hitler's invasion.

These precious clippings and photos allow Charlotte's grandchildren to participate in the French joie de vivre and experience such things as the visit of Tsar Nicholas to France in 1896. As a child growing up under the regime of Leonid Brezhnev, Makine has trouble believing that the man described as the bloody butcher of the people actually shook hands with the President of the Republique Francais as the band played the Marseillaise. Grandmother Charlotte even remembers and can recite, the poem composed for the Tsar's visit, a poem that assured him he had earned "the love of a free people."

Even more unbelievable to young Makine is his grandmother's revelation that only a few years after the visit from Tsar Nicholas, this very same President of France died of a heart attack in the arms of his beautiful mistress.

His grandmother's childhood discovery of a plaque in a Paris alleyway proves to be prophetic. This plaque commemorates the spot where, in 1407, an assassin thrust his sword through the body of the Duke of Orleans after an amorous tryst with his sister-in-law, the Queen, the lovely Isabeau. Makine, himself, as an adult, will find himself, almost miraculously, in this very same alleyway.

In between his idyllic visits to Saranza and Grandmother Charlotte, Makine is growing up in grim shabbiness in his parents' home in Moscow. Large apartment blocks built in the grandiose Stalinist style stand out in stark contrast to the "mysterious French essence" of Grandmother Charlotte and her home on the steppes. Makine wants to literally absorb France's Belle Epoque, but he must contend with his socialist schoolmates instead.

Impressionable and in love with a land he can only dream about, Makine rebels against both the ordinariness of Soviet life and the grandmother he loves but fails to understand.

A true master of prose, Makine contrasts Russia and France beautifully. Several times in the novel, Russia is mentioned as breathing and alive; the world of harsh realities. France, on the other hand, is a dream world and its images are spun from the rich and elaborate Impressionistic language of fantasy.

Although Dreams of My Russian Summers was both written and translated by a man, the imagery evoked is decidedly feminine, especially that pertaining to France; the petite pomme of a smile in a photograph, the coupling hawkmoths with the death's head and the repeated image of the Verdun stone.

The entire book, however, is the story of a young boy's maturation into a sensitive and intelligent man. A man who loves the present, yet has come to revere the past. A man who is thankful for the contrast provided in his life, a contrast he calls "an optical illusion" offering the most luminous moments of his life.

Readers are offered nothing less than the beautiful fragility of a reverie, to be visited again and again.

Mystery solved!

Brad and Murry have covered the territory well with a book that starts at the beginning (section 1) and builds (section 2) so that anyone reading the book can walk away confident in the uses of templates, new template features in DWMX and the awesome timesaver available in library items.

Instructional and easy to read material, complimented by easy to understand exercises reveal the power in templates, library items and snippets.

A great book for those new to the power in DWMX and a good reference guide for those who understand DWMX but just haven't gotten the hang of templates and library items.

Dreamweaver MX Templates thoroughly covers not only basic template usage, but also the programmability features of templates. It shows you how to manipulate the template programming language to create extensive template pages with a handful of code.

All in all, the book is very well laid out and easy to understand. There's tons of information packed into the book with plenty to "wow" the reader with a lot of "I didn't know Dreamweaver templates could do that". If you're serious about tapping deeper into Dreamweaver MX templates, this is the book to buy.

The templates have become mini-programs in a way which allow the designer a vast amount of control - control that I didn't even realize was possible. I bought this book to learn about Editable Tag Attributes and was amazed at what can be done with the new templates.

In the first section of the book, the authors cover new template features -explaining them in depth. The second section of the book walks you through the development of a template-based web site. The authors also explain pitfalls so that you can avoid making mistakes in your design.

This is a great book and I highly recommend it. The template snippet extension that they provide is fantastic too. To learn more about his book, visit the author site...

Will continue to read Maeve Binchy, she's great. I highly recommend most all of her books. This just wasn't one of my favorites.

Firefly Summer actually captures about 4 summers in Mountfern, a tiny town with three pubs. The most notable one is run by the Ryan family, led by the spirited mother Kate, the artistic father John, the lively twins, Dara and Michael, and younger brothers Declan and Eddie. Their livelihood is threatened when Patrick O'Neill, an American searching for his Irish roots, comes to his long-deserted family estate next to the Ryan's pub and decides to build a huge hotel there.

The twins fall in love with the beautiful O'Neill children, Kerry and Grace. Grace joins the circle of schoolchildren; older Kerry is shipped off to boarding school. But he meddles in Mountfern anyway.

Most aching to read is one friend's attempts to fit in and never quite managing it, a disabling accident to a parent, and the twins' inner turmoil as they struggle to grow up. Everyone can identify with that!

What, May Taylor and her daughter, Kylie experienced in their life as Kylie helped her mother to find love and hapiness as what my daughter and I went through life together in few years back.

May Taylor of the Bride Barn also mentioned "Twice" in Firefly Beach at Firefly Ball. May Taylor knows Caroline Renwick. My smile came to me when read this part in Firefly. How wonderful I thought!!

I think that it is so great that Luanne Rice had put the above excellent personal touch into her novels. I think it makes the reader, I don't know about others but for me it did, feels involved and want to read more and more of her next book. As I now just discovered that her next book "Safe Harbour" has Sam Trevor, Joe Connor's brother, of Firefly Beach as a main male character. This is so great, Just can't wait for "Safe Harbour" to come to New Zealand.

As with most novels, I read page after page anticipating the "big moment", the "turning point", a "climax", anything to cite as the work's purpose or point. I never did quite accomplish that.I found myself reading and rereading looking for the part that I must have skipped over accidentally. I have yet to find the secret chapter.

But what I accomplished wasn't known to me at the time but became clear after reflecting. The goal of the book is to help its readers acquire an inner peace within themselves; one that I found to be best appreciated in one's older years. I dont think that I was ready to read the book presently, but can see myself one day rocking in a glider totally enjoying and appreciating Jewett's novel.

A collection of quiet "sketches," this volume is a reminder of the fine writing produced by some of the earliest American realists. Critics have recently revised their first opinions of the book as a "small success" and now consider it a classic of American literature. The stories revolve around a young writer who goes to the coastal town of Dunnet Landing, Maine. In the company of Mrs. Todd, a venerable and locally revered herbalist who gives her lodging, the writer comes to know and write about the people of the area. The result is a fascinating look into personalities shaped and distilled by life on that severe coast into persons of rare character. This edition also contains eight of Jewett's best short stories, including "A White Heron" and "The Queen's Twin."

No plot devices or car chases here--this is a book to read on a rainy afternoon when nostalgia and melancholy threaten to overwhelm. It's comfort food like grandma used to make--reassuring, soul-fortifying, and full of the capacity to cheer. It's also addictive--once you take a bite out of Pointed Firs, you can't stop.

Similar author: Mary Wilkins Freeman

Instead, this is really the story of Lupica and his sons (with occasional appearances by his dad and wife). It tells how the events of 1998 impacted them, where they were at important times, etc.

If you're looking for history or for an account following the players, look elsewhere. If you'd like to read a fascinating, if slight, view of the impact of the Great Homer Race on a family of baseball fans, you'll love this book.