The Book: The Doctor and the Diva, by Adrienne McDonnell

The Story: Sometimes I avoid certain historical fiction only because I feel like it tells the same story over and over.  This story, I have to say, was totally unique and unlike anything I had read before.

It is the early 1900’s and Erika (an opera singer looking to further her career) and her husband Peter have been trying to conceive since they got married.  A child really is all that Peter wants.  Erika is on-board, but as the story progresses, you  kind of start to see that she’d just as soon have a big opera career before she has a baby.

On a tip from Erika’s brother, they start to visit a fertility doctor, Dr. Ravell.  He’s had success helping couples get pregnant when they thought for sure that they could not.  He was practicing several cutting edge techniques, including invetro fertilization.  Who know that that that existed in the early 1900’s?  As the treatments progress,  Dr. Ravell discovers that Peter will never be able to have children but has found this out on the sly and doesn’t have the guts to tell the couple.  Here’s where he’s faced with a series of tough decisions.

All three of these characters, in fact, are faced with tough decisions.  They are these complicated people who are all just trying to do what is right, even when those things seem to counteract each other at every turn.

What I Thought: I kind of thought that this book was amazing.  I know that you guys know this about me, but nothing makes a book for me like good character development, and that was just incredible here.  Erika kind of goes from this meek, annoying starlet wanna-be to this real woman with real emotions going through a seriously tough situation.  I couldn’t help but put myself in her place.  The decision to have children and put aside all these dreams that you had for your life had to have been so hard and the author fleshes all that out perfectly.  Her struggles, her talent, her needs, they are all just laid out there and the reader is left to make the decision: is she seriously selfish or is she just doing what she thinks is right?

Same with Peter.  At first, he just seems like this controlling, obsessed husband, but as the book goes on you start to see his real heart: he is genuinely madly in love with his wife and just wants a family with her.  He makes some decisions that made me cringe, but even then, was he just doing what was right by his family?

For me, though, the most interesting character was Dr Ravell.  The author somehow takes this creeper of a doctor and turns him into a character that you just want to hug.  His skill at his job combined with his pure old loneliness made for a pretty bad combination for him as far as life decisions go.  Women were falling over themselves for him and he was lonely…. the choices he made may not have been the “right” ones, but the author made his loneliness so palpable that his sleeping with these random women seem alright and even good.  Watching him change and fight these deep battles within himself was probably my favorite part of this book.

Historical fiction is a totally tricky genre I think.  It can get so cheesy so fast.  From the author’s notes at the beginning and the end of the book, she put some serious research into these characters, even basing Erika on someone in her family tree.  As far as I can tell, this is her first novel and I have to say, I was totally impressed.  I’ll keep an eye on her and not hesitate for a minute to read her next novel.

Conclusion: I would recommend this without reservation to anyone except people that are currently struggling with infertility or have recently experienced a miscarriage.  I don’t want to spoil anything, but there are some pretty graphic scenes here and they made the pregnant lady in me cringe and cry a little bit.  Other than that, seriously good stuff.  Check it out.

The Book: Eye Contact, by Cammie McGovern

The Story: In a small patch of woods outside of an elementary school, a young girl is murdered.  The only witness to the murder is Adam, a nine-year-old autistic boy.  Even on a good day, he is almost completely non-verbal, but after this, he totally shuts down.

His mom, Cara, has always been drawn to people who are broken or need fixed.  She has worked endlessly with Adam and can read his non-verbal clues like a book.  She has his mannerisms and routine down to a science.  Using this knowledge, she starts investigating why Adam (a rule follower to the max) would have been in the woods, and what could have caused the responses that he had.  This investigation takes her back to her past to her relationship with Adam’s father and her best friend at the time.  This untying of the past actually becomes pretty important as the book goes on.

There’s a lot of other stuff going on here: police officers with other motives, a middle-school boy who casts himself as a junior detective, over-bearing parents, and a lot of issues about dealing with special needs within the education system.

This book starts off strong, builds up the pressure, then offers twists everywhere until you can’t see which way is up.  I’m not going to ruin this for you, but the ending is wiiiild.

What I Thought: A lot of times, after I read a book, I’ll go to goodreads.com and read a few reviews just to see what other people think.  One of the reviewers said that this book seemed like a cross between I Promise Not to Tell and The Curious Incident of the Dog at Midnight. I think that is an incredibly fair assessment.  If you end up reading this and liking it, pick up these other two.  Peas in a pod.

I thought that the first part of this book was totally intriguing.  The mystery was part of that, of course, but really the family at the center was the biggest intrigue.  Would Adam come out of his box to tell who did this, would Cara be able to figure it out or get Adam to talk?  How would the police and the school administration treat this gentle kid involved in a really horrid killing?  All these questions are what kept me reading late into the night one night.

I have to admit to a little bit of disappointment in where this ended up going.  I felt like there were way to many characters introduced to be supported by a little 250 page book.  The ex-boyfriend, his crazy mom, the ex-best friend, her brother,  the middle school boy, his mom, his friends, the special ed teacher, the middle school bullies…. I could go on and on and on.  These characters all had interesting stories, but it was all just a little too much.  The author didn’t give me time to truly get involved in these characters so they just seemed kind of trivial.

To be fair, the twists at the end were pretty much crazy and at several different times I thought I had it figured out, only to be totally blown away with just how wrong I’d been.  I like a mystery that does that.  So, there ya go.

Conclusion: If you like a quick little mystery between heavier books, try this one out.  Probably a book that I’ll forget about in the next couple of months, but it was a good distraction for a couple of days. Like I said earlier, I think if you liked Curious Incident of the Dog at Midnight, that you will probably get into this one too.  It’s worth a shot.

The Book: A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick

The Story: It’s early-ish 1900’s and Ralph Truitt puts an ad in the paper looking for a reliable wife.  He gets a lot of answers, but one of them really strikes him.  Through letters and pictures, he and Catherine Land decide to get married.  We meet both of them while Catherine is traveling to meet Ralph for the first time.

It doesn’t take very long to realize that Catherine has something a little bit more sinister on her mind than marriage.  We also learn that she has a past that, for some reason, she is going to extreme measures to hide.

When Ralph is severely injured on their journey home, things kind of go askew.  Instead of getting to know her future husband, Catherine is put in charge of nursing him back to health.  As he recovers, they do have a chance to get to know each other and they both realize that this is not really what they were expecting.

Ralph’s first wife had died 20 years ago and around the same time, his young son ran away from home.  Before he will agree to marry Catherine, he puts her in charge of bringing his son back to him.  This starts a twisty, crazy plot that I’m not going to ruin for you!

What I Thought: I don’t really know how to rate this one.  It was alright.  I thought that the story had some real drive and from the first few pages I was intrigued.  The first few mentions of poison and murder that Catherine made got me all excited.  The copy that I got of this book didn’t have a plot outline on the back, just some blurbs.  I had no idea that this was going to be a dark book, I thought it was just going to be about these two people meeting and loving or hating each other or whatever.  Murder is much more exciting, right? Right.

But something went wrong in the execution.  I think that what killed it for me was the excessive focus on sex.  It seemed like every single character was totally obsessed.  At first, I thought it was just Ralph and that it was a serious character flaw, then I realized that it was the author.  Meh.  I don’t mind a couple steamy sex scenes, but these just got out of hand. It just ended up being totally repetitious and boring.

The same can be said for the story, I guess.  The first twist I was pretty surprised, but then the whole book started repeating itself over and over.  Eventually I was just skimming along and kinda rolling my eyes.

I think that what was missing was heart.  There were all these different relationships and back stories and issues that could get super, super emotional.  I didn’t feel an emotion after about the first 10 pages.  Nothing.  There was nothing here that was stirring and there really should have been.  The story itself had some intrigue and merit, but the lack of any connection to characters or plot or anything solid just really diminished all of the positives.

Conclusion: If you’re a screenwriter, a producer, whatever- read this book and make it into a movie.  I think that this could be one of those rare circumstances where the movie would be better than the book.  There’s a lot to work with here, but just not really done well.  I wouldn’t recommend reading this, but if the movie comes out, I’ll make plans to see it!

The Book: The Preservationist, by David Maine

The Story: You know this one, I’m sure.  Noah builds a boat.  Noah gets the animals in two-by-two.  Big flood comes and washes everything away.  Noah & his family are the only survivors. They re-populate the Earth. There ya go.

This book bounces from perspective to perspective:  Noah, his wife, his sons, and his daughters-in-law and we get to experience the flood in all these different lights.  We get to see them argue and bicker and help each other out and work their butts off.  What you get, in the end, is a more complete look at what it may have looked like to live for months in cramped quarters with thousands of animals and your family members while this giant historical event is happening right outside your window.

What I Thought: I haven’t read too many re-tellings of Biblical stories just because I generally get annoyed at the agenda that Christian Fiction tries to push.  I did read Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve and really loved it.  I loved the new, fresh perspective, the humor, and the way he relied on the Bible but also added his own bit of humanity to the story.

I can say the exact same thing for this book.  I cannot tell you how impressed I was.  David Maine didn’t take off on this “God faked us out, Noah is a crazy dude” tangent, nor did he get all pompous and preachy.  The tone that he struck was pretty much perfect for the events that were happening and it just made these characters seem very real.

This could have been written as this long, dense, heavy book but it’s really not.  It was super short- maybe 250 pages or so- and I finished it in just a few hours of reading.  It was light and easy to read.  I would almost recommend it as bedtime reading to my friends who have middle-school age kids, but there’s far too much “rutting” going on here for that.  Meh. Oh well. I’ll recommend to the parents instead.

Conclusion: Give this one a go.  It’s a quick little read that kind of fleshes out a story that everyone has heard but maybe not put a lot of thought into.  I guarantee that it will make you laugh a little and reconsider how these events actually took place.  Fun, fun.

The Book: One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd, by Jim Fergus

The Story: I guess that when the government was trying to “figure it all out” with the Native Americans, they had a big get together where they were discussing what could be done to foster peace between the two groups.  One of the Cherokee Indian groups said that in their culture, whatever tribe the mother is a part of is the tribe that the children belongs to.  They suggested that, in exchange for a thousand horses, that the government get together one thousand women to be the Indians’ wives and their children would be this generation that would make peace between the groups possible.  In reality, the government was totally appalled and ended the peace talks.  Jim Fergus took this little piece of info and played a little game of “what if?”… what if the government would have rounded up one thousand women and handed them over to the Indian tribe?  That is the basis of this book.

The book centers around the life of May Dodd, a woman who was in a mental institute for “promiscuity” because she lived with and had children with a man that she was not married to.  Instead of living the rest of her life in this horrible institute, she decided to take this get-out-of-the-mental-institute-free card and become an Indian’s wife.  Eek.  This is written like her journal of that time period, also including letter that she wrote back home.

What I Thought: I’ve been noticing more and more books that don’t have a plot outline or anything on the back of them, just little blurbs.   I got two books at the used bookstore this past week and both of them just have blurbs on the back. That’s all this one has too. I probably never would have bought this book had there bee an outline on the back, so I guess that it worked out well for them this time around. I have never really been into stories about Native Americans. I have no idea why.  Even in elementary school, when we had to read books about Native Americans, I would get annoyed.  I think it’s a fascinating subject and don’t mind non-fiction about it, but for some reason fiction books about Native Americans get on my nerves.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t like this book, but I’m pretty sure that it had nothing to do with it being about Native Americans. In fact, I kind of thought that the little tidbits of fact that were offered up were interesting and that the Indian characters were the best in the book.

I just hated Mary Dodd.  She was the main character and she was totally unlikeable.  She was full of herself and unwilling to bend or change and just kind of annoying.  She lacks any kind of emotional depth.  The other American women who were with her were just straight up cliches and even the ones that I ‘liked’ kind of made me roll my eyes.

I also hated her journal.  I don’t mind this “style” of writing- in letters and journals- if it is done well.  This wasn’t done well.  The voice was absolutely nothing like you would expect from a woman in the 1870’s (while pregnant, she describes herself as ‘as big as a house’…. really?!) and it was beyond obvious that it was written by a man.  The only time this works is when it is convincing, and this was not. I do want to add that the ‘big as a house’ bit wasn’t the only anachronism, just the one that came to mind first.  This bad boy was chock full of them.  If you want to read a well done version of the historical-fiction-as-journal, check out Impatient with Desire.  That book has everything this book was missing.

I guess I’m coming down pretty hard on ol’ Jim Fergus, huh?   To his benefit, the story was fast paced and compelling.  It had an easy flow and it was broken up into ‘notebooks’ and into the individual journal entries so that really kept it moving a long.  I found myself skimming towards the middle, but at the end it really does pick up and the story starts to pack a lot of steam.  I think that had I cared what ultimately happened to May Dodd, I would have been at the edge of my seat.

Conclusion: Like I said earlier, if you want to read what this should have been, check out Impatient with Desire.  So good. This one? Meh. I feel perfectly comfortable telling you to skip it.

The Book: The Running Man, by Richard Bachman/Stephen King

The Story: The year is 2025 and everything is kind of in shambles.  Ben Richards’ young daughter has come down with the flu and because they can’t afford to take her to the doctor, it is just getting worse and worse.  America is pretty much obsessed with reality TV that is taken up a notch- people can get severely hurt or die, but also have the chance to win money for their families at a time when jobs and money are scarce.  Ben decides that this is the way to go for his family so he goes and applies to be part of the Games.

The Game he is chosen for is called Running Man.  It is the most popular show and has the highest payout, however no one has ever survived.  The object is this:  the player is let loose in America. He gets a 12 hour head start, then he is fair game.  There are a group of men looking for him and Americans are encouraged to call in any spotting of the player.  Any confirmed spotting wins 100 dollars and any spotting that leads to a kill is worth 1,000.  The player wins 100 dollars an hour that he stays alive and if he makes it 30 days, he gets a billion dollars.  He can go anywhere in the world but has to send in two tapes every day that the Network can show on TV and can potentially give out clues to where the player is.

Ben is just this cocky, kinda smart guy and he goes into this with his goal being to get enough money for his wife and daughter to be comfortable and for his daughter to be able to go to the hospital.  He is given advice early on not to just hole up, but to run, run, run.  This is advice that he takes to heart and makes the suspense and adventure happening here totally crazy.

What I Thought: I don’t know what took me so long to read this.  I have this book that has four of Stephen King’s stories that were originally published as Richard Bachman.  The other stories I’ve read a handful of times, but I’d always just avoided Running Man.  In an attempt to clear out my basket of books I haven’t read, I decided to read this one last night. I’m glad I finally gave it a go.

What I’ve always thought was funny about The Long Walk and what I thought was funny about this one too is how ahead-of-his-time Stephen King was on calling the rise of reality TV.  Shows like Survivor and Biggest Loser and all that stuff didn’t exist at all when these stories were written, but Stephen King seemed to know that they were coming.  Weird.

Anyway, I thought that this was just alright.  Not Stephen King’s finest hour, and not his worst.  Just somewhere in the middle.  I remember reading that he wrote this full story in 72 hours though.  That in and of itself is pretty impressive.

The part I liked the most was just the bleak look at the future that was presented.  It’s funny, as we’re getting closer to 2025 to see how far off he was about some things (flying cars?  Probably  not going to happen in the next 15 years) and how close he was on others (severe, horrible pollution).  I also really got into Ben Richards’ character and although I felt like everything was stacked against him, I wanted him so badly to beat the system.  All of the stuff I liked a lot was in the first half.

The second half, for me, was where everything got kind of messy and sub-par.  It turned into a full tilt action movie pretty much and I just wasn’t impressed.  It wasn’t awful, but it just didn’t pack a punch like the first half did.  After a few pages of car chases and shooting and yadda yadda, I found myself zoning out… and then it went on for 50 more pages.  I wasn’t impressed.  I did like how it ended and thought that it was fitting, but getting there was just kind of shaky.

Conclusion: Here is really what I wanted to say my whole review: If you liked The Hunger Games, check this out.  It’s only a couple hundred pages and I know you can fit it in before Mockingjay comes out in August.  It’s such a similar story and setting that it is kind of shocking.  It is just the more “grown up” version.

The Book: The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Story: The story begins with young newlyweds Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli who have just immigrated from India starting a new life in America.  They set up house in a suburb of Boston and go to school and just begin to get acclimated to American culture.  They are not married long when they have their first son, Gogol.  They name him after a Russian author that Ashoke admires while waiting for his “real” name to be sent from family in India.  The name never arrives and the boy is Gogol from then on.

The story follows Gogol through his childhood and adolescence, just trying to strike a balance between the very Indian life that his family leads at home and the life that he sees all around him in his friends homes.  As he grows older and starts going out on his own, he has to make some real decisions about who he is and how he will allow his culture to define him.  For Gogol, a lot of this comes back to the fact that he has a name that no one has ever heard from a country that is not even his own.  He never really feels “at home” in his name, and that is a large focus of the book at times.

The last half of the book is taken by Gogol’s relationships with women.  His family want him, obviously, to find an Indian girl that is part of their circle and marry in the traditional Indian way.  While he’s at school, however, Gogol dates several women who are far, far from that mold.  When his father passes away unexpectedly, he is once again immersed in the culture he grew up in and finds that he has to make a decision about how he is going to live the rest of his life.

What I Thought: For some reason I’ve read a lot of immigration stories over the last year.  I’m not really sure why I’m drawn to them, but I think it’s kind of fascinating to see America from an outsider’s perspective.

To be perfectly honest, as far as the feelings/emotions/observations part of the immigration story, Jhumpa Lahiri really added very little to the conversation.  Because her story covered such a long time period (1968 thru 1999) and covered the lives of two full generations, all in under 300 pages, there really wasn’t a deep look into the immigration experience and what it looks like specifically to Indians.  But as far as adding a beautifully written piece? She did her job.  The prose was simple and everything was pretty understated, but she pulled it off really well.  I was hooked in from page one and I know that the main reason for that is that her words and her flow were just delicious.

I think that where she went with Gogol was kind of beyond just the basic immigration story.  She really dove into the experience of finding out who you are separate from your parents, from your culture, and from the expectations people put on you.  Gogol was pushed from a lot of different directions, just like any American teenager, and it took him a lot of thought and a lot of character-changes to really lock into who he was and start living that.  That is not just an immigration story.  That is a universal coming of age story and I really think that that is why this book was so successful.

It says on the cover that Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer for her short story collection about similar topics, and you guys know how I feel about short stories.  I have a library trip planned for tonight and you better believe that this one is coming home with me!

Conclusion: While this kind of is just another immigration story, for me it was a lot more than that. It was beautifully written and I would recommend it to anyone.  Read this!

The Book: The Eyes of the Dragon, by Stephen King

The Story: Let me start off by saying that this book has nothing to do with dragons.  I’ve had this in my pile of books to read for over a year and just haven’t touched it because I can’t get into dragon-y stuff.  It was written by Stephen King when his daughter was 13 because she was scared to read his other books, so he wrote her a book that reads almost like a bedtime story that you’d read to a kid, only a little bit more “grown up.”

In the story,  Roland is the king and he has two sons, Peter is the eldest and is mild mannered and good at everything. Thomas is younger and kind of quieter and takes the background a lot.  The Queen died while giving birth to Thomas, so it is just them.  Roland’s magician and advisor is a crooked, mysterious man named Flagg. I know you Dark Tower fans are squealing your little brains out.

Anyway,  Flagg is crazy and manipulative and he manages to kill Roland and get Peter blamed for it so t hat easy-to-sway Thomas becomes the king.  Peter is locked at the top of a tall tower and Flagg pretty  much takes over control of the country through Thomas.  Stuff gets bleak.  Peter is hatching a plan and has friends in the country that are still rooting for him.

Like almost all Stephen King books, this turns into a good vs. evil deal and sways back and forth until you really can’t tell who is going to prevail in the end.

What I Thought: Another one of those books where I’m not really sure why I liked it so much, but I really, really did.  When I read it, I wanted to read something lighter that didn’t make me cry. I’ve been crying about books way too much lately.   This was light without being total brain candy and it really kept me engaged.

I think what really made me like this one was how it was written.  It had a story-telling type of narration.  ”You’ll have to make up your mind,” “I’m sorry to say,” and other stuff like that reminded you that this was basically a bedtime story.  I love nothing more than a good bedtime story and this just did it for me.

If you are Stephen King fan, you’ll see several tie-ins with other books, particularly The Stand and the Dark Tower series.  It’s that kind of stuff that makes Stephen King compulsively readable for me and I was thrilled beyond words that Flagg was the bad guy.  Spooky dude, that Flagg.  Good stuff.

Conclusion: So fun. Read this to your kids.  Maybe not your little, little kids but probably 10 and up could handle what’s happening here.  If you don’t have kids to read it to, read it anyway. A good fantasy type book without getting too crazy.  More of a kings-and-queens-and-knights type of deal.  Love it.

The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton

So, I loved this book when I was growing up.  I read it when I was pretty young and saw the movie and thought that it was all pretty great.  Then, in maybe 6th or 7th grade (I really have no idea) we read it as a class and I learned that not only was S.E. Hinton a woman (I had just assumed that a man wrote this book), but she wrote this when she was 16 years old.  At the time, I really wanted to become an author and this was more encouragement to me than I can even tell you.  It made me love it even more.

I loved their names: Ponyboy, Soda Pop, Dallas, Two-Bit… how can you get any cooler than that?

Seriously though, the issues touched on here: life, death, classes, friendship… it’s all deep stuff that’s just done in this really great way.  It’s all about teenagers and written by a teenager, so I think that it touches on how these issues are perceived by teens in a real way.  I think that that is why a book with, let’s be honest, not a whole lot of literary-merit has had such staying power.  Seriously, great stuff.  The “nothing gold can stay” bit? Classic.

And I know I’m supposed to be talking about the book, but the movie? Awesome.  Rob Lowe, Emilo Estevez, Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Diane Lane…. how can you beat that?  I’m of the opinion that not a whole lot of good came out of the 80’s, but this is everything that is great about the 80’s.  Awesome.

To participate in Flashback Friday, head over here to get the info on what’s going on.  After posting your flashback, come back here and comment with a link to your blog so everyone can enjoy!

The Book: Mothers and Other Liars, by Amy Bourret

The Story: I was lucky enough to end up on an ARC tour started by Jennie, over at Life is Short. Read Fast. She read it and mailed it on to me.  To check out her review, head over here and read up!  I’ll let you know as the rest of the girls post their reviews too.

When she is 19, Ruby is sort of on the run from situations in her life.  At a gas station, she hears a strange noise and finds a baby in a trash can.  Running on nothing but emotion, she packs the baby into her car and for 9 years raises it as her own.  Early in the book, she finds out the situation that surrounded the baby, her daughter Lark, being abandoned and she has some big decisions to make.

At the same time, she is pregnant with her first biological child and is going through a whole different set of parenting-emotions and trying to balance out what is happening in her life and what is the “right” way to handle it.

What I thought: When Jennie sent me this book, she warned me that it may be hard to read for mothers and mothers-t0-be and to get my tissues ready.  I kinda like a good book-related cry, so I was excited.  When the book made it to me, I cringed a little because the big blurb on the back compares it to Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos, which I just hated.

I didn’t see any similarity at all with Love Walked In, but what I did find was that if I had not known who wrote it, it could have easily passed as a Jodi Piccoult book.  Family drama that leads to a court room drama all interlaced with emotional writing and plot twists?  All there.  I don’t know if that is what the author had in mind when she wrote this book, but I couldn’t get past in my mind.  To be fair, however, I liked Jodi Piccoult quite a bit the first few books I read by her.  Her formula-writing is what bothers me, so I enjoyed this one more because I didn’t anticipate what was coming.

I loved the characters here.  I found myself empathizing completely with both Ruby and Lark.  In fact, I fell pretty much in love with Lark.  She was this fun, independent, smart kid who also had a little attitude and spunk.  As she got put through the ringer over and over, my heart really did just crack for her and I wanted to shake all the adults involve and scream at them.  I thought that Ruby was faced with one of the harder decisions that a mother can be faced with.  It kind of put me in the mindset of “what would I do?” and I kind of think that Ruby made decisions that I could never make, whether that is good or bad, I really don’t know.  Made me really think though.

I thought that the writing was kinda mediocre, but not terrible.  I got kind of tired of the “flowery” over-emotional writing at a certain point, but that is pure old personal preference.  I’m sure that some readers will just fall in love with it.

In Conclusion: I’d say that if you are a Jodi Piccoult lover, watch the shelves for this in August.  I think it comes out on the 3rd. You’ll love it.  I’m going to echo Jennie and say that if you are dealing with a lot of mommy-hormones right now, maybe read this when that has calmed down a little bit or just be prepared to have your guts twisted up a little bit.