King Arthur Movie Tristan

title: Losing Beauty

author: Johanna Garth

genre: paranormal romance

published: 2011

pages: 315

first line: "I've been to hell and back."

rated: 4 out of 5 stars

Her beauty was the lure and what lay beneath was the trap. She wished she could warn them, tell them to run from her before it was too late, but she couldn't. That was the other part of the deal. She got to be beautiful but she never, ever got to tell the truth.

p.3

About:

When Haden Sarantos arrives in the small town of Iowa claiming he is the new librarian, something is very different about him. He knows when people will die and I wondered if he was the grim reaper.



The beautiful Persephone Campbell is well known in her small home town.
She was raised by a single mom, her father having died in a car crash before she was born.


After meeting Persey, the one thing Haden notices right away is that as the ruler of death, he cannot 'see' how she will die.
Haden knows every 'humans end', how and when they will die, yet Persey is a mystery to him.






Persey herself is not like others, people are compelled to confide their deepest secrets to her, secrets she sometimes wishes she didn't know. The darker the secret, the stronger the urge for people to unburden it on her.





As the years pass, Persey goes on bewitching everyone she meets. Aaron Strait, a high school football player, falls in love with her. The two eventually marry and Persey goes to work at a law firm in NYC. Aaron goes on to become a Wall Street investment banker.



All the while, Haden is in her life in some form or another, waiting to make her his own. He has been obsessed with Persey since he first laid eyes on her.

A lawyer named Daniel Hartnett works with Persey and is hopelessly in love with her as well, even though she is married. Soon enough Daniel realizes there is something different about Persey, and he figures out her special talent of inspiring people to confess themselves to her.




Persey comes in contact with Haden again in NYC when he is instructing her Yoga class. Little does she know, Haden has plans to make Persey his own and will stop at nothing to claim her. He wants to make her his immortal queen.

The heat of his body threatened to suffocate her with its intensity. It was more than heat. It was devastation, sorrow, musty odors from rooms where people sobbed lonely tears. His secrets were inside of her, consuming her. She could feel their darkness and the horror. Each one was more devastating than the next, and yet, something in her called to them. They were part of her, their pain and suffering belonged to her.

p.145

My thoughts:


I have to say I didn't know what Losing Beauty was about when I first began reading it.

I have been pleasantly surprised! It reminded me a bit of the film Meet Joe Black as far as Haden's character was concered.




Author Johanna Garth does an excellent job at weaving a unique and interesting story here. In the beginning I couldn't figure out whether Haden was a villain or not. And when I did see that he wasn't one of the good guys, I still liked him. He's one of those bad boys you love to hate. Haden became my favorite character in the story. I now have a new literary crush.


The interactions between Haden and Persey gave me the chills.

The first time Persey came to the library, he felt her. Her presence was a dark space—a hole where knowledge should be. She entered the room and filled it up with nothingness. He found her sitting on the carpeted floor, between the stacks of older children's books. She looked up as though she was expecting him. He crouched down in front of her and she inched away from him.

"Hello, Persey," he said, smiling at her.

"You know my name." She said it without wonder or surprise. It was as though his knowledge of her name was just another thing she expected.

p. 11

I liked Persey's character. I wondered who she was, where she got this special power from. Imagine people having to reveal their deepest, darkest secrets to you? I think that's a sad fate.


I liked that Persey married Aaron, and yet, I liked Daniel too and could see her being happy with him as well. Daniel himself was a sweet guy with a good heart. I rooted for him throughout the story and I enjoyed the interactions between Persey and him.




The paranormal and romance elements in this book were right up my alley and I enjoyed reading Losing Beauty very much.
I liked the mythology of the story as well.

Kronos—ruler of both the world and immortals—lived on Mount Titanus. From his mountain-top palace, he pulled the strings of time which governed all human life. His palace was carpeted with the ever-changing map of time. He walked over it as he observed and guided the timing of all events in accordance with the dictates of natural law.

p.197

The book took some unexpected twists and turns and I never really knew what would happen next, my interest was held throughout. I also like how the events in the story were wrapped up together towards the end, to create an exciting conclusion. In my opinion, the ending leaves the story wide open for a sequel.





Special thanks to author Johanna Garth for providing me a copy of her debut novel for review! I recommend Losing Beauty to fans of romance and paranormals, or for anyone looking for a good story to get caught up in.





On a final note, I'll also mention, I'm old-fashioned and still have yet to purchase an e-reader. I don't tend to read full length books online, mainly because I just prefer to be holding a paperback. I did make the exception for Johanna's book and am glad I did.




About the author:

Johanna Garth is a writer of urban fantasy and mythic fiction for adults who resides with her husband and two children in Portland, Oregon.

This is her debut novel.

title: Lady of Hay

author: Barbara Erskine

genre: historical fiction/paranormal

pages: 571

published: 1986, republished 2010

first line: It was snowing.

rated: 4 out of 5







Journalist Joanna Clifford is researching regression by hypnosis for an article she is writing. In 1970 Jo herself was hypnotized, but remembers very little about the incident. What she doesn't know is that she nearly died during the session, her heart having stopped, and the hypnotherapist gave her a mental suggestion so that she would not remember anything that occurred.



Now, 15 years later, Jo has agreed to be hypnotized again for her research. Her old flame Nick is adamantly trying to talk her out of it, while his brother Sam is as well. However after the first session, Jo regresses to 800 years in the past and finds herself seeing her life through the eyes of Matilda de Braose, The Lady of Hay.



Before she knows it, Jo's hypnotic trances are getting really vivid and she is having a hard time distinguishing what's real from what happened to Matilda.
She learns that Matilda was unhappily married to William, but was secretly in love with Richard de Clare. She experiences Matilda's pain and heartache. Jo even finds herself missing Richard and wanting to regress just to be able to be with him, if only in a trance.



While under hypnosis, Jo experiences Matilda giving birth to her first born son. When Jo awakens she find herself having post-partum symptoms. She also misses the baby and hears him crying at night.

Jo starts to think that she may have at one point in time actually been the Lady of Hay, and is just now remembering her past life. She also insists on being hypnotized again and again until she finds out what became of Matilda.
But soon enough, scared of what is happening to her, she tries to make herself forget Matilda, to no avail.

She laughed uneasily. "It appears I have an alter ego. I still don't believe I am her reincarnation-I can't bring myself to accept that-but this woman is living a life somewhere there inside my head and it is so real! More real in some ways than the life I'm leading here and now."

Jo visits the site of Matilda's former home and while there she falls into a trance midday. The same keeps happening from then on, Jo regresses into these trances on her own with no control over them. She doesn't have to be hypnotized to do it, she can be standing in the middle of a field and mentally be in Matilda's day and time oblivious as to what is going on around her in the present time.



Little by little, Jo begins to put the pieces of the puzzle together, only to find out that some of her current friends were also alive 800 years ago, and knew the Lady of Hay back then.




At 571 pages, Lady of Hay is a pretty hefty book. It took me about 100+ pages in to get hooked on the story. All the while, I didn't really relate to any of the characters, but I was curious about what was going to happen next. The plot fascinated me, but some of the characters annoyed me, mostly the men in Jo's life. There's some physical violence during the current day storyline, and the female characters put up with it, which had me shaking my head as I read.




I found the scenes where Jo would regress into Matilda's life to be really interesting. That's when the book really took a turn into the historical fiction element of the story.
Barbara Erskine makes a smooth transition from Jo's world to Matilda's and vice versa. You can also tell that the author did alot of research for the book. The events and people in Matilda's world are well detailed.




The plot is full of drama, backstabbing, time travel and a touch of romance. I liked the paranormal element to the book as well.
There's alot going on in this story and I found myself hooked from the second half of the book until the end.

It's hard to explain what it's like being someone else, even if only as a vivid dream. She doesn't inhabit my skin. I find myself in hers. I think and speak and feel as her. But I don't know her future anymore than she would have known it.

Lady of Hay is a novel with a rich plot full of interesting characters. I can see this being made into a movie or even a mini-series.


I recommend this one to fans of historicals and paranormals. This story has a nice blend of the two.


Special thanks to Danielle over at Sourcebooks for sending me a copy of this book.

title: The Violet Car

author: Edith Nesbit

genre: short story/supernatural/horror

published: late 1800's-early 1900's?

first line: Do you know the downs-the wide, windy spaces, the rounded shoulders of hills leaned against the sky, the hollows where farms and homesteads nestle sheltered, with trees round them pressed close and tight as a carnation in a button hole?






The Violet Car is a short story by Edith Nesbit. It is narrated by a nurse in London, who is telling her story about being sent to a home in Charleston for a mental case involving an elderly couple.




Mr. Eldridge wrote to the nurse asking her to come attend to his deranged wife. Yet when she arrives at their doorstep, the wife acts like she is fine, but Mr. Eldridge is the one who is deranged. The Eldridge's live on a large neglected farm and from the getgo something seems odd about them.


After dinner the couple always has a cup of tea and goes for a walk, where they return sad and depressed afterwards, the wife crying. However, other than this, the seemingly odd couple does not seem mentally ill.
The nurse arrives at their home in November, and by February she decides she should move on, seeing as the couple seemes fine. She no longer wants to accept payment for her services if she isn't really needed.


Spying on the couple one evening during their walk, the nurse sees that Mr. Eldridge and his wife go down to the lane and he freaks out insisting that a violet colored car is coming. He screams and pushes his wife out of the lane so she won't get hit. Yet, neither his wife nor the nurse hear or see a car.



Afterwards, when the nurse questions the couple, she finds out that their daughter had passed away after being run over by a violet colored car on the lane. Mr. Eldridge has never truly recovered from his grief and he insists he can hear the car coming and there is terror inside. So the nurse tells him she is going down the lane by herself to investigate and to prove him it's all in his imagination. That there is no car coming and perhaps he should consider moving.

I walked up and down the lane in the dusk, wishing not to wonder what might be the hidden horror in the violet car. I would not let blood into my thoughts. I was not going to be fooled by thought transference, or any of those transcendental follies. I was not going to be hypnotized into seeing things.

Reluctantly the nurse walks down to the lane one evening, only to find out that Mr. Eldridge silently followed her and is standing further up the lane.
She sees him once again freaking out over the car, and to her amazment, she actually sees the car as well.

Mr. Eldridge is hit by the car, and by the time the nurse reaches him, he is dead. However, there are no tire marks on the ground and no marks on him. Yet she saw it with her own eyes, the violet car ran him over.
When the doctor arrives, he says Mr. Eldridge died of a heart attack. There is no sign of a car.




I thought The Violet Car was a creepy short story. It scared me in a simple way.
The writing isn't overly descriptive, leaving it up to the readers imagination.
There's no blood or gore, just an everyday seemingly normal older couple and a nurse who is trying to help them. I definitely got the chills when the nurse went down the lane to prove to
Mr. Eldridge that there was no car. She was secretly terrified of going, and was not only trying to convice Mr. Eldridge that the car was in his imagination, but she was also trying to convince herself.

English poet, journalist, and short-story writer, perhaps now best-known for her children's books (the twice-filmed Five Children and It, The Railway Children and The Wouldbegoods) and the over-anthologized horror tale "Man-Size in Marble." She also published works under the joint pseudonym (with her husband) "Fabian Bland."

-quoted from The Literary Gothic

R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril Challenge

title: True Blood and Philosophy: We Wanna Think Bad Things With You



authors: William Irwin (Series Editor), George Dunn (Editor), Rebecca Housel (Editor)


genre: entertainment


published: 2010


pages: 246


first line: Sookie Stackhouse loves Bill Compton.



rated: 3 1/2 out of 5

Vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, fairies, telepaths—True Blood has it all. In a world where supernatural creatures coexist with human beings, Sookie Stackhouse and Bill Compton wrestle with powerful desires while facing complex issues concerning sex, romance, bigotry, violence, death, and immortality. Now, True Blood and Philosophy calls on the minds of some of history’s great thinkers to perform some philosophical bloodletting on this thought-provoking series. From the metaphysics of mind reading to Maryann Forrester’s cult of Dionysus, from vampire politics to the nature of personal identity, and from contemporary feminism to the rights of nonhuman species, True Blood and Philosophy mines the thinking of philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and John Rawls to enlighten us on the intriguing themes that surround this supernatural world. You’ll find no shortage of juicy metaphysical morsels to sink your teeth into!

True Blood and Philosophy: We Wanna Think Bad Things With You is an interesting book that discusses and analyzes True Blood the television series and The Sookie Stackhouse books. This book is food for thought. It takes different themes in True Blood and discusses them in detail. I think this book is a great conversation piece for fans of the show and books.



I haven't watched the show True Blood, but I have read the first in the series of books, Dead Until Dark, and enjoyed it.



Some of the discussions in this book are 'The Ethics of Making Vampires', 'Coming Out of the Coffin and Coming Out of the Closet' and 'Sookie, Sigmund, and the Edible Complex'.

The writers do plenty of 'what if' situations. Like what if vampires were real and living among us, would they have to pay taxes, since they don't need health care? Would they be served with life sentences in prison if they committed crimes, or would that be considered cruel and unusual punishment since they are immortal?
The book also discusses homosexuality and the comparisons between coming out of the coffin and coming out of the closet. Are the prejudices gay people face similiar to the ones vampires face?

Another topic for discussion is whether vampires are evil or not. Some vampires such as Bill are turned without choice, are they considered evil?


My one issue with this book was the repetitiveness of certain excerpts from the books and show. I'd read one chapter that quoted a certain conversation and discussed it, then I'd read the next chapter, only to find the same quote being brought up again. It didn't happen that often in this book, and it didn't deter me from enjoying this read, but I did notice it. I think it may have happened because there were different people writing the chapters, the topics overlapped a bit.



After reading this book you realize there are plenty of philosophical questions that can be raised by the Sookie Stackhouse books and True Blood. This is an interesting read, I enjoyed it. It is definitely a very detailed book, you can see that the writers are true fans of the series. I like how they would discuss great minds like Freud and Socrates and apply their theories and ideas to True Blood.










Visit The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series website for more. There are other Philosophy books for fans such as House and Philosophy, LOST and Philosophy and Mad Men and Philosophy.







Special thanks to Julie over @ FSB Associates for sending me a copy of this book.

title: Beloved

author: Toni Morrison

genre: fiction/supernatural

pages: 324

published: 1987

first line: 124 was spiteful.

rated: 4 out of 5





Having read and enjoyed Sula by Toni Morrison, I was excited to finally pick up a copy of Beloved. In this book Sethe and her daughter Denver live alone in a house in Ohio shortly after the Civil War. Sethe's two sons, run away from home by the time they are thirteen.


The house is haunted by the ghost of Sethe's 2 year old unnamed baby, simply known as Beloved. The haunting is severe and poltergeist-like, Beloved throws things, the house rattles and shakes, yet Sethe refuses to leave. No one visits Sethe and Denver, they don't want to go near the house, everyone knows it is haunted.



One day, an old acquaintance of Sethe's, a man named Paul D, shows up at her doorstep. The two become involved right away. Paul D knew Sethe years ago when she was first married and lived on a plantation before they were freed. He is happy to reconnect with her all these years later.


Not shortly after, a woman shows up in front of Sethe's home. Something about her is different, she can't talk much, is very sleepy and her skin is baby soft. When asked her name, she simply spells out the word, 'Beloved'.



Sethe lets Beloved into her home, gives her a place to sleep and takes her in for the time being. The family just figures she is a wanderer with no place to go. Beloved soon becomes obsessed with Sethe, and Sethe herself thinks of Beloved as her own child.




So many scenes stood out for me. One part in particular is when Denver walks in on her mother kneeling by her bed, praying, and sees a baby's white dress next to her, hugging Sethe around her waist. Just the thought of how this baby ghost still clings to her mother, and how even in death, mother and child are forever connected, gave me chills while reading.


Several scenes in this book also shocked me. If you've read this one, you know what I mean. As shocking as it was, I did enjoy this read. The characters are well written, the plot was excellent, the writing was fantastic and I found myself not wanting to put this book down. This is the kind of book that once you are done reading, you kind of just sit back and think about it. It's the kind of read you want to discuss.



I think Denver's character impressed me the most. How she made the best of a bad situation and survived so much. The way she is smarter and stronger than most gave her credit for.

Sethe was an interesting character. I like how she flashed back and told her story all throughout the book. She tells about Denver's birth and about the unthinkable circumstances she had to endure as a slave, the life she lived before finally gaining her freedom. Sethe has many secrets she keeps, and the worst one of all is revealed to the reader just when they least expect it. I didn't hate Sethe, but I pitied her.






Toni Morrison's writing is poetic. Here's a few passages that stood out.

In that bower, closed off from the hurt of the hurt world, Denver's imagination produced its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needed because loneliness wore her out. Wore her out. Veiled and protected by the live green walls, she felt ripe and clear, and salvation was as easy as a wish.

A fully dressed woman walked out of the water. She barely gained the dry bank of the stream before she sat down and leaned against a mulberry tree. All day and all night she sat there, her head resting on the trunk in a position abandoned enough to crack the brim of her straw hat. Everything hurt but her lungs most of all. Sopping wet and breathing shallow she spent those hours trying to negotiate the weight of her eyelids. The day breeze blew her dress dry; the night wind wrinkled it.

The return of Denver's hearing, cut off by an answer she could not bear to hear, cut on by the sound of her dead sister trying to climb the stairs, signaled another shift in the fortunes of the people of 124. From then on the presence was full of spite. Instead of sighs and accidents there was pointed and deliberate abuse.

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind-wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own.

Beloved was made into a film in 1998. I did enjoy this movie, however, it was very creepy. I wish I hadn't seen the film first because I knew the twist to the story. All in all, I recommend both the book and the film, but I think you should read the book first.