Just Half An Hour

This one is pretty easy 🙂

I have a book I’m pretty excited to recommend which I read recently, but before I get to that…

Do you ever just get sucked in to a really good Hallmark Channel movie?

I know, I know… The formula is always pretty much the same and now with Christmas just around the corner they’re going into overdrive with the Christmas-themed love stories.

But still…

I just got sucked into watching one this morning – Crown For Christmas – and pretty much ended up pushing back everything else in my day to accommodate it.

I’m actually even now considering doing a 30-Days of Hallmark Movies challenge!

Watch one Hallmark movie a day leading up to Christmas and write a review about it. But what with the plots all pretty much following the same path it might get old to write about…

Even though watching them never really gets old 🙂

Okey dokey… Now on to my book recommendation.

PS: If you’re at all interested in my review of this particular Hallmark movie, scroll all the way to the end of this post 😉

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Book Recommendation: 

Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala

This book was actually recommended to me by someone else and what I liked about the recommendation was that all he said was “read it and then call me back…”

I like that because I don’t like spoilers at all, so I’m going to attempt to give this recommendation without including any spoilers.

The book tells the story of an American-born Nigerian boy who is torn between two worlds… “A Nigerian-American” and “A black American” (or the more PC way to say it would be “African-American” but he’s already Nigerian-American so that would be redundant).

Being the child of parents who grew up in Nigeria and then emigrated to the U.S., there are certain expectations (especially since, like many Nigerians who come to America for a better life, his parents are professionals – his mother is a physician and his father is some type of government official I believe… I don’t recall exactly).

Speak No Evil tells the story of Niru (the main character) trying to find where exactly he belongs and who exactly he is… Just like all of us.

Okay, that’s about all I will say about this book so that I don’t give anything away. It’s a very gripping story, the flow is very easy and you get sucked in very early on in the book.

It’s written in such a way that the person speaking is telling the story from their own  perspective.

There was a point where I thought someone else was telling the story and it turned out to be an entirely different story so then I went back to where my confusion began and re-read it from the right person’s perspective and my goodness… All I can say is “Wow!”

If you do read this book, I’d love it if you came back here to tell me what you think about it in the comments section below.

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Catch up on my previous posts for this challenge:

• Day 1 – Why I’m doing this challenge

• Day 2 – 10 random facts about me

• Day 3 – The story behind the name of this blog

• Day 4 – Quotable Quote… Why it speaks to me right now

• Day 5 – Recent random act of kindness

• Day 6 – Three current guilty pleasures

• Day 7 – Collections… What I collect and why

• Day 8 – Throwback Picture

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Hallmark Movie Review: Crown For Christmas

Known Actors/Actresses:

Danica McKellar

Storyline:

Ally and her siblings (the Evans) are orphaned and have only each other to rely on. They’re a tight group of three – two sisters and one brother – and both sisters work as maids at a high-end hotel in New York.

Due to an “unfortunate” event (which in Hallmark Land is really the fulcrum of the love story), both sisters get fired one week before Christmas. Oh… The brutality of it all!!

Ally’s honesty in all of this however, lands her a job as the governess for the daughter of the king (who happened to be staying at the hotel where the sisters work) of a fictitious European country next to Luxembourg.

The story then turns into a modern-day (2015) version of The Sound of Music (except that there’s only one child and the king isn’t as tightly-wound up as Captain Von Trapp).

• Ally and the king fall in love…
• The king’s advisers (and the woman who hopes to be his fiance) force Ally to return to Brooklyn when they see that he’s getting too close to her and fear that he might actually fall in love with, or (say it ain’t so!) already be in love with her…
• The king fends off the not-so-nice society lady he was being forced to marry (who incidentally, wanted to send his little daughter off to boarding school after they got married)…
• In a final chivalrous move, the king dashes off to Brooklyn to profess his love to Ally and whisks her back to his royal kingdom on a horse (seriously… they did ride up to the castle on a horse!) 

And in true Hallmark Movie fashion… They all lived happily ever after. 🙂

My Hallmark Movie Rating:

6.7 out of 10 warm fuzzies (mind you, this is my very own proprietary “Hallmark Movie Rating Scale”; this scale cannot be applied to non-Hallmark movies) 😉