Monday, July 31, 2017

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past week are:

The Best of Us by Joyce Maynard
Meantime by Katharine Noel
The Portrait by Antoine Laurain

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

A Well-Made Bed by Abby Frucht and Laurie Alberts
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer
The Lake House by Kate Morton
Shelter by Jung Yun
The Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan
A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones
The Company They Kept edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal
Lily and the Octopus by Stephen Rowley
Thousand-Miler by Melanie Radzicki McManus
Dear Fang, With Love by Rufi Thorpe
Close Enough to Touch by Colleen Oakley
America's First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Hope Has Two Daughters by Monia Mazigh
After the Bloom by Leslie Shimotakahara
Metis Beach by Claudine Bourbonnais
So Much Blue by Percival Everett
The Clay Girl by Heather Tucker

Reviews posted this week:

Nuclear Family by Susanna Fogel
Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen

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

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do But You Could've Done Better by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell
To Love the Coming End by Leanne Dunic
Make Trouble by John Waters
The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman by Denis Theriault
A Loving, Faithful Animal by Josephine Rowe
City Mouse by Stacey Lender
Cutting Back by Leslie Buck
Siracusa by Delia Ephron
The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress by Ariel Lawhon
A Narrow Bridge by J.J. Gersher
The Never-Open Desert Diner by James Anderson
The Heart of Henry Quantum by Pepper Harding
The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler
Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimani
How to Survive a Summer by Nick White
Bramton Wick by Elizabeth Fair
The Finishing School by Joanna Goodman
Meet Me in the In-Between by Bella Pollen
All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg
The Island of Books by Dominique Fortier
Lights On, Rats Out by Cree LeFavour
Salt Houses by Hala Alyan
Him, Me, Muhammad Ali by Randa Jarrar
What Are the Blind Men Dreaming? by Noemi Jaffee
Girl in Snow by Danya Kukafka
The Lying Game by Ruth Ware
The Talker by Mary Sojourner
When the Sky Fell Apart by Caroline Lea
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
'Round Midnight by Laura McBride
The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See
The Jane Austen Project by Kathleen A. Flynn
Last Things by Marissa Moss
All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai
Civilianized by Michael Anthony
The Redemption of Galen Pike by Carys Davies
Woman No. 17 by Edan Lepucki
In the Woods of Memory by Shun Medoruma
Before the Wind by Jim Lynch
Dinner with Edward by Isabel Vincent
Inhabited by Charlie Quimby
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
One Good Mama Bone by Bren McClain
The Excellent Lombards by Jane Hamilton
The Long Run by Catriona Menzies-Pike
You and I and Someone Else by Anna Schachner
The Best of Us by Joyce Maynard
Meantime by Katharine Noel
The Portrait by Antoine Laurain

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

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.

Woman Enters Left by Jessica Brockmole.

The book is being released by Ballantine Books on August 8, 2017.

Amazon says this about the book: In the 1950s, movie star Louise Wilde is caught between an unfulfilling acting career and a shaky marriage when she receives an out-of-the-blue phone call: She has inherited the estate of Florence “Florrie” Daniels, a Hollywood screenwriter she barely recalls meeting. Among Florrie’s possessions are several unproduced screenplays, personal journals, and—inexplicably—old photographs of Louise’s mother, Ethel. On an impulse, Louise leaves a film shoot in Las Vegas and sets off for her father’s house on the East Coast, hoping for answers about the curious inheritance and, perhaps, about her own troubled marriage.

Nearly thirty years earlier, Florrie takes off on an adventure of her own, driving her Model T westward from New Jersey in pursuit of broader horizons. She has the promise of a Hollywood job and, in the passenger seat, Ethel, her best friend since childhood. Florrie will do anything for Ethel, who is desperate to reach Nevada in time to reconcile with her husband and reunite with her daughter. Ethel fears the loss of her marriage; Florrie, with long-held secrets confided only in her journal, fears its survival.

In parallel tales, the three women—Louise, Florrie, Ethel—discover that not all journeys follow a map. As they rediscover their carefree selves on the road, they learn that sometimes the paths we follow are shaped more by our traveling companions than by our destinations.

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Review: Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen

As a rule, I don't generally read a lot of mysteries. I happily buy them for other members of my family, all of whom seem to have a thing for whodunits but they have never been my genre of choice. Part of it is that I object to dead bodies in my reading. I prefer happily ever after to "Miss Scarlet in the conservatory with a wrench" (although both the board game and the movie are hugely entertaining). But every now and again, I break my own rules. When a mystery features a minor royal from Scotland and is set in the 1930s like in Rhys Bowen's Her Royal Spyness, well, I am more than happy to break that rule.

Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie, the daughter of the late Duke of Glen Garry and Rannoch and thirty-fourth in line for the throne, lives with her brother Binky, the current Duke, his parsimonious wife, Fig, and their small son in a drafty castle in Scotland. She flees to London after she overhears Binky and Fig discussing a house party they've been instructed to throw by the queen in order to get Georgie engaged to a distasteful foreign prince. Although she's living in Binky's town home in London, cut off from any allowance, she has no money to speak of and no way to request any either, the family being rather in the weeds financially. As she schemes for ways to survive without having to resort to the very boring solution of being a lady-in-waiting to the last surviving daughter of Queen Victoria's (Georgie's great aunt), she starts her own housekeeping business, meets a scrummy but destitute Irish noble, crashes quite a few parties, spies on Wallis Simpson for Queen Alexandra, and, oh yes, finds a dead man in the tub in her house in London, a murder she must solve without implicating her brother, compromising her reputation, or ending up dead herself.

This is the first of the Her Royal Spyness Mysteries cozy mystery series. As the first book, there is quite a bit of scene setting before the plot really gets going but getting to know Georgie and her circumstances is highly entertaining all on its own. Bowen's writing is rife with dry humor and well researched period details. She has created a character who is not anomalous for her time, even if she is striking out on the edges of a rather fast set. In the course of staying generally true to the time period, Georgie's spying is really "spy lite" and the mystery is alsovery much a light one. The murderer is pretty easy to uncover and it's surprising that it takes Georgie as long as it does to figure it out herself. But this book is exactly as it appears, a delightful, quick, breezy, and fun mystery and those readers who enjoy romps with royals or favor the early 1930s socialite scene will be charmed by Georgie and crew.

Monday, July 24, 2017

Review: Nuclear Family by Susanna Fogel

Oh, how I love a good epistolary novel! And despite appearances otherwise (how many ways can you really change letters?), there are multiple ways to shape an epistolary novel. It can be letters, emails, notes, etc. from both the main character and secondary characters. It can be solely missives written by the main character. And it can be composed of letters and emails from others to one main character whose responses remain unwritten. Susanna Fogel's hilarious, crazy epistolary novel of a dysfunctional family, Nuclear Family, is the latter of these options.

Julie Fellers' extended Jewish family is nuts in its own special way. Over the course of twenty plus years, she receives letters, emails, and notes from many of the members of her family. Her father is a neurologist, her mother a therapist. She hears from them, as well as her grandmother, her immature younger sister, her mother's goddaughter, her stepmother, her precocious half-brother, her uncle, a couple of ghosts, a few inanimate objects that have cause to know her well, and more. The letters serve to illuminate everything that is going on in the family's life, revealing their authors with surprising clarity, as well as addressing Julie's life even though the reader never sees a response from her. The letters form the portrait of a fractured family but one that has stayed connected to each other, even when they drive each other round the bend.

Fogel manages to infuse healthy doses of humor, neuroses, perfect passive aggressiveness, self-centeredness, cluelessness, and family loyalty and love in the very distinct, well-developed voices she's created here. True emotions peek out from between the lines of all the characters' writings no matter what the actual content of the letter is and that's an impressive feat.  The inanimate objects and ghosts weighing on Julie's life may be a little bit over the top but since there's no other good way to introduce some of the things they know about Julie, they do serve a purpose.  Each letter is headed with a title that captures the tone and content of the following letter beautifully (and many of the headings will cause readers to snort with laughter). At first glance, there seems to be little plot driving the story beyond the passage of time and Julie's long deferred dream of writing a novel but when you reach the end and realize what Fogel has done, you will snicker with appreciation. Truly, the book is quite clever and a joy to read. Heaven forbid you recognize your own family in the book, but at least if you do, you'll know you're not alone and have the chance to laugh at the crazy other people are keeping hidden, except in their letters, too.

Thanks to LibraryThing Early Reviewers 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 Almost Sisters by Joshilyn Jackson
You and I and Someone Else by Anna Schachner
Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen
Nuclear Family by Susanna Fogel

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

A Well-Made Bed by Abby Frucht and Laurie Alberts
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer
The Lake House by Kate Morton
Shelter by Jung Yun
The Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan
A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones
The Company They Kept edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal
Lily and the Octopus by Stephen Rowley
Thousand-Miler by Melanie Radzicki McManus
Dear Fang, With Love by Rufi Thorpe
Close Enough to Touch by Colleen Oakley
America's First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Hope Has Two Daughters by Monia Mazigh
After the Bloom by Leslie Shimotakahara
Metis Beach by Claudine Bourbonnais
Meantime by Katharine Noel

Reviews posted this week:

The Almost Sisters by Joshilyn Jackson
The Young Widower's Handbook by Tom McAllister

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

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do But You Could've Done Better by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell
To Love the Coming End by Leanne Dunic
Make Trouble by John Waters
The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman by Denis Theriault
A Loving, Faithful Animal by Josephine Rowe
City Mouse by Stacey Lender
Cutting Back by Leslie Buck
Siracusa by Delia Ephron
The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress by Ariel Lawhon
A Narrow Bridge by J.J. Gersher
The Never-Open Desert Diner by James Anderson
The Heart of Henry Quantum by Pepper Harding
The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler
Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimani
How to Survive a Summer by Nick White
Bramton Wick by Elizabeth Fair
The Finishing School by Joanna Goodman
Meet Me in the In-Between by Bella Pollen
All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg
The Island of Books by Dominique Fortier
Lights On, Rats Out by Cree LeFavour
Salt Houses by Hala Alyan
Him, Me, Muhammad Ali by Randa Jarrar
What Are the Blind Men Dreaming? by Noemi Jaffee
Girl in Snow by Danya Kukafka
The Lying Game by Ruth Ware
The Talker by Mary Sojourner
When the Sky Fell Apart by Caroline Lea
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
'Round Midnight by Laura McBride
The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See
The Jane Austen Project by Kathleen A. Flynn
Last Things by Marissa Moss
All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai
Civilianized by Michael Anthony
The Redemption of Galen Pike by Carys Davies
Woman No. 17 by Edan Lepucki
In the Woods of Memory by Shun Medoruma
Before the Wind by Jim Lynch
Dinner with Edward by Isabel Vincent
Inhabited by Charlie Quimby
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
One Good Mama Bone by Bren McClain
The Excellent Lombards by Jane Hamilton
The Long Run by Catriona Menzies-Pike
You and I and Someone Else by Anna Schachner
Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen
Nuclear Family by Susanna Fogel

Thursday, July 20, 2017

Review: The Young Widower's Handbook by Tom McAllister

When you say your wedding vows, you expect to spend the rest of your life with that person, til death do you part. But what happens if death comes sooner rather than later? What if you are still young when the one person you love the most in the world, the one person who believed in you over everything, dies suddenly, leaving you alone? How do you go on? How do you define yourself? Who are you now that you're not part of a couple? Tom McAllister's touching novel The Young Widower's Handbook asks these questions even if it can't quite answer them.

Hunter Cady is a little bit aimless and unmotivated. His wife Kait is the one person who believes in him and makes him want to be better. So when she dies unexpectedly while they are still in their twenties, he is set completely adrift. Her crazy, thuggish family blames him for her death following an ectopic pregnancy and they want to claim her ashes. Instead, Hunter takes off with them, embarking on a cross country tour, visiting the places that he and Kait had jokingly suggested they might move to one day. Sunk in his grief, he tells no one where he's gone or where he's headed, just sends photographs of himself holding Kait's ashes at stops along his way to family and friends via social media to reassure them he's still out there. As he travels the country without any clear plan, he runs into quirky people, has odd encounters, and gains some insight into their marriage and the love that he still has for her while trying to learn how to go on without her.

Hunter as a character is not always good and he doesn't always make the best decisions but he's grieving an unimaginable loss and is understandably gutted and numb after Kait's sudden death. In fact, Hunter is completely and totally human, flaws and all, and while this sometimes makes him unsympathetic, most of the time, the reader can understand his thoughtless actions and his lack of consideration for anyone else who cared for Kait. The road trip itself, with its random, unplanned stops and detours, is clearly a metaphor for the emotional journey he's on but it never verges on cliched. The pacing of the novel and the revelations of Hunter and Kait's life together and their now lost plans for the future are woven together well into a lovely and coherent whole. The writing here is beautifully done; the story itself is bittersweet without being sentimental and the ending will tear your heart out with its beauty and its rightness.

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

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Review: The Almost Sisters by Joshilyn Jackson

The South has long been a hotbed of racism. I don’t think this is news to anyone. It has a terrible history with issues of race, the raw wounds of which continue to bleed into its present. And there’s no shortage of novels, tv shows, and movies that focus on this still rampant racism. Joshilyn Jackson’s latest novel, The Almost Sisters, tackles this issue from the inside and is told with Jackson’s signature humor, eccentric characters, and unpredictable plots.

Leia Birch Briggs is a famous comic book artist. She is well known for her creation, Violence in Violet, and has signed on to write a prequel for this fan favorite, the origin story for Violence, a bloody, destructive, and vengeance minded character. At a Comic Con where the prequel is announced, Leia has a drunken one-night stand with a fan. She doesn’t remember his name, calling him Batman, for the costume he wore in the bar where they met and her major recollections of him are of his eyes and his smile and the fact that he’s black. When it turns out that she’s pregnant from this encounter, she makes peace with the fact that her child, who will be biracial, will not have a father, because how do you locate a stranger in a costume whose name you don’t know? Her bigger concern is telling her family that she’s pregnant and unwed. But just as she works up the nerve to do that, the lives of those she loves go to hell in a handbasket. Perfect step-sister Rachel kicks her husband out. Niece Lavender witnesses her parents’ ugly blow-up. And even more concerning, Leia’s ninety year old paternal grandmother Birchie, who she spent every summer with as she was growing up, causes a very uncharacteristic scene in church, a clear sign that something is not right with her. Swallowing the secret of her pregnancy, Leia hightails it to Birchville, Alabama, to the town that her family founded, to uncover what is going on with her beloved Birchie. What she eventually uncovers shows her a side of this small Southern town that she has never seen before and which makes her question the reality her unborn child will face, especially in the South.

As is usual in Jackson’s novels, there is a great deal of humor and kookiness on display here. Most of the characters are richly drawn and balanced in their characterizations. Birchie and her best friend and companion, Wattie, are wonderful. Rachel and Lavender are very real, flawed and good-hearted both. The biggest contradiction to the idea of fully fleshed out characters is Batman himself. He’s certainly unknown while Leia herself remembers nothing about him but as he is revealed to her, he stays a rather flat character to the reader, only as a real as a superficial Facebook profile is. The novel has a multitude of storylines, corresponding to the multiplicity of secrets the characters hold, and sometimes they tangle around each other. Other times they complement or mirror each other and add to the complexity of the issues weaving through the novel. Just as Leia is trying and struggling to discover the origin story for Violence, she is discovering the sometimes hidden, and not always pretty, origin stories of the town, its families, and her family in particular. The novel flows easily and the story is just the kind of zany that Jackson’s readers have come to expect but there are a few sections, mainly when Leia starts musing to herself, where it becomes heavy-handed, bordering on preachy about racism in the South. In fact, it’s strange that as smart as Leia is, she never noticed the dichotomy of the two different Souths before she got pregnant with Digby. Call it an oddly belated awakening. Over all though, this novel is a nutty and engaging romp of a story. Jackson’s fans and readers who like solving old mysteries, enjoy offbeat stories and quirky characters, and want a little more substance to their beach reads will enjoy this funny, disturbing, and eminently readable novel.

For more information about Joshilyn Jackson and the book, check out herwebsite, like her on Facebook, or follow her on Twitter. 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 Harper Collins 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.

Pieces of Happiness by Anne Ostby.

The book is being released by Doubleday on August 1, 2017.

Amazon says this about the book: A novel of five lifelong friends who, in their sixties, decide to live together on a cocoa farm in Fiji, where they not only start a chocolate business but strengthen their friendships and rediscover themselves.

"I've planted my feet on Fijian earth and I intend to stay here until the last sunset. Why don't you join me? Leave behind everything that didn't work out!"

When Sina, Maya, Ingrid, and Lisbeth each receive a letter in the mail posing the same question, the answer is obvious. Their old high school friend Kat—Kat the adventurer, Kat who spread her wings and took off as soon as they graduated—has extended the invitation of a lifetime: Come live with me on my cocoa farm in Fiji. Come spend the days eating chocolate and gabbing like teenagers once again, free from men, worries, and cold. Come grow old in paradise, together, as sisters. Who could say no?

Now in their sixties, the friends have all but resigned themselves to the cards they've been dealt. There's Sina, a single mom with financial woes; gentle Maya who feels the world slipping away from her; Ingrid, the perennial loner; Lisbeth, a woman with a seemingly picture-perfect life; and then Kat, who is recently widowed. As they adjust to their new lives together, the friends are watched over by Ateca, Kat's longtime housekeeper, who oftentimes knows the women better than they know themselves and recognizes them for what they are: like "a necklace made of shells: from the same beach but all of them different." Surrounded by an azure-blue ocean, cocoa trees, and a local culture that is fascinatingly, joyfully alien, the friends find a new purpose in starting a business making chocolate: bittersweet, succulent pieces of happiness.

A story of love, hope, and chocolate, PIECES OF HAPPINESS will reaffirm your faith in friendship, second chances, and the importance of indulging one's sweet tooth.

Monday, July 17, 2017

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past two weeks are:

My Glory Was I Had Such Friends by Amy Silverstein
The Long Run by Catriona Menzies-Pike
Kiss Carlo by Adriana Trigiani

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

A Well-Made Bed by Abby Frucht and Laurie Alberts
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer
The Lake House by Kate Morton
Shelter by Jung Yun
The Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan
A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones
The Company They Kept edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal
Lily and the Octopus by Stephen Rowley
Thousand-Miler by Melanie Radzicki McManus
Dear Fang, With Love by Rufi Thorpe
Close Enough to Touch by Colleen Oakley
America's First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Hope Has Two Daughters by Monia Mazigh
After the Bloom by Leslie Shimotakahara
You and I and Someone Else by Anna Schachner

Reviews posted this week:

Disaster Falls by Stephane Gerson
My Glory Was I Had Such Friends by Amy Silverstein
Seven Minutes in Heaven by Eloisa James
Kiss Carlo by Adriana Trigiani

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

The Young Widower's Handbook by Tom McAllister
The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do But You Could've Done Better by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell
To Love the Coming End by Leanne Dunic
Make Trouble by John Waters
The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman by Denis Theriault
A Loving, Faithful Animal by Josephine Rowe
City Mouse by Stacey Lender
Cutting Back by Leslie Buck
Siracusa by Delia Ephron
The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress by Ariel Lawhon
A Narrow Bridge by J.J. Gersher
The Never-Open Desert Diner by James Anderson
The Heart of Henry Quantum by Pepper Harding
The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler
Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimani
How to Survive a Summer by Nick White
Bramton Wick by Elizabeth Fair
The Finishing School by Joanna Goodman
Meet Me in the In-Between by Bella Pollen
All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg
The Island of Books by Dominique Fortier
Lights On, Rats Out by Cree LeFavour
Salt Houses by Hala Alyan
Him, Me, Muhammad Ali by Randa Jarrar
What Are the Blind Men Dreaming? by Noemi Jaffee
Girl in Snow by Danya Kukafka
The Lying Game by Ruth Ware
The Talker by Mary Sojourner
When the Sky Fell Apart by Caroline Lea
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
'Round Midnight by Laura McBride
The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See
The Jane Austen Project by Kathleen A. Flynn
Last Things by Marissa Moss
All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai
Civilianized by Michael Anthony
The Redemption of Galen Pike by Carys Davies
Woman No. 17 by Edan Lepucki
In the Woods of Memory by Shun Medoruma
Before the Wind by Jim Lynch
Dinner with Edward by Isabel Vincent
Inhabited by Charlie Quimby
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
One Good Mama Bone by Bren McClain
The Long Run by Catriona Menzies-Pike

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Review: Kiss Carlo by Adriana Trigiani

Instead of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Adriana Trigiani's Kiss Carlo is a My Big Crazy Italian Family story. And I should know because I've got the remnants of one of those. In fact, some parts of this felt very similar to the (unofficial?--I was little so I don't know if they spontaneously happened or were planned) family reunions that seemed to occur every year at one of my distant relative's house. I recognized the love and loyalty in the book but also the long holding of grudges. It was a fun, somewhat nostalgic read but it also reminded me of the not perfect parts of my own crazy southwestern Philly family.

The story opens in South Philadelphia with the falling out of the two Palazzini brothers over a promised inheritance that went to the wrong brother, effectively splitting this formerly close family in half. Then it jumps to 1949 and the small mountain town of Roseto Valfortore in Italy, where the town's ambassador, Carlo Guardinfante, is getting ready to leave for the US and the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania's Jubilee in hopes of convincing the town's Italian Americans, whose parents and grandparents emigrated from Roseto Valfortore to help the Italians rebuild their flood destroyed road, something they can't afford to do on their own. Once the story gets going though, it centers around Nicky Castone, a nephew of one of the original Palazzini brothers. Nicky drives a cab for his Uncle Dom and has been engaged to Peachy for seven years. Orphaned at a young age, Nicky was raised by his Aunt Jo and Uncle Dom, easily and happily enfolded into their large and growing family. But as Nicky starts to look at his life, he's no longer certain he wants to follow the path set out for him by others. What would really bring him happiness is to act. He's been moonlighting at the Borelli theater for several years and when he gets his acting break under the direction of Carla Borelli, who is taking over the theater from her father, he knows he has found his purpose. But divulging his change of plans to everyone in his life, especially Peachy, sets off a chain of events no one could have predicted and will pull together the disparate beginnings of the novel.

The plot has some almost farce-like elements as it borrows from the mistaken identity plots in Shakespeare, the only plays that are put on at Borelli's. It is light-hearted and comedic in tone and there are many, many plot threads and secondary characters taking the stage in turn. The side stories give context but there are a few too many of them at times and there is an odd abruptness to the story as it comes closer to the end, especially given the long and detailed build ups earlier in the novel. Nicky is a character who is clearly still trying to find himself, even at thirty years old, but he has a good heart and readers will root for him. This is a family saga with heart, a warm and inviting read, and if there are too many plot threads that don't necessarily move the story along, it does give the novel a big cinematic sweep. For all of its 500 plus pages, this is a relatively fast read. Readers who like family sagas, enjoy allusions to Shakespeare's comedies or acting, and those who are drawn to the nuttiness of large, crazy families should tuck this into their beach bags for sure.

For more information about Adriana Trigiani and the book, check out herwebsite, like her on Facebook, follow her on Twitter, or check out her Instagram. 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 Harper Collins 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 Tin Man by Sarah Winman.

The book is being released by Tinder Press on July 27, 2017.

Amazon says this about the book: The unforgettable and achingly tender new novel from Sarah Winman, author of the international bestseller WHEN GOD WAS A RABBIT and the Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller A YEAR OF MARVELLOUS WAYS. 'Exquisite' Joanna CannonIt begins with a painting won in a raffle: fifteen sunflowers, hung on the wall by a woman who believes that men and boys are capable of beautiful things.And then there are two boys, Ellis and Michael,who are inseparable.And the boys become men,and then Annie walks into their lives,and it changes nothing and everything.Tin Man sees Sarah Winman follow the acclaimed success of When God Was A Rabbit and A Year Of Marvellous Ways with a love letter to human kindness and friendship, loss and living.

Thursday, July 6, 2017

Review: Seven Minutes in Heaven by Eloisa James

If you want me to swoon, include witty banter in your book. It doesn't matter what kind of book it is, just include the banter. Of course, it certainly helps romances in particular when there's an intelligent, strong heroine but sometimes creating such a woman can be hard while still staying true to historical realities. But Eloisa James always manages to create worthwhile heroines in her Regency set historical romances like Seven Minutes in Heaven, the latest in the Desperate Duchesses series.

Eugenia Snowe is a widow. Although she is the daughter of a marquis, after the death of her beloved young husband Andrew 7 years prior, she turned to work to keep herself busy. Eugenia runs the exclusive and discreet Snowe's Registry Office for Select Governesses and her governesses are highly sought after in all the best homes. She herself is businesslike and circumspect and she has a real knack for business, pairing each family on her books with the perfect governess. Somehow she has not managed to land on the right governess for Edward Reeve's half sister and brother though. Ward is trying to keep guardianship of his young half siblings away from his tyrannical, unpleasant grandmother and having the proper governess working with the children would certainly go some way to taking one of her arguments away from her. When the latest Snowe-provided governess quits, Ward determines that Eugenia herself would be the perfect governess and "kidnaps" her (she goes most willingly so it's hardly a kidnapping). Ward, a rich inventor, is the illegitimate son of an earl and is cognizant of what society will expect of his half-siblings so although he is incredibly attracted to Eugenia, he guards against a real attachment, believing her to not be a member of the nobility. Meanwhile, Eugenia is falling in love with Lizzie and Otis, the children in question, and she is feeling a sexual attraction for the first time in 7 years even as she finds it hard to accept this sign that she is moving on from the grief and loneliness that has colored her world for so long.

Eugenia and Ward sizzle when they are together. They flirt and spar almost from the first moment they meet and their quick intelligence is great fun. The misunderstanding that keeps them apart, ie Ward's belief that Eugenia is not noble, is a bit far fetched given that everyone else and their grandmother knows her whole history but without the misunderstanding, there's no reason for them to ever be apart. While Ward was illegitimate, both of his parents were noble themselves so he would have had a similar understanding of who was noble as his contemporaries do and would surely have known of Eugenia's family. If he didn't hear of her husband's drowning at the time, he would have heard of it once he looked to Snowe's Registry for the children. The children, with their odd quirks and strange interests, Lizzie wearing mourning and dissecting rabbits and Otis with his quick mathematical mind and his pet rat Jarvis, are delightful and much more entertaining than children in novels generally are and it is easy to see how Eugenia warms to them and wants them to have love and stability in their lives. Although Ward, with his occasional bouts of condescension and priggishness, is not nearly as likable as Eugenia, they are still a well-matched couple and James once again delivers for her readers.

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Review: My Glory Was I Had Such Friends by Amy Silverstein

Are you an organ donor? I am. In fact, I ticked that box on my license registration without thinking much about it. When I encouraged my children to do the same, I did think a little more about it (these are my kids, after all!), hoping against hope that I would never have to face a situation where this decision came into play. As you can see, all of my admittedly slight thinking about it focused on the tragic, not on the equally important miraculous, life giving aspects of organ donation. For the sick and dying person waiting for a healthy organ, finally getting a match is an amazing thing indeed. But that’s not the end of the story at all; it’s not even the beginning. The wait for a donor organ be emotionally and physically brutal but life afterwards isn’t easy and worry free either. Amy Silverstein’s memoir of her second heart transplant, twenty-five years after her first, is an honest and moving look at all of the factors, good, bad, and everything in between, that she faced, with the help of her husband and her dearest friends, as she waited again for a heart to become available. It is a celebration of life, its fragility and its strength, and of the people who make up that life and indeed make it worth holding onto.

At the age of fifty, Amy Silverstein’s twenty-five year old transplanted heart started to fail from the development of vasculopathy, a common and deadly problem with transplanted hearts. Silverstein had long since survived the 10 years that she was initially told she’d have with her new heart and in that time she’d not only married and raised her son but she’d also faced many medical emergencies related to her transplant and undergone a double mastectomy for breast cancer. Silverstein knew firsthand that a retransplant would not be easy or mean that she would be cured forever and so she agonized over whether or not to go ahead and get on the list for a new heart, what that would mean to her emotionally and physically, and how her decision would impact her husband and her close friends. Once she decided to hope for retransplant, she and husband Scott moved to California to be closer to Cedars-Sinai for when a heart became available. During the months that Silverstein would wait, her friends from all stages of her life rallied around her. Nine women came out to stay with her on a rotating basis, to try and help her cope with everything and to give Scott a tiny break from the intensity and sleep deprivation. As they did this, Silverstein also learned a lot about each of the women, about her friendship with them, about herself, and about love and selflessness in new and deeper ways.

The memoir is self-reflective and emotional and Silverstein doesn’t whitewash the parts where her fear and anger get the better of her. She gives the reader intimate access into what makes her tick and how she makes decisions but also shares where her blunt approach is unfair to those around her and how, as the days and months tick past, she considers her impact on others, confronting her husband’s admonition to think about how she wants people to remember her in both the short term and for all time. Her fierce gratitude to those who shared her journey to a new heart shines through the pages of this unusual celebration of friendship. While Silverstein’s story is certainly medically interesting, it is the strong and continued support of those friends who gave up so much of themselves and their time to be fully present there with her, to make sure she was never alone, that make this memoir so beautiful and inspiring. Truly for Amy Silverstein, as the quote from Yeats (and the source of the title) says, “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends."

For more information about Amy Silverstein and the book, check out herwebsite or like her on Facebook. 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 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.

Refuge by Dina Nayeri.

The book is being released by Riverhead Books on July 11, 2017.

Amazon says this about the book: The moving lifetime relationship between a father and a daughter, seen through the prism of global immigration and the contemporary refugee experience.

An Iranian girl escapes to America as a child, but her father stays behind. Over twenty years, as she transforms from confused immigrant to overachieving Westerner to sophisticated European transplant, daughter and father know each other only from their visits: four crucial visits over two decades, each in a different international city. The longer they are apart, the more their lives diverge, but also the more each comes to need the other's wisdom and, ultimately, rescue. Meanwhile, refugees of all nationalities are flowing into Europe under troubling conditions. Wanting to help, but also looking for a lost sense of home, our grown-up transplant finds herself quickly entranced by a world that is at once everything she has missed and nothing that she has ever known. Will her immersion in the lives of these new refugees allow her the grace to save her father?

Refuge charts the deeply moving lifetime relationship between a father and a daughter, seen through the prism of global immigration. Beautifully written, full of insight, charm, and humor, the novel subtly exposes the parts of ourselves that get left behind in the wake of diaspora and ultimately asks: Must home always be a physical place, or can we find it in another person?

Monday, July 3, 2017

Review: Disaster Falls by Stephane Gerson

Is there anything more devastating than the death of a child? It is an inversion of the universe, a shattering of the heart, an unrepairable rip in the fabric of life. For Stephane Gerson and his family, it became a terrible reality when 8 year old Owen drowned on a family rafting vacation. And this memoir is one of the ways in which Gerson not only acknowledged their huge loss but a way that allowed him to finally look more closely at what happened that day, to understand and to accept.

When you plan a vacation with your two young children, you would never imagine that your family of four would be a family of three before it is over. The Gersons, father Stephane, mother Alison, oldest son Julian, and youngest son Owen couldn't have either. Their vacation was supposed to be safe for families with children, a rafting trip on the Green River in Utah. But they left New York as four and returned home as three, Owen having drowned at the spot known as Disaster Falls. Gerson chronicles his overwhelming grief at losing Owen as well as the different journeys that Alison and Julian also took through the days, weeks, months, and years after Owen's death. He speaks of the isolation of sorrow, the pain and anguish, his guilt over what happened that day, and the shocked huddle of a family violently rent apart in this emotionally devastating memoir.

The non-linear time line jumps from the rawness of immediately after the accident to what led up to it and back again as the family learns to negotiate life after Owen. The whole of how Owen died isn't fully presented until well into the book, Gerson coming close to it before shutting down the remembrance many times, only telling the whole of it when he feels he's capable and strong enough to look at it. The story is heart rending and the reader can feel the ache and the searching in the haunting writing even years after Owen's death. The book is clearly a way for Gerson to honor his son and his memory of his son, to mourn the loss not only of the boy that he was, but also the whole of the imagined life he never had a chance to live. There are repetitions here but they so closely echo the stunned and frozen rehashing of what happened, the what ifs, and the if onlys that they seem entirely fitting. Not easy to read, this is a thoughtful, introspective, quite beautiful look at a family and a father going on forever changed by their shared loss for those readers who don't mind being emotionally wrung out at the end of a book.

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

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past two weeks are:

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
Before the Wind by Jim Lynch
Dinner with Edward by Isabel Vincent
Inhabited by Charlie Quimby
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
One Good Mama Bone by Bren McClain

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

A Well-Made Bed by Abby Frucht and Laurie Alberts
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer
The Lake House by Kate Morton
Shelter by Jung Yun
The Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan
A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones
The Company They Kept edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal
Lily and the Octopus by Stephen Rowley
Thousand-Miler by Melanie Radzicki McManus
Dear Fang, With Love by Rufi Thorpe
All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai
Close Enough to Touch by Colleen Oakley
America's First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
Hope Has Two Daughters by Monia Mazigh
My Glory Was I Had Such Friends by Amy Silverstein

Reviews posted this week:

Water From My Heart by Charles Martin
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
The Other Woman by Therese Bohman

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

The Florence Diary by Diana Athill
Seven Minutes in Heaven by Eloisa James
The Mortifications by Derek Palacio
The Young Widower's Handbook by Tom McAllister
The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do But You Could've Done Better by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell
To Love the Coming End by Leanne Dunic
Make Trouble by John Waters
The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman by Denis Theriault
A Loving, Faithful Animal by Josephine Rowe
City Mouse by Stacey Lender
Cutting Back by Leslie Buck
Siracusa by Delia Ephron
The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress by Ariel Lawhon
A Narrow Bridge by J.J. Gersher
The Never-Open Desert Diner by James Anderson
The Heart of Henry Quantum by Pepper Harding
The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler
Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimani
How to Survive a Summer by Nick White
Bramton Wick by Elizabeth Fair
The Finishing School by Joanna Goodman
Meet Me in the In-Between by Bella Pollen
All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg
The Island of Books by Dominique Fortier
Lights On, Rats Out by Cree LeFavour
Salt Houses by Hala Alyan
Him, Me, Muhammad Ali by Randa Jarrar
What Are the Blind Men Dreaming? by Noemi Jaffee
Girl in Snow by Danya Kukafka
The Lying Game by Ruth Ware
The Talker by Mary Sojourner
When the Sky Fell Apart by Caroline Lea
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
'Round Midnight by Laura McBride
The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See
The Jane Austen Project by Kathleen A. Flynn
Last Things by Marissa Moss

All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai
Civilianized by Michael Anthony
The Redemption of Galen Pike by Carys Davies
Woman No. 17 by Edan Lepucki
In the Woods of Memory by Shun Medoruma
Before the Wind by Jim Lynch
Dinner with Edward by Isabel Vincent
Inhabited by Charlie Quimby
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

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