It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.
This past week I had a sciatica issue. I didn’t think it was my sciatica because the tightness and pain was in my calf muscle. Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs told me that she’d had sciatica and it went all the way down her leg though so I decided to look for stretches for sciatica, which I’ve had to do in the past, even though the pain had never been this bad. I found a couple of stretches and they helped a little but I was still in a ton of pain.
I saw one stretch that I thought looked stupid so I refused to do it. The guy was saying something about leaning against a wall and pushing on your hip. I thought that sounded like the dumbest, useless thing ever.
I saw it again two days later, though, when I was still in pain. It was a “shorts” video on YouTube.
This time I really listened to the guy (a physical therapist) and actually tried it. Within five minutes the pain was gone. Later in the day it was like I’d never had the injury at all.
I have reinjured it a couple of times since then but so far, the stretch has worked each time.
I’m leaving the link here for anyone who might need the stretch in the future:
I hope the pain stays away this week — I have things I need to do, including driving 45 minutes one way to get Zooma the Wonder Dog a check up and her nails trimmed.
I’m still reading A Fatal Harvest by Rachael O. Phillips because I lost the book for two days. I’m also reading Come, Tell Me How You Live by Agatha Christie. My week last week seemed to be full of less reading time than I hoped but I actually think I will have these books read this week.
After these two I’ll be diving into Murder, She Wrote: Trick or Treachery.
Coming up later will be Hours We Regret by Chelsea Michelle and Damsel in Distress by P.G. Wodehouse.
Little Miss and I will be finishing The Good Master this week.
Last week I watched It Happened One Night with Clark Cable and What’s One More with Cary Grant. Last night I watched Pennies from Heaven with Bing Crosby.
What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to, or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.
We’ve been celebrating Little Miss’s birthday for the last couple of days and today is the last activity we are participating in. She had a special breakfast out and a special lunch with her grandparents on her birthday, an outing and dinner at a restaurant Friday and a sleep over with a friend last night. Today she is going to see reptiles with her friend at a reptile zoo because she is a huge fan of reptiles. They have other animals as well, but mostly reptiles.
I wrote more about our week last week in yesterday’s post if you want to catch up there.
Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are still hosting crafternoons. We will be announcing a date for October later on. If you are wondering what Crafternoons are it is a monthly Zoom meet up where we get together with other bloggers/crafters and do a craft while we chat about life and books and all kinds of other things.
If you are interested in the crafternoon, you can find more information here.
Erin and I are also hosting a monthly bookish link party called A Good Book and A Cup of Tea. You can find that link up for this month here.
Last week I finished The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis. I did not think I was going to like it at first but it was very good. I don’t know if I ever read this one when I was younger and I didn’t think I was going to like it but I got more into it as it went on. I am looking forward to reading the rest of the series before the end of the year.
I’m still reading Come, Tell Me Where You Live by Agatha Christie Mallowen. This is a non-fiction book/memoir written about Agatha’s travels with her archeologist husband Max Mallowen to Syria from 1935 to 1937. Max was her second husband and she remained married to him until his death.
Her stories about their travels are candid, very funny, and full of her natural wit.
I’ve been reading other books in between this one. It’s taken me a little longer to read it because it isn’t really a novel and because the print is very small and the lines are close together. Somehow that makes it feel more difficult to read and like I’ll never finish it but, honestly, it does move along quite nicely and is very interesting. I am learning a lot about that part of the world and how archeological digs worked in the old days. I’ll have it finished this week.
For fun I am reading A Fatal Harvest, an Amish Inn Mystery, by Rachael Phillips. Liz Ekhardt runs an Amish Inn in ….um…Iowa I think. She has a group of friends and a “friendship” with the town mayor, Jackson. She also has a pet bulldog named Beans. He came with the inn when she purchased it.
In this installment, Liz and her friend Naomi have discovered the body of one of Liz’s guests under the haybales on the hayride. Liz is always stumbling into a mystery and this time she wants to find out if her guest had a local connection that could have led to his death.
After that I’ll probably dive into Murder, She Wrote: Trick or Treachery.
Little Miss and I will be finishing The Good Master this week.
This past week I watched a crazy old movie called Autumn Harvest. It was a wild ride involving a shell shocked World War I vet who loses his memory, falls in love, and then regains his memory but forget his wife. Oh man, it was crazy, but the ending was nice at least.
I also watched a movie with Cary Grant called. It was about a couple who kept adopting children that no one else wanted. It was really beautiful and had me weepy. I’d never even heard of this one. It was a comedy drama with a very beautiful message about taking in children who don’t seem to be wanted.
I am still slowly working on Gladwynn Grant Goes Back to School. It will be out in February. If you would like to read the other three books, though, you can find them on Kindle Unlimited on Amazon and you can find paperbacks on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Now It’s Your Turn
What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to, or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.
This past week was rainy and muggy but our leaves are changing and at least our nights are cooler.
The feel of autumn is in the air for sure on those cooler nights. The apple fritter scented candle my husband picked up this weekend is helping that mood even more.
Yesterday the kids and I took advantage of the “nicer” weather we had after a week of rain and headed to a playground about twenty minutes from us. It was a gloomy and muggy day, but the kids still had fun playing on the zipline and in the creek. Little Miss made a new friend she might never meet again but they had fun at least.
I capped off my night with a Cary Grant movie, The Talk of the Town. It was a bit of a quirky film that was supposed to be a comedy but bordered on a drama at times.
This week I am going to work on being less overwhelmed with the world. To do that I am going to try to go on a media fast of sorts. Very limited scrolling and almost no news. My nervous system is overstimulated, overworked, over…something.
I have a lot going on with my parents’ health right now and some other things in life so I can’t take on the hurts and pains of the world too.
And I do take them on. When I see people hurting and then see people who do not care about that hurt because they have become desensitized to the pain of others with the 24/7 news cycle I start to realize that people around me are also probably thinking these horrible things that people are writing online too. It feels like people care less these days unless it is some political cause they are behind and while they are promoting that political cause they are tearing down others and yelling that is actually the other people tearing them down.
It’s exhausting and I’ve heard this over and over and over recently —that our brains were not built for all this news and 24/7 stimulation from social media. As a pastor I listen to once said, “We were not meant to be walking around with the entire world accessible via our butt bone.”
Of course he was talking about people who slide their phones in their back pockets and can slide it out at any time and at any time see the horrors of the world unfolding in real time. We can see good things too but we all know that the worst of the worst that is happening is what sells news and makes people stop scrolling.
More of us need to put our phones down and actually interact with people. As an introvert this is hard for me to say. I don’t like people. Ha. I know there are good people out there, though, and we need to find those people and interact with them more and the grumpy mouthy people on the internet less.
It’s a goal anyhow and I want to work more toward it.
Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are still hosting crafternoons but completely blanked on setting up a date on September. We both started homeschooling and had other events and all of the sudden September was over. It’s crazy to me how fast it went by!
We will be announcing a date for October later on, probably next week.
If you are wondering what Crafternoons are it is a monthly Zoom meet up where we get together with other bloggers/crafters and do a craft while we chat about life and books and all kinds of other things. We do our best not to focus on religion or politics so we don’t depress ourselves.
If you are interested in the crafternoon, you can find more information here.
Erin and I are also hosting a monthly bookish link party called A Good Book and A Cup of Tea. It is almost over for September but you can still get your bookish links in. They do not have to be recent posts, just related to books in some way. I’ll have a new link party up on Wednesday.
I am finishing up the Nancy Drew book The Clue of the Broken Locket and will probably take a bit of a Nancy break.
These books were written for the youth of the day back in the 1930s and then rewritten a bit in the 1950s, so I get that there is some unrealistic stuff in there, but did they not know about concussions back then? I suppose they didn’t but these characters are always taking headshots waking up, getting a cold cloth on their head and a drink of water and then continuing on their day. Like in this book, a huge rock was thrown through a front door, supposedly hit the couch, and knocked two people forward where they hit their heads on the hearth and were both knocked unconscious at the same time.
Hmm….oookay….let’s go on and believe that could happen but then let’s also believe that no one thought they should take both of these people to a hospital to have them checked out???
So the Nancy Drew books can be silly at times, but they aren’t written for adults, and the mysteries themselves are actually very interesting and sometimes even give me ideas for my own book. I suppose that is why I keep reading them off and on. All that being said, it is time for a little break and to read something more mature.
That’s why I’m reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis. Hahahaha! Really I just have a goal to reread The Chronicles of Narnia so I am reading another children’s book but it’s less annoying than the Nancy Drew books can be.
I am actually reading an adult book by Agatha Christie called Come, Tell Me How You Live but I put it down somewhere in the house and could not find it all week. I found it yesterday finally!
So I shall be reading an adult book this week!
I am also starting one of my fall books, A Fatal Harvest by Rachael O. Phillips, this week since I will finish Nancy Drew today and probably will finish the Narnia book later in the week.
I might start Death of a Gossip by M.C. Beaton this week too, depending on my mood. It’s the first book in the Hamish MacBeth Mystery series. And Emma Lion. I totally forgot I want to start that this week! That might come before Death of a Gossip.
Little Miss and I are going to finish up The Good Master this week. We did not read it last week for some reason.
I’m not sure what The Husband is reading at the moment because I forgot to ask him before he went upstairs for a nap before work and I’m going to publish this before he gets up.
The Boy isn’t reading a book right now but he’s getting ready to read a book based on the Halo games.
This past week I watched less TV than normal but I did watch one of the worst Murder, She Wrote episodes I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen a couple of stinkers and this one was…well, weird and creepy. Jessica essentially had a college guy stalking her. A college guy who looked about 30, I might add. Either way he was obsessed with her and all older women. It was …. Ew.
The Husband and I later watched another one that wasn’t very good either. That’s how it is with series, though, there are good and bad ones. Can’t be helped when a series runs for 12 years!
I stared a movie called The Talk of the Town with Cary Grant last night but didn’t finish it yet. It’s weird. That’s all I can say. It’s also funny. Cary is accused of burning down a building with a person trapped inside but escapes from jail and Jean Arthur decides to let him stay at her rental house even though a law professor is renting out the house at the same time. Cary must prove his innocence to the professor played by Ronald Colman.
It’s a bit crazy, in other words, but I really had an itch to watch an old movie.
I also enjoyed this video about comforting reads from a new-to-me vlogger:
Last week I worked a bit on Gladwynn Grant Goes Back to School.
I also pulled my books out of Kindle Unlimited on Amazon because I feel like Amazon takes advantage and rips of indie authors. My ebooks and paperbacks are still for sale there but they will not be exclusive there anymore. I also introduced new book covers for the Gladwynn books.
What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to, or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this. Link up below if you want to:
Today’s prompt was: Books on My Fall 2025 to-Read List
I have more than ten books on my autumn hopefuls list, but I chose ten of those to share. I am leaving out those I am reading now or have already read this month:
|| Murder, She Wrote: Trick or Treachery by Jessica Fletcher and Donald Bain ||
|| Nancy Drew: The Clue of the Broken Locket by Carolyn Keene ||
|| A Damsel in Distress by P.G. Wodehouse ||
|| My Beloved (A Mitford Novel) by Jan Karon (it releases Oct. 7 but I probably won’t get it right away so this could become a winter read) ||
|| Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier ||
|| The Unselected Journals of Emma Lion by Beth Brower ||
|| A Hardy Boys Mystery: The Tower Treasure by Frankin W. Dixon ||
|| The Cat, The Mill, and the Murder by Leann Sweeney ||
|| A Fatal Harvest (An Amish Inn Mystery) by Rachael O. Phillips ||
|| The Cider Shop Rules by Julie Anne Lindsey ||
Have you read any of these books? Or maybe watched the shows based on them? What did you think of them or the characters?
If you write book reviews or book-related blog posts, don’t forget that Erin and I host the A Good Book and A Cup of Tea Monthly Bookish Blog Party. You can learn more about it here.
Hello! Welcome to my blog. I am a blogger, homeschool mom, and I write cozy mysteries.
You can find my Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.
Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs mentioned to me a couple of weeks ago that she thought I had mentioned somewhere that I was going to read The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder. I had not but it looked interesting to me so she suggested we do a buddy read. I’ve never done a buddy read so I said I could try it with her.
Having someone to talk to about the book and bounce ideas off of about what was going to happen next was fun.
This book takes place in England and is about Freya Lockwood who used to be an antique hunter. I wasn’t sure what the term “antique hunter” meant until I got into the book. It turns out it isn’t only about finding antiques that are worth something and can be sold in a store. Antique hunting is also about finding stolen antiques and returning them to their rightful owners.
What I knew from the beginning was that a man named Arthur Crockleford had died and it upset her. It is actually suggested in the prologue of the book that Arthur was murdered.
We will spend most of the book trying to figure out not only why but who.
Freya and Arthur haven’t talked in almost 20 years and we will learn more about that as we read too.
Freya’s aunt Carole, who cared for Freya when her parents died, introduced Freya to Arthur and was also good friends with him. After Freya and Arthur’s falling out, Freya married and had a child, who is now grown.
From the book description: Joining forces with her eccentric Aunt Carole, Freya follows clues to an old manor house for an advertised antiques enthusiast’s weekend. But not all is as it seems. It’s clear to Freya that the antiques are all just poor reproductions, and her fellow guests are secretive and menacing. What is going on at this estate and how was Arthur involved? More importantly, can Freya and Carole discover the truth before the killer strikes again?”
Arthur leaves behind a series of journals for Freya that he calls the Antique Hunter’s Guide.
My thoughts:
This book was … okay for me. It wasn’t the worst book I’ve ever read. It wasn’t the best. Overall, though, it was a fun escape – at least until about 60 percent when things got a bit confusing for me and sort of fell apart in my opinion. That totally could have been just a me thing, though. Maybe my brain wasn’t clicking as well with the second half as it did the first.
The book was clean and free of swearing and graphic descriptions so I would consider it a cozy mystery.
The one big thing this book had going for it was the characters. They were interesting and I got attached to them, though I was attached more to Carole than Freya.
The mystery is decent too, but the characters are interesting and fun to learn about.
Freya’s aunt Carole is a highlight of the book for me. She was eccentric, funny, and always on the brink of either blowing their investigation or getting them deeper in trouble. She was there to add some humor to the book it seems and I liked that.
Freya is getting her life back and finding the woman she used to be in this book, but don’t worry, if you forget that fact, the author will tell you about 50 more times before the book ends. She will also remind you that Freya has a scar on her hand about 50 times. I’m joking a bit, but those two things were repeated a bit too much for my liking. I got the point the first three times we were told Freya wanted her old life back. Though I thought we were told this too much I liked that Freya worked toward finding her former passion for antique hunting.
Here are a couple of quotes I highlighted as I read:
“This plate is different than before, but it’s still precious,” said Arthur. “Most of us have been broken in one way or another. We don’t need to hide the scars, for they make us who we are. This bread was mended with real gold.”
“I saw for the first time that I was me again — that person hadn’t left me; I’d just dived into the safety of my London home and become shrouded with the world of being a wife and mother.”
“Your journals are called the Antique Hunter’s Guide. But my hunting hasn’t been as straightforward — your guide led me on quite an adventure.”
“You can be so dramatic. He offered tea, and murderers don’t offer tea, do they darling?” Carole tutted at me.
“Carole appeared at my side and rubbed my arms like she used to do after we’d come in from a long, cold winter’s walk. “I want to show you what I meant about the vases. Come.” She handed back my phone and led me away from the darkness, just as she had always done.”
Erin mentioned when we were talking that she thought this book was a good introduction to a series and I think she’s right. There was a lot in it and a couple storylines going on, including a possible romance, but in the end they all converged, luckily.
I will warn you that this book switches from a few points of view to introduce us to each suspect or to Aunt Carole. The tense changes when the POV changes so we go from mainly first person for Freya to third person for everyone else. I thought Miller did this well so the changes didn’t bother me like it has in some other books I’ve tried in the past.
There is one more book in the series that is out — The Antique Hunter’s Death on the Red Sea. The third book, The Antique Hunter’s Murder At The Castle is scheduled for release in March of 2026.
The bottom line for me is that this is a fun read, something to pick up when you need an escape from the world. Don’t expect it to blow you away, but do expect to be sufficiently entertained.
If you write book reviews or book-related blog posts, don’t forget that Erin and I host the A Good Book and A Cup of Tea Monthly Bookish Blog Party. You can learn more about it here.
Hello! Welcome to my blog. I am a blogger, homeschool mom, and I write cozy mysteries.
You can find my Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.
Friday was my birthday, so I wrote about visiting a very nice restaurant with my husband in my Saturday Afternoon Chat post yesterday if you want to catch up with all that there. I’ll share some photos below of our experience.
A reminder that I — and now my new co-host Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs — host a monthly bookish link party. It’s called A Good Book and a Cup of Tea but I’ve changed the link name at the top of the page to “Bookish Link Party” so it makes more sense. It’s a link-up for any post related to reading or books and you can post throughout the month.
Another reminder that Erin and I will be hosting a Comfy, Cozy movie-watching marathon again this year, and we already have our list of movies. This week we are watching Benny and Joon with Mary Stuart Masterson, Johnny Depp, Aiden Quinn, and Julianne Moore.
Erin made this cool graphic for it:
Also, Erin and I host a monthly Crafternoon meet up where we get together on Zoom with other bloggers/crafters and do a craft while we chat about life and books and all kinds of other things. We do our best not to focus on religion or politics so we don’t depress ourselves.
If you are interested in the crafternoon, you can find more information here.
I just finished An Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder by C.L. Miller, which as a buddy read with Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs. We are both sharing a review of it tomorrow.
You can read the review tomorrow to know what I thought of it.
Right now, I am still reading Gin and Daggers, a Murder, She Wrote book by Donald Bain. I will most likely have it done tonight or tomorrow.
I am also reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis.
My slow read is still Come, Tell Me How You Live by Agatha Christie Mallowen, a non-fiction book by Agatha that is about her and her husband traveling to Syria for an archaeological dig. It’s good so far but a bit wordy and slow in some places so I’m not as interested to read it as I am my murder mysteries.
Up next I will be reading Nancy Drew: The Clue of the Broken Locket.
Tuesday I’ll be sharing my list of hopeful reads for autumn. I know for a fact I won’t get through all of them, but it will be fun trying anyhow.
Little Miss and I are reading The Good Master by Kate Seredy together.
The Husband is reading Gray Day by Walter Mosley.
This past week I watched Murder, She Wrote (of course. I am making my way through the show since I didn’t watch them when I was younger.), Poirot, Just A Few Acres Farm, Dick VanDyke, and Supernatural.
It was my first time watching Supernatural and I liked it, sort of. I’m not big on scary or horror-type stuff and though this is tamer than actual horror films, it still unsettled me. I watched it with my son and told him I might do it again but I’m not sure. I’ll have to watch a lot of All Creatures Great and Small to get it out of my system. Ha!
I actually am working on Gladwynn Grant Goes Back to School, but very slowly. It looks like I won’t have it out until winter.
I’m going to start listening to Come Rain, or Come Shine by Jan Karon this upcoming week (because I didn’t last week!) as I get ready for Jan’s new book to come out in October!
I’ve also been listening to the True Drew Podcast, which is a podcast about all things Nancy Drew. You can find it on Apple Podcasts.
What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to, or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.
We had some family time this last week with my brother and sister-in-law and my parents to discuss the future, I guess you would say. It wasn’t easy but it was necessary as my parents are both 81 now.
It was nice to have that family time together even though it was short. Luckily, my brother and his wife don’t live too far away, and we hope to visit them when the leaves change color, since they live in one of the prettiest parts of the state.
Nadda.
The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder by C.L. Miller, Gin and Daggers (A Murder She Wrote book) by “Jessica Fletcher” and Donald Bain, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis, and Come, Tell Me How You Live by Agatha Christie Mallowan.
The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder is very good and fairly fast-moving so far. It’s sort of a cozy mystery at this point. Clean. I’m reading it as part of a buddy read with Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs.
Gin and Daggers is very good and well-written. I don’t think I expected it to be, even though another one out of the series I read was good as well. This is the first in the Murder, She Wrote series.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is obviously good.
Come, Tell Me How You Live is my slow read with a chapter or two a week (the chapters are very long).
Nancy Drew: The Clue of the Broken Locket by Carolyn Keene.
Little Miss and I are reading The Good Master by Kate Seredy and are enjoying it. She is reading a chapter a night before bed, and then I read the chapters the next morning.
I am behind. Oops! Ha! She’s enjoying what’s ahead of me now.
The Husband is reading Walkin’ the Dog by Walter Mosley.
I’ve been watching The Dick VanDyke Show, The Monkees (which I could only find a couple of episodes of), Rockford Files, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, Murder, She Wrote, The Chosen and other nostalgic shows that bring me comfort.
The week before last I watched the first couple episodes of season two of the Marlow Mystery Club.
I read the first two books in the series and the second one pretty much made me decide to take a break from the series. I did not enjoy it very much. I’ll see if the season based on it is even better.
Yesterday I wrote about watching an episode of The Monkees that I found on YouTUbe (couldn’t find it streaming anywhere else) and then last night I watched a concert with them from 2001 and it was actually very good. Great music, funny, and just flat out entertaining. Watching it was the most relaxed since Wednesday afternoon. You can find it HERE.
I’m going to start listening to Come Rain, or Come Shine by Jan Karon this upcoming week as I get ready for Jan’s new book to come out in October!
What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to, or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
This week I decided to list villains from books I’ve read and some from books I haven’t yet read (and might never read. Ha!)
Professor Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I have read one book featuring Professor Moriarty, the nemesis of Sherlock Holmes, but not the short story yet. I have also seen him portrayed in at least two TV adaptations of Sherlock Holmes
2. Captain Hook from Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
Of course Captain Hook from J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan has to be on this list. I have read some of Peter Pan and watched, of course, the adaptations, specifically the Disney one and Hook. Dustin Hoffman pulled off a brilliant performance as Hook in that one
Editorial use only
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Snap/Shutterstock (390884jm)
FILM STILLS OF ‘HOOK’ WITH 1991, ACTION, AGAINST-ALL-ODDS (SWASHBUCKLER, FANTASY, DUSTIN HOFFMAN, STEVEN SPIELBERG IN 1991
VARIOUS
3. Sauron from The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Hello…what is more evil than a wizard who wants to rule the world? A devil who wants to rule it, but you know what I mean.
4. Count Dracula from Dracula by Bram Stoker
We’ve had way too many kids’ movies that have tried to turn Dracula into a funny, relatable good guy. I’ve never read the book, but from what I understand about it — he was not a good guy. Not at all.
5. Voldemort from The Harry Potter series
Another evil wizard who wants to take over the world, but most of all destroy poor Harry Potter. I have not read the books but I did read part of the first on my own and with my kids and watched the movies with them as well.
6.Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
I have never read this book and most likely won’t but I did watch the movie with my husband.
7. Eleanor Shaw from The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon
I have not read the book but I watched the 1962 movie with Angela Lansbury as Eleanor Shaw and … shudder…she was super creepy. I can’t get into too much about why she is so evil so I don’t ruin the book or movie for you. Just know she’s scum.
8. The White Witch (Jadis) from The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
Creepy to a fault, Jadis likes to tempt little boys with Turkish delight to drag all the secrets out so she can find and kill his siblings and keep her chilly hold on all of Narnia. She is, of course, a symbol of Satan, or at least one of his minions. I have read the books she is in (The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe) and have seen one movie with her in it.
9. M. Hercule Flambeau from The Father Brown Mysteries by G.K. Chesterton
This conniving burglar is always trying to get by Father Brown who is always hot on his tale. I’ve read one short story with him and have seen him in the modern version of the show. He’s quite handsome in that show too but aren’t all the best villains a bit handsome?
10. Satan from Paradise Lost by John Milton (and …hello….the BIBLE)
I have not read Paradise Lost but I have read the Bible and if you want to get technical about it, Satan is the basis for all the villains we have listed here.
Margaret, Rose, Jane, and Fran had a good thing meet every week in the quiet of their peaceful chapel and knit prayer shawls. No muss, just ministry. That is, until their pastor boots them out of the church in his last-ditch effort to revive the dwindling congregation.
Uptight Margaret isn’t having it. Knitting prayer shawls where people can watch is the most ridiculous idea she’s ever heard of, and she’s heard plenty. Prayer belongs in the church, not out among the heathen masses. How are they supposed to knit holiness into these shawls if they’re constantly distracted by the public? But with no choice, the others embrace the challenge. They pack their knitting bags and drag Margaret–grumbling the whole way–to the mall with them. She can’t wait to prove them all wrong when it fails miserably, and show the pastor that she always knows best.
Without the familiar mold the group has been stuck in, their own losses, pain, and struggles rise to the surface. And the people and situations they encounter every time they try to sit quietly and knit are taking them a lot further out of their comfort zone than they ever imagined. Can they find the courage to tackle the increasing number of knotty issues they learn about in the community–or will the tangle be too much to unravel?
Sharon Mondragon’s debut is warm and delightful, full of real laughter, grief, and personality. It beautifully illustrates the power of women across generations to reach people for Christ.
My thoughts:
This book was not something I “normally” read, but yet it was. I read a lot of mystery books, but even I need a break from the mysteries sometimes and enjoy a book that is going to make me think about my faith without bashing me over the head. I also don’t mind books that bash me over the head a little bit with my faith so…yeah…sometimes you need a lighter one though.
This book had it all – humor, lovable characters, meaningful moments, thoughtful passages, characters grappling with long-held emotional pain, and people finding a new awareness of God in their lives. It was realistic and raw without being inappropriate or salacious.
Some of the members like the idea of leaving the chapel and going into public, but at least one, Margaret, completely balks. The idea of the group is to knit quietly and pray over the shawls and the people who will receive them, she says.
Going out into the community, though, becomes an outreach for more than members of the public. Soon, the knitting group members are being ministered to as well. New friendships are formed, old hurts are healed, and the church is beginning to grow with new members. More importantly, some of the biggest objectors to moving the group out of the church are learning about themselves and coming closer to the God they said they wanted to serve.
I absolutely loved the members of the knitting club that is the center of this book. They immediately felt like friends. Out of all of them, I could actually relate to Margaret the mos,t even though she was the most “grumpy” out of the women. I don’t know that I am grumpy (others might disagree) but I am a control freak who doesn’t like change for a variety of reasons. There were some tough subjects in this book, and I don’t usually don’t like that in my books, but I kept going because I felt there would be some resolutions and comforts that were needed for the characters and the reader(s). The characters were also so lovable and, in most cases, sweet. I became very invested in their lives.
I will leave it to you to find out the meaning of the title and who the dragon lady really is.
Trigger warning: There is discussion of cancer and death in this book. It is handled very respectfully without going into graphic detail, but it could be difficult for some readers.
I listened to the majority of this one on Audible and enjoyed the narrator, Christina Moore.
I finished the last few chapters in a paperback, which I bought because I felt like I might want to loan it out to people in the future. This is the second book I read by Sharon (the first being Grandma Ruth Doesn’t Go To Funerals, which had a totally different feel to it) and I am certain I will be reading more. I really enjoy how her writing pulls you write into the story and makes you love her characters right from the start.
