The mystery surrounding Adele's mesmerizing sexuality and the decadent secrets of 1930s Paris drew me to this book. Despite witnessing the passions and fears of the book's characters including one of two protagonists, Celia (museum-robbing, sleuthing magazine publisher), the reader never gets to know why these people act as they do. Adele should perhaps remain a mystery, but the fascination behind Celia's relentless search should have been explored. On the other hand, Blanche (Adele's captor/slave/lover) is as fully fleshed as Celia should have been.

Overall, I thought that for such sensual (often grotesquely so) material, the characters seem rather cold. It also seems to be missing a final chapter. Very unsatisfying (but was that the author's intent?).

The characters Blanche, her brother Jonas, and the unexplainable Adele are interesting, but the author never gives us much.

What exactly was Adele? And what caused her to be whatever it was, that she was?

What experiments DID Jonas perform? What did he learn about Adele? And what is the connection between Marcel and Adele?

Adele's story is a sad one, as is Blanche's.

The author never comveys any true compassionate for Adele or Blanche, although they are plainly badly treated.

There is no understanding on the author's part regarding Adele. The author seems to regard her as no more than a creature, a freak--as does Jonas.

Even Blanche and Adele's love is strange, twisted, voyueristic, actually more lust than love. Although eventually we do witness Blanche's devotion, which goes beyond lust.

Over all, however, the book is disappointing because it supplies no real answers; and the author's view seems like that of an objective scientist reporting what she sees through the microscope.

An excellent maiden effort. I was enthralled by how the author held the reins to the story. Her pace, sense of mood and atmosphere is magnificent. But towards the end, it seems difficult to make the present live up to the past. Looking at things from another angle, we might say the author is trying to convey a sense of how the past was just as twisted in its treatment of sexuality as today's society is.

I thought I had found a book that incorporated my son's cat in relaxation techniques that he could use for home and school. I was REALLY disappointed! This very small book (only about 25 pages) talked more about cats and their reactions to things. I thought that if I worked with my son and his cat I would be able to calm him down when he gets uptight. This book is not intended for that!! In fact, it has very little use other than its descriptions of what cats do and how cats react to certain things. Don't bother with this book if you're looking for specifics on relaxation techniques with your cat.

This is a great book for kids and adults. It goes beyond many of the usual stress management techniques with an emphasis on self-esteem and standing up for yourself. Children have so much stress these days. This simple, easy-to-read book gets right to the heart of ways to help the children we love. I have a copy to read for myself and my 7-year-old daughter. I have bought copies for the library for people (and families) with cancer and chronic illnesses where I work - high stress situations. I also recommend it in a stress management class I teach at a local hospital for kids. Parents and kids alike are drawn to its message.

Mary Hays, an early British feminist writers, was a contemporary of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Paine, and William Blake, and like them she was excited by the French Revolution and the prospect of toppling the privileged classes. Of course, at that time all men were comparatively privileged, at least as compared to women. In The Victim of Prejudice she mounts a twin attack on the lowly status of women within society and on the exalted status of the landed gentry, who still dominated life in that pre-industrial age. The former attack is fairly successful, the latter is not.

Mary Raymond, the heroine of the novel, is orphaned at an early age, but is raised and well-educated (perhaps too well for the time) by her guardian, Mr. Raymond. Two brothers, sons of the Honorable Mr. Pelham, come to Mr. Raymond's for instruction too, and Mary falls in love with William Pelham, and he with her. But Mary is an unacceptable match for such a wealthy youth, more unacceptable than she realizes until Mr. Raymond reluctantly reveals the sordid circumstances of her birth, and so the young lovers are separated.

Meanwhile, Sir Peter Osborne, the brutal local landowner, has taken a fancy to Mary and is reluctant to accept her protestations of his advances. In a symbol laden early scene, William coaxes the teenage Mary into stealing some "forbidden fruit" from Osborne's vineyard. But he catches her and expels her from the garden, calling her "a true daughter of Eve." In the ensuing years they have several more equally unfortunate encounters, with Osborne becoming ever more determined to have her. Finally, after the death of Mr. Raymond, who had tried to get her to accept a more appropriate marriage offer to no avail, has left Mary particularly vulnerable, with no money and nowhere to go, Osborne kidnaps and rapes her.

At this point William returns to the scene and finds Mary wandering, broken and ill. Though by now married to another, he nurses her back to health. But when he proposes that she become his mistress, the outraged Mary refuses and flees. She tries to find employment several places but finds that her reputation as a fallen woman, resulting not merely from the incident with Osborne but from her time with the married William, follows her, causing scandal and encouraging other men to be forward with her.

Throughout these various travails, she remains admirably loyal to the moral upbringing which Mr. Raymond provided :

'Let it come then!' exclaimed I with fervour; 'Let my ruin be complete! Disgrace, indigence, contempt, while unmerited, I dare encounter, but not the censure of my own heart. Dishonour, death itself, is a calamity less insupportable than self-reproach. Amidst the destruction of my hopes, the wreck of my fortunes, of my fame, my spirit still triumphs in conscious rectitude; nor would I, intolerable as is the sense of my wrongs and of my griefs, exchange them for all that guilty prosperity could bestow.'

but is quite annoyingly passive in the face of these injustices :

I revolved in my mind, selected, and rejected, as new obstacles occurred to me, a variety of plans. Difficulties almost insuperable, difficulties peculiar to my sex, my age, and my unfortunate situation, opposed themselves to my efforts on every side. I sought only the bare means of subsistence: amidst the luxuriant and the opulent, who surrounded me, I put in no claims either for happiness, for gratification, or even for the common comforts of life: yet, surely, I had a right to exist!

Somehow this ambition--mere existence-- just seems inadequate. More appropriate, particularly as long as her life is ruined anyway, would be to wreak a horrific vengeance on the reprehensible Lord Peter. But as the rather unfortunate title of the book indicates, this is a story about unrelenting victimization. And because Mary never really seeks to do more than exist, never even seeks redress against Osborne, she somehow makes herself a participant in her own victimization.

A system which would punish the victim rather than the rapist is so obviously unjust, that the purely feminist angle of the story does work to a degree. However, Osborne is so awful that it is hard to accept him as a genuinely representative figure of the British aristocracy. Eleanor Ty, editor of the Broadview Text edition of the book, suggests in her introduction that the character Osborne is intended as a specific rebuke to Edmund Burke and his conservative views on the value of ancient institutions like the aristocracy. Though I'm a fan of Burke, there are coherent arguments to be made in opposition to his theories : this is not one.

The book works well enough as a kind of Gothic thriller, and is adequate as a protofeminist tract, but it fails as a radical polemic against the prevailing institutions of the time. The existence of one evil fictional nobleman doesn't serve to turn 18th Century Britain into a den of horrors.

GRADE : C+

Mary Hays's "The Victim of Prejudice" is the story of Mary Raymond, a young woman, who, from birth, seems destined to suffer. The 'prejudice' of the title consists of unfair societal standards that exclude all but the wealthy, well-born, and influential. Mary is raised by her guardian, Mr. Raymond, on a small estate in the country, where he teaches her far more than any woman of her class and birth is expected to know by society.

From her youth, Mary is tormented and pursued by Sir Peter Osborne - a depraved example of the type of man Raymond warns Mary about that are out in the world. At Raymond's death, Mary is thrown out into that world to fend for herself, and the virtues and knowledge taught her by her guardian are all put to the test.

Like Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished novel "Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman," Hays short novel is a work meant to display feminist indignation at the treatment of women in the late 18th century. Also like Wollstonecraft, Hays appropriates some of the motifs of gothic fiction to underscore the extreme evils that men, law, and society are allowed to perpetrate against women. "The Victim of Prejudice" can tend toward melodrama, but is an important text of early British feminism and illustrates the domestic and personal concerns of the female Romantics.

I liked it. It was a good collection of short, disturbing tales. Some stories creeped me out. I mean I was scared. But if you like that kind of a thing, this is for you.

Best Young Adult Novels, while some titles covered in this book are not well known the authors do a fine job listing the subject matter in the toc so that you know whether or not you want your class to read it. The activities/tests are well thought out and complete with extension activities. My complaint is that I thought it would cover more main stream novels. There is not a list under the description for the workbook. The authors evidently feel that Judy Blume is an important author as her books are included a number of times, other authors included are Barbara Brenner, Walter Dean Myers, Jan Greenberg, and Sharon Bell Mathis, Wilson Rawls, Rosa Guy, Paul Zindel, Fran Arrick, Cynthia Voight, and Irene Hunt. My compliment is that they do include a wide range of activities so that it covers all reading levels, so there is something for everyone!

This book was really good, but there were a few parts that I didn't agree with. I liked Life at Sixteen: Silent Tears better!!

Horn Book calls this book "a detailed, informative, and readable chronicle" of Chung's life, and I heartily agree. The book is very specific and has a good source of information about various political conventions and issues during Connie's years as a reporter. If the reader is searching for Chung's thoughts, ideas, or emotions during her life however, they will be thoroughly disappointed. Her wedding, probably the most personal event of her life, is briefly mentioned in the sentence "in December 1984, they were married in Connie's New York apartment. " The bottom life here is that the mediocre writing style and reservoir of trivial information about political candidates makes for a sloppy biography.

Synopsis: For the most part, this biography outlines the key achievements and milestones chronically in the life of Connie Chung. Beginning prior to her birth in China, where her parents are born, and continuing forward until about the 1990's when she began to disappear from the public eye.

This book is a little hard to review. It has all the markings of a Daredevil classic -- tragedy, love, conflict, et cetera -- but it also has parts that are mediocre, boring or confusing.

Daredevil: Typhoid Mary introduces a new and great villain to Matt's rogues' gallery. What makes this book good is its relationships between the characters (Mary, Typhoid, Kingpin, Matt, Daredevil, and Karen). This is the best part of the book and I just wish that the author, Ann Nocenti, concentrated more on them. Instead of her centering and expanding on the relationships between the characters she gives in to boring action sequences towards the end of the book, after it started off nicely. There are useless appearances from Johnny Storm (the Human Torch of the Fantastic Four), which were meant for comedic value but come off as childish and unamusing.

And, perhaps the strangest part of this book, the ending leaves much to be desired. It barely has anything to do with what has happened in the previous chapters. Basically what happens is, hell invades Manhattan. (I can't put the blame on Nocenti for that part, though, because it was a crossover event, titled "Inferno," between a lot of the Marvel properties that the editors probably enforced all series to undergo a part in.) It detracts from the overall value of the book and it's a distraction from what we should be paying attention to.

Also, the writer redundantly expresses her feelings on war in a portion of the book. It's worthless to the overall story and she just uses the two main characters, rather unfairly I might add, to spread her pro-peace message. WE GET IT, YOU DON'T LIKE WARS OR NUKES.

If you ignore the Johnny Storm appearances, the peace propaganda, the unexciting fight sequences (the good action pieces are the ones between Typhoid and Daredevil), and the incoherent ending, you've got a pretty good book on your hands.

I know that I've painted a bad picture of this book, but I honestly must say that the shining moments in Daredevil: Typhoid Mary -- such as the taboo relationship between Matt and Mary, the failing connections between Matt and Karen (and Matt and Foggy, for that matter), the unusual and malignant "love" between the Kingpin and Typhoid, and so on -- deserve to be read, for they do make for a great story. Take the good with the bad. It's worth it in this case because the good is really, really good.

And John Romita Jr. shows off some pretty nice artwork.

Don't pass this book up. Its shining moments are worth the cover price.

This concise but interesting book is an excellent biography of a courageous and gifted Black woman in the post-Colonial era. With self-composure she fought for her freedom--not by using violence, but by working within the Law, to ultimately receive her moral due: Justice in a Connecticut courtroom.

Consisting of an introduction and 15 short chpaers, this modest volume depicts her focused struggle to enjoy the same liberty which the Colonists had recently bought so dearly. In her pursuit of jusice Mumbet earns the respect of her lawyer and second master/employer. She performs all household duties with skill and modesty: nurse, housekeeper, even defender of the hearth during the master's absence. Mumbet pursues her lonely dream of freedom some 35 years before the Emancipation Proclamation, achieving her goal legally and with great personal dignity. I had never heard of this courageous woman before, I am ashamed to confess, so this little book is a perfect introduction to students of Black history, as well as Women's Studies in general. Very readable and inspiring re overcoming obstacles with patience, perseverence and peace.

Mary Stewart, one of the finest romantic suspense novelists of all time, has written a novel without any romance or suspense. This whisper of a book contains the lovely scenic descriptions of her earlier novels but the "mystery" amounts to a break-in at an empty house and the "romance" amounts to a semester together at Cambridge in the fall. The heroine is an emotionless school-marm who is so stern and prim that she is bascially an 80-year-old masquerading as a "dish." After enjoying such great mysteries as The Moon-Spinners and This Rough Magic, I thought for sure that something was going to happen. But the only excitement was the occasional sighting of a petrel (a very shy bird). Whoa! It is clear that Miss Stewart, in her dotage, lost all interest in love and danger, and was captivated only by nature and wildlife. This is not a bad thing but she should have stopped writing ficton and become an author of travel books.

This is definatly not Mary Stewart at her best. I found this book very lacksidasical and totaly unintresting. Tell me what is romantic about this book? I won't get a awnser because there isn't. I was very disapointed in this book. After having read Moonspiners and the Ivy tree. Currently I am reading the Merlin Trilogy which is absolutly fantastic.The Stormy Petrel is nonromance all the way. The only romance in the whole book is when she had s smile on her face thinking of her next fall semester term.If you think that thats romance you must not know excitment. If you must read this book though read it for the nature stuff she talks about.

If you are expecting the usual holiday-impulsive heroine of one of Ms Stewart's earlier tales to star in this short novel, you will not find her here. Rose Fenmore, professor of English Literature at Cambridge is like Ms. Stewart herself, a poet and a spinner of fantasy--for Rose in the form of Science Fiction novels under a nom de plume. Stewart does a more than adequate job of portraying Rose's inner calmness in her choice of vacation, her penchant for wordplay and in the merging of the two: her gift for describing the tableau she sees before her with such detail, the reader can actually feel the breeze move strands of hair, hear the slightest stirrings of the night birds and sense the awe in which all characters become eventually humbled by nature's majesty.

Rather than create a story of treachery as she has in the past,in the "Stormy Petrel", Stewart weaves a simple story which acts as a vehicle for her true love and the story's ultimate theme of preservation of nature's natural beauty. With every quiet word, her love of Scotland and its lovely vistas are pronounced loudly and clearly. Her description of her own writing process as outlined poetically while Rose attempts to inch her scifi plot foward is a magnificent insight into Ms Stewart's own love of her craft. I believe, the impact of the story's "mystery" and "romance" disregarded by the other reviewers, is all there---only it is as subtle and perfect as a bird's song and quite as easy to overlook when compared to the gun-in-the-back terror readers of Ms. Stewart (and her current crop of wannabees)have come to expect.

I listened to the audio version of this book, read by Isla Blair. She does a wonderful job of conveying Rose's inner quietude and does justice to Stewart's lyrical descriptions of Rose's most monumental moments on the isolated island in the Scottish Hebrides: the evenings of seals' song and the nocturnal flight of the stormy petrel.

This is recommended to anyone who has a love of nature, of beautiful language and who promises to regard the story and its soft cadences as a wise and truly loving tribute to nature.