Feeding Your Soul

At 16 you have to choose between staying with your family, friends and everyone you grew up with and leaving them all behind, never to see them again.   That is the premise for Divergent by Veronica Roth.   Beatrice “Tris” Prior is a 16 year old girl growing up in dystopian Chicago where the population is divided into 5 factions. Each faction is centered on 1 ideal – Amity (Peaceful), Candor (Honesty), Abnegation (Selfishness), Erudite (Intelligence) and Dauntless (Bravery).      Tris has grown up in Abnegation but has always felt she never belonged. In her 16 th year she has to choose to stay in Abnegation for the rest of her life or choose another faction and never see her family again.   She makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.   The book revolves around Tris, her decision and the consequences both good and bad.   Roth creates a beautiful picture of a dystopian Chicago.   At first Chicago is a separate but ...

What would you do if you were Anastasia Steele? Throughout the 3 rd and final book in the Fifty Shades trilogy I found myself asking what I would do if I were in Ana’s shoes? Would I stay with Christian through his insecurities? Would I try and help him push through those walls he has had up since he was 4?   If I loved Christian as much as Ana, my answer would be yes. Love makes us do crazy things but in the end love is what gets us through the day and especially the night.   Freed picks up a few months after the events of Darker – Ana and Christian are married and life couldn’t be happier.   There is still someone following them and threatening them but besides that they are still the loving, happy, crazy couple they have been.   Christian is slowly coming undone due to his love and need for Ana; Ana is becoming more attached to him the more she learns about his past and his mental state.   The book reads more like an action adventure book due to the s...

Today of all days it is important for people to have entertainment as outlets. I am not talking about the “entertainment” that is the news nowadays. I am talking about the entertainment of movies, books, television shows, music and radio.   These pieces of entertainment give us an outlet for an hour, 2 hours, 3 hours, however long we need to feel safe and secure. I found myself watching the Red Sox last night and already this week I have watched more Red Sox than I did all of last year. When every other news station is blaring out one unconfirmed lead after another you become immune and numb to it all. You need a release, something to take you to another world for a little while, while you decompress and return to normalcy.   After the Red Sox won I immediately went to another piece of entertainment – my book of the moment, Masquerade part of the Blue Blood series by Melissa de la Cruz.   It isn’t the most intelligent and thought provoking books in the world but i...

In the middle book of the Fifty Shades trilogy that has launched in popularity all over the word, Ana finds herself broken up with her Fifty Shades, Christian,   and mourning the loss of her libido.   She was scared of whom Christian became in the Red Room of Pain and thought at that moment that there was no way it was going to work; he was too damaged for anything to work out between them. At least she thought.   Circumstances arise that lead her and Christian to attend her friend Jose’s gallery opening and bringing all of those feelings she doesn’t want to feel to the surface.   But this time she is ready – at least more than before.   She knows what she wants and will fight to have him and the man she knows he is. She is also less afraid to tell him (notice how I said less and not fully).   This starts Ana’s journey into the darker side of her Fifty Shades. At first I was hesitant to read the second book.   I didn’t want every other page to be...

When you have done one thing your entire life, it is the backbone of your existence what happens to you when it is suddenly taken away? In Trouble With the Curve starring Clint Eastwood and Amy Adams, Gus has been a baseball scout for as long as he can remember.   He has a keen eye to finding the best of the best and sticks with his gut.   When his eye sight starts failing and he starts to go legally blind he doesn’t   know what to do or where to turn.   His friends ask his lawyer daughter to help him when they know he would never ask for her help. When she arrives to “help” him, he keeps telling her to leave that he doesn’t need help and she keeps staying.   Stubbornness runs in the family.   The story follows the two on this journey of self-discovery – who are you when everyone around you is saying you lost it.   This movie was different than I expected.   I was expecting light-hearted banter between Eastwood and Adams.   Even though...

You wake up in a hospital bed after getting shot on a routine car chase.   No machines are working to help you stay alive yet you are awake.   You try and call for help but there is no answer.   You finally get all unhooked from dead machines and leave your room.   You walk the halls of a deserted hospital to find the door to the morgue with a message written in blood: “Don’t Open, Dead Inside.”   Then the doors begin to move and a hand crawls out, dirty and broken and you turn around and get the hell out of the hospital to find rows and rows of dead, decaying bodies covered in white sheets outside.   No human around, just dead bodies and what you think look like zombies - at least that is what you would call them from movies and television shows.   So begins The Walking Dead on AMC. The Walking Dead follows a group of survivors trying to stay alive in a world surrounded by zombies.   No one knows how it started but that isn’t the forefront...

Is there a safe haven for everyone? That is the question the main character Katie deals with in Nicholas Sparks’ book Safe Haven.   Sparks delivers yet again a powerful and emotional read with a twist that I have not read from him yet – suspense and mystery.   In this book, it isn’t all about love and loss. It’s about survival and protecting yourself even if the thing you are protecting yourself from is you. The novel starts with the newest resident of a small North Carolina town, Katie.   She came to Southport, NC to start over and hopes no one notices. She rents a small cottage on a gravel road out of the way and takes a waitressing job at a local watering hole.   As much as she wants to blend in people start to notice her and ask questions as Southport is a very small and tightknit community.   She befriends the local general store owner Alex and his 2 kids, Kristen and Josh.   Hints about Katie’s past start to pop-up both for herself and Alex. ...