Miss Wisey Pants

I like books that make you think. And in my opinion, there are very few books that have the ability to take you back to your own childhood and leave you with the gentle embrace of reminiscence. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn does just that to you. In simple terms, this book is full of child-like innocence and hard-hitting at the same time. It's a brutally-honest story of a little girl, Francie, who's brought up in squalor and abject poverty by a strong-minded, hard-working mother who leaves no stone unturned to make ends meet and a father who's often shown lost somewhere in the hustle-bustle called life. Francie has a little brother who's also her friend and later a confidant. The story moves at a languid pace, though never boring, recounting the struggles Francie's family goes through just to manage a decent meal on most days. Amid all this is Francie with her wide-eyed amazement and child-like perspective towards everything in life. Like all kids, she has the simpl...

Timshel.. Thou mayest. You may. I chanced upon a gem of a book last month. Though, in my search for my next read, I did fall into a trap. I started reading this very catchy-titled book " The Paper Princess "(Part 1 of a trilogy). It turned out to be shallow and flimsy. It was an all-too-good-to-be-true story of a girl in her teens who was raised by a single mom (who was a stripper). The girl has now lost her mom and is surviving in this harsh world all by herself by studying hard during the day and working as a stripper herself at night to get through life. One day, there appears a man in her life, more than twice her age, who presents himself as her run-away father's bestie and who, also, turns out to be a business tycoon with nothing less than a whole airlines company under his belt! The run-away father, just before dying, found out that he has a daughter out of some flaky one-night-stand he had back in his 20-somethings, which he probably doesn't even remember n...