"Nina Won't Tell" isn't about she doesn't say she loves Ben, but more along the lines of her uncle abusing her as a child. This series contains adult matter, yes, but is nothing too serious and is definately worth the reading. Katherine Applegate is now my favorite author (before it was Caroline B. Cooney).

I rate this book a ten because, just like the rest of the series, this book captivates your mind and sucks you in. I love it, nothing can top this series. Except for maybe Dove's Chocolate Promises

Joyce Weatherford brings the reader "up close and personal" to one family farm, the Steele's. The transition from one generation to the next in farming has been written about in terms of inheritance laws, but never in terms of the emotional and physical price the succeeding generation pays to continue. Weatherford spares no one's feelings as she lays out the blood and death that remains the oldest way of passing on the land. In this case, to a daughter.

Weatherford is adept at drawing the reader through the customs and landscape of her story. The Steele family's disintegration is linked to the same trait that kept the family's ancestors on the Oregon Trail: violent, blood-pounding rage. It is bestial, and like the Nez Perce Creation Story of Heart of the Beast, it does swallow victims whole. Weatherford's ability to create characters true to this historical secret will test the reader's fortitude. Her characters are long overdue for inclusion into the body of work that makes up "fiction of the West." Her descriptions of farming and small communities are accurate, as are the ironies that constantly test a dwindling way of life. She has created a story that not everyone will be able to handle; but those who can will be rewarded.

Don't get me wrong, as a story it stands alone quite well. Readable and entertaining are the first thoughts that come to mind. The battles/fights seem to be historically accurate as well as well written (not always the case with storied written about this time period). The characters are understandable, without appearing to be twentieth-century men being transported to another era. As Sharpe grows as a commander, you both empathise with his problems and cheer his accomplishments.

The whole series is worth reading, and this a great prequel to the timeframe where most of the action takes place.... and there will be quite a lot of it!

PS... The books are better than the BBC series.

My father read to me a passage from RED SKY AT MORNING when I was eleven. He was trying to get me interested in reading the book for myself and chose one of the more memorable scenes. I remember reading it and getting partway into the book and giving up. I just found nothing interesting to the story.

When I turned eighteen, I recalled the book my father told me about many years prior, and picked it up again. What a difference a few years made.

I've literally spent a year getting intimate with this novel. Memorizing every passage, and character development. It's a rare American novel that has very few equal. Many people compare RED SKY AT MORNING with J.D. Salinger's CATCHER IN THE RYE. Both are classic works of literature, and have a very honest look at adolescents, but that's where their similarities end. RED SKY AT MORNING is also a rich look in the life of not just one character, but an entire town as diverse as we are. We grow along-side with those from the small town called Corazon, Sagrado.

Frank Arnold decides to move his family from MOBILE, ALABAMA to a small town in New Mexico where Joshua (our Narrator) spends his Senior year of High School.

RED SKY AT MORNING can be seen as a coming of age story; but it's very much a coming of understanding story as well. The Arnolds came from a mostly White upper class background, where they were the Majority, but by moving to this small town, they are turned into the Minority overnight. Old habits die hard for some, but through exposure others come to accept those who are different.

This is a story that will make you laugh for days. It will make you cry the first time you read it, and the 9th time you read it. It's as bitter-sweet as life itself. I will never come across a book that has touched me as deeply as RED SKY AT MORNING.

I don't know what the previous reviewer's demands are when reading a novel, but mine are these: the story must create its world - whatever and wherever that world might be - and make me BELIEVE it. If the novelist cannot create that world in my mind, and convince me of its truths, they've wasted my time (style doesn't matter - it can be clean and spare like Orwell or verbose like Dickens, because any style can work in the hands of someone who knows how to use it). Many novels fail this test, but Bleak House is not one of them.

Bleak House succeeds in creating a wonderfully dark and complex spider web of a world. On the surface it's unfamiliar: Victorian London and the court of Chancery - obviously no one alive today knows that world first hand. And yet as you read it you know it to be real: the deviousness, the longing, the secrets, the bureaucracy, the overblown egos, the unfairness of it all. Wait a minute... could that be because all those things still exist today?

But it's not all doom and gloom. It also has Dickens's many shades of humor: silliness, word play, comic dialogue, preposterous characters with mocking names, and of course a constant satirical edge. It also has anger and passion and tenderness.

I will grant one thing: if you don't love reading enough to get into the flow of Dickens's sentences, you'll probably feel like the previous reviewer that "...it goes on and on, in interminable detail and description...". It's a different dance rhythm folks, but well worth getting used to. If you have to, work your way up to it. Don't start with a biggie like Bleak House, start with one of his wonderful short pieces such as A Christmas Carol.

Dickens was a gifted storyteller and Bleak House is his masterpiece. If you love to dive into a book, read and enjoy this gem!

But being enchanted has its price. There's a warlock out to steal the sisters' awesome abilities, and he'll stop at nothing to get them -- even if it means killing the Charmed Ones!

I am in a Charmed craze, and that may be the sole reason I purchased "The Power of Three". To watchers of the TV show, it's a novella-ization of the pilot episode, "Something Wicca This Way Comes", and, fortunately, it looks as if this book will be the only episode adaptation. Unless you're a diehard fan of Charmed, you may want to skip this one and head straight for "Kiss of Darkness".