This Old House is a sweet tale filled with the idea of turning a house into a home. This story has an old abandoned home that needs repairs. It has been neglected and feels sad. People look at it and see all of it’s faults but they don’t see the potential in the house.
The home has given up it’s sense of hope. It still serves a purpose by providing shelter to the birds, a backdrop to the tree in the yard, and a place to showcase the flowers that grow alongside of it. Still, it has no family to call it’s own.
People began to talk about tearing the house down. The house looses all of it’s pride and is sagging under the criticism. Just like people do when others put them down…it lowers their self confidence.
Then one day, a family comes along in need of a home. They look at the house and examine it’s structural stability. They talk about how much work it would be to turn the house into a home. They wonder if the house is sturdy enough to house their family and be a place to call home. The house finds a shred of confidence and stands up tall and it’s stability is noted by the father. The family leaves and the home assumes all hope is lost. That negativity spreads to the trees, the birds and the flowers…all think that they have lost an opportunity to flourish and thrive.
When the family comes back; they invest their time, their energy and alot of work. The house has someone to love it, and someone to nurture it and together…the family, the home, the birds, the tree and the flowers form a place of love, safety, and security. A place to call home!
If a person were to apply this story to the relationships in their lives, you would see much more happiness and strength in the world. It shows the power of positive thinking, praise, and hard work; and you see the results from focussing on the good in life as opposed to the negatives!
This book was written by Pamela Duncan Edwards and illustrated by Henry Cole. It was published by Dutton Children’s Books in 2007. This book is a treasure and should be shared with those you care about…and those that you know who could use some hope in life!
This is a great book; i think it would even get many young boys who don’t normally wish to read to pick up the book and even finish reading it.
Many a young child expresses and interest in becoming a police officer. Lots of television shows, focus on police dogs in their dramas. There has always been alot of interest in how police dogs know what to do. This book explains the kind of work that they do, how they are trained, who they stay with and how they act when they are not doing a job for the police. Police dogs are also called K-9 units; they live and work with their handlers. There are certain kinds of dogs that are better at police work than other dogs. See how the dogs are taught to chase criminals, work at airports to find drugs, help protect their human police partners.
This is a book that answers questions that kids ask, that many parents and teacher don’t have the answers to. This book was written by Judith Janda Presnall. It was copyrighted 2002 by KidHaven Press, an imprint of Gale Group, Inc. It is written as juvenile literature.
There are many pictures in the book and even a glossary of terms in the back for a child to understand the terminology better.
Prepared For Rage is written by Dana Stabenow. It is a thriller that is written about a terrorist named Isa. He is very elusive. He is bent upon visiting his terrorism on the United States.
Isa is very good at disappearing and skilled at using a computer to manage his group of independent terrorists. Isa has a plan to shoot down the NASA shuttle. Isa has inside intel and knows the weaknesses of the target. He knows much from his training with the experts and he has a personal grudge. We get a little window into the NASA program and training not to mention the politics behind the program. We even get an insiders view of exactly what some of the astronaughts think about those who pay for the priviledge to fly on a shuttle mission. There is some rough language in the book…so be prepared for that in case it offends you.
He is close to no-one and when he finally does choose to become close to someone…he kills them because they remind him of another. This book is frightening in alot of ways. It does tend to make you think however.
Prepared for Rage was copyrighted in 2008 and published by arrangement with St. Martin’s Press. Dana Stabenow is a New York times best selling author.
Charm is a work of fiction; it is a novel written by Kendall Hart, the firstborn birth child of Erica Cane, on the American soap opera, All my Children. Of course, since this book is written by a fictional character on a soap opera…there was alot of public interest in it before it was even published. They did a lot of pre-publicity on the book by advertising on ABC, both with the book and with the corresponding perfume.
The book is about a female entrenpeneur named Avery; who creates her own cosmetic company. She is on the rising star list of companies who creates their own make-up and now they are entering into the world of perfume. However, Avery is saddled with one very spoiled and troubled rich young woman who is the daughter of Avery’s deceased lover who helped financially fund the business. The young woman’s name is Parker and she is self-destructive by consuming large amounts of drugs and alcohol. She is lonely and feels abandoned and when she is not sober…she trys to destroy Avery and her company.
Avery is not without alot of baggage of her own. She finds out that she is adopted in her thirties. She is both relieved and filled with angst. Her adoptive parents would win no parenting award…they are both alcoholics, and promiscuous. There was childhood abuse and neglect in Avery’s life as well; she just set about overcoming it. Avery has dealt with a lifetime of betrayal and divided loyalties.
However, when Avery’s birth mother makes an appearance; Avery is at first curious. Then she is aghast at the woman’s manipulations. Her birth mother is very self centered and is out to use Avery for her own gain. When that is revealed…she drops the bomb that Avery has a half sister. It opens a whole floodgate of emotions for Avery. Avery rediscovers a love and loyalty that she initially felt towards the woman who raised her in her very young years before much of the abuse and alcohol use. Avery shows strong character by taking care of a woman who has now been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
Avery’s love life is damaged as well. Her first true love is Parker’s father and he was killed. Then the next man she dares to let into her heart betrays her; the next one, kept secrets from her that the second lover used to put a wedge between him and Avery. Avery goes back and forth between the two men and finds herself pregnant and confused about what she really wants and needs.
Charmed is entertaining, it is interesting to anyone who has ever watched the soap opera All My Children because of the obvious mirror image of Avery/Kendall Hart and Avery’s famous movie star, birth mother Patricia Lucas/Erica Kane (Kendall Hart’s birth mother), Erica being Kendall’s birth mother.
It was a fun read if a bit predictible in places…after all…it is modeled after a soap opera 
. Hmmm…i would like to smell the perfume though which really was for sale in the market place to tie into the book’s publishing. This book was was published in 2008 by Hyperion and ABC. The perfume went on sale March 2008 at Sears, it is called, Charm! All My Children. You can see Hyperion’s website here: www.HyperionBooks.com
Dirty Joe the Pirate is a kids picture book that has a rhyming quality to it but it is infused with a sense of humor that children will love. Dirty Joe is a wild and mangy pirate who has a love of dirty socks. He hijacks other boats and collects their dirty socks.
Along the way, the pirates run into another fierce pirate who is female. She battles them and uggghhh the humiliation….she wins the fight. What does she demand from Dirty Joe the pirate and his crew? Something worse than socks that smell…it is their underwear. Turns out that she flys their undies on the rigging of the ship…just like they fly the dirty socks on their rigging as a warning to all other ships.
The female pirate is very familiar…she looks sort of like Joe…her name is Annie and she is just as disqusting smelling and looking as Joe. It is his sister and she is just as bossy as a pirate as she is his big sister! Fun book for children and adults to read together.
This book was written by Bill Harley and illustrated by Jack E. Davis. It was published by Harper Collins and was copyrighted in 2008. The website for the publisher is: www.harpercollinschildrens.com , the author’s site: www.billharley.com , the illustrator’s website: http://picture-book.com/imagelist/72.
Bella means beautiful. This book is about a beautiful life. What many people don’t realize is that the type of life a person has is a choice. Often times, we let our circumstances determine the quality of our life. Bella is a work of fiction but it is a great illustration of being imprisoned by poor choices and discovering a way of healing and choosing to live a life worth enjoying.
Bella is a story woven around a couple of main characters; Nina a pregnant young waitress who dreams of becoming a professional dancer, and Jose, a man who made a mistake that resulted in a death, went to jail…giving up a promising career in professional soccer…then doing pennance by living a solitary life working as a chef in his brother Manny’s restaurant and punnishing himself by burning himself regularily.
Two wounded souls who work side by side for years until circumstances allow them to reach out and try to help each other deal with the pain in their lives. In making a conscious choice to turn the corner and make wiser choices that God has put in their pathway they discover happiness…bring a life into the world that others suggested shouldn’t be given life. Following the opportunity for life, they are given freedom to once again live in joy.
Bella was written by Lisa Samson. It was published in 2008 by arrangement with Thomas Nelson.
The Rope Walk is an ecclectic collection of people and problems. It is at times; sad, cautiously hopeful, bittersweet, heartbreaking, endearing, angering, pittiful, and haunting. Ms. Carrie Brown wrote a book that sticks with you in your spirit…because she knows how to write and explore human relationships.
One of the main characters is a motherless child named, Alice. Alice is a treasure who is caught between an innocent, sheltered childhood and an abrupt jolt into a reality that is changing on all sides. She is about to meet a childhood friend who she at times, admires, wants to protect, clings to, and at all times, comes to love very much; his name is Theo.
Theo is a mystery that slowly unravels. He is bi-racial. He appears abandoned, he is living with grandparents who don’t know him and one of which doesn’t want to. Alice doesn’t understand how anyone could be prejudiced against another for the color of their skin. He has suffered neglect by all adults who should have been caring for him. He is a walking wounded child…who tries to live out loud in spite of it all by learning about the world around him.
Together, Alice and Theo take on a chore and a journey of volunteer caregiving for a man named Kenneth who is an artist who is dying of AIDS. Kenneth has come to live with his adult sister who is living in a self designed prison with some sort of phobia where she lives in fear inside her home stacked to the ceilings with walls of hoarded, dirty items.
Alice and Theo form a bond with Kenneth. They share the love of adventure through books with him. They plan a surprise for him to escape his confinement because of his health. That surprise ends badly; but, there was a written communication that never gets passed along which could have saved them all some heartache and seperation.
The book explores compassion, selfishness, volunterrism, communication and awareness. I really liked this book…but i do have to confess, it both saddened me and at the same time…showed me that if people want to…they have the ability to positively impact the lives of others if they would only take a risk and reach out to do so!
This book was copyrighted in 2007 by Thomson Gale. You can see their website at: www.gale.com/thorndikepress or www.thomson.com .
This is a book, A Man for All Seasons, was written for people who love to learn…it is about the life of George Washington Carver and his love of the earth and his love of learning. George was born African American in a time when it was not easy being black; and, having a desire to go to college and learn. Many colleges wouldn’t even talk to him when they discovered he was black.
He was not an angry young man…he just studied nature and plants; learning how they grew best and sharing that knowledge with others. He went on to study at college and to teach others…even when he was discriminated against. Sometimes, even at places where he was giving speaches…he was not allowed to come in the front door like the white people who came to hear him speak. This was not right…but he did not let it hold him back.
Being poor did not stop him from learning. Loosing both of his parents at a young age did not stop him from what he wanted to do in life. Being black did not stop him…even when others did not want to give him a chance. He learned to read and write; in a time of our country’s history, when it was not acceptable to learn to do so, if you were black.
The thing about George is that he loved to show others how they could improve their lives by rotating their crops and get more cops from the land by fertilizing and watering as well. He wanted to help others have a better way of life. George received a letter one day from a very famous black man in the country. His name was Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute. He wanted George to come to the Institute to teach because George was the only black man to receive a stellar degree from a white man’s college. Booker thought that George could be a wonderful role model for the poor black students who wanted to attend the Institute to go on and excel in their education.
George went on to teach at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in the agricultural department. He deeply respected nature and chose to share that respect with everyone who would listen. He taught others to perservere in their growth and in their desire to learn. George even spoke before Congress. He set an inspirational example for others…black, white and of every nationality.
This book on the life of George Washington Carver was written by Stephen Krensky and was illustrated by Wil Clay. It was published by Amistad and Collins an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers and was copyrighted in 2008. It was written as juvenile literature. You can view the writer’s website at: www.stephenkrensky.com and the illustrator’s website at: www.wilclay.com .