Gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson

At page 4, a thought crept subcontiously into my mind - I think I'm gonna like this book which I believe is a good sign to both reader's and book.

Arlene has spent the last ten years of her life in Chicago as she tries to forget the events that led up to her departure of her childhood home in Possett, Alabama.  She has changed her life around as she no longer will sleep with any man that walks through the door and has received a great education that will give her a stable future.  So far she has kept her promise and so does God.  Things are about to change for Arlene when her African-American boyfriend Burr is ready to take their relationship to a new level.  He has raised the ultimatum: introduce him to her family or consider him gone. Arlene loves him dearly but knows her lily white (not to mention deeply racist) Southern Baptist family will not understand her relationship.  As she and Burr embark on the long-avoided road trip back home, Arlene digs through guilt and deception, her patched-together alibi begins to unravel and she discovers how far she will go for love and a chance at redemption.

Although Arlene cited many examples of how ruthless her Aunt Flo is but I have a feeling that she's exaggerating it until I reached pp160-161 where Aunt Flo 'wiped clean' traces of Arlene from her shared room with Clarice (Arlene's cousin).  As if she never existed.

But come to think of it, what happened to Wayne's (Clarice's brother) dog and their neighbor's hen as a result of Aunt Flo's rage were equally horrifying too.

This book is full of sassy humor and family dark secrets were revealed one by one.  I enjoyed the book and it was a fast read.

I'm going to leave you with this line I got from the book 'If you keep the truth to yourself, it becomes a lie to everyone else'.  Hmm, think about it.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

If you come to me in company with a purple lion, a green elephant and a scarlet unicorn astride which was the King of England in his Royal Robes, I do believe that it is you and you alone that people would stare at, dismissing the others as minor irrelevances - p113

Picture that.  Seriously!  Somehow the paragraph got me laughing out loud.

It's post - Halloween (by 10 days or so) and I'm posting an entry which fits the occasion though late.  I guess by now it's not a surprise if I were to say that the book was read in early September LAST YEAR.  I haven't been updating my reads for the longest time.  So I'm now depending on my scribbles on the small multicolored (in this occasion they are in bright orange) notepads to remind me of the story.  What I've got so far apart from the paragraph above is that story is about a boy (named Bod short for NoBODy Owen) who was raised by ghosts in the cemetery.  As a toddler, he found his adopted ghost parents & guardians (or was it the ghosts found him?) when he escaped murder in his own house which killed his parents.

There are many interesting ghostly characters in the story.  Many whom initially appear to be scary but actually are good hearted.  But few are soulless downright scary) too.  And how sometimes the real (outside the graveyard compound) world is more dangerous for a growing up boy.  Particularly when there's someone or something out there wants to kill you when you are still a baby.  In many fantasy children's book there's always a character or two (whether willingly or not) that kinda look after the young protagonist and in this story its Silas (like Dumbledore or Hagrid in looking out for Harry Porter).  So Silas trained Bod or granted him special powers to allow him to embrace the graveyard as his home and introduce him to other 'tutors' to prepare him for the outside world.

You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished.

This is my first book by Neil Gaiman.  I knew about him after after watching Caroline which to me was pretty scary.  This was an okay book for me.  I'm not really drawn to any of the characters.  Anyways I like the idea of the story.  See how you like it.