It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Big reading week again. And per usual, the reviewing didn't keep pace. Story of my life. ;-) This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell
Read Bottom Up by Neel Shah and Sky Chatham
About a Girl by Lindsey Kelk
The Penderwicks in Spring by Jeanne Birdsall

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

A Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon

Reviews posted this week:

The Love Book by Nina Solomon
The Precious One by Marisa de Los Santos
Head Case by Cole Cohen

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

Wide-Open World by John Marshall
Children of the Jacaranda Tree by Sahar Delijani
The Year My Mother Came Back by Alice Eve Cohen
A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell
Read Bottom Up by Neel Shah and Sky Chatham
About a Girl by Lindsey Kelk
The Penderwicks in Spring by Jeanne Birdsall

Monday Mailbox

This past week's mailbox arrivals:

Orhan's Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian came from Algonquin.

I thoroughly enjoy books about family secrets, especially when they have roots in a rich history like this tale of a young man who inherits his grandfather's business but not the family home, which has been left to a stranger in an LA nursing home. I can't wait!

Circling the Sun by Paula McClain came from Ballantine Books.

Out of Africa, Beryl Markham, and the British expats in 1920s Kenya from the author of The Paris Wife, how could this one be anything short of engrossing?

If you'd like 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: Head Case by Cole Cohen

We all have things we do well and things we don't do as well. I am an English and Humanities girl while my sister is a Math and Science girl. This is just the way we are, the way our brains work. When I read about Cole Cohen's inability to tell her right from her left, the way she's spent her whole life getting lost or disoriented, that she has no sense of time, and that she gets math problems wrong in new and unique ways each time she attempts them, among other things, I realized I was reading about a kindred spirit. My own issues with these difficulties are of a much smaller magnitude than hers though, as her memoir, Head Case, about the discovery that she has a large hole in her brain where her parietal lobe should be makes clear. Mine are clearly just quirks, sometimes annoying quirks for sure, but hers is a documented case of complete absence.

All her life Cole Cohen has had trouble with things that other people learn with ease. As a child, her spatial and temporal difficulties were chalked up to a changing list of learning disabilities. But none of these diagnoses were the right one as she discovers when she is on the verge of leaving for graduate school. In an effort to get to the bottom of why she is completely incapable of learning to drive or to handle her own finances, in addition to the other problems she's had to fight to overcome or mitigate with coping strategies for her entire life, Cole submits to many tests but no one is more shocked when an MRI shows that she has a hole the size of a lemon in her brain. If this had been the result of a stroke or an accident, it would likely have rendered her incapacitated, but because it seems to have happened organically, she is spared the otherwise likely devastation, a strange ray of light in an otherwise baffling situation.

The first half of the memoir recounts Cohen's difficulties and the long search through the medical community for answers, the many misdiagnoses and finally the completely astounding correct diagnosis. The second half of this slight book focuses on the way she continues to be impacted, how she feels about all of it, and how she lives her life with the knowledge of her disability. She recognizes the lifelong way in which her disability has driven her sometimes difficult relationship with her parents and sisters, knowing that an inordinate amount of attention has had to be paid to her over the years and will continue to be necessary to help her in those problem areas she'll likely never master. She discusses the series of jobs she has had and the reasons she has struggled to hold onto those jobs. And a large portion of this latter half of the book looks at the on and off romantic relationship Cohen had and how the reality of her situation played out in it as well. The memoir is very introspective but it meanders a bit. Cohen doesn't slip into self-pity about her condition although there is some wistfulness for the easy life she'll never lead. Her story is interesting for its uniqueness but perhaps because it is so unusual as to have no real documentation, it feels a bit repetitive by the end. The amazing thing turns out not to be the hole in Cohen's brain but that she has accomplished all that she has, not least of which is writing this generally readable book.

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

Review: The Precious One by Marisa de los Santos

We are all shaped by our families. We not only learn our traditions and histories from them but we internalize our own self worth from them. Certainly people can overcome what they've learned, but it isn't easy or smooth when something has been so ingrained for so long. In Marisa de los Santos' addicting newest novel, The Precious One, she captures the way in which family molds and shapes a person, for better or worse.

Eustacia Cleary is 35 years old when she wakes up to a phone call from her father. This would not be remarkable except for the fact that the brilliant and cold Wilson Cleary left his family, Taisy, her twin brother Marcus, and their mother, for another woman 17 years prior and has had very little contact with his children ever since, all by his own choice. He's called to tell her he's had a heart attack and to ask her to move into his home with his artistic but seemingly spacey wife, Caro, their 16 year old daughter, Willow, and him so that Taisy can write his life story. Because Taisy makes her living as a very successful ghost writer. Although he couches it in non-emotional terms, Taisy can't resist him, the father whose withheld approval she's ached for her whole life.

But if Wilson has his own reasons for wanting Taisy around, and Caro is perfectly accepting of her stepdaughter's presence, Willow, the doted on, adored, precious daughter, isn't so sure she wants to share her beloved father or the title of daughter. Her world has come crashing down on her since her father's heart attack. Homeschooled by Wilson using an incredibly reductive curriculum of his own design and isolated from other kids her age because of his belief that she is too smart and special for them, Willow is a strange mix of highly intelligent and socially innocent, something that doesn't serve her well when she is enrolled in a local private school while Wilson recuperates. On top of having to navigate the unfamiliar channels of school for the first time, she has to cope with her suspicion over Taisy's sudden and unwanted presence in her life, her fears that her father won't recover, and the fear that she could ever lose his love and approval, something that she is certain has happened to Taisy.

This novel is really about Taisy and Willow coming together, to know each other and to learn what it means to be the others' sister. Each of them have experienced such different families because of Wilson's enormous difference within those families but they still have a lot to teach each other about learning to let go and be happy on their own terms. Even though Taisy has given up everything for her father, she must get past her craving for his approval or she will not be able to reclaim the love she once turned her back on for him. Taisy is an interesting character and her evolution from the young woman so hurt by her father's inexplicable outright rejection to a confident, determined woman who can defy his wishes and dig into his hidden past as a means to understand and forgive him in the present despite the years of happiness he's cost her is a slow and believable one. Willow's character is rather bratty but she's a threatened teenager even if she is certain of being loved. Her complete lack of street smarts and inability to sense danger is frustrating and her hostility to Taisy makes the reader want to shake her. But she's generally a believable, if appallingly naïve, sixteen year old under a lot of stress.

The novel's narrative switches back and forth between first person accounts from Taisy and Willow so the reader is always certain where their respective mental states are. Their voices are incredibly different and easily distinguishable and the gradual change each undergoes, not only with regard to the other but also in terms of their views of the secondary characters, is well detailed. The secondary characters, including acerbic Marcus, flaky but perhaps ultimately triumphant Caro, wary Ben, intense and honest Luka, and flamboyant Trillium come across as charmingly quirky if not always fully developed. The writing is lovely and the emotion is true and deeply felt. This is a warm, touching, and insightful look at learning to live and love for yourself and to find the value in family, both the one you are born into and the one that you create around yourself.

For more information about Marisa de los Santos and the book, take a look at her website, like her Facebook page, follow her on Twitter, or check out 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.

Her Name Is Rose by Christine Breen. The book is being released by St. Martin's Press on April 14, 2015.

Amazon says this about the book: People used to say Iris Bowen was beautiful, what with the wild weave of her red hair, the high cheekbones, and the way she carried herself like a barefoot dancer through the streets of Ranelagh on the outskirts of Dublin city. But that was a lifetime ago.

In a cottage in the west of Ireland, Iris--gardener and mother to an adopted daughter, Rose--is doing her best to carry on after the death of her husband two years before. At the back of her mind is a promise she never intended to keep, until the day she gets a phone call from her doctor.

Meanwhile, nineteen-year-old Rose is a brilliant violinist at the Royal Academy in London, still grieving for her father but relishing her music and life in the city. Excited but nervous, she hums on the way to an important master class, and then suddenly finds herself missing both of her parents when the class ends in disaster.

After the doctor's call, Iris is haunted by the promise she made to her husband--to find Rose's birth mother, so that their daughter might still have family if anything happened to Iris. Armed only with a twenty-year-old envelope, Iris impulsively begins a journey into the past that takes her to Boston and back, with unexpected results for herself and for Rose and for both friends and strangers.

Intimate, moving, and witty, Her Name is Rose is a gorgeous novel about what can happen when life does not play out the way you expect.

Review: The Love Book by Nina Solomon

I don't read self-help books. Not those that tell you how to be happier, nor those that tell you how to improve your life, nor those that purport to tell you how to attract the relationship you want. But a lot of people do read these sorts of books, as is shown by their massive sales and enormous wave of word of mouth.  What is truly impressive is how many of those readers try to incorporate the book's advice into their own lives. Nina Solomon's new novel, The Love Book, is not a self-help book, but it has a self-help book of sorts at its core and its impact on the lives of the four women in the novel is indeed transformational.

Emily, Cathy, Max, and Beatrice meet in France on a Flaubert singles bike tour. They are quite different from each other and despite appearances, they are all on the tour for different reasons. Emily is a divorced single mother who is trying to make a go of freelance writing before her alimony payments stop and she's on the tour in order to write about it. Cathy is an earnest and chipper special education teacher whose fiancé left her at the altar and who truly wants to find her soul mate. Max is an incredibly fit, rather cynical personal trainer who was gifted the trip by a client. And Beatrice is a smart, elegant, older woman who had a years long affair with a married man and who still maintains that she is not looking for the settled comfort of an exclusive relationship. None of the women seem like they would become friends with each other and yet the trip and a rainy stay at a French auberge throws them together to make unexpected connections even in the face of so many differences. And perhaps they don't exactly become friends, having such varying outlooks on life, but when Cathy finds a copy of The Love Book, a book to help you find your soul mate, at the auberge, and it makes its way back to the states with the women, they stay connected.

Although the other women want to disappear back into their usual lives once they get home to the states, Cathy is determined to help everyone follow The Love Book's advice and find their soul mate. She sends each of the women their own copy of the book and organizes gatherings to check in on everyone's progress. The narrative flips from woman to woman as she faces the challenges and stumbling blocks in her own regular and romantic life at home. It is interesting to watch as each of the women pursues what she thinks she wants (or doesn't want) in her romantic life and as each of them face the mistakes they've made and the regrets they've had along the way. Emily is sort of the centerpiece of the ensemble cast of characters and her realizations are bittersweet. Cathy is the only one who truly wants to find the man she's meant to be with, taking the advice of the book but still misreading situations all over the place. But all of the women, in searching for, or shutting out, men, discover quite a lot about themselves and the ways their hearts work. In fact, it is not only predictable who the soul mates will be, but they aren't all that fleshed out as characters, being generally incidental in this story about the women's fears, insecurities, and small snobberies.

Solomon has written the antithesis of a traditional romance and poked a little bit of sly fun at these mega popular self-help books with their insubstantial, interpret-it-any-which-way advice. There are witty bits of writing that will make the reader snicker in appreciation and everyone should be able to find at least one of the four women sympathetic even if they each can be incredibly frustrating as well. As in classic works of romantic fiction, the women all suffer from unearned prejudices and first impressions that miss the mark, a nice nod to the literature that precedes Solomon's own work. The beginning of the novel takes a little work but then it find its groove and rolls smoothly along from there. And although the end is quickly wrapped up, it has a finished enough feel to it that the speed with which the pages end can be mostly forgiven. Over all, this is a lighthearted and entertaining look at the realities, in all their bumbling incarnations, of romance in the twenty-first century.

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

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Big reading week again. And per usual, the reviewing didn't keep pace. Story of my life. ;-) This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

The Precious One by Marisa de Los Santos
Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum
Wide-Open World by John Marshall
Children of the Jacaranda Tree by Sahar Delijani
The Year My Mother Came Back by Alice Eve Cohen

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell

Reviews posted this week:

Splinters of Light by Rachael Herron
The Godforsaken Daughter by Christina McKenna
Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum

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

The Love Book by Nina Solomon
Head Case by Cole Cohen
The Precious One by Marisa de Los Santos
Wide-Open World by John Marshall
Children of the Jacaranda Tree by Sahar Delijani
The Year My Mother Came Back by Alice Eve Cohen