It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

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

Life…

Watching: Justified with my husband – we are trying to get through all the seasons before our Amazon Prime membership trial expires

Listening: To my daughter singing Taylor Swift’s latest song, Blank Space, over and over and over and over…

Doing: Reluctantly moving out of my office to give my youngest daughter her own room (she has to share with my biggest bookshelf though, it won’t fit anywhere else!)

Cooking:  Tonight, it’s taco burrito’s.

Thinking: The weather is horrible, too hot and sticky.

Reading: As below

 

  What I Read Last Week

The Dead Wife’s Handbook by Hannah Beckerman

Fly In Fly Out by Georgina Penney

Behind the Gates of Gomorrah by Stephen Seager

Mobile Library by David Whitehouse

A Things of Beauty by Lisa Samson

 

  New Posts

(click the titles to read my reviews)

Review: The List by Joanna Bolouri  ★★★

Review: What Burns Away by Melissa Falcon Field ★★★★

Review: The Dead Wife’s Handbook by Hannah Beckerman  ★★

AWW Feature: A Rig Girl’s Night Out with Georgina Penney

Review: Fly In Fly Out by Georgina Penney ★★★1/2

Review: Behind the Gates of Gomorrah by Stephen Seager ★★★★

Review: Mobile Library by David Whitehouse ★★★1/2

Review: A Thing of Beauty by Lisa Samson ★★★

 

What I Am Reading Today

All families have their problems. None more so than the mad Maxwells of Tawny Brooks Winery. Situated in the heart of the Margaret wine region, this world-renowned winery was the childhood home to three sisters, Natasha, Eve, and Phoebe. Now all three girls are enmeshed in their city lives and are eager to forget their past, until Phoebe decides to get married at home. . . This novel follows three extraordinary women’s journey to find love. It is a complex story, full of warmth, humor, and family. It’s about recognizing that sometimes your best friend may also be your sister.

 What I Plan To Read This Week

(click the covers to view at Goodreads)

 

What if the place you called ‘home’ happened to be a funeral home? Kate Mayfield explores what it meant to be the daughter of a small-town undertaker in this fascinating memoir evocative of Six Feet Under and The Help, with a hint of Mary Roach’s Stiff.
The first time I touched a dead person, I was too short to reach into the casket, so my father picked me up and I leaned in for that first, empty, cold touch. It was thrilling, because it was an unthinkable act. After Kate Mayfield was born, she was taken directly to a funeral home. Her father was an undertaker, and for thirteen years the family resided in a place nearly synonymous with death. A place where the living and the dead entered their house like a vapor. The place where Kate would spend the entirety of her childhood. In a memoir that reads like a Harper Lee novel, Mayfield draws the reader into a world of Southern mystique and ghosts. Kate’s father set up shop in a small town where he was one of two white morticians during the turbulent 1960s. Jubilee, Kentucky, was a segregated, god-fearing community where no one kept secrets, except the ones they were buried with. By opening a funeral home, Kate’s father also opened the door to family feuds, fetishes, and victims of accidents, murder, and suicide. The family saw it all. They also saw the quiet ruin of Kate’s father, who hid alcoholism and infidelity behind a cool, charismatic exterior. As Mayfield grows from trusting child to rebellious teen, she begins to find the enforced hush of the funeral home oppressive, and longs for the day she can escape the confines of her small town. In The Undertaker’s Daughter, Kate has written a triumph of a memoir. This vivid and stranger-than-fiction true story ultimately teaches us how living in a house of death can prepare one for life.

One modern-day Rapunzel. One naked man. Two very different wicked witches. At 22, Sage Rampion has barely spoken to a man, but she’s read a lot about them. She was raised and home-schooled by an expert on the subject: her grandmother, a Professor of Womyn’s Studies (spelt with a Y). When Sage meets the male nude model she saw from her grandma’s office window, her sheltered world begins to unravel. She starts asking questions about how she was brought up, and the teenage mother who abandoned her. It looks like the battle of the sexes is way more complex (and far more fun) than she’s been told …

To everyone else in this carriage I must look normal; I’m doing exactly what they do: commuting to work, making appointments, ticking things off lists.  Just goes to show. Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning and every evening. Every day she passes the same Victorian terraces, stops at the same signal, and sees the same couple, breakfasting on their roof terrace. Jason and Jess seem so happy together.  Then one day Rachel sees something she shouldn’t have seen, and soon after, Jess disappears. Suddenly Rachel is chasing the truth and unable to trust anyone. Not even herself. Tense, taut, twisty and surprising . . . The Girl on the Train creeps right under your skin and stays there.

 

Dave Hooper has the hangover from hell, a demonic ex-wife and the claws of the tax office sinking into him. So the last thing he needs is an explosion at the off-shore oil rig where he works. But this is no ordinary industrial accident, and despite the news reports, Dave knows that terrorists aren’t to blame for the disaster. He knows because he has killed one of the things responsible. When he wakes up in a hospital bed guarded by Navy SEALs, he realises he hasn’t been on a bad acid trip. It all really happened. Yet his shock is cut short by a startling self-discovery; his contact with the creature has transformed the overweight, balding safety manager into something else entirely. A goddamned superhero. Then he learns the attack on the rig is only the first.

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