Candace Kling has been involved in the textile industry for over 25 years. She is a graduate of the California College of Arts and Crafts. Articles by Candace have been published in Threads, Fiberworks, Treasures in Needlework, and Victoria Magazine. Candace has been a featured guest on The Carol Duvall Show. She resides in Oakland, California.

I read this book aloud to my kids every Christmas. A real tear-jerker.

Must have!

I didn't know much of anything about Tim Russert's life before listening to this book. But I found that many of his remembrances of growing up Catholic paralleled my life, even though he's a tad older than I, and grew up in a decidedly more liberal household.

This book is very accessible in it's approach. It is full of life lessons, but Tim doesn't hit you over the head with any particular morality. Instead, he just tells the stories that lead to the lessons ... the lessons most often learned at the side of his dad.

There were a couple "sports" chapters about baseball and football that didn't interest me too much. But even these chapters had enough meat to hold my interest. That's saying a lot, considering how little I enjoy sports.

Wonderfully engaging

This book is filled with memorable characters that you come to care about, a good storyline, and some powerful lessons about love and life.

Highly recommended

Gosh, was this a treat! It reminded me a bit of the Ugly Betty TV show. Smart girl, gets a job at a fashion magazine and feels somewhat out of place. She keeps her head while those around her go nuts.

There's a lot of good "fish out of water" goings on here. The characters are rich. The writing is quick. The humor is outstanding.

Fun!

This is a classic tale of mother and daughter coming to put into perspective their tumultuous relationship, make peace with their past(s), and learn acceptance and love for themselves and each other. This leads the daughter to accept being loved by her man. It's a wonderful generational tale.

Highly Recommended

This book is a must for website designers. The jist of the book is to help you create websites that are attractive, easy to navigate, and ultimately usable. The book is extremely easy to read. It's very sensible. The illustrations and examples and writing are crystal clear. The logic is outstanding. And the humor makes it a fun read.

Don't Make Me Think! is the cry of all web surfers as they go to a site and try to find the information they are seeking. Steve's approach is to make a site's navigation obvious. Get rid of the junk! Eliminate oversized and useless graphics! Test your site on real people before before you foist it on the world! Help your visitors get the information they need as quickly as possible. And don't be too cute.

I learned a lot from this book, and hope to implement more and more of his ideas on this website as I continue to build and expand.

Highly recommended

This is a great introduction to a magnificent animal. It's short. It has wonderful photos. And it has simple facts. The large type size and simple vocabulary make it excellent for early readers.

See also Bald Eagles ; Llamas ; Sea Turtles

Highly recommended

This two-book set is filled with both color and black & white photographs of samplers, paintings, and newspaper clippings about needlework during this 200-year period. This is not a book for the casual reader. But it is full of information for the different time periods and areas of the U.S. It is not a book of charts, nor many stitch descriptions. But this book does give insight into the origin of specific pieces of needlework, and discusses the history of the schools that taught needlework.

I enjoyed this book as I did the first in the series. It felt like the author was back on track with the distinct personalities, teenage angst and fun.

See also The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants ; The Second Summer of the Sisterhood

Read! Enjoy!

Order this from your local needlework shop.

Order this book through your local needlework specialty shop.

In the summer of 2002 I read this book to my nine year old daughter. Lord knows, if she had read it to herself it would have been faster. But she loves it when I spend one-on-one time reading to her. I told her that after we finished reading Harriet, I would allow her to read the journal I wrote when I was in the sixth grade, the journal this book inspired. (Yes, of course I still have it!)

I love children's literature. I love the characters. I love the lessons they teach:

1. Sometimes you have to say you are sorry even if you don't believe you were wrong.
2. Sometimes telling a small white lie is necessary to help others feel better.
3. It's important to never lie to yourself, to be true to who you are even if it means you're considered an odd duck.

He Who Must Not be Named is after Harry again. This time he wants a prophecy that only Harry can deliver to him. The forces of good and evil are firmly aligned against one another. The forces of good are joined in the Order of the Phoenix — an ultra-secret society — for good shall rise against evil again.

I love reading these books, and did read the first four. But I listened to the audio version of book five and it was splendid! Jim Dale is a marvelous story teller and has an uncanny ability to give each character a distinct voice. This was a true treat!

Not to be missed!

Camp Green Lake was not a lake at all. It was a dry desert. The boys sent to the camp had one job. Dig holes. 5 feet deep, 5 feet wide, 5 feet long. A new hole every day. The excuse given was that digging would give the boys character. Instead, Stanley learned that the camp leaders were looking for something ... something with quite a history.

Stanley does learn some "character" during his time about Camp Green Lake. But it all came when he ran away ...

This is good realistic fiction that depicts how these boys act under pressure. Stanley learned that there is more to him than meets the eye -- and that his actions can end the family curse.

A great read.

This picture book is a delightful spin-off of the children's song, I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. Here, a hungry old lady comes for a Thanksgiving feast and eats it all herself, ballooning in size to rival the holiday parade balloons. This is a quick, fun read for Thanksgiving with very funny illustrations.

Highly recommended

This picture book is a scream! I laughed my whole way through it. The old woman who lives in a shoe decides to move into larger quarters with all her kids in tow. She land in one nursery rhyme after another, and never quite finds the right home — until the end of the book. The words are clever, the illustrations a riot.

Highly recommended

This contains the thoughts of a little boy as he spends the day by himself, exploring his world and enjoying the time he has Just Being Alone.

I was prompted to buy a used version of the book recently when I found myself home alone and enjoying my Creative Journey. It's a great reminder that even if one is alone, one does not have to be lonely. In fact, "Just being alone is a nice thing to be."

An old favorite

It's short. It's heart-wrenching. It's got the vocabulary of real life mother-daughter interactions. In fact, that's the best part of it!

The book is about 15 year old Claire and her single mother, a busy OB/GYN. School, boyfriends, babysitting and work keep them on opposite schedules. They have very little time when they are both awake and in the same room together. Very little time to talk. Instead, they leave messages for one another on the refrigerator door.

The entire book is made up of these messages between mother and daughter. They share news. They ask each other for help (and allowance!) They even fight with each other in these short messages.

As the story unfolds, we learn that mom has an aggressive breast cancer. As a doctor, she makes for a lousy patient. She has a hard time discussing her illness with her teenage daughter, wanting to spare her daughter the pain and confusion that goes with a life-threatening illness. This only make for more confusion and unspoken feelings welling up in Claire. Eventually, the two women find the need and strength to speak candidly to each other face to face ... and to clarify their thoughts in their continued notes to one another.

The audio version of the book is wonderfully done. There are two distinct voices (Dana Delany as the mom and Amanda Seyfried as Claire) reading the notes. Their vocal acting is superb.

This is a great read. My daughter Julie and I read the book at the same time and are now looking for the opportunity to talk about it. She's 21, away at school. We can't leave messages on the refrigerator door, so we've got to find another way.

If you're a mom with a teenage daughter, I highly recommend sharing this book together. It will allow you to laugh and nod and weep together. It will remind you that underneath all the spats and growing need for adolescent independence, there is a strong bond and interdependence that mothers and daughters share.

Great mother-daughter read!

Patti’s writing is lyrical. In this audio version of the book, Patti’s voice is tender and compassionate. She is a wonderful writer. Her reading is clear, unhalting. Her voice catches occassionally as she re-lives what she reads.

There are two passages that particularly struck me. The first …

"There is something that happens in the death of a parent which people are reluctant to talk about. It feels blasphemous, as if the experience of bereavement were being dishonored. But if people are being very honest, or very brave, they will tell you that in the process of losing a parent to death, something within them was born -- something that had been waiting beneath the surface for years. Decades. No other loss, no other experience in life can give birth to the part of ourselves that steps out of the shadows once we have whispered our last goodbye to either our mother or our father. … Ask someone who has buried a parent what was born in them with that death, and there is an obvious relief. Someone has asked. It must be alright to acknowledge it, to admit that fresh light flooded in."

This rings true with me. Something fresh was born in me after the death of my parents. I would love to have this conversation with others that have survived the pain of losing their parents. I would love to know what was born in them.

The second passage had to do with the passing of the baton. With the death of a parent, the child becomes the adult. Patti talked about it in this passage about her brother, Ron, on the day her father died:

"My brother is already there, sitting beside the hospital bed. His eyes are soft and sad. His hand is resting on our father’s back, a back grown thin, the bones sharp and narrow as twigs. Ron’s hand is the strong one now, large and wide and capable."

Perhaps this book touched me deeply because it reminded me so very much of watching my own strong father become physically weak in his last year. We, too, had a healing and a strengthening of our relationship. And I kept vigil at his side when he died. Patti’s writing evokes empathetic emotions with polished skill.

Tender, compassionate, loving

I liked this book a lot. I think one of the reviewers, Aimee Bender, got it just right when she wrote this "is the kind of novel that, once you're done, you may go visit while wandering through a bookstore and touch on the binding, just to remember the emotions you felt while reading it."

Highly recommended