Angelfall

I good friend of mine presented me with Angelfall on my 36th Birthday.  Knowing what kinds of books I love, she took a leap of faith, having not read it herself. I'm so glad she did!

Angelfall is the first novel by writer Susan Ee and fits right into the YA books I seem to love so much.  Even though I had promised myself to stay away from all of the post-apocalyptic books out there (with December 21, 2012 coming and going without a bang), I immediately felt compelled to read the book after reviewing the book description. 

For those who've read The Hunger Games, you'll want to give Angelfall a read.  Angelfall's protagonist Penryn is reminiscent of Katniss.  Penryn is a caring, loving, protective daughter and sister whose mother has failed to live up to her motherly role, leaving her to protect her sister as their mother should.  She's strong willed and determined to help her family find a safe haven in a world that has been shattered by war.  In this case, their splintered world isn't decades after a man-made battle, it's only weeks after Angels have fallen from the skies, to completely obliterate the Earth as we know it. 

Without giving too much away, the book starts off with Penryn trying to escape her apartment with her mother and wheelchair bound sister.  They've been living as long as possible in an area that has become overwhelmed with street gangs, and during their attempted escape, Penryn's sister is taken by Angels.  She makes a deal with Raffe, an Angel whose wings were cut off, in hopes of finding her sister in exchange of finding someone to help Raffe reattach his wings.  On their journey to a location protected and inhabited by powerful Angels, they come across many obstacles, both humans and Angels, and they all discover there is much more to the post-apocalyptic world Earth has become. 

Shortly after reading Angelfall, I started following Susan Ee on Facebook. She was pleased to announce Angelfall becoming a movie in the near future. I can't wait to see Susan Ee's book brought to life on the big screen.  With all the action sequences and Angel wings flapping and flying, I expect it may even have a 3D release. Readers should also expect to see a sequel to the book in late 2013. I really hate having to wait this long, but I will be one of the first ones to purchase the book, and to see the movie. 

Beautiful Creatures

While anxiously awaiting the beginning of The Hobbit: An Unxpected Journey to start, 3D glasses on, popcorn in hand, with my son and husband seated to my left, I was saw the Beautiful Creatures movie trailer.  Instantly I knew this must have been based on a book, and was probably another YA (young adult) series.  Sure enough, I went home and found it on my Kindle.  As always, I started with the free preview download and sped through it, making my purchase for the book in no time.

For those YA readers out there, especially those who enjoy propular series like the Twilight Saga and The Hunger Games Trilogy (both of which I thoroughly enjoyed), you will most likely enjoy the first installment in the Beautiful Creatures series.  Think Bella and Edward.  However, this time we have Lena, a beautiful, mystical Caster (witch) and Ethan, a mere mortal who has fallen in love with the one girl he is told he can never have.  Like Bella and Edward, they refuse all laws of their respective supernatural worlds, and are determined to be together. 

Other interesting characters are mixed into the little southern town of Gatlin, where nothing is as it seems.  There's Macon, Lena's reclusive uncle the entire town seems to be scared by, and Amma, Ethan's surrogate mother with a deep family history rooted in mysticism.  The local Librarian is more than meets the eyes, and Ethan's dad is hopelessly stuck living in a room that embodies the smells and memories of Ethan's mother, who passed away within the past year.  There are good witches, bad witches, and something else in between.  Cheerleaders (think Mean Girls), jocks, the Ladies' Auxillary, and more can be found in Gatlin, all creating bumps on the way to Lena and Ethan's ultimate purpose: to halt Lena's destiny to cross over to the dark side, so to speak.

Personally, I love YA books because they are normally quick reads and are free from the adult romance that leads to affairs and, well, you know...  The series seems to have potential and I look forward to seeing it on the big screen.  Adults may not enjoy this book like the Twi-Hard Moms do, but I can see teens and early twenty-year-olds enjoying it.  If you're looking for something to read over a weekend or during a holiday break, Beautiful Creatures might be the one for you.

Know It All: The Little Book of Essential Knowledge (Excerpt #2)

The following is an excerpt from Know It All: The Little Book of Essential Knowledge by Susan Aldridge, Elizabeth King Humphrey and Julie Whitaker. You can read my review of this book here.

The Religions of the World

The map of world religions reflects the political and social history of humankind. Eternal quests for meaning, along with conquests, migration, trade, and evangelistic fervor have helped to shape the beliefs of nations and peoples alike.

Every human society has had some form of religious belief or practice. In simplest terms, religion is the belief that the world is inspired and directed by a superhuman power of some type.

Christianity, with some 2.1 billion followers, is the largest of the world's religions. Though it originally began in the Middle East, Christianity is no longer the dominant faith there. It is, however, the predominant religion in much of Europe and in North and South America.

Like some other religions, Christianity is divided into a number of different churches: In Russia, Orthodox Christianity is the leading religion. In South America, most Christians are Roman Catholics, and the same holds true in southern Europe.

Protestantism is more prevalent in both northern Europe and North America. With more than 1.5 billion adherents, Islam is the world's second most popular faith. Following the faith are most people of the Middle East and North Africa, a significant number in South and Southeast Asia, and long-standing minorities in the Balkans and eastern Europe. An influx of immigrants from former European colonies has seen the number of Muslims in Western Europe rise in recent decades.
Hinduism, the world's third largest religion, is prevalent in India, though large populations of Sikhs and Muslims can also be found on the Indian subcontinent.

Although Buddhism originated in India, the countries with the largest Buddhist populations are now China, Japan, and Southeast Asian states such as Vietnam and Thailand. Buddhism also has many followers in the Western world.

A notable exception to the dominance of Islam throughout the Middle East is Israel. Large populations of Jews are also found across Europe and North America, the latter home to more than 40 percent of the world's Jews. In fact, New York City has the second largest population of Jews of any city in the world, after Tel Aviv.

The United States is unusual for a developed nation in that a greater than usual proportion of its population holds religious beliefs, most commonly Protestant Christianity.

South America is predominantly a Catholic Christian continent. This is a legacy of the Spanish and Portugese Conquistadors, who brought the continent under colonial rule.

Africans retain many traditional religious practices in some regions. Christianity arrived more than two millennia ago, and Islam is the dominant religion of North Africa and West Africa.

India is a country of many religions. Four in every five Indians are Hindu, but there are also significant numbers of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains.

Australia is primarily Christian; however, its indigenous religions, centered around a belief in the ancient "Dreamtime" of creation, are key to its culture.

The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.

The above is an excerpt from the book Know It All: The Little Book of Essential Knowledge
A Reader's Digest book published in association with Quid Publishing. Copyright © Quid Publishing 2008.

Author Bios
Susan Aldridge has been a freelance science and medical writer for more than 15 years and has contributed to a number of magazines and websites. She lives in London.

Elizabeth King Humphrey has been a contributing writer, editorial advisor, copy editor, and co-designer for several magazines, books, and PBS documentaries. She lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Julie Whitaker has a master’s degree in anthropology and American studies. Whitaker has contributed to many books, including several encyclopedias. She lives on Vancouver Island, Canada.

Know It All: The Little Book of Essential Knowledge (Excerpt)

The following is an excerpt from Know It All: The Little Book of Essential Knowledge by Susan Aldridge, Elizabeth King Humphrey and Julie Whitaker. You can read my review of this book here.
Earth’s Climate: What Gives?
The Earth's average temperature has fluctuated greatly throughout its history. Today we worry about polar ice caps and glaciers melting more quickly than ever before. Still, there have been times in the past when ice and snow were virtually absent from the planet. Could we be headed for another iceless age?
The term ice age sometimes refers to periods when ice sheets were more extensive than usual. But these times are more accurately called glacials, and they occur within an ice age; the periods between glacials are called interglacials. We are now in an interglacial in what is probably the Earth's fourth great ice age. What has distinguished the last 200 years is the melting of ice at apparently unprecedented rates as the temperature of the Earth gradually grows warmer.
Climate Change
In the early nineteenth century the Swiss-German geologist Jean de Charpentier suggested that the Alpine glaciers he had been studying had at one time been far larger. Later a Swiss-American geologist, Louis Agassiz, built on Charpentier's notion and proposed that Earth at one time had been completely covered by ice.
Ice Ages Past . . .
Since then, scientific advances have contributed to our understanding of the Earth's ice ages, and it is now thought that the first major ice age occurred some 2 billion years ago. Another ice age, 850 to 630 million years ago -- probably the most severe -- may have covered the entire globe in ice, a frosty scenario known as "Snowball Earth."
The end of that ice age seems to have coincided with the evolution of a great many tiny organisms, although whether there is a causal link between these events and what they might be remains a matter of debate.
Then, between 400 and 300 million years ago, another ice age struck, and the planet was again plunged into a cold period, known as the Karoo Ice Age, named for the glacial till (sediment) found in the Karoo hills of South Africa.
. . . and Present
The current ice age began some 40,000,000 years ago, reaching its coldest period about 3,000,000 years ago. The last glacial period (often referred to inaccurately as an ice age) ended about 10,000 years ago, and the first human civilizations began to flourish shortly after. How global warming will affect Earth's cooling and warming cycles -- and, more urgently, sea level as glaciers and the polar ice caps melt -- is the pressing issue of our age.
The Global Greenhouse
Without the greenhouse effect, a natural process that heats the Earth's surface and atmosphere, our average temperature would be a frigid 0°F (–18°C) -- ensuring a permanent ice age, to say the least. The warmed globe radiates what is called "infrared radiation," most of which should travel through atmospheric layers to space. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s, more and more infrared radiation began to be absorbed by naturally occurring greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2). The increase of average concentrations of CO2, from about 280 parts per million in 1700 to about 380 parts per million in 2005 is the major cause of global warming.
In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) asserted that human activities -- including the use of fossil fuels -- was “very likely” the catalyst for global warming.
Some scientists estimate that the Earth's temperature will rise by as much as 9°F (5°C) by 2050, while others heatedly disagree. What isn't in dispute is that the world's ice is in a literal meltdown. For instance, the largest single block, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in the Arctic, lasted some 3,000 years before it started to crack in 2000; a mere two years later it was split through and is now breaking apart.
The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.
The above is an excerpt from the book Know It All
A Reader's Digest book published in association with Quid Publishing. Copyright © Quid Publishing 2008.
Author Bios
Susan Aldridge has been a freelance science and medical writer for more than 15 years and has contributed to a number of magazines and websites. She lives in London.
Elizabeth King Humphrey has been a contributing writer, editorial advisor, copy editor, and co-designer for several magazines, books, and PBS documentaries. She lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Julie Whitaker has a master’s degree in anthropology and American studies. Whitaker has contributed to many books, including several encyclopedias. She lives on Vancouver Island, Canada.

An Intimate Understanding of America's Teenagers: Shaking Hands with Aliens

As a thirty-something mom to a kindergartener and twin infants, I face daily challenges that test not only my parenting skills, but my negotiation skills, time-management skills, communication skills and a laundry list full of other skills needed to make my family and home a happy and safe place to be. As a step-mother to a sixteen year old, I have to work from a completely different playbook. Although I feel like it wasn't that long ago I was actually a teenager myself, I am reminded of just how far removed I am from those teenage years. It is almost as if I am an outsider looking at something completely foreign to me… something so different from what I remember my teenage years as being… something completely alien.

Bruce J. Gevirtzman has appointed himself as the expert on teenagers, and rightly so. He's spent more than 30 years teaching teens, being active in their lives in many different ways, and his hands-on experience has given him the ability to bridge the gap of understanding between teens and their parents. An Intimate Understanding of America's Teenagers: Shaking Hands with Aliens is the ultimate guide for understanding and communicating with teens. Not only is it appropriate for parents to read, but Gevirtzman speaks directly to teachers and teens in the book as well. If teens came with a user's manual, this would be it!

Although my husband's daughter doesn't live with us and I don't have a lot of contact with her, Gevirtzman's book and the topics discussed have shed a much needed light upon some of the concerns I've had in understand where she is coming from. I've also gotten a glimpse into the future of what I will be facing, because as Gevirtzman points out quite clearly, although times have changed and some issues are more serious with teens than they were when we were that age, teens are facing the same issues as before and they always will.

An Intimate Understanding of America's Teenagers is broken down into chapters that revolve around one specific topic each, beginning with communication and the unique language of each generation of teens, to the topics of self image, athletics and other extra curricular activities, sex, controlling parents, and a large array of other topics that make up the life of America's teens. In many of the chapters, Gevirtzman presents different answers to straight-shooting questions that teens themselves have provided. Answers to questions like what they see when they look into a mirror, why they participate in sports, would they tell a friend's parents if they knew their friend was doing drugs or other illegal activities, and even why males pierce their ears. It isn't necessarily the questions that will shock parents. Actually, it is quite the opposite. The questions are the same questions we as parents should pose to our teens at some point. The truthful answers are in part quite shocking when we realize that finally, teens are being honest and open (mostly), as this peek into their reality is very telling to their situations. All of this is provided in a way that only Gevirtzman could supply. His intimate knowledge of teens, from public faces they put on for the world to see, to private challenges they face every day, these teens share with him a slice of their lives that many parents and teachers never see or are just to pre-occupied to notice.

As Gevirtzman points out, being a teen is such a small snippet in time compared to the long life many of us have. However, the drama and effects of those few short years can not only last a lifetime, but it can also help (and often does) shape who we are for the rest of our lives. One off-the-wall incident in our teen years could change our very core and affect how we respond to things decades down the road. So why aren't we spending more time with teens, understanding them, so we can help make this time better for them? An Intimate Understanding of America's Teenagers does exactly that. It truly is a handbook for the ins and outs of the American Teenager.

Gevirtzman's shares countless stories of tragedy and triumph from the lives of the teens he's known over his three-plus decades of experience. An Intimate Understanding of America's Teenagers is also as funny as it is endearing and educational. Gevirtzman's experience as a playwright creates a page-turning book with the comic relief needed to make the seriousness of
the topics easier to swallow.

So whether you've got a teen, pre-teen, a tween or even a toddler, An Intimate Understanding of America's Teenagers has the information you need to make it through those few tough years that challenge even the most solid and stable families. Be sure to either read it with your teen if you have one, or ask them to take the time to read it too. It will benefit you both in ways that will not only makes those tough years a little easier to manage, but as Gevirtzman points out, the information he provides will help open those much-needed lines of communication that are key to having a good and loving relationship with the person most important in your teen's life… you.

More on An Intimate Understanding of America's Teenagers...

An Intimate Understanding of America's Teenagers: Shaking Hands with Aliens
By Bruce Gevirtzman

Gevirtzman takes us inside the minds of today's youths and contrasts them with teens of decades past. Including interviews with fellow teachers, Gevirtzman's book is threaded with one recurring truth: "Sadly, instead of parents and teachers and lawmakers and the public looking out for our kids, today's kids are largely left to fend for themselves," he concludes.

Know It All: The Little Book of Essential Knowledge (Review)

At least once each time my husband and I sit down to watch television, I spout off some useless trivia about Hollywood stars that he has absolutely no interest in. It usually starts off with something like "Hey, did you know the lead singer of that group is married to..." or "That actress' mom is the same actress who played in…" and so on. His usual response sounds something more like an animal's grunt, far from the response full of amazement or shock that my best friend would have supplied. Either way, I still enjoy sharing this useless information because I believe - rather, I dream of the day it will come in handy for him. Who knows, maybe he'll end up on Jeopardy one day and the question to the answer will be something he learned from me. Yeah right… dream on!

But now I have a plethora of facts to quote to him. Everything from protons, neutrons and electrons, to facts about the Cold War, Stock Markets, Religion, Philosophy, art, music and so much more. Facts that are more likely to be topics of interest on Jeopardy as opposed to which actor is divorcing over a love interest they met on their last movie set. Not that either of us will ever end up on Jeopardy, but Know It All: The Little Book of Essential Knowledge is in fact the best book I have on hand to help me feel like the studious citizen I wish I had time to be!

Know It All wraps up almost a hundred different subjects in just two pages each of straight facts. Each topic provides just enough information on its subject to enlighten and educate the reader, in preparation of conversations that could make their way around to these talking points. These "subjects of study" are broken down into nine different chapters of the book, including "Invention and Discovery," "Conflicts of the Modern Age" and "Religion and Thought." Know It All wraps up many things I should have learned (or remembered) from my schooling, but I either didn't pay attention that day, or I didn't use it, and years ago, I truly did lose it.

Know It All also throws in special features - little snippets of information packaging a topic in "an even smaller nutshell" like "Conversation Starters" you can use in casual situations, and even quiz pages to review what you may have learned in that chapter. Even as the book educates you, it does it in a fun and interesting way that will leave the reader wanting more. Each subject is an easy read as there are no fillers and the information doesn't go on and on - just the facts ma'am!

So, whether you are simply looking to increase your knowledge of worldly subjects, or you are interested in cramming for that Jeopardy try-out, Know It All is your best and quickest bet to learning more on the topics that not only come up from time to time, but actually have something to do with your day-to-day life.

Personally, I plan on memorizing a chapter or two so that when my husband and I are drinking our morning coffee and watching MSNBC, I can throw something even more meaningful out into the conversation at hand. Perhaps then I will watch his eyes light up in amazement of my broader scope of knowledge. That would be a nice change from his uninterested grunt over my Hollywood dribble! Thanks Know It All! Now I can feel like a know-it-all, too!