Book Review: Death of a Tom Turkey (Hayley Powell Food and Cocktails Mystery, #18) by Lee Hollis

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Death of a Tom Turkey (Hayley Powell Food and Cocktails Mystery, #18)  by Lee Hollis  opens with Tom Farley and his neighbors in a snit because he's the last holdout to sell his house to a property developer who wants to build a resort. When Tom is shot at a pre-Thanksgiving community gathering and hospitalized, Hayley Powell puts her amateur sleuthing skills to good use. Thank you to NetGalley and Kensington Publishers for providing me with an Advanced Readers Copy (ARC) of this cozy mystery. I received a copy of this book for free in exchange of my honest opinion and review of the story. I loved the fact that this latest installment of the Hayley Powell Food and Cocktails Mystery  series had a theme around the Thanksgiving holiday and included live turkeys in the plot. It was good to visit some familiar characters. Since this is the eighteenth installment in the series, Lee Hollis didn't go into much detail of the background of those reoccurring characters; however, she...
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Book Review: Neil Patrick Harris, Choose Your Own Autobiography by Neil Patrick Harris

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choose your own adventure
Back in the Fall of 1989, I was a ten year old girl who watched the pilot episode of Doogie Howser, M.D. I fell in love with the television show immediately. When the show went off the air, I was terribly sad about it. Over the years, I wondered if Neil Patrick Harris would ever appear in another television show or even in a movie. Fast forward to the Fall of 2005 . . . I was over at my parent's house after working out at the gym. My parents yelled at me to come into the living room. A new show called How I Met Your Mother was premiering its pilot episode and who else was on it but "Doogie Howser". I rarely was at home when it aired so I never really watched the show, except for reruns, until the last season because I wanted to know the outcome of the show. When it went off the air, I felt like a piece of me was missing. So, when Neil Patrick Harris came out with his autobiography, I was super excited, and I loved the concept that it was a "Choose Your Own Autobiography" based off of the children books "Choose Your Own Adventure", which I never read as a kid but had always wanted to.

Neil Patrick Harris, Choose Your Own Autobiography takes you through Neil Patrick Harris' life starting with his birth. From there, you get to choose whether you have a wonderful childhood or a miserable childhood. Throughout the autobiography, you learn of Harris' acting career, how he struggles with his sexuality, finding love, and having children with his partner.

Being the person I am, I ended up reading the entire book in numerical order . . . I just couldn't bring myself to read the book out of order. Because of this, I got a great surprise. There is one page in the book that you will never come to if you actually do the "Choose Your Own Autobiography", and I thought this was really cool and super clever. Is there nothing that he can't do well? It was exceptionally well written, especially compared to some of the other autobiographies I've read by other actors. (Several people I know disagree with me on this, which is totally fine . . . everyone is entitled to their own opinion.) On top of that, there were some guest authors, mainly other celebrities, who wrote a chapter in his autobiography, so it wasn't a true to form autobiography.
I absolutely loved the insight to his life and all of the encounters he had with other celebrities, including getting into a fight with Scott Caan, actor from Hawaii Five-O and son of James Caan. Another intriguing part of his life was when Harris and his partner decided they wanted biological children and used a surrogate and the hoops they had to jump through to maintain everyone's privacy.
If you enjoy getting a glimpse into celebrities lives, then I definitely recommend Neil Patrick Harris, Choose Your Autobiography.


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