-
Special Feature: Triple Love Score by Brandi Megan Granett
What happens when you stop playing games? Miranda Shane lives a quiet life among books and letters as a professor in a small upstate town. When the playing-by-the-rules poet throws out convention and begins to use a Scrabble board instead of paper to write, she sets off a chain of events that rattles her carefully planned world. Her awakening propels her to take risks and seize chances she previously let slip by, including a game-changing offer from the man she let slip away. But when the revelation of an affair with a graduate student threatens the new life Miranda created, she is forced to decide between love or poetry. Publisher:…
-
Cover Reveal: SLIGHTLY SOUTH OF SIMPLE by Kristy Woodson Harvey
Earlier this year I had the chance to read a very lovely book by Woodson Harvey called, LIES AND OTHER ACTS OF LOVE. She has a beautiful prose and story telling ability to say the least! Unfortunately her latest novel, SLIGHTLY SOUTH OF SIMPLE will not be out until spring 2017……but between now and then we can enjoy some stunning cover art today! In addition to this lovely eye candy, Woodson Harvey is also hosting a giveaway for $100 Amazon gift card and several book bundles on kristywoodsonharvey.com/blog to celebrate the cover reveal! So I highly recommend heading over to her blog to see get entered! If you haven’t heard about…
-
Release Day Blitz: LEAVING LUCY PEAR by Anna Solomon
Two-time Pushcart Prize-winner Anna Solomon’s new novel, LEAVING LUCY PEAR, is officially out today! It is a moving exploration of motherhood, friendship, and marriage, and a perfect beach book for readers who like their summer reading smart and nuanced! Early reviews are unanimous in their enthusiastic praise, calling the novel “truly new and fresh” (Good Housekeeping), “beautifully told” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune), and “fully-fleshed, compassionate, and satisfying” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Novelists Sue Monk Kidd, Celeste Ng, J. Courtney Sullivan, and Paula McLain are also early fans. ABOUT THE BOOK In 1917, Beatrice Haven—the unwed teenage daughter of wealthy Jewish industrialists in Boston—sneaks out of her uncle’s house on Cape Ann in the…
-
Special Feature: ENCHANTED AUGUST by Brenda Bowen
Last summer I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing ENCHANTED AUGUST by Brenda Bowen and now it’s coming to paperback this summer! This fun summer beach read, is out in paperback on July 5th from Penguin Books with a gorgeous new cover. A Maine Literary Awards finalist, ENCHANTED AUGUST transports readers to a tiny island in Maine, telling the story of four mismatched people who learn that sometimes—if you’re lucky—a change of scenery can lead you right back to where you belong. Romantic, optimistic, and as refreshing as a summer cocktail, the novel itself is a perfect escape. Mary Kay Andrews agrees—she recently recommended ENCHANTED AUGUST as a summer…
-
Review: 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad
This book came across my desk for review a couple of months ago and initially I passed on it for review and agreed to do a special feature instead. I wasn’t sure that I could fit it into my review schedule and I wasn’t sure it was something that I really wanted to read. However when I did the special feature, I completely rethought my decision! After reading the discussion questions of the feature, I was intrigued. This book sounded like it was going to be raw, honest, and dark but yet poignant and meaningful. This book was all of these things and more! This book is set up with…
-
Review: Stars Over Sunset Boulevard by Susan Meissner
This is a novel that I liked so much more than I expected to. I love when books do that! I’ve read a ton of books this year that have been set in the 1920s and 1930s eras, some with the glitz and glamour of old Hollywood as a backdrop. So many books in fact that I am getting a little tired of the era. So when I picked up this book, I wasn’t sure what to expect and how I was going to feel about it. As soon as I started the book and found out the backdrop was not just old Hollywood but also had hints of the…
-
Special Feature: RE JANE by Patricia Park
RE JANE: A Novel (Penguin Books ; On-sale: April 19, 2016; $16.00; ISBN: 978014310794) by Patricia Park is a fresh, contemporary retelling of Jane Eyre and a poignant Korean-American debut novel that takes its heroine Jane Re on a journey from Queens to Brooklyn to Seoul—and back. For Jane, a half-Korean, half-American orphan, Flushing, Queens, is the place she’s been trying to escape from her whole life. Sardonic yet vulnerable, she toils, unappreciated, in her strict uncle’s grocery store and politely observes the traditional principle of nunchi (a combination of good manners, hierarchy, and obligation). Desperate for a new life, she’s thrilled to become the au pair for the Mazer-Farleys,…
-
Review: The Winemakers by Jan Moran
Caterina Rosetta has got some big time choices to make in her life but her options are limited. She’s had a daughter out of wedlock with a man who she thinks has abandoned her….and since it’s the 1950’s, having a child out of wedlock basically means social suicide. She hasn’t told her mother about the baby because she knows her mother will basically disown her so she needs to give the baby up for adoption…..but she can’t bring herself to do that either. Her mother basically raised her all on her own, so why can’t she raise her daughter by herself? Caterina is an accomplished sommelier who has grown up in a…
-
Review: Lies and Other Acts of Love by Kristy Woodson Harvey
I don’t typically read a lot of ‘Southern fiction’ or women’s fiction, but there was something about this intriguing cover and description that lured me in. After sixty years of marriage and five daughters, Lynn “Lovey” White knows that all of us, from time to time, need to use our little white lies. Her granddaughter, Annabelle, on the other hand, is as truthful as they come. She always does the right thing—that is, until she dumps her hedge fund manager fiancé and marries a musician she has known for three days. After all, her grandparents, who fell in love at first sight, have shared a lifetime of happiness, even through…
-
Special Feature: 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad
Since the book, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, has been released at the end of February it’s been on everyone’s lips not to mention all over social media! From People, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post to magazines such as O to Cosmo and Marie Claire, pretty much anyone who has picked it up has been blown away. Roxane Gay has even called the book “necessary” and “Beautiful” and just this week highlighted it in a recommendation list for iBooks. People are saying that it’s one of the most powerful novels they have read. Many are saying that author Mona Awad is saying things that have been in the…