It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past week are:

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

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 Last Time She Saw Him by Jane Haseldine
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
Water From My Heart by Charles Martin
Meet Me in the In-Between by Bella Pollen

Reviews posted this week:

Eggshells by Caitriona Lally

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

Exposure by Helen Dunmore
Eliza Waite by Ashley E. Sweeney
Nine Island by Jane Alison
I Hid My Voice by Parinoush Saniee
The Other Woman by Therese Bohman
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
The Vicar's Daughter by Josi S. Kilpack
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

Monday Mailbox

I rewarded myself with a bunch of new books this week. Must learn to control these impulses! This past week's mailbox arrivals:

Greenery Street by Denis Mackail came from me to me. :-)

I just learned that Mackail is Angela Thirkell's brother and I do so like her writing but this novel about newly weds trying to learn to economize would have appealed even without the family connection.

The Library at the Edge of the World by Felicity Hayes-McCoy came from me to me. :-)

A light novel about a mobile library van driver in rural Ireland, how could this not be delightful?

A Thatched Roof by Beverley Nichols came from me to me. :-)

Have I mentioned yet how much I love Beverley Nichols? ;-) This is the second in the Allways trilogy and I do adore his snarky his gardening trilogies.

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.

The Color of Our Sky by Amita Trasi. The book is being released by William Morrow Paperbacks on April 18, 2017.

Amazon says this about the book: In the spirit of Khaled Hosseini, Nadia Hashimi and Shilpi Somaya Gowda comes this powerful debut from a talented new voice—a sweeping, emotional journey of two childhood friends in Mumbai, India, whose lives converge only to change forever one fateful night.

India, 1986: Mukta, a ten-year-old village girl from the lower caste Yellama cult has come of age and must fulfill her destiny of becoming a temple prostitute, as her mother and grandmother did before her. In an attempt to escape her fate, Mukta is sent to be a house girl for an upper-middle class family in Mumbai. There she discovers a friend in the daughter of the family, high spirited eight-year-old Tara, who helps her recover from the wounds of her past. Tara introduces Mukta to an entirely different world—one of ice cream, reading, and a friendship that soon becomes a sisterhood.

But one night in 1993, Mukta is kidnapped from Tara’s family home and disappears. Shortly thereafter, Tara and her father move to America. A new life in Los Angeles awaits them but Tara never recovers from the loss of her best friend, or stops wondering if she was somehow responsible for Mukta's abduction.

Eleven years later, Tara, now an adult, returns to India determined to find Mukta. As her search takes her into the brutal underground world of human trafficking, Tara begins to uncover long-buried secrets in her own family that might explain what happened to Mukta—and why she came to live with Tara’s family in the first place.

Moving from a traditional Indian village to the bustling modern metropolis of Mumbai, to Los Angeles and back again, this is a heartbreaking and beautiful portrait of an unlikely friendship—a story of love, betrayal, and, ultimately, redemption.

Review: Eggshells by Caitriona Lally

Sometimes I look at my daily life and think I live a very mundane existence. And that's why I read, to have experiences I'd never have, to be people I'll never be, to live lives far different from mine. Most of the time this works and I can slip into the skin of the characters or into the place or defining situation or a novel. But sometimes, just sometimes, I cannot make the leap. I cannot find a way into a character. Perhaps my very mundanity betrays me. And that leads to a very frustrating reading experience. Unfortunately, Caitriona Lally's Eggshells was one of those experiences for me.

Vivian lives alone in the house she's inherited from her great aunt. She collects chairs, glares at the urn containing her great aunt's ashes, and frequently sniffs things to see if they've acquired her "meaty" scent yet (she's not big on hygiene). Her sister, also named Vivian, doesn't have much to do with her, clearly wanting to protect her children from their off-kilter aunt. Our main character Vivian actively avoids the neighbors but posts flyers on trees advertising for a friend named Penelope (the balance between consonants and vowels in the name is just right), cultivates a jungle of a front garden to encourage mice to move in, and walks all over Dublin looking for the portal she's convinced will send her back to fairy land, believing that she's a changeling. So you might say that she's a bit of an odd duck, an eccentric. Or you might wonder if she's so neuro-atypical that there is something more going on with her. She's an odd mix of amazingly insightful and strangely ignorant. There are textual hints that Vivian has been damaged in some way, especially by her father, but there's only a whisper of that, and only two or three brief times at that.

Vivian's character is sometimes fanciful and other times just weird. Her obsession with smelling herself and wanting her unwashed scent on everything is almost animalistic and the repetition of the same adjectives to describe this tick becomes tedious throughout the novel. Her interactions with others, almost none of whom play any sort of real major role in the novel, are telling and allow the reader to see how she is viewed in general. She's clearly considered batty, not quite right. She is definitely childlike, operating most days on a whim. Appropriate social interactions are certainly a struggle for her. And so she goes about her days walking different routes around the city, trying to get back to the fairy world she's been looking for her whole life. The structure of her days is made up on the fly and only makes sense to her. These daily perambulations are broken up by a couple of small events, her uncomfortable meetings with Penelope, a woman almost as odd as Vivian; an unsolicited and unwelcome visit to her sister's family; and their rather unsuccessful return visit to her (she, however, considers it a success because "only 50 percent of the guests left in tears").

Other readers have found Vivian charming and whimsical. I fear I am more like her annoyed older sister. She made me nuts. I wanted to get social services to intervene so that she had someone looking after her. And in the name of all that is holy, I wanted her to stop sniffing herself and take a bath. There was very little plot to the book to distract me from the fact that I wasn't enjoying spending time with this character either. Lally is obviously a talented writer given her beautiful turns of phrase and descriptive skill but she needed more than just a character who thought she was a changeling to hang a story on. As a starting concept, it was intriguing, but without a well-developed story around it, this feels like one long character exposition, not a fully fleshed out tale. I really wanted to be able to slip into Vivian's world. I just couldn't.

For more information about Caitriona Lally and the book, check out her publisher's website as she doesn't do much social media. You can poke through her retired Twitter account too if you wish. 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 Lisa from TLC Book Tours and Melville House for sending me a copy of this book to review.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

A very slow week for me. Not entirely sure why but disappointing for sure. This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

Books I completed this past week are:

Eggshells by Caitriona Lally

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 Last Time She Saw Him by Jane Haseldine
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
Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimoni

Reviews posted this week:

Roughneck Grace by Michael Perry

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

Exposure by Helen Dunmore
Eliza Waite by Ashley E. Sweeney
Nine Island by Jane Alison
I Hid My Voice by Parinoush Saniee
The Other Woman by Therese Bohman
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
The Vicar's Daughter by Josi S. Kilpack
Eggshells by Caitriona Lally

Monday Mailbox

This past week's mailbox arrivals:

One Hot Summer by Kat French came from me to me. :-)

Eloisa James recommended this contemporary romance on Litsy and it sounds light and appealing, especially as we're heading into summer (especially here in the South where we get summer less than five seconds after we get spring).

Miss You by Kate Eberlen came from Harper and TLC Book Tours for a blog tour.

Centered on two teenagers in Florence who cross paths and then continue to briefly cross paths for the next sixteen years, this novel about fate and possible soul mates sounds absolutely fantastic.

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: Roughneck Grace by Michael Perry

Michael Perry is always a joy to read. I first discovered him through his debut nonfiction Population 485 and then Visiting Tom. Then I followed him as he dipped a toe in fiction with The Jesus Cow. In fact, I think I own all of his published books, even if I haven't actually read them all yet. I know that when I do, his comfortable, homey writing will be just as engaging as ever, as it was in Roughneck Grace, a volume of collected weekly columns that Perry wrote for the Wisconsin State Journal.

Whether writing long form or short, Perry's writing is homespun and folksy in the best possible sense. He is reflective and thoughtful, entertaining and funny. In these short columns, he writes about work and family, community and aging ("creeping codgerism"), the simple joys of life and those things that give us pause. The title was a term he coined in Visiting Tom and it accurately reflects the beauty and grace of these unadorned, heartfelt pieces.  Perry comes across as comfortable, friendly, and approachable and his musings and meditations leave the reader with a deep appreciation for the fact that he has shared his life so beautifully and so openly.  Perry makes readers feel as if they know him so perhaps it's not such a surprise that people drive down his driveway uninvited.  Fair warning Mr. Perry, if I ever find myself in your neck of rural Wisconsin, I might not be able to help myself either.

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