I discovered this author when she was writing as Sabrina Jeffries and this story is probably the closest to that style of any of her Deborah Martins. It's light, humorous, and sexy, and Barbara Crampton's narration only adds to the story's delights. I'd recommend the package to anyone.

This is a great addition to the Young Indianna Series. I am just mad I can't buy it. I read it at by local liberey AND IT WAS great. I wish more kids like me today could have the chance to read this great books.... Well this is about young Indy and hes trip home to American on the Titanic. It's full of action and fun. So if u can get your hands on this book read it Okay. <3 <3 <3 J.E.

I'm 12 years-old and I thought this story was very exciting. My older brother read it also, and he said it was great. It is about a fifteen-year-old boy who is eager to go to war. However, it ends up being the most horrifying life a young man could have. I would give six stars if I could. Since I can't, I'll write it down: six stars!

Poor Maggie. She's only a teen but is faced with problems no one ever wants to see. She's challenged with the fact she has anorexia, a devistating eating disorder. Her mother is an alcoholic and to top it all off, her father is trying to make her something she'll never be.

This story makes you realize that even having a tremendous amount of money like Maggie's family, its not all that wonderful. Especially in Maggie's case!

I can never put down California Diary books because they are so interesting! Ann M. Martin is an excellent author of this series and I recommend it to everyone! The author's got a great idea of what goes on in our minds!

This book is really, really good. It seemed so real to me that I just wanted to slap Maggie around and tell her to wake up or something! I read it in one day, which is what I always do with the California Diaries series books. I am really excited and can't wait until Amalia diary two comes out!

Maggie is a teenage girl who is like a lot of other teenagers who aren't happy with her looks. Maggie thinks that she is really fat even though she is about to disappear, so she stops eating. Besides being aneroxic, her mom is an alcoholic and she has to help her with a benefit because she can't handle it because of her drinking. Then she volenteers at an animal shelter and on top of all that she is the lead singer in a garage band. And she also contradicts herself in that by saying she can't sing even though everyone loves her singing. Then she has a huge crush on the new guitar player in her band and he asks her out on a date and bearly eats at all. Will Maggie start having faith in herself or start eating? For the answer to that you'll have to read this book and I suggest you do because you could see how a person in this situation thinks and see how she gets through her hard times.

When you first look at the cover of the book "Missing Since Monday," by Ann Matthews Martin, you can see right off that the book is going to be some kind of mystery book from just looking at the title. Threw the book there will be a lot of mysteries. When you start reading this book you can't put it down until you have read everything.

Maggie's father had been divorced with her mother since Maggie and her little sister and her older brother since they were about 6 or 7 years old. Along the years Maggie's father had has gotten married. They don't get out that much because they have to always look after Maggie's little sister all the time. Maggie's parents have there Honeymoon coming up. Maggie's little sister is about 6 years old. Maggie's step mom is her little sister's real mom.

Maggie's parents are thinking that they might not go because Maggie is not that responsible enough to take care of her sister all alone. Maggie's parents leave to go to there honeymoon because Maggie convinced then that she is responsible enough to take care of her sister.

When Maggie takes her sister to the park she notices that there is someone following them around and watching there every move. So that day Maggie got so scared that she went throw this hole thing with her sister about what to do when somebody is trying to get you in there car or just safety tips when something is happening to you.

One day her sister flooded the kitchen. So Maggie had to clean it up. She told her sister to just get her self ready to go to school. Her sister got ready went when to the bus. That day her sister never came back from school. Maggie thought that her sister might of just have gone to her friend's house. So Maggie called some of her little sister's friend's houses but none of then said she was over there.

She never came home. Maggie called her sisters bus driver but she said that she never got on the bus after school. That's when Maggie got really scared. But Maggie didn't want to tell her parents because she wanted them to have a good time and not have to come back.

Maggie is stumped and she can't find out what happened to her sister. She doesn't know what to do or who to turn to. That is my summary of "Missing Since Monday," by Ann Matthew Martin.

Maggie and her brother are in charge of their half sister whileMaggie and her brother's dad and step mother go on a long delayedhoneymoon. The first couple days at home by themselves are fine until Maggie puts Courtie, her half sister, on the bus that takes her to school. When Maggie gets home, her sister isn't there and when she calls the school, they say that she wasn't even in school. Calling the police and coming up with a lists of suspects, then questioning each one is hard for Maggie to do but she does it. Then one night, Maggie's mother calls. She tells Maggie and her brother to meet her at a resurant a couple days later and says she has a present for them. Is this present something that they want but don't want to get from her. I know I probably gave you too much information but I think you should read this book because it is really good. :) Thanx for reading my review. Also you can go on my mystery web page ( ) and see more mysteries I think you will enjoy!

This book is by Ann M. Martin. It tells a story that I think may have happened to her or even one of her friends and she wrote about it because it sounded like a really good thing to write about at the time being .I also think she wrote it because others could relate to it and maybe even tell others about it to get there friends to read it. Those people might have even tried to contact her to find out how she felt when her s or her friend's sibling had disappeared. I guess all that I am saying is that this event happened sometime in her life so she wrote it to kind of describe it with out saying names. This book is a non-fiction and is a really good one if you are willing to sit down relax a while and read till you get tired or hungry.

Now the book is mainly about a little girl named Courtney but goes by coutie. Who gets on the bus and arrives to school but a women calls her over and she walks over and winds up in a car wit the women who her dad was married to a while ago. A little later her sister gets home and starts getting worried because Courtney has not got home yet. So the next day kids were getting out of school to help form a search party to find her along with the cops.

The one thing about this book is I would give it a ten for extremely good work and effort to change names and tell something that had something done to her in her life and changed it a little bit to make an exotic book come a live. Another reasons why is because I really loved her creativity she did to this to make a story seem a tiny bit different and neat at the same time.

My response to this was wow I really love it and want to read it more to possible see if there might be more of these stories written by the terrific writer who wrote this book.

I recommend this book to people who love mysteries and have maybe even felt like they lost a love that they needed in there life at some point. So if you have just got through with reading this then go get this book from the nearest library and read it to see if you will like it to.

"Martin Eden" is my fifth foray into the works of Jack London. Although I don't find the excitement within that was apparent in "Sea Wolf," the passion is certainly evident. I have read that "Martin Eden" inspired more bad writers to sequester themselves with paper and pencil in unheated attics than any other book, and it is easy to determinewhy. Eden's obsession with learning and then creating the immortal printed word -- after falling for a woman above his class in society/socialist-conscious San Francisco -- is a powerful force that London expounds convincingly. Then, without warning, the sage advice "be careful what you wish for, it may come true," rears its ugly head. London also includes a line about ghosts that should be a classic, but isn't, and his description of a suicide ranks as the best of its kind. A WORD OF WARNING: Do not read the foreward until after. It tells too much of the story and robs some of the author's intended suprises. This is unforgivable. May the publisher rot in hell.

If there's such a thing as an American canon, this book should be there. Everytime I recommend this book to a friend, they ask, "Who's it by?" "Jack London." "Jack London! The author of call of the wild?"

Well, yes. He's the one, but wait!, this book is like nothing else Jack London has ever written, and bears scant semblance to his Sea Wolf or Call of the Wild. In short, this is serious literature (advance apologies to Call of the Wild and Sea Wolf fans), and it's worth reading.

This book reminded me a lot of Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome (another wonderful book). Both begin with hope, engage in change, and end in pathos. Martin Eden is a self-educated, self-made man (see why I say it should be in the American canon?) who attempts to garner the love of a young college student who pushes him out of what she sees to be his stifling chrysalis and become more like her and her fellow intelligentsia. The plot thickens when he does not only this, but surpasses them all in erudition with a passionate, eager mind, a more eager heart, and lots of hard work, all in the name of love. And then in the book's climax, he decides to ... oh, I can't tell you that. You'll hate me, and I'll ruin the book for you.

What I can tell you, however, is that if you go to a bookstore, and pay full price for this book, you'll love it and feel that you've gotten a good bang for your buck. If you get it at a discount, you'll walk away feeling as though you've five-finger discounted this little gem.

Read it ... you'll be glad you did.

If you are looking for pleasant summer reading, pass this one by. It ain't pretty and it ain't pleasant, but it ranks as one of the Great American novels of all time. Was it autobiographical? You betcha. More so than most airbrushed autobiographies of our time. Jack London was the first author to awaken in me the love of the printed word. I was 9 years old. The title that awakened me was Call of the Wild. I, like Marcia and everyone else, thought that Jack London was just an aborigine, wandering around in the vast metropolis and utterly lost. Years later I read The Sea Wolf, and my opinion changed. I no longer thought of Jack as an aborigine, but as a refined young man, rudely abducted from the civilized world and forced to accept the law of the strongest. Later still, I read Martin Eden, and I was devastated by the tortured visions of that same young man who was tranfigured by that experience and who was no longer acceptable as a member of civilized society. There's a whole lot of bitterness in Martin Eden, folks! And, the more I read of Jack's life, the more I am convinced that it is autobiographical. The fact is that Jack became a monster. At the same time, he became the most successul novelist of his time. In terms of money, we can only gasp at the financial success he enjoyed. He turned out novel after novel, and each of them was gobbled up by a hungry public. In the end, the SAME PEOPLE who had rejected him because of his crude mannerisms and calloused knuckles sought him out because of his MONEY. Do you really want the brutal truth about Jack London? And are you really prepared to weep for one of America's great sons? If so, then read Martin Eden. Otherwise, pass it by.

The good thing about this book is that the author appears to have read a good deal of the relevant literature and provides a lot more in depth historical information than one expects in a history book for children.

The bad thing is that he takes real incidents from the primary sources (in particular the Icelandic sagas), substantially alters them (by, for example, replacing the central character in the original version with someone else, or falsely describing the context), then reports them as "Viking stories." A few examples:

He tells the story of Egil's encounter with Erik Bloodaxe at York (from Egilsaga). Among the errors:

He describes Erik as having successfully defeated his brothers in the competition for the Kingdom. In fact, Erik was in York because his brothers had driven him out of Norway.

He describes Egil as Erik's one rival. In fact, Erik is the son of a king, and Egil is an Icelandic farmer (and poet and famous warrior). The basis of their conflict is not rivalry for the crown, which Erik doesn't have and Egil has no conceivable interest in, but a family feud between their families (Egil being the third generation of the feud on one side, Erik the second on the other). Finally, the book's account leaves out one of the central figures of the incident--Arinbjorn, who is both one of Egil's closest friends and one of Erik's chief retainers, and who plays a crucial role in the real story.

The book gives an equally butchered version of the famous execution scene from Jomviking saga. Almost every fact is wrong. It starts by describing the captives as the 70 survivors of the battle--in fact they are the crew of the one ship from the losing side that didn't turn and run. It continues by omitting two of the three central figures of the story--Buni, the commander of the ship, and the young Jarl, Hakon's son. It then gives Erik, a minor figure in the original, Buni's role from the original.

In addition, it omits the explanation of the execution involving the dropped knife, which is a fascinating example of scientific thinking in a pre-modern society--a deliberate experiment to determine whether human consciousness is located in the head or the body. It omits the whole business about who the Jomvikings are, why they are expected to be brave, etc.

In both of these cases, the author has taken a passage from one of the world's great literatures, the sagas, and mutilated it almost, although not quite, beyond recognition.

For a final example, the author asserts that a Norse woman divorced her husband for showing too much of his bare chest. In fact, the reason she wanted to divorce him had nothing to do with that--the anecdote concerns not a cause but a pretext. In order to be able to divorce her husband, she made him a shirt with a low neck, tricked him into wearing it, then divorced him on the grounds that he was wearing feminine clothing.

In this case and others, the real account is a better story, as well as a more accurate portrayal of Norse culture, than the author's revised version.

Compared to the norm of children's books, this has a good deal to recommend it, but compared to what it ought to have been--a truthful description of a fascinating society--it is a serious disappointment.

I am a big fan of this series and own tons of them. I am a history buff and also love comics and this book has both. If you are looking for a book that is easy to read but is also very fun to read, buy a horrible history. Terry Deary makes a bunch of facts about vikings into a very fun book. The comics are really funny and have great bits of puns and sarcasm. These books are designed to make history fun for people who don't like history. If I hadn't loved history before I picked up one of these books, I sure would love it now.

This seires of books are the best history books I've ever read. I am 12 years old and I still use these books to suprise my teachers(Did you know pyramids contained toilets). I read these books over and over again. These books are the best you can buy for all ages, American or English.

This play is by Martin McDonagh, an award-winning playwright whose previous Irish play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, won a Tony award for Best Play. The Cripple of Inishmaan focuses on the lives of the residents of Inishmaan in 1934. We follow Billy the cripple, the main character of this play. The supporting characters include: Helen, a feisty young lass who has a tongue that would offend even the most colorful drunk. Billy's two aunts, Kate, who talks to rocks, and Eileen, who runs a sweets store. Johnnypateenmike, the town gossip, as well as BabbyBobby who is constantly getting his old lady drunk, and finally Bartley, Helen's younger brother. This is a riveting story that will bring you on a roller coaster ride of emotion. You will experience love, hate, compassion, joy, sadness, but most of all, you will laugh. This play is hysterical! We would recommend reading it or seeing it to anyone who enjoys theater, or just likes Irish culture, or even if you like Hollywood in the 1930's. The story centers on Billy and his wanting to be in a film that is being made on the neighboring island of Inishmoore, The Man of Aran. To get to the island, he has to tell everyone that he has tuberculosis so that they will feel sorry for him and let him go. Billy later decides to leave his aunts and the island and go to Hollywood with the rest in an attempt to fulfill his dream of becoming a film actor. Does Billy really have tuberculosis? Does he have what it takes to make it in the harsh world that is Hollywood? There's only one way to find out.

Wonderfully dark, mean and hysterical, but under it all is the message that we all need family, community and each other. McDonagh has an incredible way with very natural stage dialogue and his characters are unique and vivid. I laughed on every page and winced with every vicious attack. Although some may argue that the play is hateful and sad, I have read few plays as ultimately life affirming. To use every characters' sentiments, Ireland mustn't be such a bad place if Martin McDonagh writes so well about it!

I have not yet had the chance to read "The Cripple of Inishmaan," however I have had the rare opportunity to see it performed at the Pioneer Memorial Theater in Salt Lake City. This play is absolutely amazing. I enjoyed it from start to finish, despite some of the harsh language. It only served as tool to further explore the characters. This play gave me the opportunity to explore a huge range of emotions in a short amount of time. I was laughing when it started and crying when it ended. The story is beautiful and gives a true and realistic view of humanity as we know it today.

I am not as excited about this book as I was others. This one was okay, it just didn't have that special I-am-a-writer-you-can't-copy-my-style touch if you know what I mean. It was like a totally different writer wrote the book, you know? If u don't u can check it out at your library for yourself-but beware! I would rather you read it before you buy it. You might be disappointed a little bit. I was.

I think this book is the best out of all the super mysteries. Spooky things are happening to the baby-sitters--they're being followed. It really gave me the creeps, and I like how the ending turns out. (You'll like it even more if you've read the other BSC books) Buy this one--it's definitely worth reading.

Baby Sitters Beware is a great book! It has a lot of action. Buy it and you will thank me.

Wow! This book first of all connected to me since I have had experince with depression(unfortunatly). I could see the pain that both Ducky and Alex were experincing. Not only was the plot good, but the characters were also well written. The only problem i had with this is that is was sort of a repeat of the first book. That didn't stop me from reading it though. The ending is the best and i almost cried! i suggest people who love the series should read this book.

Ducky, Diary Two is the tenth book in the California Diaries series, and maybe one of the best. Ducky, Diary Two is about Ducky and his struggle to help out his best friend, Alex Snyder. After getting a few pointers from his English teacher, Ducky realizes that the key to really helping Alex is to never give up. Ducky may be one of my favorite characters because of his optimistic look on life and strong willingness to help others. The CA Diaries series is excellent because it combines real-life problems and struggles along with morals and humor. I've read every book in this series and each one outdoes the one before it. This is a terrific book for any teen who has ever had problems with a friend or problems of their own.

Ducky is one of my favorite characters. His depressed friend Alex is so frustrating sometimes you want to scream, but it is very realistic and detailed. People have described Ducky as optimistic, I think he's a definite pessimist, but then life has burned his bridges. It was nice to see a more detailed relationship with Ted. I don't know how accurate Ducky's diary is, you can kind of tell the author is a woman without knowing who it is. One thing about the CA diaries, though I love them... how do they find so much time to write in their diaries? Ducky finds time to write several times during the school, before dinner, after dinner, the middle of the night (insomnia), etc....whew! I will say that reading these books makes me want to write in my own diary and they are very good, but really- how do they find the time? Overall: Really awesome book. His writing style isn't as enjoyable to read (at least I found it this way) as Maggie or Amalia, the "you" thing but I love his sense of humor and how he starts his entries like: After Math- The Aftermath. The book is very similar to Ducky 1, it's like an extension of itself. It's ending is similar, but much more hopeful. There's a wonderful breakthrough with Alex. Oh yes, one more thing... The book's message is inspiring but not corny. Never, ever give up.