It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

I thought I was doing so well with extra reviews but then I read about a thousand books this week and my needs to be reviewed list grew anyway! This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past week are:

Aunt Dimity and the Summer King by Nancy Atherton
The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg
Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday by Debbie Graber
Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell
An Improper Arrangement by Kasey Michaels
Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll
The Boy Is Back by Meg Cabot

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

You Have Never Been Here by Mary Rickert
West With the Night by Beryl Markham
A Well-Made Bed by Abby Frucht and Laurie Alberts
Riverine by Angela Palm
The Other Woman by Therese Bohman
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer
The Lake House by Kate Morton
Exposure by Helen Dunmore
I Will Find You by Joanna Connors
The Veins of the Ocean by Patricia Engel
Eliza Waite by Ashley E. Sweeney
Shelter by Jung Yun
The Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan
The Edge of Lost by Kristina McMorris
A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Last Time She Saw Him by Jane Haseldine
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
I Hid My Voice by Parinoush Saniee
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Different Kind of Daughter by Maria Toorpakai
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti

Reviews posted this week:

Just Fine With Caroline by Annie England Noblin
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Put a Ring on It by Beth Kendrick
Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast

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

One Perfect Summer by Paige Toon
The Things We Keep by Sally Hepworth
The Sisters of Versailles by Sally Christie The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel by Maureen Lindley
Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson
American Housewife by Helen Ellis
The Two-Family House by Lynda Cohen Loigman
The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty
Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton
Closer All the Time by Jim Nichols
The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett
Over the Plain Houses by Julia Franks
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
Forsaken by Ross Howell Jr.
The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman
The Spice Box Letters by Eve Makis
Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman
A Very Special Year by Thomas Montasser
Specimen by Irina Kovalyova
One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Telling by Zoe Zolbrod
The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera
The Boy Who Speaks in Numbers by Mike Masilamani
Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave
Every Exquisite Thing by Matthew Quick
What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas
After the Dam by Amy Hassinger
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
Umami by Laia Jufresa
The Education of a Poker Player by James McManus
Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse
Mrs. Engels by Gavin McCrea
The Iceberg by Marion Coutts
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Remarkable by Dinah Cox
Miss Jane by Brad Watson
The Inland Sea by Donald Ritchie
The Unseen World by Liz Moore
The Silver Spoon by Kansuke Naka
Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett
The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine by Alex Brunkhorst
The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith
The Last Weynfeldt by Martin Suter
The Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum
Bottomland by Michelle Hoover
This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance by Jonathan Evison
The Lake by Perrine Leblanc
Orhan's Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian
A Girl From Yamhill by Beverly Cleary
If You Left by Ashley Norton
The Heart You Carry Home by Jennifer Miller
And Again by Jessica Chiarella
Man by Kim Thuy
The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George
The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood
The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende
The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora
A Good American by Alex George
Bertrand Court by Michelle Brafman
When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams
The Winter War by Philip Teir
This Side of Providence by Sally M. Harper
Lost and Found by Brooke Davis
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling
Course Correction by Ginny Gilder
Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya
300 Days of Sun by Deborah Lawrenson
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan
The Tsar of Love of Techno by Anthony Marra
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick
The Book of Harlan by Bernice L. McFadden
Hey Harry, Hey Matilda by Rachel Hulin
The Measure of Darkness by Liam Durcan
Finding Fraser by KC Dyer
A Mother's Reckoning by Sue Klebold
The Drone Eats With Me by Atef Abu Saif
Heat and Light by Jennifer Haigh
Moo by Sharon Creech
Dear Reader by Paul Fournel
Hotel Angeline by 36 authors
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen 83 1/4 Years Old by Anonymous
Xenophobe's Guide to the English by Antony Miall and David Milsted
No. 4 Imperial Lane by Jonathan Weisman
Lord Roworth's Reward by Carola Dunn
Violation by Sallie Tisdale
Fall of Poppies by a collection of authors
A Fall of Marigolds by Susan Meissner
Sitting in Bars With Cake by Audrey Schulman
Plus One by Christopher Noxon
Aunt Dimity and the Summer King by Nancy Atherton
The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg
Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday by Debbie Graber
Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell
An Improper Arrangement by Kasey Michaels
Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll
The Boy Is Back by Meg Cabot

Monday Mailbox

This past week's mailbox arrivals:

Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Ed Tarkington came from Algonquin Paperbacks.

Centered on a boy who once hero worshiped his older brother who has since disappeared, this small town Southern novel with a murder mystery both makes me nervous and intrigues me in equal measure.

Victoria by Daisy Goodwin came from St. Martin's Press.

I really enjoyed both The American Heiress and The Fortune Hunter by Goodwin so this one about Queen Victoria looks like it will be amazing.

Flight Path by Hannah Palmer came from Hub City Press.

This memoir written by a woman who finds that her three childhood homes have all been razed to make room for Atlanta's Hartsfield airport expansions over the years sounds completely intriguing, especially to someone whose childhood houses might still be standing but are so scattered across the country that ever visiting that piece of my history is unlikely. I can't wait to dive into this one.

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: Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast

Aging and dying are topics we don't typically address if we can help it. Very few people want to acknowledge their mortality before they are forced to. I don't know the statistic offhand but the number of people who don't have wills is pretty staggering. There are likely countless reasons why not but one that certainly can't be dismissed is that a will forces people to look their own ultimate end directly in the face. We're a culture that doesn't even like to use the word "died." Instead we say we "lost" someone or that they "passed" to cushion the reality. If we are uncomfortable with death, we are at least as uncomfortable with aging, especially extreme aging. We avoid all of the unpleasant realities of elderly and failing bodies. Once people are no longer spry and fit, they disappear from our advertisements and our sight. To find a book that addresses these usually hidden topics, and to do it with openness and honesty is unusual. That it is a graphic memoir is perhaps even more unusual. Roz Chast's Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is just that book though, a no-holds-barred look at Chast's experience caring for her aging parents as they went from their eighties into their nineties and about the parent/child relationship that dictated so much of how they viewed each other and mortality.

New Yorker cartoonist Chast has drawn and written the story of her parents' aging. She looks honestly at the indignities of growing older and at the ways that watching her parents age makes her re-examine her feelings for them, her memories of a strained only childhood, and the changes that the inevitable decline causes, both for her and for Elizabeth and George. She doesn't shy away from the universal difficulties so many face as they age, physically, mentally, emotionally, but she also doesn't shy away from an examination of her own feelings about caring for elderly parents and the generally undiscussed aspects of doing.  The fact that her parents' aging doesn't change the fact of her sometimes tough, sometimes contentious relationship with them (and specifically her mother) is also well on display. Combining comics and prose here often highlights the black humor involved in the end stages of life and the fact that if you didn't laugh, you'd cry many a time. She chronicles Elizabeth and George's reluctance to discuss death or to acknowledge their reduced abilities, their fierce attempt to hold onto their independence, and their eventual, unavoidable decline into dementia and physical frailty. It's tough subject matter indeed.

The memoir is honest, sometimes brutally honest in ways that feel intrusive. The photographs of her parents' apartment after they leave it for assisted living are unspeakably sad although Chast seems to be trying for a levity with them by highlighting the ancient and long discontinued products in them. Her frustration with her parents comes through the story loud and clear and I do appreciate that she hasn't turned them into undeserved saints by virtue of their deaths but sometimes it does feel as if she goes too far in revealing them in all of their truth. Although the exact situations she faces are hers and her parents' alone, the general feel of the memoir will certainly be relatable for many caring for their own parent or parents. I have to admit that I am not a fan of the graphic format, feeling pulled between pictures and words, never allowing me to fully engage in one or the other and this memoir hasn't changed my mind. For me, they do not compliment each other entirely, instead leaving me feeling that the exclusion of one or the other would allow the author to go deeper into the chosen medium rather than splitting the difference between the two. Then again, in such a difficult book, perhaps going deeper would have been a mistake that magnified the things I already had trouble with. I watched my mother experience much of what is portrayed here when she cared for my grandmother but I never doubted that there was a deep and abiding love between them no matter what, a feeling I didn't see enough evidence of in this.  This is an unflinching look at the way we avoid the end of life, the reality and weight of it, and how we all finally do have to deal with it no matter how unpleasant it might be.

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

Review: Put a Ring on It by Beth Kendrick

Sometimes it's the little things that send you, or someone else, right over the edge. And sometimes that edge is one you end up not wanting to climb back up onto, not that you realize it to start with. Beth Kendrick's third novel in the Black Dog Bay series, Put a Ring on It, opens with just such an edge.

Brighton's fiance has asked for the engagement ring back. For him, their argument about the efficiency of the zipper merge during their morning commute was the last straw. Feigning sickness to leave work once she realizes that Colin isn't going to call and repair things between them, Brighton, a buttoned up insurance actuary who carefully weighs the pros and cons of everything, calls an old friend and invites herself to stay. What she doesn't know is that her old friend has just relocated to Black Dog Bay, Delaware, the break-up and broken hearts capital of the country. Once there, Brighton acts impulsively and also rediscovers her creative side through her love for jewelry design. First, she meets Jake Sorensen, who would be the perfect rebound relationship.  He'd be perfect, except they actually end up married after former fiance Colin calls Brighton and tells her that he's married a woman he just met. Her spontaneous revenge marriage to Jake is just tit for tat. And in her case, Jake knows the score. They'll stay married for two weeks to allow Brighton to cut loose in ways she never dreamed (not too loose though as two weeks is all the vacation time she has from work). But what if the life she's living is the one she wants to keep? And what if the cons she uncharacteristically didn't take time to consider could derail this happiness?

Although this novel is the third in the series, it stands alone just fine. Characters from previous books do make appearances but not knowing their back stories is no detriment to the reader. Brighton has allowed fear to dictate who she's become in life. She's too financially scared to do what she loves and feed her creative side and so she subsumes all of that to the boring and measured practicality of being an actuary. Going to Black Dog Bay and acting so incredibly out of character allows her to reconnect with the person she's hidden inside herself for so long. Learning who she wants to be and how she wants to live her life brings her happiness as well as insecurity and it is in the acceptance and embracing of that insecurity that she really starts to live. Jake is drawn as a sexy, stoic character whose past history, while not entirely secret, is not mentioned until it threatens the budding relationship he and Brighton are building. It turns out that the pasts that shaped both of them have a very similar base, even if they've reacted to that base in wildly different ways.

As in the previous books in the series, Kendrick has written a frothy, cute romantic story that just happens to have a woman who is finally being empowered to be who she wants to be, one who finds happiness and success and love because she is determined to follow her own heart. This is light and fun escape reading with an ending that won't disappoint.

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.

Am I Alone Here? by Peter Orner. The book is being released by Catapult on November 1, 2016.

Amazon says this about the book: Peter Orner reads and writes wherever he finds himself—in a hospital cafeteria, a canoe in northern Minnesota, the Las Vegas Cafe in Albania, or on a bus in Haiti. Stories have always been his lifeblood, as they are the only way he has been able to make sense of a chaotic life. His father's death, his divorce, an unexpected pregnancy—all are seen, one way or another, through the lens of literature. The result is what Orner calls "a book of unlearned criticism that stumbles into memoir."

Among the writers Orner addresses in these essays are Isaac Babel and Zora Neale Hurston, both of whom told their truths and were silenced; Franz Kafka, who professed loneliness but actually had a far busier social life than Orner; Robert Walser, who spent the last twenty-three years of his life in a Swiss insane asylum, "working" at being crazy; and Juan Rulfo, who practiced silence. Also lauded are Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Yasunari Kawabata, Saul Bellow, Mavis Gallant, John Edgar Wideman, Vaclav Havel, Gina Berriault, William Trevor, and the poet Herbert Morris, about whom almost nothing is known.

Hovering over Am I Alone Here? is Peter Orner's eccentric late father, who he kept at a distance and now mourns. The book is also an elegy for the end of a marriage, as well as a celebration of the possibility of renewal. At once personal and panoramic, Am I Alone Here? conveys the absolutely necessary place of stories in Orner's life, which will inspire readers to return to the essential stories of their own lives.

Review: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Long and short listed for just about every award out there, I picked up Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life and read about 100-150 pages before putting it down for months because I was struggling to keep my eyes open as I read. The continued raves convinced me to give it another go though and this time I pushed on to the end. Now here comes the heresy about this much lauded book: I was bored. There was plenty that should have inspired an emotional response but it didn’t because I never felt any connection with the characters. In fact, I rooted for the end I knew must come and I wanted it to come far sooner than it did.

Be warned that spoilers will follow in the below paragraphs.

Ostensibly the story of four friends who meet in college, one character quickly takes over the narrative. Even to his closest friends, Jude remains an enigma. They only know him from the moment he enters their lives, never sharing any personal information, staying infuriatingly blank. His history is slowly, over the course of the novel, revealed to the reader and it is a terrible, horror filled history indeed. Jude is literally and figuratively crippled by his childhood, and understandably so given the magnitude of wrongs done to him. That these terrible wrongs would define his life forever is certainly believable. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that there was so much else that wasn’t believable. That this secretive and unknowable person should inspire such love and loyalty from close to everyone around him is not quite believable. Only one person in his adulthood treats him as he expects to be treated and that character is drawn so firmly evil that he was a caricature who only exists briefly in the story to reinforce Jude’s unworthiness to himself.  That Jude and all three of his closest friends would be wild successes in their chosen fields, Jude a ruthless attorney, JB an artist of such renown that MOMA wanted one of his paintings, Malcolm a celebrated architect, and Willem a famed actor on both stage and screen, stretches credibility. That one of Jude’s professors feels such a connection to his enigmatic, culinarily skilled student that he and his wife fall in love and welcome Jude into their family is head shaking. That every single grown man that Jude encountered before college was a sexual predator/pedophile and attracted to him, and I'm not just talking about the creepy men that Brother Luke finds for him (yes, he was beautiful and all that but...) and then all but one notable exception after college was practically sainted is a strange and incredibly unlikely dichotomy.

Credibility is not the only thing that stymied me about the book either.  There is scant character development of anyone but Jude and there's not much development of him either as we have to take it on faith that despite his ongoing struggles to feel worthy, he overcame everything to become who he is presented as in his adult life. There's no credible transition from the abused child to the steely and determined lawyer. There's no nuance here; everyone is either/or. Two of the four friends in this life-saving and amazing friendship essentially disappear from the novel for large chunks of time and the friendship itself presents problems. Nothing in Jude's character makes the reader understand how he comes to trust not only these three college friends, but also his doctor and his professor to the extent he does. All of this is just presented as a fait accompli although trust to this extreme would be a serious, hard earned accomplishment in someone with his background. The narrative was overwritten to the point that this reader wished that the story would just get on with it already (and I'm not proud to admit that I just wanted Jude to die already because I was tired of him--clearly not the visceral reaction Yanagihara was going for). The story felt endless and the reoccurring scenes of sexual abuse started to feel as if they were included for a prurient reaction rather than to add depth to the story. Even Jude's understandable despair got old in this drawn out telling. I know every prize committee on the planet thought it was amazing. I thought it was an exercise in lengthy tedium. In short, I just didn’t get it. And it was a very long commitment to come away feeling this way about it. I wasn’t emotionally drained by the story, I was disappointed, a far less welcome feeling after 800 plus pages.

Review: Just Fine with Caroline by Annie England Noblin

When the weather starts cooling off, I find that I look forward to curling up with lighter books. Maybe it counteracts the visual evidence that another year is heading to a close. It slows the dying of the season somehow. Perfect for this mood, are books set in small towns with quirky characters. Annie England Noblin's newest book, Just Fine with Caroline, is the first in the Cold River novel series and it has just the right heartwarming small town romantic feel that counters the sadness of the falling leaves so very well.

Caroline gave up getting a college degree and a teaching certificate to go back home to Cold River, a small town tucked in the Missouri Ozarks, when her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. She has been mostly happy living in the town she grew up in, running her family's bait shack business, hanging out with her best friend Court, and helping her father, the local doctor, look after her mom. As the title suggests, she's doing just fine. When Noah Cranwell, the youngest member of the rather notorious local Cranwell family, comes back to town to start up a business across from Caroline's bait shack, Caroline is intrigued by the very sexy man. Noah's mother took him away to New Jersey when he was just five so he's a bit of an enigma in this small town where everyone knows everyone else's life story. But as Caroline and Noah learn, there are still secrets here, hurtful secrets that challenge how Caroline's coping with everything.

The major plot line is that of Caroline and Noah's growing relationship but there are several other secondary threads that deal with Caroline's kooky cousin Ava Dawn, who is trying to finally escape from her abusive marriage, with Caroline's best friend Court and the source of his sadness, with the sorrow of Alzheimer's and what it does to a family, and with loss of many different sorts. Despite these heavy topics, the characters populating the pages are quirky and rather endearing. None of the secrets they are hiding (nor the one that Caroline eventually uncovers) is terribly surprising but they could just be the seeds for future books in the series where they'll receive more in-depth treatment. The immediate attraction between Caroline and Noah was believable but they were all over each other much sooner than the character development would have suggested. As a whole though, this was an easy, light read and I reckon it was sweet story (a reference lost on you if you haven't read the book).

For more information about Annie England Noblin and the book, like her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter. Also, check out the book's Good Reads 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 HarperCollins for sending me a copy of this book to review.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past week are:

A Fall of Marigolds by Susan Meissner
Sitting in Bars With Cake by Audrey Schulman
Plus One by Christopher Noxon
Just Fine With Caroline by Annie England Noblin
Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

You Have Never Been Here by Mary Rickert
West With the Night by Beryl Markham
A Well-Made Bed by Abby Frucht and Laurie Alberts
Riverine by Angela Palm
The Other Woman by Therese Bohman
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer
Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll
The Lake House by Kate Morton
Exposure by Helen Dunmore
I Will Find You by Joanna Connors
The Veins of the Ocean by Patricia Engel
Eliza Waite by Ashley E. Sweeney
Shelter by Jung Yun
The Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan
The Edge of Lost by Kristina McMorris
A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Last Time She Saw Him by Jane Haseldine
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
I Hid My Voice by Parinoush Saniee
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Different Kind of Daughter by Maria Toorpakai
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg

Reviews posted this week:

Mercury by Margot Livesey
Inheriting Edith by Zoe Fishman

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

Put a Ring on It by Beth Kendrick
One Perfect Summer by Paige Toon
The Things We Keep by Sally Hepworth
The Sisters of Versailles by Sally Christie The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel by Maureen Lindley
Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson
American Housewife by Helen Ellis
The Two-Family House by Lynda Cohen Loigman
The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty
Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton
Closer All the Time by Jim Nichols
The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett
Over the Plain Houses by Julia Franks
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
Forsaken by Ross Howell Jr.
The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman
The Spice Box Letters by Eve Makis
Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman
A Very Special Year by Thomas Montasser
Specimen by Irina Kovalyova
One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Telling by Zoe Zolbrod
The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera
The Boy Who Speaks in Numbers by Mike Masilamani
Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave
Every Exquisite Thing by Matthew Quick
What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas
After the Dam by Amy Hassinger
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
Umami by Laia Jufresa
The Education of a Poker Player by James McManus
Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse
Mrs. Engels by Gavin McCrea
The Iceberg by Marion Coutts
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Remarkable by Dinah Cox
Miss Jane by Brad Watson
The Inland Sea by Donald Ritchie
The Unseen World by Liz Moore
The Silver Spoon by Kansuke Naka
Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett
The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine by Alex Brunkhorst
The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith
The Last Weynfeldt by Martin Suter
The Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum
Bottomland by Michelle Hoover
This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance by Jonathan Evison
The Lake by Perrine Leblanc
Orhan's Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian
A Girl From Yamhill by Beverly Cleary
If You Left by Ashley Norton
The Heart You Carry Home by Jennifer Miller
And Again by Jessica Chiarella
Man by Kim Thuy
The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George
The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood
The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende
The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora
A Good American by Alex George
Bertrand Court by Michelle Brafman
When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams
The Winter War by Philip Teir
This Side of Providence by Sally M. Harper
Lost and Found by Brooke Davis
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling
Course Correction by Ginny Gilder
Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya
300 Days of Sun by Deborah Lawrenson
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan
The Tsar of Love of Techno by Anthony Marra
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick
The Book of Harlan by Bernice L. McFadden
Hey Harry, Hey Matilda by Rachel Hulin
The Measure of Darkness by Liam Durcan
Finding Fraser by KC Dyer
A Mother's Reckoning by Sue Klebold
The Drone Eats With Me by Atef Abu Saif
Heat and Light by Jennifer Haigh
Moo by Sharon Creech
Dear Reader by Paul Fournel
Hotel Angeline by 36 authors
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen 83 1/4 Years Old by Anonymous
Xenophobe's Guide to the English by Antony Miall and David Milsted
No. 4 Imperial Lane by Jonathan Weisman
Lord Roworth's Reward by Carola Dunn
Violation by Sallie Tisdale
Fall of Poppies by a collection of authors
A Fall of Marigolds by Susan Meissner
Sitting in Bars With Cake by Audrey Schulman
Plus One by Christopher Noxon
Just Fine With Caroline by Annie England Noblin
Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast

Review: Inheriting Edith by Zoe Fishman

Maggie is a house cleaner in Manhattan and single mom to a demanding toddler. She's just fine with her life when she finds out that a former client, one time friend, and bestselling author with whom she had a falling out has committed suicide and left her beautiful home in Sag Harbor to Maggie. The house comes with a stipend and everything Maggie needs to live there with two-year old Lucy. It also comes with Edith, Liza's octogenarian mother who has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Mothering a toddler is hard; add in caretaking for a prickly Alzheimer's patient grieving the death of her larger than life, beloved daughter and nothing about this bequest will be easy, especially as the irascible Edith is displeased with the whole set-up. This unlikely trio have to come to detente in order to live together peacefully. When Edith falls and she is even physically reliant on Maggie, detente slowly grows into a genuinely caring familial relationship. Maggie offers to write down Edith's quickly slipping away memories, and revives her own long-shelved interest in writing in the process. More than just reliving memories, both Maggie and Edith look closely at the secrets they've buried, the past hurts they've brushed under the rug, and make the difficult decision to allow the truth to come out so they can live with no regrets. Both Maggie and Edith have to learn about forgiveness and acceptance, which they'll do together.

The premise of the novel, inheriting a failing parent, is an intriguing one for sure and the concept of then creating a manufactured family is very well handled. It is a sweet, feel-good novel even though it touches on quite heavy themes: depression, death, abandonment, and Alzheimer's. Both Maggie and Edith are grappling with lives that have taken unexpected turns but the novel doesn't belabor what could be a much bleaker situation. Esther, Edith's best friend, is a pip and a delight. Lucy, Maggie's two year old daughter, is definitely in the throes of terrible two-hood and she is surprisingly verbal for a child her age. Sometimes her tantrums overwhelm the rest of the story but that does serve to show how difficult it is for Maggie as a part of the sandwich generation (no matter that Edith is not her own aging parent). The story line with the kindly Sam as a potential love interest for Maggie doesn't really come to fruition and stalls the tale out a bit. Although it is Liza's suicide, and therefore her absence, that sets the story in motion, more of her big personality would have been a nice addition to either Maggie or Edith's reminiscences. Inheriting Edith is over all an easy and enjoyable read, a heartwarming look at caring, love, forgiveness, and building a family even in the wake of terrible loss.

For more information about Zoe Fishman and the book, check out her website, like her on Facebook, or follow her on Twitter. Also, check out the book's Good Reads 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 HarperCollins 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.

The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon. The book is being released by Delacourt Press on November 1, 2016.

Amazon says this about the book: Natasha: I’m a girl who believes in science and facts. Not fate. Not destiny. Or dreams that will never come true. I’m definitely not the kind of girl who meets a cute boy on a crowded New York City street and falls in love with him. Not when my family is twelve hours away from being deported to Jamaica. Falling in love with him won’t be my story.

Daniel: I’ve always been the good son, the good student, living up to my parents’ high expectations. Never the poet. Or the dreamer. But when I see her, I forget about all that. Something about Natasha makes me think that fate has something much more extraordinary in store—for both of us.

The Universe: Every moment in our lives has brought us to this single moment. A million futures lie before us. Which one will come true?

Review: Mercury by Margot Livesey

When you get married and have kids, sometimes you have to put other things about your life on the back burner, at least in the early years when babies are so overwhelmingly needy. This can be incredibly difficult, especially when the thing you've sidelined is something that once brought you much joy or even defined a major piece of yourself. And if you come to find the time to pursue that passion once again, it can be that much more intense than it was before you knew what life was like without it. The trick is in the balancing of the life you've chosen and the newly rediscovered dream, not allowing one to subsume the other. This struggle and the way it changes the dynamic of the family involved is at the heart of Margot Livesey's newest novel, Mercury.

Donald and Viv Stevenson have what looks to be an enviable marriage. They have two children and jobs they enjoy well enough. Their personalities balance each other out and they hold the same liberal beliefs, working from the same moral stance. But in the past year, Donald has been felled by grief after the death of his father and he seems to have insulated himself from further emotion. While Donald is at an emotional remove from Viv and the kids, he is missing a complete sea change in his wife. Having given up a lucrative job in finance to work at her best friend's barn and riding school, Viv is happy working with young riders until a new horse comes to board at Windy Hill. Mercury, a beautiful thoroughbred, is an exceptional horse and he reawakens Viv's long dormant desire to compete. Slowly she is drawn into more and more obsessive and troubling behaviour around this horse that is not hers.

Told in three sections, with Donald's narrative framing Viv's, this story of a foundering marriage, obsession, omissions, and shifting perspectives is an interesting one. Donald is by far the more sympathetic character. He is an optometrist whose vision certainly isn't clear but he never betrays his base character. His worst sin is in missing the transformation of his wife. In fact, he has a long history of not confronting unpleasantness and waffling over decisions in his background, which causes him to take on quite a lot of unearned guilt over the terrible result of Viv's unhealthy obsession and possessiveness. In his narration, he struggles to discover where he has been willfully blind and therefore must take responsibility for missing pivotal moments that could have changed their eventual outcome. Inserted into the middle of his hindsight narration is Viv's section, which is written as if she is telling her version of events to Donald, justifying her actions and laying blame on his emotional unreachability. But it is only in the wake of the shocking happening that she reveals her secrets and her trespasses to his view. And even in the wake of this event, neither of them have any clarity on the moral imperative they face.

The novel is complex with ambiguities and blame, and the theme of sight and blindness is quite obvious throughout the narrative. The tension rises throughout Donald's first section but once the threatened action comes to fruition, the story becomes less alarming and more focused on internal reactions, the question of what is right and why, and whether a marriage gone so far off track can come together again. There is much that is troubling here, both intentionally written that way and for me as a reader. There is an overt political diatribe that could have been more subtly (and therefore effectively) handled and a couple of tangential plot lines had more weight than they deserved.  The ending is unrealistic and rather unsatisfying.  But over all, the novel is a quiet look at the secrets, omissions, and incremental changes in character that result in a marriage that is no longer what it once was and will appeal to those who enjoy reading about non-attention grabbing marriages in crisis or about the small, non-sexual infidelities that can, and do, change the tenor of everything.

For more information about Margot Livesey and the book, check out her website, like her on Facebook, or follow her on Twitter. Also, check out the book's Good Reads 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 HarperCollins for sending me a copy of this book to review.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past week are:

Violation by Sallie Tisdale
Mercury by Margot Livesey
Fall of Poppies by a collection of authors
Inheriting Edith by Zoe Fishman

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

You Have Never Been Here by Mary Rickert
West With the Night by Beryl Markham
A Well-Made Bed by Abby Frucht and Laurie Alberts
Riverine by Angela Palm
The Other Woman by Therese Bohman
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer
Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll
The Lake House by Kate Morton
Exposure by Helen Dunmore
I Will Find You by Joanna Connors
The Veins of the Ocean by Patricia Engel
Eliza Waite by Ashley E. Sweeney
Shelter by Jung Yun
The Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan
The Edge of Lost by Kristina McMorris
A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Last Time She Saw Him by Jane Haseldine
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
I Hid My Voice by Parinoush Saniee
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Different Kind of Daughter by Maria Toorpakai
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Plus One by Christopher Noxon

Reviews posted this week:

News of the World by Paulette Jiles
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

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

Put a Ring on It by Beth Kendrick
One Perfect Summer by Paige Toon
The Things We Keep by Sally Hepworth
The Sisters of Versailles by Sally Christie The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel by Maureen Lindley
Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson
American Housewife by Helen Ellis
The Two-Family House by Lynda Cohen Loigman
The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty
Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton
Closer All the Time by Jim Nichols
The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett
Over the Plain Houses by Julia Franks
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
Forsaken by Ross Howell Jr.
The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman
The Spice Box Letters by Eve Makis
Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman
A Very Special Year by Thomas Montasser
Specimen by Irina Kovalyova
One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Telling by Zoe Zolbrod
The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera
The Boy Who Speaks in Numbers by Mike Masilamani
Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave
Every Exquisite Thing by Matthew Quick
What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas
After the Dam by Amy Hassinger
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
Umami by Laia Jufresa
The Education of a Poker Player by James McManus
Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse
Mrs. Engels by Gavin McCrea
The Iceberg by Marion Coutts
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Remarkable by Dinah Cox
Miss Jane by Brad Watson
The Inland Sea by Donald Ritchie
The Unseen World by Liz Moore
The Silver Spoon by Kansuke Naka
Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett
The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine by Alex Brunkhorst
The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith
The Last Weynfeldt by Martin Suter
The Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum
Bottomland by Michelle Hoover
This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance by Jonathan Evison
The Lake by Perrine Leblanc
Orhan's Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian
A Girl From Yamhill by Beverly Cleary
If You Left by Ashley Norton
The Heart You Carry Home by Jennifer Miller
And Again by Jessica Chiarella
Man by Kim Thuy
The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George
The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood
The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende
The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora
A Good American by Alex George
Bertrand Court by Michelle Brafman
When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams
The Winter War by Philip Teir
This Side of Providence by Sally M. Harper
Lost and Found by Brooke Davis
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling
Course Correction by Ginny Gilder
Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya
300 Days of Sun by Deborah Lawrenson
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan
The Tsar of Love of Techno by Anthony Marra
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick
The Book of Harlan by Bernice L. McFadden
Hey Harry, Hey Matilda by Rachel Hulin
The Measure of Darkness by Liam Durcan
Finding Fraser by KC Dyer
A Mother's Reckoning by Sue Klebold
The Drone Eats With Me by Atef Abu Saif
Heat and Light by Jennifer Haigh
Moo by Sharon Creech
Dear Reader by Paul Fournel
Hotel Angeline by 36 authors
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen 83 1/4 Years Old by Anonymous
Xenophobe's Guide to the English by Antony Miall and David Milsted
No. 4 Imperial Lane by Jonathan Weisman
Lord Roworth's Reward by Carola Dunn
Violation by Sallie Tisdale
Mercury by Margot Livesey
Fall of Poppies by a collection of authors
Inheriting Edith by Zoe Fishman

Review: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

We used to have a pair of African dwarf frogs on the counter in the kitchen. I spent countless hours watching them drift up and down in their aquatic home. I worried when the heavier frog seemed to be getting all of the food I put in the tank. (I had reason to worry, as it turned out, since Mossy ended up starving to death.) Even down to one frog, I was mesmerized by the tiny creature. And I was truly sad when Senor Flipper followed his fellow frog to the great aquarium in the sky. I loved watching the frogs just go about their daily business. So perhaps it isn't unusual that I found Elisabeth Tova Bailey's book about the wild snail she watched from her bedside as she was ill and bedridden to be a beautiful, completely engrossing, and meditative read.

After a trip abroad, Bailey contracted a terrible illness that almost killed her. In fact, it kept her bedridden for more than a decade. In that time, she had to learn to live the very constrained life she was capable of, even as she was robbed of mobility, strength, and everything she understood to be who she was. When a friend, knowing how much she missed the outdoors, brings a tiny wild snail and a small violet plant into Bailey's room, she can't have predicted the outcome. Bailey is fascinated by the snail, watching the small mollusc as it explores its new home, learning about the tiny creature in scientific terms, and uncovering other authors and poets who have, in their turn, been intrigued by and written about snails.

The book is a short one, easily read but it is a true gem for all its brevity, combining the inner life of a thoughtful and careful writer with the simple but elegant outer life of a snail. It is gorgeous, introspective, and quiet. It's filled with fascinating information and lovely passages. It is sustaining in the way that the best writing is and I hope that people who might not think to look at the beauty of a snail's life will in fact find their way to this book.

Thanks to Algonquin books for sending me a copy of this 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 Survivor's Guide to Family Happiness by Maddie Dawson. The book is being released by Lake Union Publishing on October 25, 2016.

Amazon says this about the book: Three women, three lives, and one chance to become a family…whether they want to or not.

Newly orphaned, recently divorced, and semiadrift, Nina Popkin is on a search for her birth mother. She’s spent her life looking into strangers’ faces, fantasizing they’re related to her, and now, at thirty-five, she’s ready for answers.

Meanwhile, the last thing Lindy McIntyre wants is someone like Nina bursting into her life, announcing that they’re sisters and campaigning to track down their mother. She’s too busy with her successful salon, three children, beautiful home, and…oh yes, some pesky little anxiety attacks.

But Nina is determined to reassemble her birth family. Her search turns up Phoebe Mullen, a guarded, hard-talking woman convinced she has nothing to offer. Gradually sharing stories and secrets, the three women make for a messy, unpredictable family that looks nothing like Nina pictured…but may be exactly what she needs. Nina’s moving, ridiculous, tragic, and transcendent journey becomes a love story proving that real family has nothing to do with DNA.

Review: News of the World by Paulette Jiles

We all have images in our heads of the Wild West, gunslingers, and cowboys. All of it is out-sized and iconic But how many of those images grew out of Hollywood movies or TV rather than out of a truth that might be less palatable or slower or not as outrageous? Paulette Jiles' newest novel, News of the World, finds a dreamier, more personal story set in a lawless West that does have a passing resemblance to the one depicted on screens and page but which is also more tempered and truthful feeling.

Captain Jefferson Kidd is a widower whose daughters are grown and gone. He was a soldier and a printer. Now retired from both professions, he's an itinerant news reader traveling through small towns reading articles and bringing news of the outside world to remote places in Texas. When he encounters a good man he knows in one of the towns, he agrees to take on returning a ten year old girl, a captive of the Kiowa for four years, to her aunt and uncle many miles away. The young girl, Johanna, doesn't speak English and has forgotten German. She doesn't remember life before joining her Kiowa family and she desperately wants to be returned to them. As they travel towards the white family she doesn't remember, Johanna and "Kep-dun" come to a fragile trust in each other. Kidd is weary and feeling his age. Johanna is fierce in the stoicism learned from her Native family. But ultimately they come to be each other's family, grandfather and granddaughter, on the long road, offering respect, protection, and concern for each other.

Jiles has written a slow, deliberate, and beautifully written character study here. In this novel, that sometimes has the hypnotic feel of sitting in a saddle and creaking back and forth along a trail, she has drawn a tale that captures the time, just after the Civil War when tensions were high, and the place, a Texas where the law was sometimes markedly absent, so very well. The characters of Captain Kidd and Johanna are spare and yet full. Kidd's careful selection of the news pieces for each stop on their journey to the Leonberger homestead tells not only the news of the world far from the towns they visit but also very much about the towns themselves. Told almost entirely from Kidd's perspective, with only small insights into Johanna's thoughts, the narrative leaves the child fairly enigmatic but gives the reader more insight into the goodness and personality of Kidd. The novel is quite short, muted, and quiet, despite a couple of scary situations, and it maintains a feeling of rightness and inevitable fatedness throughout its pages. It is not a wild western but a measured, almost hushed, lovely piece of work.

For more information about Paulette Jiles and the book, check out her website. Also, check out the book's Good Reads 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 HarperCollins for sending me a copy of this book to review.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past week are:

News of the World by Paulette Jiles
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
No. 4 Imperial Lane by Jonathan Weisman
Lord Roworth's Reward by Carola Dunn

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

You Have Never Been Here by Mary Rickert
West With the Night by Beryl Markham
A Well-Made Bed by Abby Frucht and Laurie Alberts
Riverine by Angela Palm
The Other Woman by Therese Bohman
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer
Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll
The Lake House by Kate Morton
Exposure by Helen Dunmore
I Will Find You by Joanna Connors
The Veins of the Ocean by Patricia Engel
Eliza Waite by Ashley E. Sweeney
Shelter by Jung Yun
The Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan
The Edge of Lost by Kristina McMorris
A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Last Time She Saw Him by Jane Haseldine
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
I Hid My Voice by Parinoush Saniee
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Different Kind of Daughter by Maria Toorpakai
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Violation by Sallie Tisdale

Reviews posted this week:

Echoes of Family by Barbara Claypole White
The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan

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

Put a Ring on It by Beth Kendrick
One Perfect Summer by Paige Toon
The Things We Keep by Sally Hepworth
The Sisters of Versailles by Sally Christie The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel by Maureen Lindley
Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson
American Housewife by Helen Ellis
The Two-Family House by Lynda Cohen Loigman
The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty
Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton
Closer All the Time by Jim Nichols
The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett
Over the Plain Houses by Julia Franks
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
Forsaken by Ross Howell Jr.
The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman
The Spice Box Letters by Eve Makis
Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman
A Very Special Year by Thomas Montasser
Specimen by Irina Kovalyova
One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Telling by Zoe Zolbrod
The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera
The Boy Who Speaks in Numbers by Mike Masilamani
Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave
Every Exquisite Thing by Matthew Quick
What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas
After the Dam by Amy Hassinger
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
Umami by Laia Jufresa
The Education of a Poker Player by James McManus
Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse
Mrs. Engels by Gavin McCrea
The Iceberg by Marion Coutts
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Remarkable by Dinah Cox
Miss Jane by Brad Watson
The Inland Sea by Donald Ritchie
The Unseen World by Liz Moore
The Silver Spoon by Kansuke Naka
Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett
The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine by Alex Brunkhorst
The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith
The Last Weynfeldt by Martin Suter
The Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum
Bottomland by Michelle Hoover
This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance by Jonathan Evison
The Lake by Perrine Leblanc
Orhan's Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian
A Girl From Yamhill by Beverly Cleary
If You Left by Ashley Norton
The Heart You Carry Home by Jennifer Miller
And Again by Jessica Chiarella
Man by Kim Thuy
The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George
The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood
The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende
The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora
A Good American by Alex George
Bertrand Court by Michelle Brafman
When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams
The Winter War by Philip Teir
This Side of Providence by Sally M. Harper
Lost and Found by Brooke Davis
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling
Course Correction by Ginny Gilder
Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya
300 Days of Sun by Deborah Lawrenson
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan
The Tsar of Love of Techno by Anthony Marra
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick
The Book of Harlan by Bernice L. McFadden
Hey Harry, Hey Matilda by Rachel Hulin
The Measure of Darkness by Liam Durcan
Finding Fraser by KC Dyer
A Mother's Reckoning by Sue Klebold
The Drone Eats With Me by Atef Abu Saif
Heat and Light by Jennifer Haigh
Moo by Sharon Creech
Dear Reader by Paul Fournel
Hotel Angeline by 36 authors
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen 83 1/4 Years Old by Anonymous
Xenophobe's Guide to the English by Antony Miall and David Milsted
News of the World by Paulette Jiles
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
No. 4 Imperial Lane by Jonathan Weisman
Lord Roworth's Reward by Carola Dunn

Monday Mailbox

What a pair! Both boots and high heels in my mailbox; love the juxtaposition. This past week's mailbox arrivals:

A Shoe Addict's Christmas by Beth Harbison came from St. Martin's Press.

With a woman locked in a department shoe store after hours and visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, this sounds like it will be light and charming and full of Christmas spirit.

Roughneck Grace by Michael Perry came from LibraryThing Early Reviewers and Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

I have thoroughly enjoyed the other books I've read by Perry and look forward to this collection of brief essays.

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.

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.

Hungry Heart by Jennifer Weiner. The book is being released by Atria Books on October 11, 2016.

Amazon says this about the book: Jennifer Weiner is many things: a bestselling author, a Twitter phenomenon, and an “unlikely feminist enforcer” (The New Yorker). She’s also a mom, a daughter and a sister, a former rower and current clumsy yogini, a wife, a friend, and a reality-TV devotee. In her first essay collection, she takes the raw stuff of her life and spins it into a collection of tales of modern-day womanhood as uproariously funny and moving as the best of Nora Ephron and Tina Fey. Born in Louisiana, raised in Connecticut, educated at Princeton, Jennifer spent years feeling like an outsider (“a Lane Bryant outtake in an Abercrombie & Fitch world”) before finding her people in newsrooms, and her voice as a novelist, activist, and New York Times columnist.

No subject is off-limits in these intimate and honest stories: sex, weight, envy, money, her mother’s coming out of the closet, her estranged father’s death. From lonely adolescence to modern childbirth to hearing her six-year-old daughter say the f-word—fat—for the first time, Jen dives deep into the heart of female experience, with the wit and candor that have endeared her to readers all over the world.

Hilarious and moving, Hungry Heart is about yearning and fulfillment, loss and love, and a woman who searched for her place in the world, and found it as a storyteller.

Review: The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan

All around us library budgets are being cut, hours reduced, staff made redundant. Those who manage to hang onto their jobs are busy in ways that don't mesh with traditional ideas of librarianship; technology and finding ways to be relevant in an age of computers is one of the biggest challenges for libraries of today. So what happens to those old-fashioned (but not necessarily old in age) librarians whose true love is books and helping the right book into the right reader's hand? Where do these folks go when the scope of the library changes so significantly that this is just a small, small portion of the job? In Jenny Colgan's lovely new novel, The Bookshop on the Corner, main character Nina faces this very conundrum when her own library branch is closed and unwilling to pivot away from her focus on books, she loses her job.

Nina is quiet, bookish, and unassertive. She is a fount of knowledge about books but this skill isn't enough to help her make the move to the more technologically focused centralized library. As the move is going on, she must attend training sessions, one of which asks her to look into her heart and figure out what she would do if she wasn't a librarian. The answer surprises her although it doesn't surprise her friend and flatmate, who worries that Nina's ever burgeoning book collection will cause their flat to collapse. It turns out that Nina would like to own a bookshop. Renting premises is impractical and so she sets her heart on a mobile bookshop somewhere that people are in need of books and her skill of connecting people to the right book. When she finds a van online that would be perfect for a mobile bookshop, she hies to rural Scotland to take a chance on her dream. After doubts and road blocks, both internal and external, she lands in Kirrinfief, Scotland, ready to change her life. As she works toward following her dreams and gaining confidence, she finds community and belonging and, embracing actual real life, she starts to live a life outside of the pages of her beloved books.

Nina is a timid mouse of a character who slowly blossoms in the right climate. The secondary characters, Marek, the train conductor/engineer; Lennox, Nina's landlord--a crusty, cynical farmer; Surinder, Nina's best friend from Birmingham who comes to visit; and Ainslee and Ben, the children Nina grows close to in town, are all delightful and appealing.  Each of them is not only a fully fleshed character in their own right but each of them shows the reader a new facet of Nina's personality.  The story is a charming and sweet romance, with books, between townspeople and a welcome outsider, and between Nina and a good man. Although Nina faces some setbacks and disappointments, these are not dwelt upon nor is the reality of the non-book work (accounting and the like) involved in opening a business really mentioned, giving the novel a dreamy, fairy tale feel. The story is a gentle and joyous look at the good in life and it will appeal to fans of whimsical, feel-good tales, those who love books about bookselling, and those for whom a small Scottish village is their idea of heaven. In short, it appeals to someone very much like me!

For more information about Jenny Colgan and the book, check out her website, like her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter. Also, check out the book's Good Reads 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 HarperCollins for sending me a copy of this book to review.

Review: Echoes of Family by Barbara Claypole White

Mental illness is a hard thing. We don't understand enough about it and so we fumble around (with good intentions) trying to support and stabilize people who face a darkness that those of us don't suffer can only guess at. As terrible as these disorders are for those who live with them, they are also terrible for those who love someone living with mental illness. It takes a toll on everyone. Barbara Claypole White shows the effects of bipolar disorder on one woman, the family who loves her, and an old friend she once betrayed in her newest novel, Echoes of Family.

Marianne Stokes runs a successful recording studio in North Carolina with her husband Darius. She started a group called Girls in Motion to help runaway girls find a home in music although she's since passed control of the group to the daughter of her heart (and a former member of the program), Jade. Marianne is a creative and empathetic person. She is also bipolar. After she is involved in an accident that results in a stillbirth, she is driven to go back to the small village in England where she grew up to face the accident in her youth that left her lover and her unborn baby dead and seriously injured her best friend and first love. She tells no one that she is going, leaving Darius and Jade to handle the business and to worry about Marianne's well being and whereabouts.

Initially unable to face the cemetery she feels drawn to visit, Marianne finds herself in the village church being awakened by her long lost best friend, Gabriel, who happens to be the village vicar. Although he hasn't forgiven Marianne for her long ago betrayal, he offers her a place to stay as she faces her demons. What he doesn't know is that Marianne has decided to go off of her meds and this will push his forbearance to the very limits. Meanwhile, Jade and Darius have tracked Marianne down and are trying to do what is best for her but also support Gabriel in his caretaking even as Darius in particular is fighting with his jealousy toward this man who has a long and complicated past with his wife.

As Marianne spirals into a manic phase, the chapters centered on Marianne become more and more frenetic, mimicking the out of control disorder of her very thoughts. Other chapters center on Gabriel, Jade, and Darius and the struggles they face in their own lives and in caring for a Marianne in crisis. Obviously her disorder is a large part of Marianne but there are many other drawings of her personality as well. She wants to protect those she loves from herself and her demons and as a caretaker, she wants to save and nurture those struggling around her even as she needs to heal herself. She carries impossible loads of guilt for the accident so many years ago that cost Simon's life, her unborn baby's life, destroyed her friendship with Gabriel, and drove her to a psychotic break. Never having told all of the details from that night to anyone else, she has been unable to find forgiveness. She is not the only one who needs to finally face up to the truth of that terrible tragedy though. Gabriel too needs to find forgiveness and come to peace.

Although Marianne is the central focus of the novel, the other major players, Gabriel, Jade, and Darius, are all the focus of chapters as well. This helps show the impact that loving someone who is mentally ill has on those around that person, the various different ways people react, and the depth to which they are affected. Marianne is a force of nature, both on and off her medication, and she inspires great loyalty from those around her. Gabriel is a little bit cliched: the attractive vicar who tends his flock (and Marianne) with only occasional apologies to God for not always thinking the best of people. Despite this, he is quite a likable character and towards the end once he starts to face his own demons from that long ago accident, he becomes a much more complete character. Given he is still devastated by Marianne choosing his brother Simon over him, it isn't entirely understandable why he takes Marianne in and wants to protect her after so many years though. Darius isn't all that well fleshed out beyond being a jealous and potentially volatile spouse. And Jade, the constant voice of reason, never quite connected for me. Perhaps, as Darius feared, the story was always the Marianne and Gabriel story for me and the others were rather incidental. This is clearly a sensitive, nuanced, and understanding look at mental illness, bipolar disorder in particular, but it is also about guilt and forgiveness, loss and understanding. It is about the ways that the past shapes all of us, the ways we carry it with us always, and the necessity of coming to peace within ourselves with all of it.

For more information about Barbara Claypole White and the book, check out her website, like her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter. Also, check out the book's Good Reads page, follow the rest of the blog tour, or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

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

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past week are:

The Girl in the Castle by Santa Montefiore
Echoes of Family by Barbara CLaypole White
The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan
The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen 83 1/4 Years Old by Anonymous
Xenophobe's Guide to the English by Antony Miall and David Milsted

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

You Have Never Been Here by Mary Rickert
West With the Night by Beryl Markham
A Well-Made Bed by Abby Frucht and Laurie Alberts
Riverine by Angela Palm
The Other Woman by Therese Bohman
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer
Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll
The Lake House by Kate Morton
Exposure by Helen Dunmore
I Will Find You by Joanna Connors
The Veins of the Ocean by Patricia Engel
Eliza Waite by Ashley E. Sweeney
Shelter by Jung Yun
The Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan
The Edge of Lost by Kristina McMorris
A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Last Time She Saw Him by Jane Haseldine
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
I Hid My Voice by Parinoush Saniee
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Different Kind of Daughter by Maria Toorpakai
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
No. 4 Imperial Lane by Jonathan Weisman

Reviews posted this week:

The Girl in the Castle by Santa Montefiore

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

Put a Ring on It by Beth Kendrick
One Perfect Summer by Paige Toon
The Things We Keep by Sally Hepworth
The Sisters of Versailles by Sally Christie The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel by Maureen Lindley
Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson
American Housewife by Helen Ellis
The Two-Family House by Lynda Cohen Loigman
The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty
Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton
Closer All the Time by Jim Nichols
The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett
Over the Plain Houses by Julia Franks
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
Forsaken by Ross Howell Jr.
The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman
The Spice Box Letters by Eve Makis
Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman
A Very Special Year by Thomas Montasser
Specimen by Irina Kovalyova
One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Telling by Zoe Zolbrod
The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera
The Boy Who Speaks in Numbers by Mike Masilamani
Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave
Every Exquisite Thing by Matthew Quick
What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas
After the Dam by Amy Hassinger
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
Umami by Laia Jufresa
The Education of a Poker Player by James McManus
Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse
Mrs. Engels by Gavin McCrea
The Iceberg by Marion Coutts
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Remarkable by Dinah Cox
Miss Jane by Brad Watson
The Inland Sea by Donald Ritchie
The Unseen World by Liz Moore
The Silver Spoon by Kansuke Naka
Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett
The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine by Alex Brunkhorst
The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith
The Last Weynfeldt by Martin Suter
The Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum
Bottomland by Michelle Hoover
This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance by Jonathan Evison
The Lake by Perrine Leblanc
Orhan's Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian
A Girl From Yamhill by Beverly Cleary
If You Left by Ashley Norton
The Heart You Carry Home by Jennifer Miller
And Again by Jessica Chiarella
Man by Kim Thuy
The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George
The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood
The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende
The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora
A Good American by Alex George
Bertrand Court by Michelle Brafman
When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams
The Winter War by Philip Teir
This Side of Providence by Sally M. Harper
Lost and Found by Brooke Davis
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling
Course Correction by Ginny Gilder
Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya
300 Days of Sun by Deborah Lawrenson
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan
The Tsar of Love of Techno by Anthony Marra
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick
The Book of Harlan by Bernice L. McFadden
Hey Harry, Hey Matilda by Rachel Hulin
The Measure of Darkness by Liam Durcan
Finding Fraser by KC Dyer
A Mother's Reckoning by Sue Klebold
The Drone Eats With Me by Atef Abu Saif
Heat and Light by Jennifer Haigh
Moo by Sharon Creech
Dear Reader by Paul Fournel
Hotel Angeline by 36 authors
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
Echoes of Family by Barbara CLaypole White
The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan
The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen 83 1/4 Years Old by Anonymous
Xenophobe's Guide to the English by Antony Miall and David Milsted

Monday Mailbox

Just one this week but it looks like a good'un. This past week's mailbox arrival:

Next by Stephanie Gangi came from St. Martin's Press.

Although no subtitle is listed on the cover, the one that Amazon assigns to the book pretty much sums up the appeal, "a novel of love, revenge and a ghost who can't let go," doesn't 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: October is National Reading Group Month

October means fall. It's pumpkin patches and brightly colored leaves. It's football games under lights and Halloween trick or treats. It's also National Reading Group Month. DO you know National Reading Group Month? It's an initiative of the Women's National Book Association to "celebrate the joy of shared reading." Each year a carefully curated list of books, called Great Group Reads, is selected to draw attention to some wonderful books that might not otherwise find the book club audiences they deserve. The books are varied in topic and scope. Some are fiction and some are non-fiction. All are well written and will provoke discussion beyond that second glass of wine. In the interest of full disclosure, I have been on the reading selection committee since the inception of the list in 2009 and this year I was also Co-Manager. So I am a bit biased but I think we created a fantastic resource for all sorts of book clubs. In fact, I still recommend many books from past year's lists as well. They really are that good. And now that everything's public, feel free to ask me about any of the books on the list because I'm happy to natter on about them. But now please excuse me while I send the list off to my own book clubs and convince them that they need to read these asap!

2016 Selections

Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett
The Book of Harlan by Bernice L. McFadden
Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman
Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya
The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick
The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary by Atef Abu Saif
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Heat and Light by Jennifer Haigh
The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith
The Measure of Darkness by Liam Durcan
Miss Jane by Brad Watson
A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy by Sue Klebold
Orhan’s Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian
Over the Plain Houses by Julia Franks
The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald
This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison
This Side of Providence by Rachel M. Harper
300 Days of Sun by Deborah Lawrenson
The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories by Anthony Marra
What Comes Next and How to Like It: A Memoir by Abigail Thomas