Drama Queen Series

**Updates may become a little more sporadic over the next month. I’m preparing for the ACFW conference in Denver, and so all other writing is getting pushed to the sidelines a bit. I’m going to try to keep updating twice a week, but we’ll see.**

Today I would like to talk about Tracey Bateman’s “Drama Queens Series.” This is a series of three books about three best friends, Tabby, Dancy, and Laini. All written in the first person, each book follows one main character as she goes through job displacement (and replacement ) and romance. The characters grow as their lives change and they’re wonderful reads.

Book one, Catch a Rising Star, is about Tabby, a former soap opera actress who made an enemy of the wrong writer (Think Joey on Friends), but after a several year hiatus manages to get her job back (again, think Joey). She finds herself on set with a “husband” with bad breath, her “twin children” and their rather handsome, widowed, real life father. At the same time she’s fending off the advances of a man that her mother likes, though she doesn’t. It seems like everything keeps coming in between her “children’s” father, not the least of which is his seeming attachment to her archrival. It’s a story of reclaiming what you think you want, and finding out what really matters.

Book two, You Had Me at Goodbye, is a story about Dancy, an editor who very quickly gets fired. While she’s searching for a new job, at least a new one where she won’t get hit on by her new boss, she works as a waitress in a local café and takes the time to work on her writing, something she’s always longed for but has never quite been able to allow herself to do. To make matters worse her family life is in shambles, between her parents’ on-again-off-again relationship and her newly discovered half-brother, she’s about to go crazy, and that doesn’t include the things that her brother’s best friend does to her mental and emotional state (albeit unintentionally). Will she be able to follow her dreams and will her family survive any more stress (a better question, will she?)

The final book is That’s (Not Exactly) Amore, the story of Laini, a former account-turned color-blind interior-design student that makes one mean pastry (actually she makes a lot of them). When she offers to help update a friend’s business she could never have expected that it would lead to attention from two different men, a new roommate with boyfriend issues, and involvement with the mob. When her mother, who has been in a 12-year depression after the death of her father, decides to remarry after only a few weeks, Laini isn’t sure she’d be able to take much more.

These books are all very well written and are great examples of Christian Chick Lit.

I'm Torn

I’ll admit it: I’m a bit torn. I’ve always been a bit of a purist when it comes to books. I love the feel of a hard cover or paperback in my hand. I love to turn the pages and to feel the number of pages at the back getting smaller and the number of pages in the front getting bigger. From the moment I first heard about the Kindle I was opposed. I’m not really much of a fan of the ebook. I understand their uses, and really enjoyed them while I was in college (it’s nice to do research in your pajamas from your bed or couch rather than having to drag yourself up to the stacks), but I’ve never been convinced that they’re the way of the future.

And then last semester I had a professor who was a believer that Amazon is going to be the end of the bookstore as we know it, and most definitely the end of the independent bookstore. She touted that the internet was going to be the downfall of reading (and definitely the downfall of the newspaper) and that everything that Gutenberg worked so hard for hundreds of years ago is going to disappear into antiquity.

I’m not sure I believe it. Part of her belief that the independent bookstore as it exists now is going to disappear is because one of the independent bookstores in Ann Arbor where most professors order their textbooks was going out of business last year. She always failed to acknowledge that Ann Arbor has something like the most independent bookstores per capita of any town in the United States. She also failed to acknowledge that perhaps it was the bookstores business practices (e.g. the fact that they charged 15-20% more for textbooks than Amazon and Barnes and Noble Online) that perhaps could be pushing it out of business.

But I digress…

Even as a college student you can only spend so much time staring at a computer screen before you want to go blind, so I was hesitant to trust that the Kindle would be any better, and reading is supposed to be about pleasure (regardless of what English teachers try to torture us with) and having to stop reading because of eye strain would be too disappointing a situation to consider.

But then last Sunday I sat beside a woman with a Kindle on an airplane. She really seemed to like it and it was different than I expected it to be. It was much thinner than I expected, and I’ll admit, I was fascinated. I didn’t take the time to borrow it from her, even though she offered, but I did ask her some questions about it. She said that she too loves the feel of having a book in her hand, but that there are certain benefits that come with the Kindle.

According to the website the Kindle can hold 1,500 books, and the books are cheaper than their paper companions, with hard-covers and paperbacks coming in at around $10 a piece and mass market books coming in between $4 and 6. Magazines are also pretty inexpensive. There are places where you can find classics and more unpopular titles for free.

So I’m torn. Free books. Cheaper books. There’s a lot of potential there. And having thousands of books at your fingertips on a long plane ride, or on a trip, would be great. I have a tendency to either over pack or to under pack, so it would be nice not to have to worry about that. And there are ways to add notes to the books that you read, like margin notes, which is perfect for a former English major such as myself. I’m constantly reading things that I want to mark up, to take notice of, and it would be nice to be able to do that without totally defacing the books.

So I’m torn. Well, not that torn. I’m pretty broke, so I’m not about to go and spend the $300 necessary to purchase one. But Christmas is coming… as is my birthday… so, we’ll see.