Diana HolquistCritiques

I won this book as part of a prize pack a few months back. At the time I wasn't sure I would read it, as I don't read contemporary romances too often, but the fact that the main character Jasmine was as shy as I am piqued my interest.

Some of the most humorous parts of the novel came from when Jasmine would fangirl over a certain design or fabric. I have clothing designer friends, so I could easily picture how many tubs of extra fabric or how lovingly she takes care of her sewing machine.

The romance I think was just a shade too unbelievable. The chemistry was there, but I couldn't believe in Josh as a character, so it threw the romance flat. He didn't act like your typical Hollywood hunk, but he didn't act like a guy who wanted to prove himself either. He spent more time trying to get Jasmine to loosen up about her fear of men then he did practicing his so-called 'serious' acting.

Jasmine felt real, until the end at least, in her behavior and her mannerisms. Though the trauma that made her so afraid of men, or groups of people at all, seems flimsy it really is the small things that affect you the worst. I think she got over it a little too easily, but I could relate to it.

The backstory with her parents and two sisters was a confusing jumble. Her parents divorced when she was young, she was carted off with her mother to India while her two sisters went with their dad. Jasmine lived the life while they struggled. Then when she went to go live with them as a teenager something happened to make her realize that they didn't want her or could forgive her so she ran away again. It stayed like that for ten years until the sisters reunited. I have a feeling there is a first book I am missing that may have explained some of these things better.

Overall it was a fun diverting read that was perfect to just relax and not bother thinking too hard on. Jasmine was a likable character and I enjoyed reading about how she overcame her social anxieties.

This story is definitely like nothing I have ever read before; a crazy old lady (I totally see myself turning into her because of all the regency books I read), a Duke of Whatthehell, and frumpy schoolteacher. I'm three chapters in and feel like I should write some comments but honestly I'm flabbergasted as to what to say, not because it is awful but because it is so damn good and intriguing right now.
 
When someone asks you to waltz, you waltz. I understand Ally's fear for her grandmother (grandmother ran away and has dementia) but she did find her safe and sound and with so many people around it would have been safe and ok to have a night waltz in central park with Sam. Yeah, yeah I get the author is trying to establish and make known Ally's personality here. She has issues from her parents abandoning her, I get it. Just please let the lady waltz!
 
Awesome stuff, when Sam is imaging Ally's "garden" (personality/environment) and how it differs from Veronica's and is possibly full of poison ivy but doesn't care and wants to scoop her out of it and carry her to his jungle. Funny, Funny.
 
Up until ch. 11 I kind of brushed Sam off as carefree, rich, and good looking male but after he reads "The Dulcet Duke" (regency romance book Ally's grandmother thinks she is living in) and proceeds to get drunk at the pub the reader gets an insight into the real man. These couple of pages that show Sam's thoughts, feelings, and past are fantastic and add some much needed heft to his character and the story.
 
The trip in a horse carriage through New York seemed kind of crazy and a bit fortuitous how everything worked out perfectly for them. However, in the pursuit of the greater good (storyline) I was able to forgive the author for these nagging little unbelievable parts.
 
I liked Ally's friend June, great secondary character doesn't try to take over the story but adds something and is intriguing in her own right.
 
Very touching how Sam is hurt that Ally doesn't think him worthy. He is also bothered that he and Ally had to role-played as a duke and princess in order for Ally to sleep with him. After they sleep together he just wants Ally to respect him and see him for who he really is. So touching; story becomes about breaking through walls to get to the true essence of a person.
 
Oh the late night conversation between Ally and Sam when they are at the Brazilian hotel is where I felt like the fun, frivolous aspect of their relationship stopped and it started to become meaningful. Ally wants him to tell her about his past but he argues he is his own man and his past doesn't matter (even though it's obvious it affects who he is and his actions) and that only what they feel and do here and now matters. This little part was incredibly meaningful and brought this couple out of "Chik-lit" for me.Oh Sam what a hero sigh sigh sigh. I refuse to tell you what made me type this, you must read for yourself.
 
Oh letter writing such a lost art form! When Sam writes his "prologue" my eyes watered for some weird reason. The last chapters of this book are guaranteed to make your heart clench. Ally is the focus of the first half of book then Sam last half, it worked, sort of. Mateo (carriage driver) was nice character but his soccer story was unnecessary. The quotes from a regency romance called "The Dulcet Duke" was just about one of my favorite things from this story. I want to read that story!
 
LOVED the ending (I really want to waltz) just sigh, sigh, sigh.Read this book people. Sure it's a little fluffy, glossed over heavier tones the author tried to introduce in regards to her character's background, a hero/heroine not fully flushed out, and some unnecessary secondary character drama. But the overall story is wonderful from it's humor, sheer romanticism, and sigh inducing moments. Simply a modern day fairytale. This book is going in keeper purgatory. Meaning it was really, really good but I don't know if it is quite keeper worthy. I have a bad feeling that the magic and sigh worthiness will fade after the first reading. You all know books like that where some dialogue loses it's weight with a second reading. Time will only tell, we'll see after I read it a second time in the distant future.

This is a fun, quick read. Although this book is not just a book but an interactive experiment. Before you even start this book, there is a introduction in the beginning that explains the different font and how to read this book. Yes, this book does come with instructions.

I found myself reading the book like it was meant to be read. Just to see if and how it made a difference. It did make a difference in how the story was projected to the listening audience. Although, I can't say that I felt any stronger in my desire to want to go to Harvard. Yet, all of the characters in this book were good: Ronald, Mommy Rabbit, Adderall Aardvark, Kollege Koach Kitty, and Admission Officer Owl.

I need a reality check on one thing. What does the title of this book say to you?

I assumed it was a book by the daughter of an Amy Chua-type mom.

It isn't. It's by a mom and her teenaged daughter. Well, technically it's all by the mom, but she interviews her daughter and then weaves her answers together into coherent chapters.

I wasn't sure I'd like it at first. The whole first chapter is a smug, pompous brag about how Diana Holquist totally rejects the tiger-mom ethos and lets her children watch TV and play video games, and those kids are still mad overachievers.

Swell.

She rattles off examples of her kids' amazingness, giving a looong paragraph to each of them. Then she chides readers for being impressed:

The second reason my kids are awesome is that I don't care about achievement. That dull list of exploits I rattled off a few pages back? Those accomplishments are the least interesting aspects about any of us.

I almost stopped reading right there, but the book's short and I did pay for it. Still -- wow, was that above and beyond the call of obnoxious. Your kids get straight A's; one of them plays elite-level soccer, and also the cello; the other does every kind of handicraft under the sun, plays the viola well enough to be invited to join her school's chamber orchestra, and is already earning scholarships to take classes at "a prestigious art college," as well as running her own business selling handcrafted fashion accessories -- oh, but it's just too boring to focus on these trivial aspects of their lives.

Insert barfy-face emoticon here.

(And for the record, people have aspects. Saying something is an aspect "about" someone is weird and wrong.)

Still, I gave this book three stars, and would have given it four if it hadn't been for moments like this one. Because this book became a lot of fun to read almost immediately after this admittedly painful chapter.

Although first it got kind of misleading. Holquist explains that she read some of Amy Chua's book to her kids. They all got a good laugh out of it. Holquist asks them if they wish she would be tougher on them, like the tiger mother. Conditional yes: each kid wishes Mom would be tougher on the other kid, which is pretty funny, as is her son's suggestion that a book about her should be called Off-key Ditty of the Sloth Mother.

Then Sloth Mother makes a confession:

"You know," I told my kids. "It might surprise you guys, but I used to a tiger mother."

Yes, she left out the word "be." There are a few such minor but irritating errors throughout the book. Later, in an otherwise wonderful passage, Holquist tells her readers, "You have to love your children for whom they are." Some writers think that "whom" is the intelligent version of "who," rather than just another word that it's sometimes correct and sometimes incorrect to use. (For the record, this sentence is the pronoun equivalent of saying "Love him for who him is.")

But I digress. The point of the passage above is that Holquist insists she's a reformed tiger mother. And she really isn't.

Being a tiger mother isn't about believing that your baby is the most amazing baby ever born. This sort of localized insanity is expected, at least in America, and amusing as long as it doesn't get out of hand.

A tiger mother wouldn't spend time watching her baby cooing and decide that her baby cooed the best of all the babies in her play group (as Holquist does, quite entertainingly). A tiger mother would never think her child was the best. She'd tell her child that she'd better be the best – the best when it came to school, and playing the piano or violin, and competing in the science fair, and scoring the highest on all possible tests.

A tiger mother wouldn't tell her daughter, "No one cares if you miss a note" at a violin recital. A tiger mother would have died of shame – or, more realistically, demanded her daughter practice more and be given more lessons – if all the other kids who'd started lessons at the same time were songs ahead of her in the first Suzuki violin book. She certainly wouldn't have let the daughter in question quit violin.

If a tiger mother got the news from her daughter's teacher that the daughter "isn't learning to read as quickly as we'd like," she wouldn't just let the kid learn at her own pace. She'd sell whatever she needed to, including the house if necessary, to hire whatever tutors were needed to catch her daughter up to grade level and beyond. (Or, more likely, she'd sit down and tutor the daughter herself, for hours and hours and hours every day.)

A tiger mother would never say her daughter "can't learn her times tables to save her life." See above re tutoring. She certainly wouldn't smile contentedly as her daughter's teacher taped a multiplication chart to the front of her daughter's notebook. If that teacher told a tiger mother cheerily, "Some kids just can't memorize math facts. No need to torture them," the tiger mother would eat her alive, possibly without bothering to chew.

These are all things that happened when Holquist was supposedly in tiger mother mode.

The thing is, she tells a terrific story. She's passionate about children being given the chance to shape their own lives and pursue their passions, and she makes her argument forcefully and beautifully. The pain she feels when her daughter Hana struggles both academically and socially is wrenching; and the reader wants to cheer as Holquist learns, step by tiny step, that everything's going to be fine as long as Holquist lays off and lets her daughter sort things out for herself, already.

This book would be worth reading just for the story of the birthday spent skating through a frozen forest. I will never forget that, and it didn't even happen to me. I get real live actual chills just thinking about it.

But there are plenty of other reasons to pick up Tiger Daughter. This book is a fast, humorous, often moving read that gripped me a lot harder and left me a lot happier than I'd ever expected it to, given that initial unpromising chapter.

But please let the record state: Diana Holquist was never a tiger mother. Not even once. Not even a little. Worrying about how your kid's doing in school and wanting the best for her doesn't count, or we'd all be tiger moms.

Read this book, especially if you've already read Amy Chua's Battle Hymn. If you haven't, read them both. You'll have a great time, and then you'll have a lot to think about.

This is a contemporary romance that is an easy, fun, lighthearted read.

Commitment-phobic Sam Carson has only dated model-gorgeous women. But one stolen kiss from a plain-Jane schoolteacher and he's hell-bent on stripping away her floral dresses and teaching her the art of being bad. If only her good-girl ways didn't make him want to be a better man...

Ally Giordano is at the end of her rope. Her beloved grandmother actually believes that she's living in her favorite romance novel in Regency England and Ally doesn't have the heart to set her straight. But now Granny Donny's last wish is for a retreat to the country and Ally can't refuse her...until she demands that Sam accompany them. And though his smiles turn her knees into jelly, Ally knows better than to trust a playboy...and she definitely knows better than to try to change one. Or does she?

What a great premise for a book! Ally's aristocratic, addled grandmother thinks she's living in a Regency romance novel, one of her favorite reading genres and Ally, who is moving out of state shortly, has no desire to disabuse her grandmother of this, aside from the fact that this means Granny Donny is determined to marry Ally off to a Duke. As they live in New York City, Dukes are in short supply but one roguish English ex-pat literally jumps into the masquerade as he's trying to sneak off undetected by an irate ex. Sam Carson is indeed the modern incarnation of a rogue but he's also a good enough guy that he helps Ally play along with her grandmother's delusion. So when Granny Donny insists that her horse and carriage (hired from Central Park) must take them to the country estate (no matter what NYC law says about horses on bridges), Sam smooths the way, staying in character and allowing Ally to maintain the charade for Granny Donny, even as Ally allows herself to hope against all evidence to the contrary that perhaps her long missing parents are waiting for her at the "country house." What might be waiting is a changed Sam, one willing to be a reformed rogue.

This was a cute book, playing on the conventions of both historical and contemporary romances. It was funny and sweet and clever. The characters, especially Granny Donny and Ally, were charming. Sam was more stereotypical in presentation but his conversion from playboy to solid, dependable, likable to grannies guy was natural if a little easy. Fans of both historical and contemporary romances will definitely enjoy this dip into each others' swimming pools.½

The good news first: This book was a lot of fun. I loved the setup-- the always eccentric grandmother decides she's living in the world of a particular Regency Romance novel. As in the book, she must marry off her granddaughter (who, luckily, is not 16 as in the book). So she picks out a duke, or the closest thing to one that she can find.Granny Donny was an interesting character, and I liked Ally. I wish I'd liked Sam a little more. His resemblance to your typical physically attractive but emotionally wounded regency romance hero was something of an ongoing gag. I did like it when he showed up in lace up pants :-).The problem is that I need to be able to shut off the analytical part of my brain when reading a book like this. I did have some issues with this book, that usually went away when I reminded myself I was looking forward to this book for the fun part, I wanted a break from books I needed to think about.

Recieve this book for tha author and I absolutely LOVED it! The charaters were quite personalble. Bigger than life, yet so human they were relateable (wait, is that even a word?!) Had a few twists and turns, yet it turns out better that you hope. An excellent read! Couldn' put it down.

Reviewed for queuemyreview.com; book release Sep08

I opened “Hungry For More” looking for a change in tenor from my recent reading. Diana Holquist certainly provided that with a story about food and love…or food as love. Each chapter is headed with a food quote from the hero of the book comparing life’s lessons with food. Since I was hungry for something unusual, I dug right in.

James is a fabulous, but lonely chef. His food and his restaurant are his whole life. His famous dishes are each inspired by, and named after, the temporary women in his life. When he meets Amy, just being near her inspires one of his best ever appetizers. It’s not long before that’s not all she’s inspiring!

Amy is a footloose gypsy. At five years old, suddenly she became able to touch a person and tell them the name of their One True Love. When she touched her mother and said a name, her mother promptly left her current family for her real love. A lonely, hurting Amy named the voice Maddie, learned her ‘lesson’ and has used her ability to con her way through life; never becoming too attached to anyone or anything and never staying in one place too long. Then, three months ago, on the biggest day of her life, Maddie left her. Amy is determined to get ‘her’ back.

This story is really about a pair of people who are lonely at heart but have found other ways to compensate. Their younger years weren’t very happy and each grew up without a mother. So even though one grew up rich and one poor, they have a connection and understanding that goes deeper than appearances. The biggest difference between them is that James is quicker to realize and open himself up to love. Amy, on the other hand, is a shallow and selfish woman. I didn’t like her in the beginning and I still didn’t like her at the end. I would have chosen another woman, any other woman, for James. I thought he deserved so much more. Because I didn’t like the lead female character, I didn’t ‘feel’ the love between the two, and that meant that nothing else worked either!

The story in “Hungry for More” is an interesting one. What would be the consequences of knowing your ‘one true love’? I just wish Diana Holquist’s heroine was one I could care about and want to like. But if heroines who run away, again and again, from their hero (and then of course, have hot reunion sex) are more to your taste, then you should certainly try a serving of this story. As for me, it only left me hungry for ice cream.

Note: This book will be raffled on the 2nd at http://j-kaye-book-blog.blogspot.com/.

My Thoughts:

Diana Holquist’s book Sexiest Man Alive is a reminder why I no longer do research on author or the book prior to reading. The reason is I’m no good at prejudging a book. I’ll give you an example of what I mean.

Take the book cover. See the hunk of a fellow on the cover? Hot, right? The woman is grabbing him from the back made me think of the song by Arrow “Hot, Hot, Hot.” I conjured up graphic sex scenes. Imagine my surprise to find out the main character, Jasmine Burns, is actually shy, so much so that she has anxiety attacks anytime she is near a hunk. Right away, I knew this was going to be interesting.

To add to the mix, her sister, Amy, is a psychic and not just your Sylvia Browne model. Amy specializes in being able to hear the name of the person you are destined to be with, your life mate, if you will. Of course, there is a catch. When Amy hears the name, let’s say, John Smith. This could be the John Smith, a wino down the street or John Smith, the billionaire. What a twist!

Diana Holquist’s sense of humor tops the laugh charts in this comedy romance. The giggles started on page six turned to laugh-out-loud funny before the chapter was done. I even woke my husband from a dead sleep before I was done with my laughing jag. And the prologue at the end with the first chapter of her next book is completely priceless!

After reading Sexiest Man Alive, I discovered this was Diana Holquist’s second book. Her first, Make Me a Match, also has the gypsy sisters and it’s Cecelia Burns who finds her one true love. Her next book, titled Hungry for More will be out in fall of 2008.