Book Review: The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner

Do not waste money on this book.  If you are curious about this book, just go to your local library to borrow it.  After all, you pay a lot of property taxes as a home owner, or you pay a lot of rent for your landlord to pay the property taxes to support the local libraries which cost millions a year to run. So make use of your library whether you are renters or homeowners, but do your wallet a favor and do not spend a dime on this book.  Even if this book is free, it's not worth the expensive real estate to store.  Just think of how many US$ does it cost you  to purchase or rent one square foot of space??

What this book is selling is a dream in a utopia where you can always get the bank to loan you $160,000 to buy a $200,000 home and you only pay $40,000.  Then this book assumes that you can always turn around and sell the house for $220,000, assuming your house is always going to increase in value by 10% immediately.  Do you now see how misleading this book is?  This book totally assumes that you can't invest your $40,000 in other investments to make money but in real estate only. How absurd is this? So if you have $40,000, you just have to buy a house in order to be rich?  How about investing in yourself, or investing in stocks, or a business?  Yeah, selling a home of $220K with only $40,000 down and you will "easily" get $20K for profit immediately?  Seriously?  How about the thousands of dollars you pay for inspections, title clearance, escrow fees and document fees at the time when you make a purchase?  How about the 6% broker's commission you have to pay when your house sells?  How about repairs?  How about the interest expense on the $160K loan?  And how about property taxes for the time you are holding title of the house until it is sold?  How about home insurance, maintenance fees?  How about the  investment returns in a mutual fund, a stock or a business that you can potentially have but you gave up having because you spent your $40K on buying a house that is literally the food for termites? How about the time you spent in searching properties to buy and getting bank financing, when you can use that time for leisure, a second job or a business that makes money? Or cook more to save money?   Now when you consider all these costs, the profit of buying a house with other people's money and sell it at $220 immediately without having to wait  one day,  doesn't seem to be as profitable. (The situation where you can sell your house the same day you buy it almost never happened because a house is not liquid like a stock where you can buy in the morning and sell in the afternoon. If you want that, why not borrow from the bank to buy stocks then? Or use your interest free deals from your credit cards to just speculate the stock market for one year!!!)

This book was first written in 2005, and you already saw  what happened to a lot of home owners since then!! Broke!!!  Real estate isn't the only way to use other people's money to invest.  It's however the least liquid investment that you can invest with other people's money, compared to day trading stocks using your 18 months 0% APR credit card offers. 

Real estate is no less risky than any investment, and it's no more profitable than any investment.  It takes luck, brains, hard work and meticulous calculations to make money in anything.  If only it's so easy to be a millionaire just by being a homeowner, then there will be a lot more millionaires, but the truth is there are more homeowners who are house poor than house rich. 

Book Review: Dearie

This is a remarkably detailed biography on the life of Juila Child.  I had learnt an awful lot about the long and legendary life of Julia Child from this book.  Julia Child didn't take an interest in cooking until after she got married in her 30s.  It's really inspiring for all of us to learn from the life of Julia Child that, sometimes it's okay to not know what we really want, and it's okay to take a little detour to discover who we really are.  Many of us know very well what Juila Child was famous for, yet many of us know very little about the war that Julia Child served, and her thrilling plane ride above  the sky of Chongqing in war torn China back in the 40s.  How many of us know that before Julia Child took an interest in French cooking, it was Chinese food in Chongqing that woke up Julia's Child's palate? Do many people know that Julia Child and Paul had a serious car accident the day before their wedding, on her way to her rehearsal dinner? She was ejected out of the car.  What a survivor!!!  Having a broken arm and numerous stitches on her forehead didn't make her cancel her rehearsal dinner and wedding plan!   It may look to the world that Julia Child had her success very easy.  But little do people know that it took her many years of hard work and dedication to evolve to the celebrity TV cook she had become.  Then what life doesn't have tragedy, heart break, crisis and trauma?  This book has lots of remarkable details on the ups and downs of Julia Child's life, and the book takes the readers to experience a lot of emotions, happiness, pains and sadness behind that cheerful face of America's TV icon.  Julia Child is no doubt a very strong woman, and a fighter, and this book tells it all.  This book is a great read and it tells me not only the detailed biography of Julia Child, but it gives me a very valuable history lesson, regarding the bygone eras which Julia Child grew up and rose up to become America's icon. 

Book Review: The Right Prayers For Every Need

This is a truly beautiful prayer book that provides comfort and inner peace to the soul.  There are lots of practical and spiritually healing prayers for all situations in life. Whenever you need the courage, the confidence and the spiritual support to face whatever crisis and challenges in life, you can refer to this prayer book.  I found the prayers very calming to my panic attacks.  I carry it inside my handbag at all times because I feel that it's my lucky charm.  I like to be able to take it out and flip a page to read a prayer whenever I start panicking or whenever I get discouraged.  The prayers are very soothing and they have a calming effect on me.  I actually read a prayer from this book every morning before I start my day. The prayers are all very short, and the couple minutes spent reading a prayer from the book are absolutely therapeutic.  I also love that there are lots of beautiful photos inside.

Book Review: Girl Boss

Is success really this easy?  Is it really simple to build a multi-million company from nothing in just a few short years?  From being broke and without health insurance to be the CEO of a company that has revenue at over $100 million (2015 revenue according to Style.com), the author of this book is the poster child of one of those "rags-to-riches" stories.  The book is short and very easy to read but it lacks details on giving much useful business advice that wasn't already retold a million times elsewhere.  From the way the book was written, the author seemed to have lived in a dream all those years, albeit a sweet one. It's because the story is so vague and so lack of details in so many ways that it resembles a really good dream when the good life just breezes by.  I'm sure there was lots of hard work involved but the book made "striking rich" sound so easy.  The clothing business isn't an innovative business, neither is selling vintage fashion on Ebay an original "golden" idea. The book didn't provide much detailed information on how exactly the author's business beat out the crowd to become the $100+million company today.  Besides, all the book talks about is the sales revenue.  It didn't say much about profit.  $100+ million sales revenue a year is very impressive but how much profit is this sales figure generating?  Besides, is this sales figure audited by any accounting firm?  How is Nasty Girl compared to Baby Phat as a business other than the somewhat difference in fashion style? Tossing big sales revenue figure makes the story sounds spectacular but in the end it's the net profit that matters.  Afterall, where is the once very famous Baby Phat nowadays (when it used to have $900++ million annual sales revenue)?  

The book spends more pages on detailing  the author's  very mundane hitchhiking and drifting early years than solid advice and specific strategies on how to successfully start and grow a profitable business.  Venture capital plays a very important role in the success of Nasty Girl Inc, very much like the role of a model scout from an elite model agency, without whom, there is no super model.  But how can a start-up get discovered by the venture capital without relying on pure luck or a chance encounter?  The book doesn't provide detailed advice on that.

Overall, it's a nice little book to read by the beach.  But for readers who are serious about starting and growing a competitive and profitable business other than the general "feel good" encouragement, we need to read a book that is more substantial on strategic information.

Book Review: The Girl On The Train

Is "Diary Narratives" the chic of novel writing now?  Like the book "Gone Girl", the story of this novel is told in the form of  diary entries.  After "Gone Girl"  I found myself reading the troubled marriage of another sad woman again.  Is marital trouble going to be the inspiration and the foundation of all the best-selling novels from now on??  The fact that this type of topics is the mainstream tastes of the readers, is starting to feel a little disturbing to me.  What does this kind of taste profile tell about the readers or the women today?  I suppose most of the readers of this book are females.  What are the women going through in their real lives now that they enjoy reading this type of story?  What do you think?  I don't know what to think of it. This book just makes me sad.  After all,   I can only read so many novels based on a sad woman in a sad marriage.  Why am I spending time and money on reading something that makes me sad?  "Gone Girl" was okay to me because at least the woman was smart and she was in control.  I read this book because it receives such good reviews.  I read it because I got sucked into the "herd" effect.   To me, the main character Rachel is a very sad woman, and she is quite passive aggressive.  She is so sad that it's hard for me to keep motivated to follow her train rides day in and day out.  But I pushed myself through because I thought I was going to be rewarded in the end if I hanged on to her boring train rides to the final destination where all wrongs would be righted, where she would snap out of her sad life and find salvation.  But in the end, I was disappointed to realize that the finale of her sad train ride would give her so much trauma that she may never be able to snap out of it, given her inability to deal with the earlier blows before her train journey.  Even the book didn't talk about it much, anyone who experienced what Rachael experienced in the end of the book is going to be haunted for the rest of her life. 

Whatever happened to Rachael before she shared her diary with me was sad enough, and bad enough, but the ending of the story would top all Rachael's miseries. It was a finale of the worst fate that she was unfortunately casted in. Having experienced a bad marriage is bad enough, but what Rachael experienced in the end will certainly not help pave an easier path for her to move on.  The end of the book wasn't a closure to Rachael's unsettling problems that destroyed her.  It was just another blast of cruelty that life had unfairly tossed onto Rachael once again. Only this time, there will be no hope for any closure, there will never be closure. It will forever be the tragedy that Rachael will never be able to forget.

While the book made me sad, the story was nevertheless creative and suspenseful.  

Book Review: Make Your Life Prime Time

Life is short and time is precious.  This is one of those books that are worth spending our precious time reading.  Through her recollection of her life journey, the author shared with us all the valuable lessons she had learnt.  It's always good to have a mentor who had experienced it and who had made it to help us navigate our scary journey called life.  But not everyone is lucky to have a mentor.  I myself never had the fortune to meet anyone who can mentor me on my education or on my career.  My life would have been much better now if I had such a mentor.  I just wish I had been given this book years ago.  But it's not too late for me yet and I think this book certainly helps what I am dealing with now and what I will be dealing with in the future.  Most of those lessons are very relatable to women, particularly young women. It's easy to read and it's easy to understand.  The author had told her stories with her infectious conviction. Reading this book  is like having a mentor cheering you on. I highly recommend this book as a graduation gift for this coming May.  All mothers will do themselves a great favor by reading this book together with their daughters.  After all, a mother can only make her life prime time by helping her daughter make hers a prime time. 

Book Review: Gone Girl

I decided to read this book after watching a movie trailer on Youtube.  The movie trailer's footage somehow reminded me of the Scott Peterson murder case years ago and all that media frenzy that came with it.  After knowing that the movie was based on a novel of the same title, I wanted to read it to find out what was so interesting about the novel that made Ben Affleck pick it up to produce it into a movie.

Just as I originally suspected, the first part of the book, which took up almost half of the total pages, was almost like a detailed story re-telling of the Scott Peterson murder case;  that put all the news releases, the footage and the stories that we read and watched at the time into words, and detailed descriptions.  It was quite boring to me because I didn't need to read pages of words that described the news crew from the media storming Scott Peterson's home, or crowding the venue of the news conference room...  It was all Dejavu to me and I had to take many breaks so I could continue reading.  To me, the first part was just a mundane reenactment of the Scott Peterson murder case with the throw-in of the diary of the mundane life of the girl who was gone. I was bored and I wasn't interested in knowing the heroine's mundane life through her diary in the first part.

Then the story started to get good in the second part. So after I spent over a week, painstakingly forcing myself to continue with the book, I finally got to a point where all the good stuff started pouring in.  It was from there I couldn't put the book down.  After reading the whole book, I realize how smart it was for the author to tell the story from both the husband's side and the wife's side.  The parallel stories brilliantly explained and unfolded to me the "whats" and "whys" behind the twisty plots.  It's definitely a story that is inspired by the Lacy Peterson murder, but it was provoking in a way that it made me think if the truth of that case was really what I saw and heard from the media.  After all, there is always two sides of a story.  There is always more to the surface of everything we see.   The book is brilliantly written, and it's very entertaining.  But the readers have to read the entire book before they can fully enjoy it.  Now I can't wait to see the movie.    

Book Review: You Can, You Will: 8 Undeniable Qualities of a Winner

This is a short and a really easy-to-read book from America's most popular Christian preacher, Joel Osteen.  This book is quite similar to his previous book in terms of context and preaching principles.  To those of us who already read Joel's previous books before and who watch his sermons often, this book may contain a lot of repetition.  For those who had never read Joel Osteen's books before and who had not watched his sermons, this book is an inspiring and uplifting guide to living a better life and the messages are easy to remember.  We love Joel and we listen to his sermons over and over again so this book presents no new material to us.  We would like to listen to this book on tape though. It's because listening to his preaching repetitively can help us reinforce the positive thinking that Joel has instilled on us. We highly recommend young people to read this book.  The earlier one starts reading, the longer one can lead a happier life. We just wish our parents could teach what this book taught us when we were teenagers.

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Book Review: Diary of a Mad Diva

This diary started with Joan's 2013 New Year vacation in Mexico and  ended on December 2013, with Joan watching the ball drop in NYC on the TV in her hotel room in Mexico. On Joan's last entry in her diary, she talked about how she would like to host New York's ball dropping event and new year countdown to 2015.  It's hard to believe that 2014 was her last new year countdown.  She was so funny throughout her book and she was always so full of life and energy.  While she made fun of  her  death  many times in her diary, I don't think she actually anticipated that she would not live to see 2015.  After reading the entire book and having a lot of good laugh, I'm now feeling a little sad for the loss of a really funny and entertaining comedian.  There was no one who cracked jokes like Joan Rivers and there won't be anyone like her.  She isn't afraid of offending anyone and therefore her jokes are so funny and are of no limit.  I find this book very hilarious and I truly enjoy her humor.  But for those who are politically correct and are sensitive, or those who are always serious about every topics,  this isn't a book for you.  This is a book about jokes and this is a book that makes fun of everything and everybody. So read it as is with a sense of humor and crack yourself up from the first diary entry to the last.

Book Review: The Wreath Recipe Book

This book is not just about making beautiful wreaths.  This book presents lots of how-to instructions of various floral decorations and arrangements for every season.  Each project is presented like the format of  a cookbook recipe, which is more action friendly for readers to work through.  The book is full of beautiful and inspiring photos.  The style of the arrangements is contemporary minimalist, which focuses on using simple techniques and simple materials with minimal handling.  Most of the plants and floral used in the book are easily available and they require minimal trimming.  The book is full of inspiring ideas on how to make the fullest and best use of the floral materials in season that would otherwise have gone into the waste basket, if the traditional elaborate arrangement techniques were used. The inspiring simple designs of the projects show how floral and plants can become absolutely stunning decorations when we focus on showcasing their most natural forms instead of relying on over elaborating and complicated techniques.

Book Review: Stepping on Roses Vol 4

In this volume, the melodrama had progressed to include a corporate power struggle, an infiltrator within a household, and the expansion of the love triangle into a love "square".  There is really no limit on imagination and story development in this Japanese Manga.  This book is quite entertaining and it takes my mind off my very stressful reality for one hour.  Yes, it takes this long to finish one book and this is the beauty of reading a Japanese Manga.

Book Review: Stepping on Roses, Vol. 3

The story is getting more melodramatic in Volume 3.  For some reason, it's also not as funny to me as the previous volumes.  It's entertaining enough however.  There are a lot of pretty drawings in Magna fashion. The plot in this volume further established the rivalry between the two handsome leading men in the love triangle.  It's a quick entertaining read during the subway or bus commute.

Book Review: Your Best Life Now

Whether we are religious or not, this book wastes no time in setting our mentality straight from Chapter one. Whether there is a God to bless our life,  it helps if we make ourselves vision the best of our life and future. After all, what good does it do us when we keep telling ourselves, "We can't do this, we can't have this or that..." Since it really takes the same energy and oxygen for us to vision the positive and the negative, why not vision the positive?  For those who have faith in God's blessing, they have all the reasons to not worry but to vision a great prospect, but for those who don't believe in God, they particularly have to see clearly the positive and should even try harder to see the positive because when a hunter can't see, he can never hunt the boar down.  May be for the God blessed hunter, he can close his eyes and a boar will run into the tree next to him and drop dead.  But for a hunter who isn't blessed, he has more reasons to keep his eyes open, to vision and see even more carefully.  This is a great book to set us off to a more positive mentality right from the beginning of reading.

Book Review: Sanctuary by Nora Roberts

This story is very similar to another fiction that I read years ago, the title of which is "Dead Sleep".  The latter book was extremely impressive to me when I was reading it because what the heroine saw was so terrifying and so mysterious that I thought it was a great eerie idea for a story to begin. Unlike Nora Roberts' book, "Dead Sleep" however doesn't have much romance in it and it is mainly a suspense mystery.  Now fast forward years later when I was reading Nora Robert's "Sanctuary", I was not as excited. It's not because the story was not interesting, it was mainly because the mystery had no shock value to me anymore after I had read something similar and more suspenseful.  I realize  that Nora Roberts' "Sanctuary" was published years before "Dead Sleep" was written.  I probably would have loved "Sanctuary" a lot more if only I hadn't read "Dead Sleep" before.  I'm not sure why, I was beginning to feel bored by Nora Roberts' same old sex scenes and love making pages.  I was so bored that it took me a few months to finish reading the book.  This had never happened to me before when I was reading other Nora Roberts' books.  Despite having the similar eerie idea of a mystery, I feel Nora Robert's version is a lot toned down in the suspense department.  May be because it's a story where romance is the main dish and suspense is only the side dish. I felt that there were too many pages dedicated to tedious girl chats, and the same sex dynamics that had been used many times already in Nora's other books. Yet there was not enough adrenaline draining adventures for the characters; in terms of their journey of falling in love and finding out the real murderer.  May be I'm just growing out of Nora Roberts' style of romance?  I'm sure I would have loved this book very much  if it were the first Nora Roberts book I read.  It's a decent read although it didn't amuse me as much as I was expecting to be amused.

Book Review: Your Money Or Your Life

If you are expecting to read a book that provides advice on investment or money management, this isn't the book you should read.  But if you are looking for some good laughs, and some entertaining life lessons that you didn't get enough from your parents, then this is quite a fun book to read.

This book is a collection of some of the commentaries that Neil Cavuto gave on his TV Shows on Fox News Channel throughout the years.  Some of the commentaries provided accurate predictions about how the Federal government would run into financial trouble because they were spending based on optimistic estimates when the cashiers were ringing in surplus.  I have to admire Neil's foresight during those prosperous years when Clinton was in office.  I had not watched him back then but I assume he probably was one of the few who was singing the sour tone during those surplus years?

While I am impressed with his perspectives about the Federal Reserve, the government spending and some of his values on morals and patriotism, I disagree with him completely on the war on Iraq and his unfair rants on doctors, among other things.  Regardless of my disagreements with the book and the author, I overall find the book fun to read.  My goal in reading a book is not to have someone agree with me, but to see what others are thinking, particularly those who are supposedly educated and smart.  Reading this book makes me realize how serious mis-information can be.   If the smart and educated ones like Neil can't understand the logic behind his wait time at the doctors' office, then how do we expect the mass of voters who are less educated to have sufficient understanding on whom to vote for as their President?? This revelation is quite scary and makes me feel pessimistic about my future.

To the author:

By the way, Neil, I just want to tell you that, the reason you have to wait so long in your doctor's office was because the patients ahead of you either arrived late or over ran their 15 minutes' appointments with a long list of complaints, questions and special requests on diagnostic tests, prescriptions, or other demands like filling out state disability applications, insurance forms and other nonsense paper work which the insurance companies don't pay the doctors to do but they have to do!!!!  Each patient appointment has to be done in 15 minutes in order for the doctors to make a living.  Unlike you, the doctors have to share lots of overhead expenses and they are all ripped off by the insurance companies, the government and also the patients who try to get so much done with $10 dollar co-pay cheap insurance plan which pays the doctor $20 to $50 per appointment!!  The doctors' office scheduling system has to schedule 15 minutes appointments throughout the day, any patients arriving late and over running the appointment duration will push the patients behind them to later of the day. Also, all those phone calls to the doctors, insurance companies and medicare don't pay for them either! So any patients calling the doctors and asking questions on the phones, push your appointment back also.  Get it????  What I'm surprised is, for people who make so much money like yourself, you can easily afford to pay extra to go to a Concierge Doctor who charges more, but schedules less patients in a day, and who is more flexible in giving special appointment at the time specified by the patients.  I use Concierge Doctor even I don't make 6 figures salary like you.  It's because I think Doctor is well worth my money and I don't see why a doctor should work for free to see me.  I never had to wait to see my doctor.  I sometimes even go see a Doctor after work or even on weekends!!!!  You want service, you have to pay more.  Fox isn't going to let us watch your show for free, why are you expecting the doctors to work cheap?  I think Doctors are more valuable than you.  I will turn off the TV before I complain about how much I have to pay to see my doctor!!!!  Don't compare your work schedule with the doctors' who have no control over their time at all and they don't just sit in front of a camera and look pretty for a couple hours and make 6 figures.  Doctors have to work many hours and often have to work at home on stupid paper works that they didn't get paid for.  If you compare the pay by the actual hours they work, many of the doctors don't make much per hour, may be even less than a hair stylist. Yet the stress and legal risks are so much more, even more than your job, Mr. Cavuto!!

Why do people never complain about the price of a hair cut but their doctor's $10 appointment??  What's wrong with this country??? Stop whining about how much the doctors make, they make peanuts compare to guys like you and the executives in the so-called healthcare administration and insurance companies who don't do anything for my healthcare but add the overheads and therefore my insurance premium.  The patients like myself are ultimate victims and the doctors also suffer.  So get your enemies straight, Neil!! Go whine about all parasites who are eating the "Healthcare" pie,  not your doctors, who are just the hosts and their blood is being sucked too,  just like mine, get it????

Book Review: Light on Snow by Anita Shreve

Told by a twelve year old girl in the snow country, this is a story about love, loss and painful recovery.  It's simply written and yet it illustrates the complicated details of the lost souls trapped in the beauty of the chilling cold.  The characters won my sympathy many times over. The story is emotionally charged and thought provoking. It reminds the readers to cherish every moment in life and be truly grateful for everything and every second. It's a beautiful work of fiction.

Book Review: Montana Sky by Nora Roberts

The breathtaking beauty of Montana, with its vibrant ranch life, makes the perfect setting that changed the lives of three sisters to the better.  The romantic tension, the suspenseful plots and the charming characters make this book a very exciting and entertaining read.  Thanks to Nora Robert's ability to engage the readers using the beautiful landscape and the ultra interesting ranch life, I felt as if I had spent a really refreshing vacation in beautiful Montana.  Country life is never sexier.

Book Review: The House at Riverton by Kate Morton

The story of this book reminds me of what Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves."  If there is one good thing about this story, it's this valuable lesson that I learnt from the tragic ending of  two of the main characters, Hannah and Emmeline. There is no doubt that the English writing is good, and this book is just about that.  I'm not impressed by the plot, story, or the characters.  They actually bored me.  Instead of being a page turner like the book cover claims, the pages kept me closing the book and putting it aside.

May be if I hadn't watched "Upstairs Downstairs",  "Downton Abbey" or "The Titanic", I would find this novel more interesting.  I felt like I was reading someone painstakingly describe and write about what I had already seen with my own eyes, someone who tried very hard in putting those fancy images in English texts. This book is more of a show off of the author's use of the English language, than the telling of a compelling, or even convincing story.  The English writing is riveting, not the story.

I never got "The Game" that the book spent so many pages talking about.  This so called "Game" was often played by the aristocratic children of the House at Riverton.  From what the book showed me, the life of those aristocratic people in that era couldn't be any borer. How can that be?  That was a fascinating time, a fascinating era,  how could life be this boring in high society?   May be it's just in the House at Riverton.

To me, the book is like a painting of a grand estate in the early 20th century that illustrates lots of details of the landscape and yet it's an empty mansion that has nobody inside.  The story's narrator, the 90+ years old Grace, who was a young house maid who served the family and the young ladies, failed to retain my attention.  It's just not convincing for Grace to tell me the stories of her mistresses in such great intimate details on events when she was not even there to witness. Even Grace herself admitted that she wasn't there but yet, when she was telling Hannah's story with her lover, her husband, her outings and her experience and feelings, Grace was able to tell in great details, not just the place, the time but the inner thoughts and feelings of Hannah and Emmeline...  Grace was often telling stories of her masters and mistresses that nobody could possibly know except the masters and mistresses themselves. Grace could easily confuse me into believing that it was not Grace who was the narrator, but at some point, Hannah took over to become the narrator of the story.

I don't understand why this book was loved by so many.  I admire the writing skills, but not the story telling ability of the author.  The story has little passion, little suspense, but pretty boring and unimpressive characters.  It's a shame, the story could have been made really exciting and exotic.

Book Review: Stepping on Roses, Vol. 2

In this book 2 of the "rag to riches" romance, the story follows the heroine, Sumi's new life as the new bride of the heir of a prominent and wealthy Japanese family, Soichiro. Sometimes a picture speaks better than a thousand words.  The fancy illustrations of the book are amazing and they perfectly illustrate the emotional dilemma that Sumi was facing in the middle of a love triangle.  This volume gives the readers a glimpse of the secrets of Sumi's new husband, Soichiro and his ambition.  The dialogue continues to be funny and entertaining.  This book is another hour of light and fun reading that somehow is able to stress on the importance of one's duty and integrity over selfish romantic love.  The story ends with a question on what secrets is Soichiro really hiding and what is he really plotting, which I'm determined to find out in the next volume. This book has engaging illustrations, a little suspense and really fun and quirky characters.  It's a good one hour break in between serious readings.  The book cover is just gorgeous.

Book Review: After the Parade by Dorothy Garlock

This is a very comforting novel with romance, passion and suspense that kept me turning the pages.  This book is a follow-up of  the novel "With Heart" that I previously read.  This sequel is however more entertaining and has a faster pace than "With Heart".  The love between Kathleen and Johnny is admirable in a way that the years apart didn't drive them into other people's beds like the couples that I read about in other contemporary romance fictions.  This is why I like this novel.  There was setback in the marriage, yet there was always the unbreakable love and passion between Kathleen and Johnny that kept pushing them back together and that kept me cheering them along.  It's rare that I cheer for any heroine in a fiction, but I did when reading this book.  This book is an enjoyable read.