Breaking the Spine

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D.

2012-02-01T00:01:00.011-06:00

By Nichole Bernier
Publication Date: June 5

From Amazon:

Summer vacation on the island was supposed to be a restorative time for Kate, who'd lost her close friend Elizabeth in a sudden accident. But when she inherits a trunk of Elizabeth's journals, they reveal a woman far different than the cheerful wife and mother Kate had known. The complicated portrait of Elizabeth--her upbringing, her marriage, and journey to motherhood--makes Kate question not just their friendship, but her most fundamental beliefs about loyalty and deception at a time when she is uncertain in her own marriage. When an unfamiliar man's name appears in the pages, Kate realizes the extent of what she didn't know about her friend--including where she was really going when she died. Set in the anxious post-September 11th summer of 2002, this story of two women--their friendship, their marriages, private ambitions and fears--considers the aspects of ourselves we show and those we conceal, and the repercussions of our choices.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Tigers in Red Weather

2012-01-25T00:01:00.013-06:00

By Liza Klaussmann
Publication Date: July 17

From Amazon:

Nick and her cousin, Helena, have grown up sharing sultry summer heat, sunbleached boat docks, and midnight gin parties on Martha's Vineyard in a glorious old family estate known as Tiger House. In the days following the end of the Second World War, the world seems to offer itself up, and the two women are on the cusp of their 'real lives': Helena is off to Hollywood and a new marriage, while Nick is heading for a reunion with her own young husband, Hughes, about to return from the war.

Soon the gilt begins to crack. Helena's husband is not the man he seemed to be, and Hughes has returned from the war distant, his inner light curtained over. On the brink of the 1960s, back at Tiger House, Nick and Helena--with their children, Daisy and Ed--try to recapture that sense of possibility. But when Daisy and Ed discover the victim of a brutal murder, the intrusion of violence causes everything to unravel. The members of the family spin out of their prescribed orbits, secrets come to light, and nothing about their lives will ever be the same.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Gilded Age

2012-01-18T00:01:00.013-06:00

By Claire McMillan
Publication Date: June 12

From Amazon:

A debut author transforms Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth into a powerful modern story of one woman’s struggle with independence and love. Ellie Hart made a brilliant marriage in New York, but it ended in a scandalous divorce and 30 days in Sierra Tucson rehab. Now, returning home to Cleveland, she finds that, despite feminist lip service, she will still need a husband to be socially complete. A woman’s sexual reputation matters, and so does her family name in the treacherous social terrain where old money meets new: charitable benefits and tequila body shots, inherited diamonds and viper-bite lip piercings, country house weekends and sexting. Ellie finds that her beauty is a powerful tool in this world, but it has its limitations, even liabilities. Through one misstep after another, Ellie mishandles her second act. Her options narrow, her prospects contract, until she faces a desperate choice.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Wife 22

2012-01-11T00:01:00.013-06:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

Wife 22

By Melanie Gideon
Publication Date: May 29

From Amazon:

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

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Hypnotist's Love Story

2012-01-04T00:01:00.011-06:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

The Hypnotist's Love Story
By Liane Moriarty
Publication Date: June 14

From Amazon:

Ellen O’Farrell is an expert when it comes to human frailties. She’s a hypnotherapist who helps her clients deal with everything from addictions to life-long phobias. So when she falls in love with a man who is being stalked by his ex-girlfriend she’s more intrigued than frightened. What makes a supposedly smart, professional woman behave this way? She’d love to meet her! What she doesn’t know is that she already has. Saskia has been masquerading as a client, and their lives are set to collide in ways Ellen could never have predicted. As Ellen is about to discover, we’re all a little crazy – even her.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Master's Muse

2011-12-28T00:01:00.021-06:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

The Master's Muse
By Varley O’Connor
Publication Date: May 8

From Amazon:

In the tradition of Loving Frank and The Paris Wife comes an unforgettable novel based on the life of George Balanchine’s fifth wife, a star ballerina whose career was cut short after she contracted polio at 26. Once author Varley O’Connor, the daughter of a polio survivor, came across the facts about Tanaquil (Tanny) Le Clercq, she could not get the story out of her mind. O’Connor dug deeper, reading countless articles and interviews, and watching hundreds of hours of documentaries and New York City Ballet footage to capture Le Clercq’s essence. The result is an evocative, compelling portrayal of the 17-year marriage between George Balanchine—the ballet master credited with creating an American style of dance—and his final wife.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Newlyweds

2011-12-21T00:01:00.013-06:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

The Newlyweds
By Nell Freudenberger
Publication Date: May 1

From Amazon:

Amina Mazid is 24 when she leaves Bangladesh for Rochester, New York, and for George Stillman, the husband who met and wooed her online. It's a 21st century romance that echoes ancient traditions--the arranged marriages of her home country. And though George falls for Amina because she is "straightforward" and doesn't "play games," each is hiding something from the other. Amina struggles to find her place in America--as a Muslim woman, an aspiring teacher, a wife with her own desires. But it is only when they put an ocean between them that Amina and George will discover whether they have a future--or if their secrets will tear them apart.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: So Far Away

2011-12-14T00:01:00.011-06:00

By Meg Mitchell Moore
Publication Date: May 29

From Amazon:

Thirteen-year-old Natalie Gallagher is trying to escape: from her parents' ugly divorce, and from the vicious cyber-bullying of her former best friend. Kathleen Lynch is an archivist at a Boston library, a widow, estranged from her only daughter. Their very different lives are joined by a woman long-dead--Bridget O' Meara, who came to Boston in 1925 to work as a maid. When Natalie discovers Bridget's diary in her mother's attic, she embarks on a quest to learn more about the woman on the page, finding an unlikely and sometimes unwanted ally in Kathleen. As they unlock the secrets to Bridget's life, and her link to theirs, they learn that their present day fears and frustrations are more timeless than they seem, and that solace can come from unlikely sources.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: An Unexpected Guest

2011-12-07T00:01:00.011-06:00

By Anne Korkeakivi
Publication Date: April 17

From Amazon:

Clare Moorhouse, the American wife of a high-ranking diplomat in Paris, is arranging an official dinner crucial to her husband's career. As she shops for fresh stalks of asparagus and works out the menu and seating arrangements, her day is complicated by the unexpected arrival of her son and a random encounter with a Turkish man, whom she discovers is a suspected terrorist. More unnerving is a recurring face in the crowd, one that belonged to another, darker era of her life. One she never expected to see again. But it can't be him--he's been dead for 20 years....

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: More Than You Know

2011-11-30T00:01:00.016-06:00

Note: Sorry for the link troubles last week. I don't know what was going on...like one commenter said, the system went on holiday early! :)

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

More Than You Know
By Penny Vincenzi
Publication Date: April 10

From Amazon:

A privileged girl from a privileged class, Eliza has a dazzling career in the magazine world of the 1960s. But when she falls deeply in love with Matt, an edgy working-class boy, she gives up her ritzy, fast-paced lifestyle to get married. By the end of the decade, however, their marriage has suffered a harrowing breakdown, culminating in divorce and a dramatic courtroom custody battle over their little girl. Also at risk is Eliza's gorgeous family home, a pawn in the game, which she can't bear to give up.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Song Remains the Same

2011-11-23T00:01:00.004-06:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

The Song Remains the Same
By Allison Winn Scotch
Publication Date: April 12

From Amazon:

One of only two survivors of a plane crash, Nell Slattery wakes in the hospital with no memory of the horrific experience--or who she is, or was. Now she must piece together both body and mind, with the help of family and friends, who have their own agendas. She filters through photos, art, music, and stories, hoping something will jog her memory, and soon, in tiny bits and pieces, Nell starts remembering.

It isn't long before she learns to question the stories presented by her mother, her sister and business partner, and her husband. In the end, she will discover that forgiving betrayals small and large will be the only true path to healing herself and to finding happiness.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Affair

2011-11-16T00:01:00.007-06:00

By Alicia Clifford
Publication Date: March 13

From Goodreads:

As a writer, Celia Bayley’s insights into the ways of the human heart made her famous. And why not? She had married a handsome war hero and produced three successful children. Yet, as her family gathers for her funeral, the diaries and notebooks and letters she left behind paint a very different picture, one that shocks those who loved her and will force them to confront the difficult conflicts in their own lives.

Utterly compelling and beautifully written, The Affair makes vividly real the agonizing choice one woman must make. Powerful and moving, the novel is about marriage, families, and the definition of happiness.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Another Piece of My Heart

2011-11-09T00:01:00.010-06:00

By Jane Green
Publication Date: March 20

From Amazon:

Andi has spent much of her adult life looking for the perfect man, and at thirty-seven, she's finally found him. Ethan--divorced with two daughters, Emily and Sophia--is a devoted father and even better husband. Always hoping one day she would be a mother, Andi embraces the girls like they were her own. But in Emily’s eyes, Andi is an obstacle to her father’s love, and Emily will do whatever it takes to break her down. When the dynamics between the two escalate, they threaten everything Andi believes about love, family, and motherhood—leaving both women standing at a crossroad in their lives…and in their hearts.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Odds

2011-11-02T00:01:00.011-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

The Odds

By Stewart O'Nan
Publication Date: January 19

From Amazon:

Valentine's weekend, Art and Marion Fowler flee their Cleveland suburb for Niagara Falls, desperate to recoup their losses. Jobless, with their home approaching foreclosure and their marriage on the brink of collapse, Art and Marion liquidate their savings account and book a bridal suite at the Falls' ritziest casino for a second honeymoon. While they sightsee like tourists during the day, at night they risk it all at the roulette wheel to fix their finances...and save their marriage. A tender yet honest exploration of faith, forgiveness and last chances, The Odds is a reminder that love, like life, is always a gamble.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Carry the One

2011-10-26T00:01:00.015-05:00

By Carol Anshaw
Publication Date: March 6

From Amazon:

Carry the One begins in the hours following Carmen’s wedding reception, when a car filled with stoned, drunk, and sleepy guests accidently hits and kills a girl on a dark, country road. For the next 25 years, those involved, including Carmen and her brother and sister, connect and disconnect and reconnect with each other and their victim. As one character says, “When you add us up, you always have to carry the one.”

Through friendships and love affairs; marriage and divorce; parenthood, holidays, and the modest tragedies and joys of ordinary days, Carry the One shows how one life affects another and how those who thrive and those who self-destruct are closer to each other than we’d expect.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Darlings

2011-10-19T00:01:00.011-05:00

By Cristina Alger
Publication Date: February 16

From Amazon:

Now that he's married to Merrill Darling, daughter of billionaire financier Carter Darling, attorney Paul Ross has grown accustomed to New York society and all of its luxuries: a Park Avenue apartment, weekends in the Hamptons, bespoke suits. When Paul loses his job, Carter offers him the chance to head the legal team at his hedge fund. Thrilled with his good fortune in the midst of the worst financial downturn since the Great Depression, Paul accepts the position.

But Paul's luck is about to shift: a tragic event catapults the Darling family into the media spotlight, a regulatory investigation, and a red-hot scandal with enormous implications for everyone involved. Suddenly, Paul must decide where his loyalties lie--will he save himself while betraying his wife and in-laws or protect the family business at all costs?

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: First You Try Everything

2011-10-12T00:01:00.012-05:00

By Jane McCafferty
Publication Date: January 17

From HarperCollins:

Evvie and Ben used to love popular music. Songs were able to get them through anything in their early years together, but now there is a gulf between them. Ben started wearing a suit, and it no longer looks like a costume; he is forgetting the years when they worked a foodcart, selling Middle Eastern meals so they could get home by three and focus on their dreams. Now Evvie has lost sight of herself and Ben has set his sights on a different kind of future–alone. Convinced that Ben can’t let her go, Evvie begins to unravel at the seams, obsessively devising ways to staunch the inevitable separation. Told from Ben and Evvie’s alternating points of view, First You Try Everything is an intimate portrait of a marriage, examining questions of love, sanity, and the lengths we go through to avoid facing ourselves.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Gilly Salt Sisters

2011-10-05T00:01:00.012-05:00

By Tiffany Baker
Publication Date: March 14

From Amazon:

In the isolated Cape Cod village of Prospect, the Gilly sisters are as different as can be. Jo, a fierce and quiet loner, is devoted to the mysteries of her family's salt farm, while Claire is popular, pretty, and yearns to flee the salt at any cost. But the Gilly land hides a dark legacy that proves impossible to escape. Although the community half-suspects the Gilly sisters might be witches, it doesn't stop Whit Turner, the town's wealthiest bachelor, from forcing his way into their lives. It's Jo who first steals Whit's heart, but it is Claire--heartbroken over her high school sweetheart--who marries him.

Years later, estranged from her family, Claire finds herself thrust back onto the farm with the last person she would have chosen: her husband's pregnant mistress. Suddenly, alliances change, old loves return, and new battle lines are drawn. What the Gilly sisters learn about each other, the land around them, and the power of the salt, will not only change each of their lives forever, it will also alter Gilly history for good.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Starboard Sea

2011-09-28T00:01:00.015-05:00

By Amber Dermont
Publication Date: February 28

From Library Journal:

A Manhattan penthouse, a flashy prep-school eduction, a summer home in Maine: as his name suggests, Jason Prosper comes from wealth. But he ignores all the fuss and pretension, instead preferring to sail with Cal, his best friend at Kensington Prep. When Cal commits suicide during their junior year, a devastated Jason transfers to another school and launches a gentle romance with Aidan. Then Aidan’s bruised body is discovered on the beach after a terrible storm blows through, and she is ruled a suicide, too. But Jason begins to wonder—could something connect the deaths of two people so close to him?—and he begins contemplating what dark secrets those around him might be hiding.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Underside of Joy

2011-09-21T00:01:00.012-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

The Underside of Joy
By Seré Prince Halverson
Publication Date: January 17

From Amazon:

To Ella Beene, happiness means living in the northern California river town of Elbow with her husband, Joe, and his two young children. Yet one summer day Joe breaks his own rule--never turn your back on the ocean--and a sleeper wave strikes him down, drowning not only the man but his many secrets.

For three years, Ella has been the only mother the kids have known and has believed that their biological mother, Paige, abandoned them. But when Paige shows up at the funeral, intent on reclaiming the children, Ella soon realizes there may be more to Paige and Joe's story.

The Underside of Joy is not a fairy-tale version of stepmotherhood pitting good Ella against evil Paige, but an exploration of the complex relationship of two mothers.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Lost Saints of Tennessee

2011-09-14T00:01:00.011-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

The Lost Saints of Tennessee
By Amy Franklin-Willis
Publication Date: January 31

From Amazon:

With enormous heart and dazzling agility, Amy Franklin-Willis expertly mines the fault lines in one Southern working-class family. Driven by the soulful voices of 42-year-old Ezekiel Cooper and his mother, Lillian, The Lost Saints of Tennessee journeys from the 1940s to 1980s as it follows Zeke’s evolution from anointed son, to honorable sibling, to unhinged middle-aged man.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: How It All Began

2011-09-07T00:01:00.010-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

How It All Began
By Penelope Lively
Publication Date: January 5

From Library Journal:

A chance encounter between a retired schoolteacher and a petty thief sets off an unexpected chain of events. A marriage is undone by a misdirected cell phone call revealing an affair, for instance, while an interior designer finds the perfect business partner and an old-timey historian gets an idea for a snappy miniseries. The moral—life always has other plans for us—should be beautifully conveyed by Man Booker Award winner Lively.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea

2011-08-31T00:01:00.014-05:00

By Morgan Callan Rogers
Publication Date: January 19

From Library Journal:

Bread baking, lobster pots, and Maine’s cold blue sea: none of it is the same for Florine Gilham after her mother disappears on a weekend outing. When she grows up, secrets from her father’s past further complicate her life.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Train of Small Mercies

2011-08-24T00:01:00.016-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

The Train of Small Mercies
By David Rowell
Publication Date: October 13

From Amazon:

In haunting and crystalline prose, The Train of Small Mercies follows six characters' intrepid search for hope among the debris of an American tragedy.

In New York, a young black porter struggles through his first day on the job, a staggering assignment aboard Robert F. Kennedy's funeral train. In Pennsylvania, a woman creates a tangle of lies to sneak away from her disapproving husband and pay her respects to the slain senator, dragging her child with her. In Maryland, a wounded young soldier awaits a newspaper interview that his parents hope will restore his damaged self-esteem. And in Washington, an Irish nanny in town to interview with the Kennedy family must reconcile the lost opportunity and the chance to start her life anew.

In this stunning debut, David Rowell depicts disparate lives united by an extraordinary commemoration, irrevocably changed as Kennedy's funeral train makes its solemn journey from New York to Washington.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: An Available Man

2011-08-17T00:01:00.012-05:00

By Hilma Wolitzer
Publication Date: January 24

From Amazon:

When Edward Schuyler, a modest and bookish 62-year-old science teacher, is widowed, he finds himself ambushed by female attention. The problem is that Edward doesn’t feel available. He’s still mourning his beloved wife, Bee, and prefers solitude and the familiar routine of work, gardening, and bird-watching. But then his stepchildren surprise him by placing a personal ad in The New York Review of Books on his behalf. Soon the letters flood in, and Edward is torn between his loyalty to Bee’s memory and his growing longing for connection. Gradually, reluctantly, he begins dating, and his encounters are variously startling, comical, and sad. Just when Edward thinks he has the game figured out, a chance meeting proves that love always arrives when it’s least expected.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Home Front

2011-08-10T00:01:00.014-05:00

By Kristin Hannah
Publication Date: January 31

From publisher:

From a distance, Michael and Joleen Zarkades seem to have it all: a solid marriage, two exciting careers, and children they adore. But after twelve years together, the couple has lost their way; they are unhappy and edging toward divorce. As a military family the notion of deployment is never out of the realm of possibility. But when it actually happens it seems to tear their already fragile family apart, sending one of them deep into harm’s way and leaving the other at home, waiting for news. When the worst happens, each must face their darkest fear and fight for the future of their family.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: 150 Pounds

2011-08-03T00:01:00.008-05:00

By Kate Rockland
Publication Date: January 17

From the publisher:

A smartly written novel of two women starting at opposite ends of the scale—and finding compromise and friendship in their journey towards 150 pounds. In the fast-paced life of blogging, two women stand out: Alexis Allbright, of Skinny Chick, and Shoshana Weiner, who writes Fat and Fabulous. Both have over five million loyal readers. Both are hungry for success. But the similarities stop there. When both appear as panelists on a popular talk show, their lives intersect in ways neither could have imagined.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

2011-07-27T00:01:00.010-05:00

By Joshilyn Jackson
Publication Date: January 25

From author's website:

Every 15 years, trouble comes after the Slocumb women. Now, as their youngest turns 15, a whole new kind of commotion is chasing all three generations. Mosey's desperate to know who used their yard as a make-shift cemetery, and why. The oldest, 45-year-old Ginny, fights to protect Mosey from the truth, a fight that could cost Ginny the love of her life. Between them is Liza, silenced by a stroke, with the answers trapped inside her. To survive Liza's secrets and Mosey's insistent adventures, Ginny must learn to trust the love that braids the strands of their past---and stop at nothing to defend their future.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: White Truffles in Winter

2011-07-20T00:01:00.015-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

White Truffles in Winter
By N. M. Kelby
Publication Date: November 7

From Amazon:

White Truffles in Winter imagines the world of the remarkable French chef Auguste Escoffier, who changed how we eat through his legendary restaurants at the Savoy and the Ritz. A man of contradictions—kind yet imperious, food-obsessed yet rarely hungry—Escoffier was also torn between two women: the famous, beautiful, and reckless actress Sarah Bernhardt and his wife, the independent and sublime poet Delphine Daffis, who refused ever to leave Monte Carlo. In the last year of Escoffier's life, in the middle of writing his memoirs, he has returned to Delphine, who requests a dish in her name as he has honored Bernhardt, Queen Victoria, and many others. How does one define the complexity of love on a single plate? N. M. Kelby brings us the sensuality of food and love amid a world on the verge of war in this work that shimmers with beauty and longing.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Before Ever After

2011-07-13T00:01:00.013-05:00

Samantha Sotto
Publication Date: August 2

From Library Journal:

Twentysomething Shelley’s world is shattered as she hears her husband being blown up while talking to him on the phone. Three years later, she’s made little progress in getting beyond her paralyzing grief when she opens the door to a man who looks so much like her husband, Max, that she faints. Paolo’s story is so utterly improbable—Max was his grandfather who never aged—that she can barely keep it together. The two grieving survivors head to Europe to retrace the offbeat continental tour that Max led five years before. As they slowly unravel the mystery of Max’s immortality and multiple reincarnations, Shelley and Paolo seem to be getting closer to finding the latest version of Max.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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Weekly Roundup 7/8

2011-07-08T08:45:00.001-05:00

After all of my angst about what books to take to the beach, I didn't have the opportunity to read very much. When I did have a second, I kept picking up books and putting them back down...I couldn't stay with anything for very long. Have you ever gone through a period like that?

I came home to find Kindred Spirits by Sarah Strohmeyer waiting on me...so I quickly dove in. It's sad, but it's a sweet and touching story of friendships between women, which is always a hook for me. This was my first by this author, but I'll definitely be reading more from her.

This was a big week for great fiction releases, all of which I have in hand: The Gap Year by Sarah Bird, Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante, Never Knowing by Chevy Stevens, and A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano.

Also, I don't read a lot of non-fiction, but I'm excited to start How to Eat a Small Country by Amy Finley. If you're a fan of The Next Food Network Star, you may remember that she was the season three winner...and the new fame/career ending up wrecking her family. She decided to leave it all behind, pack up her husband and two children, and move to France to rebuild her life. It sounds sooooo good...and I think the cover is so pretty!

Finally, my favorite recipe this week was Southern Living's Southwestern Pull-Apart Ring, a savory twist on monkey bread. This is a crowd-pleaser!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Starting from Happy

2011-07-06T00:01:00.012-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

Starting from Happy
By Patricia Marx
Publication Date: August 23

From Amazon:

While waiting in line for apple pie at a party, Imogene Gilfeather, a lingerie designer who does not understand the reason for romance, meets Wally Yez, a scientist whose business card says “An Answer for Everything.” Imogene is told that Wally is the perfect guy. He is told that her company, Featherware, manufactures intimates (that gets his attention). Unfazed by Imogene’s indifference, Wally resolves to win her over. E-mails turn into late-night phone calls; one date turns into two and then into more. Thus begins the most absurd and amusingly unbalanced relationship to grace the pages of a novel.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave your link below!

Weekly Roundup 7/1

2011-07-01T09:10:00.001-05:00

I'm taking a half day off work and getting my holiday weekend started early...heading down to the beautiful Gulf Coast. If you're going out of town and still haven't packed your bag of books, here are links to my best beach picks for this summer, in case you missed them the first time around.

Preview Part I

Preview Part II

Of the 10 picks, I've already read all but three (Kindred Spirits, One Summer, Burnt Mountain), and I can vouch for those seven...all great reads!

Thanks to your suggestions, my bag includes South of Superior, Ten Thousand Saints, and The Borrower.

I've made a batch of Redneck Caviar (black-eyed peas, black beans, corn, Rotel tomatoes, Italian dressing), and I'm ready to hit the road!

Help!!

2011-06-30T08:00:00.004-05:00

I'm not usually at a loss for what to read next, but I found myself last night staring at 10 books, with absolutely no clue where to start. They all hold equal appeal. So....I'm asking for your help!

What should I read next? Or, even better, what three should I take with me on vacation this weekend???

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty

Best Staged Plans by Claire Cook

Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson

The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai

South of Superior by Ellen Airgood

The Astral by Kate Christensen

A Young Wife by Pam Lewis

Groundswell by Katie Lee

One Summer by David Baldacci

Daughters of the Revolution by Carolyn Cooke

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Most Dangerous Thing

2011-06-29T00:01:00.015-05:00

By Laura Lippman
Publication Date: August 23

From Publishers Weekly:

Childhood friends, long since splintered off, uneasily reunite after the death of one of their own in Edgar-winner Lippman's superbly unsettling tale of the consequences of long-buried secrets. Gordon "Go-Go" Halloran drives his car into a wall after a night of drinking, even though he's been on the road to sobriety. On the brink of divorce, Gwen Robison returns home to care for her aging father and learns of Go-Go's death from his older brother, Sean. With the eldest Halloran brother, Tim, and a scruffy, nature-loving neighborhood girl, Mickey Wickham, the five had come together in the spring of 1977. The group broke apart after a violent encounter in the woods, an event that was never spoken of again, but permeates each of their lives. Lippman cleanly shifts between the past, following the band of kids through their adventures in the woods of their Baltimore suburb, and the present when Go-Go's death draws them back together.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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Weekly Roundup 6/24

2011-06-24T13:30:00.005-05:00

My most notable read this week was Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan. Believe every great thing you've seen/heard about this book (like Lily King's NYT review)...it's a must-read. It had all of my favorite elements...strong female characters, (complex and complicated) relationships between family members, a lush/summer setting. I stood at my mother's kitchen island last Sunday, while over there for Father's Day, with my finger in the air (hold on) as I read the final pages so I could leave it with her.

I'm up to my ears in "beach reads"...and I'm in heaven. I feel like I need to take a vacation just to read everything I have on hand. I plan on finishing Folly Beach by Dorothea Benton Frank today and reading Silver Girl by Elin Hilderbrand and Heat Wave by Nancy Thayer over the weekend.

I also picked up Southern Living Off the Eaten Path, subtitled Favorite Southern Dives and 150 Recipes that Made Them Famous. I've been waiting forever for it, and it has some heavy competition for my attention right now...but doesn't it look/sound great???

Finally, my new (to me) recipe of the week was Bubble Up Pizza, a sure-to-please-everyone recipe that is easily customizable to your preferences. Yum!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Falling Together

2011-06-22T00:01:00.012-05:00

Publication Date: October 4

From the author:

Pen, Will, and Cat met during their first week of their first year of college and struck up a remarkable friendship, one that sustained them and shaped them for years--until it ended abruptly, and they went their separate ways. Now, six years later, Pen is the single mother of a five year old girl, living with her older brother in Philadelphia and trying to make peace with the sudden death of her father. Even though she feels deserted by Will and Cat, she has never stopped wanting them back in her life, so when she receives an email from a desperate-sounding Cat asking her to meet her at their upcoming college reunion, Pen goes. What happens there sends past and present colliding and sends Pen and her friends on a journey across the world, a journey that will change everything.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave your link below!

Weekly Roundup 6/17

2011-06-17T14:15:00.001-05:00

I'm halfway through Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister, and it's an absolute pleasure. I love, love, love novels about women friendships. And the premise really got me thinking...after the main character recovers from cancer, she commits to taking a white-water rafting trip, a big fear of hers. She then issues individual challenges to her group of friends, getting them each to do something they would never normally do.

It made me wonder...what would my friends challenge me to?

I'm well-known for my all-black wardrobe (I even got married in it!), and my "uniform" of sorts is a black top and jeans. So, it was no surprise when I asked one of my friends what she would make me do outside of my comfort zone, she responded, "Spend an entire day in a hot pink, sleeveless dress with hot pink high heels." :) What would your friends say?

Next up for me is Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan!

Also this week, I discovered the Decatur Book Festival, held in a suburb of Atlanta, which is just a couple of hours away from me. I'm definitely going to make a Labor Day road trip. They released the list of authors today, and it includes Mary Kay Andrews, Jennifer Haigh, Joshilyn Jackson, and Kim Severson. If you've attended this event, please let me know your thoughts/experiences!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Aftertaste

2011-06-15T00:01:00.012-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

Aftertaste: A Novel in Five Courses
By Meredith Mileti
Publication Date: August 30

From Amazon:

Mira Rinaldi lives life at a rolling boil. Co-owner of Grappa, a chic New York City trattoria, she has an enviable apartment, a brand-new baby, and a frenzied schedule befitting her success. Everything changes the night she catches her husband, Jake, "wielding his whisk" with Grappa's new waitress. Mira's fiery response earns her a court-ordered stint in anger management and the beginning of legal and personal predicaments as she battles to save her restaurant and pick up the pieces of her life. Mira falls back on family and friends in Pittsburgh as she struggles to find a recipe for happiness. But the heat is really on when some surprising developments in New York present her with a high stakes opportunity to win back what she thought she had lost forever. For Mira, cooking isn't just about delicious flavors and textures, but about the pleasure found in filling others' needs. And the time has come to decide where her own fulfillment lies - even if the answers are unexpected.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave your link below!

Weekly Roundup 6/10

2011-06-10T09:22:00.001-05:00

I spent the majority of the week on vacation, reading in front of beautiful water. I took Still Alice by Lisa Genova with me. I know...I think I'm one of the last people to read this. It just escaped me when it was first published, but after reading Left Neglected earlier this year (and loving it!), I went back and picked this up. Genova has an amazing ability, with both of these books, for you to really internalize the medical issues of her main characters.

I also read Seven-Year Bitch by Jennifer Belle. It was an ideal vacation read...easy, fun, light, humorous.

For my weekend reading, I picked up Summer Rental by Mary Kay Andrews (one of my favorite Southern authors) and To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal.

Finally, I did way more eating out than in this week, but I did make my favorite topping for spaghetti, Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter, the night I got home. Clean and simple (three ingredients!).

"Waiting On" Wednesday: There But For The

2011-06-08T00:01:00.013-05:00

By Ali Smith
Publication Date: September 13

From Amazon:

At a dinner party in the posh London suburb of Greenwich, Miles Garth suddenly leaves the table and locks himself in an upstairs room, communicating only through notes slipped under the door to his involuntary hosts, the Lee family. In an act of desperation, Genevieve Lee summons Anna, a woman Miles knew briefly as a teenager, in the hope that she might be able to lure him out. Anna quickly finds herself thrust into the chaotic and surreal world of the Lees: their precocious nine-year-old neighbor, Brooke; their dinner guest Mark; and May, an elderly woman living nearby. Though each of these characters knows Miles only slightly, his self-imposed isolation will serve as the central event linking them to one another and to their own pasts.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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Weekly Roundup 6/3

2011-06-03T08:00:00.000-05:00

My favorite read this week was The Arrivals, which centers around three grown children who return home one summer as a result of various upheavals in their respective lives. I think this is such an easy situation to relate to, whether you're the parent or the child. I personally have moved back in with my parents briefly as an adult three times...most memorably, with my then-husband while we were between houses. THAT was an interesting experience.

I'm heading to the Gulf Coast on Sunday, and as of right now, my book beach bag pretty much looks like this:

That's right...EMPTY. How is that possible? The next two weeks are full of great summer releases, but, alas, my TBR pile doesn't exist right now.

I think I'm going to go back to my library list and re-check out books that I didn't get around to reading the first time...in particular, The Sweet Relief of Missing Children and You Know When the Men Are Gone.

I've already got WoW scheduled for next week, so be sure to come by and leave your link, even in my absence. As always, I'll be reading each and every participant's pick when I get back!

Finally, here's the best thing I cooked this week: Maple Sausage and Waffle Breakfast Casserole. It's my new go-to for brunch!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Wife-In-Law

2011-06-01T00:01:00.014-05:00

By Haywood Smith
Publication Date: September 13

From Amazon:

Neighbors Betsy Callison and Kat Ellis were oil and water when they met 35 years ago. Betsy was a prim, neat freak, Republican wife, and Kat was a wild, irreverent, hippie Democrat. But they soon discover common ground that creates a bond that lasts for decades. Until Betsy's husband leaves her for his secretary, then comes sniffing back around two years later and convinces newly widowed Kat to marry him! Not that Betsy wants him back, but it’s hard to move on when the newlyweds are flaunting their love right across the street. But there’s trouble brewing in Paradise, and no one knows philandering Greg better than his ex-wife Betsy. Can Betsy get involved in her best friend's marriage--even if it means helping her wife-in-law figure out the same man she shared a bed with for 30 years?

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave your link below!

Weekly Roundup 5/27

2011-05-27T09:00:00.057-05:00

This week, I finished The First Husband by Laura Dave. It was a fun, easy read...but it also gave me enough food for thought to imagine a "what if" scenario in my own life. And, I came away with another entry for my quote book. Love this:

"You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life."
--Jane Hirshfield

I don't read a lot of non-fiction, but I love the blog Carrots 'N' Cake, so I was thrilled to get my hands on her new book. It's full of great tips about making good food decisions without depriving yourself...achieving that ideal balance. Plus, it got me back on board with Body Pump, a fantastic class that works every muscle group. I've just been spinning five days a week lately, but I know I need strength training as much as cardio.

For the long weekend, I'm looking forward to finishing The Arrivals by Meg Mitchell Moore and getting started on Summer in the South by Cathy Holton. I also picked up a new cookbook from Southern Living magazine: The Half-Hour Hostess.

Finally, speaking of food, I made these Mini Lasagna Cups for dinner this week...now such a fan of working with wontons, I keep looking for other ways to use them. They were DELICIOUS!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Sisters

2011-05-25T00:01:00.015-05:00

By Nancy Jensen
Publication Date: November 8

From Amazon:

Growing up in hardscrabble Kentucky in the 1920s, with their mother dead and their stepfather an ever-present threat, Bertie Fisher and her older sister Mabel have no one but each other—with perhaps a sweetheart for Bertie waiting in the wings. But on the day that Bertie receives her eighth-grade diploma, good intentions go terribly wrong, setting off a chain of misunderstandings that will send the sisters on separate paths and reverberate through their daughters’ and granddaughters’ lives. From the Depression through World War II and Vietnam, and smaller events both tragic and joyful, Bertie and Mabel forge unexpected identities and raise daughters—and sisters—of their own, learning that love and betrayal are even more complicated than they seem.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave your link below!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Family Fang

2011-05-18T00:01:00.011-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

The Family Fang
By Kevin Wilson
Publication Date: August 9

From the author's website:

Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. But when an artist’s work lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise well-adjusted children. Just ask Buster and Annie Fang. For as along as they can remember, they starred (unwillingly) in their parents’ madcap pieces. But now that they are grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it difficult to cope with life outside the fishbowl of their parents’ strange world.

When the lives they’ve built come crashing down, brother and sister have nowhere to go but home, where they discover that Caleb and Camille are planning one last performance—their magnum opus—whether the kids agree to participate or not.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave your link below!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: This Beautiful Life

2011-05-11T00:01:00.015-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

This Beautiful Life
By Helen Schulman
Publication Date: August 2

From HarperCollins website:

When the Bergamots move from a comfortable upstate college town to New York City, they’re not quite sure how they’ll adapt—or what to make of the strange new world of well-to-do Manhattan. Soon, though, Richard is consumed by his executive role at a large New York university, and Liz, who has traded in her academic career to oversee the lives of their children, is hectically ferrying young Coco around town. Fifteen-year-old Jake is gratefully taken into the fold by a group of friends at Wildwood, an elite private school.

But the upper-class cocoon in which they have enveloped themselves is ripped apart when Jake wakes up one morning after an unchaperoned party and finds an email in his in-box from an eighth-grade admirer. Attached is a sexually explicit video she has made for him. Shocked, stunned, maybe a little proud, and scared—a jumble of adolescent emotion—he forwards the video to a friend, who then for-wards it to a friend. Within hours, it’s gone viral, all over the school, the city, the world.

The ensuing scandal threatens to shatter the Bergamots’ sense of security and identity, and, ultimately, their happiness. They are a good family faced with bad choices, and how they choose to react, individually and at one another’s behest, places everything they hold dear in jeopardy.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Light from a Distant Star

2011-05-04T00:01:00.009-05:00

By Mary McGarry Morris
Publication Date: September 13

From Library Journal:

With her father’s business in trouble and her mother now working, 13-year-old Nellie is the determined caretaker of her little brother. The adults she does encounter, like the thuggish guy who works at her grandfather’s junkyard and the stripper who rents an apartment at the back of the house, upend her life further. Then, a moment of violence lands Nellie in court as witness, where no one believes the awful truth she’s trying to relay. As evidenced by her many novels, from National Book Award nominee Vanished to Oprah pick Songs in Ordinary Time, Morris excels at family dramas with dark and tingly psychological twists.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: I Gave My Heart to Know This

2011-04-27T00:01:00.011-05:00

By Ellen Baker
Publication Date: August 2

From Amazon:

In January 1944, Grace Anderson, Lena Maki, and Lena’s mother, Violet, have joined the growing ranks of women working for the war effort. Though they find satisfaction in their jobs at a Wisconsin shipyard, it isn’t enough to distract them from the anxieties of wartime, or their fears for the men they love: Lena’s twin brother, Derrick, and Grace’s high school sweetheart, Alex. When shattering news arrives from the front, the lives of the three women are pitched into turmoil. As one is pushed to the brink of madness, the others are forced into choices they couldn’t have imagined—and their lives will never be the same.

More than five decades later, Violet’s great-granddaughter, Julia, returns to the small farmhouse where Violet and Lena once lived. Listless from her own recent tragedy, Julia begins to uncover the dark secrets that shattered her family, eventually learning that redemption—and love—can be found in the most unexpected places.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Birds of Paradise

2011-04-20T00:01:00.016-05:00

By Diana Abu-Jaber
Publication Date: September 6

From Amazon:

In the tropical paradise that is Miami, Avis and Brian Muir are still haunted by the disappearance of their ineffably beautiful daughter, Felice, who ran away when she was thirteen. Now, after five years of modeling tattoos, skateboarding, clubbing, and sleeping in a squat house or on the beach, Felice is about to turn eighteen. Her family—Avis, an exquisitely talented pastry chef; Brian, a corporate real estate attorney; and her brother, Stanley, the proprietor of Freshly Grown, a trendy food market—will each be forced to confront their anguish, loss, and sense of betrayal. Meanwhile, Felice must reckon with the guilty secret that drove her away, and must face her fear of losing her family and her sense of self forever.

This multilayered novel about a family that comes apart at the seams—and finds its way together again—is totally involving and deeply satisfying, a glorious feast of a book.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Winters in Bloom

2011-04-13T00:01:00.010-05:00

By Lisa Tucker
Publication Date: September 13

From author's website:

Together for over a decade, Kyra and David Winter are happier than they ever thought they could be. They have a comfortable home, stable careers, and a young son, Michael, who they love more than anything. Yet because of their complicated histories, Kyra and David have always feared that this domestic bliss couldn’t last--that the life they created was destined to be disrupted. And on one perfectly ordinary summer day, it is: Michael disappears from his own backyard. The only question is whose past has finally caught up with them: David feels sure that Michael was taken by his troubled ex-wife, while Kyra believes the kidnapper must be someone from her estranged family, someone she betrayed years ago.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave your link below!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: A Good Hard Look

2011-04-06T00:01:00.015-05:00

By Ann Napolitano
Publication Date: July 7

From Amazon:

Crippled by lupus at twenty-five, celebrated author Flannery O’Connor was forced to leave New York City and return home to Andalusia, her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. Years later, as Flannery is finishing a novel and tending to her menagerie of peacocks, her mother drags her to the wedding of a family friend.

Cookie Himmel embodies every facet of Southern womanhood that Flannery lacks: she is revered for her beauty and grace; she is at the helm of every ladies’ organization in town; and she has returned from her time in Manhattan with a rich fiancée, Melvin Whiteson. Melvin has come to Milledgeville to begin a new chapter in his life, but it is not until he meets Flannery that he starts to take a good, hard look at the choices he has made. Despite the limitations of her disease, Flannery seems to be more alive than other people, and Melvin is drawn to her like a moth to a candle flame.

Heartbreakingly beautiful and inescapably human, these ordinary and extraordinary people chart their own courses in life. In the aftermath of one tragic afternoon, they are all forced to look at themselves and face up to Flannery’s observation that the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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Summer "Beach Book" Preview, Part II

2011-04-01T08:00:00.003-05:00

April? Really? I certainly can't tell it from the weather. It's still really chilly here (for Alabama!). Two of my nieces are playing softball this year, and there's something wrong about it being so cold at the ballpark. Spring is slow to come this year...so here's a warm-up!

Here are the other 5 of 10 "hot" reads I'm excited about coming out this summer. I need to head to the Gulf Coast soon!

One Summer by David Baldacci

Burnt Mountain by Anne Rivers Siddons

Folly Beach by Dorothea Benton Frank

Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan

Summer Rental by Mary Kay Andrews

Looking forward to reading other summer previews...what did I leave off my list?

Did you miss Part I? Click here to read.

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Close Your Eyes

2011-03-30T00:01:00.011-05:00

By Amanda Eyre Ward
Publication Date: July 26

From the author's website:

What would you risk to bring the truth to light?

On the night their mother was killed, Alex and Lauren were asleep in their backyard tree house. Their beloved father was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder. Twelve years later, Lauren is a real estate agent who can't believe in love, and Alex is still trying to understand what happened to shatter his idyllic childhood. Only one stranger, a pregnant woman on the run from her boyfriend in Colorado, holds the clues that can free Lauren and Alex.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave your link below!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Never Knowing

2011-03-23T00:01:00.015-05:00

By Chevy Stevens
Publication Date: July 5

From Amazon:

At 33, Sara Gallagher is finally happy. Her antique furniture restoration business is taking off and she’s engaged to a wonderful man. But there’s one big question that still haunts her — who are her birth parents? Sara is finally ready to find out.

Sara’s birth mother rejects her—again. Then she discovers her biological father is an infamous killer who’s been hunting women every summer for almost forty years. Sara tries to come to terms with her horrifying parentage — and her fears that she’s inherited more than his looks. But soon Sara realizes the only thing worse than finding out your father is a killer is him finding out about you.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave your link below!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Best Staged Plans

2011-03-16T00:01:00.009-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

Best Staged Plans
By Claire Cook
Publication Date: June 7

From Amazon:

Sandy Sullivan is a professional home stager in the Boston suburbs, so getting rid of her own house, remaking it for the market, and downsizing should be a breeze. But nothing is ever as easy as it seems, with her husband Greg dragging his feet and their son Luke moving back home to inhabit the basement “bat cave.” Sandy reads them the riot act and takes a job staging a boutique hotel in Atlanta recently acquired by her best friend’s boyfriend. The good news is that she can spend time with her recently married daughter Shannon. The bad news is that Shannon soon receives a promotion and heads back to Boston for training, leaving Sandy and her Southern son-in-law Chance as reluctant roommates.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave your link below!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Year We Left Home

2011-03-09T00:01:00.014-06:00

By Jean Thompson

Publication Date: May 3

From Simon & Schuster:

Stretching from the early 1970s in the Iowa farmlands to suburban Chicago to the coast of contemporary Italy—and moving through the Vietnam War's aftermath, the farm crisis, the numerous economic boomsand busts—The Year We Left Home follows the Erickson siblings as they confront prosperity and heartbreak, setbacks and triumphs, and seek their place in a country whose only constant seems to be breathtaking change. Ambitious, richly told, and fiercely American, this is a vivid and moving meditation on our continual pursuit of happiness and an incisive exploration of the national character.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave your link below!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: To Be Sung Underwater

2011-03-02T00:01:00.012-06:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

To Be Sung Underwater
By Tom McNeal
Publication Date: June 2

From Amazon:

Judith Whitman always believed in the kind of love that "picks you up in Akron and sets you down in Rio." Long ago, she once experienced that love. Willy Blunt was a carpenter with a dry wit and a steadfast sense of honor. Marrying him seemed like a natural thing to promise. But Willy Blunt was not a person you could pick up in Nebraska and transport to Stanford. When Judith left home, she didn't look back. Twenty years later, Judith's marriage is hazy with secrets. In her hand is what may be the phone number for the man who believed she meant it when she said she loved him. If she called, what would he say?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: A Small Hotel

2011-02-23T00:01:00.017-06:00

By Robert Olen Butler
Publication Date: July 5

From Amazon:

Set in contemporary New Orleans but working its way back in time, A Small Hotel chronicles the relationship between Michael and Kelly Hays, who have decided to separate after 24 years of marriage. The book begins on the day that the Hays are to finalize their divorce. Kelly is due to be in court, but instead she drives from her home in Pensacola, Florida, across the panhandle to New Orleans and checks into Room 303 at the Olivier House in the city’s French Quarter—the hotel where she and Michael fell in love some 25 years earlier and where she now finds herself about to make a decision that will forever affect her, Michael, and their 19-year-old daughter, Samantha.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Arrivals

2011-02-16T00:01:00.012-06:00

By Meg Mitchell Moore
Publication Date: May 25

From Amazon:

It's early summer when Ginny and William's peaceful life in Vermont comes to an abrupt halt.

First, their daughter Lillian arrives, with her two children in tow, to escape her crumbling marriage. Next, their son Stephen and his pregnant wife Jane show up for a weekend visit, which extends indefinitely when Jane ends up on bed rest. When their youngest daughter Rachel appears, fleeing her difficult life in New York, Ginny and William find themselves consumed again by the chaos of parenthood - only this time around, their children are facing adult problems.

By summer's end, the family gains new ideas of loyalty and responsibility, exposing the challenges of surviving the modern family - and the old adage, once a parent, always a parent, has never rung so true.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: South of Superior

2011-02-09T00:01:00.011-06:00

By Ellen Airgood
Publication Date: June 9

From Amazon:

When Madeline Stone walks away from Chicago and moves 500 miles north to the coast of Lake Superior, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, she isn't prepared for how much her life will change. Charged with caring for an aging family friend, Madeline finds herself in the middle of beautiful nowhere with Gladys and Arbutus, two octogenarian sisters--one sharp and stubborn, the other sweeter than sunshine. As Madeline begins to experience the ways of the small, tight-knit town, she is drawn into the lives and dramas of its residents. It's a place where times are tough and debts run deep, but friendship, community, and compassion run deeper. Gladys, Arbutus, and the rest of the town teach Madeline more about life, love, and goodwill than she's learned in a lifetime.

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Summer "Beach Book" Preview, Part I

2011-02-04T13:00:00.002-06:00

I usually wait until Spring Break to post this each year, but a) it's freezing here right now and I think we all need some warming up and b) there are so many books from favorite authors coming out that I just can't wait any longer!

So...without further ado, here are 5 of 10 summer reads I'm dying to get my hands on...don't the covers just make you long to be HOT??

Silver Girl by Elin Hilderbrand

Kindred Spirits by Sarah Strohmeyer

Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister

Heat Wave by Nancy Thayer

Summer in the South by Cathy Holton

More to come!!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Silver Sparrow

2011-02-02T00:01:00.010-06:00

By Tayari Jones
Publication Date: May 31

From Amazon:

Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, this novel revolves around James Witherspoon’s two families—the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered. As Jones explores the backstories of her rich yet flawed characters—the father, the two mothers, the grandmother, and the uncle—she also reveals the joy, as well as the destruction, they brought to one another’s lives.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: When God Was a Rabbit

2011-01-26T00:01:00.018-06:00

By Sarah Winman
Publication Date: May 10

From Amazon:

In a remarkably honest and confident voice, Sarah Winman has written the story of a memorable young heroine, Elly, and her loss of innocence--a magical portrait of growing up and the pull and power of family ties. From Essex and Cornwall to the streets of New York, from 1968 to the events of 9/11, When God Was a Rabbit follows the evolving bond of love and secrets between Elly and her brother Joe, and her increasing concern for an unusual best friend, Jenny Penny, who has secrets of her own. With its wit and humor, engaging characters whose eccentricities are adroitly and sometimes darkly drawn, and its themes of memory and identity, When God Was a Rabbit is a love letter to true friendship and fraternal love.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Mothers and Daughters

2011-01-19T00:01:00.015-06:00

By Rae Meadows
Publication Date: March 29

From Amazon:

Samantha is lost in the joys of new motherhood...but in trading her artistic dreams to care for her child, Sam worries she's lost something of herself. And she is still mourning another loss: her mother, Iris, died just one year ago.

When a box of Iris's belongings arrives on Sam's doorstep, she discovers links to pieces of her family history but is puzzled by much of the information the box contains. In confronting secrets from her family's past, Sam comes to terms with deep secrets from her own.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Friendship Bread

2011-01-12T00:01:00.017-06:00

By Darien Gee
Publication Date: April 19
From FriendshipBreadKitchen.com:

In Avalon, Illinois, a woman and her young daughter return home to find a plate of Amish Friendship Bread along with a bag of starter on their doorstep. There’s no note, just a yellow sticky with the words, “I hope you enjoy it.” The instructions tell them to feed the starter over a 10-day period, then bake two loaves and share the remaining starter with three other people.

At the insistence of her five-year old daughter, Julia Evarts reluctantly follows the instructions. Soon, the bread and its starter are making their way through the town of Avalon, touching the lives of its residents in ways both comical and unexpected.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: This Vacant Paradise

2011-01-05T00:01:00.013-06:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

This Vacant Paradise

By Victoria Patterson

Publication Date: March 1

From Amazon:

The 1990s—Newport Beach, California. Money is God. A man’s worth is judged by the size of his boat, the make of his car. A woman’s value is assessed by the blank perfection of her quantifiable desirability: dress size, cup size, the whiteness of her teeth. And oh yes: her youth. Though Esther Wilson has the looks to marry well, things aren’t going as planned. She’s nearing her mid-30s and possibly aging out of the only role she’s equipped to play: wife to a powerful member of the elite.

In the tradition of Edith Wharton and Henry James, This Vacant Paradise recasts the important questions about our very American obsessions: class, caste, race, age, and the roles of men and women in our drive toward an ever more lofty sense of our upward mobility.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Cleaning Nabokov's House

2010-12-29T00:01:00.009-06:00

By Leslie Daniels
Publication Date: March 1

From Library Journal:

Barb Barrett left her husband because they couldn’t agree on how to load the dishwasher. In the divorce, he got the kids, the house, and the car, and she got her freedom. But she finds that freedom without her children is not all it’s cracked up to be. To begin the process of getting them back, she buys a house once occupied by Vladimir Nabokov. While cleaning the house she finds a baseball/love story written on index cards. Could Nabokov have been the author? Could she turn this find into financial stability?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Big Girl Small

2010-12-22T00:01:00.003-06:00

By Rachel DeWoskin
Publication Date: March 29

From Amazon:

Judy Lohden is your above-average sixteen-year-old—sarcastic and vulnerable, talented and uncertain, full of big dreams for a big future. With a singing voice that can shake an auditorium, she should be the star of Darcy Academy, the local performing arts high school. So why is a girl this promising hiding out in a seedy motel room on the edge of town?

The fact that the national media is on her trail after a controversy that might bring down the whole school could have something to do with it. And that scandal has something—but not everything—to do with the fact that Judy is three feet nine inches tall.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: In Office Hours

2010-12-15T00:01:00.016-06:00

By Lucy Kellaway
Publication Date: February 7

From Amazon:

IN OFFICE HOURS is the story of Stella and Bella, two intelligent working women who each fall for impossible lovers--at work. Kellaway's keen observations on the way in which affairs move from state to state are a sort of masterclass in office love, bringing to life both the excitement of illicit romance and the ridiculousness of business behavior and language with a sharp sense of humor. IN OFFICE HOURS is intelligent, funny, moving and agonizing, but it's also so painfully reconizable to any woman who has ever worked in an office or ever been in love.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Learning to Swim

2010-12-08T00:01:00.011-06:00

By Sara J. Henry
Publication Date: February 22

From author's website:

The opening lines of Sara J. Henry’s moving and disturbing novel plunge us directly into the action, along with our narrator, Troy Chance. It is a child she’s seen thrown overboard. Harrowing minutes later, Troy and a terrified little boy emerge shivering from the spring chill of Vermont’s Lake Champlain. Troy is a freelance writer living in Lake Placid, New York, with no responsibilities to speak of and just a few close friends. Suddenly, little Paul is in her life. Her fierce protective feelings stun her. Who could even think of doing such a thing to a child? She’s repulsed and determined to find out in equal measure. Her search will take her into a world of great wealth—a world in which horrible things are all too imaginable, a world in which she’ll either sink or swim. And along the way, she’ll come to discover that it is amazing what you can do if you don’t stop to think.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Save As Draft

2010-12-01T00:01:00.019-06:00

By Cavanaugh Lee
Publication Date: February 1

From the author:

A broken engagement, a broken heart, and endless drafts of unsent emails. A love triangle unfolding in the electronic age illustrates all that can go wrong (and right) by this new form of miscommunication. Told in “electro-epistolary” form, the novel unfolds entirely through emails and text messages. What do these tools of technology mean for love? What happens when age-old courtship rituals fall prey to the ever-changing sensibilities of how we share not only information, but our own hearts?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Other Life

2010-11-24T00:00:00.018-06:00

By Ellen Meister
Publication Date: February 17

From Amazon:

What if you could return to the road not taken?

Happily married with a young son and another child on the way, Quinn Braverman has the perfect life. She also has an ominous secret. Every time she makes a major life decision, she knows an alternative reality exists in which she made the opposite choice--not only that, she knows how to cross over. But even in her darkest moments, like her mother's suicide, Quinn hasn't been tempted to visit...until she receives shattering news about the baby she's carrying.

Desperate to escape her grief, Quinn slips through the portal that leads to her other life: the life in which she stayed with her exciting but neurotic ex-boyfriend, and is childless. The life in which, as she is amazed to discover, her mother is still very much alive.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Silver Boat

2010-11-17T00:00:00.010-06:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

The Silver Boat
By Luanne Rice
Publication Date: April 19

From Amazon:

From the beloved New York Times bestselling Luanne Rice comes a heartwarming yet heart-wrenching portrait of three far-flung sisters who come home to Martha's Vineyard one last time. Their mother's beach house is the only place any of them ever found true happiness and they need to begin the difficult process of letting go. Memories of their grandmother, mother, and their Irish father, who sailed away the year Dar turned twelve, rise up and expose the fine cracks in their family myth-especially when a cache of old letters reveals enough truth to send them back to their ancestral homeland.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Bird Sisters

2010-11-10T00:01:00.011-06:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

The Bird Sisters

By Rebecca Rasmussen

Publication Date: April 12

From Amazon:

Love is timeless. So too is heartbreak. Whenever a bird flies into a window in Spring Green, Wisconsin, sisters Milly and Twiss get a visit. Twiss listens to the birds' heartbeats, assessing what she can fix and what she can't, while Milly listens to the heartaches of the people who've brought them. The two sisters have spent their lives nursing people and birds back to health.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Uncoupling

2010-11-03T00:00:00.012-05:00

By Meg Wolitzer
Publication Date: April 5

From Amazon:

When the elliptical new drama teacher at Stellar Plains High School chooses for the school play Lysistrata--the comedy by Aristophanes in which women stop having sex with men in order to end a war--a strange spell seems to be cast over the school. Or, at least, over the women. One by one throughout the high school community, perfectly healthy, normal women and teenage girls turn away from their husbands and boyfriends in the bedroom, for reasons they don't really understand. As the women worry over their loss of passion, and the men become by turns unhappy, offended, and above all, confused, both sides are forced to look at their shared history, and at their sexual selves in a new light.
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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Three Stages of Amazement

2010-10-27T00:01:00.013-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

Three Stages of Amazement

By Carol Edgarian

Publication Date: March 8

From Amazon:

Many love stories end in marriage; rare is the love story that begins with one—already promised, already worn. Set in San Francisco during the first year of Obama’s presidency, Three Stages of Amazement deftly charts the struggles and triumphs of Lena Rusch and her husband Charlie Pepper, still believe they can have it all--sex, love, marriage, children, career, brilliance. But life delivers surprises and tests--a stillborn child, an economic crash, a ruthless business rival and the attentions of an old lover. Touched by tragedy and by ordinary hopes unmet, Lena and Charlie must face, for the first time in their lives, real limitation.
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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Weird Sisters

2010-10-20T00:01:00.015-05:00

By Eleanor Brown

Publication Date: February 17

From Amazon:

The Andreas family is one of readers. Their father, a renowned Shakespeare professor who speaks almost entirely in verse, has named his three daughters after famous Shakespearean women. When the sisters return to their childhood home, ostensibly to care for their ailing mother, but really to lick their wounds and bury their secrets, they are horrified to find the others there. But the sisters soon discover that everything they've been running from--one another, their small hometown, and themselves--might offer more than they ever expected.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Emily, Alone

2010-10-13T00:01:00.002-05:00

By Stewart O'Nan

Publication Date: March 17

From Amazon:

A sequel to the bestselling, much-beloved Wish You Were Here, Stewart O'Nan's intimate new novel follows Emily Maxwell, a widow whose grown children have long moved away. She dreams of vists by her grandchildren while mourning the turnover of her quiet Pittsburgh neighborhood, but when her sole companion and sister-in-law Arlene faints at their favorite breakfast buffet, Emily's days change. As she grapples with her new independence, she discovers a hidden strength and realizes that life always offers new possibilities.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The View From Here

2010-10-06T00:01:00.014-05:00

Publication Date: February 1

From Amazon:

When Frances was twenty-two, she was drifting, scraping by giving English lessons in Mexico, when she met up with a glamorous group of vacationing Americans staying in a mansion on a private beach. Two decades later in rural England, she discovers a love letter from a younger woman addressed to her husband almost at the same time as she learns that she’s facing a life-threatening illness. As her contented existence begins to unravel and she tries to decide how and if she will confront her husband about his infidelity, Frances finds herself haunted by the memory of her heady desert encounter with the charmed circle of the Severance family.
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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Georgia Bottoms

2010-09-29T00:00:00.012-05:00

By Mark Childress

Publication Date: February 23

From Amazon:

Georgia Bottoms is known in her small community of Six Points, Alabama, as a beautiful, well-to-do, and devoutly Baptist Southern belle. Nobody realizes that the family fortune has long since disappeared, and a determinedly single woman like Georgia needs an alternative, and discreet, means of income. In Georgia's case it is six well-heeled lovers, one for each day of the week, with Mondays off, none of whom knows about the others. But when the married preacher who has been coming to call (Saturdays) decides to confess their affair in front of the whole congregation, Georgia must take drastic measures to stop him.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: A Cup of Friendship

2010-09-22T00:01:00.014-05:00

By Deborah Rodriguez
Publication Date: January 25

Sunny is an energetic American living in Kabul, whose pride and joy is the coffee shop she runs for expats--and their stories that filter through her daily life. Yazmina is a young woman from a remote village; when she's kidnapped and left on a city street, pregnant and alone, Sunny gives her a home--but all Yazmina wants is to find a way to rescue her sister from the same fate. Into the coffee shop--and Yazmina's and Sunny's lives--come Candace, a wealthy American looking for a way to help but who ends up needing help herself; Isabel, a determined journalist whose past secret might keep her from the biggest story of her life; and Halajan, the den mother whose long-hidden love affair breaks all the rules--and threatens to turn her own son against her. As these women gather together and discover that there's more to one another than meets the eye, they'll form a bond that will change not only their lives, but the lives of an entire country.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Being Polite to Hitler

2010-09-15T00:01:00.013-05:00

By Robb Forman Dew

Publication Date: January 6

From Amazon:

After teaching and raising her family for most of her life, Agnes Scofield realizes she is truly weary of her routine. But how, at 51, to establish a separate identity?
Her newfound freedom may not sit so well with the rest of the Scofields, who operate strictly within the confines of polite Midwestern values. They'd be polite to Hitler if need be. But underneath the façade, private triumphs and tragedies---including struggles with alcoholism and illicit affairs-simmer, and Agnes finds herself becoming even more entangled in the family web.
Being Polite to Hitler is a richly wrought portrait of a woman coming into her own in the middle of her life and a family that experiences passions, joys, and grief against the backdrop of the post-WWII era.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Lake of Dreams

2010-09-08T00:01:00.013-05:00

By Kim Edwards
Publication Date: January 4

From Amazon:

At a crossroads in her life, Lucy Jarrett returns home from Japan, only to find herself haunted by her father's unresolved death a decade ago. Old longings stirred up by Keegan Fall, a local glass artist who was once her passionate first love, lead her into the unexpected. Late one night, as she paces the hallways of her family's rambling lakeside house, she discovers, locked in a window seat, a collection of objects that first appear to be useless curiosities, but soon reveal a deeper and more complex family past. As Lucy discovers and explores the traces of her lineage, from an heirloom tapestry and dusty political tracts to a web of allusions depicted in stained-glass windows throughout upstate New York, the family story she has always known is shattered, Lucy's quest for the truth reconfigures her family's history, links her to a unique slice of the suffragette movement, and yields dramatic insights that embolden her to live freely.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Solomon's Oak

2010-09-01T00:01:00.012-05:00

By Jo-Ann Mapson

Publication Date: October 12

From Amazon:

A year after the untimely death of her husband, Dan, Glory Solomon is adrift, in financial trouble, and unable to find much meaning in a world without her mate. But when she opens a wedding chapel on her historic California ranch (known for its ancient oak tree), she attracts a variety of couples in search of unconventional nuptials--and two lost souls. Juniper McGuire, an angry teenage girl, is still reeling from the tragedy that put her into the foster care system. And a former crime scene photographer, Joseph Vigil, suffers chronic pain from an on-the-job accident. Together, the three grievers form a tentative support system that could--if they'll let it--be called love.

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Separate Beds

2010-08-25T00:01:00.012-05:00

By Elizabeth Buchan

Publication Date: January 24

From the author's Web site:

Tom and Annie's children have grown up, the mortgage is doable and they're about to get kitchen make-over. Life is good-or so it seems. Beneath the veneer of professional success and domestic security, their marriage is crumbling, eaten away by years of resentment, loneliness, and misunderstandings, and they've settled into simply being two strangers living under the same roof. Until the economy falls apart, and suddenly their lives are upended when Tom loses his job. As their world shrinks, Tom and Annie are forced closer together. For the first time in years, their home is filled with people, conversation, tears - and laughter. Is it possible, they ask themselves, to start again?

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Weekend Cooking: FOUR New Southern Cookbooks!

2010-08-21T07:00:00.040-05:00

Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads.

Ninety percent of my sizable cookbook collection is Southern, ranging from local church cookbooks to ones penned by culinary icons. So, I was understandably excited to see four new Southern cookbooks coming out this fall, including this first one, by one of my favorite food bloggers:

Southern Plate: Classic Comfort Food That Makes Everyone Feel Like Family
By Christy Jordan
October 5
"You won't find fancy food or new fangled recipes in this cookbook; just easy, no fuss Southern favorites because at the end of the day most folks want to come home to a meal just like Mama used to make, prepared by someone who loves them."

Second Helpings
By Johnnie Gabriel
October 19
"In this follow-up to Cooking in the South, Gabriel serves up Second Helpings of more than 150 delectable Southern recipes."

My Southern Food: A Celebration of the Flavors of the South\
By Devon O'Day
November 2
"My Southern Food will take readers and cooks on a mouthwatering journey with photographs, stories, and 200 recipes that make this much more than a traditional cookbook."

The Complete Southern Cookbook: More than 800 of the Most Delicious, Down-Home Recipes
By Tammy Algood
September 28
"With more than 800 delicious Southern recipes for over 85 different ingredients, there are plenty of options when your garden is plentiful and your freezer is stocked."

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Marriage Artist

2010-08-18T00:01:00.013-05:00

By Andrew Winer

Publication Date: October 26

From Amazon:

When the wife of renowned art critic Daniel Lichtmann plunges to her death, she is not alone. Lying next to her is her suspected lover, Benjamin Wind, the very artist Daniel most championed. Tormented by questions about the circumstances of their deaths, Daniel dedicates himself to uncovering the secrets of their relationship and the inspiration behind Wind's dazzling final exhibition.

What Daniel discovers is a web of mysteries leading back to pre-World War II Vienna and the magnificent life of Josef Pick, a forgotten artist who may have been the twentieth century's greatest painter of love. But the most astonishing discoveryis what connects these two artists acrosshalf a century: a remarkable woman whose response to the tragedy of her generation offers Daniel answers to the questions he never knew to ask.

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"Waiting on" Wednesday: Great House

2010-08-11T00:01:00.009-05:00

By Nicole Krauss

Publication Date: October 12

From Books a Million:

For twenty-five years, a solitary American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet's secret police; one day a girl claiming to be his daughter arrives to take it away, sending her life reeling. Across the ocean in London, a man discovers a terrifying secret about his wife of almost fifty years. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer is slowly reassembling his father's Budapest study, plundered by the Nazis in 1944. These worlds are anchored by a desk of enormous dimension and many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or give it away. In the minds of those it has belonged to, the desk comes to stand for all that has disappeared in the chaos of the world-children, parents, whole peoples and civilizations.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Compass Rose

2010-08-04T00:01:00.015-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

Compass Rose

By John Casey

Publication Date: October 19

From Amazon:

Rose is spunky with an inborn talent for theatrics, but being slightly overweight and unpopular at the fancy new school where she’s a scholarship student is bad enough. It doesn’t help that her single mother is at war with her; her fisherman father lives practically next door with his own wife and kids; and the whole of their insular, gossipy community knows she’s an illegitimate child. On the other hand, maybe it isn’t so bad being related to half the town and unofficially adopted by everyone.

John Casey’s magnificent new novel follows Rose and the complex constellation of family, friends, and foes that circle around her as the years go by, working their slow but irreversible changes on one another and on the rugged, magical landscape they inhabit, with its salt marshes, its creeks and rivers, and the ever-present ocean, whose rhythms and moods shape and reshape the lives of the men and women of Rhode Island.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Rescue

2010-07-28T00:01:00.010-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

Rescue

By Anita Shreve
Publication Date: November 30

From LibraryThing:

Peter Webster is a rookie paramedic when he pulls a young woman out of a car wreck that should have killed her. Sheila haunts his thoughts, and despite his misgivings, Peter is soon embroiled in an intense love affair. Nineteen years later, Sheila is long gone and Peter is raising their daughter, Rowan, alone—until a phone call from Sheila alters their quiet existence, bringing long-buried questions back to the surface. A story about trespass and forgiveness, secrets and the seismic force of the truth, Rescue is a masterful portrayal of a family trying to understand its own fractured past and begin again.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: World and Town

2010-07-21T00:01:00.026-05:00

By Gish Jen

Publication Date: October 5

From Amazon:

Hattie Kong—the spirited offspring of a descendant of Confucius and an American missionary to China—has, in her fiftieth year of living in the United States, lost both her husband and her best friend to cancer. But now, two years later, it is time for Hattie to start over. What Hattie makes of this situation is at the center of a novel that asks deep and absorbing questions about religion, home, America, what neighbors are, what love is, and, in the largest sense, what “worlds” we make of the world.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: I Still Dream About You, Honey

2010-07-14T00:01:00.013-05:00

Publication Date: November 9

From Amazon:

Though her friends think Maggie has the perfect life, she's actually perfectly miserable. The former Miss Alabama is worried about how her life has turned out--she's given up on her dream of living in a beautiful home like Crestview, and instead is a real estate agent in Birmingham. But just when Maggie begins to wonder if there's much point in going on, her life takes a wild turn, and she finds herself catapulted into one surprising discovery after the next. As Maggie learns valuable lessons about the nature of friendship, the challenges of modern life, and the dangers of impossible dreams, she starts to see how much more there is to life than what can be listed in a Miss Alabama bio. Bestselling author Fannie Flagg's trademark comic flair is out in full force in this fabulous new novel about the unpredictability of life.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Waking Up in Dixie

2010-07-07T00:01:00.015-05:00

By Haywood Smith

Publication Date: September 14

From Amazon:

When Elizabeth Mooney escaped the shame of her “white trash” family to marry the crown prince of her small town, Howell Whittington, she never dreamed that thirty years later, she’d end up trapped in a loveless marriage to the cruel banker who’s foreclosing on all her friends. Then Howe has a stroke sitting up in church, and when he wakes up, he’s at the mercy of all his appetites and emotions. Transformed, Howe wants to be a real husband, which scares proper, repressed Elizabeth to death, and setting out to right past wrongs, he blackmails the town’s baddies into doing the right thing by threatening to foreclose on their mortgages. The ensuing hilarious rollercoaster ride wakes up not only Elizabeth and their marriage, but the whole town and its hidebound institutions.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Bound

2010-06-30T00:01:00.002-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

Bound
By Antonya Nelson
Publication Date: September 28

From Amazon:

Catherine and Oliver, young wife and older entrepreneurial husband, are negotiating their difference in age and a plethora of well-concealed secrets. Oliver, now in his sixties, is a serial adulterer and has just fallen giddily in love yet again. Catherine, seemingly placid and content, has ghosts of a past she scarcely remembers. When Catherine's long-forgotten high school friend dies and leaves Catherine the guardian of her teenage daughter, that past comes rushing back. As Oliver manages his new love, and Catherine her new charge and darker past, local news reports turn up the volume on a serial killer who has reappeared after years of quiet. In a time of hauntings and new revelations, Nelson's characters grapple with their public and private obligations, continually choosing between the suppression or indulgence of wild desires. Which way they turn, and what balance they find, may only be determined by those who love them most.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Weekend

2010-06-23T00:01:00.019-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

The Weekend

By Bernhard Schlink

Publication Date: October 12

From Amazon:

Old friends and lovers reunite for a weekend in a secluded country home after spending decades apart. They excavate old memories and pass clandestine judgments on the wildly divergent paths they’ve taken since their youth. But this isn’t just any reunion, and their conversations about the old days aren’t your typical reminiscences: After twenty-four years, Jörg, a convicted murderer and terrorist, has been released from prison. The announcement of his pardon sends shock waves throughout the country, but before the announcement, his friends gather for his first weekend of freedom. They are invited by Jörg’s devoted sister, Christiane, whose overwhelming concern for her brother’s safety is matched only by the unrelenting pull of Marko, a unnervingly passionate young man intent on having Jörg continue to fight for the cause.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Bitter in the Mouth

2010-06-16T00:01:00.013-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

Bitter in the Mouth

By Monique Truong

Publication Date: August 31

From Amazon:

Growing up in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the 70s and 80s, Linda believes that she is profoundly different from everyone else, including the members of her own family. Now in her thirties, Linda looks back at her past when she navigated her way through life with the help of her great-uncle Harper, who loves her and loves to dance, and her best friend Kelly, with whom Linda exchanges almost daily letters. For as long as she can remember, Linda has experienced a secret sense—she can “taste” words, which have the power to disrupt, dismay, or delight. Even as Linda makes her way north to Yale and New York City, she still does not know the truth about her past.Then, when a personal tragedy compels Linda to return to Boiling Springs, she gets to know a mother she never knew and uncovers a startling story of a life, a family.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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Library Loot: 6/10

2010-06-10T06:00:00.002-05:00

Let summer reading begin! Based on my too-full library on-hold list (who knew it maxed out at 30?), it looks like women's fiction enthusiasts are in for a treat over the next few months.

Here's what came up for me this week:

Beach Week by Susan Coll

The Stormchasers by Jenna Blum

Backseat Saints by Joshilyn Jackson

My Name Is Memory by Ann Brashares

The One That I Want by Allison Winn Scotch

Visit Library Loot to see what other bloggers picked up this week.

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Freedom

2010-06-09T00:01:00.012-05:00

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

Freedom

By Jonathan Franzen

Publication Date: August 31

From Amazon:

Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter’s dreams. Together with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man—she was doing her small part to build a better world.

But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz—outré rocker and Walter’s college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become “a very different kind of neighbor,” an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street’s attentive eyes?

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The False Friend

2010-06-02T00:01:00.004-05:00

By Myla Goldberg

Publication Date: October 5

From Amazon:

Leaders of a mercurial clique of girls, Celia and Djuna reigned mercilessly over their three followers. One afternoon, they decided to walk home along a forbidden road. Djuna disappeared, and for twenty years Celia blocked out how it happened. The lie Celia told to conceal her misdeed became the accepted truth: everyone assumed Djuna had been abducted, though neither she nor her abductor was ever found. Celia’s unconscious avoidance of this has meant that while she and her longtime boyfriend, Huck, are professionally successful, they’ve been unable to move forward, their relationship falling into a rut that threatens to bury them both. Celia returns to her hometown to confess the truth, but her family and childhood friends don’t believe her. Huck wants to be supportive, but his love can’t blind him to all that contradicts Celia’s version of the past.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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Breaking the Spine

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D.

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Tigers in Red Weather

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Gilded Age

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Wife 22

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Hypnotist's Love Story

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Master's Muse

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Newlyweds

"Waiting On" Wednesday: So Far Away

"Waiting On" Wednesday: An Unexpected Guest

"Waiting On" Wednesday: More Than You Know

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Song Remains the Same

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Affair

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Another Piece of My Heart

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Odds

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Carry the One

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Darlings

"Waiting On" Wednesday: First You Try Everything

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Gilly Salt Sisters

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Starboard Sea

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Underside of Joy

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Lost Saints of Tennessee

"Waiting On" Wednesday: How It All Began

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Train of Small Mercies

"Waiting On" Wednesday: An Available Man

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Home Front

"Waiting On" Wednesday: 150 Pounds

"Waiting On" Wednesday: A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

"Waiting On" Wednesday: White Truffles in Winter

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Before Ever After

Weekly Roundup 7/8

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Starting from Happy

Weekly Roundup 7/1

Help!!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Most Dangerous Thing

Weekly Roundup 6/24

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Falling Together

Weekly Roundup 6/17

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Aftertaste

Weekly Roundup 6/10

"Waiting On" Wednesday: There But For The

Weekly Roundup 6/3

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Wife-In-Law

Weekly Roundup 5/27

"You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life."--Jane Hirshfield

Finally, speaking of food, I made these Mini Lasagna Cups for dinner this week...now such a fan of working with wontons, I keep looking for other ways to use them. They were DELICIOUS!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Sisters

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Family Fang

"Waiting On" Wednesday: This Beautiful Life

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Light from a Distant Star

"Waiting On" Wednesday: I Gave My Heart to Know This

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Birds of Paradise

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Winters in Bloom

"Waiting On" Wednesday: A Good Hard Look

Summer "Beach Book" Preview, Part II

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Close Your Eyes

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Never Knowing

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Best Staged Plans

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Year We Left Home

"Waiting On" Wednesday: To Be Sung Underwater

"Waiting On" Wednesday: A Small Hotel

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Arrivals

"Waiting On" Wednesday: South of Superior

Summer "Beach Book" Preview, Part I

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Silver Sparrow

"Waiting On" Wednesday: When God Was a Rabbit

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Mothers and Daughters

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Friendship Bread

"Waiting On" Wednesday: This Vacant Paradise

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Cleaning Nabokov's House

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Big Girl Small

"Waiting On" Wednesday: In Office Hours

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Learning to Swim

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Save As Draft

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Other Life

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Silver Boat

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Bird Sisters

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Uncoupling

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Three Stages of Amazement

"You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life."
--Jane Hirshfield