Book Review: Thank You, God, For Blessing Me

Max Lucado’s Thank You, God, For Blessing Me features Little Hermie, a cute baby caterpillar with a big thankful heart. Little Hermie teaches toddlers how to thank God for His many blessings. The book is a prayer of thanks from Little Hermie to God. He thanks God for his friends, family, and all that he has.

Thank You, God, For Blessing Me is a nice smaller sized board book, perfect for little toddler hands. The glossy finish makes the book easy to clean. With only ten pages, the book is short enough to keep a toddler’s attention and great for bedtime reading. The size makes it easy to pack up and take along to Grandma’s house.

The illustrations of Little Hermie and all his friends in the garden are cute and colorful, they are simple and easily recognizable for toddlers. The book is a prayer from Little Hermie to God. It uses everyday language and words that a toddler would be familiar with, such as this sample from the book: “So I give thanks to You, God, for the flowers, stars, and trees, for friends and food and playtime. Thank, God, for blessing me.”

My two year old son and I read this book together before bedtime, he liked finding all the flowers, leaves and different bugs on the pages. The words were simple enough for him to understand and I would stop and ask him if he was thankful for his family, friends, and so on. This book is a great tool to help teach toddlers about God’s love for them, to teach little ones how to accept that love and to thank God for all he has given them.

 (Thank you to Thomas Nelson for providing me a copy of this book to read and review. I'm a member of Thomas Nelson's BookSneeze prorgram.)

Book Review: The Elemental Journal: Composing Artful Expressions from Items Cast Aside

The Elemental Journal: Composing Artful Expressions from Items Cast Aside by author Tammy Kushnir is a beautiful full color instructional craft book. This book offers step-by-step visual and written instructions on how to create journals, scrapbooks, and other keepsakes from re-purposed items.

The Elemental Journal uses a conversational and encouraging writing style. It does include photos of each project and the page layout makes it simple to review, see what you need, gather materials and create. In general, the projects in the book require pieces from your yard, paper, plastic, metal, fabric, thread and needle, and/or simple unpainted objects you can create or buy inexpensively at a crafting store or maybe even get at a garage sale.

The style of these pieces is what I would call contemporary artsy. They are fun pieces but would not fit everyone’s taste. Of course, the book is just giving ideas; it is a good jumping off point. It gives you the materials list, a photo and the how-to guide, but you can always alter the colors or materials to fit your own taste. The projects are definitely unique and would help you create a one of a kind gift for a friend or something to keep and treasure.

I would say that these projects vary in skill level. Some of them require you to sew or work with materials you may not be familiar with, etc. It is certainly mixed media crafting. I would not recommend this book for an inexperienced crafter or someone who does not enjoy experimenting with their crafty side. However, for an out of the box crafter, a mixed media crafter, or an experienced crafter who is looking for something new and different this would certainly be a nice book for their collection.

(Thank you to Thomas Nelson for providing me a copy of this book to read and review. I'm a member of Thomas Nelson's BookSneeze program.)

Book Review: Curiosities of the Civil War

I have read a couple of Webb Garrison’s books in the past and always found them interesting, so I was excited to review this one too.

Curiosities of the Civil War is what you would expect from Webb Garrison, a compilation of facts and research (and sometimes rumors), compiled into a user friend layman’s guide. This tome is quite large at over 500 pages of little know facts and stories related to people, places and events surrounding the Civil War. It is broken down into sections and includes a detailed index.

I am not a history buff so I was actually very overwhelmed with the deep and scope of information in this one. The remarks on a particular person, place, event or rumor are broken down in paragraph form, which makes for a quick read and easy to scan, but difficult to understand or reference if you are not familiar with that particular story or event in history.

I think anyone interested in the Civil War would love a copy of Mr. Garrison’s book and would find hours of entertainment in it. It may be too much and too obscurely referenced for the non-history buff though. I'm going to share it with my dad who is a HUGE military history buff!

(Thank you to Thomas Nelson for providing me a copy of this book to read and review. I'm a member of Thomas Nelson's BookSneeze program.)

Book Review: A Billion Reasons Why

A Billion Reasons Why by Kristin Billerbeck is a romance novel following the rekindled love between Katie McKenna, teacher and Luc DeForges, millionaire. He was her first love but she decided to move on and move away. She is engaged to an everyman character named Dexter. The story finds her in New Orleans to sing for her childhood friend's wedding, and falling back in love with Luc.

I’m sorry to say that while I was initially excited to read this romance novel, I found this book disappointing and boring. The characters where un-endearing and I couldn’t find a hook to make me care about them, their lives, or their love. It was all but impossible to get invested in the story or the characters plights. Neither the characters, nor the plot had much depth or quality. The back story was lackluster at best.
Reading the book felt like I was reviewing a first draft and not a completed, published work. “He’s a handsome billionaire. She’s not impressed.” Nor was I.

(Thank you to Thomas Nelson for providing me a copy of this book to read and review. I'm a member of Thomas Nelson's BookSneeze program.)