Book Review: Sunshine Girl: An Unexpected Life by Julianna Margulies

I’ll be honest. I really wanted to write a review that wasn’t biased, but as a lifelong Julianna Margulies fan, I gave up before I even started.
If you’re going to read this book just to get tidbits and backstories of her TV appearances or celebrity friendships (ahem…hello George Clooney), I’m telling you, you’re in the wrong place.

Sunshine Girl: An Unexpected Life is about her life, starting from her eccentric and somewhat chaotic childhood traveling the world with a dysfunctional family, to the experiences and choices throughout her life that have made her the extraordinary woman she is today.
Having come to the end, all I can say is that I love her even more than before.

The book includes several photographs, some surely already known to most fans, others instead are beautiful testimonies of private life.
If you want to read a memoir, this one will not disappoint you at all.

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Book review: Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

How can you write about the world of time travel and still make it unique? 

Before The Coffee Gets Cold manages to pull off the miracle of combining sentimentality and magic in a web of stories and characters that you can’t help but root for.

What if you could travel back to the past or take a peek into the future? But with the knowledge that you can’t change the present, no matter what?

That’s the question the quirky characters in this short novel ask themselves, and that’s the question we ask ourselves by the end of the book.

The time to drink a coffee, so much time is given to face our regrets or reassure ourselves of a choice. And a series of conditions that, if not met, will make the unwary digressors slip into perpetual oblivion.

But if we can change neither the past nor the future, what is the point of taking such risks? Is everything really immutable?

Read in one sitting, Before The Coffee Gets Cold brought me to tears on several occasions. Kawaguchi’s writing is of a simplicity that, were it not for the originality of the story, would be almost trite. And that is perhaps what made this book so enjoyable to me.