So, today I’ve been playing around with the paper I bought a couple of weeks ago. Remember these two sheets?

I thought I’d make some new journals, but oh boy did I have some trouble with the paper that has newspaper and magazine bits in it. The paper is pretty thin and I knew it was going to be trouble so I cut out a small piece, glued it and covered a small piece of board. Sure enough it started tearing when I was turning the corners. I got a bit frustrated and put it aside. I’ve worked with very thin papers before so I know I can do something with it but I wasn’t in the mood to battle with this paper today.

So I grabbed the other sheet, the one with the couple on it, and found out it works perfectly for one of my beaded journals. Take a look. It’s like it was meant to be that size.

And, as I’ve been amassing quite a collection of small scraps of pretty papers, I started thinking about what I could do with them. I’d hate to throw them out because they are so pretty so I decided to make my small beaded journals into mini ones. Here they are. I think they look so cute and best of all, all my pretty scraps become journals.

That’s what I’ve mainly been up to today. Now, it’s time to go read. My hands hurt, my fingertips are sore from the thread and I’m tired of cutting paper. See, it’s not all glamour in a Bookgirl’s life. heh.

I stayed up late last night finishing up The Likeness and what can I say, I loved it. I thought it was just as good as In The Woods or even better. Especially if you like endings that are a bit more tidy then this was definitely more satisfying. In this novel detective Cassie Maddox, who is still reeling from what happened in the investigation of In the Woods, is asked to go undercover.

Now I admit at first I just didn’t think this was going to work out because you see, Cassie is supposed to become Lexie. A woman who is found murdered who happens to be identical to Cassie. To make matters more complicated, Lexie is found with an ID of an alias Cassie and her former boss created back when Cassie was working undercover. Sounds a bit confusing and implausible right? If you can just put any doubts aside you’ll be fine. You’ll get swept up into the investigation and the engrossing story. You can read more about the book here.

Being that I enjoyed this story I had to dig around in the internet to see if the author is writing another story because what I’d really like to see is some of the characters from the first book come back. I found a couple of articles and it looks like she is working on a third book but this one will focus on Detective Frank Mackey. I can’t say he was my favorite character but I’ll still want to read the book. Oh, and this book also counts as one of my reads for the 2nds Challenge.

My other read was just as character-driven but I’d say even more intense. This Japanese novel takes the reader deep into the lives of four women who are feeling oppressed and want a way out of their situations.

I remembered picking up this book several years ago and setting it aside because I was finding it too gritty and just not something I wanted to read at the time. I’m so glad I finally went back to it. It is gritty, it is oppressive and sometimes makes for a very hard read but I really liked it. This is not your typical formulaic crime novel. You can read more about the book here.

And, this one also counts as a challenge read – both for the Japanese challenge and the Orbis Terrarum challenge.

Still not caught up on my reviews but I’m getting there. Now it’s back to some time spent with my books.