Review: The Virtues of Oxygen, by Susan Schoenberger

23 July 2014 by Melissa

About the book, The Virtues of Oxygen

Paperback: 242 pages
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing (July 22, 2014)

From the award-winning author of A Watershed Year comes a heartrending story of unlikely bonds made under dire straits. Holly is a young widow with two kids living in a ramshackle house in the same small town where she grew up wealthy. Now barely able to make ends meet editing the town’s struggling newspaper, she manages to stay afloat with help from her family. Then her mother suffers a stroke, and Holly’s world begins to completely fall apart.

Vivian has lived an extraordinary life, despite the fact that she has been confined to an iron lung since contracting polio as a child. Her condition means she requires constant monitoring, and the close-knit community joins together to give her care and help keep her alive. As their town buckles under the weight of the Great Recession, Holly and Vivian, two very different women both touched by pain, forge an unlikely alliance that may just offer each an unexpected salvation.

Buy, read, and discuss The Virtues of Oxygen

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About the author, Susan Schoenberger

Susan Schoenberger is the author of the award-winning debut novel A Watershed Year. Before turning her attention to writing fiction, she worked as a journalist and copyeditor for many years, most recently at The Hartford Courant and The Baltimore Sun. She currently serves as the director of communications at Hartford Seminary and teaches writing classes at the Mark Twain House in Hartford. She lives in West Hartford, Connecticut, with her husband and three children.

Connect with Susan

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My Thoughts

You would think that a story about a woman who spends her entire life in an iron lung would be pretty grim, but The Virtues of Oxygen is anything but. Author Susan Shoenberger gives us not only a glimpse into what is now a very rare form of disability, but also a character piece about two women who are not in competition with each other, but work as partners.

Vivian, the one in the iron lung, is the perfect example of how the internet has, and still can, change lives. We get her backstory as a series of unaired podcasts, flashbacks into the life of a once boisterous and vibrant child, whose mind was both a blessing and a curse for much of her life.

Holly is not in an iron lung, but circumstance has given her a life almost as limited as Vivian’s. The death of her husband, the economic recession – both have conspired against her, to the point where she’s in danger of losing her house, when we first meet her.

Together, these two women move from companions to friends to a sort of chosen family, as each learns more about the other and herself, and opens herself enough to both give and receive assistance, be it physical, emotional, spiritual, or financial.

Yes, there are other characters in the novel, but all revolve around these two strong personalities, Vivian and Holly. Holly and Vivian.

I’ll confess that while I’ve never been as close to Holly was at homelessness, I know what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck in a society where even those of us who would normally be considered upper-middle-class are sometimes one or two paychecks away from foreclosure.

I’ll also confess that Vivian made such an impression on me that I spent no small amount of time on Google, reading about real women who lived in iron lungs after being stricken by polio, including the woman whose story actually inspired Shoenberger to write this novel.

The Virtues of Oxygen is a gripping read, and the ending, while somewhat predictable, is also true to the characters the author created. It’s also the ending I wanted them to have, one filled with the easy breath of hope.

Goes well with Bacon, eggs, and a toasted English muffin, eaten at a local diner.

This review is part of a blog tour sponsored by TLC Book Tours. For more information, including the complete tour schedule, click HERE.

Review: the New Men, by Jon Enfield

16 July 2014 by Melissa

About the book, The New Men

Publisher: Wayzgoose Press (May 14, 2014)
Print Length: 303 pages

For us, the new man, he is one of two things. First, he is the new worker, a man we instruct and investigate until his probation is complete. But also he is an idea. In the foundry, they make parts. On the line, they make autos. But in Sociological, we make men.

Tony Grams comes to America at the start of the twentieth century, set on becoming a new man. Driven to leave poverty behind, he lands a job at the Ford Motor Company that puts him at the center of a daring social and economic experiment.

The new century and the new auto industry are bursting with promise, and everyone wants Henry Ford’s Model T. But Ford needs men to make it. Better men. New men. Men tough enough and focused enough to handle the ever-bigger, ever-faster assembly line. Ford offers to double the standard wage for men who will be thrifty, sober, and dedicated… and who will let Ford investigators into their homes to confirm it.

Tony has just become one of those investigators. America and Ford have helped him build a new life, so at first he’s eager to get to work. But world war, labor strife, and racial tension pit his increasingly powerful employer against its increasingly desperate enemies.

As Tony and his family come under threat from all sides and he faces losing everything he’s built, he must struggle with his conscience and his weaknesses to protect the people he loves.

Buy, read, and discuss The New Men

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About the author, Jon Enfield

Jon Enfield has written for a range of audiences and publications. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Poetry Ireland Review, Underground Voices, Xavier Review, and Forbes.com. He is a former fiction editor of Chicago Review, and he taught writing at the University of Southern California for several years. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago for his dissertation on the relationships between American film and fiction 1910-1940.

The New Men arose from his longstanding fascination with America in the early twentieth century and from his sense that the emergence and evolution of the American auto industry shed light on some fundamental realities of present-day America.

Connect with Jon

Blog

My Thoughts

I was a bit concerned when I agreed to review this book. I mean, the concept and plot sounded interesting, but it had the potential to be a lot dryer than I typically prefer. I’ve never been more pleased to be proven wrong.

From the opening notes, where author Jon Enfield warns us about specific spelling and dialogue choices to the very last page, I was never bored. In fact, it would be fair to say that I was riveted, because I read this book last weekend, cover to cover, in one night.

We often hear about the concept of a “company town,” and I’ve certainly experienced a few: Marshalltown, IA, for example, is pretty much dominated by Fisher, and my husband and I worked in the Sioux Falls, SD campus of Gateway, back when they were a new-ish corporation. In The New Men, however, Enfield shows us the best and worst of company town culture – the progressive programs put in place to create the perfect workers, and the strictures that came with working for such a business.

After spending roughly half of the last decade doing corporate blogging for auto sales and auto insurance companies, it was incredibly interesting to me to see, in this novel, how the industry began, and to reflect upon the way it’s changed. Through his protagonist, Tony, and through all the other characters in The New Men Enfield shows us, not just a version of what was, but lets us glimpse what could have been, as well.

Sometimes gritty, sometimes poignant – often at the same time – The New Men is a period piece that manages to comment on contemporary culture without feeling as if it’s doing so. Taken as pure fiction, however, it’s a compelling story about people who aren’t that different than most of our grandparents. If you want something a bit toothier than typical summer fare, this novel is an excellent choice.

Goes well with Baked ziti, garlic bread, and a huge salad with fresh tomatoes.

This review is part of a blog tour sponsored by TLC Book Tours. For more information, and the complete list of tour stops, click HERE.

Review: Love & Treasure, by Ayelet Waldman

14 July 2014 by Melissa

About the book, Love & Treasure

Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Knopf (April 1, 2014)

A spellbinding new novel of contraband masterpieces, tragic love, and the unexpected legacies of forgotten crimes, Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Treasure weaves a tale around the fascinating, true history of the Hungarian Gold Train in the Second World War.

In 1945 on the outskirts of Salzburg, victorious American soldiers capture a train filled with unspeakable riches: piles of fine gold watches; mountains of fur coats; crates filled with wedding rings, silver picture frames, family heirlooms, and Shabbat candlesticks passed down through generations. Jack Wiseman, a tough, smart New York Jew, is the lieutenant charged with guarding this treasure—a responsibility that grows more complicated when he meets Ilona, a fierce, beautiful Hungarian who has lost everything in the ravages of the Holocaust. Seventy years later, amid the shadowy world of art dealers who profit off the sins of previous generations, Jack gives a necklace to his granddaughter, Natalie Stein, and charges her with searching for an unknown woman—a woman whose portrait and fate come to haunt Natalie, a woman whose secret may help Natalie to understand the guilt her grandfather will take to his grave and to find a way out of the mess she has made of her own life.

A story of brilliantly drawn characters—a suave and shady art historian, a delusive and infatuated Freudian, a family of singing circus dwarfs fallen into the clutches of Josef Mengele, and desperate lovers facing choices that will tear them apart—Love and Treasure is Ayelet Waldman’s finest novel to date: a sad, funny, richly detailed work that poses hard questions about the value of precious things in a time when life itself has no value, and about the slenderest of chains that can bind us to the griefs and passions of the past.

Buy, read, and discuss Love & Treasure

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About the author, Ayelet Waldman

Ayelet Waldman is the author of the recently released Love and Treasure (Knopf, April 2014), Red Hook Road and The New York Times bestseller Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace. Her novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits was adapted into a film called “The Other Woman” starring Natalie Portman. Her personal essays and profiles of such public figures as Hillary Clinton have been published in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Vogue, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Her radio commentaries have appeared on “All Things Considered” and “The California Report.” Her books are published throughout the world, in countries as disparate as England and Thailand, the Netherlands and China, Russia and Israel, South Korea and Italy.

Connect with Ayelet

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My Thoughts

You wouldn’t think that a novel that spends fully half it’s pages dealing with the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust could be magical and amazing, but Ayelet Waldman’s Love & Treasure manages to be so.

To be clear, those magical moments come between a lot of candid, even gritty, scenes. The first half of the book is the story of Jack Wiseman, an ethnic Jew and American soldier, in Europe at the end of World War II. Largely due to circumstance he is put in charge of a warehouse which holds the contents of a train, which, in turn, was full of the stolen, stripped down belongings – everything from ceramics to jewelry to bed linens to art – of Hungarian Jews who were either sent to concentration camps or sent to forced labor camps by the Nazis.

The second half of the book is mostly the story of Jack’s granddaughter Natalie, and her quest to fulfill her grandfather’s dying wish: track down the owner of a necklace he took from the warehouse, and return it. To do this, she travels to Europe and Israel, hooking up with an art dealer named Amitai who operates just at the surface, or maybe slightly below, the law. He isn’t a bad person, but he doesn’t make high-percentage choices. Also, he’s not that interested in the necklace – he’s trying to track down a painting done by the same artist. (He is, however, increasingly interested in Natalie.)

The problem is that Natalie’s story, which I referred to as the second ‘half,’ ends in such a way that it feels like an ending, but there’s a third part of the story, the history of the necklace’s original owner.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved learning the story of the necklace, loved a glimpse into early twentieth century feminism in Europe, it just felt like the novel would have been even more magical and amazing than it already is if Jack had been part one, Natalie had been part two, and the rest had been woven through in bits and glimpses.

But that’s me, who sometimes likes books to be ideally structured even though life never actually is, and the reality is that this minor structural issue didn’t detract from the story in any way. Jack’s section is heartbreaking, Natalie’s is a grand adventure, and all the rest? Quiet magic and amazing history.

Is this a beach read? Maybe not.
But it’s a great book for a lazy summer Sunday.

Goes well with: Organic eggs scrambled with spinach, salmon and cream cheese, a toasted bagel with butter, and a few chunks of really ripe cantaloupe.

This review is part of a blog tour sponsored by TLC Book Tours. For more information, and the complete list of tour stops, click HERE.

Review: Painting Juliana, by Martha Louise Hunter

17 June 2014 by Melissa

About the book, Painting Juliana

Hardcover: 362 pages
Publisher: Goldminds Publishing, LLC (May 20, 2014)

A young girl’s terrifying nightmare, five mysterious oil paintings and a red, flaming firebird all carry the same message:

Stand still, look up and let the funnel cloud suck you up inside.

It’s the last thing Juliana Birdsong wants to hear. Now a woman who’s losing everything, she’s still running from the dream, and it’s catching up fast. When her Alzheimer’s-stricken father’s canvases come to life exposing secrets, heartbreak and yearnings that mirror her own, Juliana discovers that some memories can be a blessing to forget.

Hit with devastating loss and betrayals, her old life stripped away, Juliana has no choice but to call on the person who’s never helped her before. Steering the chrome handlebars of a vintage motorcycle down a long, tapering highway, she must face her defining moment. It’s the only way she’ll gain the strength and courage to begin painting Juliana.

Buy, read, and discuss:

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About the author, Martha Louise Hunter

Martha Louise Hunter has an English degree from the University of Texas. After writing magazine features, working in politics and owning homebuilding and interior design companies, she now has an estate jewelry collection, www.marthasjewelrycase.com.

With four children between them, she and her husband, David live in Austin, Texas. This is her first novel.

Painting Juliana was awarded finalist in the Writers League of Texas Mainstream Fiction Contest.

Connect with Martha

Website | Blog

My Thoughts

As the daughter of a type-A, independent woman who is also a staunch feminist, and as someone who is all those things herself, it’s always a little bit difficult for me to empathize with the kind of women, who, like the Juliana we meet at the beginning of this novel, sublimate all their dreams and desires and let their husbands rule their lives.

For the first few chapters, then, I wanted to grab the lead character and shake some sense into her.

Then my mad “willful suspension of disbelief” skills took over, and I was able to simply experience her story, which is wonderfully told by author Martha Louise Hunter.

I particularly liked Juliana’s interactions with her Alzheimer’s-stricken father, and with her brother and his partner. Those two (three) relationships helped form the picture of how Juliana became the woman we first encounter, but also let us see that she really did have a core of steel, just just needed to use it.

Weaving through the novel was Juliana’s discovery of her father’s artwork, and her response to it, and her eventual assistance in giving him his art back, because while her father was painting pictures, it was very clear that Juliana was painting herself a whole new life.

Hunter’s characters and dialogue never felt flat or false, and even though I initially didn’t particularly like Juliana, I found myself rooting for her in the end, and even applauding her ballsy-est moves.

If you want a great summer read that has a bit more depth than the typical “beach novel,” but isn’t asking you to remember chunks of European history in order to follow the plot, and if you enjoy reading about adult women who reinvent themselves, this novel should appeal to you.

Goes well with anything Tex-Mex and a pitcher of margaritas.

This review is part of a blog tour sponsored by TLC Book Tours, who provided me with a copy of the book. For more information, and the list of tour stops, click HERE.

Review: Bee Summers, by Melanie Dugan

10 June 2014 by Melissa

About the book, Bee Summers

The spring she is eleven years old, Melissa Singer’s mother walks out of the house and never returns. That summer her father, a migratory beekeeper, takes her along with him on his travels. The trip and the people she meets change her life. Over the years that follow, Melissa tries to unlock the mystery of her mother’s disappearance and struggles to come to terms with her loss.

Buy, read, discuss

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About the author, Melanie Dugan

Melanie Dugan is the author of Dead Beautiful (“the writing is gorgeous,” A Soul Unsung), Revising Romance, and Sometime Daughter.

Born in San Francisco, Dugan has lived in Boston, Toronto, and London, England, and has worked in almost every part of the book world: in libraries and bookstores, as a book reviewer; she was Associate Publisher at Quarry Press, where she also served as managing editor of Poetry Canada Review and Quarry Magazine. She has worked in journalism, as a freelancer, and as visual arts columnist. Dugan studied at the University of Toronto Writers Workshop and the Banff Centre for the Arts, and has a post-graduate degree in Creative Writing from Humber College. She has done numerous public readings.

Her short stories have been shortlisted for several awards. She lives in Kingston, Ontario with her partner and their two sons.

Connect with Melanie

Website | Blog

My Thoughts

First of all, it’s kind of weird reading a novel written in first person about a person who shares your first name. True, the Melissa in this novel is called “Lissy” by most people, but even so, I was always the slightly out of place, voracious reader, and as such I really identified with her, except that I never lost my mother – in any sense. That aside, I was instantly drawn into Lissy’s story. My own childhood involved moving (and changing schools) roughly every eighteen months, so her sense of displacement, especially the first summer she traveled with her father, was familiar to me, and helped draw me further in.

The story itself was compelling, both in seeing the way Lissy grew and changed – going from lost child, to accomplished adult – and also in the evolution of er relationships, not only with her father, but with the array of characters they encountered on their bee-related excursions, and the way those connections formed a whole picture, once you had enough distance to see it from the right perspective.

Bee Summers is a thoroughly engaging novel, that, while sad in places, is also incredibly satisfying and really real.

Goes well with peanut butter and banana sandwiches, drizzled with honey, and fresh, cold milk.

This review is part of a blog tour organized by the lovely folks at TLC Book Tours, who also provided me with a copy of the book. For more information, or the complete list of tour stops, click HERE.

Review: Chasing the Sun, by Natalia Sylvester

6 June 2014 by Melissa

About the book, Chasing the Sun

Hardcover: 304 pages

Publisher: New Harvest (June 3, 2014)

Partially inspired by her grandfather’s kidnapping in Peru, CHASING THE SUN: A Novel (Lake Union/New Harvest; on sale June 3, 2014) is Natalia Sylvester’s suspenseful debut about a man whose wife is kidnapped just as their marriage is falling apart.

After going out for an errand, Marabela Jimenez doesn’t return home and her husband suspects she has left him – again. Only, the next day a letter arrives in the mail that reads:

Querido Andres,

I’m being held by three men who say they’ll keep me safe as long as you cooperate. They say that means no cops and no media. They say they’ll call when they’re ready to talk to you. Kiss our children for me and tell them not to worry. Keep me in your thoughts as I will be keeping you in mine.

Marabela

Despite their crumbling relationship, Andres quickly realizes he must do whatever it takes to get Marabela home. He can’t possibly afford the ransom the kidnappers demand or handle this threat to his family alone so he hires a consultant to help negotiate with the terrorists. He also reaches out to his estranged mother, who has never cared for Marabela and even reconnects with an old friend who may hold the key to his past and his wife’s future. As each day passes without the return of his wife, Andres is forced to come to terms with whether or not what he and Marabela have left is worth saving and how far he’ll go to bring her home.

Set against the backdrop of the political turmoil and terrorist threats of 1992 Peru, CHASING THE SUN is a story of how trauma has a way of exposing our most difficult truths and healing past wounds and regrets.

Buy, read, discuss

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About the author, Natalia Sylvester

Natalia Sylvester was born in Lima, Peru. She came to the U.S. at age four and grew up in South Florida, where she received a B.A. in creative writing from the University of Miami. A former magazine editor, Natalia now works as a freelance writer in Austin, Texas.

Connect with Natalia

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My Thoughts

Despite the fact that this novel opens with a kidnapping, and is mainly focused on a marriage that is falling apart rather than one that is coming together, the author’s sense of place, her vivid descriptions, her three-dimensional characters, are all so compelling that I literally could not put it down, reading it straight through in a single evening.

And not even in the bath.

It’s heart-achingly honest, sad but with bright moments, and ultimately so completely truthful that I felt as though I knew these people. And maybe that’s why it works, because while the situation is anything but normal, the characters are as real, as substantial, as our own family members, friends, and neighbors.

I really like that, unlike any other novel dealing with the same subject, the focus would have been on the one who was kidnapped, the wife, Marabela. Instead, it’s very much Andres’s story, and in choosing to make him our POV character, in choosing to have him be sympathetic, author Sylvester forces us to look at our own culture, our own relationships, and see exactly how we cast our gender and familial roles.

Chasing the Sun is simply brilliant. Deep, satisfying, literary brilliance.

Goes well with arroz con mariscos (though I prefer mine without octopus) and a really good wine.

This review is part of a virtual tour hosted by TLC Book Tours. For more information, and the complete list of tour stops, click HERE.

Review: Cutting Teeth, by Julia Fierro

5 June 2014 by Melissa

About the book, Cutting Teeth

Hardcover: 336 pages

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press (May 13, 2014)

One of the most anticipated debut novels of 2014, Cutting Teeth takes place one late-summer weekend as a group of thirty-something couples gather at a shabby beach house on Long Island, their young children in tow.

Nicole, the hostess, struggles to keep her OCD behaviors unnoticed. Stay-at-home dad Rip grapples with the reality that his careerist wife will likely deny him a second child, forcing him to disrupt the life he loves. Allie, one half of a two-mom family, can’t stop imagining ditching her wife and kids in favor of her art. Tiffany, comfortable with her amazing body but not so comfortable in the upper-middle class world the other characters were born into, flirts dangerously, and spars with her best friend Leigh, a blue blood secretly facing financial ruin and dependent on the magical Tibetan nanny everyone else covets. Throughout the weekend, conflicts intensify and painful truths surface. Friendships and alliances crack, forcing the house party to confront a new order.

Cutting Teeth is about the complex dilemmas of early midlife—the vicissitudes of friendship, of romantic and familial love, and of sex. It’s about class tension, status hunger, and the unease of being in possession of life’s greatest bounty while still wondering, is this as good as it gets? And, perhaps most of all, Julia Fierro’s warm and unpretentious debut explores the all-consuming love we feel for those we need most, and the sacrifice and compromise that underpins that love.

Buy, read, discuss

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About the author, Julia Fierro

Julia Fierro’s debut novel, Cutting Teeth, was listed as one of the “Most Anticipated Books of 2014” by HuffPost Books, The Millions, Flavorwire, Brooklyn Magazine, and Marie Claire. Her work has been published, or is forthcoming, in Guernica, Ploughshares, Poets & Writers, Glamour, and other publications, and she has been profiled in the L Magazine, The Observer, and The Economist.

Connect with Julia

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My Thoughts

Julia Fierro is an awesome writer.

I know that sounds really flippant, but seriously, she’s created this group of “mommies,” – a bunch of women, and one man – who are largely unlikeable, self-entitled, damaged people, and managed to make their lives and stories not only seem interesting, but in the process also made them into characters we can care about.

As a child-free woman in her early forties, I’m pretty certain Cutting Teeth was not written with me in mind, and, in truth, I found myself wanting to knock some sense into these people, make them wake up and realize that while their children really are not the little princes and princesses of the world, they are, in fact, actual (very small, unformed) people, and should be treated accordingly.

I also had to fight urges to crawl into the book and remind these women that it’s unhealthy (and kind of annoying) when women describe themselves as Moms or Mommies first, and only talk about their careers or the rest of their interests as things they squeeze in around the child. (This tendency annoys me in real life, as well.)

If these two statements make it seem like I didn’t “like” this book, you’re misreading. I did like it. I liked it well enough that even though I felt rather like a bug-eyed alien looking into a strange, new, world, I could accept these characters as people who could exist outside the scope of their pages.

And speaking of pages, Julia Fierro crafts an excellent story. The constant changing of POV means we get to see the way each character perceives herself, and the way each of them is perceived by the others. As well, while the women are incredibly three-dimensional, she did a good job of not making the men interchangeable hipsters or guys in pastel golf shirts and khakis (a peeve of mine that often comes up around this type of year.) Rip, the father in the group of “mommies,” Michael, and Josh are all just as dimensional as the women in their lives.

And yes, these people are largely unlikeable, so it’s pretty amazing that you end up feeling for them at the end. Cutting Teeth has struck the sweet spot of summer reading. Fast-paced enough to take to the beach, it’s also meaty enough to really sink your teeth into (no pun intended). Read it. You might find yourself shaking your fist at the characters, but you won’t be disappointed in the story.

Goes well with homemade lemonade and tuna-fish sandwiches. Followed by cocktails.

This review is part of a blog tour sponsored by TLC Book Tours. For more information, and the complete list of tour stops, click HERE.

Review: Midsummer, by Carole Giangrande

3 June 2014 by Melissa

About the book, Midsummer

• Paperback: 150 pages
• Publisher: Inanna Poetry and Fiction Series (April 2014)

All her life, Joy’s been haunted by a man she’s never met — her visionary grandfather, the artist Lorenzo. At work on digging a New York subway tunnel, his pickaxe struck the remains of an ancient Dutch trading ship — and a vision lit up the underground, convincing him that he was blessed. As it turned out, his children did well in life, and almost a century later, his granddaughter Joy, a gifted linguist, married the Canadian descendant of the lost ship’s captain.

Yet nonno’s story also led to the death of Joy’s cousin Leonora, her Aunt Elena’s only child. It was a tragedy that might have been prevented by Joy’s father Eddie, a man who’s been bruised by life and who seldom speaks to his sister. Yet in the year 2000, he has no choice. Wealthy Aunt Elena and Uncle Carlo are coming from Rome to New York City to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary. They’ve invited the family to dine at the sky-high restaurant in one of the Twin Towers — above the tunnel where nonno Lorenzo saw his vision long ago. On the first day of summer, Elena and Eddie will face each other at last.

Midsummer is a story of family ties and fortune, and of finding peace as life nears its close, high above the historic place where nonno’s story began.

Buy, read, and discuss Midsummer

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About the author, Carole Giangrande

Born and raised in the New York City area, Carole Giangrande now resides in Toronto, Canada.

Her novella, A Gardener On The Moon was co-winner of the 2010 Ken Klonsky Novella Contest, and is published by Quattro Books. She’s the author of two novels (An Ordinary Star and A Forest Burning), a short story collection (Missing Persons), all published by Cormorant, and two non-fiction books. Her new novella, Midsummer, will be published in April 2014 by Inanna.

She’s worked as a broadcast journalist for CBC Radio (Canada’s public broadcaster), and her fiction, articles and reviews have appeared in Canada’s major journals and newspapers. Her 50-part literary podcast Words to Go has been downloaded over 20,000 times in 30 countries. She comments as The Thoughtful Blogger, and she’s recently completed a novel. She’s a dual citizen of the United States and Canada.

Connect with Carole

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My Thoughts

You know how, when you have a large family gathering, one where the assembled family spans the generations, and everyone knows a different piece of family history, so you’re never entirely certain where things begin and end and what the real truth of any story might be? That’s the feeling I got from reading Carole Giangrande’s novella Midsummer, and in that sense, it was a lot like coming home, spending time around the seemingly-huge round dining table in my Italian grandmother’s house, hearing family stories.

But where my family is one ruled by drama and comedy, Giangrande’s story is a much calmer, more poetic look at family dynamics, and love and loss, and at the way history informs us.

Told mostly in the first person voice of Joy, granddaughter of Lorenzo, a manual laborer who finds the remains of a Dutch sailing ship in old (old) Manhattan, we are treated, not just to her life and perceptions, but also to those of her Aunt Elena, keeper of the family stories, her sheltered cousin Leonora, her father, and her own family, Dutch-born Adrian, and their two sons.

The language of the novella is absolutely luxurious, a blend of English and Italian that rolls of the tongue like honey wrapped around a Vivaldi symphony. More than once, I found myself reading passages out loud because I loved the language so much, to the amusement of my husband (and the confusion of my dogs). It’s also incredibly poignant as the action in the story takes place, not just in a world where the twin towers haven’t yet fallen, but in a world where they’re just being built. Passages like the one below, then, had a special resonance for this Jersey-girl-turned-Texan, who grew up in a Jersey shore community that was decimated by that disaster:

Because we were standing on an island, I imagined us gazing out over the sea, then turning to watch these two grey forms, their strange fragility of arches and latticework unmoored as they drifted upward, hovering over the city. Mesmerized, I began to wonder what was in the air down here, as all at once I stood inside the noon of midsummer, in an unknown June when the elegant towers would leave no shadow, would vanish into light.

Lyrical, languid, brilliant, Midsummer is a fast read for a slow and sultry afternoon. I highly recommend it.

Goes well with Caprese salad and iced tea.

This review is part of a blog tour sponsored by TLC Book Tours. For more information, and the complete list of tour stops, click HERE.

Review: The Dirty Book Murder: an Antiquarian Book Mystery, by Thomas Shawyer

29 May 2014 by Melissa

About the book The Dirty Book Murder: an Antiquarian Book Mystery

Publisher: Alibi (May 6, 2014)
Sold by: Random House LLC

In this smart, fast-paced mystery debut, Thomas Shawver introduces a charming, unlikely hero from the rarefied world of antique books.

Book merchant Michael Bevan arrives at the Kansas City auction house hoping to uncover some hidden literary gold. Though the auction ad had mentioned erotica, Michael is amazed to find lovely Japanese Shunga scrolls and a first edition of a novel by French author Colette with an inscription by Ernest Hemingway. This one item alone could fetch a small fortune in the right market.

As Michael and fellow dealer Gareth Hughes are warming up for battle, a stranger comes out of nowhere and outbids them—to the tune of sixty grand. But Gareth is unwilling to leave the auction house empty-handed, so he steals two volumes, including the Colette novel. When Gareth is found dead the next day, Michael quickly becomes the prime suspect: Not only had the pair been tossed out of a bar mid-fistfight the night before, but there is evidence from Michael’s shop at the crime scene.

Now the attorney-turned-bookman must find out who wanted the Colette so badly that they would kill for it—and frame Michael. Desperate to stay out of police custody, Michael follows the murderer’s trail into the wealthiest echelons of the city, where power and influence meet corruption—and mystery and eroticism are perverted by pure evil. Unfortunately for Michael, one dead book dealer is only the opening chapter in a terrifying tale of high culture and lowlifes.

Buy, read, and discuss:

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Books-a-Million | Goodreads

About the author, Thomas Shawyer

Thomas Shawver is a former marine officer, lawyer, and journalist with American City Business Journals. An avid rugby player and international traveler, Shawver owned Bloomsday Books, an antiquarian bookstore in Kansas City.

My Thoughts

I stayed up all night reading The Dirty Book Murder, not because I’d forgotten that I was supposed to review it, but because it was that good. It opens a bit slowly, with main character Michael Bevan going to an auction because there’s some rare Japanese erotica he might want for his used bookstore, but very quickly turns into a fast-paced neo-noire murder mystery replete with mobsters, movie stars, and an estranged daughter.

It’s also got enough literary references, references, I might add, that are relevant to the plot, to make any bibliophile want to start tracking the various times Collette, Hemingway, and others are invoked by characters in the story.

And then there’s a hint of romance, though this book is in no way a love story, unless it’s a love of reading and literature, and the preservation thereof.

Author Shawyer shares a few traits (per his bio) with his main character, but he manages to do so in a way that is very much “write what you know,” and not at all “annoying author insertion.”

This book should appeal to both those who like their mysteries a little bit cerebral, but it should also be great for those who were raised on hard-boiled detective novels, as there’s a bit a both.

Goes well with Shepherd’s pie and Irish beer.

This review is part of a virtual tour sponsored by TLC Book Tours. For more information, and the complete list of tour stops, click HERE.

Review: Return to the Beach House, by Georgia Bockoven

27 May 2014 by Melissa

About the book Return to the Beach House

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks; Original edition (May 13, 2014)

Over the course of one year, in a charming cottage by the sea, eight people will discover love and remembrance, reconciliation and reunion, beginnings and endings in this unforgettable sequel to Georgia Bockoven’s The Beach House and Another Summer.

Alison arrives at the beach house in June to spend a month with her restless grandson before he leaves for his first year of college. More than a decade earlier, Alison lost her beloved husband, and has faced life alone ever since. Now she discovers a new life and a possible new love.

August brings together four college friends facing a milestone. During summer’s final days, they share laughter, tears, and love—revealing long-held secrets and creating new and even more powerful bonds.

World-class wildlife photographer Matthew and award-winning war photographer Lindsey arrive at the beach house in January, each harboring the very real fear that it will mark the end of their decade-long love affair. Alone in the house’s warm peace, they are forced to truly look at who they are and what they want, discovering surprising truths that will change their lives forever.

Buy, read, discuss

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Add to Goodreads

About the author, Georgia Bockoven

Georgia Bockoven is an award-winning author who began writing fiction after a successful career as a freelance journalist and photographer. Her books have sold more than three million copies worldwide. The mother of two, she resides in Northern California with her husband, John.

My Thoughts

I’d read the original The Beach House a couple of summers ago, and I love beach novels, so when I was offered the chance to read and review the latest installment in Georgia Bockoven’s collection, I didn’t just jump at the chance, I swan dove. Or maybe cannonballed. Whatever.

Having spent a significant chunk of my life living in San Francisco and San Jose, I feel a special kinship with Return to the Beach House. I’ve always wanted to rent one of those houses in Santa Cruz or Capitola or anywhere else along the Northern California coast for the summer, or February, or pretty much ever. If I were rich, I’d buy one, and live there full time.

But that’s about me, and not the novel.

Here’s what I love about this book: it’s a novel, but it’s also an anthology, because while everything is tied together by this wonderful house – so much so that the house itself really becomes a character, it’s also separate stories. Alison and her grandson Christopher are one story. The four “alphabet girl” friends are another.

The glimpses into the life of Julia, who owns the house, make lovely bookends, and further serve to tie everything together, and the stories are always related by theme, but if reading a traditional novel is too much for you in this 140-character world, this book will be palatable because of the way it’s crafted.

Conversely, if you’re not a fan of novellas or short stories, you needn’t worry, because there is enough continuity, enough of a through-theme, to keep everything feeling relevant and related.

Bockoven’s characters, especially the women, are vibrant, realistically portrayed people, and her sense of place is equally vivid. I could smell the salt, hear the surf, and feel the coarse, damp, Pacific coast sand under my toes.

Read this book, if you love great characters, and a story that’s light enough for summer without being at all frothy or fluffy. Read this book, if you want a summer beach read that is deeply satisfying. But definitely read this book.

Goes well with fresh fish from Phil’s Fish Market in Moss Landing, pasta, and San Francisco sourdough, with any local microbrew beer, or a California wine. (Fetzer “Sundial” Chardonnay is my fave.)

This post is part of a blog tour hosted by TLC Book Tours. For more information, and the complete list of tour stops, click HERE.