Tag: Bonnie

Mini Shopaholic


It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Sophie Kinsella, and as soon as I heard there was another book in the Shopaholic series coming out in early September, I started skulking around bookstores to get my copy.

Mini Shopaholic is the sixth book in Kinsella’s wildly popular Shopaholic series, following the books The Confessions of a Shopaholic (in UK it’s The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic), Shopaholic Takes Manhattan (UK Shopaholic Abroad), Shopaholic Ties the Knot, Shopaholic and Sister, and Shopaholic and Baby.

While my favorite Sophie Kinsella books are outside of the Shopaholic series (I love Undomestic Goddess, and the last one, Twenties Girl), Becky Bloomwood has grown on me as I read the novels. I was a bit outraged at her addiction to shopping in the first two books, but well, later on, I realized there’s a little Becky Bloomwood inside of me: the book shopper (hahaha!). And I really love the supporting cast in the series —  the dreamy Luke Brandon, the delightful Suze and Tarkie, the oddballs Jess and Tom, Becky’s folks Jane and Graham, their next-door neighbor Janice, the wild and wacky designer Danny Kovitz, and dear old Derek Smeath!

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The Mockingjay has landed!


(first published in Manila Bulletin)

The long wait is finally over for fans of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, as “Mockingjay,” the final installment in Scholastic’s hottest property since Harry Potter, was released worldwide this week.

Since “Mockingjay” was announced in December 2009, fans have kept an eye on the countdown clock as they held their breaths on the fate of the series heroine, Katniss Everdeen, and the nation of Panem. Much of the fandom is based online: fan pages, countdown counters and badges, miles of fan fiction, online book clubs and book discussions, and blog tours.

“Mockingjay” has been so highly anticipated that even those in the literary circles were scrabbling about for advance copies, but to no avail. Scholastic kept it under wraps, more closely guarded than “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” that furor ensued all over the internet when Andrew Sims, administrator of Harry Potter fan site mugglenet.com, tweeted that he got ahold of a copy nearly two weeks before the release.

And when a video of Suzanne Collins reading the first few paragraphs of “Mockingjay” was posted on the internet one day before the release, fans all over the world hung on to her every word.

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Catching Fire (and the HG fever continues!)

mockingjay

I know this is way overdue, as I finished Catching Fire three weeks ago. But the book fair, the two storms (and the great flood) that hit the country, my trip to Singapore (more on that on a future post!), and rearranging the house (ugh, reshelving my books, and still resuscitating those that went under during the flood) have kept me pretty busy and this is the first weekend I’ve had to myself in a long time.

If you’ve just discovered my blog, well, I read Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games (Scholastic Press) about a month back, and to my surprise, it slaked that craving I had for a really good read, and about time too, as I’d spent more than half of the year looking for a book to wow me.

Several days later, I got ahold of the I had newly-released sequel, Catching Fire, and finished it just before I had the thrill of watching the Hunger Games Live Action Role Play (LARP) at the Manila International Book Fair, organized by Scholastic and National Bookstore with the New Worlds Alliance.

(Spoiler free!)

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