(from Long and Short Reviews)

Between the Lines by Jasmine Aherne
Publisher: Wild Horse Press
Genre: Contemporary
Heat Level: Sensual
Rating: 4.5 Books
Reviewed by Edelweiss

"Early in Jasmine Aherne’s Between the Lines, we meet Tory, a successful New York City lawyer who is harried but successful in her family law practice. But success comes at a price. She has friends aplenty but no love life beyond blind dates and a jilted relationship that leaves regret but no pain because it never really got off the ground. As a favor to a cousin, she meets Aaron, a British author who needs her assistance for a novel he is setting in NYC. The attraction between them crackles from their first meeting.

The main characters have an introspective quality, owing to the way the author uses POV shifts to put us alternately in the heads of the protagonists. From their viewpoints we see their emotions waver, and hesitate, and advance. The characterizations are very good, and as we take their part, we are cheering on a relationship that looks to be in grave doubt. As a counterweight to emotional gravity, this book has a chick-lit flavor, with Tory repeatedly consulting with her girlfriends to review strategy and gauge the course of her feelings. Eventually we learn that Aaron’s romantic decision making is blocked by some deep, dark secret, and this brake on his progress provides the story with a healthy dose of suspense.

The word to summarize the story is touching. It ultimately wins out over a substantial amount of humor and slapstick informality. This is a story with an unabashedly sentimental ending, and its triumph is one you’ll not soon forget.

* * *


(from Talk About my Favourite Authors)

"I really fell for the hero, Aaron, and the heroine, Tory, because they seem like opposites but they really have so much in common. After finishing this novel I really couldn't believe that I finished it so fast and was left in awe as well as wanting to get my hands on another of Jasmine Aherne's novels."

I'd say this is about right. My life is probably rated PG.

So, J, a potential cinema buddy, has a particular love for Asian Horror cinema. I do not begrudge him this (and I did actually quite enjoy The Ring), but horror isn't my genre of choice....

However, I have arranged to go and see Prince Caspian with P, the singing teacher, who seems pretty cool. We're meeting on Monday at 5.30pm. Luckily it seems that we both have the whole "bladder of a child" issue going on, so no worries when someone has to get up and interrupt the other person briefly. 

In other news, still no word from the publisher, even though today I fired off a polite but firm email enquiry. I'm feeling so restless about the whole thing; I just want TO KNOW.

So, in an effort to see more movies on the big screen, I posted an anonymous advert on www.gumtree.com to ask for cinema buddies.

I've had a few replies, and, much to my pleasure and surprise, not all of them seem to be interweb wierdos.

I have narrowed my list down to:

J, a web designer who lives in Roath/Cathays, we share a lot of interests and he seems geunine. He likes Chinese food too so we'll have at least one thing to talk about.

P, a singing teacher who lives in Canton. I know her a little bit alrady courtesy of random Facebook-ness and she sounds like she'd be a nice friend.

Those who I won't be movie-going with are:

B, who suggested that I not tell Alex that I'm going to the cinema with a guy (why would I not tell Alex, that implies something is going on, you freak) 

F, who is 49 and lives in London. London, I mean, wtf? I posted in the CARDIFF section of the site.

Updates soon. This could become quite an interesting topic for LJ posts.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


41/100. Not bad, but could do better!