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Review: The Lemon Orchard by Luanne Rice
Sometimes people come into your life and show you exactly what you have been missing. These people may only be in your life for a short time or they might stay forever but they are meant to shape you, change you and guide you in directions that you might never have done without them. These special people are meant to help you through difficult times, and often bring joy where there was once only sadness. Julia Hughes has lived through an unimaginable tragedy, the death of her only child and husband. For five years she has been reliving the event over and over again, she has becoming listless and depressed.
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Guest Post: The Lemon Orchard by Luanne Rice
After reading and reviewing this stunning new novel just in time for summer, the author Luanne Rice was able to provide us with a sneak peak from The Lemon Orchard! If you haven’t read this book yet, it’s a great one to read on those balmy summer nights on your patio with a glass of soothing lemon aide! Be sure to enter the giveaway for a chance to win a copy of The Lemon Orchard! Here is an excerpt from The Lemon Orchard…
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Review: Cascade by Maryanne O’Hara
Make way for the modern woman. Small town America saw substantial changes during the Great Depression. People were not just out of jobs and desperate for money, another notable shift was the role of women in the workplace and family. The golden age of traditional, Middle American values were on the way out which left many feeling nostalgic for a simpler time. Asa Spaulding felt this shift in society acutely in Maryanne O’Hara’s novel, Cascade. In the small, rural Massachusetts town of Cascade, Asa runs a small pharmacy, owns a nice house in town, is well known among the locals as a stand up man, and he has married a…
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Review: The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma
How do you trust someone who lies for a living? Don’t all writers lie to some degree or another? In Kristopher Jansma’s debut novel The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, we follow one man’s quest to become a writer, but his is a story told through a bunch of short stories with one very unreliable narrator. We never learn what the narrator’s real name is, but there are two things we know for sure: he has lost every novel he has ever written and he follows Emily Dickens famous advice to the letter, ‘tell all the truth but tell it slant’. In the first short story the narrator is a teenager whose…
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Announcement: Elizabeth Gilbert lets fans choose the cover of her new novel THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS!
I have some exciting news to share with all of my readers….Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, is letting her fans choose the US cover of her new novel THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS—an epic novel of love, ambition and 19th century botanical exploration, coming out from Viking on October 1st. Voting on three potential book covers begins today 3/21/13 at 8am on Gilbert’s Facebook page and runs through Sunday night 3/24/13. I hope you’ll consider voting in this contest and helping spread the word about this exciting opprotunity! See here for USA Today’s coverage including quotes from Gilbert. To my knowledge, Gilbert is one of the first…
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Review: Fresh Mint with Lemon by Monika Zgustová
Russian art critic, Vadim, sees a beautiful woman in a café one day and is immediately captivated by her beauty and sparkling aura. There is something about her that draws him in– he soon discovers she is a well known artist, Patricia Pavloff, whose art he has long admired. Every day he goes to the museum where her art work is on display. He is haunted by one specific painting, red tulips with black pistils that look like eyes. In that painting there is an element of intrigue that he can’t ignore and he longs to meet the intoxicating beauty behind the art. One day he gets his wish, he…
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Review: As Sweet as Honey by Indira Ganesan
On a tiny island in the Indian Ocean a young woman prepares for a wedding. Meterling is about to do something completely against the social grain and break all kinds of traditional culture….this young Indian woman is going to marry an older Englishman. On the day of her wedding, Meterling’s husband dies….right there during their first dance! Just as Meterling begins to deal with the death of her husband, she finds out she is pregnant. Ostracized by the village for already being too tall, she is now a widow and having a baby out of wedlock. Meterling’s husband, Archer, originates from England and he comes to the island of Pi…
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Review: There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmila Petrushevskaya
What can I say, I am a sucker for books with compelling titles and let’s be honest….tell me you didn’t see this title and you weren’t the slightest bit curious? When I was approached by Penguin to review this book, how could I say no….especially with Valentines Day around the corner. Besides the title of this book, the cover also attracted my eye, and then I started reading the description, honestly I would have reviewed the book based on title alone, but the description sealed the deal….Poe meets Tolstoy? Who can say no to that! In this collection of short stories Petrushevskaya explores the darker side of love. Many of the…
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Review: Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles by Ron Currie, Jr.
Here is a post modern novel after my own heart. In his latest novel Ron Currie, Jr sets out to tell the capital-T Truth about his life, career, and his tumultuous love affair with a woman no one could ever hold a candle to, Emma. He has been in love with Emma since the moment he met her in eighth grade, after a short romance in their teens, Ron and Emma went their separate ways. Emma married another man while Ron tried desperately to escape Emma’s ghost by finding comfort in the arms of many other women. Later in life their paths cross and they begin their romantic relationship again, even…
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Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium #1) by Stieg Larsson
Financial journalist, Mikael Blomkvist’s, life is falling apart. Not only is he being sued for libel and facing jail time and mounting financial losses, his boss (who happens to be his sometimes lover) is forced into accepting his resignation. When he is at his lowest point, Blomkvist is approached with a curious offer of employment. Henrik Vanger is a wealthy, retired CEO of a major Swedish company, Vanger Cooperation. Vanger wants Blomkvist to use his trained journalists eye and find out what happened to his niece who mysteriously disappeared in the 1960’s. Blomkvist doesn’t really have a whole lot of options….he needs the money Vanger is offering but Vanger also…
