Alice Fielding

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!, Jan 31 2004

I'll begin with what I like about this book: The chapter called "The Truth and Consequences of Child Care" is a well done illustration of the rock and the hard place parents are driven to today in order to provide for their children while they are very young.

The rest of the book is a suave combination of good advice, observations that should be obvious to anyone, and Chicken Little. Shaw is right that parents who buy their children everything instead of spending time with them are probably going to raise jerks. My guess, though, is that any parent who cares enough to pick up a book about parenting is probably smart enough to figure this out already. Shaw is not right that we are all… Read more

Very useful, but redundant, Sep 29 2003

While I recommend buying this book and trying out all the recipes, I don't recommend going wild all at once like I did.

The basic message of the book is this: Clean your windows and mirrors with plain club soda. Clean everything else with one or more of the following: baking soda, vinegar, Dr. Bronner's soap, or distilled water. The trick is to scent your baking soda or vinegar with a few drops of your favorite essential oil.

The cool thing about the book is that it gives detailed recipes for exactly what proportions of these main ingredients (plus a few others) work best to clean each different thing in your house, and it goes into some detail about what spray and squirt bottles work… Read more

Frustrating, April 28 2003

I wanted very much to like this book, especially after having loved A Ring of Endless Light. But Troubling a Star threw me again and again.

First of all, there are way too many characters. Isn't there some sort of rule in writing where you're not supposed to create more characters than your readers can follow? There were dozens and dozens of them, way more than I could keep track of.

Secondly, while the "mystery" in the plot was clever in places and quite good at drawing suspense, it fell all over itself at the end. The "bad guys" turned out to be the Hispanic man and the man with the Texas drawl. Hmm, we're not being stereotypical or anything, are we? The kinks in the story were… Read more