Yes, you read that right. Just two ingredients – Nutella and eggs – combine together to create this beautifully complex brownie. Crisp on top, moist on the bottom, its guaranteed to take you straight to chocolate heaven! If this isn’t alchemy, I don’t know what is!
Here’s what you need:Continue reading
Those of you who have followed my blog long enough would know that spirituality is a big p
art of my life. I believe in taking regular me time, in meditating, and in being creative – be it through art or photography, writing or cooking.
In the busyness of daily life though, it is easy to let me time slide…to lose focus…but you need to give yourself permission to take a break and play.
From the back cover: Trapped for 15 years in the stranglehold of a dead marriage and soulless household domesticity, the beautiful, full-bodied and passionate Meera Patel depends on her memories and her flights of fantasy to soothe the aches that wrack her body…until one cataclysmic day in Mumbai, when she finally breaks free. Bold, brazen and defiant, Sita’s Curse looks at the hypocrisy of Indian society and tells the compelling story of a middle class Indian housewife’s urgent need for love, respect, acceptance – and sexual fulfillment.
From the back cover:
Servants of the Goddess weaves together the heartbreaking, yet paradoxically life affirming stories of five devadasis – Women, in the clutches of an ancient fertility cult, forced to serve the gods. Catherine Rubin Kermorgant sets out attempting to make a documentary film about the lives of present-day devadasis. Through her, we meet and get to know the devadasi women of Kalyana, a remote village in Karnataka. As they grow to trust Kermorgant and welcome her as an honorary sister, we hear their stories in their own words, stories of oppression and violence, but more importantly, of resistance and resilience. Kermorgant becomes a part of these stories and finds herself unwittingly enmeshed in a world of gender and caste bias which extends far beyond Kalyana, all the way to Paris, where the documentary is to be edited and produced. Servants of the Goddess is a testament to women’s strength and spirit and a remarkably astute analysis of gender and caste relations in today’s rural India.
Getting back to art
Starting some DIY projects
My adorable fur babies
Walks in the park
An inspiring husband
A peaceful life
What are you grateful for today?
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, Babur Khan – a hard-lined jihadi who enforces strict Sharia laws and promises to get rid of the Poppy pashas and infidel Americans –is also hunting for the Kohinoor to ensure that India doesn’t get its hands on the document.Continue reading
“The moment the lawyer opened his eyes he knew he’d be tired for the rest of the day. He wasn’t sure whether he’d heard it on the radio or read it in the newspaper, but he’d come across a specialist who described sleep in terms of cycles. Often the reason people are tired, the specialist explained, was not due to insufficient sleep but rather a sudden awakening before the cycle had run its course. The lawyer did not know anything about the cycles – their duration, their starting point, their ending point…”
Starting slowly, languidly, Kashua sketches the plot and characters in broad, bold, sweeping strokes.Continue reading
When Ruth picks up a piece of flotsam that has washed up on the beach near her home in British Columbia, little does she know that her life will be changed. For in that package, which at first glance looked liked a jellyfish, is a Hello Kitty lunchbox with a diary, a bunch of old letters in French, and an old watch.
The diary belongs to 16-year old Nao Yasutani, who wants to write the story of her 104-year-old anarchist, feminist Buddhist grandmother. But she ends up writing about her life, the unimaginable ijime (shame) she faces in school, tidbits of Zen wisdom from her grandmother, and the sheer heartbreaking despair of life – both she and her father want nothing more than to commit suicide.
As Ruth is drawn into Nao’s world, she finds herself spending all of her spare time trying to track Nao down. She desperately scrolls through information online to try and find out if Nao or her family feature in the tsunami casualty list; she runs a number of searches to try and corroborate some of the stories from Nao’s diary; and in her quest, she forgets that a decade has passed between the time that Nao wrote the diary and it washed up on the beach near Ruth’s home.Continue reading
Can I let you in on a secret? I have seen the devil, and I know its name. Come closer, so I can whisper it in your ear.
{ NetGalley }
Really. It is the devil! Because every time you promise to be good, to not get tempted by another book you simply have to read and to hell with all the other books that are piling up alarmingly on your to-read pile, there it is, with a shiny new book that you just cannot resist. And so you succumb, over and over and over again.Continue reading
This is a guest post by KB Hoyle, author of The Gateway Chronicles. Enjoy!
Because sometimes it’s more fun to hear from the readers than the author, I interviewed several of my teenage readers this week the day after the release of book 5, The Scroll. Blaine and Jennifer are ninth-grade girls, Keisha is an eleventh-grade girl, and Terra, who came into the room just as I was asking the last question, is in twelfth grade. With the exception of Keisha, these are all girls who have been readers of The Gateway Chronicles since I first self-published them, before I was signed by TWCS Publishing House. They are also current creative writing students of mine, so they really have the inside track!Continue reading
