TLC: Moonface by Angela Balcita

About Moonface

Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial; Original edition (February 1, 2011)

“Angela Balcita’s love story takes a couple of artsy wanderers off the road and into the bright, scary world of transplants, dialysis, and neonatal intensive care.” —Marion Winik, author of The Glen Rock Book of the Dead

From the pages of the New York Times’ Modern Love column comes one woman’s moving and uproarious story of how love and laughter rescued her from life-threatening illness. Angela Balcita’s cathartic memoir of finding love while wrestling with kidney failure will strike a chord with anyone yearning for a poignant, true-to-life romance…with a real fairy tale ending.
About Angela Balcita

Angela Balcita received an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. She is an editor at Imagine magazine, a publication of Johns Hopkins University. Her writing has been included in journals such as The Iowa Review and Utne Reader and named a notable entry in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, edited by Dave Eggers. She lives in Baltimore.

Angela’s Tour Stops (Please be sure to visit these other bloggers to see what they have to say about this book as well)

Tuesday, February 1st: Books Like Breathing

Wednesday, February 2nd: My Own Little Corner of the World

Thursday, February 3rd: Take Me Away

Wednesday, February 9th: Reviews from the Heart

Thursday, February 10th: Rundpinne

Friday, February 11th: Debbie’s Book Bag

Tuesday, February 15th: Reading Through Life

Wednesday, February 16th: I’m Booking It

Monday, February 21st: BookNAround

Tuesday, February 22nd: Clever Girl Goes Blog

Wednesday, February 23rd: Life In Review

Thursday, February 24th: The Book Chick

I'm not a super large fan of memoirs. However, when Trish from TLC Book Tours asked me if I'd be interested in reviewing this book, I couldn't pass it up! 

Our author, Angela, bares her life and soul in this book. She shares her struggles of dealing with a serious kidney disease (glomerulonephritis) and the treatments and transplants required to keep her alive. She deals with all of these serious issues as if they were "no big deal". She uses a lot of humor (I laughed, I cried, I laughed until I cried) to keep her life so positive. The reader will see a different side of her towards the end though, so I don't want to mislead and have you thinking the entire book is positive. We are all human and I'm glad that the author chose to show this side of herself and her journey as well. Towards the middle of the book I was feeling that the story was a bit unrealistic, although enjoyable, until a tide of events changed her life and we see the other side. 

This is a great book to curl up with and read on a rainy day (or any day!) It's a super quick read as well. This one is going to school with me so my students can take turns reading it! :) Overall, it's a 4 out of 5 stars. You might want to know that there is some strong language in this book.


Many thanks to Trish and TLC Book Tours for allowing me the opportunity to read and review this book! 

A-Z Wednesday Featuring the Fantastic Letter "F"

Welcome to A-Z Wednesday!!
To join, here's all you have to do:
Go to your stack of books and find one whose title starts with the letter of the week.
Post:
1~ a photo of the book
2~ title and synopsis
3~ link(amazon, barnes and noble etc.)
4~ Come back here and leave your link in the comments
If you've already reviewed this book you can add it also.
Be sure to visit other participants to see what book they have posted and leave them a comment.
(We all love comments, don't we?)
Who knows? You may find your next "favorite" book.
THIS WEEKS LETTER IS: F

Final Exam by Pauline W. Chen

The following is posted from RandomHouse

ABOUT THIS BOOK

A brilliant young transplant surgeon brings moral intensity and narrative drama to the most powerful and vexing questions of medicine and the human condition.

When Pauline Chen began medical school twenty years ago, she dreamed of saving lives. What she did not count on was how much death would be a part of her work. Almost immediately, Chen found herself wrestling with medicine’s most profound paradox, that a profession premised on caring for the ill also systematically depersonalizes dying. Final Exam follows Chen over the course of her education, training, and practice as she grapples at strikingly close range with the problem of mortality, and struggles to reconcile the lessons of her training with her innate knowledge of shared humanity, and to separate her ideas about healing from her fierce desire to cure.

From her first dissection of a cadaver in gross anatomy to the moment she first puts a scalpel to a living person; from the first time she witnesses someone flatlining in the emergency room to the first time she pronounces a patient dead, Chen is struck by her own mortal fears: there was a dying friend she could not call; a young patient’s tortured death she could not forget; even the sense of shared kinship with a corpse she could not cast aside when asked to saw its pelvis in two. Gradually, as she confronts the ways in which her fears have incapacitated her, she begins to reject what she has been taught about suppressing her feelings for her patients, and she begins to carve out a new role for herself as a physician and as human being. Chen’s transfixing and beautiful rumination on how doctors negotiate the ineluctable fact of death becomes, in the end, a brilliant questioning of how we should live.

Moving and provocative, motored equally by clinical expertise and extraordinary personal grace, this is a piercing and compassionate journey into the heart of a world that is hidden and yet touches all of our lives. A superb addition to the best medical literature of our time.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (January 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 030727537X
• ISBN-13: 978-0307275370
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces

This one is on my TBR list, as well as a required reading for HOSA (Healthcare Occupations Students of America) competition which will be held in March, 2010.

The Apothecary's Daughter by Julie Klassen

The Apothecary's Daughter by Julie Klassen

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This has to be one of my most favorite books of all time! This was my first read by Julie Klassen and certainly won't be my last!

***I have amended this review based on the advice of a fellow reading friend***

This story is about Miss Lillian Haswell, the daughter of Charles Haswell, the town apothecary. From a young age, Miss Haswell learns how to concoct the potions for her father from their physic garden they grow. They are toted as being "miracle workers" for their prescriptions and mastery of the medicinal herbs they prescribe.

I really enjoy how the author quotes various remedies or sayings from some rather ancient apothecaries and their writings. This appealed to me, I'm sure, because of my nursing background.

I also thoroughly loved the descriptions of high life in London during this time period. The descriptions of the frocks made me want to jump into the book and be Lillian for a while.

I also enjoyed the love interests that popped up for various characters throughout this book. I am one to try to guess the ending, but I wouldn't have guessed it to end the way it did. Was the right choice made? I think so!

There are many twists and turns in this book that tempt the reader to continue turning pages no matter what 'real life' is presenting at the moment. This is definitely a book that will stay on my book shelves!!!


View all my reviews.