Written In Blood - Book Review

Written In Blood
by Sheila Lowe
Obsidian Books (Imprint of Penguin)
September 2008
Claudia Rose Series
Sheila Lowe

For those of you who like Mysteries, there is a brand new series of Mystery books available with a most unusual heroine. Her name is Claudia Rose and she is a Handwriting Analyst. This book is the second in the series. The first book was called Poison Pen and was also published this year.



And for those of you with Kindles, both books are now available on the Kindle list.

Anyway, Paige Sorenson is a young widow who's elderly husband died a few months before. In his will, Torg Sorenson left his business to his wife, Paige, but his adult children from Torg's previous marriage are challenging the will. Claudia is asked to verify if the signature on the will is genuine or not. Considering that Torg had had a stroke, and was not in the best of health when he signed his will, Claudia has some serious comparing to do. She must compare the signature on the will with 57 other samples of Torg's signature.

The adult children, Dane, Diana and Neil, are all involved in making Paige's life hell, calling her a trophy wife and a gold digger. Torg owned a large old house which he had turned into a school for troubled and emotionally sensitive girls. It was called the Sorenson Academy. One of the girls who has just enrolled at the school is Annabelle Giordano. Her father Dominic Giordano is a very wealthy and powerful studio owner and movie producer. He is rumoured to have links to the mob. Annabelle is disliked by all the other girls at the academy because she was "different". She was a manipulator and she had a huge crush on the athletic director, Cruz Montenegro.

While Claudia is analysing the will signature, Paige tells her about Annabelle, the rebellious new teenager at the school. When Claudia goes to probate court to testify about the will, she states that the signature on the will is genuine, thus allowing Paige to keep the school. Dane and Diana Sorenson start threatening Paige about the school and about the will. They call Paige a fraud and the signature a fake.

Claudia breaks the rules and becomes involved. Claudia arranges to do a lecture on handwriting at the school and get an example of Annabelle's writing to see if she can understand what emotional state Annabelle is in. She invites Annabelle back to her home to stay for one weekend. Claudia's niece Monica is staying with her and the two teenagers become good friends.

Then things come to head during the Christmas vacation break. Annabelle was supposed to stay at the school over the holidays because her father couldn't pick her up until New Years Eve. On Chrtsmas Eve both Paige and Annabelle go missing. Cruz is interrogated by the police and is the main suspect because he was the last person to see them alive. On Christmas Eve Annabelle calls Monica and says she think she is in a hospital, and then hangs up.

The race is on to find Annabelle and Paige, and there are three groups looking for them. Dominic Giordano, the Police and Claudia.

A few days later Annabella calls Claudia and says she is in Las Vegas. The last part if the books follows Claudia and Annabelle's adventures in Las Vegas and also includes two surprise twists in the ending.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book - I read it in just 4 hours. I enjoyed the characters - especially those of Claudia and Annabelle. They were both very well written. Now I must find Poisen Pen and read the first book in this new and exciting series.

With more than 35 years experience in the field of handwriting, Sheila Lowe has been qualified as a handwriting expert in the California Court system since 1985. She holds a bachelor's degree in psychology and was certified by the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation in 1981, as well as the Society of Handwriting Analysts in 1985. She is an active member of the National Association of Document Examiners. Sheila is also the author of a mystery series, beginning with Poison Pen, featuring a sleuth who shares her expertise.

Anne of Green Gables Musical.

Next year (May 2009) the Anne of Green Gables Musical is coming to Toronto. Its been running in Charlottetown, PEI for quite some time. It is supposed to be the longest runing musical in Canada's history - started in 1964. It's as old as I am (GASP)

May 7 to 31. 2009 at ELGIN Theatre in Toronto

Now tickets should be available at Dancap Tickets (turn your speakers down - there is a lot of music) Just click Coming Soon on the left and then click Anne of Green Gables.


This is Megan Followes' original audition for the famous TV series made in 1985.
4 minutes

WOTS was once again, NOT a successful trip

I had hoped that DH would babysit our son while I went to WOTS, (Word on the Street) but he made an excuse saying he just wasn't up to it. Of course I was angry. But since I had run out of money (so I knew I was not going to be able to buy any books) I agreed to take our son with me.

And just like last year it was not a good day. He got to run around, I got to browse a LITTLE, but not much. I also won a free magazine subscription. My son was upset that I hadn't won any toys. All my son wanted was food and toys. I refused to spend what little money I had on $3 hotdogs and a $3 cup of lemonade. My son refused to go home when he got tired. He doesnt recognize when he is tired - I do. Hey its a mothers job to know when her kid is tired, right?

The highlight of my day was to meet Patricia and Dorothy at WOTS.

Next year I am making VERY VERY sure that I go to WOTS on my OWN - WITH money. As long as Bush and Co do not do anything too drastic to affect the economy - I should hopefully be working by September next year.

The Social Contract - 50 Greatest Books

50 Greatest Books

The Social Contract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
September 27, 2008
Globe and Mail

The Social Contract (1762) is a masterpiece of one of the most fascinating of writers. The thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was world-breaking and world-making. His effect on his own age was seismic, and the tremors have never subsided.


To proclaim him the intellectual founder of the modern left is actually to understate his accomplishments. There was no other thinker in whom so many modern impulses converged, only to emerge transformed, still more modern, more radical, more dangerous and enticing. For all his vast influence on the 19th century, much in his thought was so farsighted that it came to be appreciated only in the late 20th.

Rousseau begins from a radical critique of the bourgeois. Indeed, it was he who coined this term in its modern pejorative sense. The bourgeois was the emergent 18th-century type, post-feudal and, one might say, post-Christian. Rational, industrious, this-worldly, homo economicus rather than homo politicus or religiosus, Rousseau was the practical ideal of such Enlightenment thinkers as Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith.

For Rousseau, by contrast, the bourgeois was a mere shadow of the human. Both his rationality and his individualism were spurious. Hopelessly divided against himself, he sought only his own good, but was wholly dependent on others to realize it. Compelled either to serve or to oppress his fellows in order to make them means to his ends, he exemplified what Rousseau called "unsocial sociability." Neither a whole unto himself nor fully a part of a greater whole, he could find no rest himself and could leave none to others.

The Social Contract offers Rousseau's positive alternative to the bourgeois, namely the citizen. Free of the divided consciousness that defines the bourgeois, the citizen is fully integrated into his society. He identifies his own good with its good, his will with the collective or general will.

His primary identity is that not of Lucius or Pierre, but of a citizen of Rome or Geneva. This is so far from natural to human beings that Rousseau himself describes successful civic education as "denaturing." For this, the Legislator is required, that Godlike manipulator of the souls of a people for its own good. Now this doesn't sound at all "liberal"; it may even sound "totalitarian."

It certainly sounds reactionary, given that, as Rousseau tells it, the only genuine examples of such citizens and societies are to be found in the distant past, above all in warlike Sparta and the Roman Republic. Yet Rousseau's argument against the modern liberal solution to the political problem rests on impeccably liberal premises. Human beings are by nature free and equal, and both their interests and their dignity demand that the terms of the social contract be such as to permit them to remain so.

There is, according to Rousseau, only one way to accomplish this: for each to alienate his rights to the community as a whole. If the wills of some are not to be subject to those of others, then all must be subject to the will of all, in which each equally participates. Only thus transformed into the sovereignty of the general will can natural human liberty be preserved in civil society. Anything short of this is a pipe dream, a mere illusion of liberty.

Political equality can be genuine, moreover, only in conditions of substantial social equality. In replacing the inequalities of feudalism with those of rich and poor, modern commercial society offers only a vain pretense of liberty and equality alike.

It was the fate of The Social Contract to serve as the (very partial) inspiration of the Jacobins, and thereafter as a political football between left and right. The latter loathed Rousseau. The former adored him (even if it came to regard him as having been superseded by Marx). For the New Left of the 1960s, however, Rousseau had in effect superseded Marx. Theirs was a cultural and political revolution more than an economic one, and they looked to Rousseau for inspiration on both counts.
He remains the patron saint of communitarianism and "participatory democracy."

In fact, however, The Social Contract transcends all these categories. Far from providing a dogmatic answer to the question of how to establish a just society, it offers a series of paradoxes. If Rousseau's realism teaches that the only legitimate basis for political authority is that offered by the general will, it also renders him acutely sensitive to all the obstacles to this outcome. He is thus is his own most trenchant critic, and The Social Contract is the testament of a first-rate mind grappling with the most intractable problems of human society.

Clifford Orwin is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He has written widely on Rousseau.

The Sandcastle Contest - Munsch Review

The Sandcastle Contest
By Robert Munsch
Illustrated by Michael Martchecnko
Scholastic 2005

Matthew's family are packing up to go to the Beach. Matthew desperately wants a dog, but the family does not have a dog. So they drove and drove and drove and drove and drove and drove until they arrived at the beach.


When they finally got to the Beach, Matthew went to see what was happening. There was a sandcastle competition going on. Matthew asked a girl what the first prize was. A bathtub full of ice cream she said.

Matthew started building a house. The house was taller than Matthew, and it looked really real. It had several rooms - a kitchen with a sand refridgerator, a lounge with a sand TV and a bedroom with a sand bed.

A judge came by and asked WHO put this house on the beach. Houses are not allowed on the beach. Matthew said it's my sand house for the competition. HA HA HA laughed the judge. This is a real house and he went in and sat down in the lounge and watched the program on the sand TV.

Another judge came by and asked WHO put this house on the beach. Houses are not allowed on the beach. Matthew said its my sand house for the competition. HA HA HA laughed the judge. This is a real house and she went in and opened the refridgirator and pulled out some sand food.

Matthew was mad. He said, I'll show you this is a sand house and he went outside the house and kicked in one corner. Immediately the house collapsed, right on top of the two judges. Once they dug themselves out they immediately said that Matthew's sand house won the competition, because it was so real. They could not tell that it was a sand house. So Matthew won the bath tub of ice cream. The girl he had spoken to had made a sand dog. So Matthew asked her if she could make a sand dog for him. And so she did.

Attention Jane Austen fans

Some months ago I reviewed a book called Old Friends and New Fancies.

Old Friends and New Fancies
The first Jane Austen sequel ever written!

Originally published in 1914, this charming and original sequel to the novels of Jane Austen intertwines the lives of the most beloved characters from all six Austen novels with new characters of the author's devising. Inventive matchmaking leads numerous pairs of lovers through the inevitable (and entertaining) difficulties they must encounter before they are united in the end.

Old Friends and New Fancies is a gratifying read for any Jane Austen enthusiast.

"This is the ultimate Jane Austen sequel.…Virtually all the characters left standing at the end of the novels-most particularly the unmarried ones-must all meet up… Broken engagements will follow, a few false trails and threatened unacceptable matches must be endured before the Forces of Good prevail." -Charles Wenz, Life Member of the Jane Austen Society

The publisher currently has a sale on this book. If anyone wants to purchase the book, they can use the coupon code AUSTENSOURCE10 to get 40% off the purchase price. They can purchase it through this link. This coupon is valid from today through October 31, so if anyone wishes to purchase it, you are welcome to do so. Dont forget to quote AUSTENSOURCE10.

Sourcebooks the publisher contacted me to tell me about this.

Everyone Worth Knowing - Book Review

Everyone Worth Knowing
by Lauren Weisberger
Pocket Books 2005

This is the authors second novel. The first was the hugely succesful The Devil Wears Prada. This book is also set in NYC but this time it is about Bette, a young lady who quits her job at the bank and looks around for something else. She eventually gets a job with Kelly PR at the behest of her uncle.


Some years ago I used to work for a media monitoring company and it was my job to read the newspapers and magazines and mark up the articles with key words in them that were required by our client. Frequently we had to read and clip every single press release for the PR companies. Apparently they wanted to know which papers and magazines picked up and printed their releases and which did not.

In reading this book, I finally gained some idea of what it is like to work for a PR company, and I have decided that I do not wish to work in a PR company if they really are like this book claims.

Anyway Bette's jobs start out with event planning. She meets a bouncer at a prestigious night club. His name is Sam and he looks vaguely familiar. It turns out that Sam attesnded Bette's old high school 12 years before. Sam is taking cooking classes part time to become a chef. He also cooks Sunday lunch at a tavern.

Kelly's PR company do not associate with bouncers. Bette is hooked up with Philip Weston, a rich English fellow, a socialite and a snob. Bette's job is to do anything Philip wants and keep him happy. If that means sleeping with him, then yes, do that too.

Kelly's employees thrive on name dropping. Even names of real celebrities are mentioned frequently. Gwyneth Paltrow, Brad Pitt, Lindsay Lohan etc. And then Bette's name starts turning up in a newspaper social gossip column.

Bette has to cope with her loathing for Philip, her growing love for Sam and her desire to "keep her job" and not upset the uncle.

So when Kelly sends the team to Istanbul to help advertise the Istanbul Night clubs, Bette discovers Philip in bed with a man, and learns the real reason why Philip has never had sex with her. However Philip thinks nothing of telling the gossip colums that he has slept with her. Bette spends the night with Sam instead, and is photographed leaving Sam's room in the morning. When that picture shows up in the gossip column, Bettes discovers who the writer of the gossip column is.

During all this Bette has been arranging the major event of the year - the Playboy party. On the night of the Playboy party, it all goes wrong (but not because of Bette). And when Bette discovers that one of her co-workers was passing the information to the gossip writer, Bette just says to Kelly, I quit, and walks out.

Two months later the gossip writer has also lost her job when it was discovered that she lied on her job application. And a few more months later Bette and Sam finally get together. Sam opens his own restaurant, and Bettes joins him in managing it. Sam creates the menus and Bette does the administration. She's a whiz with numbers. She used to work in a bank, you know.

I really enjoyed this book, although I was not too happy with all the name dropping. Thats why I have decided that if this is true then PR work is not the place for me.