Jenn's Bookshelves

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; 1 edition (August 3, 2010)
• Source: Publisher
• ISBN-10: 0061906077

When they were young, Bobby rescued Cami from debilitating anorexia.  Decades later, she needs saving again when he decides he wants to end their marriage.  Cami is devastated.  She’s a veterinarian, running her own practice and Bobby owns his own restaurant.  While things weren’t perfect, she never expected this.

Earlier that day, Cami goes on on a horrible cruelty & abuse case in which she has to euthanize several horses beyond healing.  One of the survivors is a severely underweight horse with a serious back kick.  Even though he literally knocks Cami out when she attempts to load him onto her trailer, she can’t bear to leave him in the current conditions and she takes him home to her farm.

Despite the rough start, this horse, eventually named Moonshot, becomes a key part of Cami’s physical and emotional recovery.  Her form of healing is in the presence of animals.

She’s torn between following the advice of her family and trying to mend a broken marriage and finding a life of her own.  She starts to evaluate and reconsider the relationships of those around her: her parents who are about to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary; her brother and his lover, trying to adopt a baby; and her best friend Olive, just embarking on the adventure of marriage.

Inspiring her is their teen daughter, Gabriella.  Gabriella sees the pain her father has put her mother through and swears of marriage.  Cami can’t bear to see her daughter feel this way about love and marriage.  She must prove to Gabriella, and herself, that being true to yourself brings happiness.

I think I’ve read everything Katrina Kittle has ever written, and I’ve literally fallen in love with every bit of it.  Her books, the characters, the storyline are all very compelling, multifaceted, and really leave you contemplating your own life.  You close the book, the only words that come to your lips are “Wow!”, and you can’t wait to start the book all over again.The best way to sum up this book is to quote it directly:

“What a risk love was.  But the riskier the venture and greater the chance of failure, the higher the reward.” (p. 422)

WARNING-the rest of this review might be considered a spoiler!

My favorite thing about this book: the ending.  So many times I read books with similar story lines, and the woman feels the need to be in a relationship with a man.  She either begs for her husband to stay with her or rushes into another relationship.  Cami does neither, and I commend the author for writing such a strong and independent character.

Katrina Kittle will be on Blog Talk Radio on August 26th at 7pm ET. Here’s the link: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/book-club-girl/2010/08/26/katrina-kittle-discusses-the-blessings-of-the-animals. Be sure to tune in, I know I will!

Thank you TLC Book Tours for giving me the opportunity to participate in this tour.  Be sure to check out the other stops:

Thursday, August 19th: Booksie’s Blog

Tuesday, August 24th: The Little Reader

Wednesday, August 25th: Take Me Away

Thursday, August 26th: Books and Things

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• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (August 3, 2010)
• ISBN-10: 0061843415
• Source: Publisher

Summertime is nearing an end.  Thirteen-year-old Henry hasn’t done much but watch television.  He lives with his mother Adele who, since the divorce from his father, very rarely wants to leave the house.  Her heart has been broken for some time, nearly everything she once lived for is now gone.

They live off of Campbells soup and TV dinners. However, one day they forced to leave the house and trek to the local discount store.  Henry is approached by an injured man who asks for help.  Henry & Adele’s lives are forever changed.  For the next several days, Henry learns things he’d never learned before:  how to play catch, how to play baseball, and most importantly, he learns a lesson about love.  He also learns that it’s important not to judge someone based on their past, but instead an individual should be judged by who they are now, and what they can provide in the future.

Labor Day is told from the viewpoint of Henry, a young boy on the cusp of young adulthood.  He’s still young, a bit naive about girls, and very sensitive emotionally.  The six days he spends with this stranger play a key role in his emotional and mental development.  It is not until he’s an adult that he really begins to comprehend just how important this weekend was. He gains an insight on life that many don’t discover in an entire lifetime.

Maynard does a stunning job portraying Henry’s character; she’s able to so accurately describe the attitudes and emotions of a teenage boy.  One couldn’t help but sympathize with Henry’s character.  We were all teens once; we experienced similar “growing pains.”

The secondary characters Adele and Frank are just as aptly detailed.  Initially, Adele’s character annoyed the heck out of me.  She seemed to have given up on life, completely forgetting that she had a son, a reason to live.  It wasn’t until I read a bit more about her that I realized the cause of her pain. Frank is an interesting character.  He has a pretty rough history and realistically one should have disdain for a man of his character.  But I couldn’t help but love him for what he gave to Adele and Henry.

The relationship this trio shares is initially perplexing, but ultimately rewarding. The storyline is captivating and unpredictable.  While reading this book my initial thought was “What!?” but by the end it was replaced with a “Wow!”  I was caught off guard by how much I enjoyed this book; I fell in love with this odd little “family” and Maynard’s descriptive, flowing prose. I highly recommend this one; it would make the perfect beach or lazy summer day read.

Thank you to TLC Book Tours for giving me the opportunity to participate in this tour.  Please be sure to check out the other upcoming stops:

Monday, July 26th: Café of Dreams

Wednesday, July 28th: Rundpinne

Monday, August 2nd: Book Chatter

Tuesday, August 3rd: Jo-Jo Loves to Read!

Wednesday, August 4th: excess baggage

Thursday, August 5th: Peetswea

Friday, August 6th: Stiletto Storytime

Monday, August 9th: Alison’s Book Marks

Tuesday, August 10th: Lisa’s Yarns

Wednesday, August 11th: Bookstack

Thursday, August 12th: The 3 R’s: Reading, ‘Riting, and Randomness

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (June 8, 2010)
• Language: English
• Source: Publisher

Delilah Blue is a twenty-year old budding artist, so desperate to enter art school that she begins to model nude for art students in an attempt to raise money.  She lives with her father, Victor, in a quaint little cabin outside of Los Angeles.  They moved to LA when Delilah was eight.  Since Delilah, now  called Lila, could remember, they lived a pretty secluded life. Her father wouldn’t let her play with other children growing up, and when she got old enough to enter college, refused to let her apply for financial aid.  Victor always claimed he was just protecting Lila but it did get to be a bit extreme.

Victor begins to experience moments of memory loss, confusion, and eventually anger.  Lila insists that he go to the doctor, but he keeps putting it off.  Around the same time a ghost from Lila’s past makes a reappearance: her mother, who allegedly abandoned her when she was younger.  Lila must come to terms with her past, including her feelings of abandonment, while dealing with her father’s illness and her future as an artist.

I’ve been a fan of Cohen’s writing since I reviewed her book Inside Out Girl (click to read my review.  I must warn you it was VERY early in my blogging career and is quite pathetic!) In The Truth About Delilah Blue, she continues to write about strong, deep characters who must overcome some sort of battle.  It may sound a bit cliche but I guarantee it is not.  Her prose is detailed, developed, and fluid:

To have a mother like Elizabeth, and then lose her-not because she was struck by a car or swept out to sea by a dangerous current, but because she wasn’t sufficiently enamored by you to hang around-it left a hole in who you were.  You became one of those people who radiated worthlessness.  You became a living, breathing, walking–and in Lila’s case, drawing, painting, getting naked–tragedy.

You can’t help but feel for Lila and all the pain she is forced to endure.  Cohen’s skillful writing paints the scene right before your eyes.  The scene becomes multi-dimensional, you not only picture the setting and the characters but you can genuinely feel the emotion flowing from the pages.

Writing of Lila’s reuniting with her mother:

When a child spends a lifetime, or close to it, waiting for one specific moment, something magical and faraway with the power to set her entire world straight, she imagines that someday from up, down, and sideways…But there’s a fact about someday that you can’t possibly understand until it has settled upon you.  Someday you’ve doomed the moment you wished it into existence.  You’ve already ruined it.  By imagining it even once, you’ve created an expectation someday can’t possibly live up to.

It was hard not to like Lila’s character.  She was extremely strong-willed and did her best to keep control over the havoc that was attempting to take over her life.  The characters of her father and mother were a bit more difficult to like.  Her father seemed stubborn and unreliable while her mother was extremely flighty and self-absorbed.  My favorite character, other than Lila would have to be Kieran, Lila’s young half-sister.  I truly felt for her; she was a child but refused or was unable to behave as one.

I highly recommend reading The Truth About Delilah Blue.  For me, it helped me appreciate what I had growing up, the relationship I had with my parents, and my childhood overall.  It’s the perfect book club read.  In the back of the book, readers can learn more about the author, including a short interview and a list of the author’s favorite female characters in literature.

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for giving me the opportunity to review this book.  Check out some of the other upcoming stops on this tour:

Monday, June 28th:  Take Me Away

Tuesday, June 29th:  Galleysmith

Wednesday, June 30th:  Write Meg

Thursday, July 1st:  1330v

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; 1 edition (June 1, 2010)
• ISBN-10: 0061351636
• Source: Publisher

Neil White was convicted of  fraud for kiting checks and ordered to serve one year in a federal prison.  However, he wasn’t sent to your typical prison, instead, he was sentenced to serve time at Carville, the last leper colony in mainland America. White is instantly concerned about his well-being and the safety of his health.  He’d never seen a leper before and wasn’t quite familiar with how the disease was spread.

“This place was bizarre, like something out of Alice in Wonderland or The Twilight Zone. Nuns and monks.  A leper with no fingers.  A man who howls like a dog.  A doctor with an impotence injection device.  Inmates fat enough to be in a carnival.  A guard who squelches my questions, but seems just fine with prisoners sunbathing.  And a legless woman chanting like Dorothy in Oz.  How the hell did I end up in here?”

Within minutes of his arrival, White meets quite the interesting cast of characters residing at Carville, both inmates and patients.

The first is Doc, his roommate.  Doc has recently invented an injection device that cures impotence.  He’s quite proud of his invention and is anxious to get some marketing advice from White.

“There’s this stigma about giving yourself an injection in the base of the penis…It doesn’t hurt.  I’ve done it.  With clever marketing, I can get around it, don’t you think?”

White is assigned his first prison job, writing the menu on a board in the patient cafeteria. It is here where White is forced to come face to face with the patients. One of the first patients he interacts with is Ella Bounds, an elderly woman in an antique wheelchair.  Ella has been a patient at Carville since she was twelve years old and lost her legs to the disease.   White immediately stops complaining about the six hours he’s spent there; it’s nothing compared to Ella’s “sentence.”   White and Ella start talking, and White learns to see past the disease to the individual:

There was something remarkable about this woman.  The way she held herself, and her eyes. She seemed to possess unwavering confidence.  Or maybe it was strength.  But at the same time, she was gentle and friendly. . . For a moment, I had forgotten she might be contagious.  She was so vibrant…it was hard to believe Ella carried a debilitating disease.

Ella and White form quite the friendship. Ella inspires White to see past his status as inmate and be hopeful about his future.  White decides to not be a federal convict.  He would pretend to be an inmate, and collect the stories of the leprosy patients and the inmates.  He would put a voice to a disease that wasn’t spoken of, documented the lives of patients whose family abandoned them once they were diagnosed with the disease.

Inmates were also interviewed, one of the most interesting was Link.  Link gave White the nickname of Clark Kent due to his resemblance to the nerdy news reporter. Link referred to the patients as “leopards.”  You would think White would steer clear of Link, but instead he spent time with him.

Link told everyone-inmates, guards, even the leprosy patients-that I was out of place…in his own way, he was saying exactly what I wanted them all to know.  Link told them I was different.  He made certain everyone knew I didn’t belong here. I didn’t have to say a word.

Jimmy Harris was a patient who was writing his own book about life in quarantine, King of the Microbes. White begins to learn a great deal about the history of treatment of individuals with leprosy.  In most cases, lepers were forced to live in jails or dilapidated homes known as pesthouses.  If they weren’t forced to live in quarantine, they were in constant fear or their lives or the lives of their loved ones.  People still believed that leprosy was a form of punishment from God, and had no problem using violence to lepers.  It wasn’t until the 1920s that Carville, a free leprosarium, was established in the US.

Once White becomes closer to some of the patients, he begins to feel sympathy for the lives they have been forced to lead. He begins to see similarities between them and himself-”Prisoners and leprosy patients might have been considered outcasts by most of the world, but we were stuck here together.”  After a while, White is able to see past the disfigurement and to the beauty within:

Intimate, prolonged contact, it seemed, made everything commonplace. Beauty and disfigurement disappeared with familiarity.  Beauty queens became ordinary; leprosy patients did, too.

White is forced to come to terms with the person he’d become:

Finally, in a sanctuary for outcasts, I understood the truth.  Surrounded by men and women who could not hide their disfigurement, I could see my own.

White continues to learn and grow after his interactions with Ella.

“…Ella carried her leprosy like a divine blessing.  She had faith that she would be healed in heaven.  She embraced the life she believed God had schosen for her on earth. She had transcended the stigma that crippled so many.”

In the Sanctuary of Outcasts is a engaging, emotional, and detailed account of White’s time as prisoner in Carville Leprosarium. White arrives in Carville one person and leaves a completely new individual.  While told from White’s point of view, the reader gets a unique look at many of the patients and inmates who resided at the institution.  Going in, I didn’t know much about the premise of the book.  I would have never imagined just how much is packed into such a short book.  Let’s not forget that I typically don’t read/review nonfiction, yet this one grabbed hold of me and I couldn’t bear to put it down.  I highly recommend this one; I learned so much about personal strength and survival.

Thank you to TLC Book Tours for giving me the opportunity to review this book!

About Neil White

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Four young friends from Sexton College in Vermont formed a group called the Compassionate Dismantlers.  The motto of the Dismantlers was: ” To understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart.”  The leader of the group is Suz, whose main motivation is revenge.

They spent a summer in a remote cabin with Suz plotting crazy pranks and seemingly innocent acts of destruction. Suddenly, Suz’s plans become much more violent and Suz is killed. The group breaks up, vowing not to speak of the incident, and they go live their own lives. 

A decade later two of the members, Henry DeForge and Tess Kahle, have married and now have a nine year-old daughter, Emma.  Their marriage is in a shambles and Henry has moved into the garage apartment.  Emma and a friend are determined to get Emma’s parents back together. They come across evidence of the couple’s past. Believing that reuniting the group of friends will bring the couple back together, they  decide to send postcards to those individuals who played such a key part in their lives.

Soon after Henry and Tess learn that one of their friends has committed suicide. They fear what happened ten years ago has been revealed and is beginning to haunt them.  A private investigator has been hired by the family of the suicide victim and begins snooping around, asking a lot of questions.

Young Emma plays a very key role in this story.  She has an imaginary friend named Danner, who starts making comments and asking questions that remind Henry and Tess of Suz and that tragic summer long ago. They soon feel like they are being watched.  Is it possible that Suz has returned from the grave to make them pay for what happened so long ago?

McMahon weaves a very intriguing tale in Dismantled, a character-driven thriller told from the point of view of several of the  main characters. She weaves the past with the present in a very fluid manner.   The several plot twists keep the reader engaged, not knowing what to expect with each turn of the page.   I warn you, this one is addictive, forcing me to stay up late at night to finish reading it.  I’m quite a fan of psychological thrillers, those seem to be the only type that really spook me.  Mcmahon wove bits of suspense in with the supernatural. I found myself turning on all the lights in the house, jumping at every little sound I heard. This book got to me…in a very good way.  Highly recommend to fans of literary thrillers.

About Jennifer McMahon

I was born in 1968 and grew up in my grandmother’s house in suburban Connecticut, where I was convinced a ghost named Virgil lived in the attic. I wrote my first short story in third grade. I graduated with a BA from Goddard College in 1991 and then studied poetry for a year in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College.

A poem turned into a story, which turned into a novel, and I decided to take some time to think about whether I wanted to write poetry or fiction. After bouncing around the country, I wound up back in Vermont, living in a cabin with no electricity, running water, or phone with my partner, Drea, while we built our own house. Over the years, I have been a house painter, farm worker, paste-up artist, Easter Bunny, pizza delivery person, homeless shelter staff member, and counselor for adults and kids with mental illness—I quit my last real job in 2000 to work on writing full-time. In 2004, I gave birth to our daughter, Zella. In 2005, we left the woods (for now), and moved to Barre, Vermont—producer of one-third of all the granite gravestones and mausoleums in the US.

My first novel, Promise Not to Tell, was published in 2007. The follow-up, Island of Lost Girls, was published in 2008, as was my debut young adult novel My Tiki Girl.

Visit Jennifer at her website, www.jennifer-mcmahon.com, and friend her on MySpace!  If you are attending BEA, McMahon will be signing copies of Dismantled, Thursday, May 27 from 3-3:30 PM at Table 20!

Thank you to TLC Book Tours for giving me the opportunity to take part in this tour.  Be sure to check out the other stops:

Tuesday, May 18th:  Rundpine

Thursday, May 20th:  Luxury Reading

Tuesday, May 25th:  The Cajun Book Lady

Thursday, May 27th:  Lit and Life

Monday, May 31st:  I’m Booking It

Tuesday, June 1st:  Drey’s Library

Wednesday, June 2ed:  Bookalicio.us

Thursday, June 3rd:  Chick With Books

Monday, June 7th:  Regular Rumination

Wednesday, June 9th:  Booksie’s Blog

Thursday, June 10th:  Take Me Away

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• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Avon A; 1 edition (June 23, 2009)
• ISBN-10: 0061547786
• Source: Publisher

Anna O’Shea has just returned from a trip to London, a getaway after going through a divorce five months before. The divorce was a painful one; after years of miscarriages, her husband told Anna that he was leaving her for someone else.  His mistress was able to give him something Anna was unable–a child.

Immediately upon her return, she learns her brother, Patrick, has been in a severe automobile accident.

Before she is able to unpack from her Ireland trip, Anna makes her way to the hospital to see her brother.  Her mother, Alice, was already there.  Patrick sustained severe head injuries and his fate is undetermined. Anna’s brother then drops another bomb: Patrick was on the way to pick up his teenage son, Joseph, from jail when he got into the accident.  Joseph was arrested after stealing a car with a friend.

Anna is asked to pick up her nephew, who is in a jail approximately five hours away.  She does so, grudgingly.  She’d rather stay by her brother’s side until he regains consciousness.

Anna picks up Joseph and returns to her home to get some rest. She’s exhausted, so she quickly succumbs to sleep.  She’s awoken to the sound of the zipper on her suitcase. She finds Joseph holding an object in his hand.  She grabs on to the item, and the both of them are sucked into what Anna believes is a tornado or some other catastrophic event.

Anna awakes on a beach, her body riddled with injures from the sea, including a long gash that extends from her knee to her ankle.  She hovers in and out of consciousness.  She is soon rescued and is taken to a small village to recover. Anna soon realizes that something is amiss.  Her rescuers use primitive methods (leeches!) for healing her leg injury.  When she asks the date her suspicions are confirmed: It is September 1844.  Joseph is no where in sight.

Joseph awakes on a bed made of corn husks.  His rescuers have brought him to a local manor.  He heals relatively quickly and soon begins exploring the manor in which he currently resides. His memories of his father’s accident are faint and fading quickly.

And so begins Anna’s desperate search for Joseph.  While on her search, she soon realizes that her leap through time is her destiny.  Her family’s fate is dependent upon her…

Sheehan has done an outstanding job of combining rich,multifaceted characters and a compelling storyline.  Fans of historical fiction, particularly Irish history, will be fascinated by this book.  Sheehan’s writing is incredibly descriptive; you can’t help but be pulled in.  The underlying issues of infertility and family issues add depth to the storyline. My only complaint would be the references to the dog.  The paperback has an image of a dog clearly displayed on the cover, and the line “A magical tale of hope, second chances…and a not-so-little dog.”  At first glance, it appears the book is about this dog. While the dog does play a fairly key role in the novel, I think it’s a little  misleading to readers to give that much attention to a seemingly minor character.  But this is really the only complaint I have with this book!  If you can see past this, as I could ultimately, then I highly recommend that you read this book!

Thank you to TLC Book Tours for giving me the opportunity to review this book.

Check out the other stops on this tour:

Tuesday, December 1st: The Tome Traveller

Wednesday, December 2nd: Bloggin’ ’bout Books

Want to hear more about Jacqueline Sheehan? Be sure to listen to her interview with Book Club Girl!

Now on to the giveaway!  The publisher has provided me with five copies of the book to give away.  To enter, please follow this link and submit the form. Winners will be announced on Monday, December 7th. US and Canadian residents only.  Books will be sent directly from the publisher.