Monthly Archives: October 2014

Booking Through Thursday: Scary

by

Booking Through Thursday Booking Through Thursday asks…

“What’s the scariest book you’ve ever read?”

I love horror novels as much or more than I love horror movies, but most of them only affect me in the moment. Like many people of my generation, I grew up reading Stephen King novels as they came out. I was a teenager when I read IT for the first time, on a visit to my grandparents’ house in New Jersey.

While their neighborhood was nothing like small-town Derry, Maine, it did have the same kind of old-style gutters depicted in the novel, and I spent most of that summer crossing the street to avoid the possibility that a killer-clown might be peering up at me from within one.

I’ve often said that Stephen King and Garrison Keillor have the same folksy style, but that the difference is that Keillor isn’t going to have a monster show up to dismember you on page twenty six. I believe one of the reasons King’s work sticks with us isn’t the films, which, let’s face it, are never as scary as the books, but the fact that he sounds like every hometown storyteller, sucking you into small-town life.

The Unforgivable Fix, by T.E. Woods (@tewoodswrites) – Review

by

About the book, The Unforgivable Fix The Unforgivable Fix

Publisher: Alibi (October 14, 2014)
Pages: 320

On the heels of her runaway hits The Fixer and The Red Hot Fix, T. E. Woods ratchets up the tension with her newest explosive thriller in the fast-paced Justice series.

The killer won’t come for you, you fool. He’ll come for me.

Detective Mort Grant of the Seattle PD has finally decided to sell. The home where he and his late wife raised two kids feels too large and too full of old memories. His son is married and raising a family of his own, and despite desperate efforts to find her, Mort has lost touch with his wayward daughter. That is, until the day she walks back into her childhood home and begs for his help.

For the last four years, Allie Grant has been the lover—and confidante, confessor, and counselor—of one of the world’s most powerful and deadly men. But a sudden, rash move has put Allie in the crosshairs of a ruthless Russian crime lord. Mort knows of only one place where Allie will be safe: with The Fixer.

As a hired desperado, The Fixer has killed twenty-three people—and Mort was complicit in her escape from the law. She has built an impregnable house, stocked it with state-of-the-art gear, armed it to the teeth, and locked herself away from the world. But even The Fixer may not be able to get justice for Allie when real evil comes knocking.

Buy, read, and discuss The Unforgivable Fix

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

About the author, T. E. Woods T.E. Woods

T. E. Woods is as eager as her fans to return to the thrilling world of the Justice series. She’s busy writing the next installment and is developing a new series set in Madison, Wisconsin.

Connect with T.E.

Facebook | Twitter

Connect with T.E.’s publisher, Alibi: Facebook | Twitter

My Thoughts

I’ve just read all three “Fixer” books back to back, so the plots of each are a bit muddled in my head, but it doesn’t matter, because whether you read these in order (beginning with The Fixer) or not, you will be plunged immediately into a fast-paced story of action, adventure, and intrigue.

You will also see that T.E. Woods is incredibly deft at weaving those three elements together without ever ignoring plot or characterization. Whether the character in question is an embezzling corporate executive about to get his just desserts or the owner of the local coffee joint, everyone you meet in the pages of one of these novels feels incredibly real.

Since one of those characters – the main character – is a hired assassin, the incredible dimension and depth of each personality can feel a bit creepy at times, but that vibe actually works, making the books seem that much more visceral.

What I loved about this series -all of it- is that the dialogue is always both snappy and appropriate. Adults sound like adults, and their language always fits their station in life. The pacing, also, is excellent. Nothing is a constant rush; when the reader needs to breathe a bit, we’re given the chance.

What I didn’t love about this series: these books move so quickly, that one doesn’t merely read them, one devours them, and then one is left waiting for more. I was having such a great time immersed in The Fixer’s world that I really didn’t want the experience to end.

Goes well with champagne, strawberries, dark chocolate, and baked brie en croute.

TLC Book Tours

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

Monday, October 6th:  A Fantastical Librarian

Monday, October 6th:  Patricia’s Wisdom

Monday, October 6th:  Kritter’s Ramblings – Red Hot Fix

Tuesday, October 7th:  Tiffany’s Bookshelf

Tuesday, October 7th:  Kritter’s Ramblings

Monday, October 13th:  Patricia’s Wisdom – Red Hot Fix

Thursday, October 16th:  FictionZeal

Friday, October 17th:  Mystery Playground – “Drinks with Reads” guest post

Monday, October 20th:  She Treads Softly

Tuesday, October 21st:  Kahakai Kitchen

Monday, October 27th:  From the TBR Pile

Wednesday, October 29th:  Bibliotica

Wednesday, October 29th:  Queen of All She Reads

Thursday, October 30th:  Mockingbird  Hill Cottage – Red Hot Fix and The Unforgivable Fix

Friday, October 31st:  Back Porchervations

Friday, October 31st: The Novel Life

Olde School by Selah Janel – Review

by

About the book Olde School Olde School

• Paperback: 428 pages
• Publisher: Seventh Star Press, LLC (March 18, 2014)

Kingdom City has moved into the modern era. Run by a lord mayor and city council (though still under the influence of the High King of The Land), it proudly embraces a blend of progress and tradition. Trolls, ogres, and other Folk walk the streets with humans, but are more likely to be entrepreneurs than cause trouble. Princesses still want to be rescued, but they now frequent online dating services to encourage lords, royals, and politicians to win their favor. The old stories are around, but everyone knows they’re just fodder for the next movie franchise. Everyone knows there’s no such thing as magic. It’s all old superstition and harmless tradition.

Bookish, timid, and more likely to carry a laptop than a weapon, Paddlelump Stonemonger is quickly coming to wish he’d never put a toll bridge over Crescent Ravine. While his success has brought him lots of gold, it’s also brought him unwanted attention from the Lord Mayor. Adding to his frustration, Padd’s oldest friends give him a hard time when his new maid seems inept at best and conniving at worst. When a shepherd warns Paddlelump of strange noises coming from Thadd Forest, he doesn’t think much of it. Unfortunately for him, the history of his land goes back further than anyone can imagine. Before long he’ll realize that he should have paid attention to the old tales and carried a club.

Darkness threatens to overwhelm not only Paddlelump, but the entire realm. With a little luck, a strange bird, a feisty waitress, and some sturdy friends, maybe, just maybe, Padd will survive to eat another meal at Trip Trap’s diner. It’s enough to make the troll want to crawl under his bridge, if he can manage to keep it out of the clutches of greedy politicians.

Buy, read, and discuss Olde School

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Goodreads

About the author, Selah Janel Selah Janel

Selah Janel has been blessed with a giant imagination since she was little and convinced that fairies lived in the nearby state park or vampires hid in the abandoned barns outside of town. The many people around her that supported her love of reading and curiosity probably made it worse. Her e-books The Other Man, Holly and Ivy, and Mooner are published through Mocha Memoirs Press. Lost in the Shadows, a collection of short stories celebrating the edges of ideas and the spaces between genres was co-written with S.H. Roddey. Her work has also been included in The MacGuffin, The Realm Beyond, Stories for Children Magazine, The Big Bad: an Anthology of Evil, The Grotesquerie, and Thunder on the Battlefield. Olde School is the first book in her new series, The Kingdom City Chronicles, and is published through Seventh Star Press. She likes her music to rock, her vampires lethal, her fairies to play mind games, and her princesses to hold their own.

Connect with Selah

Blog | Facebook

My Thoughts

I don’t read a lot of true fantasy anymore, but there was a time when I was reading it voraciously. Still, it’s a genre I go back to when something interesting or original crosses my path, and in this case, the result – reading Selah Janel’s Olde School – was a sheer delight.

From the first scene in Trip Trap’s diner (frequented mainly by trolls and shepherds) I was hooked on Janel’s writing style, and on the world she created. Paddlelump, her main character, is fantastically different from any character I’ve ever read, and Kingdom City is a place I’d love to visit for a couple of days.

Janel spins a fun-filled yarn that gives a nod to pop culture and the current love of modernizing classic tales, but it’s just a nod. There’s nothing in Olde School that doesn’t feel fresh, interesting, and completely awesome.

So many times we forget that reading is entertaining as well as educational. Olde School is a reminder that it’s okay for something to be funny, smart, and completely engaging without necessarily requiring us to be made aware of the popular cause of the moment or disease du jour. Moreover, it reminds us that the best thing any of us can be is ourselves.

Read this book. Seriously, you won’t stop smiling for like a week, after.

TLC Book Tours

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

Monday, October 13th: Must Read Faster

Tuesday, October 14th: Booksie’s Blog

Wednesday, October 15th: Priscilla and Her Books

Thursday, October 16th: Sidewalk Shoes

Friday, October 17th: Reading Reality

Thursday, October 23rd: Bibliotica

Monday, October 27th: Dab of Darkness

Tuesday, October 28th: Ms. Nose in a Book

Wednesday, October 29th: Fuelled by Fiction

Thursday, October 30th: Book Marks the Spot

Monday, November 3rd: Bookie Wookie

The Betrayed, by Heather Graham (@heathergraham) – Review

by

About the book, The Betrayed The Betrayed

Series: Krewe of Hunters

Mass Market Paperback: 400 pages

Publisher: Harlequin MIRA (September 30, 2014)

One night, New York FBI agent Aiden Mahoney receives a visitor in a dream—an old friend named Richard Highsmith. The very next day he’s sent to Sleepy Hollow because Richard’s gone missing there.

Maureen—Mo—Deauville now lives in the historic town and works with her dog, Rollo, to search for missing people. She’s actually the one to find Richard…or more precisely his head, stuck on a statue of the legendary Headless Horseman.

Mo and Aiden, a new member of the Krewe of Hunters, the FBI’s unit of paranormal investigators, explore both past and present events to figure out who betrayed Richard, who killed him and now wants to kill them, too. As they work together, they discover that they share an unusual trait—the ability to communicate with the dead. They also share an attraction that’s as intense as it is unexpected…if they live long enough to enjoy it!

Buy, read, and discuss The Betrayed

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

About the author, Heather Graham Heather Graham

New York Times and USA TODAY  bestselling author Heather Graham has written more than a hundred novels and has been published in more than 20 languages. An avid scuba diver, ballroom dancer and the mother of five, she enjoys her south Florida home, but loves to travel as well, from locations such as Cairo, Egypt, to her own backyard, the Florida Keys. Reading is still the pastime she still loves best, and she is a member of many writing groups. She’s a winner of the Romance Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Thriller Writers’ Silver Bullet. She is an active member of International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America, and also the founder of The Slush Pile Players, an author band and theatrical group.

Heather annually hosts the Writers for New Orleans conference to benefit both the city, which is near and dear to her heart, and various other causes, and she hosts a ball each year at the RT Booklovers Convention to benefit pediatric AIDS foundations.

Connect with Heather

Website | Facebook | Twitter

My Thoughts

After I reviewed Heather Graham’s The Hexed a few weeks ago, I fell so much in love with the world she’s created that I ran right out and bought (well, okay, I used my iPad in my pajamas and clicked to get the kindle edition) the second in this Krewe of Hunters series, The Cursed.

And, just as when I read The Hexed, once I started reading The Cursed, I couldn’t put it down. The same is true of this book, The Betrayed.

This one takes place in Tarrytown/Sleepy Hollow, and while it’s a more reality-based Sleepy Hollow than the popular TV series (which, I confess, I enjoy despite the many, many historical inaccuracies), it at least acknowledges that the series exists (and that it’s good for tourism). The new hunter, Aidan Mahoney is everything you want in a paranormal romance hero: sensitive, strong, protective, but never patronizing.

The new female lead, Maureen “Mo” Deauville (who comes with a sidekick in the form of giant Irish Wolfhound Rollo) is funny, spunky, smart, and just a little bit reckless – all the perfect traits for a paranormal romance heroine.

Together they fight crime – cliche, I know, but, it’s what happens. What is NOT cliche is Heather Graham’s uncanny ability to weave historical subplots with contemporary plots, and give us just enough romance to keep the homefires burning softly, but not so much that the plot is overshadowed.

Yes, there are ghosts, and people talk to them, but Graham makes that work, as well, treating the ability to see and speak with the dead as something special, to be savored, and used on the side of good, rather than something sinister.

If you, like me, prefer your spooky stories with believable characters and accurate history, you should grab a copy of The Betrayed right now. Then you should read the rest of Heather Graham’s amazing novels, because you will NOT be disappointed.

Goes well with roasted pumpkin seeds (with garlic salt) and spiced apple cider.

TLC Book Tours

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

Monday, September 15th: From the TBR Pile

Monday, September 15th: Books a la Mode – Spotlight and giveaway

Tuesday, September 16th: Bewitched Bookworms

Wednesday, September 17th: Snowdrop Dreams of Books

Friday, September 19th: Supernatural Snark – Spotlight and giveaway

Monday, September 22nd: Read – Love – Blog

Tuesday, September 23rd: A Chick Who Reads

Wednesday, September 24th:  Hopelessly Devoted Bibliophile

Thursday, September 25th: Queen of All She Reads

Monday, September 29th: Saints and Sinners Books

Tuesday, September 30th:  Mom in Love with Fiction

Thursday, October 2nd: Musings of a Bookish Kitty

Thursday, October 2nd: Ladybug Literature

Monday, October 6th:  Bibliophilia, Please

Wednesday, October 8th: Sara’s Organized Chaos

Thursday, October 9th:  No More Grumpy Bookseller

Monday, October 13th: Peeking Between the Pages

Wednesday, October 15th:  Bibliotica

Monday, October 20th:  Tiffany’s Bookshelf

Thursday, October 23rd: My Shelf Confessions – Wonderfully Wicked Read-A-Thon Giveaway

Thursday, October 23rd: Harlie’s Books

How to Build a Girl, by Caitlin Moran (@caitlinmoran) – Review

by

About the book, How to Build a Girl How to Build a Girl

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Harper (September 23, 2014)

What do you do in your teenage years when you realize what your parents taught you wasn’t enough? You must go out and find books and poetry and pop songs and bad heroes—and build yourself.

It’s 1990. Johanna Morrigan, fourteen, has shamed herself so badly on local TV that she decides that there’s no point in being Johanna anymore and reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde—fast-talking, hard-drinking gothic hero and full-time Lady Sex Adventurer. She will save her poverty-stricken Bohemian family by becoming a writer—like Jo in Little Women, or the Brontës—but without the dying-young bit.

By sixteen, she’s smoking cigarettes, getting drunk, and working for a music paper. She’s writing pornographic letters to rock stars, having all the kinds of sex with all the kinds of men, and eviscerating bands in reviews of 600 words or less.
But what happens when Johanna realizes she’s built Dolly with a fatal flaw? Is a box full of records, a wall full of posters, and a head full of paperbacks enough to build a girl after all?

Imagine The Bell Jar—written by Rizzo from Grease. How to Build a Girl is a funny, poignant, and heartbreakingly evocative story of self-discovery and invention, as only Caitlin Moran could tell it.

Buy, read, and discuss How to Build a Girl

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Goodreads

About the author, Caitlin Moran Caitlin Moran

Caitlin Moran was named the Columnist of the Year by the British Press Awards in 2010, and Critic and Interviewer of the Year in 2011 for her work at the Times of London. Her debut book, How to Be a Woman, won the 2011 Galaxy Book of the Year Award and was an instant New York Times bestseller.

Connect with Caitlin

Website | Twitter

My Thoughts

If I hadn’t gone to a performing arts high school (and been an only child in an upper middle class American family) I might have turned out very much like Johanna – depressed, and never quite fitting anywhere. As it is, I’m certain that I’ve met this girl, or girls like her, when I’ve worked with high school students.

Fourteen is a difficult age, especially when nothing else in your life is remotely ‘normal,’ and Caitlin Moran captures the angst and alienation of the teen years incredibly well, then surrounds Johanna with a cast of eccentric, often annoying, but never boring characters, and the sense of glimpsing a world that’s not quite as pretty and happy as our own is only enhanced.

And yet, as much as Johanna and her family are imbued with a sense of otherness, there’s also something profoundly, painfully, viscerally REAL about them that makes you want to alternately hug them and shake them until they come to their senses.

This book is gritty, even grim at times, and yet it’s also a brilliantly written coming-of-age story with elements of snark and black comedy that should not be missed.

Goes well with Fish and chips and a really good craft-brewed lager.

TLC Book Tours

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

Monday, September 29th: BoundbyWords

Tuesday, September 30th: The Scarlet Letter

Wednesday, October 1st: Fourth Street Review

Thursday, October 2nd: Lit and Life

Tuesday, October 7th: The Steadfast Reader

Wednesday, October 8th: Luxury Reading

Thursday, October 9th: Snowdrop Dreams of Books

Friday, October 10th: Bibliophilia, Please

Monday, October 13th: A Bookish Affair

Tuesday, October 14th: Bibliotica

Tuesday, October 14th: Sara’s Organized Chaos

Wednesday, October 15th: guiltless reading

Thursday, October 16th: Cerebral Girl in a Redneck World

Friday, October 17th: Books à la Mode

Monday, October 20th: Consuming Culture

Tuesday, October 21st: Drey’s Library

Wednesday, October 22nd: The Whynott Blog

TBD: Book Addict Katie

The Moonlight Palace, by Liz Rosenberg – Review

by

About the book, The Moonlight Palace The Moonlight Palace

Paperback: 174 pages
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing (October 1, 2014)

Agnes Hussein, descendant of the last sultan of Singapore and the last surviving member of her immediate family, has grown up among her eccentric relatives in the crumbling Kampong Glam palace, a once-opulent relic given to her family in exchange for handing over Singapore to the British.

Now Agnes is seventeen and her family has fallen into genteel poverty, surviving on her grandfather’s pension and the meager income they receive from a varied cast of boarders. As outside forces conspire to steal the palace out from under them, Agnes struggles to save her family and finds bravery, love, and loyalty in the most unexpected places. The Moonlight Palace is a coming-of-age tale rich with historical detail and unforgettable characters set against the backdrop of dazzling 1920s Singapore.

Buy, read, and discuss The Moonlight Palace

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

About the author, Liz Rosenberg Liz Rosenberg

Liz Rosenberg is the author of more than thirty award-winning books, including novels and nonfiction for adults, poetry collections, and books for young readers. She has been the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Paterson Prize, the Bank Street Award, the Center for the Book Award, and a Fulbright fellowship in Northern Ireland in 2014. She is a professor of English and creative writing at Binghamton University, in upstate New York, where she has received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. She has guest-taught all over the United States and abroad, and has written a book column for the Boston Globe for the past twenty-five years. Her previous novels, Home Repair and The Laws of Gravity, have been bestsellers in the United States, Europe, and Canada. She and her husband, David, were raised on Long Island, and went to the same summer camp at ages seven and eight, respectively.

My Thoughts

TLC Book Tours provided me with a copy of The Moonlight Palace via NetGalley, which meant the version I was reading was an uncorrected proof. Some of the punctuation and capitalization hadn’t yet been standardized in the ebook I had, but rather than finding it annoying, I actually think it lended to the otherness that pervaded the novel.

Rosenberg’s writing in this novel is lyrical, as if we’re seeing Agnes, her family, and the boarders in their once-grand (and now putting the ‘shabby’ in ‘shabby chic’) home, through a gauze filter and soft pink light. I got the sense that she was being meticulous with her word choices, because once I started reading The Moonlight Palace, I was completely absorbed.

Agnes, of course, is a wonderful character, and we get to experience her coming of age in a way that makes us realize how jaded we Westerners can be, at times, while also appreciating how very lucky most of us are. I’m not certain that the author meant her book to force readers to confront their inherent privilege, or if it’s just that’s that where my own consciousness was when I was reading it. I think it’s possibly a little of both.

But political and cultural awareness aside, what Rosenberg has done is give us something that could have been a Singaporean version of Tales of the City or Grey Gardens (and yes, I’m aware of how vastly different those two works are), and instead, has woven a tale that puts us in the middle of the same sights and sounds that Agnes experiences, with her perspective to aid our understanding.

The Moonlight Palace is a wonderful novel, and it will draw you in, and keep you there, until it finally releases you to go hunt down a warm meal and a hot cup of tea.

Goes well with Coconut curry chicken and strong black tea.

TLC Book Tours

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

Monday, October 6th: Reading Reality

Monday, October 6th: Great Imaginations

Tuesday, October 7th: A Bookish Affair

Wednesday, October 8th:  Savvy Verse and Wit

Thursday, October 9th:  A Bookish Way of Life

Friday, October 10th: Patricia’s Wisdom

Monday, October 13th: Bibliotica

Tuesday, October 14th: Book Dilettante

Wednesday, October 15th: Svetlana’s Reads and Views

Thursday, October 16th: Brooke Blogs

Friday, October 17th: Good Girl Gone Redneck

Monday, October 20th: The Whimsical Cottage

Tuesday, October 21st: No More Grumpy Bookseller

Wednesday, October 22nd: BookNAround

Thursday, October 23rd: Broken Teepee

Friday, October 24th: Wensend

Monday, October 27th: Books on the Table

Tuesday, October 28th: Missris

Wednesday, October 29th: Time 2 Read

Thursday, October 30th: Kahakai Kitchen

Date TBD: Lavish Bookshelf

A Breast Cancer Alphabet, by Madhulika Sikka (@madhulikasikka) – Review

by

About the book, A Breast Cancer Alphabet A Breast Cancer Alphabet

Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Crown; First Edition edition (February 25, 2014)

From NPR News executive editor comes an indispensable and approachable guide to life during, and after, breast cancer.

The biggest risk factor for breast cancer is simply being a woman.  Madhulika Sikka’s A Breast Cancer Alphabet offers a new way to live with and plan past the hardest diagnosis that most women will ever receive: a personal, practical, and deeply informative look at the road from diagnosis to treatment and beyond.

What Madhulika Sikka didn’t foresee when initially diagnosed, and what this book brings to life so vividly, are the unexpected and minute challenges that make navigating the world of breast cancer all the trickier.  A Breast Cancer Alphabet is an inspired reaction to what started as a personal predicament.

This A-Z guide to living with breast cancer goes where so many fear to tread: sex (S is for Sex – really?), sentimentality (J is for Journey – it’s a cliché we need to dispense with), hair (H is for Hair – yes, you can make a federal case of it) and work (Q is for Quitting – there’ll be days when you feel like it).  She draws an easy-to-follow, and quite memorable, map of her travels from breast cancer neophyte to seasoned veteran.

As a prominent news executive, Madhulika had access to the most cutting edge data on the disease’s reach and impact.  At the same time, she craved the community of frank talk and personal insight that we rely on in life’s toughest moments.  This wonderfully inventive book navigates the world of science and story, bringing readers into Madhulika’s mind and experience in a way that demystifies breast cancer and offers new hope for those living with it.

Buy, read, and discuss A Breast Cancer Alphabet

Amazon | Books-a-Million | Goodreads

About the author, Madhulika Sikka Madhulika Sikka

MADHULIKA SIKKA is a veteran broadcast journalist with decades of experience. Among other media outlets, she has worked at NPR News and ABC News.

Connect with Madhulika

Website | Twitter

My Thoughts

There are two ways to read A Breast Cancer Alphabet. You can read it straight through, in which case it feels very much like one woman’s memoir of a trip down breast cancer lane, at times witty and at other times poignant, and mostly a mixture of both. Alternately, you can read the introduction, and then flip through the actual alphabetized entries at random, going forward and backward as your mood dictates. Either way, you’re likely to learn something new, either about breast cancer, or about the woman who wrote the book, journalist Madhulika Sikka.

Either way, what you’ll find is information that is witty and engaging, but also honest and useful about this disease that affects so many of us, across cultures, heedless of age, income level, or geography.

To be honest, it’s not the kind of book you sit down and read straight through, like a novel. Even if you read it in order, it’s probably best in small doses…it makes a great “bathroom book” in that way. (Which is not to denigrate the author or the book – I get the majority of my reading done by multitasking in the bathroom or in the actual bathtub.)

It would make a great gift for the mother, daughter, or sister of someone going through breast cancer, or someone who’s just been diagnosed, and it’s designed to feel almost like a journal, and not at all like the encyclopedia of a malady it could easily has become.

All around us are companies pushing pink products because it’s October. Most of them use Breast Cancer Awareness Month as just another marketing ploy. If you really want to think pink this fall – or at any time of year – I heartily suggest this book. Not only will it help you, or someone you love, you’ll also be supporting another woman.

Sisterhood is never something to look away from.

Goes well with a strawberry milkshake. Or a lot of liquor.

TLC Book Tours

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

Wednesday, October 1st: The Reading Date 

Thursday, October 2nd: Peeking Between the Pages

Friday, October 3rd: Guiltless Reading spotlight/excerpt

Monday, October 6th: WV Stitcher

Tuesday, October 7th: Lisa’s Yarns

Wednesday, October 8th: Sharon’s Garden of Book Reviews

Wednesday, October 8th: Life is Story

Thursday, October 9th: Melanie’s Muse

Friday, October 10th: Bibliotica

Monday, October 13th: A Chick Who Reads

Tuesday, October 14th: Nightly Reading

Thursday, October 16th: Back Porchervations

Monday, October 20th: Lesa’s Book Critiques

Monday, October 20th: From the TBR Pile

Tuesday, October 21st: Sincerely Stacie

Tuesday, October 21st: My Shelf Confessions

Thursday, October 23rd: Luxury Reading

Monday, October 27th: Patricia’s Wisdom

Butternut Summer by Mary McNear – Review

by

About the book, Butternut Summer Butternut Summer

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks; Original edition (August 12, 2014)

Caroline’s life is turned upside down the moment her ex-husband, Jack, strides through the door of her coffee shop. He seems changed—stronger, steadier, and determined to make amends with Caroline and their daughter, Daisy. Is he really different, or is he the same irresistibly charming but irresponsible man he was when he left Butternut Lake eighteen years ago? Caroline, whose life is stuck on pause as her finances are going down the tubes, is tempted to let him back into her life . . . but would it be wise?

For Caroline’s daughter, Daisy, the summer is filled with surprises. Home from college, she’s reunited with the father she adores—but hardly knows—and swept away by her first true love. But Will isn’t what her mother wants for her—all Caroline can see is that he’s the kind of sexy “bad boy” Daisy should stay away from.

As the long, lazy days of summer pass, Daisy and Caroline come to realize that even if Butternut Lake doesn’t change, life does. . . .

Buy, read, & discuss Butternut Summer

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Goodreads

About the author, Mary McNear Mary McNear

New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Mary McNear is a writer living in San Francisco with her husband, two teenage children, and a high-strung, minuscule white dog named Macaroon. She bases her novels on a lifetime of summers spent in a small town on a lake in the northern Midwest.

Connect with Mary

Facebook

My Thoughts

Mary McNear has created, in Butternut Lake, the kind of small town most of us would secretly love to live in, even when we pretend to be ultra-sophisticated urbanites. She’s also created a group of characters, old and new, who feel like just the sort of people who would actually inhabit such a town. I fell in love with her work when I read and reviewed Up at Butternut Lake in April, and that love has only grown stronger with Butternut Summer.

In this book we have a lovely dose of family drama – Jack has been estranged from his wife Caroline and their daughter Daisy for most of the latter’s life – set against two romances – the slow, reconnection between Jack and Carolyn, and the almost-immediate connection between Daisy and Will. Each relationship is given its own attention, and its own rhythm, and McNear has done a particularly good job at showing the reluctance of former lovers to risk renewing their relationship as well as the intensity of young love.

While it’s not a character, per se, the local diner, Pearl’s is as important to the plot of Butternut Summer as the U.S.S. Enterprise is to Star Trek. Not only is it the center of much of the action, saving the place is a core factor of Caroline and Jack’s relationship. It’s the coffee shop we all wish we could visit, park Luke’s, part Mel’s, and part something else entirely, and visiting it again through this novel reminded my of my own childhood visits to my own family’s diner in New Jersey.

If you want a compelling story full of interesting, believable characters and a rich setting, you need to read Butternut Summer.

Goes well with Broasted chicken and mashed potatoes, and a glass of iced tea.

TLC Book Tours

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.