Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

In honor of Valentine's Day, I wanted to post about a book about all kinds of love. I recommend this book if you are single, or in love, or just trying to figure out your own self. Also, congrats to Liz Gilbert on being the first author to make me cry and laugh all on the same page. I feel like if I had read this book five years ago I would not have appreciated it, but in the way of many good things, this book came to me exactly when I needed it. Don't be put off by the title, as I was initially - Gilbert is not maudlin or proselytize-y. She is absolutely laugh out loud hilarious and the people she meets are fascinating and outrageous. This book will definitely make you cry, but in a good way.

Prophet of Blood by Ben Bradlee Jr and Dale Van Atta

Two months ago I read a memoir called Sound of Gravel by Ruth Wariner. It detailed her childhood growing up in abject poverty in Mexico as a member of a polygamist cult. She was the 39th of 42 children born to her father before he was murdered by his brother's followers.

Her memoir was devastating, and in that particularly horrible human way, fascinating.

So I needed to know more.

Turns out several members of the book club that chose the memoir are huge fans of cults and other awful human proclivities (this may have something to do with the fact that both of them are prosecutors) and they recommended Prophet of Blood. It's from 1981 which means if you want to read it you will need to have a library that never gets rid of things or find it moderately overpriced on Amazon, but if you love cults, this is the book for you.

There is so much going on that it can be almost overwhelming, and I do wish the authors had gone with a chronological timeline. The story is told through big events, so one chapter will begin years before the previous chapter ended in an attempt to keep a cohesive storyline, but it does get a little hard to keep track of who the characters are. I probably should have taken notes.

It's fascinating because Ervil, the aforementioned cult leader, was arrested and put on trial in 1980, so the book, though old, is very timely and has some highly entertaining quotes from people involved. It is a fascinating history of Mormonism as well as a study of what kind of person becomes a cult leader and how they do it.

Also, check out this cover. Terribly 80s, and I love it.

The Darkest Powers Trilogy

The three books in this trilogy are; The Summoning, The Awakening, and The Reckoning.
The story itself is pretty good. It follows a girl named Chloe as she finds out (in the most embarrassing way) that she is a necromancer. She is then put into a group home, under the guise that she's mentally unstable. Upon learning the truth, she runs away from the home with a few other kids in the house, who also have supernatural powers. Over the course of three books, they're running from the people who turned them into supernatural beings, and are trying to get them back or kill them.
There are some plot holes and extra things added that don't need to be in there, but the story is pretty good. Until the end of the last book. The story builds to the EPIC fight. Only for it to be over in what amounts to just a few minutes, and then the story shifts to a teen romance.
All in all, I think I'd give this book series a solid 3.5/5 stars. 

Welcome!

Welcome to The Book Club Blog!
We'll be sharing our reviews of book that we've read, as well as books we're currently reading and need to tell people about it.
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