Waiting on Wednesday

This meme was 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. I'm choosing to continue the tradition even though she has stopped.

The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo.

The book is being released by Doubleday on June 25, 2019.

The book's jacket copy says: When Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, they are blithely ignorant of all that's to come. By 2016, their four radically different daughters are each in a state of unrest: Wendy, widowed young, soothes herself with booze and younger men; Violet, a litigator-turned-stay-at-home-mom, battles anxiety and self-doubt when the darkest part of her past resurfaces; Liza, a neurotic and newly tenured professor, finds herself pregnant with a baby she's not sure she wants by a man she's not sure she loves; and Grace, the dawdling youngest daughter, begins living a lie that no one in her family even suspects. Above it all, the daughters share the lingering fear that they will never find a love quite like their parents'.

As the novel moves through the tumultuous year following the arrival of Jonah Bendt--given up by one of the daughters in a closed adoption fifteen years before--we are shown the rich and varied tapestry of the Sorensons' past: years marred by adolescence, infidelity, and resentment, but also the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile.

Spanning nearly half a century, and set against the quintessential American backdrop of Chicago and its prospering suburbs, Lombardo's debut explores the triumphs and burdens of love, the fraught tethers of parenthood and sisterhood, and the baffling mixture of affection, abhorrence, resistance, and submission we feel for those closest to us. In painting this luminous portrait of a family's becoming, Lombardo joins the ranks of writers such as Celeste Ng, Elizabeth Strout, and Jonathan Franzen as visionary chroniclers of our modern lives.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

I am in the middle of a streak of picking up and putting down a lot of books. :-( This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this week are:

Waisted by Randy Susan Meyers
The Paris Orphan by Natasha Lester
Educated by Tara Westover
The Desert Sky Before Us by Anne Valente

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Smoke by Dan Vyleta
Coco Chanel by Lisa Chaney
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas
The Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo Fresan
A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon
The Confessions of Young Nero by Margaret George
A Moveable Feast edited by Don George
The Atlas of Reds and Blues by Devi S. Laskar
Speaking of Summer by Kalisha Buckhannon
Breaking the Ocean by Annahid Dashtgard
The Current by Tim Johnston
Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery by John Gregory Brown
Searching for Sylvie Lee by Jean Kwok
Oval by Elvia Wilk
The Girls at 17 Swann Street by Yara Zgheib
Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane

Reviews posted this week:

Waisted by Randy Susan Meyers
The Desert Sky Before Us by Anne Valente

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

The Magnetic Girl by Jessica Handle
Oh, Tama! by Mieko Kanai
The Red Address Book by Sofia Lundberg
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
Exposure by Jean-Philippe Blondel
Here I Am! by Pauline Holdstock
All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung
Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Golden Samovar by Olga Wojtas
Ways to Hide in Winter by Sarah St. Vincent
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
The Archive of Alternate Endings by Lindsey Drager
Granny’s Got a Gun by Harper Lin
White Elephant by Julie Langsdorf
At Briarwood School for Girls by Michael Knight
The Optimistic Decade by Heather Abel
All Ships Follow Me by Mieke Eerkens
Like This Afternoon Forever by Jaime Manrique
Gravity Well by Melanie Joosten
Motherhood So White by Nefertiti Austin
America's First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Dear Baba by Maryam Rafiee
Saint Everywhere by Mary Lea Carroll
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Tonic and Balm by Stephanie Allen
Black Light by Kimberly King Parsons
In the Shadow of Wolves by Alvydas Slepikas
The Queen of Hearts by Kimmery Martin
CinderGirl by Christina Meredith
The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones
The Chelsea Girls by Fiona Davis
Autopsy of a Boring Wife by Marie-Renee Lavoie
The Fragments by Toni Jordan
The Question Authority by Rachel Cline
The Plaza by Julie Satow
The Lonely Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya
Portugal by Cyril Pedrosa
To Keep the Sun Alive by Rabeah Ghaffari
Haben by Haben Girma
The Paris Orphan by Natasha Lester
Educated by Tara Westover

Monday Mailbox

Just one again this week. This past week's mailbox arrival:

The Summer Country by Lauren Willig came from TLC Book Tours and William Morrow for a blog tour.

About the poor cousin, an English vicar's daughter, who inherits a ruined plantation in Barbados from her grandfather in 1854, this sounds like it will be completely lush and atmospheric and I can't wait!

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: My annual summer reading list

Since tomorrow marks the unofficial start of summer, it's time for me to put together my annual summer reading list again. Go ahead and weigh in if you've read any of these or if they are on your own summer reading list. And by all means, feel free to add to my list if I've missed a great one. I never get through the entire list and I do end up reading things that aren't on this original list so it's always interesting to see what the final product ends up looking like.

Southernmost by Silas House
The Summer Country by Lauren Willig
The Islanders by Meg Mitchell Moore
The Great Unexpected by Dan Mooney
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Vacationland by Sarah Stonich
The Lost Vintage by Ann Mah
The Accidentals by Minrose Gwin
A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park
The Chocolate Maker’s Wife by Karen Brooks
The Lost Daughter by Gill Paul
Death of a Rainmaker by Laurie Lowenstein
The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland
An Afterlife by Frances Bartkowski
Something Like Breathing by Angela Readman
Three Ways to Disappear by Katy Yocom
Tacoma Stories by Richard Wiley
Broken Wing by David Budbill
The Dishwasher by Stephane Larue
Man with a Seagull on His Head by Harriet Paige
In West Mills by De'Shawn Charles Winslow
The Rapture Index by Molly Reid
River People by Margaret Lukas
Retablos by Octavio Solis
Wait It Gets Worse by Lydia Slaby
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
No Good Asking by Fran Kimmel
Trolls by Stefan Spjut
Being Various edited by Lucy Caldwell
Vintage 1954 by Antoine Laurain
The Paper Wasp by Lauren Acampora
The Affairs of the Falcons by Melissa Rivero
The Peacock Summer by Hannah Richell
Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Unfurled by Michelle Bailat-Jones
The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr by Susan Holloway Scott
Tomorrow’s Bread by Anna Jean Mayhew
The Abolitionist’s Daughter by Diane C. McPhail
The Guest Book by Sarah Blake
Brown White Black by Nishta J. Mehra
Walking to the End of the World by Beth Jusino
Zuleikha by Guzel Yakhina
The Last Year of the War by Susan Meissner
Love You Hard by Abby Maslin
The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo
The Last Ocean by Nicci Gerrard
Lights All Night Long by Lydia Fitzpatrick
Sugar Land by Tammy Lynne Stoner
We Hope for Better Things by Erin Bartels
The Lake on Fire by Rosellen Brown
Questions I Am Asked About the Holocaust by Hedi Fried
Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner
The Tubman Command by Elizabeth Cobb
Flowers Over the Inferno by Ilaria Tuti
The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt by Andrea Bobotis
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michelle Richardson
Bedside Manners by Heather Frimmer
Mother India by Tova Reich
Laurentian Divide by Sarah Stonich
A Catalogue of Small Pains by Meghan L. Dowling
A Dream and a Chisel by Angela Gregory and Nancy L. Penrose
Nima by Adam Popescu
The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall
The Ticking Heart by Andrew Kaufman
Congratulations! Who Are You Again by Harrison Scott Key
The Unbreakables by Lisa Barr
All Manner of Things by Susie Finkbeiner

And of course, I'd like to finish all the books I have started and set aside but I'll consider them bonuses since I have so many others on the list above that I really do need to read.