jessdone's reviews
1113 reviews

The recipes for fruit infusion are great and the advice to get the most out of your fruit was helpful.

Overall, I found the book a little strange. It talks about the properties of the fruits, but we aren't eating them so I'm not sure one is getting any health benefit a whole fruit would provide. The book talks about how dangerous sugar is, but again part of what we are pulling out of the fruit is the sugar. Fruit infused water is certainly better than juice or soda but I don't know it's as healthy as straight water or even unsweet tea. Obviously these are questions we'd need more research to have answers for, but I did find aspects implying health benefit to be misleading.

A good recipe book but a bad health book.

For me this was a 2 or 1 star book, but I recognize that some stuff going on that I took issue with are personal. Also, I was having such a bad time reading this; I stopped about 20 pages in. So maybe it gets better or some of my out of the gate problems with the work resolve. I am conflicted writing a review for a book I didn’t finish. On one side, it was so bad; I stopped reading. On the other side, I never saw the ending.  

So, I’m splitting the difference and rating the book with a 3 and laying out some facts in this book. If it appeals to you: go to town.   

1. The book takes you right in to a fantasy world, which sounds amazing, but what I mean is that there are peoples, lifestyles, and words with NO EXPLANATION, it’s just happening and hope the reader figures out the significance....or that the reader cares enough to go to the back and read the glossary. Real talk, I’ve read Shakespeare, Canterbury Tales, and Beowulf using context clues to get through the parts I didn’t understand. This story doesn’t have enough context to do that. I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know why it’s happening, and worse I don’t know why I should care. The Elf vs Dwarf scenario is alien and all the imaginary whatever made it feel more like it had nothing to do with me and my world instead of drawing me in.  

2. The elf vs dwarf feels problematic. It’s always problematic when you have two intelligent species living together and one group is hunting and eating the other group. It’s further complicated because they base the language off of human languages and that makes me wonder if there were cultural connections or jabs intertwined.  

3. The writing is so tied up in this world building by a glossary, that I can’t discern if it’s good or bad on its own. I lean towards a neutral writing style. I have downloaded “Wham” (which is a bad title) hoping to glean more about the author’s style.   

4.Pacing was a miss for me. Maybe if I could have figured out what the elves were doing or why---or if I could have understood what the dwarves were doing and why, it would be different. As the work stands, pacing appears confusing. There seemed like a lot of waiting for reasons.

I hated this book. It's cliche, heavy handed and ridiculous. However, it would make a good beach read as long as you never stopped to think about anything that was happening.

Wonderfully written. A sad, tragic story. I saw a lot of myself in the main character. That said, others who don't connect with the lead, will probably find the story annoying. If you have a sense of exploration and a romantic desire to abandon the modern world and retreat into the woods, this is a haunting true story of one man/boy's attempt to live and die that way. If you've never had that desire, this book is probably a tale of one man's absurd mental illness run amuck.

My mother recommended this book and I'm glad I took her up on this suggestion. While not my common genre "Matchmaking for Beginners" is an engaging holiday read.

If pushed, I'd say the book tells a predictable tale and doesn't challenge new age stereo types. But even knowing the outcome, I enjoyed the journey offered. Not every book has to examine the intricacies of claiming to be magic in the real world or how potentially damaging some of those views are. We can just have a story that revels in the whimsy of an eccentric personality.

It's hard to review a collection of short stories and interviews. Overall my interactions with this installment was positive. I enjoyed the exposure to new authors as well as reading some of my personal favorites. Deep Magic is a publication dedicated to fantasy without the gore and sex sometimes found in the genre. I'm personally committed to the transformative and alternative properties fantasy can explore. Always love when a writer chooses to explore a logic puzzle rather than another thousand person battle.

I love dark work too, but it's refreshing to see fantasy written for adults that has wonder and just plain breathe taking magic, environments, and characters.

I never finished this book. Early on it kept introducing characters and didn't give a lot defining them. This got me lost. Plus I couldn't figure out what, if anything of note was going one. I'm disappointed because it has good overall reviews and the summary interests me.

Perhaps I wasn't in the right frame of mind?

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People doesn’t include reading this book. I managed a quarter of this book before putting it down. It’s a meandering mess. The book opens with an appeal to emotion where author and wife try to compel agreement by discussing how their response to their child’s sports efforts was sabotaging his efforts.
The story makes me feel icky, so it was unfortunate the writer spends so much time fleshing this example out and relating a child’s ego to an adult’s ego, using his child’s struggle and equating it to the reader’s struggles.

Besides this manipulative opening, it takes too long to get to the 7 habits and the habits are so weak the writer takes a long time convincing the reader they are needed before discussing what these habits are and how they would look in our lives.  

Up to where I read there was no science and there are few helpful case study examples. Since the writer is a marketer, I would accept if each chapter was a case study on a company/group he helped rehabilitate through the habit he suggests. Seven different cases each with a different lack solved by one of these habits. Maybe the cases even show how the habits are interconnected: like company X used Chapter 2 skills correctly, but they were lacking X which is the next step to maximizing productivity.

This book unfortunately perpetuated a stereotype where marketers offer long winded pretty, but meaningless words to an audience and try to bury this trait but dragging a story out so long the audience doesn’t remember what the point should be.  Kind of like the million line sentence I just wrote. 

It’s ironic that I’m discussing different ways his book could more efficiently shared its message.