Mailbox Monday (April 23, 2012)

 Mailbox Monday will be hosted in April by Cindy at Cindy's Love of  Books.  In My Mailbox is hosted Sundays at The Story Siren.  I got some more nice wins this week and a couple of review books.  Come on in and take a look!


Review books first:




(NO PICTURE AVAILABLE)
Mind Monsters: Conquering fear, worry, guilt and other negative thoughts that work against you
by Kevin Gerald


Every day we are bombarded with negative messages—from society, the media, and even from self-talk in our own minds. Take a minute to think about these questions:
 


Do you lack peace because of your perspective? Do you focus on the problems around you? Do you have trouble recognizing the good things in your life? Do you feel despair or depression, despite your blessings?


 Answering yes to questions like these is evidence of mind monsters. Mind monsters are those negative thoughts we all battle, the creeping shadows in the corners of our minds that feed our insecurities, worries, and fears. They will steal your life…if you let them. But there is good news! You can take control. In Mind Monsters Kevin Gerald shows you how to recognize destructive thoughts, take them captive, and use biblical truths to overcome them.
 
Today you have a choice: Will you allow your mind monsters to take up residence, affecting who you are and God’s plan for your life, or will you conquer them and experience a life that is positive, abundant, joyful, and overflowing with peace?




(NO PICTURE AVAILABLE)


Listening to Africa


by Diana M. Raab


Poet Diana M. Raab travels to the heart of Africa with her family to experience the beauty and fascination of another world. During her safari, she observes the distress, the delight, and the dignity of the humans and animals who live there and parallels them with her own quest for health.

The Sausage Maker's Daughters

by AGS Johnson

The sausage maker's youngest daughter is heading for the fight of her battle-scarred life. It's the era of the counterculture and Vietnam. But twenty-four-year-old Kip Czermanksi is nowhere near her home in California. She's in a jail cell in her hometown in Wisconsin awaiting a court appearance in the mysterious death of her ex-lover, who happened to be her brother-in-law. Given her father is the small town's leading citizen; Kip isn't overly worried, at first. But the personal grudge the DA holds for all the Czermanskis is about to find a foil Kip. What follows is a wild ride through Kip's present predicament and her past. She'll come to regret leaving her life in LA, regardless of the good reason for which she returned, when family dynamics and sibling rivalries, magnified by her counterculture attitudes and feminist beliefs, lay Kip's life bare before the courtroom. Distrusting her legal team, her rebellious history well known, things both personal and legal spiral out-of-control. It doesn't look good for Kip Czermanski.

The Get Yourself Organized Project:

21 Steps to Less Mess and Stress

by Kathi Lipp

Finally, an organizational book for women who have given up trying to be Martha Stewart but still desire some semblance of order in their lives.

Most organizational books are written by and for people who are naturally structured and orderly. For the woman who is more ADD than type A, the advice sounds terrific but seldom works. These women are looking for help that takes into account their free-spirited outlook while providing tips and tricks they can easily follow to live a more organized life.

Kathi Lipp, author of The Husband Project and other "project" books, is just the author to address this need. In her inimitable style, she offers

easy and effective ways women can restore peace to their everyday lives 
simple and manageable long-term solutions for organizing any room in one's home (and keeping it that way) 
a realistic way to de-stress a busy schedule 
strategies for efficient shopping, meal preparation, cleaning, and more 

Full of helpful tips and abundant good humor, The Get Yourself Organized Project is for those who want to spend their time living and enjoying life rather than organizing their sock drawer.

Goodbye For Now


by Laurie Frankel

Sam Elliot works for an internet dating company, but he still can't get a date. So he creates an algorithm that will match you with your soul mate. Sam meets the love of his life, a coworker named Meredith, but he also gets fired when the company starts losing all their customers to Mr. and Ms. Right.

When Meredith's grandmother, Livvie, dies suddenly, Sam uses his ample free time to create a computer program that will allow Meredith to have one last conversation with her grandmother. Mining from all her correspondence—email, Facebook, Skype, texts—Sam constructs a computer simulation of Livvie who can respond to email or video chat just as if she were still alive. It's not supernatural, it's computer science.

Meredith loves it, and the couple begins to wonder if this is something that could help more people through their grief. And thus, the company RePose is born. The business takes off, but for every person who just wants to say good-bye, there is someone who can't let go. 

In the meantime, Sam and Meredith's affection for one another deepens into the kind of love that once tasted, you can't live without. But what if one of them suddenly had to? This entertaining novel, delivers a charming and bittersweet romance as well as a lump in the throat exploration of the nature of love, loss, and life (both real and computer simulated). Maybe nothing was meant to last forever, but then again, sometimes love takes on a life of its own.

The Innocents


by Francesca Segal

A smart and slyly funny tale of love, temptation, confusion, and commitment, "The Innocents" is a generous and deeply satisfying look at a close-knit society in which one young man's pre-wedding panic illuminates the universal conflict between responsibility and passion.

Newly engaged and unthinkingly self-satisfied, twenty-eight-year-old Adam Newman is the prize catch of Temple Fortune, a small, tight-knit Jewish suburb of London. He has been dating Rachel Gilbert since they were both sixteen and now, to the relief and happiness of the entire Gilbert family, they are finally to marry. To Adam, Rachel embodies the highest values of Temple Fortune; she is innocent, conventional, and entirely secure in her community—a place in which everyone still knows the whereabouts of their nursery school classmates. Marrying Rachel will cement Adam’s role in a warm, inclusive family he loves. 
But as the vast machinery of the wedding gathers momentum, Adam feels the first faint touches of claustrophobia, and when Rachel’s younger cousin Ellie Schneider moves home from New York, she unsettles Adam more than he’d care to admit. Ellie—beautiful, vulnerable, and fiercely independent—offers a liberation that he hadn’t known existed: a freedom from the loving interference and frustrating parochialism of North West London. Adam finds himself questioning everything, suddenly torn between security and exhilaration, tradition and independence. What might he be missing by staying close to home?

Momnesia was won from the author Lori Verni-Fogarsi in the Hoppy Easter Giveaway!

Momnesia


by Lori Verni-Fogarsi

She's smart, pretty, and runs her own business. So then why does she feel so dead inside? Between work, two kids, and a husband who finds her about as exciting as furniture shopping, this is the story of a (formerly-exciting but now way-too-typical) suburban mom who diagnoses herself with "Momnesia" and sets about finessing a new version of her old vivaciousness:

MOMNESIA (mahm-nee-zhuh) -noun-
Loss of the memory of who you used to be. Caused by pregnancy, play dates, and trying to keep the house cleaner than the Joneses.

She finds some adventure pursuing her own interests, and does make some new friends (including the battery operated variety), but still feels like nothing more than a caretaker.

In between dealing with her husband's manic-depressive behavior, drama with her friends, and some naughty Internet escapades, she keeps facing the question, "Is it that I haven't been myself? Or is it that I am being myself but just different than I used to be?" It isn't until she tosses the Invisible Rule Book altogether that she discovers life--and love--have more to offer than she ever imagined!

The next two books I won from Kathi at I am a Reader, Not a Writer from the Autism Awareness Giveaway: 

The Legend of Mickey Tussler


by Frank Nappi

Seventeen-year-old Mickey Tussler is recruited to play for a minor league affiliate of the Boston Braves. Arthur Murphy swears Mickey has the greatest arm he has ever seen, that anybody has ever seen.  And it might be true.  But Mickey's autism is prohibitive.  It keeps him sealed off from a world he scarcely understands.  Lost both in the memory of his former life with an abusive father and the challenges of a new world filled with heckling teammates, opponents and fans, there's no way Mickey can succeed.  But his inimitable talent -- one of the most gifted arms in the history of baseball -- gives him a chance. Can he survive a real life dream?  Or are the harsh realities of life too much for him?  This is the powerful underdog story of how a young man with an extraordinary gift comes of age in a harsh and competitive world.

Sophomore Campaign


by Frank Nappi

It s 1949 and eighteen-year-old pitching phenomMickey Tussler is back with the rejuvenated minorleague Brewers in the sequel to The Legend of MickeyTussler (the basis for the television movie A Milein His Shoes). Despite Mickey s proclamation thathe will never play baseball again after last season sviolent conclusion, his manager and now surrogatefather Arthur Murphy cajoles the emotionallyfragile, socially awkward boy with autism into givingit another shot. Mickey reluctantly returns to thefield and must once again cope with the violenceand hatred around him. When a young AfricanAmerican player joins the team, the entire team issubjected to racial threats and episodes of violence, one of which Mickey witnesses firsthand. Strugglingto understand such ugliness and hatred, and fearfulof reprisal should he tell anyone about what he hasseen, the boy s performance on the field suffers.Mickey now must deal with a side of human naturehe scarcely comprehends.

Happy Reading!

Mailbox Monday (April 16, 2012)

 Mailbox Monday will be hosted in April by Cindy at Cindy's Love of  Books.  In My Mailbox is hosted Sundays at The Story Siren.  I got some more nice wins this week and a couple of review books.  Come on in and take a look!


First the review books:

The Good Father
by Diane Chamberlain


A beloved daughter. A devastating choice. And now there's no going back.Four years ago, nineteen-year-old Travis Brown made a choice: to raise his newborn daughter on his own. While most of his friends were out partying and meeting girls, Travis was at home, changing diapers and worrying about keeping food on the table. But he's never regretted his decision. Bella is the light of his life. The reason behind every move he makes. And so far, she is fed. Cared for. Safe.But when Travis loses his construction job and his home, the security he's worked so hard to create for Bella begins to crumble….Then a miracle. A job in Raleigh has the power to turn their fortunes around. It has to. But when Travis arrives in Raleigh, there is no job, only an offer to participate in a onetime criminal act that promises quick money and no repercussions.With nowhere else to turn, Travis must make another choice for his daughter's sake.Even if it means he might lose her.

The Midwife of Venice


by Roberta Rich


Hannah Levi is renowned throughout Venice for her gift at coaxing reluctant babies from their mothers -- a gift aided by the secret "birthing spoons" she designed.  But when a count implores her to attend to his wife, who has been laboring for days to give birth to their firstborn son, Hannah is torn.  A Papal edict forbids Jews from rendering medical treatment to Christians, but the payment he offers is enough to ransom her beloved husband, Isaac, who has been captured at sea.  Can Hannah refuse her duty to a suffering woman?  Hannah's choice entangles her in a treacherous family rivalry that endangers the baby and threatens her voyage to Malta, where Isaac, believing her dead in the plague, is preparing to buy his passage to a new life.  Not since The Red Tent or People of the Book has a novel transported readers so intimately into the complex lives of women centuries ago or so richly into a story of intrigue that transcends the boundaries of history.

A Chance in the World
An Orphan Boy, a Mysterious Past and How He
 Found a Place Called Home


by Steve Pemberton

From the day he is five-years-old and dropped off at his foster home of the next eleven years, Stephen is mentally and physically tortured. No one in the system can help him. No one can tell him if he has a family. No one can tell him why, with obvious African-American features, he has the last name of Klakowicz.

Along the way, a single faint light comes only from a neighbor’s small acts of kindness and caring—and a box of books. From one of those books he learns that he has to fight in any way he can—for victory is in the battle. His victory is to excel in school.

Against all odds, the author succeeded. He attended college, graduated, became a successful corporate executive, and married a wonderful woman with whom he established a loving family of his own. Through it, he dug voraciously through records and files and found his history, his birth family—and the ultimate disappointment as some family members embrace him, but others reject him.

Readers won’t be the same after reading this powerful story. They will share in the hurts and despair but also in the triumph against daunting obstacles. They will share this story with their family, with their friends, with their neighbors.

These are the books I won:

I won this from Celtic Lady's Reviews

Catriona


by Jeanette Baker


Kate Sutherland always felt out of place in brash and modern Southern California. But when she comes to her ancestral home in the Shetland Islands to seek a mystical guide who may shed light on her true heritage, Kate is plagued with visions of a life from five centuries past.... A fiery young woman of royal English blood, Catriona Wells is determined to save her family from the deadly political clashes of 15th-century Britain. But Cat's cunning is no match for Scottish border lord Patrick MacKendrick. When this powerful warrior betroths her against her will, Cat must decide whether she dares to love him -- and to trust him with lives that are more precious to her than her own.

Meanwhile Kate, whose dreams rapidly take on a reality of their own, is caught between a present-day attraction to a charming Scottish historian -- and risking everything in Catriona's dangerous world of passion and bloodshed.




I won the following two young adult books from The Unread Reader.

Forgive My Fins


by Tera Lynn Childs


Lily Sanderson has a secret, and it’s not that she has a huge crush on gorgeous swimming god Brody Bennett, who makes her heart beat flipper-fast. Unrequited love is hard enough when you’re a normal teenage girl, but when you’re half human, half mermaid like Lily, there’s no such thing as a simple crush.

Lily’s mermaid identity is a secret that can’t get out, since she’s not just any mermaid – she’s a Thalassinian princess. When Lily found out three years ago that her mother was actually a human, she finally realized why she didn’t feel quite at home in Thalassinia, and she’s been living on land and going to Seaview high school ever since, hoping to find where she truly belongs. Sure, land has its problems – like her obnoxious, biker boy neighbor Quince Fletcher – but it has that one major perk – Brody. The problem is, mermaids aren’t really the casual dating type – when they “bond,” it’s for life.

When Lily’s attempt to win Brody’s love leads to a tsunami-sized case of mistaken identity, she is in for a tidal wave of relationship drama, and she finds out, quick as a tailfin flick, that happily-ever-after never sails quite as smoothly as you planned.

The Way We Fall


by Megan Crewe


It starts with an itch you just can’t shake. Then comes a fever and a tickle in your throat. A few days later, you’ll be blabbing your secrets and chatting with strangers like they’re old friends. Three more, and the paranoid hallucinations kick in.

And then you’re dead.

When a deadly virus begins to sweep through sixteen-year-old Kaelyn’s community, the government quarantines her island—no one can leave, and no one can come back.

Those still healthy must fight for dwindling supplies, or lose all chance of survival. As everything familiar comes crashing down, Kaelyn joins forces with a former rival and discovers a new love in the midst of heartbreak. When the virus starts to rob her of friends and family, she clings to the belief that there must be a way to save the people she holds dearest. 

Because how will she go on if there isn’t?




What books came home to you this week?

Mailbox Monday! (April 9, 2012)

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 Mailbox Monday will be hosted in April by Cindy at Cindy's Love of  Books.  In My Mailbox is hosted Sundays at The Story Siren.  I got some nice wins and swaps this week as well as review books.  Come on in and take a look!

Girl Unmoored
by Jennifer Gooch Hummer

Apron Bramhall has come unmoored. It’s 1985 and her mom has passed away, her evil stepmother is pregnant, and her best friend has traded her in for a newer model. Fortunately, she’s about to be saved by Jesus. Not that Jesus—the actor who plays him in Jesus Christ, Superstar. Apron is desperate to avoid the look-alike Mike (no one should look that much like Jesus unless they can perform a miracle or two), but suddenly he’s everywhere. Until one day, she’s stuck in church with him—of all places. And then something happens; Apron’s broken teenage heart blinks on for the first time since she’s been adrift. 

Mike and his grumpy boyfriend, Chad, offer her a summer job in their flower store and Apron’s world seems to calm. But when she uncovers Chad’s secret, coming of age becomes almost too much bear. She’s forced to see things the adults around her fail to—like what love really means and who is paying too much for it.

The Day the World Ends

by Ethan Coen

From one of the most inventive and celebrated filmmakers of the twentieth century, and co-creator of such classics asFargo, No Country for Old Men, and True Grit, a collection of poems that offers humor and insight into an artist who has always pushed the boundaries of his craft.
Ethan Coen's screenplays have surprised and delighted international audiences with their hilarious vision and bizarrely profound understanding of human nature. This eccentric genius is revealed again in The Day the World Ends, a remarkable range of poems that are as funny, ribald, provocative, raw, and often touching as the brilliant films that have made the Coen brothers cult legends.

One Breath Away

by Heather Gudenkauf

On a bitter March day, as a sudden snowstorm envelops the small town of Broken Branch, Iowa, an unknown man with a gun enters the town’s only school and takes a classroom of children hostage. As awareness of the situation spreads, the panicked community is ready to do anything to protect their children, but can only watch and wait. 

As a teacher with a long career behind her, Evelyn Oliver is ready to enjoy retirement with her loving husband. But now, faced with a crazy man armed with a gun, terrorizing her classroom, she’d rather die than fail to protect any of her students. But why is he doing this? Evelyn’s been scouring her mind but doesn’t recognize the intruder. Maybe one of the students is the key? 

Holly Thwaite left Broken Branch and her family behind without a word eighteen years ago, vowing never to return. But after a debilitating accident leaves her recovering in a hospital in Arizona, she’s forced to send her children to her hometown to be looked after by their grandfather, the man she never wanted them to meet. Will Thwaite never understood why his estranged daughter, Holly, ran away all those years ago. But now that her children are in his care, he refuses to fail his daughter again. One way or another, Will is going to get his grandkids, P.J. and Augie, out of that school safely even if he has to go in and get them himself. What Will doesn’t know is that thirteen-year-old Augie is just as determined to rescue her little brother from the killer and help her classmates, even if it means putting herself in the crosshairs of the gunman. 

Police officer Meg Barrett wants to know who the intruder is and why he’s doing this. Whoever it is, there’s no excuse for this. Meg should know. She’s had plenty of hardships herself. But with innocent lives at stake, Meg is prepared to risk her own life to save these hostages, although it means disobeying orders and taking on the gunman face-to-face. 

As the standoff progresses and the snowstorm rages outside, anxiety and frustration start to build to dangerous levels. But everyone knows how precarious the situation is. One wrong move, even a breath, could have the most devastating of consequences.

Ebooks for review:

The Forsaken

by Estevan Vega

DON'T LET IT IN. 

The first victim has no natural wounds. No prints left behind. No lacerations. But the life has been gruesomely drained from the corpse, and a broken cross is now imprinted inside the skin. 

Left for dead a year ago by his former partner, reckless and medicated Detective Jude Foster now endures mindless therapy sessions in order to be given another chance at his life.When the chief of police discovers the first victim strangely killed in this sadistic fashion, Jude enters a dark world all-too-familiar. He knows he’s seen this method of murder before, but he never caught the killer. 

Could this be a copycat, or is it the one that got away? 

Forced to take on a new partner for the case, Jude must come to terms with the fractured memories of his past, attempt to keep his younger brother safe, and chase down a ghost killer who is collecting human souls. But time is against him. How many more victims will there be before the killer is satisfied? And will Jude Foster be able to survive this new hell or in the chaos, will he risk becoming something else entirely?

The Lost Ones

by Ace Atkins

Fresh from ten years as a U.S. Army Ranger, Quinn Colson finds his hands full as the newly elected sheriff of Tibbehah County, Mississippi.  An old buddy running a local gun shop may be in over his head when stolen army rifles start showing up in the hands of a Mexican drug gang.

At the same time, an abused-child case leads Quinn and his tough-as-nails deputy, Lillie Virgil, deep into the heart of a bootleg baby racket and a trail of darkness and death. And when the two cases collide, Quinn and his allies are forced to realize that, though they may be home from the war, they are now in the fight of their lives.

Some Kind of Fairy Tale

by Graham Joyce

It is Christmas afternoon and Peter Martin gets an unexpected phonecall from his parents, asking him to come round. It pulls him away from his wife and children and into a bewildering mystery. 

He arrives at his parents house and discovers that they have a visitor. His sister Tara. Not so unusual you might think, this is Christmas after all, a time when families get together. But twenty years ago Tara took a walk into the woods and never came back and as the years have gone by with no word from her the family have, unspoken, assumed that she was dead. Now she's back, tired, dirty, dishevelled, but happy and full of stories about twenty years spent travelling the world, an epic odyssey taken on a whim. 

But her stories don't quite hang together and once she has cleaned herself up and got some sleep it becomes apparent that the intervening years have been very kind to Tara. She really does look no different from the young women who walked out the door twenty years ago. Peter's parents are just delighted to have their little girl back, but Peter and his best friend Richie, Tara's one time boyfriend, are not so sure. Tara seems happy enough but there is something about her. A haunted, otherworldly quality. Some would say it's as if she's off with the fairies. And as the months go by Peter begins to suspect that the woods around their homes are not finished with Tara and his family...

The Book of Summers

by Emylia Hall

Beth Lowe has been sent a parcel. 

Inside is a letter informing her that her long-estranged mother has died, and a scrapbook Beth has never seen before. Entitled The Book of Summers, it's stuffed with photographs and mementos complied by her mother to record the seven glorious childhood summers Beth spent in rural Hungary. 
It was a time when she trod the tightrope between separated parents and two very different countries; her bewitching but imperfect Hungarian mother and her gentle, reticent English father; the dazzling house of a Hungarian artist and an empty-feeling cottage in deepest Devon. And it was a time that came to the most brutal of ends the year Beth turned sixteen. 

Since then, Beth hasn't allowed herself to think about those years of her childhood. But the arrival of The Book of Summers brings the past tumbling back into the present; as vivid, painful and vital as ever.

Books Won:

Hold Still 

by Nina LaCour

An arresting story about starting over after a friend’s suicide, froma breakthrough new voice in YA fiction dear caitlin, there are so many things that i want so badly to tell you but i just can’t.

Devastating, hopeful, hopeless, playful . . . in words and illustrations, Ingrid left behind a painful farewell in her journal for Caitlin. Now Caitlin is left alone, by loss and by choice, struggling to find renewed hope in the wake of her best friend’s suicide. With the help of family and newfound friends, Caitlin will encounter first love, broaden her horizons, and start to realize that true friendship didn’t die with Ingrid. And the journal which once seemed only to chronicle Ingrid’s descent into depression, becomes the tool by which Caitlin once again reaches out to all those who loved Ingrid—and Caitlin herself

What Would Emma Do?

by Eileen Cook

Thou Shalt Not Kiss Thy Best Friend’s Boyfriend...again...

There is no greater sin than kissing your best friend’s boyfriend. So when Emma breaks that golden rule, she knows she’s messed up big-time...especially since she lives in the smallest town ever, where everyone knows everything about everyone else...and especially since she maybe kinda wants to do it again. Now her best friend isn’t speaking to her, her best guy friend is making things totally weird, and Emma is running full speed toward certain social disaster. This is so not the way senior year was supposed to go.

Time to pray for a minor miracle. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s time for Emma to stop trying to please everyone around her, and figure out what she wants for herself.

Heft

by Liz Moore

Former academic Arthur Opp weighs 550 pounds and hasn't left his rambling Brooklyn home in a decade. Twenty miles away, in Yonkers, seventeen-year-old Kel Keller navigates life as the poor kid in a rich school and pins his hopes on what seems like a promising baseball career if he can untangle himself from his family drama. The link between this unlikely pair is Kel s mother, Charlene, a former student of Arthur s. After nearly two decades of silence, it is Charlene s unexpected phone call to Arthur a plea for help that jostles them into action. Through Arthur and Kel s own quirky and lovable voices, Heft tells the winning story of two improbable heroes whose sudden connection transforms both their lives. Like Elizabeth McCracken s The Giant s House, Heft is a novel about love and family found in the most unexpected places.

Swapped:

The Night Season

by Chelsea Cain

With the Beauty Killer Gretchen Lowell locked away behind bars once again, Archie Sheridan—a Portland police detective and nearly one of her victims—can finally rest a little easier. Meanwhile, the rest of the city of Portland is in crisis. Heavy rains have flooded the Willamette River, and several people have drowned in the quickly rising waters. Or at least that’s what they thought until the medical examiner discovers that the latest victim didn’t drown: She was poisoned before she went into the water. Soon after, three of those drownings are also proven to be murders. Portland has a new serial killer on its hands, and Archie and his task force have a new case. 

Reporter Susan Ward is chasing this story of a new serial killer with gusto, but she’s also got another lead to follow for an entirely separate mystery: The flooding has unearthed a skeleton, a man who might have died more than sixty years ago, the last time Portland flooded this badly, when the water washed away an entire neighborhood and killed at least fifteen people. 

With Archie following the bizarre trail of evidence and evil deeds to catch a killer and possibly regain his life, and Susan Ward close behind, Chelsea Cain—one of today’s most talented suspense writers—launches the next installment of her bestselling series with an electric thriller.

11/22/63

by Stephen King

On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed forever. 

If you had the chance to change the course of history, would you? 
Would the consequences be worth it? 

Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk. 

Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time. 

Explore the Possibilities...

Gone

by Lisa McMann

The conclusion of the paranormal teen series, Wake. Janie is spending her summer with Cabel, but deep down she's panicking about how she's going to survive her future when getting sucked into other people's dreams starts to take its toll.

What books came home to live with you this week?

Mailbox Monday (April 2, 2012)

 Mailbox Monday will be hosted in April by Cindy at Cindy's Love of  Books.  In My Mailbox is hosted Sundays at The Story Siren.  Hopefully you will find some must reads in the variety that I received this week.  There are a couple that I can't wait to dive into!

Bloom
by Kelle Hampton


From the outside looking in, Kelle Hampton had the perfect life: a beautiful two-year-old daughter, a loving husband, a thriving photography career, and great friends.  When she learned she was pregnant with her second child, she and her husband, Brett, were ecstatic.  Her pregnancy went smoothly and the ultrasounds showed a beautiful, healthy, high-kicking baby girl.


But when her new daughter was placed in her arms in the delivery room, Kelle knew instantly that something was wrong.  Nella looked different than her two-year-old sister, Lainey, had at birth.  As she watched her friends and family celebrate with champagne toasts and endless photographs, a terrified Kelle was certain that Nella had Down syndrome -- a fear her pediatrician soon confirmed.  Yet gradually Kelle's fear and pain were vanquished by joy, as she embraced the realization that she had been chosen to experience an extraordinary and special gift.


Bloom takes readers on a wondrous journey through Nella's first year of life -- a gripping, hilarious, and intensely poignant trip of transformation in which a mother learns that perfection comes in all different shapes.  It is a story about embracing life and really living it, of being fearless and accepting difference, of going beyond constricting definitions of beauty, and of the awesome power of persepctive.  As Kelle writes, "There is us.  Our Family.  We will embrace this beauty and make something of it.  We will hold our precious gift and know that we are lucky."

A Land More Kind Than Home

by Wiley Cash

For a curious boy like Jess Hall, growing up in Marshall means trouble when your mother catches you spying on grown-ups.  Adventurous and precocious.  Jess is enormously protective of his older brother, Christopher, a mute whom everyone calls Stump.  Though their mother has warned them not to snoop, Stump can't help sneaking a look at something he's not supposed to -- an act that will have catastrophic repercussions, shattering both his world and Jess's.  It's a wrenching event that thrusts Jess into an adulthood for which he's not prepared.  While there is much about the world that still confuses him, he now knows that a new understanding can bring not only a growing danger and evil -- but also the possibility of freedom and deliverance as well.

Told by three resonant and evocative characters -- Jess; Adelaide Lyle, the town midwife and moral conscience; and Clem Barefield, a sheriff with his own painful past -- A Land More Kind Than Home is a haunting tale of courage in the face of cruelty and the power of love to overcome the darkness that lives in us all.  These are masterful portrayals, written with assurance and truth, and they show us the extraordinary promise of this remarkable first novel. 

Oklahoma City:

What the Investigation Missed -- and Why It Still Matters

by Andrew Gumbel & Roger G. Charles

In the early morning of April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh drove into downtown Oklahoma City in a rented Ryder truck containing a deadly fertilizer bomb that he and his army buddy Terry Nichols had made the previous day.  He parked in a handicapped-parking zone, hopped out of the truck, and walked away into a series of alleys and streets.  Shortly after 9:00 A.M., the bomb obliterated one-third of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people, including 19 infants and toddlers.  McVeigh claimed he'd worked only with Nichols, and at least officially, the government believed him. But McVeigh's was just one version of events.  And much of it was wrong.

In Oklahoma City, veteran investigative journalists Andrew Gumbel and Roger G. Charles puncture the myth about what happened on that day -- one that has persisted in the minds of the American public for nearly two decades.  Working with unprecedented access to government documents, a voluminous correspondence with Terry Nichols, and more than 150 interviews with those immediately involved, Gumbel and Charles demonstrate how much was missed beyond the guilt of the two principal defendants: in particular, the dysfunction within the country's law enforcement agencies, which squandered opportunities to penetrate the radical right and prevent the bombing, and the unanswered question of who inspired the plot and who else might have been involved.

To this day, the FBI heralds the Oklahoma City investigation as one of its great triumphs.  In reality, though, its handling of the bombing foreshadowed many of the problems that made the country vulnerable to attach again on 9/11.  Law enforcement agencies could not see past their own rivalries and underestimated the seriousness of the deadly rhetoric coming from the radical far right.  In Oklahoma City, Gumbel and Charles give the fullest, most honest account to date of both the plot and the investigation, drawing a vivid portrait of the unfailingly compelling -- driven, eccentric, fractious, funny, and wildly paranoid -- characters involved. 

More Like Her

by Liza Palmer

In Frances's mind, beautiful, successful, ecstatically married Emma Dunham is the height of female perfection.  Frances, recently dumped with spectacular drama by her boyfriend, aspires to be just like Emma.  So do her close friends and fellow teachers, Lisa and Jill.  But Lisa's too career-focused to find time for a family.  And Jill's recent unexpected pregnancy could have devastating consequences for her less-than-perfect marriage.

Yet sometimes the golden dream you fervently wish for turns out to be not at all what it seems -- like Emma's enviable suburban postcard life, which is about to be brutally cut short by a perfect husband turned killer.  And in the shocking aftermath, three devastated friends are going to have to come to terms with their own secrets. . .l and somehow learn to move forward after their dream is exposed as a lie. 

Secret Heroes:

Everyday Americans Who Shaped Our World

by Paul Martin

Not all American heroes appear in the standard history texts.  Their achievements aren't celebrated like the monumental exploits of presidents, generals, and founding fathers.  But for as long as this great nation has existed, ordinary citizens have done extraordinary things.  In Secret Heroes, author Paul Martin spotlights thirty overlooked Americans, all of whom had an impact on their world and ours, including:

Hercules Mulligan, the New York tailor and spy who saved George Washington's life. . . twice!

Jimmie Angel, the gold seeking bush pilot who, in 1933, discovered the world's highest waterfall in Venezuela.

Carl Akeley, a pioneering taxidermist who killed a leopard with his bare hands and inspired Africa's first national park.

Eliza Scidmore, who convinced the government to plant cherry trees in Washington, D.C. . . . after twenty-four years of lobbying!

The Bond:

Our Kinship with Animals, Our Call to Defend Them

by Wayne Pacelle

In countless fascinating ways, our relationship with animals is an essential part of the human experience.  Now, one of the world's leading champions of animal welfare offers a dramatic examination of our age-old bond to all creatures.  Wayne Pacelle explores the many ways animals contribute to our happiness and well-being, and he reveals scientists' newfound understanding of their remarkable emotional and cognitive capacities.  Pacelle also takes on animal cruelty in its many varieties, as well as stubborn opponents of animal protection -- from multinational agribusiness corporations to the National Rifle Association and even our own government.  An instant classic, The Bond reminds us that animals are at the center of our lives, not just a backdrop, and how we treat them is one of the great themes of the human story.

Winged Obsession:

The Pursuit of the World's Most Notorious Butterfly Smuggler

by Jessica Speart

One of the world's most beautiful endangered species, butterflies are as lucrative as gorillas, pandas, and rhinos on the black market.  In this cutthroat $200 million business, no one was more successful -- or posed a greater ecological danger -- than Yoshi Kojima, the kingpin of butterfly smugglers.

In Winged Obsession, author Jessica Speart tells the riveting true story of rookie U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agent Ed Newcomer's determined crusade to halt the career of a brazen and ingenious criminal with an almost supernatural sixth sense of survival.  But the story doesn't end there.  Speart chronicles her own attempts, while researching the book, to befriend Kojima before betraying him -- unaware that the cagey smuggler had his own plans to make the writer a player in his illegal butterfly trade. 

Fated (The Soul Seekers, #1)

by Alyson Noel

At the center of it all is Daire Santos, a 16-year-old girl whose life has taken a bizarre turn -- animals follow her, crows mock her, glowing people appear out of nowhere -- and the disturbing visions are getting worse.  Sent to stay with her grandmother in the dusty plains of Enchantment, New Mexico, it is there that Daire learns of her true calling as a Soul Seeker -- one who can navigate between the worlds of the living and the dead.  Now she must embrace her fate and find out if Dace, the boy in her dreams, is her one true love. . . or if he is allied with the enemy she is destined to destroy. 

 

An Unexpected Guest

by Anne Korkeakivi

Clare Moorhouse is an American in Paris who has been leading a graceful life abroad.  There are pleasures to being married to a high-ranking diplomat, but there are also appearances to be upheld and responsibilities to be executed -- like tonight's unexpected dinner party, one crucial to her husband's career.  As Clare navigates the spring-green streets of Paris, shopping for fresh stalks of asparagus, the right cheeses, and flowers for the table, she is haunted by a brief period of violence in her past that threatens to resurface and crack the immaculate veneer she's worked so hard to achieve.  At tonight's dinner, her husband hopes to receive a new posting.  But to Clare, the potential move means wrestling with a secret that has been deeply and carefully buried for twenty-five years -- or so she thought.

The myriad preparations for dinner are only the beginning of her day's complications.  Clare's son appears on her doorstep, absent without permission from his boarding school.  But much more unsettling is a face in the crowd that she glimpses again and again.  A face that belongs to that other, darker era of her life, and one she never expected to see again.

Like Virginia Woolf did in Mrs. Dalloway, Annd Korkeakivi brilliantly weaves the complexities of an age into an act as deceptively simple as hosting a dinner party in this alluring and timely debut. 

Great-Aunt Sophia's Lessons for Bombshells

by Lisa Cach

When Grace Cavanaugh agrees to be a summer companion to her elderly, wealthy Great-Aunt Sophia, she envisions plenty of time to finish her dissertation on sexual politics.  But Sophia has other plans.  With a tart tongue that would put Bette Davis to shame, she sets about transforming her frumpy great-niece into a modern version of the B-movie bombshell Sophia once was, teaching her about men, sexual liberation, and power.  Two very different men provide opportunities for Grace to practice her new skills, but can she truly be both seriously bookish and seriously sexy?  and what does she do when she's attracted to both men?

Wife 22

by Melanie Gideon

Maybe it was my droopy eyelids.

Maybe it was because I was about to turn the same age my mother was when I lost her.

Maybe it was because after almost twenty years of marriage my husband and I seemed to be running out of things to say to each other.

But when the anonymous online study called "Marriage in the 21st Century" showed up in my inbox, I had no idea how profoundly it would change my life.  It wasn't long before I was assigned both a pseudonym (Wife 22) and a caseworker (Researcher 101).  And, just like that, I found myself answering questions. . .

7.  Sometimes I tell him he's snoring when he's not snoring so he'll sleep in the guest room and I can have the bed all to myself.

61.  He was cutting peppers for the salad.  I looked at those hands and thought, I am going to have this man's children.

32.  That if we weren't careful, it was possible to forget one another.

Before the study, my life was an endless blur of school lunches and doctor's appointments, family dinners and budgets.  I was Alice Buckle: spouse of William and mother to Zoe and Peter, drama teacher and Facebook chatter, downloader of memories and Googler of solutions.

But these days, I'm also Wife 22.  And somehow, my anonymous correspondence with Researcher 101 has taken an unexpected turn.  Soon, I'll have to make a decision -- one that will affect my family, my marriage, my whole life.  But at this moment, I'm too busy answering questons.

As it turns out, confession can be a very powerful aphrodisiac. 

What books came home to you last week?