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: Love Story, Take Three by Gloria D. Miklowitz

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When I was a kid, there was a book club subscription service called Especially For Girls. My mom signed me up for it when I began to become an avid reader. One of the books I received was Love Story, Take Three by Gloria D. Miklowitz. For whatever reason, it ended up on a shelf in my mom's shoe closet without me reading it. Several years later, she was cleaning out the closet and came across the book and gave it back to me. I remember reading it in high school and falling in love with it. As part of my rereading my way through my childhood, I decided to read it again to see if it stood the test of time.

Love Story, Take Three by Gloria D. Miklowitz is about a teenage actress named Valerie who wants nothing more than to have a normal life like her classmates. When she starts dating basketball player Tom Gordon, Valerie lies about being an actress, which becomes harder to hide when she lands a lead role on a new television show.

One of the things I enjoyed about the book as a kid and as an adult is that it's about acting. I grew up in the industry, which is one of the reasons the topic of the book was so interesting to me. What I disliked about the book is that it may give people the wrong idea about the entertainment industry when it comes to agents, parents, actors, and other people involved in the industry. Not everyone in the industry acts like these characters. It is simply just one person's perception of it.

A couple of things that I found interesting is that the television show that Valerie auditioned for was to be about teens falling in love and their everyday life at Beverly Hills High School. The book was published in 1986. Was it just a coincidence that the television show in Love Story, Take Three bares some similarity to the television show Beverly Hills, 90210 that premiered in 1990?  This was oddly eerie to me. The other thing I found interesting was there is another book published with a character named "Tom Gordon" . . . that book is Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I know this last thing is completely coincidental, but it is still an interesting tidbit.
As a kid, I would have given Love Story, Take Three by Gloria D. Miklowitz 5 stars out of 5 stars. However, as an adult, I'd give it 3.5 stars out of 5 stars.

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