The LitChicks: RESTORING HARMONY and DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS

Yes, it's Thursday. Yes, I promised that the LitChicks would happen on Thursdays. Yes, back to school, travel baseball, two soccer teams and hubs traveling are kicking my a**. But hey, it's still Thursday here on the west coast, so without further ado.....

Liesl Recommends:

RESTORING HARMONY by Joelle Anthony

I was a little hesitant to read this book when Cynthia lent it to us, but i was out of things to read and was like "Oh heck, how bad can it be?" let me tell you, it wasn't bad. i really liked it, and ask Portia, when i was done i was like “You need to read this, you need to read this”.

So, this book is about a girl named Molly who lives in the future (in the book the mom is talking about her mom and how she hadn't talked to her since 2028). Anyway...the world isn't doing the greatest economically and Molly is elected by her parents to go to Oregon (she's from Canada) to get her grandparents to come back with her and live with her family. She sets out on a long journey with nothing but her fiddle, jewels and a backpack of things including her dad’s almanac. She finally gets to her grandparents house and crazy stuff happens, she falls in love, takes care of these kids that live next door, gardens, and gets into a little trouble. In the end everything turns out good and i loved the ending!!

Portia’s Choice:

DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS by C. J. Omololu.

[I had to laugh when I saw that Portia picked this particular book, but I never said they couldn’t, so here goes.]

I'm not a suck-up, so I want everyone to know that me doing a review on Cynthia's book was purely accidental! Well, not entirely. I was browsing my house for a book that inspired me to reread it, and nothing was coming up. As you know, I came home from a long, tiring car ride to and from Southern California recently and am weary and lacking in library books and whatnot, so I was running around my house trying to find a book to read because I had a book review coming up, and let's face it--it would be really bad to miss one when we're only a month in. So, I saw Dirty Little Secrets on our bookshelf (our very own signed copy!) and thought I could read it. It's been a couple months since my last reading, and I remembered why I keep coming back to this book time and time again even though it is relatively new out.

I'm a little nervous about summarizing CJ's book to her face. Well, on her blog, but I'll give it her best shot because I already promised not to just type the jacket blurb. Only if I'm really desperate!

Dirty Little Secrets is a book about hoarding. Or rather, that's the central topic explored. Lucy is a sixteen year old girl (I think. You can never be too careful with ages, but she's in her junior year, I believe, so let's just call it sixteen) who lives along at home with her mother. Her mother has a hoarding problem. She never throws anything away. She buys everything as long as she gets a good deal for it. Clothes that no one will ever wear. Fancy mixers and kitchen supplies. Gifts for people that she'll never give. She keeps all her newspapers and magazines from years back to reread in case she missed some piece of information she might need. Their house is a disaster. The dishes in the kitchen sink are years old and covered in mold and fungus. Ancient meals and takeout dinners are sitting around and most are unidentifiable in their old age. Their refrigerator doesn't work so food is left on the sink to be eaten or not to be eaten. Their bathroom is barely usable if you could even get to it through all the piles of plain junk left everywhere.

Lucy is sick of living like an animal in a house that no one can ever see with a mom she's ashamed of. She only has 2 years until she can jet off far away to college and let her mom drown in her own filth, but she can't take it anymore. She finally has her first best friend in years and is determined to keep her. She has a crush on Josh Lee who asked her to come watch him play at a party. What she has is a shot at a normal life if she can only reach out and grab it.

The day Lucy comes home to find her mom dead in the hallway under a fallen 6 foot stack of National Geographic magazines is the day everything changes. What should she do? Obviously, Lucy can't just leave her dead mom lying there. So she decides to finally clean up! But it's not as easy as it might sound. She only has a few days if that before her mother's body starts to decay and she can't make it look suspicious. She must clean up years and decades of accumulated junk in under 100 hours. She must deal with a suspicious friend, an unexpected visit from her elder sister who is scary like her mom....., a invitation she must turn down, and all the trash in such a short time!

I know I have a history of giving incredible amounts of spoilers that Cynthia must cut out, so I won't do that with this book, but I thought then ending was perfect! I'm very picky about endings and hard to please, but the ending to Dirty Little Secrets fit the book perfectly. It wrapped up everything nicely and was so unexpected! I think the last few chapters were my favorite. I was really fascinated by the house, though. I loved the idea of hoarding in a book because I had never read anything about it. The whole grotesqueness of the way they lived was interesting to me and I could have read pages and pages about it, but I guess that wasn't the point of the book. I liked the little coffee shop scene too. :) I know I sound like a suck up, but I really liked this book. It was different, it was unexpected, it was suspenseful, it was cute, it was the type of book that made you hold your breath and release and hold your breath some more! If you haven't gotten around to reading it, even though you apparently read Cynthia's blog and see her little ad every week, then I suggest you get around to it! She knows what she's doing! Maybe that's because she has us! *angelic smiles* (If I may have my moment of bragging.) :)

On this date: In 1980, Macaulay Culkin was born.