Melanie Page > Recent Status Updates

Barbra had appeared in the doorway, shaking her head. "She love too hard for a girl. Too, too hard." Barbra had said that, and she was wrong. So wrong that she couldn't be any wronger. Loving too hard was the only option. Grace was glad that she'd loved Lady too hard. And Greg Inouye. The boy who got her sent away.

I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to be paying attention to or caring about, but I hope the last third proves explosive so I have something to say when my book club video chats with the author.

"Because a mortgage is never just a mortgage, is it? It's a promise. A promise that your life can change. A promise that you can be the sort of person who should live in that house no matter how far it is from your real price range. And let's be truthful, shall we? What is a promise like that but your world-famous American Dream."

"In truth, May Lee [Charles's first wife and the mother of his children] never stumbled. She was light and graceful and sweet, and by the time she died, Charles was thoroughly tired of spending his life with her."

"By the turn of the millennium, he was rich already. Rich enough, probably, to buy back all the land in China that had been lost, the land that his father had died without ever touching again. Never mind that the Communists would never have allowed it to be privately owned."

"Makeup was American, and Charles understood makeup. It was artifice, and it was honesty. It was science and it was psychology and it was fashion; but more than that, it was about feeling wealthy. Not money -- wealth."

I'm going to have to let this one go. Although the story is interesting, the audiobook format doesn't really leave my time to pause and put together what the author is saying. I'd definitely consider trying it again in a textual format.

YOU are you. The plucky, penniless, Regency-era London version.

Is anybody actually reading, or are we all just mind-numbingly adding books to our TBR piles?

I'm not feeling it. That, and I can only tolerate about one use of "nibble" or "munch" per book. Never have I ever actually seen anyone eat in this nibble/munch squirrel fashion that some authors love.