The Its Monday! What Are You Reading meme is hosted at Book Journey.
Life…
The Good News: Thank you for the many lovely birthday wishes I received last week, they truly brightened my day.
The Bad News: The tradition continues however, making this the 41st year without receiving a single book (or book voucher etc) as a birthday gift! What I did get was a block of Crunch chocolate and a television remote control (don’t ask!)
The Good News: The children have two weeks of school holidays
The Bad News: I’m exhausted trying to keep them entertained.
The Good News: We’ve spent the four day Easter holidays at home, overdosing on chocolate and hot cross buns.
The Bad News: Hubby will go back to work tomorrow
The Good News: This weekend we celebrate ANZAC Day and so he will be able to enjoy another long weekend.
The Bad News: I’m nervously preparing for the presentation I am giving this Thursday night to a local women’s network group about books and blogging.
The Good News: I’m hoping to be able to share the details of a special bookish event with you sometime this week, I’m so excited about it and can’t wait to make the announcement!
What I Read Last Week
From The Feet Up by Tanya Saad
The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon
The Accident by CL Taylor
Guidebook To Murder by Lyn Cahoon
The Forever Song by Julia Kagawa
The Man Who Couldn’t Stop by David Adam
New Posts
(click the titles to read my reviews)
Review: The Tea Chest by Josephine Moon ★★★1/2
Review: From The Feet Up by Tanya Saad
Review: The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon ★★★
Guest Post: Writing What You Fear by CL Taylor
Review: The Accident by CL Taylor ★★★
Review: Guidebook To Murder by Lyn Cahoon★★1/2
Review: The Forever Song by Julie Kagawa ★★★★
Stuff on Sundays: Bookshelf Bounty
What I Am Reading Today
For centuries, the Furies have lived among us. Long ago they were called witches and massacred by the thousands. But they’re human just like us, except for a rare genetic mutation that they’ve hidden from the rest of the world for hundreds of years. Now, a chance encounter with a beautiful woman named Ariel has led John Rogers into the middle of a secret war among the Furies. Ariel needs John’s help in the battle between a rebellious faction of the clan and their elders. The grand prize in this war is a chance to remake the human race. Mark Alpert’s The Furies weaves cutting-edge science into an ingenious thriller, showing how a simple genetic twist could have inspired tales of witchcraft and sorcery, and how the paranormal could indeed be possible.
What I Plan To Read This Week
(click the covers to view at Goodreads)
Four-year-old Nathan Fisher disappears from the bank of a rocky creek. Did he drown or was he taken? The search for the missing boy grips the nation. A decade later, young teen Adam Vander has grown tall enough, strong enough, to escape his abusive father. Emerging from behind the locked door of their rambling suburban home, Adam steps into a world he knows little of. In the days that follow, with the charismatic and streetwise Billy as his guide, Adam begins to experience all that he’s missed out on. And he begins to understand that he has survived something extraordinary. As the bond between the boys grows, questions begin to surface. Who is Adam really? Why was he kept so hidden? Was it just luck that Billy found him, or an unsettling kind of fate? Unearthing the shocking truth of Adam’s identity will change the lives of many and put at risk a cast of flawed, desperate people. It’s a treacherous climb from the darkness. For one boy to make it, the other might have to fall through the cracks.
Ever since she was a little girl, Emily Wallace-Jones has loved Rocking Horse Hill. The beautiful family property is steeped in history. Everything important in Em’s life has happened there. And even though Em’s brother Digby has inherited the property, he has promised Em it will be her home for as long as she wishes. When Digby falls in love with sweet Felicity Townsend, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, Em worries about the future. But she is determined not to treat Felicity with the same teenage snobbery that tore apart her relationship with her first love, Josh Sinclair. A man who has now sauntered sexily back into Em’s life and given her a chance for redemption. But as Felicity settles in, the once tightly knit Wallace-Jones family begins to fray. Suspicions are raised, Josh voices his distrust, and even Em’s closest friends question where Felicity’s motives lie. Conflicted but determined to make up for the damage caused by her past prejudices, Em sides with her brother and his fiancée until a near tragedy sets in motion a chain of events that will change the family forever.
Dan’s got a new job. But he’s moved out of town in order to start a family and had to start commuting into the city every day, leaving his young wife Beth and newborn daughter at home. After 14 months of the trains either making him late for work or late getting home, he’s had enough. Tracking down the email address of the train company’s director, he starts to write him letters. Emails that take as long to write as the delay to his journey has been. If his time’s been wasted, why shouldn’t he waste the director’s? And so begins a hilarious and extraordinary correspondence. When the director begins to write back, Dan finds himself with a dysfunctional father/confessor to talk to — one who he never imagined would care. In truth, he probably doesn’t. But Dan finds solace in opening up to a stranger about the dramas of his day job at a scandal-hit newspaper, the challenges of his night job as the father of a baby who isn’t sleeping, and about life as it is played out in the confines of Coach C, while world events pass by its odd mix of inhabitants.
Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heat wave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman called Jenny Bonnet is shot dead. The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny’s murderer to justice – if he doesn’t track her down first. The story Blanche struggles to piece together is one of free-love bohemians, desperate paupers and arrogant millionaires; of jealous men, icy women and damaged children. It’s the secret life of Jenny herself, a notorious character who breaks the law every morning by getting dressed: a charmer as slippery as the frogs she hunts. In thrilling, cinematic style, FROG MUSIC digs up a long-forgotten, never-solved crime. Full of songs that migrated across the world, Emma Donoghue’s lyrical tale of love and bloodshed among lowlifes captures the pulse of a boom town like no other.
Physician and reporter Sheri Fink reconstructs five days at Memorial Medical Center and draws the reader into the lives of the doctors and nurses who struggled to preserve life amidst chaos. After Katrina destroyed the generators that make twenty-first century medicine possible, to be a patient at Memorial meant you were wholly at the mercy of caregivers forced to make a cascade of decisions about whose lives could be preserved and who would most likely die in the face of serious illness and limited medical care. The result was an almost unthinkable tragedy: several health professionals deliberately injected severely ill patients with drugs to hasten their deaths. In an engrossing narrative that exposes the human drama that fuels medicine and the unchartered territory of end-of-life care, Fink brings the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about just how ill-prepared we are as Americans for the impact of large-scale disasters on the most vulnerable among us.
While you are here…
Winner of Beached by Ros Baxter : Carla P
Vote for Book’d Out in the Best Australian Blog Awards. Click the image below and look for Book’d Out (listed alphabetically). I’d appreciate your support!
The Honey Brown book will impress. Just started What Came Before – what an emotional read, a great psychological thriller/murder/contemp work of fiction – as you can see I am not quite sure where this one fits. Have a great week.
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What Came Before landed on my doorstep last week too.
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I have just finished the essay that i am calling a book review …
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I just finished “Crimson Dawn” & “Time Will Tell” and started “Rocking Horse Hill” this morning 🙂 Life always has it’s ups and downs doesn’t it – I had a nice 10 day holiday, but came home to a mountain of work for the local sports club I’m secretary of and have spent almost four days solid doing paperwork 😦
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Ugh paperwork 😦 Hope you get that cleared up quickly Paula
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Congrats on your speaking engagement! And it sounds as though you have been having fun.
I’m very curious about The Word Exchange.
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It is a curious sort of book Laurel.
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Hope the holidays go well for you. Also hope you get your reading done!
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Thanks Mystica
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Happy belated birthday!
Honey Brown’s Through the Cracks sounds quite intriguing.
I’ve just started reading Red Hill by Jamie MacGuire, which has been sitting on my to-read pile for a little while now.
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I’ve loved everything I’ve read by a Honey Brown so far, I haven’t read anything by Jamie McGuire, I hope you are enjoying it.
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I can’t believe you didn’t get something bookish for your birthday! I am now enjoying school hols, and we will of course have ANZAC day too. Have been watching a little of Prince George in Australia, that kid is so sweet.
All the best for your speaking to woment about books and blogging, would love to be at it. You will be great I am sure. All the best for it.
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Sigh* I know LOL. Prince George is a cutie, and thanks for the good wishes
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Happy Easter, and hope your week ahead is a good one. We buy cozies from time to time and I thought Guidebook to Murder looked good, so glad I saw your review-maybe we’ll wait a bit on that one…
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Didn’t quite work for me Greg though and has had several great reviews. I like my costs with a good dose of humour.
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Just voted for you as I think you do a cracking job introducing non-Aussies to Australian (and other) books.
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Thanks for your vote and kind words 🙂
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Something must be done. This must not be allowed to continue. A tv remote? No books for your birthday? Oh my!
Here is my It’s Monday!
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It is unfair isn’t it! LOL
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*Shock horror* … no books again!! lol. All the best for your speaking engagement, they’ll love it, I have no doubt! Seriously excited about Through The Cracks this week. Enjoy the holidays and happy reading 🙂
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Thanks for the good wishes Sheree,
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What a great line up of books! I’ll be interested to see your reviews. Thanks for visiting me!
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Thanks for stopping by Brandie
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I can’t wait to read Frog Music! It’s been getting amazing reviews, and the synopsis makes it sound like something I’ll love. Good luck with your presentation! And I’m curious to hear about your upcoming good news…
Have a great week!
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I hope Frog Music lives up to the raves, and thanks for the luck
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Sounds like you are keeping busy. You have some nice looking books on the stack for this week. I hope you enjoy them. Come see what I read last week. Happy reading!
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Always busy, but seemingly never enough!
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I really want to read something by Honey Brown. I hope you didn’t eat to many hot cross buns, lol It sounds like you had a great holiday with the family. Good luck with presentation.
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I still have a whole packet left Marce!
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Great mix of books, Shellyrae. Good luck with your presentation and thanks for visiting my blog.
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Thanks Catherine, and thanks for stopping by
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That’s a lot of books! I have Frog Music and Five Days at Memorial on my to-read list too. I look forward to seeing what you think about them, but I’m even more curious about the Utton book. Thanks for visiting my blog!
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Good luck with your presentation and have a great week!
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Martin Harbottle’s Appreciation of Time sounds great. It reminds me a bit of Dear American Airlines. Did you read that one?
Have a wonderful week and if you figure out how to keep those kids entertained, let us know!
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I haven’t Lindsey, Ill have to check it out though.
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Have fun with your presentation! Books, blogging, and networking are three of my favorite presentation topics, too. People always seem to appreciate learning about them.
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I hope so Joy!
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That is a bit of up and down on life. *Grin* I hope you enjoy your presentation. The cover of Rocking Horse Hill caught my eye. Happy Reading!
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