The Sweetness of Forgetting

The Sweetness of Forgetting

Kristin Harmel

Description: The North Star Bakery has been in Hope's family for generations, the secret recipes passed down from mother to daughter. But at thirty-six and recently divorced, with rebellious daughter Annie and elderly grandmother Rose to care for, Hope is less than enthusiastic about carrying on the family legacy. When the bakery runs into financial trouble and Rose takes a turn for the worse, Hope's delicate balancing act is in danger of crumbling entirely.
Then Rose reveals a shocking truth about her past and everything Hope thought she knew about her family and the bakery is turned upside down. At her grandmother's request, Hope travels to Paris, armed only with a mysterious list of names. What she uncovers there could be the key to saving the bakery and the fulfilment of a star-crossed romance, seventy years in the making.

My Opinion: "As long as there are stars at the sky Im going to love you" - At the first moment this sounds like a sentimental, kind of brummagem lovestory. But this doesn't describe the book at all!! Kristin Harmel crate a sad, drastic past in a sickly sweet story about family, love and saolidarity. The novel is smart and brave, speaks about love, about losing and finding, about hope and believes. The story fascinates everybody, draw everone deep inside and especially at the last hundred sides everyone is captured.

Rose and Hope, as well as Alain and Annie are going more sympathic the whole time, one is captured and feels with them and wishes finally for a Happy End. The spelling style of the author is just incredible amazing. She describes everything wonderful pictorial, one can taste the ingredients of the sweets from the backery. She has an amzingly good diction, that makes everything sad more sad and everything wonderful more wonderful.

A great role in the novel plays the refurbishment of the happenings in France around 1940. It touches one a lot, when the plot is about Rose's past, when Hope meets people in Paris, who lost their whole family and still have hope. Furthermore she shows atmospheres, anticiptions and hoper of people in a special way. As consequence I had to cry often.

A lot of times the story has surprising turns, but attentive readers can see later happenings or their adumbrations early. 

Kristin Harme balances out the mixture of sad history and wonderful lovestory, that goes over all times and decades aeay. As consequence the reader doe not have to be afraid about the theme, becasue it is described realistic, but told with intuitation.

All in all: A profound, bittersweet, sad, wonderful love- and famiystory fo all that believe on true love and are ready to dream another time!!

My Life Next Door

 Title: My Life Next Door

Author: Huntley Fitzpatrick

Description: The Garretts are everything the Reeds are not. Loud, numerous, messy, affectionate. And every day from her balcony perch, seventeen-year-old Samantha Reed wishes she was one of them . . . until one summer evening, Jase Garrett climbs her terrace and changes everything. As the two fall fiercely in love, Jase's family makes Samantha one of their own. Then in an instant, the bottom drops out of her world and she is suddenly faced with an impossible decision. Which perfect family will save her? Or is it time she saved herself?
My Opinion: "My Life Next Door" is a happy, rippling novel fpr youth, which is perfect for summer. Both main characters, Jase and Samantha, are sympathic teens with logical and natrual feelings. They aren't happy the whole time, but have phases of beeing sorry and phases of being happy like every other teen.They are 3-D characters, with common problems and the feeling of first/true love.
Not being just a lovestory the novel tells about typical problems, from the fight with the best frined to the disregard of the parents. After getting some time to understand the situation and knwoing the persons, the reader hears about a surprsing problem. Samantha has to lern to make her own decisions - the reader goes to be part of this development.
One of the reasons for my decision to read the novel a second time immediatly are the deep ideas, which are behind the actions. Nothing in the book just happens. Instead everything has a reason and has consequences for the happenings later. The sub-plots are goood integrated into the story and the sub-characters are lively and good shown. In this way they can include other themes like drugs and alcohol by youth. 
Extraordinary and another reason, why I liked the book that much are the Garrets. Jase's familiy. Funny, bracing, fascinating, extraordinary - there is a lot more. All the time I jsut wished Samantha would go back to them or to Jase. What she's doing - looking inside of there life - is the same thing the reader is doing. A lot of times I wished I would knwo the family in real life.
All in all: A wonderful book, that makes a good mood. It makes it possible for the reader to fall into another worl and to forget everything around you!