Review: Facing the Music and Living to Talk About It

Facing the Music and Living to Talk About It by Nick Carter
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

[DISCLAIMER: I won a copy of this book on the Goodreads Giveaways]

I turned 30 this year. It was hard to admit, harder to deal with, and I still don't feel like I'm in my 30's. But one thing I promised myself was, I am not going to spend any more time reading books I don't like, just because I have this masochistic tendency to finish every freaking book I start.

Unfortunately, Facing the Music and Living to Talk About It is one of those books that's going to have to be put down and never picked up again. I wanted to get at least 25% of the way through before I let go, just to give it a fair shot. But that 25% was brutal. This is a disorganized, rambling piece of self-help, and it did not do a darn thing for me. What bothered me even more than the "If I can do it, so can you!" reiteration was that he kept saying things like, "I wish I'd written this book sooner so I could have given it to my sister and maybe she wouldn't have died." I know that he didn't mean it to come across as arrogant, but my goodness did this scream "Her death was all my fault even though it wasn't!" I feel for you Nick, I really do, and I wish your sister had gotten better too, but this book was not going to save her life.

I have always had a huge soft spot for Nick Carter. BSB were my boys. Okay not really. But I always loved them, especially Nick. Nick, you are not a writer. You should keep singing, because as you said in your "strengths" chapter, that's what you do best. I love you! Really! I promise!

As a sidenote: When I entered to win this book in the giveaway, there was next to nothing about it being a self-help book. This book, as I remember it, was marketed as an autobiography with bits of advice for people on how to get through the tough times. As you can clearly see, I'm not the only one who had this impression from the description provided back in September. Now, I don't know if the publisher or Goodreads have changed the description several times since then, but I can tell you that what's up there now ("This book is Nick Carter’s autobiography and self-help hybrid in which he chronicles his struggles with a dysfunctional family and the unimaginable rigors of becoming an internationally successful pop-star at the age of 12.") was not up there when I entered the giveaway. If it had actually been autobiography instead of self-help with a few anecdotes about his childhood and time with BSB, I might have liked this. A suggestion to Goodreads, then: Add a time/date-stamp for edits because it's misleading to put up one description and then change it later with no proof of the old description.

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Review: Hooray For Me

Hooray For Me: A Foggy Memoir by Ello Black
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

[DISCLAIMER: I RECEIVED A COPY OF THIS FROM THE GOODREADS GIVEAWAYS IN EXCHANGE FOR AN HONEST REVIEW]

I *really* wanted to enjoy this book, because it sounded so funny and interesting. Unfortunately, it just didn't live up to expectations. I read the little introduction, explaining that the spelling and grammar wasn't going to be standard because it's just the way she writes, which is fine, but I couldn't really get past it.

This book is a series of vignettes about Ello Black's life. It was too short to have any depth to it, and none of the stories related to each other except for the fact that they all had at least something to do with her dad (some more than others). Yes it was funny, and yes the stories were biographical, but at some point there needs to be cohesion and that cohesion just never came.

It was also difficult to read because of the voice. It was as if she was speaking the book to me instead of writing it, but that's not really how I enjoy to read. Dialect is one thing, but there should have at least been some proofreading done to make it grammatically correct. I know that she said in the intro that she isn't grammatically correct and that's just the way it is, but there's only so much of it that I can take before I start getting out my red pen.

I wish this had been more of a cohesive story and less of separate essays on various parts of her life that, frankly, weren't all that extraordinary in the first place. The chapter on her father's death was certainly heartbreaking and the chapter in which she recounts being bullied struck a chord with me. But the rest felt like filler.

Ello, you seem like a cool person and I hope you keep on being your bad self. And thanks for the book. It just didn't do it for me.

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