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

"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:

I Gave My Heart to Know This

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. 


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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Birds of Paradise

"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:

Birds of Paradise

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.


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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Winters in Bloom

 

 "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 Winters in Bloom

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.


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"Waiting On" Wednesday: A Good Hard Look

 "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:

A Good Hard Look

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

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

"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:

Close Your Eyes

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?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Never Knowing

"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:

Never Knowing

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?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: Best Staged Plans

"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?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Year We Left Home

"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 Year We Left Home

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?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: To Be Sung Underwater

"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?


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

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