It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

The Its Monday! What Are You Reading meme is hosted at Book Journey.

Life…

As expected this past week has been rather frantic.

My oldest daughter not only completed her HSC trial exams (she is in her final year of school) , she was fabulous in her gymnastics annual concert- the concert is so popular they have to run two shows so it was a big weekend for her, especially as she was part of five routines.

Meanwhile my youngest daughter has joined a basketball team and training began this week and she also attended a two day Scout outing, practicing her orienteering skills – confronting a red bellied black snake during her pack’s bush hike.

My youngest son dressed up as Harry Potter for the school’s book parade last week and both the boys finished their season of AFL (football) and were proud to receive their trophies at the presentation day on Sunday.

All three of the younger children are also busy rehearsing for their school’s annual concert next week. Tuesday night is the infants concert (years K-2) where J is playing the Lion from the Wizard of Oz and Wednesday is the primary concert (years 3-6) where A is playing Jane in their production of Mary Poppins, while M is a penguin.

Work has been equally frantic for my husband and he has not only been working 12 hour days, he had to go into work over the weekend as well – leaving me to juggle the kids commitments. Meanwhile I am in the midst of writing a new course I am teaching in September and just trying to keep up with everything else! The housework is suffering – badly 🙂

Oh, and tomorrow Book’d Out turns 3!

Make sure you stop by to join in the celebration!

What I Read Last Week

The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

His Stupid Boyhood by Peter Goldsworthy

Trouble Brewing by Jane Tara

Nefarious Doings by Ilsa Evans

Claire de Witt and the Bohemian Highway by Sarah Gran

New Posts

(click the titles to read my reviews)

Review: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon ★★★★

Review: Human Remains by Elizabeth Haynes ★★★

Review & Giveaway: Trouble Brewing by Jane Tara ★★★1/2

Review: His Stupid Boyhood by Peter Goldsworthy ★★★

Stuff On Sunday: How do you keep track of all the books that make their way into your house?

 What I Am Reading Today

Private investigator Janelle Watkins swore off investigating child abductions four years ago, when she left the San Francisco PD. But when two clients beg for her help, one to find her missing 11-year-old son and the other to find a toddler who’s vanished, Janelle can’t say no. Even though it means returning to the scene of her nightmares – her hometown of Greenville. Janelle enlists the aid of her ex-partner and ex-lover, Greenville County Sheriff Ken Heinz – but in the midst of their investigation, two other children are discovered missing and connected to Greenville. Then Ken’s niece disappears on her way to school. Janelle and Ken find themselves in a race against the clock. Will they find the missing children in time, or will history repeat itself?

What I Plan To Read This Week

(click the covers to view at Goodreads)

Empathetic, supportive and respectful… Or competitive, manipulative and downright bitchy? Or somewhere in between? In Just Between Us , a host of Australia’s best-loved female writers bare all on this age-old quandary:
Are female friendships all-natural and nurturing? Or are some more damaging than delightful? And most of all, what happens when female relationships go off the rails? And who is to blame? While falling in and out of romantic love is a well-documented experience, losing a friend rarely gets discussed. Which doesn’t mean the pain is less – quite the opposite, as we discover in this extraordinary collection of heartfelt fiction and non-fiction works that put female friendship in the spotlight.

Ex-detective Frank Swann is now on the outside of the police force – the only way to get justice done in Perth. In 1979 the city is a place of celebration and corruption. There are street parties, official glad-handing – even a royal visit – to commemorate a century and a half since colonisation. But behind the festivities a new kind of land grab is going on, this time for mining leases. The price of gold is up and very few, it seems, are incorruptible before its lure. When Swann is hired to probe the suicide of a respected geologist, he’s drawn into a mire of vice and fraud, at the centre of which sit the directors of a gold-lease consortium. They’re an unlikely collection of the seemingly respectable and the clearly not, with one thing in common: a lust for wealth that verges on a disease. For an old-school tough guy like Swann, that’s a gauntlet he just has to pick up . .

‘I’m going to love my baby and give her lots of attention,’ Jade said. ‘I’ll show my mum she’s wrong.’ Jade, 17, is pregnant, homeless and alone when she’s brought to live with Cathy. Jade is desperate to keep her baby, but little more than a child herself, she struggles with the responsibilities her daughter brings. Cathy is worried as soon as Jade arrives: she’s never looked after a pregnant teenager before, but none of the mother and baby carers free, and – seventeen years old, seven months pregnant and homeless – Jade is in a desperate situation. But Jade doesn’t want to listen or advice and although her daughter is born safely it isn’t long before Jade’s in trouble with the police. Cathy knows that Jade loves her daughter with all her heart, but will she be able to get through to Jade in time to make her realise just how much she might lose?

Sierra Court Blues” transports the reader on a mind-bending adventure with the main character Bo Kineally, a young father and husband with dreams of becoming a nationally known star from the backwoods of Bethel, Ohio. Can Bo strike a balance between his responsibilities and desires as both sides vie for his attention? “Sierra Court Blues” leaves nothing to the imagination with gripping characters, dysfunctional band members, roller-coaster drama, heart wrenching relationships, betrayal, and intricate family dynamics. The novel is sure to be a page turner for metal music enthusiasts everywhere.

It is customary to bring gifts to a wedding. But as daughter Luna prepares to marry her dream husband, the Smith family instead have in tow their own idiosyncratic brands of emotional baggage. Her father, Graham, struggles to write his own own obituary; her mother, Velma, attempts to negotiate her mid-life crisis with a lover seventeen years her junior; her brother, Ginsberg, tries to come to term with being a homosexual who has inadvertently fallen in love with his wife; and her obese uncle, Darren, starts an obsession with the absurd hero Ignatius J Reilly of John Kennedy Toole’s A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES. Can these hopelessly misguided attempts to unravel the complexities of family, legacy, sexuality and, ultimately, love and death, ever come to a resolution?

While you are here…

ENTER TO WIN 1 of 6 copies of  Deadly Virtues by Jo Bannister (Worldwide)

ENTER TO WIN 1 of 4 copies of Trouble Brewing by Jane Tara (Worldwide)

Thanks for stopping by, I’ll be along to visit you shortly!