We all have that book, the best book you’ve never read, right? Maybe it’s The Time Traveler’s Wife or Water for Elephants or East of Eden. For me, it was Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. I’ve heard about this book for years, I’ve had book snobs and non-book snobs both tell me it’s fabulous. But I always had something else I was more interested in, until this tour came up and I figured this is the perfect time to hunker down and read it.

Outlander is about Claire Randall, a 28-year-old nurse during WWII, who, when the book opens, has just been reunited with her husband, Frank. They had to be apart during the war while Claire nursed soldiers coming in from the battlefields. They’re celebrating a second honeymoon in Scotland, researching more into Frank’s ancestry, and visiting famous sites in Scotland such as Loch Ness. Together they happened upon a circle of stones where they observed some women performing a pagan ceremony. When Claire goes back to these stones to get a plant she saw, she’s transported back 200 years. She’s disoriented and think the battle taking place below is a re-enactment on a movie set. It’s here that she’s found by Captain Jack Randall, one of Frank’s ancestors that they were doing research on, and he’s about to rape her when she’s saved by Jamie Fraser. Jamie and the men he’s riding with take her back to their castle, where her skills as a nurse are put to use.

More story blah blah blah Claire and Jamie end up marrying out of convenience (to both of them), and they spend most of the book trying to get away from or running from or avoiding Captain Jack Randall. Jamie has a long backstory involving Randall that puts Jamie in Randall’s crosshairs.

That blah blah blah? That wasn’t me being lazy, it’s just that there’s SO MUCH STORY that it’s hard to talk about the book without going on and on and on. And you’d think that this would make the story drag, but it’s totally the opposite. Gabaldon has a way of giving you all the details of the surroundings and the characters and the situation, but she’s never repeating herself, I never felt like I wanted to skip pages just to get back to the meat of the story.

I saw Gabaldon last year around this time when the seventh book in this series, An Echo in the Bone, was released. I KNEW I would love her books because she was describing this scene that she wrote. It was in 18th century Scotland in a tavern, and she described how the light shone through the window, and she saw a barmaid push a pint of ale into the hands of a man sitting at one of the tables. She said she didn’t know why this barmaid had to put the glass into the man’s hands. As she’s mulling this over, she happens to be taking her daughter to soccer practice, and it dawns on her that the man in the tavern is blind, which was why the barmaid had to physically put the pint into the man’s hands. This revelation caused her to miss the exit for her daughter’s soccer practice! That’s when I knew I’d love her books. Because she’s not inventing this story so much as peeling back the layers of a story already there. For me, those are the best authors.

The only thing I wasn’t prepared for was Gabaldon’s unflinching willingness to put her characters in situations that broke my heart. Jamie endures this one thing that OH MY GOD seemed worse than death. And Claire! The things she had to do to help Jamie and stay alive. But it doesn’t detract from how BEAUTIFUL the story is.

One thing I loved is the use of dialect. You never forget Claire’s in 18th Scotland. I could hear Jamie’s accent as he affectionately referred to her as ‘mo duinne’. I think I swooned.

I have to temper this love fest by saying that it did take me a little while to get into the story, and I was not too interested in the sex scenes, not because they weren’t hot (they were), but because I wasn’t invested in Claire and Jamie as a couple. By the end, though, I was ready for some romance!

There is so much I’m leaving out. But with a story this epic, there’s no way I could tell you all the wonderful things about it, so if you haven’t read it, please trust me and read it immediately!

I think of Outlander as a classic, and I really can’t rate it. Let’s just say it’d be somewhere in the 90s.

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for allowing me to be on this tour!

When I was, oh, 18 or so, the phone was my lifeline. My girlfriends and I could chat for hours on end, and when the phone rang I was running to the phone, snatching it out of my dad’s hands before he could utter a hello.

But now?

Today?

The phone rings and I cringe. Without picking up the phone, I ask with a throaty voice, WHY ARE YOU CALLING ME!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!

I’d much rather text or email, or even send pigeons. Flickering lights! That is GREAT communication! But the sound of a phone ringing makes me want to fling it out the door.

Ironically, the one phone call I’m happy to pick up is telemarketers so I can tell them to STOP CALLING ME.

Micah, the main character in Liar by Justine Larbalestier, is just what the title of the book alludes to: a liar. She tells you right off the bat she’s a liar on the very first page:

My father is a liar and so am I.

But I’m not going to stop. I have to stop.

I will tell you my story and I will tell it straight. No lies, no omissions.

That’s my promise.

This time I truly mean it.

The unreliable narrator? Awesome! I love those characters. Except this one doesn’t sit quite right with me, because you have to wonder as you read, Is she finally telling the truth? Is this the truth? And I know that’s the whole point of an unreliable narrator, but I can’t elaborate without giving you spoilers.

Like I mentioned, I can’t say much without giving away major plot points, but let me point out two things.

1. At about halfway through the book, the story took a turn that I thought was…unbelievable. Now, in order for an author to pull something like that off, they have to set the story up to be that kind of story, but the author didn’t do that for this particular plot point.

2. One of my blogging friends got to meet Justine Larbalestier in person, and Justine said that even she doesn’t know what all’s true in this story. On the one hand this completely appalls me, that an author wouldn’t know her own main character. Is this hypocritical of me, considering that I loved The Lace Reader (which, if you read this guest post, you’ll see that the story wasn’t really clear to her until the end)? Perhaps. But I thought The Lace Reader was fantastically woven, whereas Liar seemed to have more holes. On the other hand, I’m completely enamored with the fact the Justine Larbalestier doesn’t always know when Micah is lying, because I asked this very question at Book Group Expo two years ago to a panel of authors, and never received a satisfactory response (whether they, as the author, always knew when their main character was telling the truth).

I guess I also got frustrated when Micah showed obvious contempt for the reader, her audience:

I wanted to see if you would buy it. And you did.

You buy everything, don’t you?

You make it too easy.

I know it goes with her character, but it really bothered me, her obvious disdain for the reader. Her haughtiness at how trusting we would be of her. I lost interest in her story at that point, as any thread of interest I had in her was gone.

There were quite a few things I didn’t like about Liar, but I love the concept of the unreliable narrator.

Rating: 79 out of 100

Other reviews:

Steph Su Reads

Bookshelves of Doom

My Friend Amy

The YA YA YAs

Presenting Lenore

Semicolon

Fyrefly’s Book Blog

Book Addiction

Book source: This book was a gift from friends! Yay!

I lost my wedding ring this weekend.

Here’s what happened: I went to a wedding on Friday and wore my ring. When I got home, I took it off, but I didn’t put it where I normally (almost) always put it. I knew I had it on when we left the wedding, and I was 99.99% sure I had it on when I entered my home, but from that point forward, I couldn’t remember what I’d done. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought I drank heavily at the wedding, but I knew all I had was water.

On Saturday when I realized my ring wasn’t where it should have been, I didn’t panic. Sometimes I place it someplace else, but I’m never cavalier about it. But some casual looking didn’t turn up the ring, so casual looking turned into frantic looking by both myself and Dave. We had friends who came over that night, and it was all I could think about. I was quiet most of the night as I wracked my brain on where I might have put the ring. I looked numerous times in the same logical places. Places that my ring should have been but wasn’t. I wanted to stay home on Sunday just in case I thought of a new place to look…I’d be right here and I could look in that spot the second I thought of it.

If this ring had been something we bought prior to getting married, I wouldn’t have been quite so upset. But this ring has a diamond from my mother-in-law’s wedding ring, and two diamonds from Dave’s grandmother’s wedding ring. So every day I’m wearing what I always wanted to wear: history. And I’d lost it. How could I lose something so precious? It didn’t matter that the ring was insured because we’d never be able to replace that history.

I sobbed into Dave’s shoulder, realizing I’d lost the one thing I’d rescue from a fire.

History and the people who came before me are extremely valuable to me. The one thing I hoped to get from my grandmother was her wedding ring. Not because it’s particularly valuable (it’s not), not because it’s unique (it’s a rather common style), but because it was my grandmother’s, and she was married over 50 years. What better reminder could I have of wanting to grow old with someone, of the importance of getting through the hard times so you can enjoy the really good times?

I got lucky. We found my ring on the ear of a glass rabbit, which was why we couldn’t see it. But as important as this ring was to me before, it’s even more important now. If I really and truly lost this ring, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. But I will do everything in my power to make sure that that doesn’t happen. For just a minute on Friday night, I forgot how important this ring was to me. I won’t easily forget again.

Carina from Reading Roots interviewed me for a feature she’s doing.

Things I mention:

• I created a song with a friend when we created our own babysitters club. Remind me to do a vlog so I can sing that jingle for you.
• That I memorized ONE poem from this book of children’s poetry: Fuzzy Wuzzy. Anyone else remember that?
• And other stuff.

Please go check it out and show Carina some comment love.

Also, Carina’s blog reminds me that I need to tell you you have to read Word Freak. It is in my top five favorite books of all time. Doo eet! I’m talking to you, Dad. You’ll love it, I swear.