I’m a voracious reader, and thanks to a few blog reviews I’ve done lately, I’ve been gifted with Amazon gift certificates. In exchange for reading a new book, I get a copy of said new book, and $20 to spend on whatever I want at Amazon.com - how can you beat that?

The neat thing about Amazon is that it isn’t just books. Where else on the web can you buy books, clothes, toys, linens, or electronics? A department store website perhaps, but you’ll find a limited selection, as compared to the thousands and thousands of items available at Amazon.com. Just this past Christmas, I used the site to find Cadbury’s Drinking Chocolate, which is typically only available in the U.K., for my 10 year old daughter. (She’s got expensive taste!) I also located a few hard to find Webkins for each of my children. I was able to do quite a bit of shopping at Amazon and had the ease of checking out just once.

Oh, and the book I bought this time was called Escape. It’s the story of a woman who escaped from a large polygamist group in Arizona, with her EIGHT children in tow. That prompted a long court battle in which she probably needed to consult not only a child support attorney (her husband ended up paying nothing!), but an appeals attorney when her first attorney agreed to a crappy visitation agreement! (The children were all hers, so no adoption attorney was required.)