Review – the hundred lies of Lizzie lovett

I’m somewhat conflicted about this novel. I found the title/subtitle a bit misleading because Lizzie isn’t really a liar, she simple changes her style as she ages like most women do. To me the title suggests Lizzie is a pathological liar who believes in her own version of the truth, and I expected a novel about her house of lies crashing down. Instead it was about an immature and self-absorbed teenager named Hawthorn and her relationship with the boyfriend of a missing girl named Lizzie, who wasn’t the happy-go-lucky girl Hawthorn thought her to be.

Hawthorn was a somewhat fresh take on a teenaged heroine. Though I found her to be annoying and selfish–especially when she betrayed her brother Rush’s secret during a minor argument–I still appreciate the uniqueness of her character, including her obsession with the life of the popular girl she felt she could never become (Lizzie). Chelsea Sedoti is a talented YA author who very accurately portrays the thought processes of a teenaged girl. I enjoyed Hawthorn’s witty lists of all the terrible things she wished would happen to someone who wronged her; “I wish someone would replace Mychelle’s fancy shampoo with the drugstore brand. I wish she would suddenly forget the name of her five favourite songs. I wish every time she microwaved a frozen burrito, the center would stay cold.”

I disliked Hawthorn’s (first Lizzie’s) romantic interest, Enzo, who was way too old for her at 25. And even though I knew she would end up with Connor, I wish more time had been spent on that positive relationship so the book would have felt like less of a downer. Sure it was an accurate portrayal of a lot of first loves, and even brought me back to my cringe-worthy boyfriends, but he was just such a loser and I found it painful to read sometimes. I think the moment I really didn’t like him was after he found out Hawthorn was a virgin and instead of panicking at the news in addition to committing a crime, he just lazily rolled a cigarette and said he felt like a bad guy. Ugh. I wanted her to kick him to the curb! Then he went ahead and got with Hawthorn’s nemesis Mychelle and told her the embarrassing news about Hawthorn staining his sheets. What a bag of dicks!!! AmIright?

I think my issue was that while I appreciated that the characters were realistically portrayed, I simply didn’t like them. This made the book a bit hard to read (for me), in addition to the book being a bit slow. An exception to this, and when I could not put the book down, was when Hawthorn and Enzo entered the abandoned house in the woods. I thought Chelsea Sedoti did a wonderful job unravelling the mystery of Lizzie’s disappearance and portraying Hawthorn’s feelings once the mystery was solved. I’m giving it 3.5 stars.

Personally, I wish Ms. Sedoti would write a sequel and the first scene would begin with Hawthorn kicking Enzo in the nuts.

Review – Be Frank with Me

I picked this book up in Costco and bought it because the description on the back spoke to me. Not because it sounded interesting, which it did, but because I recently lost an investment, I’m a writer, and I have a son. Sure I’m not a hugely successful writer depending on my next book to fix a devastating financial mistake, but Be Frank with Me still felt like one of those reads you need at a certain time in your life.

The premise is that Mimi Banning, a reclusive writer who wrote a famous book twenty years prior, has lost all her money due to a Ponzi scheme. She must now write a second bestseller to support herself and her son Frank. To aid her in this task, her publisher sends his assistant Alice to type the manuscript onto computer (Mimi will only use a typewriter). However, Alice turns into more of a maid and babysitter to Mimi and her son Frank, who is an eccentric nine year old boy obsessed with 1930s film stars and has nothing in common with the kids at school.

Be Frank with Me is definitely a character-driven novel. The majority of the novel centers around Frank and his shenanigans and Alice’s quest to discover the true identity of Frank’s father. There were a lot of laugh-out-loud moments and I felt like I knew the characters on a personal level. Johnson did an excellent job of describing the house, which became a character in itself. When the house burns and all of Mimi’s work is lost—and after she locks herself away from Frank in order to meet her deadline, too—I felt for her in a way that only a writer who has experienced a computer crash can. Writers put so much of their lives on hold to create and without any certainty that the work will pay off. To waste all that time would be heartbreaking.

The good news is that in the end, Frank’s eccentricities are what end up saving Mimi’s book. The real question is whether or not the book becomes an instant success like her first and saves them from financial ruin. The outcome of Mimi’s book after publication is left unexplored, which I felt was a flaw considering it forms the premise of the novel. I know that the ending is one of the hardest parts of a novel to write, and it’s impossible to write an ending that every reader will enjoy, but I felt that too many questions were left unanswered. Is Mr. Vargas Frank’s father? Will Frank be okay? What happens to Xander?

I felt the novel ended abruptly but everything else was done right, so I’m giving it 4 stars.

Refinishing an antique vanity

For the last week we’ve been having a lot of “fun” installing a stackable washer/dryer in the upstairs closet, and today we passed the plumbing inspection! Huzzah! Now I can finally get started on that large pile of laundry sitting in the hallway! But first I’ll post pictures of my last project: refinishing an antique vanity.

I actually finished this late May, but I’m posting it now because I’m feeling all crafty and handy, and to avoid that laundry mountain. The vanity is part of a bedroom collection that belonged to my Nana and was quite yellowed and chipped. First I cleaned it with TSP to degrease the wood, then I sanded it down and painted it white with sea green drawers. I love how it turned out! We live in an old house without a lot of closet space, so having this vanity has been awesome.

this is how it looked when I started sanding

this is the cats helping me do the sanding

these are the insides of the drawers, which happened to match the sea green paint (wish I could say this was intentional)

and drum roll…finished product!