Collins - Listening For IELTS (Kèm 2 CD) tải về miễn phí cuốn sách

Moodi Studios jqsirls — It reads like a night-club stand-up routine.

Vostorg It vostorgit — First, be aware that I devoured this book down like chocolate. Good chocolate. Good, dark, European chocolate. So whatever my criticisms, bear in my mind, I loved this book. 4 ½ stars. The Good. 1.) The internet chat room for transformed people. I would have liked to learn more about the moderator "Chris Anderson," who airily mentions at one point he’s studied “this type of thing,” but the few chat room scenes really worked as a plot device to move things along. And it was hilarious. I would love to see more books on the stories of the other members of the chat room - I really want to know how things worked out for "froggie", “Grizzlyguy” and “snowgirl”. 2.) The school. If ever there were a place where it could be said the medieval royal court moved to where courtiers peck each other and jockey for power and royalty rule supreme with absolute power it surely is the high school. Our Beast while still the human Kyle is king of the cool kids, and boy does he know it and abuse his power, and it is so gratifying when the Goth girl turns out to be a witch ("you made this so easy to decide", she tells him) and takes him down a few pegs. 3.) Motivation. The author manages to make Kyle vial and understandable deserving of the curse, but at the same time presented with a list of reasons why a) he turned out so bad and b) why he is redeemable. Good job of balancing the opposing traits. 4.) Point of view. It’s the Beast’s point of view, which is a fun twist. Last time this was done - Beast by Donna Jo Napoli - I had to scrub my brain with brain bleach due to some very bad scenes involving the prince’s royal zoo. Luckily, Kyle doesn’t go to the NYC zoo and I didn’t have to get the brain bleach back out. 5.) The brownstone. The brownstone as castle worked perfectly, with the Beast knocking around the place exactly like an enchanted prince in an abandoned castle. Wonderful job of showing just how awful it was despite being surrounded by just about all possible material goods. 6.) Literature. Beauty and the Beast both have an excellent taste in books. Beauty reads Jane Eyre and Beast reads The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Like every other B&B story, I drooled over the library. I loved that Beast got so incredibly bored that he started reading and specifically asked for a teacher, which brings me to: 7.) Their teacher. Mr. Fratalli is all kinds of awesome, and a lot of help in setting Kyle on the path to redemption. His attitude is great, in all its sarcastic, amused, angry, softened, I-am-helping-you-learn moments. He also gets some great wry one liners, very deft at summing up all sorts of situations. And he brings the roses, which leads to: 8.) The rose garden. It’s beautiful. And a wonderful explanation is offered as to why the original Beast might have flipped out over one rose. Kyle/Beast shows real growth (no pun intended) when he learns about gardening and takes the time to actually make and take care of something himself for the first time instead of just paying someone to do it. 9.) The love story. Beauty and the Beast is alone in the fairy tale cannon of not having love-at-first-sight, but actually giving the couple the radical concept of time to get to know one another. The author does a good job with the time frame here. 10.) The whole re-telling is very well imaged – each part of the original story is taken apart and fitted back together to make sense in a modern setting and yet still stay true to the fairy tale. The Bad. 1.) The genre saviness was always in flux - sometimes people knew about fairy tales, and sometimes they don't. It’s always hard to know where to draw the line in a fairy-tale retelling between awareness of the genre itself and recognizing being in an actual tale that's already been told and wrecking the suspension-of-disbelief. Meh. 2.) The limitless credit card - as fun as the shopping spree scenes were, it sure made life easier for everyone, didn't it? I would have liked to see how Holly Black would have handled this plot - she really knows how to mix magic with those of us not living like royalty. 3.) Linda. Really? You named your Beauty character Linda? It sounds … so not like Beauty’s name. I looked up and yes, Linda does mean beautiful in Italian, but nothing is said in text, which is weird, because a lot of in-text thought goes into the Beast’s name. As a human he is Kyle Kingsbury, ‘Kyle’ meaning handsome, (which is explicitly stated in the text) and Kingsbury obviously having the word ‘king’ in it. Then, as beast, he goes looking for a new name online and picks “Adrian” because it means “dark one,” which fits his mood at that point. 4.) Magda. The reveal of her back-story left a bad taste in my mouth - it did nothing but reinforce some bad stereotypes. 5.) Beast is going to let Beauty go… but instead Magda convinces him to take her upstate? It would have worked better if going to the cabin was his idea. 6.) Fanfiction. The author admits in her author’s note in the end, and partly through the author-avatar board moderator that she has read/watched a LOT of fairy tales, and it shows. She comes close to fanfiction territory quite a few times as certain scenes seemed to be quite close to Disney, Beaumont, both McKinley versions, Duvall, and Napoli. The Ugly. 1.) Linda as a damsel-in-distress kinda pissed me off. Shouldn’t she be a little more street-wise by this point? 2.) She… forgot the address? And no one remembered to tell it to her or write it down before she left? That’s why she’s late coming back? Nothing to do with the original Freudian sub-texts in the old fairy tale? Lame. Its as plot-thin as the part in King Leer when the servant is all: “Oops. The princess is dead – I forgot to give the executioner that whole ‘don’t-execute’ order. My bad.” Oh, please. >eye roll< The unknown The movie. Will it be as good as the book? Dare I hope?