Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival

I'd like to welcome everyone to Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival.  We are a group of Catholic bloggers who gather weekly to share our best posts with each other.  To particpate, go to your blog and create an entry titled Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival.  In it, highlight one or more of your posts from the past week that you believe would be of interest to Catholic bloggers---whether they are posts reflecting on spiritual matters or posts about antics of Catholic kids, or anything in between.  Come back here and enter the URL of that post into Mr. Linky.  Finally, go visit other participants, and leave comments!  If you want a weekly reminder to post, join our yahoogroup.

No particularly Catholic posts this week.  I reviewed one book I highly recommend: The Goodbye Quilt.  I also reviewed The Lightkeeper's Ball (Christian romance), Lilly's Wedding Quilt (Amish Romance), Moonlight Cove (mass market romance, pretty clean) and Malled (memoir about working in retail sales).  I also wrote a post about writing negative book reviews.  Those of you who read book reviews, do  you like to see bloggers write negative reviews, or do you think we should just pass on writing about books we don't like?

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Review: Malled

Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail

About the Book:

After losing her job as a journalist and the security of a good salary, Caitlin Kelly was hard up for cash. When she saw that The North Face-an upscale outdoor clothing company-was hiring at her local mall, she went for an interview almost on a whim. 

Suddenly she found herself, middle-aged and mid-career, thrown headfirst into the bizarre alternate reality of the American mall: a world of low-wage workers selling overpriced goods to well-to-do customers. At first, Kelly found her part-time job fun and reaffirming, a way to maintain her sanity and sense of self-worth. But she describes how the unexpected physical pressures, the unreasonable dictates of a remote corporate bureaucracy, and the dead-end career path eventually took their toll. As she struggled through more than two years at the mall, despite surgeries, customer abuse, and corporate inanity, Kelly gained a deeper understanding of the plight of the retail worker. 

In the tradition of Nickel and Dimed, Malled challenges our assumptions about the world of retail, documenting one woman's struggle to find meaningful work in a broken system.

My Comments:

I'm lucky, I guess.  I've never worked in retail, though my husband has--he spent many years working in a small specialty shop of the type Caitlin Kelly admires, and while like most jobs it had it's good point and bad points, the fact of the matter is, he isn't there any more.  Kelly's basic thesis is that retail salespeople in the average mall shop are overworked, underpaid, over-managed and abused by customers so that the company for which they work, can make profits--and if the company does make a profit during a recession, that has to be bad, right?  

After being laid off from her prestigious (and I assume well-paid) journalism job in New York, Kelly took a part-time retail sales job to help her hone her sales skills (so that she could better sell her freelance work) and to cover difference in her budget between what her freelance work brought in and what she was spending.  She worked one or two days a week at slightly more than minimum wage with no commission or benefits.  

I found the beginning of the book to be interesting.  I enjoyed watching Kelly train for this job and learn to do it.  I've never given much thought to what goes on in the back room of a retail store and it was interesting to hear her tell us "the rest of the story".  However, by the time I got halfway through the book I was getting tired of it.  She had the same complaints over and over again--that the help was underpaid, the work environment uncomfortable and the customers could be rude.  She didn't like the way the pay structure and other parts of the job basically showed that the company considered the sales associates to be replaceable employees, and counted on them not being there long-term.  However, when she was asked about taking a job at a store catering to the well-to-do, a store that would have paid her a commission on her sales, she stated that she didn't want to wait on princesses--yet she was a princess herself--even though cleaning the bathroom was a regular duty of people in her position, she refused to do so.   She complained over and over again about how much money the company made, and how little she and her co-workers did and how little those who made the clothing made.  By the time the book was over, I was just plain tired of listening to her complain.  The reality is that if her company was making money (the goal of any business) then they were doing better than those retailers who went bankrupt that year.  

I'm not doubting anything she said about her work environment, her co-workers, the management style or anything else about the job--what I doubt is that it was all that horrible.  She had a part-time job that didn't require her to work in extreme temperatures, that was relatively low on the danger scale, and that, from everything I've heard, could be very flexible to work around other things in her life.  It is a job that does not have many formal educational requirements.  In short, it is a job almost anyone can perform at some level.  I have to wonder how much more Kelly would  be willing to pay for her clothes in order to give raises to all those people she thinks should be paid more?  

I'd like to thank the publisher for making a review copy available via NetGalley.  Grade:  C

Writing Negative Reviews

Photo compliments of KristyKay, some rights reserved.

Anyone who has been writing a book blog for any amount of time has had to consider whether or not she should write a negative review of a book.  It isn't necessarily a matter of choosing to lie, or not, but rather, a matter of choosing whether to bother reading enough of a book one is not enjoying so as to be able to write a review, or a matter of choosing to spend time writing about a book one did not enjoy.  I recently wrote a negative review of Inconceivable (click to read) and the author emailed me and asked why I didn't just DNF it and move on--in other words, why did I go to the effort of writing a bad review, particularly when my review policy (you can see the link at the top of the page) says that if I dislike a product I may just run promotional material in lieu of a review.  When I finish this post, the next one to be written will be a review that is at least somewhat negative.  Why am I bothering?  There are plenty of books I've chosen not to review since instituting this policy (I used to read everything sent to me for review, and then after plowing through the horrible books, write critical reviews, but I decided I wasn't going to do that anymore); why these?

For me, part of the answer is the "persona" if you will that I've tried to project as my on-line image.  I am a Catholic, a mom, middle aged, conservative and a bookworm.  I try to reflect those elements in my writing, even if, as usual, I'm not writing about subjects directly related to those qualities.  While I review books for a couple of Catholic bookstores, the fact that I'm a Catholic affects the way I look at most books.  If I am unhappy with the way an author (whether writing a religious book or not) portrays Catholicism, I'm going to write about it.  If I read non-fiction and disagree with the author's conclusions, you'll read my opinion here.  If I enjoy the book and hate the end,  you'll know it.  If I think I have some prejudice that is coloring my vision, I try to mention it, but hey, this is my blog, and if you are reading it, you want to know what someone like me thinks, right?

Part of the answer has to do with how much of the book I read, and why I quit.  If I read most or all of the book, I'm much more likely to write a review than if I gave it fifty pages before giving up.  If I recognized that it was just one of those books that wasn't for me, but will probably have readers that enjoy it, I'll likely just move on.  If it is a book garnering a lot of positive reviews, and I have specific reasons for disliking it, you are a lot more likely to see a negative review from me than than you would be if it is a little-known tome that just doesn't grab me.  I guess I think my readers are like me; and while something initially attracted me to the negatively reviewed book, ultimately I decided I didn't like it, and I'd like my readers to understand why.   If someone sends me a review book and specifically asks for a review, whether good or bad, I'll write the negative review.  

What about you?   Do you ever write negative reviews?  If so, why do you choose to write a negative review rather than just moving on?

Moonlight Cove: My Review

Moonlight Cove (Chesapeake Shores)

About the Book:

Jess O’Brien has overcome a lot — the challenges of attention deficit disorder, the near bankruptcy of her beloved Inn at Eagle Point and her self-perception as a screwup in a family of overachievers. Now she’s ready to share the future with a man. Her friends persuade her to join a dating service — but she gets no takers! Which is fine with her childhood friend, psychologist Will Lincoln, who’s already chosen the perfect man for Jess: himself. Will has loved Jess practically forever. He knows her faults and her strengths. But for all Will’s sincerity and charm, Jess fears he views her as some psychological case study. With her family and the town of Chesapeake Shores behind him, Will finally makes his case. But is it enough to convince Jess to take the risk of a lifetime?

My Comments:

The guy next door, the one who has always been there, but has never been seen in "that" light; the girl who, for a variety of reasons, isn't sure she is lovable--or that she would want to be loved by anyone who would love her; can they make it work?  While Jess and Will are the main couple in this book, they share time with two other couples, one of which, like them, consists of folks who have known and cared for each other for a long time, but who have never made the move to coupledom. 

This is a sweet story, pretty typical of those Sherryl Woods writes.  The characters all have some connection to the O'Brien clan of whom Woods has written in other books, and given the unresolved nature of two of the relationships in this book, I suspect we'll see more of them.  

It is mass-market romance, and as such, no one waits until marriage to hop into bed--though Will makes it clear that intimacy is more to him than scratching an itch, that going to bed with him means she won't get rid of him.  However, they pretty much leave us outside the door when they head to bed.  

I'd like to thank the publisher for making a review copy available to me via NetGalley.  Grade:  B