Hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Just Imagine {Unabridged Audio} by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

“With the Civil War over, Kit Weston, a.k.a. Katherine Louise of Risen Glory Plantation, South Carolina, travels to New York disguised as a boy to eliminate her newly named guardian and regain control of her beloved plantation. Unfortunately for Kit, Baron Cain proves difficult to kill, and when he discovers her identity, Baron promptly stashes her in a New York finishing school for young ladies.”

I had a problem with the relationships based on manipulation and borderline emotional abuse in the last book of this author’s that I read. This one has the same problems. Some of it you could excuse as a product of the period but it was uncomfortable. The most interesting part of this story was the development of a freed slave who is learning to deal with freedom and the repercussions of her life as a slave.

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein

“Pink and pretty or predatory and hardened, sexualized girlhood influences our daughters from infancy onward, telling them that how a girl looks matters more than who she is. Somewhere between the exhilarating rise of Girl Power in the 1990s and today, the pursuit of physical perfection has been recast as a source—the source—of female empowerment. And commercialization has spread the message faster and farther, reaching girls at ever-younger ages.
Those questions hit home with Peggy Orenstein, so she went sleuthing. She visited Disneyland and the international toy fair, trolled American Girl Place and Pottery Barn Kids, and met beauty pageant parents with preschoolers tricked out like Vegas showgirls. She dissected the science, created an online avatar, and parsed the original fairy tales. The stakes turn out to be higher than she—or we—ever imagined: nothing less than the health, development, and futures of our girls. From premature sexualization to the risk of depression to rising rates of narcissism, the potential negative impact of this new girlie-girl culture is undeniable—yet armed with awareness and recognition, parents can effectively counterbalance its influence in their daughters’ lives.”

I didn’t really learn anything new from this book. I can’t stand the whole princess thing. I liked the movies but all the accessories and what all drive me crazy. It was interesting to see the marketing history behind it all.

The Year of Eating Dangerously: A Global Adventure in Search of Culinary Extremes by Tom Parker Bowles

“Fugu. Dog. Cobra. Bees. Spleen. A 600,000 SCU chili pepper.
All considered foods by millions of people around the world. And all objects of great fascination to Tom Parker Bowles, a food journalist who grew up eating his mother’s considerably safer roast chicken, shepherd’s pie and mushy peas. Intrigued by the food phobias of two friends, Parker Bowles became inspired to examine the cultural divides that make some foods verboten or “dangerous” in the culture he grew up with while being seen as lip-smacking delicacies in others. So began a year-long odyssey through Asia, Europe and America in search of the world’s most thrilling, terrifying and odd foods.

Parker Bowles is always witty and sometimes downright hilarious in recounting his quest for envelope-pushing meals, ranging from the potentially lethal to the outright disgusting to the merely gluttonous—and he proves in this book that an open mouth and an open mind are the only passports a man needs to truly discover the world . “

This is a weird thing to read while I’m on a juice fast but since I’m a vegetarian all the food in here sounds disgusting to me anyway. It is funny but there is a cruelty underlying most of the food. He discusses it briefly in the discussion of eating dogs but just comes to the conclusion that cruelty is a part of eating meat so what are you going to do?