Mini Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella

From book flap:

Becky Brandon thought motherhood would be a breeze and that having a daughter was a dream come true:  a shopping friend for life!  But it's trickier than she thought.  Two-year-old Minnie has a quite different approach to shopping.
Minnie creates havoc everywhere she goes, from Harrods to her own christening.  Her favorite word is "Mine!" and she's even trying to get into eBay!  On top of everything else, Becky and Luke are still living with her parents (the deal on house #4 has fallen through), when suddenly there's a huge financial crisis.
With people having to cut back, Becky decides to throw a surprise party for Luke to cheer everyone up.  But when costs start to spiral out of control, she must decide whether to accept help from an unexpected source - and therefore run the risk of hurting the person she loves most.
Will Becky be able to pull off the celebration of the year?  Will she and Luke ever find a home of their own? Will Minnie ever learn to behave?  And...most important...will Becky's secret wishes ever come true?

My thoughts:

I must admit that I absolutely adore Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic series; they are some of my favorite reads, because I always know that I'm in for a rollicking good read.  And with Mini Shopaholic, Kinsella does not disappoint - the book was hilarious!  I laughed out loud so many times that I cried from laughing so much.  I LOVED IT!  Of course how you can not laugh at the ridiculously over the top situations that Becky always seems to find herself in - like when she finds out that Minnie's pocket money (50 pence a week) has been spent until 2103 (Minnie is in the red and only 2 years old!); or when she gets caught in a lie, which always seems to be the case, like when her husband Luke finds her outside his work building (she had just secretly met his secretary for lunch to get help planning his surprise birthday party) and she tells him she just had botox, then decides to switch it up and say she wants a boob job (the kind that is not invasive and consists of getting your breasts inflated for a week) - they are all super funny moments that easily put a smile on your face.  Along with the funny, Kinsella throws in real life issues, such as, the economic meltdown, motherhood (specifically child-rearing), relationships (marital, friendships, mother-daughter, mother-son, etc) and so forth; all of which help to ground the story and allow for us to see how much Becky has developed and grown as a character.  All in all, another fantastic read in Kinsella's successful Shopaholic series!  I can't wait for the next one - which, according to the teaser at the end of Mini Shopaholic, will take place in Hollywood (can't you just imagine all the high-jinks Becky will get herself caught up in?)

Til the next book! Ta! Happy Reading!!!

ROOM by Emma Donoghue

From book flap:

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the world.  It's where he was born, it's where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn.  There are endless wonders that let loose Jack's imagination - the snake under Bed that he constructs out of eggshells, the imaginary world projected through TV, the coziness of Wardrobe below Ma's clothes, where she tucks him in safely at night in case Old Nick comes.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it's the prison where she has been held since she was nineteen - for seven years.  Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in that eleven-by-eleven-foot space.  But Jack's curiosity is building alongside her own desperation - and she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer.

My thoughts:

Emma Donoghue has received so much praise for her book, ROOM, and I have to be honest and admit that I'm not really getting what all the fuss is about.  I may be one of the few people to feel this way, but so it goes.  Truthfully, I think the majority of my disappointment lies with the fact that the entire book is told from Jack's perspective and being that he is only 5 years old, well, that perspective is extremely limited in scope and understanding.  How can Jack explain to us how his Ma was kidnapped and held captive for seven years, when he can barely grasp the idea that Outside exists for real and not just in TV.  Jack can only share with us what he knows to be true, which is his life inside of Room - the daily routines of eating, Phys Ed, reading, Bed,etc.  I honestly wanted to give up with this book - I found Jack's voice to be tiresome and repetitive - but for some reason I stuck with it hoping that eventually it would get better. I thought that perhaps once they escape to Outside we would finally get to know more about Ma and perhaps see them reintegrate themselves into the world - of course, I didn't get what I wanted.  Don't get me wrong, Donoghue writes about their escape and where they wind up afterward, but for some reason I felt it lacked a depth and realness that would have provided us with a much more powerfully emotional read.  I just believe that having Jack, instead of Ma, be the narrator deprived the book from truly reaching its point; which was to capture the essence of a horrifying and heartbreaking experience.  I feel as if we didn't really get to know these characters well enough, specifically Ma, whom I feel would have provided the best voice for describing and sharing their ordeal within Room and Outside.  Instead of pushing the story along further and truly examining the psychological effects of everything that occurred before Room, within Room and after Room, we merely get a quick overview of the events fleshed out a bit.  I found the whole story to be rather underwhelming and unrealistic at times, repetitive with information and not at all as emotional as I had expected.  Overall, not one of my favorite reads.  I wouldn't recommend this book. Of course, at the same time, I wouldn't mind reading your thoughts on it - perhaps you can show me what I missed. 

Happy reading!!