Month: October 2024

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#BlogTour: One Big Happy Family by Susan Mallery

For this blog tour, we’re looking at . For this blog tour, we’re looking at One Big Happy Family by Susan Mallery.

First, the review I posted to the book sites (Hardcover.app / BookHype.com / BookBub.com / TheStoryGraph.com / Goodreads.com):

Hallmarkie “Messy Family Comes Together” Type. This is a Susan Mallery book, and it is Christmas book from Susan Mallery – so you know you’re going to get a lot of drama, but in a very Hallmarkie manner where the drama never gets *too* intense and everything wraps up with a nice dose of Christmas magic by the end. Considering the popularity of both Mallery and Hallmark Christmas movies, this isn’t exactly a losing strategy… if a bit “been there, done that”.

Where Mallery manages to spin things with this particular one are, well, the particulars – and there are a lot of things here that aren’t exactly typical. Irritable Bowel Syndrome shown in all of its complexities in a book? Happens some, not exactly overly common in my experience. Female tow truck company owner? I actually am related to one – a cousin – but she’s literally the only one I had ever heard of before reading this book. Age gap romance where the *woman* is the older *and* is on the back side of “middle age” to boot? Done, somewhat, but rarely in this particular combination/ age range. On and on it goes.

Oh, and for anyone who says that this gets way too far out there with just how “together” everything gets… if you’ve read a few of my other reviews over the years, you know about my own family history – same side as the cousin above, actually. You see, both sets of my grandparents were divorced long before I was ever alive. But my mom’s parents in particular? My grandmother remarried, also before I could ever remember anything. My step grandfather was my “second grandfather” (the other died 5 weeks after my birth). And yet there was more than one instance of my grandmother and step-grandfather living on my grandfather’s land over the years, including at least one stint in his house with him. So my sense of “weird family relationships” may be a bit skewed, having seen this type of thing – along with several of the exact scenarios Mallery includes in this book – in my own (extended) family over the years.

Ultimately a solid book of its type, and one for anyone looking for a good Christmas family drama to check out.

Very much recommended.

After the jump, an excerpt from the book followed by the “publisher details” – book info, description, author bio, social links, and buy links.
Continue reading “#BlogTour: One Big Happy Family by Susan Mallery”

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#BookReview: The Weather Machine by Andrew Blum

Weather Machine : Political Machine :: forge : weave. Hey, first time I’ve ever used an analogy in that particular format in the title of a review. The answer, of course, is that all four are ways of making different things. Forging is the process of creating metal objects, weaving is the process of creating cloth objects. Similarly, a “political machine” is the process of creating some political outcome, and according to Blum in this text, a “Weather Machine” is the process of creating a… weather forecast.

Blum begins with a history of some of the earliest attempts at forecasting the weather for a given location, moving from the realm of religion and superstition to the realm of science – religion and superstition by another name, but sounding better to the “modern” ear. The history largely culminates with a discussion of the early 20th century concept of the “Weather Machine”, a giant warehouse full of human computers using slide rules to run calculations based on observations placed into a mathematical model in order to predict the weather.

An admiral goal well ahead of its time… but once computers (and particularly supercomputers) became a thing… perhaps an ideal no longer ahead of ours. It is here, in the era of computing, that Blum spends the rest of the text, showing how the first and earliest computer models found success all the way up to showing how certain modern models and teams work to forecast ever further out ever more rapidly… and how all of this now largely happens inside the computer itself, rather than in the suppositions of “trained meteorologists”.

In other words, this is a book not about weather itself, but about the process and, yes, *business*, of creating a weather *forecast* and the various issues and histories tha come to bear in this process.

Ultimately a very illuminating work about the business side of forecasting, Blum could have perhaps spent more time showing how say hurricane and tornado forecasts are formed and how much they have progressed in the last few decades, rather than forecasting more generally – but he also ultimately stayed more true to his general premise in staying more general, showing how forecasting *as a whole* has gotten so much more detailed without diving too deep into any particular area of forecasting itself.

Ultimately a rather fascinating look at a topic few people truly understand.

Very much recommended.

This review of The Weather Machine by Andrew Blum was originally written on October 3, 2024.

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#BookReview: Arkangel by James Rollins

Solid Sigma Tale. Unlike a certain reviewer who claimed that this was a standalone book, I’m going to tell you right now that you need to read at *least* books 14-17 (ish) before coming into this one in order to fully understand and appreciate it. But once you’ve read those other books, you’re going to want this one anyway… and you *will* appreciate likely the very same things I liked about this book – namely, certain elements of its ending. Which is all I’ll say without going into spoiler territory.

Beyond those ending elements, this is a standard-ish globe trotting Sigma Force action/ thriller, emphasis on the action. And yes, it is about as plausible as the Fast and Furious franchise at this point, but you don’t come into these kinds of tales wanting or expecting the ultra-realism of say Andy Weir’s The Martian. You come into these types of books *wanting* to see the motorcycle vs attack helicopter fights, the desperate and last second escapes from traps of various forms, the ultra close quarters action where blades get left stuck between arm bones… and, yes, with now *two* very well trained war dogs, Tucker and Kane and Marco’s scenes damn near steal the show every time they come up, ala the “motorcycle ride with the raptors” from the first Jurassic World movie that Universal’s Islands of Adventures’ Velocicoaster captures so well with its initial launch. Because *that* is the kind of adrenaline rush you want in a rollercoaster and in a tale like this, and by God James Fucking Rollins is going to give you that in *spades*.

Some people like Hallmarkie romance books. Others like This Is Us level dusty-rooms-every-other-scene dramas. Others like more pure scifi ala the aforementioned Weir or the more scifi based Rollins type action of Jeremy Robinson. Some like their fiction to be ghost chili level damn near erotica spicy, others don’t like reading the word “fuck” at all in anything whatsoever. There are all kinds of books for all kinds of readers, in other words, and if you like the type of book that Rollins continues to write, well, you’re gonna like this one too.

Very much recommended.

This review of Arkangel by James Rollins was originally written on October 1, 2024.

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#BookReview: The Holiday Cottage by Sarah Morgan

Forced (Yet Needed) Christmas Break. Another year, another Sarah Morgan Christmas tale. And yet again, if you like Hallmark Christmas movies – and so very many people very clearly do – you’re going to like this one. Perhaps more drama than many of those movies here, Imogen is truly broken – and with good reason, when we get her full backstory. She’s coping – she thinks – but even then, she *barely* has her ducks in a row. They’re more like cats than ducks, and they *really* don’t like walking in rows. Of course, much of this – she admits – she brought on herself.

Let’s face it, this is 2024, and it almost doesn’t matter your generation, from Boomer all the way down to Zoomer, far too many of us can identify *all too well* with Imogen.

But really, it is the *rest* of the tale – where Imogen is forced into exile and ultimately comes face to face with her past and all of its traumas that created the version of herself she now knows – that is where the true heart of this story is, the true magic – yes, with a bit of Christmas “magic” thrown in to boot. It is this part of the tale that gives it both its gravitas and its wonder, even as it also makes its characters ever more *real*.

Christmas has few Santas, but also few Scrooges. Few Grinches. Just a lot of Whos living their who-lives in their little who-world, doing the best they can.

And here, Morgan hits that particular message out of the ballpark. Kudos to Morgan, and, since I’m writing this review on the day my beloved Atlanta Braves begin their extremely unlikely 7th straight Major League Baseball postseason run, let me just toss in a “Go Braves” and a #ChopOn as well – even though it has *nothing* to do with the book at all. 😀 May they get a bit of the magic of this book and make a *truly* unexpected season.

Very much recommended.

This review of The Holiday Cottage by Sarah Morgan was originally written on October 1, 2024.

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#BookReview: The Christmas Inn by Pamela Kelley

If Bobby Flay and Candace Cameron Bure Had A Baby. Particularly a “baby” in the business sense (aka, a company 😉 ), this is probably what it would look like. Fans of both the Hallmark Channel and the Food Network are going to love this, as the plot itself *is* very stereotypically Hallmarkie (and, given that their Christmas movies in particular seem to be looked forward to all year by *millions*… perhaps this isn’t a bad thing) and yet the level of detail Kelley goes into when describing the food… well, I daresay Gordon Ramsey himself would have a challenge trying to make words on paper sound so utterly delectable.

Now, if this isn’t your scene… eh, maybe you like the women’s fiction and/ or romance elements here and don’t care so much about the foodie side or the Hallmarkie side. In which case, you’re still going to enjoy this book. But if you’re looking for Michael Bay action where there are explosions just because the “camera” turned… yeah, this isn’t that. If you’re looking for a Jeremy Robinson style balls to the wall scifi action… yeah, this isn’t that either. But for what it *is*, it is done quite well – well enough that if Kelley can get this into enough hands, she’s going to have quite the success on her hands.

Very much recommended.

This review of The Christmas Inn by Pamela Kelley was originally written on October 1, 2024.

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#BookReview: The Sullivan’s Island Supper Club by Susan M. Boyer

Solid Story Suffers Slipshod Storytelling. Wait. Sexton. You rated this thing 5* and yet you’re telling me *in the title of the review* that it actually had major problems? Yes. Why? Because just because *I* thought the multi-perspective/ prologue-as-flashforward approach didn’t work as well for this story as Ms. Boyer had hoped doesn’t mean that *you* will. And beyond that disagreement on storytelling (or perhaps even editing, really) approach, this actually was a solid story akin to a South Carolina Low Country version of Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid, perhaps without the atmospheric nature of how Reid chose to tell that story. It has the same level of overall drama and mystery, and the actual tale being told here was just as good if not better – really depends there on whether you prefer a more genteel Old Money East Coast lifestyle or a more glitzy Nouveau Riche West Coast lifestyle. As a native Son of the South who grew up in the trailer parks of Georgia but rose to become a Vice President at a Fortune 50 global megacorporation (which sounds more impressive than it was, fwiw), yeah, I’m far more familiar with and a fan of the East Coast version. (Though this level of neighborhood snobbery, pettiness, and gossip are all aspects of the South that I’ve truly despised for most of my life.)

Still, ultimately Boyer tells a strong women’s fiction/ drama tale that does both her characters and her setting justice, and is a great mind vacation to the area for those looking to escape whatever in your “real” life has you needing it.

Very much recommended.

This review of The Sullivan’s Island Supper Club by Susan M. Boyer was originally written on October 1, 2024.