REVIEW: Build It Simple: Practical Projects and Inventive Solutions for Home and Garden by How-To Experts at Storey Publishing

Synopsis

Discover 50 simple, thrifty, low-tech projects that you can create, even if you're a novice builder!

With simple tools and materials and just basic building skills, you can make exactly what you need for all of your backyard and gardening projects, from a tool shed and storage bins to lawn chairs, fences, plant supports, and feeders for your chickens. These sustainable, timeless designs, paired with step-by-step instructions and resourceful tips provide a wealth of ideas for a practical and purposeful garden and home.

Format 144 pages, Paperback

Expected publication July 8, 2025 by Storey Publishing, LLC

ISBN 9781635868241 (ISBN10: 1635868246)

My Thoughts

I'm admittedly fascinated with survival techniques. I have been since I read the books Cold River by William Judson and Survive! by Evan Lee Heyman as a kid. They sparked my interest in the things people can and will do to survive, and in old homesteading practices. 

So, when I saw this book available on Netgalley for review, I had to take a look! This book is trove of practical projects to resolve common problems. The introduction states this book was written to save you money, time and resources by guiding you on how to make items for the house and home using some relatively basic hand tools. 

The book starts with instructions for how to build some projects that will help you with other projects like a sawhorse, carpenter's box, and workbench. These earlier projects are more detailed and include drawings showing how to assemble them. Later projects (which include the likes of benches, storage bins, a solar dryer, macrame plant hangers, garden boxes and plant supports) regularly only offer up a drawing of the project and a description of the wood needed with the assumption that if you got through the first few projects then you can handle this.

Sprinkled throughout the book are charming colorful drawings that show happy scenes of home life with these projects in use.

My final word: This book is simple and exactly what it purports to be. A book of 50 relatively simple projects, mostly wood projects, that you can make for your home or garden. With some basic tools, minimal skill, and a bit of ambition, you can fill your home and garden with a bevy of homemade projects that can both bring joy and be practical and useful.

My Rating:

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The Cerebral Girl is a middle-aged blogger just digging her way out from under a mountain of books in the deep south of Florida.

I received a copy of this book to review through Netgalley, in exchange for my honest opinion. I was not financially compensated in any way, and the opinions expressed are my own and based on my observations while reading this novel. The book that I received was an uncorrected proof, and quotes could differ from the final release.  

REVIEW: The Crash by Freida McFadden

Synopsis

The nightmare she’s running from is nothing compared to where she’s headed.

Tegan is eight months pregnant, alone, and desperately wants to put her crumbling life in the rearview mirror. So she hits the road, planning to stay with her brother until she can figure out her next move. But she doesn’t realize she’s heading straight into a blizzard.

She never arrives at her destination.

Stranded in rural Maine with a dead car and broken ankle, Tegan worries she’s made a terrible mistake. Then a miracle she is rescued by a couple who offers her a room in their warm cabin until the snow clears.

But something isn’t right. Tegan believed she was waiting out the storm, but as time ticks by, she comes to realize she is in grave danger. This safe haven isn’t what she thought it was, and staying here may have been her most deadly mistake yet.

And now she must do whatever it takes to save herself—and her unborn child.

A gut-wrenching story of motherhood, survival, and twisted expectations, #1 New York Times bestselling author Freida McFadden delivers a snowbound thriller that will chill you to the bone.

Format 384 pages, Hardcover

Published January 28, 2025 by Poisoned Pen Press

ISBN 9781464232985 (ISBN10: 1464232989)

About the Author

#1 New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Publisher's Weekly, and Amazon Charts bestselling author Freida McFadden is a practicing physician specializing in brain injury who has penned multiple Kindle bestselling psychological thrillers and medical humor novels. She lives with her family and possessed cat in a centuries-old three-story home overlooking the ocean, with staircases that creak and moan with each step, and nobody could hear you if you scream. Unless you scream really loudly, maybe.

My Thoughts

The Crash is a passable psychological thriller that starts with promise but quickly veers into the mundane and, at times, the downright preposterous. Freida McFadden delivers fast pacing and accessible prose, and twists that feel more forced than clever.

The characters are thinly drawn and often behave in baffling ways, making it hard to stay emotionally invested. and while the premise is intriguing, the execution relies too heavily on unlikely coincidences and melodramatic turns. By the end, the story stretches credibility to its limits, making it hard to stay invested in the outcome.

Five words: mundane, preposterous, fast-paced, theatrical, unbelievable

Buy Now:

Visit the publisher

My final word: It’s not a bad book—it moves quickly and may satisfy readers looking for an easy, forgettable read. But The Crash feels like a fender bender of ideas that never quite adds up to a solid impact. The plot winds up feeling overly familiar (more than once I thought of Stephen King's Misery) and eventually collapses under the weight of its own implausibility. Overall, it’s a mundane but readable effort-- adequate for a lazy afternoon, but little else.

Warnings:

Violence, kidnapping, references to rape

My Rating:

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The Cerebral Girl is a middle-aged blogger just digging her way out from under a mountain of books in the deep south of Florida.

REVIEW: James by Percival Everett

Synopsis

A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

303 pages, Hardcover
First published March 19, 2024

About the Author

Percival L. Everett (born 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

There might not be a more fertile mind in American fiction today than Everett’s. In 22 years, he has written 19 books, including a farcical Western, a savage satire of the publishing industry, a children’s story spoofing counting books, retellings of the Greek myths of Medea and Dionysus, and a philosophical tract narrated by a four-year-old.

The Washington Post has called Everett “one of the most adventurously experimental of modern American novelists.” And according to The Boston Globe, “He’s literature’s NASCAR champion, going flat out, narrowly avoiding one seemingly inevitable crash only to steer straight for the next.”

Everett, who teaches courses in creative writing, American studies and critical theory, says he writes about what interests him, which explains his prolific output and the range of subjects he has tackled. He also describes himself as a demanding teacher who learns from his students as much as they learn from him.

Everett’s writing has earned him the PEN USA 2006 Literary Award (for his 2005 novel, Wounded), the Academy Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (for his 2001 novel, Erasure), the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature (for his 1996 story collection, Big Picture) and the New American Writing Award (for his 1990 novel, Zulus). He has served as a judge for, among others, the 1997 National Book Award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1991. 

-- from his Goodreads listing

Setting/Location

This story takes place on the Mississippi River in the 1800s.

My Thoughts

Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.

Percival Everett’s James is an inventive reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn-- this time allowing the spotlight to shine on Jim, giving him voice, intellect and complexity long overlooked.

From the outset, James feels both familiar and surprisingly new. The language hums with originality. Everett is at times reverent, crafting a voice for Jim that is intellectually rich, biting, and sometimes heartbreakingly introspective, making it not just a retelling but a reworking of American mythology.

Everett’s novel is deeply nostalgic, not for the mythic Mississippi River of Twain’s era, but for the power of storytelling itself—its ability to challenge, to liberate, and to reimagine. With moments of biting satire and profound humanity, James confronts the past with both rage and grace.

Five words: nostalgic, original, storyteller, human, reawakening

Buy now:
Penguin Random House

My final word: A timely novel, James is a reminder of literature’s power to reframe the past and reshape the present. I appreciate the author's ability to give dignity to a previously undervalued voice, to make him the star of the story. Written with compassion, humor, and courage, James is an original literary reinvention. This story will resonate strongly with lovers of Twain!

Warnings:

Abuse, cruelty, slavery, lynchings

My Rating:

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The Cerebral Girl is a middle-aged blogger just digging her way out from under a mountain of books in the deep south of Florida.

REVIEW: The Return of Ellie Black by Emiko Jean (audiobook)

 

Synopsis

Detective Chelsey Calhoun’s life is turned upside down when she gets the call Ellie Black, a girl who disappeared years earlier, has resurfaced in the woods of Washington state—but Ellie’s reappearance leaves Chelsey with more questions than answers.

It’s been twenty years since Detective Chelsey Calhoun’s sister vanished when they were teenagers, and ever since she’s been searching: for signs, for closure, for other missing girls. But happy endings are rare in Chelsey’s line of work.

Then a glimmer: local teenager Ellie Black, who disappeared without a trace two years earlier, has been found alive in the woods of Washington State.

But something is not right with Ellie. She won’t say where she’s been, or who she’s protecting, and it’s up to Chelsey to find the answers. She needs to get to the bottom of what happened to Ellie: for herself, and for the memory of her sister, but mostly for the next girl who could be taken—and who, unlike Ellie, might never return.

The debut thriller from New York Times bestselling author Emiko Jean, The Return of Ellie Black is both a feminist tour de force about the embers of hope that burn in the aftermath of tragedy and a twisty page-turner that will shock and surprise you right up until the final page.

Format Audio CD

Published May 7, 2024 by Simon & Schuster Audio

ISBN 9781797174686 (ISBN10: 1797174681)

About the Author

Emiko Jean is a New York Times best-selling author of adult and young adult fiction. Her books have been published in over thirty languages. Her work has been featured on Good Morning America as a GMA book club pick, by Reese Witherspoon as a young adult book club pick, and in publications such as: Marie Claire, Entertainment Weekly, Time, Cosmopolitan, Shondaland and Bustle. She lives in Washington with her husband and two kids.

Learn more about the author

My Thoughts

I recently finished listening to The Return of Ellie Black, and honestly, it was just okay. The story had some interesting moments — the premise of a missing girl returning home after missing for years definitely had potential — but it didn’t quite deliver the emotional punch I was hoping for.

The narrator did a decent job overall, and I appreciated the attempt to alternate voices for different characters to enhance the experience, but I found that it could actually be a bit distracting. The pacing felt uneven too; some parts dragged on while others felt rushed, which made it a little hard to stay engaged.

The characters were fine but not especially memorable. I kept waiting for some deeper development or big revelations, but most of it felt pretty surface-level. By the end, I wasn’t totally sure if I even cared what happened next. I appreciated the mystery aspect as Ellie's disappearance and life away from home was slowly revealed piecemeal, but I lacked any real emotional connection to the characters or story.

Five words: mediocre, mysterious, promising, slow-paced, detached

Buy Now:

Visit the publisher for purchase options

My final word: It’s not a bad audiobook — if you need something to pass the time on a commute or while doing chores, it’ll do. But if you're looking for something that really pulls you in and sticks with you afterward, this probably isn't it.

Warnings:

Violence, kidnapping, abuse, murder, rape

My Rating:

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The Cerebral Girl is a middle-aged blogger just digging her way out from under a mountain of books in the deep south of Florida.

REVIEW: The Words That Made Us by Andrea Busfield

 

Synopsis

After fleeing their home in Romania, Mala and her family travel to the South of France to make an offering to Sara e Kali – patron saint of the Roma whose statue rests in a small church in Saintes Maries de la Mer. Once the family’s pilgrimage is complete, they seek refuge among their own to consider their future during a time when anti-Roma sentiment is running high.

As the government begins to expel hundreds of foreign-born ‘gypsies’, a local man arrives at the travellers’ camp eager to learn their history, and it falls to Mala to speak to him.

Beginning in India she recounts the fall of Kanauj and the relocation of tens of thousands of Indians to Ghazna as prisoners of war. Mala then speaks of the Roma’s flowering in Constantinople, before the plague forced them westwards – into 300 years of slavery. After recounting the horrors of the Second World War, Mala ends with her own story – of her life in present-day Romania, and the tragedy that stole the smile from her young daughter’s face.

Five stories covering one thousand years, The Words That Made Us chronicles the mistrust, misunderstandings and monstrous cruelty that has followed a scattered nation whose only crime was that of being different.

Format 371 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 18, 2024

About the Author

The author only humbly and simply states on Goodreads that she's a "journalist and writer". I will add that she's a bit of a nomad who's lived in numerous places, she loves cultural diversity, she's a vegetarian, and a momma to horses, dogs, cats, and literally has the birds eating from her palm. She currently resides in Ireland.

My Thoughts

I have a name though it's unlikely you've heard of it. Instead, you'll recognise and claim to know me through words of your own making such as gitano, ijito, gjupci, sipsiwn, and yiftos. In England - the birthplace of Shakespeare and Dickens - I'm known as gypsy, my people as gypsies. In other places, at other times, there have been other names, most of them stemming from a medieval belief that we were Egyptian. Sometime later, when this was clipped to 'gypcian, we lost not only the truth, but also entitlement to a capital letter - something the rest of the world's nations appear to enjoy.

I was introduced to author Andrea Busfield through her book Born Under a Million Shadows, and thus began my love affair with her. So, this time I decided to explore her lesser-known book The Words That Made Us.

This book is essentially a series of short stories within a story as Mala, a keeper of Roma history, shares their stories with a couple of outsiders referred to as gadje (essentially "peasants" in Romani). 

I am just as familiar with anti-Romani propaganda as the next person. We've been taught that they are all thieves and con artists; they abuse, sexualize and exploit their children, and are unclean. They're "gypsies".

This book has helped to open my eyes to my own bias, to the larger picture explaining why many Romani in America seem to skirt around the fringes of society, and even why those we see in grocery store parking lots pulling things like the violin-playing scam may have to resort to such things just to survive in a world where they have repeatedly been victimized, persecuted, hunted and run out of towns-- for a thousand years. A proud people who are dedicated to their culture, who have had to evolve to adapt to the environments they've found themselves in as they have spread across the globe seeking safety, peace, and a place to call home.

While some Romani still live as outsiders as a nomadic people seeking labor in the housing and metalworks industries, or running violin scams in parking lots and selling flowers at streetlights, others have become well-assimilated into American culture. Here in America, we have had renowned Romani like Rita Hayworth and Tracey Ullman who have succeeded in Hollywood, and others have succeeded in public service and politics. Bill Clinton is even said to have the blood of the Romani running in his veins.

Romani Americans have served as experts on official delegations to meetings and conferences in the U.S. held by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). At an OSCE Supplementary Human Dimension Meeting on Roma issues in November 2013, Nathan Mick, who is Romani American, delivered the U.S. delegation's intervention and participated in working sessions on improving respect for the rights of Romani people. Another American Roma Dr. Ethel Brooks served as a moderator at this same event; she also spoke at the UN Holocaust Commemoration in New York in 2013 in commemora- International Efforts to Promote Roma Rights 79tion of the Romani genocide during World War II. In January 2016, former President Barack Obama named Dr. Ethel Brooks to serve on the Holocaust Memorial Council, making her the only Romani American on the council since President Bill Clinton appointed Ian Hancock in 1997.  (Wikipedia)

All this to say that the Romani are a complicated people, just like the rest of us. They have suffered hardships and persecution, they are proud of their heritage, and they want peace and safety for their children just like everyone else. 

The author takes the reader through the origins of the Romani, a thousand years of distrust, hatred, misunderstanding, enslavement, abuse, and slaughter. But through it all they have persevered and never lost sight of who they are or where they came from. The author does an admirable job of bringing humanity to an oft-reviled people, of portraying them as a prideful people without making them feel cold, of explaining why so many Romani still hold themselves apart from general society, and shares with the reader a history that has helped form who the Romani are today as they have been continually chased out of towns through the generations, or worse.

Five words: Insightful, humane, heartbreaking, determined, inspirational

Buy Now:

Amazon

My final word: Andrea Busfield's The Words That Made Us is a thought-provoking exploration of the power of words and the persecution of the Romani people. Busfield masterfully takes the reader through the historical and cultural impact of bias and bigotry against a race of people who refused to bow to societal expectations and have held fast to their culture and history. Andrea always knows how to stir me, to reach a place that not many can touch. Her writing is well-researched; nothing is ever shallow or without depth. There's always a feeling of reading someone's private diary, being privy to their deepest hopes and fears and suffering. If you want a story within a story, an inspiring journey through history, well-researched and well-crafted, pick up this one! And then afterwards, grab her book Born Under a Million Shadows. You'll thank me and will quickly find yourself a Busfield fan, too!

Warnings:

Cruelty and violence

My Rating:

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The Cerebral Girl is a middle-aged blogger just digging her way out from under a mountain of books in the deep south of Florida.