A book series that should be made into film

Yep I said it. The Lunar Chronicles should be turned into films. (I just checked to make sure this dream hadn't turned reality yet...it hasn't.) As I mentioned in my review of Cinder, Meyer has created a world where favorite fairytale characters are very different from the stories we read as children. Scarlet is the story of a regular farm girl who discovers that her grandmother has kept a secret from her and now it's gotten her into a lot of trouble. Cue Wolf (who I must say makes Jacob from Twilight a distant memory) to the rescue. He seems to have all the answers as to why her grandmother has disappeared and how this fits into the puzzle regarding the missing Lunar Princess. And we can't forget Cinder who is on the run from the authorities...all of them in fact. Long story short: The sequel didn't disappoint. It delivered an action packed, high energy, emotional rollercoaster that I highly recommend you give a shot. If you enjoyed the first in this series or The Dorothy Must Die series then you'll probably enjoy this one.

Next on deck is A Buzz in the Meadow: The Natural History of a French Farm by Dave Goulson. I was intrigued by this because of the beautiful butterflies on the cover and from the description of the first book that Goulson wrote (and which I fully intend to read as well) about his study of bees. A Buzz in the Meadow is a look at the other creatures that inhabit his farm (where he cultivated the aforementioned bees). It's a conservationist's call-to-arms, I believe. We shall shortly see!

Reality or fantasy...I can't decide

Okay, I can admit that I have a vivid imagination and at times it has run away with me. This might be one of those times. I was about 50 pages (or fewer) into The Historian and I started to question if what I was reading was actually a work of nonfiction. Let me remind you that this is the story of a quest to locate Dracula. DRACULA. And here I am reading it and the story is too believable to be a work of fiction. The main voice (if you can call it that) of the narrative is the author who has assembled together various pieces of evidence such as letters, manuscripts, book passages, maps, and folk songs to weave the story of her parents mission to find and kill the man who was Vlad the Impaler but more widely known as the mythical vampire, Dracula. Even now as I'm writing this, I feel a thrill of horror that the man Vlad the Impaler was an actual living breathing man. He did unspeakably horrible things in his time (mid to late 15th century) which is why many people felt he was too evil to die outright. This is how the legends that he was an immortal, evil creature came into being. Elizabeth Kostova took this even further by using historical documents that made it all too believable. (I have no desire to check and see if those items mentioned in the book are real or fictional by the way.) I urge you to give this book a try and let me know if you finish it absolutely convinced that it couldn't be real.

Now that I have thoroughly freaked myself out, let me tell you about my next book. About a month ago I reviewed Cinder by Marissa Meyer and I mentioned that it was the start of a series called the Lunar Chronicles. Do you see where this is headed yet? That's right, I'm reading book two in the series, Scarlet! For those of you who heeded my advice and read the first book in the series you will remember that it ended on somewhat of a cliffhanger. This book picks up at that point but it also introduces us to a completely different character, Scarlet, who is on the opposite side of the world from Cinder. She's got problems of her own because her grandmother is missing and she soon discovers that she is in grave danger. Who can she trust? How do the paths of these two girls cross? LET'S FIND OUT!