Have you entered my giveaway of THE UNDERSIDE OF JOY?
"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 Gift for My Sister
By Ann Pearlman
Publication Date: May 1
From Amazon:
Tara and Sky share a mother, but aside from that they seem to differ in almost every way. When a series of tragedies strikes, they must somehow come together in the face of heartbreak, dashed hopes, and demons of the past. The journey they embark on forces each woman to take a walk in the other’s shoes and examine what sisterhood really means to them. It’s a long road to understanding, and everyone who knows them hopes these two sisters can find a way back to each other.
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!
It's the beginning of Spring Break week here in Alabama, and my family is heading down to the Gulf Coast. In celebration of warmer weather and beach trips, I'm offering up my annual summer preview, featuring five of my favorite novelists. These ladies consistently deliver fun, "beachy" reads.
Have you entered my giveaway of THE UNDERSIDE OF JOY?
"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:
What Women Want
By Fanny Blake
Publication Date: June 19
From Amazon:
Bea, Kate and Ellen have always known that they can depend on each other no matter what. But when Ellen, a widow who has devoted herself to her children and her art gallery for the last ten years, falls head over heels in love with Oliver, the long-term bonds of these three friends is put to the test. Bea and Kate are driven away from their friend and from each other as they react differently to this unfamiliar stranger in their midst. What Women Want is a novel about love and life and the challenges of female friendship that face women as they try to decide what they want—and come to realize what they really need.
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!
I featured THE UNDERSIDE OF JOY as a "Waiting on Wednesday" pick last September. When the author contacted me to show her appreciation, I asked if she'd be interested in participating in this feature on my blog upon publication. She graciously agreed.
Quotables is an event in which I present authors with a meaningful (to me) passage from their books and ask them to speak to it in whatever way they wish.
This novel explores an unusual relationship between a mother and a stepmother, each laying claim to the children after the father unexpectedly dies in an accident. Right when I read this quote, I knew it was "the one."
"Invisible walls. The illusion of light and space and even air. The kind you can't see, that are as fragile as glass. They work great until an unseen force pushes you into one and the illusion shatters, so that every step you take cuts you, cuts those who walk alongside you."
This line comes at a point when Ella is realizing some things about herself and her relationship with Joe. I didn’t work hard on this particular passage, Ella just gave it to me. But soon I could see that it fit into the themes of the story. Without giving away the plot, I will say that this image is also very closely related to the idea of the underside of joy. When we don’t acknowledge the darker side of our lives—the sorrow, the hurt, the loneliness, the loss, take your pick—those feelings often start to rise up, or in this case, push back on the illusions we’ve created of light-filled, perfect happiness. And suddenly we’re walking on glass. And so are those we love. But the only way through it is through the pain.
The good news is that this is not a total downer! There’s no such thing as perfect happiness. That’s okay. Life has its brilliant shining moments, and underneath, we can also feel the sorrow that comes from living life, from experiencing life’s heartbreaks. That’s what makes the joy all the sweeter.
The publisher has offered a copy of this novel for me to give away. Just leave a comment below by Monday, March 26 at 11 p.m. CST, and I'll randomly pick a winner. Be sure to fill out the email portion of your comment form, so it won't be visible to others, but I will have a way to contact you.
"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:
When In Doubt, Add Butter
By Beth Harbison
Publication Date: July 17
From Amazon:
Gemma Craig has spent her career as a private chef taking care of other people. From Lex, the fussy department store owner straight out of a movie from the thirties; to grossly overweight Willa, who must radically change her eating habits or die; to the strange Oleksei family, with a constant parade of mysterious people coming and going; to the hideously demanding Angela who is “allergic to everything” and foists her tastes on her hapless family; to the man Gemma thinks of only as “Mr. Tuesday” because they’ve never met. Everyone relies on Gemma, even while she goes home alone each night and feasts on cereal and quick meals. But when life takes an unexpected turn on a road Gemma always thought was straight and narrow, she must face her past and learn to move on in ways she never imagined.
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!
** Have you entered my giveaway for THE LOST SAINTS OF TENNESSEE yet? **
"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:
You Are the Love of My Life
By Susan Richards Shreve
Publication Date: August 20
From Amazon:
It is 1973 and Watergate is on everyone’s lips. Lucy Painter is a children's book illustrator and a single mother of two. She leaves New York and the married father of her children to live in a tightly knit Washington neighborhood in the house where she grew up and where she discovered her father’s suicide. Lucy hopes for a fresh start, but her life is full of secrets: her children know nothing of her father’s death or the identity of their own father. As the new neighbors enter their insular lives, her family’s safety and stability become threatened.
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!
** Have you entered my giveaway for THE LOST SAINTS OF TENNESSEE yet? **
"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:
Where'd You Go, Bernadette
By Maria Semple
Publication Date: August 14
From Amazon:
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.
To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.
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!
I featured THE LOST SAINTS OF TENNESSEE as a "Waiting On" Wednesday pick back in September, and it started a discussion with the author, Amy Franklin-Willis, who I found out was born in my hometown. I asked if she would be interested in writing a guest post upon publication of her debut novel, and she graciously agreed.
Quotables is an event in which I present authors with a meaningful (to me) passage from their novels and ask them to speak to it in whatever way they wish.
This novel delves into a Southern family over several decades, tracing the events leading up to and following a tragic death. Of particular interest is the relationship between the main character and his mother, and when I came across the following sentence, I thought it captured their ongoing conflict perfectly.
"The way you love is like sucking all the air out of a person's lungs and then telling him you'll breathe for him."
This quote is uttered by my main character Ezekiel when he is age 18 to his mother Lillian at the absolute lowest moment in their child/parent relationship. Prior to this line, Zeke discovers by accident how his mother has betrayed his twin brother Carter. From Zeke's perspective, he's had enough of his mother's manipulations and dreams for him over the past 18 years. Of her five children, Lillian poured her own lost ambitions into Zeke and anointed him, from a very early age, as the chosen son in their family, the one who would escape the small confines of working-class Clayton, Tennessee.
What Zeke views as his mother's abandonment of his developmentally disabled brother pushes him in this scene to sever ties with Lillian. Her actions have led them all to this place and both she and Zeke recognize that the life she coveted for Zeke might have been dealt a potentially fatal blow by causing Zeke to forgo his full scholarship to the University of Virginia to stay in Clayton to care for Carter.
When I initially wrote that line, I was fully immersed in Ezekiel's perspective, having only written the story in his voice at that point. Ezekiel and his brother Carter are exceptionally close, in part due to Zeke's role as Carter's champion and "bridge" to the rest of the world and partly because they are twins. Their tie to one another is deep and inexplicable. At 18, Zeke can not comprehend how his mother could betray Carter after he is severely beaten by local thugs not long after Zeke has left for his first semester of college far from home. To betray Carter is to betray Zeke. It's that simple for him. He knows that he would never have made the choice his mother makes following Carter's attack.
I would go on to revise the manuscript and expand the role of narrator to include Lillian, whose voice dominates the middle section of the book. Lillian is on a mission in the story to set the record straight about what really happened in the Cooper family as the boys were growing up. We all know that any story about a family without the inclusion of the mother's perspective is not telling the whole story. Lillian and Zeke have been estranged for 25 years following the above scene. I began to understand her experience--what it would have been like to be a 1960s mother trying to do the best she could for her child, for all her five of her children, when parenting them alone most of the time and always having money be tight and sometimes non-existent. Lillian has sacrificed mightily for her children but it is not enough. She has made devastating choices whose aftereffects ripple through the whole family. Her belief in Zeke's ability to transcend their place in the world of small town Clayton was critical to her. She needed one of the children to make it over what seemed an insurmountable wall around Clayton. That need ends up clouding one of the most important decisions of her life.
How far do we go as parents for our children? How do we tuck our own needs and aspirations into our children? How does a child respond to being the "favored" one? These are all themes I was trying to explore in Lost Saints. And when Zeke speaks those words to his mother they are true. He means them. But when he reflects years later on the events that led up to that moment, he looks back with the added insight of being a flawed parent himself and grants his mother some dispensation, though forgiveness may still be yet to come.
You can visit the author online here.
The publisher has offered a copy of this novel for me to give away. Just leave a comment below by Monday, March 5 at 1:00 p.m. CST, and I'll randomly pick a winner. Be sure to fill out the email portion of your comment form, so it won't be visible to others, but I will have a way to contact you.
"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:
Seating Arrangements
By Maggie Shipstead
Publication Date: June 12
From Amazon:
Winn Van Meter has a Harvard education, membership in all the right clubs, a pedigreed wife, and a tastefully understated summer home on a pristine New England island where the wedding of his eldest daughter, Daphne, is about to take place. The weather is idyllic and so, it would seem, is the gathering. But, the bride is seven months pregnant; the maid of honor, Daphne's younger sister, has just had her heart broken by the son of her father's oldest rival; Aunt Celeste, herself on her fifth marriage, watches with a jaundiced eye as the groom's exceedingly well-dressed brothers stealthily make their way through the bridal party. And the irresistible siren call of Daphne's best friend, the bombshell bridesmaid Agatha, will drive the bride's father finally to combust, taking the family down with him in a raucous explosion of misplaced attention and thwarted desire, not to mention confetti and wedding cake.
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 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 World Without You
By Joshua Henkin
Publication Date: June 19
From Amazon:
It's July 4th, and the Frankel family is descending upon their beloved summer home in the Berkshires. But this is no ordinary holiday; the family is gathering for a memorial. Leo, the youngest of the four Frankel siblings and an intrepid journalist and adventurer, was killed one year ago while on assignment in Iraq. His parents, Marilyn and David, are adrift in grief, and it's tearing apart their 40-year marriage. Clarissa, the eldest, is struggling at 39 with infertility. Lily, a fiery-tempered lawyer, is angry about everything. Noelle, a born-again Orthodox Jew (and the last person to see Leo alive), has come in from Israel with her husband and four children and feels entirely out of place. And Thisbe--Leo's widow and mother of their three-year-old son--has arrived from California bearing her own secret. Over the course of three days, the Frankels will contend with sibling rivalries and marital feuds, volatile women and silent men, and, ultimately, with the true meaning of family.
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!
"You may have tangible wealth untold; caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be. I had a mother who read to me." --Strickland Gillian
Posts
