Review: Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans

World War II books seem to be everywhere these days. It is a war that has captured the popular imagination in a way no other war in the twentieth century seems to have done. Like all wars before and after it, it didn't just affect those on the battlefield or in government, it had a profound effect on the general population. And for those in the path of the fighting and the bombs, it was forever life-altering. In Lissa Evans' brilliant novel, Crooked Heart, an orphaned evacuee from London and a debt-ridden suburban scam artist come together and are forever changed.

Ten year old Noel Bostock lives with his godmother Mattie in Hampstead Heath. An intelligent and unusual bookish child, he's been raised unconventionally by his elderly suffragette guardian. When Mattie starts exhibiting signs of senile dementia, Noel fills in the blanks for her, learns to cook, and keeps her secret. But when she wanders away one winter night, he is sent to live with Mattie's cousin and his wife, a couple who are kind enough but really have no room in their lives for a grieving young boy. It is a relief to them when Noel must be evacuated from London like the rest of the city's children. Sent to St. Alban's, not far from London, the serious child with jug handle ears and a limp from a bout of polio as a baby lands with the not always entirely honest Mrs. Vera Sedge, her lazy son Donald, and her dependent, mute mother Flora.

Vee only chooses to take Noel in on a spur of the moment whim--she'll receive money monthly for his upkeep--but immediately regrets her decision as she realizes she'll have to also provide and care for him. She worries that he'll also interfere with her money making schemes, no matter that they generally fail miserably anyway. Instead Vee and Noel become a team. With his brains and her action, their scam of collecting money for invented wartime charities is going a treat. Meanwhile the otherwise unremarkable Donald is up to his own dangerous tricks. And Vee's mother Flora stays busy writing hilarious, chatty missives to government officials about the illegal goings on inspired by the war and morale killers as she sees them.

Evans has written a wonderfully entertaining novel. Her characters are complete and engaging, even when they are up to no good. The growing connection between Noel and Vee is touching to watch, especially as this waif with nowhere else to go is the first person to treat Vee with any dignity and respect at all. Noel is an odd duck but he's heartwarming for all his eccentricities and the reader cannot help but feel sympathy for him both in the loss of his godmother and in his naive outrage over the small scale immoralities allowed by war (his and Vee's not included). There is a deliciously sly wit that threads through the narrative and shines through in unexpected places. This is a lovely novel of friendship, caring, and moral implications only partially hidden underneath a delightfully humorous story of bumbling ineptness, petty scams, and war. Thoroughly recommended.

For more information about Lissa Evans and the book, check out her website or follow her on Twitter. Takes a look at the book's Goodreads page, follow the rest of the blog tour, or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of the book for review.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme is hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on.

Villa America by Liza Klaussmann. The book is being released by Little, Brown and Company on August 4, 2015.

Amazon says this about the book: A dazzling novel set in the French Riviera based on the real-life inspirations for F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is The Night.

When Sara Wiborg and Gerald Murphy met and married, they set forth to create a beautiful world together-one that they couldn't find within the confines of society life in New York City. They packed up their children and moved to the South of France, where they immediately fell in with a group of expats, including Hemingway, Picasso, and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald.

On the coast of Antibes they built Villa America, a fragrant paradise where they invented summer on the Riviera for a group of bohemian artists and writers who became deeply entwined in each other's affairs. There, in their oasis by the sea, the Murphys regaled their guests and their children with flamboyant beach parties, fiery debates over the newest ideas, and dinners beneath the stars.

It was, for a while, a charmed life, but these were people who kept secrets, and who beneath the sparkling veneer were heartbreakingly human. When a tragic accident brings Owen, a young American aviator who fought in the Great War, to the south of France, he finds himself drawn into this flamboyant circle, and the Murphys find their world irrevocably, unexpectedly transformed.

A handsome, private man, Owen intrigues and unsettles the Murphys, testing the strength of their union and encouraging a hidden side of Gerald to emerge. Suddenly a life in which everything has been considered and exquisitely planned becomes volatile, its safeties breached, the stakes incalculably high. Nothing will remain as it once was.

Liza Klaussman expertly evokes the 1920s cultural scene of the so-called "Lost Generation." Ravishing and affecting, and written with infinite tenderness, VILLA AMERICA is at once the poignant story of a marriage and of a golden age that could not last.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme has been hosted by Sheila at Book Journey and I hope will be again one day.

Books I completed this past week are:

Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg
The Road Home by Kathleen Shoop
Landfall by Ellen Urbani

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Love Maps by Eliza Factor Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson
Henna House by Nomi Eve

Reviews posted this week:

The Road Home by Kathleen Shoop

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

The Surfacing by Cormac James
The Secret Wisdom of the Earth by Christopher Scotton
Sweet Salt Air by Barbara Delinsky
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League by Jonathan Odell
Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim
Making Nice by Matt Sumell
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
Spinster by Kate Bolick
Migratory Animals by Mary Helen Specht
Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Secrets of a Charmed Life by Susan Meissner
Girl in Glass by Deanna Fei
Orphan Number Eight by Kim van Alkemade
Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capo Crucet
The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories by Wendy J. Fox
Lost Canyon by Nina Revoyr
The Door by Magda Szabo
Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper
Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg
Landfall by Ellen Urbani

Review: The Road Home by Kathleen Shoop

Poverty and hardship are nothing new. They have stalked society as long as society has existed. And women and children have always suffered disproportionately, especially when there is no male bread winner. The turn of the century was no easier in this respect than it is now as is evidenced by the main characters and situations in Kathleen Shoop's novel The Road Home.

As the novel opens in 1905, Katherine Arthur stands at her mother's casket reflecting on all that had passed between them, the misunderstandings and hard feelings that had only just started to heal. Her twin Tommy has yet to be able to let his own unhappy feelings and estrangement from their mother go. The novel then moves back fourteen years in time to when the family was splintered apart, suffering terrible hardships, gross indignities, and bowed down by tragedy. Years prior, after discovering that her father and husband lost the fortunes of most everyone they knew in Des Moines, the once proud Jeanie Arthur left the city with her shamed husband and their young children. They left destitute to try and make a new future. Unfortunately that future included the death of oldest son James, infidelity and abandonment by her husband, divorce, and the need to board her surviving children out with sympathetic families as Jeanie tries to get back on her feet.  But families who seem sympathetic in public can be infinitely less so in private.  The family Katherine ends up living with takes terrible advantage of her, forcing her to work herself to the bone and depriving her of food. As if that isn't enough, the father of the family is a disgusting lech whose professed religious feeling and his shrew of a wife are the only thing that have kept him from doing more than brushing up against and sneaking inappropriate touches from the young teenager. Tommy, meanwhile, moved between situations, one terrible, which left deep emotional scars, and one wonderful caring one until he is left alone, by choice, to fend for himself. Jeanie has no idea of her children's suffering as she tries to find a way to reunite them with herself and her young, slow daughter toddler, Yale.

Jeanie learned that family and the angels among us were the most important things during her own trials but it takes at least until her death for Katherine and Tommy to accept the same thing, at least in terms of their mother although they recognize it with regard to their own families. Each of them grapples with the idea of forgiveness, both for the staits their mother was driven to that tore their family apart and for themselves and the rancor they harbored for so long, never knowing the whole story.

The back and forth between the two different times in the Arthur family's lives is a little hard to get used to in the beginning, especially since there are also scenes that go even further back to their privileged past and to the moment they lost everything. The book is a sequel and it surely benefits from a reader who has read the first one so that many of the secondary characters' importance and the necessary backstory which is merely alluded to here are already a part of their reading lexicon. Without this information, the reader is left wondering why Katherine and Tommy are still trying (and, in Tommy's case, failing) to reconcile with their mother and why they and their families feel that they don't really know Jeanie Arthur fourteen years after she reunited them. Shoop has done a good job evoking the turn of the century in Des Moines and the farming communities close to it. The dreadful and demeaning options open to the poor are well drawn and her characters' perseverance, endurance, and strength is impressive. I wish I had read the first book before this one though because there is just too much unexplained here for the tale, and its ending to be satisfactory although it certainly points to the importance of even just one person acting as an angel for others in changing lives forever.

For more information on Kathleen Shoop and the book, visit her webpage, like her on Facebook, or follow her on Pinterest or Twitter. Check out the book's GoodReads page. For others' opinions on the book, check it out on Amazon.

Thanks to the publisher and BookSparks PR for sending me a copy of the book for review.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme is hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on.

The Invisibles by Cecilia Galante. The book is being released by William Morrow on August 4, 2015.

Amazon says this about the book: In the vein of Meg Donohue and Jennifer Close, comes Cecilia Galante’s adult debut about the complicated and powerful bonds of female friendship—a compelling, moving novel that is told in both the present and the past.

Thrown together by chance as teenagers at Turning Winds Home for Girls, Nora, Ozzie, Monica, and Grace quickly bond over their troubled pasts and form their own family which they dub The Invisibles. But when tragedy strikes after graduation, Nora is left to deal with the horrifying aftermath alone as the other three girls leave home and don’t look back.

Fourteen years later, Nora is living a quiet, single life working in the local library. She is content to focus on her collection of “first lines” (her favorite opening lines from novels) and her dog, Alice Walker, when out-of-the-blue Ozzie calls her on her thirty-second birthday. But after all these years, Ozzie hasn’t called her to wish a happy birthday. Instead, she tells Nora that Grace attempted suicide and is pleading for The Invisibles to convene again. Nora is torn: she is thrilled at the thought of being in touch with her friends, and yet she is hesitant at seeing these women after such a long and silent period of time. Bolstered by her friends at the library, Nora joins The Invisibles in Chicago for a reunion that sets off an extraordinary chain of events that will change each of their lives forever.

The Invisibles is an unforgettable novel that asks the questions: How much of our pasts define our present selves? And what does it take to let go of some of our most painful wounds and move on?

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme has been hosted by Sheila at Book Journey and I hope will be again one day.

Books I completed this past week are:

Lost Canyon by Nina Revoyr
The Door by Magda Szabo
Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Love Maps by Eliza Factor Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson
Landfall by Ellen Urbani

Reviews posted this week:

Washing the Dead by Michelle Brafman
Maybe in Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

The Surfacing by Cormac James
The Secret Wisdom of the Earth by Christopher Scotton
Sweet Salt Air by Barbara Delinsky
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League by Jonathan Odell
Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim
Making Nice by Matt Sumell
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
Spinster by Kate Bolick
Migratory Animals by Mary Helen Specht
Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Secrets of a Charmed Life by Susan Meissner
Girl in Glass by Deanna Fei
Orphan Number Eight by Kim van Alkemade
Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capo Crucet
The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories by Wendy J. Fox
Lost Canyon by Nina Revoyr
The Door by Magda Szabo
Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper

Monday Mailbox

I was only home a few days this week but when I was home, I was certainly spoiled!  This past week's mailbox arrivals:

A Window Opens by Elisabeth Egan came from Simon and Schuster.

A book about a mom trying to have it all, the future of reading, and recommended for readers of Where'd You Go, Bernadette? Well, sign me right up! I can hardly wait.

The Road Home by Kathleen Shoop came from CreateSpace and BookSparks PR for a blog tour.

The turn of the century (that'd be the nineteenth century) is fascinating to me so I am looking forward to this book about twin teenagers and their mother and all of the strife they must make it through.

Baker's Blues by Judith Ryan Hendricks came from Chien Blue Press and TLC Book Tours for a blog tour.

The third in the Bread Alone series, I have been collecting this series and waiting for it to be complete before diving into it so I didn't have to wait for it to finish. Now I can read it with no worries.

The Woman in the Photograph by Dana Gynther came from Gallery Books.

I find the relationship between Lee Miller and Man Ray to be intriguing in so many ways so I am looking forward to another fictionalization of it.

If you want to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

Sunday Salon: A Little Vacation Reading

I am a lake and fresh water kind of girl so of course I am currently overlooking the ocean in SC. And because sharks respect state lines, loads of people are unconcerned about the shark attacks in recent weeks less than an hour up the beach from here (in another state, y'all) and are happily swimming in the ocean. Having just seen the video of the shark attack on the surfer in South Africa (and yes, I appreciate how far away that is), coupled with a long-held fear dating back to Jaws, I have no interest in getting in the water. In fact, when we were scuba diving several years ago and the dive master signaled to all of us that there was a shark (the signal involved a hand on his head like when kids pretend to be sharks in a pool), I think I hyperventilated most of the oxygen in my tank until I realized it was a baby and hiding under coral with absolutely zero interest in attacking us. But I have no desire to meet another shark any time soon, so I'll stay on the room's balcony or lounge by the pool with my book.

Meanwhile, my crazy daughter and her friends will play on the beach. (The kid buried in the sand is mine and she says it's hard to breathe under all that sand. Plus she had sand in her eyes and mouth, so that's yummy. ;-P)

She's the reason I'm here at the ocean instead of at the lake. She's a competitive dancer and we're at Nationals. She's already danced her solo and earned a National Elite Top First award (the highest award possible) and took 16th overall. I don't know how many kids there were competing but it sure seemed like loads. She's the one in the black here with her fellow senior dancers and their teacher.

As is generally true at dance competitions, I am not getting an overwhelming amount of reading done but since this one is longer than usual, we have a bit more down time and I'm not trapped in an auditorium all day every day so I have done a little bit. My actual travels this past fortnight have taken me from Upper Peninsula Michigan to back home, from home to Asheville, NC and back again, and from home to Myrtle Beach, SC so far. I have bought books in all of these places (duh!) but I also brought more than my fair share with me as well. Many of my books are as well traveled as I am.

The books themselves have taken me even further afield than my actual travels have. Over the last two weeks, I have spent time in New York City, first in the NICU with a severely premature baby whose very existence inspired a nationwide conversation about insurance and the value of one life and then in a Jewish orphan's home and a Jewish old folks home with a young woman who was experimented on medically while a child too young, alone and defenseless to protest and who later finds herself the nurse to the dying doctor who perpetrated this evil. I split some time between Miami's Little Havana and a New England college campus with the daughter of Cuban immigrants, the first of her family to go to college, who happens to go amidst turmoil surrounding a young Cuban boy similar to Elian Gonzalez. I traveled out to the West Coast and just inland in a series of short stories. I went hiking in the Sierra Nevadas with four disparate Los Angelenos who run into trouble and face trials they never imagined on what should have been a strenuous but wonderful camping trip into the beauty of the natural world. I was in Hungary with a prize winning author and the inscrutable housekeeper who organizes her life and teaches her lessons. I walked across Canada with an elderly woman who is starting to forget things and with her husband and neighbor in Saskatchewan waiting for her to come home. And now I am in Alabama and New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and a terrible car accident that killed a runaway girl and a mother, looking for the connection between the two dead and the surviving mother and daughter. Where have you been this summer, either literally or in the book world?

I'm easy

I think we all know that I am congenitally unable to go somewhere and not visit a bookstore (or several if the place is lucky enough to have more than one). So far this summer I have been at the tiny indie bookstore by the cottage (Safe Harbor Books, which has no website to link to here), McLean and Eakin Booksellers in Michigan, and every bookstore I could find in downtown Asheville, NC (Malaprop's Bookstore, Downtown Books and News, The Captain's Bookshelf, and Battery Park Book Exchange Champagne Bar). I'm not done visiting bookstores in random places yet either.

And I'm not terribly likely to walk out of any bookstore without (many) new additions to my stash. So how do you best find books in new to you bookstores? Well, there are the always obvious ways of wandering around, dipping in and out of sections that interest you or scouring the usually treasure laden staff picks shelves. But if you're me on this most recent visit to Asheville, you will have driven up there listening to booky podcasts. In this case, I was listening to my appalling backlog of the wonderful The Readers, with Simon and Thomas who do tend to read things I enjoy. Mostly I can happily nod along with their banter and suggestions but occasionally they really pique my interest in something new or they remind me of an author I've enjoyed in the past. And on this trip, they did both. Better yet, when I poked around the used bookstores, I found everything I was looking for. The first excitement was Plant Dreaming Deep by May Sarton, signed by the author. I have long loved Sarton, first reading Kinds of Love way back when I was in high school back at the dawn of time, but I rarely think of getting more of her works. The second was The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters edited by Charlotte Mosley. I have Nancy Mitford's novels but I don't know that I knew there was a book of correspondence between the sisters so when this one was mentioned, I was immediately intrigued. And while I was poking around in this same state of mind, I also stumbled across Angela Thirkell's Tribute for Harriette. I have all of her Barsetshire Chronicles and adore them so this was a very pleasing find. If you want to see the titles of the rest of my new books, feel free to poke around on my LibraryThing bookshelf. Sadly, I can't blame anyone else for the others I brought home. They're all on me. I guess I'm just easy.

Do you listen to any podcasts? Do they ever inspire you to get books?

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme is hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on.

Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal. The book is being released by Pamela Dorman Books on July 28, 2015.

Amazon says this about the book: When Lars Thorvald’s wife, Cynthia, falls in love with wine—and a dashing sommelier—he’s left to raise their baby, Eva, on his own. He’s determined to pass on his love of food to his daughter—starting with puréed pork shoulder. As Eva grows, she finds her solace and salvation in the flavors of her native Minnesota. From Scandinavian lutefisk to hydroponic chocolate habaneros, each ingredient represents one part of Eva’s journey as she becomes the star chef behind a legendary and secretive pop-up supper club, culminating in an opulent and emotional feast that’s a testament to her spirit and resilience.

Each chapter in J. Ryan Stradal’s startlingly original debut tells the story of a single dish and character, at once capturing the zeitgeist of the Midwest, the rise of foodie culture, and delving into the ways food creates community and a sense of identity. By turns quirky, hilarious, and vividly sensory, Kitchens of the Great Midwest is an unexpected mother-daughter story about the bittersweet nature of life—its missed opportunities and its joyful surprises. It marks the entry of a brilliant new talent.

Review: Maybe In Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Do you believe in fate?  Chance? Do the decisions you make change the path of your future or is that path set so that no matter which choices you make or free will you exhibit you'll get to the same place because you were always destined to be there? And what about multiple universes? If you believe that your decisions drive your future, can there be alternate realities where you chose differently and ended up living a different life? Taylor Jenkins Reid's newest novel, Maybe in Another Life, asks just these questions.

Hannah is 29 years old and after a lifetime of moving around and feeling rootless, she is moving back to LA. She'll live near her best friend Gabby again and maybe even reconnect with Ethan, the high school ex-boyfriend she's always thought might one day turn out to be "the one." On her first night back, she goes out to see a bunch of friends, including Ethan. When Gabby and her husband are ready to go home, Hannah must decide whether she's going to go with them or if she wants to stay out a little longer and pursue what she suspects could in fact happen with Ethan. And in the pivotal moment of making a decision, the universe splits and her life spirals outward from both options, radically changing the trajectory of her life in unexpected ways.

Oddly, both choices are the right one and lead to vastly different outcomes in her life. Both choices also include aspects that must have been fated as well because they happen regardless of her chance decision at the bar. But as the narrative flips back and forth between the two realities that she is living concurrently, her decisions have altered almost everything. The flipping back and forth between the different lives is a little bit confusing and difficult in the beginning but adjusting to the back and forth becomes easier as the novel progresses. And the chapters start to end just when the reader wants them to continue, just when a situation needs resolving or Hannah is on the verge of making another decision, giving the narrative pacing a breathless and anticipatory sort of feel all the way through.

There are echoes from one life to another, especially in the dual endings, that ask us to question whether we could be happy in more than one reality. Is your soul mate the only person out there for you? Is your profession the only one that can be fulfilling? Reid seems to argue that we make our own lives and our own happiness and that we can construct it differently, but no less contentedly, based on chance and our choices. The novel is a fun and quick read with an interesting and quirky concept. Hannah's choices, in both of her lives, will resonate with readers who have probably wondered "what if?" more than once in their own lives. This novel makes is delicious to contemplate those endless possibilities for ourselves.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book for review.

Review: Washing the Dead by Michelle Brafman

We are all part of communities. It can be reassuring to be a part of a community, whether it be one we chose or one we were born into. We feel belonging and acceptance in communities. We understand and cherish the traditions and rituals of the groups to whom we belong. In fact, often times our communities define us. So if we are exiled from a community, we find ourselves adrift, hurt, and rejected. In Michelle Brafman's new novel, Washing the Dead, main character Barbara Blumfield must examine the severed bonds of community in order to find forgiveness for her mother and for herself.

Alternating mainly between the mid-1970s and 2009, Barbara Pupnick Blumfield tells the story of her Orthodox Jewish youth, the rupture that pushed her family away from their community, her strained relationship with her mother, and the more secular Jewish life she's created as an adult. As Barbara struggles to mother her own troubled teenaged daughter Lili, she must examine the things that influenced her to become the woman and mother that she is. She reflects on the way that her own mother failed her, abandoning the family through depression and the sadness of her unshared, secret past, and the way that her mother continues to abandon her, disappearing into an ever increasing Alzheimer's fog. It is in examining her memories of her teenaged years that she faces the life-altering rupture from the Orthodox community she knew and loved and all the reasons behind her long exile from that safe and comfortable community of her childhood. When the rebbetzin of the shul in Milwaukee calls on the middle-aged Barbara, telling her that her mentor Mrs. Kessler has died and offers to have Barbara participate in washing the body, a final act of love, preparing Mrs. Kesssler for burial, it allows Barbara to start her search for answers about her own youth even as she deals with Lili's rebellion in the face of a season ending sports injury.

This is a coming of age novel, even though Barbara long ago became an adult. But in the present, she can see how the early inversion of the mother-daughter dynamic between she and her mother colored so much of her life. As a girl she tried to protect her mother from sorrows and trespassings without understanding the impetus behind any of it. And as her mother loses her memories to the ravages of disease, she cannot fully piece together the secret history of her family that exacerbated her mother's descent into deep depression without the help of those whom she holds liable for so much hurt. The narrative moves fluidly forwards and backwards through time, detailing the long ranging impact and the ripples that continue to push outward even in Barbara's present. The story is a quiet one. Barbara as a character sometimes comes across as far younger than she really is, still just learning to accept imperfections in those she loves. The storyline with Lili is very secondary and therefore doesn't quite compliment the whole as well as it might have. But Brafman has given us a well developed inside look at an orthodox community and the women in it, their failings and their love, in the primary storyline. Writing movingly of connection, the pain over a loss of culture, and the power of forgiveness, this book offers an unusual insight into a complex, generally reserved, and separate community.

Thanks to the publisher and LibraryThing Early Reviewers for sending me a copy of this book to review.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme has been hosted by Sheila at Book Journey and I hope will be again one day.

Books I completed this past week are:

Girl in Glass by Deanna Fei
Orphan Number Eight by Kim van Alkemade
Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capo Crucet
The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories by Wendy J. Fox

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

The Door by Magda Szabo
Love Maps by Eliza Factor Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson
Lost Canyon by Nina Revoyr

Reviews posted this week:

Newport by Jill Morrow
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
George's Grand Tour by Caroline Vermalle

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

The Surfacing by Cormac James
The Secret Wisdom of the Earth by Christopher Scotton
Washing the Dead by Michelle Brafman
Sweet Salt Air by Barbara Delinsky
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League by Jonathan Odell
Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim
Making Nice by Matt Sumell
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
Maybe In Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Spinster by Kate Bolick
Migratory Animals by Mary Helen Specht
Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Secrets of a Charmed Life by Susan Meissner
Girl in Glass by Deanna Fei
Orphan Number Eight by Kim van Alkemade
Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capo Crucet
The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories by Wendy J. Fox

Monday Mailbox

I came home to a stack of books after a short vacation. I do so love coming home to goodies!! This past week's mailbox arrivals:

Lost Canyon by Nina Revoyr came from Akashic Books and LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

About four city people heading off into the mountains on a backpacking trip to a mysterious place, this promises to be thrilling and maybe even a little chilling.

Maybe in Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid came from Washington Square Press.

The idea of one decision impacting your life forever is a fascinating one so this novel that posits two different lives depending on the pivotal choice is completely appealing.

If You Find This Letter by Hannah Brencher came from Howard.

I have always loved letters so this memoir about a woman who writes letters that bring a small piece of happiness into the lives of strangers is uber-appealing to me.

Henna House by Nomi Eve came from Scribner.

I really enjoyed Eve's The Family Orchard many years ago so I am looking forward to this story of a young Yemenite Jewish woman and the traditions of her world.

The Trouble With the Truth by Edna Robinson came from Infinite Words.

Having moved around a lot as a child (and adult), I am always curious about books that take on peripatetic lives like this one. That it's set in the 1920s and 30s makes it that much more interesting.

Emily Goes to Exeter by M.C. Beaton came from me to myself. :-)

I had no idea that Beaton wrote Regency romances but when I found out I was terribly curious and couldn't resist this one where a matchmaker attempts to connect the rake and his fleeing fiancé.

On the Rocks by Erin Duffy came from William Morrow.

Dating in the age of social media? Argh! This novel about a woman trying to escape the break-up her fiancé announced to the world and to her via Facebook sounds delicious!

The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories by Wendy J. Fox came from Press 53.

Short stories are not usually my thing but this prize winning collection that teases out struggle and boredom and the ordinary out West on the coast and slightly further inland is enticing.

If you want to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

Review: George's Grand Tour by Caroline Vermalle

Some books just emanate a happiness from the shelf. They beam their goodness out with cheerful, happy covers and delightful sounding plots. Caroline Vermalle's charming novel, George's Grand Tour, is one of these novels, a small gem of a book. You can't help but read it with a smile on your face.

George Nicoleau is 83 years old. He's retired, a widower, and has a few health concerns. He and his best friend Charles, who live next door to each other in Chanteloup, France, are devotees of the Tour de France and together they have concocted a plan to drive the more than 3,000 miles of the world's most famous bicycle race. The timing is perfect since George's protective daughter is on a trip of her own and no one will miss him at home, at least not until his granddaughter Adele calls, having been instructed by her mother to keep tabs on her elderly grandfather.  Quelle horreur!  How can they leave now with Adele calling?  Luckily Charles' grandson forwards all calls to George's home phone to his cell phone, thereby saving the long hoped for trip.

As George and Charles travel the stages of the Tour, they meet strangers, make friends, learn to text when Adele figures out what is really going on, break out of the set ways they have long inhabited, argue with each other and then make up, enjoy the adventure of a lifetime, live in the moment, and George nurtures a growing relationship with the heretofore distant Adele. The two old men are quirky and lovely characters and the tale of them learning to live life to the fullest even at their stage of life is perfectly lovely.  Adele's life as a runner on television sets and her interest in entertaining her granddad with stories from her experiences add another layer to the tale.  The novel is quite short but gentle, life affirming, and emotionally affecting all the way through. There are hilarious moments as the old men confront technology and touching moments when they each realize the need behind their friend's stubborn insistence on something. The story is an ode to happiness, understanding, and the joy we seldom associate with aging. It captures love and friendship and hope beautifully, and left me smiling through tears in the end. A heart-warming tale, I hope this finds a wide and appreciative audience.

Review: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

I typically shy away from dystopian novels. But Margaret Atwood being the author she is, her books always manage to slip under my defenses. More impressively, she makes me care about her characters and the dystopian world she's created. Although I haven't read Oryx and Crake, the first book, I picked up the middle book of the MaddAddam trilogy, The Year of the Flood, after letting it languish on my shelves literally for years and quickly found myself pulled into yet another of her inventive and disturbing worlds.

Two women, Ren and Toby, find themselves accidental survivors of the long predicted waterless flood that has devastated a future Earth. While most of the rest of the population succumbed to a horrific plague, Ren was safe from the ravages, locked away in quarantine in the sex club where she worked as a trapeze dancer. Toby survived at a spa, luckily stocked with lots of natural edible products intended for the wealthy. As the two of them separately set about the uncertain work of survival, the narrative shifts between the present of their predicament and their pasts. Both women were once members of God's Gardeners, a religion striving to minimize the hurt we cause the earth and revering the early harbingers of what must come, the environmentalists, the activists, and those who intentionally tread lightly on the earth. Run by the beneficent and peaceful seeming Adam One, God's Gardeners prepare for the apocalypse of the waterless flood, cultivate small patches of earth, eschew meat, and live without modern technology in the pleebland slums of their unnamed cities.

Outside of the God's Gardeners, technology has taken over. The government is bought and sold, consumerism is rampant, and no one, or almost no one, can outrun the corporation that controls everything. Corporate biotech and genetic engineering rules the world, from splicing unrelated creatures together to manufacturing pleasure and pain, creating questionable drugs to synthesizing unidentifiable food. The world before the flood is bleak and horrific. The world after the flood is empty but incredibly dangerous. As Toby and Ren realize what has happened and what they have to do if they not only want to continue to survive but to find out if anyone they care for has also survived, they are more fettered than they have ever been but also somehow more free to direct their own destinies.

Atwood has created a world like ours on steroids. It is terrifying and horrible, an object lesson on our own excesses, a condemnation of rampant science without checks or balances, a disregard for consequences. Each chapter starts with a simple hymn, sermon, or explanation of a saint from Adam One or the God's Gardeners, pointing the reader to the tenets of their faith and of the way the earth has been plundered beyond all recognition. The narration alternates between Ren in the first person and Toby in the third, allowing for both a very intensely personal narration and a more measured broader look at the world both before and after the flood. It is a little too coincidental that characters whose run-ins before the flood are pivotal would continue to cross paths afterwards, especially given the nature of their interactions. The ending of the novel is very much unresolved, which is the only reason I would say the novel doesn't quite stand on its own apart from the MaddAddam trilogy. But Atwood can create a world like no one else so having to read the other two books to fill in the blanks left by this one to find out the fate of human beings will certainly be no hardship.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme is hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on.

Driving Hungry by Layne Mosler. The book is being released by Pantheon on July 14, 2015.

Amazon says this about the book: A delicious memoir that takes us from Buenos Aires to New York to Berlin as the author, driven by wanderlust and an unrelenting appetite, finds purpose, passion, and unexpected flavor.

After putting her dream of opening her own restaurant on hold, Layne Mosler moves to Buenos Aires to write about food. But she is also in search of that elusive something that could give shape to her life. One afternoon, fleeing a tango club following a terrible turn on the dance floor, she impulsively asks her taxista to take her to his favorite restaurant. Soon she is savoring one of the best steaks of her life and, in the weeks that follow, repeating the experiment with equally delectable results. So begins the gustatory adventure that becomes the basis for Mosler’s cult blog, Taxi Gourmet. It eventually takes her to New York City, where she continues her food quests, hailing cabs and striking up conversations from the back seat, until she meets a pair of extraordinary lady cab drivers who convince her to become a taxi driver herself. Between humbling (and hilarious) episodes behind the wheel, Mosler reads about the taxi drivers in Berlin, who allegedly know as much about Nietzsche as they do about sausage. Intrigued, she travels to the German capital, where she develops a passion for the city, its restlessness, its changing flavors, and a certain fellow cab driver who shares her love of the road.

With her vivid descriptions of places and people and food, Mosler has given us a beguiling book that speaks to the beauty of chance encounters and the pleasures of not always knowing your destination.

Newport by Jill Morrow

Anyone who has been to Newport, Rhode Island has seen the opulent magnificence of the summer homes there. But even the staggering wealth of the inhabitants could not shield them from death, not from natural causes or those resulting from the Great War or the Influenza pandemic of 1918. With so many people in the country reeling from the loss of loved ones, spiritualism, contacting the dead from beyond the grave, gained wide-spread acceptance. Some of the mediums were charlatans preying on a grieving population while others might have been sincere in their desire to help the living. Jill Morrow's intriguing novel, Newport, is grounded very much in this decadent Roaring Twenties milieu of riches, loss, skepticism, and the spirit world and its adherents.

Adrian De la Noye is a lawyer with wealthy clients. He and his young, impressionable associate, Jim Reid, are headed to Newport to revise the will of one of the wealthiest, Bennett Chapman, in advance of his upcoming second marriage. But Chapman's rather unpleasant grown children, Nicholas and Chloe, are convinced he's being scammed and want to prevent their future stepmother from getting her hands on their father's fortune. When Adrian discovers that the prospective bride is Catherine Walsh, a woman he once knew with whom he shares a long past history, and that Chapman is certain that his late wife, speaking through Catherine's niece Amy, a medium, has chosen her as Bennett's next wife, he must get to the bottom of the potentially delicate situation and determine whether Chapman is being taken for a ride or whether Catherine and Amy are above board. As Adrian and Jim participate in the séances to call the late Mrs. Chapman, they are each in turn convinced that Amy Walsh is in fact a legitimate medium and that the truths she exposes do come from the beyond becoming as ensnared in the slowly tightening web as anyone.

Morrow does a good job twisting and turning her plot, keeping the reader guessing almost as much as her characters. The eventual revelations and unwinding of the mystery behind Catherine and Amy unmasks the time's terrible disparity between classes, the ease of privilege and the helplessness of the underclass, and the idea of restitution and right. Although this is not a traditional ghost story, the thread of the supernatural weaves throughout the entire story, alternately laced with both skepticism and legitimacy, echoing the way manifestations of the spirit world were viewed at the time. The character of Catherine was very contained but Morrow added just enough of her emotions to allow the reader to question of her motives, flip-flopping between believing that she was an opportunist and that she was honest many times as the tale unwound. Adrian as a character also keeps his cards very close to his chest, not revealing all of his knowledge at one time, patiently waiting to see how much he will be required to expose. The story starts off seeming to head in one way but as the tension rises and the second storyline is added, it heads in a completely different direction. A quick and spell-binding read, the novel offers readers both romance and suspense in its fascinating historical setting.

For more information about Jill Morrow and the book, check out her website, like her Facebook page or follow her on Twitter. Takes a look at the book's Goodreads page, follow the rest of the blog tour, or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of the book for review.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme has been hosted by Sheila at Book Journey and I hope will be again one day.

Books I completed this past week are:

Migratory Animals by Mary Helen Specht
Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Secrets of a Charmed Life by Susan Meissner

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

The Door by Magda Szabo
Love Maps by Eliza Factor Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson
Girl in Glass by Deanna Fei

Reviews posted this week:

It's You by Jane Porter

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

The Surfacing by Cormac James
The Secret Wisdom of the Earth by Christopher Scotton
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
George's Grand Tour by Caroline Vermalle
Washing the Dead by Michelle Brafman
Sweet Salt Air by Barbara Delinsky
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League by Jonathan Odell
Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim
Making Nice by Matt Sumell
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
Maybe In Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Spinster by Kate Bolick
Newport by Jill Morrow
Migratory Animals by Mary Helen Specht
Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Secrets of a Charmed Life by Susan Meissner

Monday Mailbox

This past week's mailbox arrivals:

The Tell-Tale Heart by Jill Dawson came from Harper Perennial.

I've already reviewed this one here.

Orphan #8 by Kim van Alkemade came from William Morrow.

A woman disfigured as a result of medical experiments when she was a child in an orphanage comes to be the nurse in charge of the elderly doctor who once conducted those experiments. This novel based on a true story promises to be an outrage and a heartbreaker.

Migratory Animals by Mary Helen Specht came from Harper Perennial.

I love stories that center on college friends and the ways in which their lives have changed and continue to intersect once they are through with school so this tale of a woman who has returned home from West Africa, leaving her fiance behind, and finds herself surrounded by college friends whose lives have all gone on in ways she cannot imagine intrigues me no end.

Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg came from Scout Press.

How can you not want to read a book that starts with a woman losing her entire family on the eve of her daughter's wedding? I can't wait to see how all the people touched by this tragedy, and the main character in particular, comes out changed by the terrible events.

If you want to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.