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review 2020-06-07 16:30
Parker Looks Up: An Extraordinary Moment - Parker Curry,Jessica Curry,Brittany Jackson
For more reviews, check out my blog: Craft-Cycle

An absolutely stunning book about a simple trip to the museum that inspired one little girl's dreams. A perfect example of why representation is so important. Every person needs to see themselves positively reflected in all areas to feel connection and show that they can do anything.

The simple narration worked perfectly for this story. It is a simple story and when told in a simple way, it really emphasizes the experience and impact rather than getting bogged down in wordy narration.

Also, that artwork is just perfect. I loved the bright feel. Each page is magical. That's nothing else to say. Every bit of it is amazing and adds to the inspiration of the story.

A beautiful work that emphasizes positive representation, inspiration, confidence, kindness, and the drive to do anything. Simple yet eloquent. A lovely book that shows how one simple moment can change the world. 
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review 2020-05-28 00:07
‘Everything My Mother Taught Me’ by Alice Hoffman -highly recommended short story.
Everything My Mother Taught Me - Alice Hoffman,Brittany Pressley

I rather like Amazon's idea of having collections of short stories, written by well-known writers and available as Kindle and audiobook versions.

 

One of these collections is called 'Inheritance' and focuses on family secrets and their consequences.

 
 

When I saw that one of these stories was by Alice Hoffman, I was excited. When I heard the opening sentences, I knew I had to have a copy:

'There are those who insist that mothers are born with love for their children and place them before all other things, including their own needs and desires. This was not the case with us.'

The dispassionate tone of the second sentence was the hook for me, a move into a minor key that says, 'something is very wrong here and has been wrong for some time.

 

So I spent an hour listening to Alice Hoffman's precise prose describing a girl's deep understanding of her mother's loveless nature, her choice to stop speaking after her father's death and her decision, as she comes of age, on how to put a stop to her mother's behaviour and achieve her own freedom by learning one of the lessons her mother taught her: put your own needs first.

 

Brittany Pressley's narration sets exactly the right tone for the story. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

 
https://soundcloud.com/audiolibrary-a/everything-my-mother-taught-me-by-alice-hoffman-audiobook-excerpt 
 

 

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review 2020-03-17 03:22
When the Unthinkable Happens, What's a Parent to Do?
The In Between - Brittany Pressley,Michael Landweber,Mark Boyett

The author also participated in a Q&A with me.
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A couple of years ago, when mystery writer Brad Parks wrote his first stand-alone thriller, in more than a couple of interviews I heard/read him talk about the struggle getting going. A friend gave him some advice to "write the book that scares you," which would likely scare his readers. He ended up deciding that as a parent, the thing that scared him the most was something involving trauma to one of his kids. Which resulted in at least two different novels (Say Nothing and Closer than You Know), both of which provided me with a level of fear I don't usually get from thrillers. I couldn't stop thinking about that anecdote and those two books while I listened to this, did someone give Landweber similar advice?

 

We start off meeting Lillian, who works in the PR department of Teleportation Services International. She's taking her son's class on a tour of TSIsomething she and his teacher had arranged to help him deal with his anxiety about their upcoming trip via Teleportation. Cole is shy, nervous, and not really assured by this exercisealthough the rest of his class has a blast (and it sounded pretty fun to me, too).

 

Then we meet her husband, Jackson. Jackson is one of the few drivers around in 2047his clientele is primarily made up of the elderly who won't trust self-driving cars (and, yeah, it occurred to me that I'd be one of his client base on both of those counts) and those whose mental health or anxiety issues won't allow them to trust the cars, either. He augments this income by teaching super-rich teens how to drive the smattering of sports cars still around so they can go on joyrides.

 

TSI gives one employee's family a month a free week's vacation to anywhere in the worldand then milks their experience for publicity. They've picked Tokyoand none of the family have ever teleported before. This will be a new experience for them all. Lillian steps through the portal in Omaha and stumbles out in Tokyo (the first trip is typically difficult on the destination side). There's a strange delay that worries her, but before long, Jackson comes out in worse shape than her. But where's Cole?

No one has an answer. Cole is missing and no one has an explanation. No one can even begin to hazard a guess about what happened.

 

Not at all surprisingly, Lillian and Jackson are devastated. Heartbroken. Inconsolable. And their individual reactions are so different that they can't even be there for each other in this time.

 

Lillian, whose own childhood was marked by tragedy, directs her grief into work. If she can be busy, she can cope. Quickly, her energies are directed into investigating (on her own) what happened that day, and what can be done to prevent it from happening againand maybe finding a little vengeance along the way.

 

Jackson's reaction is two-fold. First, he's an alcoholic who hasn't taken a drink in six years. He's not in recovery in any sense, he just stopped drinking to be a father. With Cole gone, he returns to the bottleany bottle. Before taking that first drinkand after ithis question was, "My son is missing, why isn't anyone looking for him?" For Jackson, Cole isn't dead, he's lost. Jackson knowshe can't convince anyone, but he knowsthat he saw somethingsome place?in between Omaha and Tokyo. He spends his days going back and forth between the two cities, trying to find that In Between again, before crawling back into a bottle.

 

They haven't just lost their son, they've lost each other. The love is still there. But they just don't understand the other's reaction. She can't cope with his drinking or his denial. He can't understand why she's given up on Cole. While he hunts for Cole and she hunts for an explanation, they're both burdened, distracted and shaped by this other pain. It is heartbreaking to watch their marriage crumbleas with the Parks thrillers, what happens to Cole is terrifying to this parent. But that feeling was frequently overshadowed by my reaction to his parent's relationship.

 

Now that I've gone on longer than I intended to about the plot (not that I'm cutting any of it), let's talk about the setting. This is not quite a post-apocalyptic world, but it's one where the apocalypse could be just around the corner. Environmental changes have impacted coastal cities around the worldmany of what we know as coastal cities no longer exist. We all know that the Midwest gets hit by huge storms throughout the year, their frequency and intensity have grown. There are changes to transportation (air travel as well as the automobile changes mentioned above) in efforts to reduce pollution. New--and deadly--flu strains crop up with a regularity that makes them seem routine, and everyone knows how to react when one comes along.

 

There's a lot that could be said about the government (governments?) in this future. Not that Landweber talks about politics at allbut there's a tremendous lack of civil liberties on the one hand, and yet a very laissez-faire stance when it comes to TSI (at least as evidenced by TSI who really only seem to care about customer perception, not any kind of reulatory oversight). There's a benevolent totalitarianism at work when it comes to the storms (and reactions to them) in Nebraska, as well as the medical response to new flu strains.

 

I want to stress here that these environmental and health elements are just parts of the story, and the government observations are only my impressions, and nothing I could really provide footnotes about. Landweber doesn't take the opportunity to get on a soapbox about any of it, they're just part of the world he's describing. Much in the same way that someone writing a book set in 2020 would talk about current cultural trends, technologies or current events. He doesn't indulge in any real explanation of his world-building, there are no big info dumpsit's all just the setting.

 

This is an Audible Originaland I should talk about the audio aspect of this. It's a gripping listen and wonderfully performed. As you may have guessed Brittany Pressley narrates the chapters from Lillian's point of view, and Mark Boyett takes Jackson's. I don't think I'd heard anything by either of them beforebut I'll keep my eyes peeled for their names when I browse for audiobooks in the future. They truly did wonderful jobs. They got the emotion of the moment, the tensionand occasional moments of fun, joy, or reliefas well as giving a real sense of the characters. It didn't happen often, but even when a character usually only seen in a Lillian chapter showed up in a Jackson, you could recognize them (and vice versa)which was nice. Landweber wrote a great story but Boyett and Pressley brought it to life.

 

The last time I listened to an Audible Original, I had trouble with a couple of the SF-y terms usedmostly because I couldn't be sure exactly what the narrator was saying (e.g., was that a "d" or a "b"or a "g"in the middle of that word?) It wasn't that I couldn't understand the narrator, they were just terms the author invented that was hard to get my head around. Landweber didn't do any of that, which was a reliefalthough there were a couple of Japanese names I wouldn't be able to repeat (in print or voice), but I knew what Pressley and Boyett were saying.

 

Another pair of books that came to mind while I was listening to this were Mike Chen's novels. Like Chen, Landweber creates a wonderful Science Fiction world, and then tells a gripping family drama. Yes, the science fiction elements are thereand are incredibly well-executedbut the heart of this novel is about parenting, marriage, love. Fans of Chen would do well to check this book out. Fans of this book should give Chen a chance.

 

I read and enjoyed Landweber's last novel, Thursday, 1:17 PM, but this is a much better showcase for his talents (not to knock his earlier work). There's so much to commend about this Audiobook that I have only begun to scratch the surface (truly, I can think of a half-dozen characters I should've profiled*, a couple of themes I could have talked about, and other plotlines I should have addressed). There's something for everyone in this bookan element of a thriller, some great SF Technology, some conspiracy elements, the environmental setting, some media commentary, some Big Business critique, a lot of focus on people with anxiety issues and/or mental health diagnosis, ethical quandaries, parent/child stories, and a touching love story, too.

 

* There's a hacker character that I'm going to kick myself for not talking about, for example. He's one of the most entertaining characters I've encountered this year—Top 3 for 2020.

 

Get this into your ears, folks, you won't regret ityou may not like it as much as I did, but I can't imagine you won't like it.

 

Disclaimer: I received this audiobook from Audible in exchange for this post and my honest opinion. Thanks to them for the book and Laura Blackman for approaching me.

Source: irresponsiblereader.com/2020/03/16/the-in-between-audiobook-by-michael-landweber-brittany-pressley-narrator-mark-boyett-narrator-when-the-unthinkable-happens-whats-a-parent-to-do
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review 2019-11-23 02:12
I'm Not Dying With You Tonight
I’m Not Dying With You Tonight - Kimberly Jones,Channie Waites,Brittany Pressley,Gilly Segal

I grabbed this when it came up for the Big Library Read, but then I didn't manage to get to it before the Read was over.

 

Campbell is the new girl in her southern, predominantly black high school, and she is working the concession stand at a football game, when a racially motivated fight breaks out in the growing line to the stand.  Lena jumps into the stand to take cover.  There are gunshots, police arrive, and that is just the start of a night where things keep getting worse.

 

As the blurb reports, Lena and Campbell must rely on one another to survive and progress through the night, each demonstrating to the other that her assumptions had been misguided.  

 

This book in some ways reminded me of The Hate U Give, though it has a much more compressed timeline.  In this book, the Caucasian girl Campbell, having been transplanted from the home she shared with her mother in Pennsylvania to her her father's house, is the outsider/fish out of water.  African-American Lena is the wildly popular fashionista Campbell can't help but envy.  I appreciated the way this set-up diverted from more usual book premises.

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review 2019-05-03 14:54
Influencer: Building Your Personal Brand in the Age of Social Media - Brittany Hennessy
For more reviews, check out my blog: Craft-Cycle

I received a copy of this book through Goodreads in exchange for an honest review.

Overall, a decent read. This book is targeted toward people interested in becoming Instagram influencers, specifically those who already have a lot of followers and know how to create great content. For me personally, I was more interested in creating effective content, which was pretty much just skimmed over in this book so it wasn't a great fit for me. The sections included on this topic were more focused on setting up various platforms (blog, YouTube) with some common sense tips thrown in. 

This does seem like a good book for those who are ready to take the next steps in their career as influencers, especially how to contact advertisers and organize collaborations. There is a lot of good business advice and sample letters/emails, which is helpful as well. 

The book mostly focuses on beauty and fashion, but can mostly be applied to other areas as well (although I am so sick of reading about bag spills). It includes interviews with established influencers, tips, and a glossary of terms at the end.

I think there is good information in this book, it just wasn't that applicable to me personally. I have no interest in being an influencer and was more so looking for tips on creating good content. The ability to create good content already seemed like kind of a prerequisite for this book, so not that helpful. But if you already have a lot of followers and have content down to an art, this book can help push your success further and guide you along the complicated business side of things.
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