![]() Reese refers to wise sayings and words from her grandma as “Betty-isms”. Both involve sharing the best and worst part of your day. Dinner time conversation for my gals and I is called “Peak and Pit”. Louise Mandrell was the favorite sister for both of us! (love a good fiddle!)ĭinner time conversation with her kids is called “Roses and Thorns”. Watching the Barbara Mandrell Show was a weekly highlight for us. We both grew up around gardens picking beans with our grandpas and “broke them up” with our grandmas. When asked in grade school what she wanted to be when she grew up, she replied, Dolly Parton! As for me, apparently, I thought I was Dolly Parton! (see photo below!) I chose to the same song, to perform on guitar, for my ever-so-important high school pageant in 1993! ![]() Reese Witherspoon played “Rocky Top” at her wedding. Written inside was “To Marada, one of the most ‘whiskey in a teacup’ gals I know.” Well that really peaked my interest! I immediately dove into the book and pages into it, I knew that was 100% accurate!īefore sharing my list, let me encourage you to read this book…especially if you grew up in the South! Almost every page, I found myself squealing “me too!” For your enjoyment, here’s a list of ten reasons why I’m “whiskey in a teacup”. I was recently gifted the Reese Witherspoon book, “Whiskey in a Teacup”. ![]()
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![]() Her target: Sebastian Devereux, the cold and calculating Duke of Montgomery who steers Britain's politics at the Queen's command. Her charge: recruit men of influence to champion their cause. In return for her scholarship, she must support the rising women's suffrage movement. Annabelle Archer, the brilliant but destitute daughter of a country vicar, has earned herself a place among the first cohort of female students at the renowned University of Oxford. Representative Katie PorterĪ stunning debut for author Evie Dunmore and her Oxford suffragists in which a fiercely independent vicar's daughter takes on a powerful duke in a fiery love story that threatens to upend the British social order.Įngland, 1879. “This series balances friendship, politics, history, and romance in just the right mix.” -U.S. ![]() Her A League of Extraordinary Women series is extraordinary.” -Julia Quinn, #1 New York Times bestselling author “Dunmore is my new find in historical romance. ![]() ![]() ![]() The youngest of three children of the Miller family. She atuhored The Mousetrap, the longest-running play in the history of modern theater. Of the most enduring figures in crime literature, she created Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. ![]() According to Index Translationum, people translated her works into 103 languages at least, the most for an individual author. Her books sold more than a billion copies in the English language and a billion in translation. This best-selling author of all time wrote 66 crime novels and story collections, fourteen plays, and six novels under a pseudonym in romance. ![]() More than seventy detective novels of British writer Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie include The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), and And Then There Were None (1939) she also wrote plays, including The Mousetrap (1952). Agatha Christie also wrote romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, and was occasionally published under the name Agatha Christie Mallowan. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Mithridates dreams of ruling an empire that stretches far further than his little Black-Sea-bordering Pontus he wants to take Rome’s provinces, and then take Rome. We get some background on the labyrinthine genealogy that dictates the succession of eastern kings, we see Mithridates grow to power and eliminate his rivals - and we see him tuck tail and wait for better times when faced with the Romans. ![]() First Gaius Marius and then Lucius Cornelius Sulla travel through the nations that border Rome’s province of Asia Minor: Bithynia, Pontus, Armenia, and even into the westernmost part of Parthia. Much of the first half of the book focuses on events in the east. The reader gets to see it all through the eyes of some of the most fantastic characters who’ve ever lived, men and women who are at once larger-than-life and all too real. The scope of the world expands, Rome faces new crises, and the Republic continues to crumble inevitably towards its own destruction. The second book of Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series follows up admirably on the first. Title: The Grass Crown (Masters of Rome #2) ![]() ![]() ![]() Fear of the unknown ratchets up the reader’s anxiety, and yet Leave the World Behind unfolds slowly for a thriller. It’s clear something terrible is happening.Īlam’s brilliance is less in what he reveals and more in what he doesn’t. How bad could a blackout really be? And couldn’t this rich couple just go stay in a hotel? But then eerie occurrences begin to happen where they are, too. Something seems very wrong, and the older couple thought they should get out.Īt first, Amanda is annoyed that their vacation has been interrupted. There’s been an epic blackout in New York City. Their respite has barely begun, however, when the house’s owners, wealthy Black couple George and Ruth, appear at the door in the middle of the night. Their kids are thrilled about the pool, less thrilled about being isolated in the woods with no cell service. White parents Clay and Amanda leave Brooklyn for a gorgeous vacation rental home far out on Long Island. Such is the premise of Rumaan Alam’s novel, Leave the World Behind. They might even happen while we’re on vacation. ![]() But perhaps more realistically, most worst-case scenarios are mundane. The phrase “worst-case scenario” calls to mind extreme situations, like being on a hijacked plane or a bridge during an earthquake. ![]() ![]() ![]() Now, to reclaim his rightful place among France's elite, he must obtain the Babel fragment for the Order. S verin Montagnet-Alarie's birthright was stolen from him. Hidden among the technological marvels and artistic creations on display is an item of unimaginable power-a Babel fragment that would enable those who wield it with magical Forging abilities over nature's elements. ) historical fantasy series, Roshani Chokshi'sįollows the exploits of a found family-six societal outcasts tasked with stealing a powerful artifact that can alter their lives for the better, but at the cost of breaking the world.Īll eyes are on Paris where the Exposition Universelle World Fair is to be held. First in a "wildly inventive and wildly representative" ( ![]() ![]() ![]() On another, it's a goofy comedy very much in the vein of the Scott Pilgrim books (albeit one more influenced by the blogosphere than classic video game culture). Leslie is far too confused and adrift to be anything other than a likable, tragic character. On one hand, Snotgirl is an intriguing character study of a young woman struggling to figure out what it actually means to be an adult. ![]() The series works precisely because it spins so many plates at once. ![]() Plus, there's the fact that she suffers from severe allergies, hence the "Snotgirl" moniker. Lottie is also a chronic self-loather who struggles to create meaningful relationships in her Twitter-dominated life. But if the idea of reading about a self-absorbed Millennial/social media maven doesn't sound appealing, know that there's a lot more to the series. This trendy writer is utterly obsessed with projecting the ideal image to her massive audience of followers. Snotgirl revolves around the bizarre double life of blogger Lottie Person. ![]() ![]() There's just one catch - or rather, a hoop you'll have to jump through if you want to read We Can Be Mended when it comes out on January 17: The short story is being released as an exclusive gift for fans who preorder Veronica Roth's new book, Carve the Mark, so click "add to cart" now if you want your Four fix.Ĭarve the Mark is about a planet where vengeance rules and everyone develops a "currentgift," or special power that shapes the future. Four had somewhat come to terms with Tris' death at the end of Allegiant (who could forget his heartbreaking line, "A fire that burns that bright is not meant to last"?), but fans are still dying to know his fate now that Chicago is being rebuilt. ![]() This epilogue will be a welcome conclusion to the Divergent series. ![]() ![]() The first generation Indian-Americans are caught in the cultural limbo, whereas the next generation Indian-immigrants are the victims of emotional vacuum and hyphenated existence. As a separate racial and cultural identity, they feel a magnetic field of their 'home culture' operative on their minds. Lahiri Projects these Indian-Americans as 'self-chosen exiles' and 'transnational hybrids'. The stories in the collection deal with the large section of second generation Indian-Americans, their cultural traditions, value system, their feeling for home and of homelessness. Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth provides the readers with different paradigms of the life of the characters with Indian roots and American life. They help in deciding a separate national identity for the nationals of a country. Race, culture and ethnicity are the very significant identities that distinguish one society from another. Jhumpa Lahiri, a very powerful name in the field of diasporic literature, very skillfully portrays the racial and cultural conflicts in her short story collection Unaccustomed Earth. In the absence of the same, we, even, cannot imagine the harmonious relationships among its various constituents. ![]() Racial and cultural harmony is very much essential for peaceful existence of a society or a country. ![]() ![]() ![]() More damaging still, after he published A Moment of War some questioned whether he had ever, as he claimed in that book, been a member of the International Brigades fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. “Why didn’t he just catch a train?” people asked of his account of his long tramp to London and then Spain, As I Walked Out Early One Morning. The greatest controversy surrounds his later volumes of autobiography. Cider With Rosie starts with the following note: “The book is a recollection of early boyhood, and some of the facts may be distorted by time.” Even so, I can understand why people grumble about his veracity. Lee doesn’t pretend that everything he says is accurate. But all those other details? Do you remember anything from when you were that age so vividly? Could you, in fact, write a whole chapter based on even earlier memories? Me neither. ![]() It’s possible, I suppose, that he might remember something as momentous as the end of the first world war, not to mention as enjoyable and strange the fire. ![]() The Laurie Lee who we are told looked in on that pub and on the burning chimney was just four. I’m aware that not everybody enjoys Lee’s ripe-to-bursting prose, but I find passages like that hard to fault.īut I did have one nagging doubt as I first read that passage. Fire! “We stood in the rain and watched it entranced,” Lee tells us. ![]() |