Jenn\'s Bookshelves

Review: The Far Side of the Sky by Daniel Kalla

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Jenn

Hardcover: 464 pages
Publisher: Forge Books; First Edition edition (June 5, 2012)
ISBN-10: 076533233
Source: Publisher

November 9, 1938 is a well-known date in world history. Also known as Kristallnacht, a night of terror for Jews living in Germany, the night Nazi’s unleash a new sort of terror. Dr. Franz Adler, a renowned surgeon, is desperate to find a place of safety for his family, especially after his brother is found lynched. So, with his daughter, his recently widowed sister-in-law, and friend they find refuge in the unlikeliest of places, Shanghai. The cost of leaving Germany is a hefty ones. Luckily for them, Nazi’s want to rid Germany of Jews so they are granted permission to leave the country they called home.

In Shanghai, Franz finds work at a refugee hospital. The doctors there feel truly privileged to have a doctor of his skill, willing to assist. There he meets Soon Yi “Sunny” Mah, a young nurse that has devoted her time to aiding the injured refuges. The safety they hoped for isn’t guaranteed in Shanghai, however. As the Chinese city becomes the last source of hope for thousands of European Jews, the Japanese Imperial army storms through China, taking control of Shanghai.

The chemistry between Franz and Sunny is strong but the situation brewing around is a damper to any sort of romantic relationship. As Franz struggles to survive in this political minefield, the Hippocratic Oath he took as a doctor is constantly on his mind when he’s asked to save the life of the enemy. He’s torn between doing what is right, as a doctor, and what the repercussions will be if those near and dear to him find out he was aiding the enemy.

The Far Side of the Sky is a truly remarkable political thriller, focusing on a period of history that, while is very familiar to many of us, has aspects that were not known to many. This reviewer was aware of the horrible tragedies that took place during Kristallnacht but had no knowledge of Shanghai serving as a refuge for European Jews.

The extent of Kalla’s research into these events is truly compelling. The detail he uses to express these historical facts is tremendous. One can almost forget that this took place over seventy years ago for the world Kalla creates makes the reader feel immersed in the terror experienced by the main characters.

This is not to say that the subject matter of this novel is dreary and depressing. There is a great deal of passion and determination at the hands of Franz. He emotion he feels for his daughter and his tormented family is real, vivid. The care and generosity shown by the Chinese and European Jews, both in similar circumstances, is heartwarming.

The page count of this novel may be overwhelming for many, but in my opinion shortening this book would take away from the important historical facts that need to be retold, building of characters that need to slowly evolve, not rushed.

The Far Side of the Sky is a truly rewarding novel of hope, perseverance, forcing the reader to contemplate how they would react, put in the same situations in which Franz was forced to deal. Highly, highly recommended.

Check back later today for a post about my opportunity to meet to meet Daniel Kalla at an event at my favorite independent bookstore!

Posted in Forge Books, Historical Fiction, Review | Tagged Kristallnact, Nazis, Shanghai, World War II | 7 Comments

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading This Week?

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Jenn

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading This Week? This is a weekly event to list the books completed last week, the books currently being read, and the books to be finish this week. It is hosted by Sheila from One Person’s Journey Through a World of Books so stop by and join in!

Books Completed Last Week

The Far Side of the Sky by Daniel Kalla
Talulla Rising by Glen Duncan
The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice (audio)
The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker (review)
The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
The Reckoning by Alma Katsu

Currently Reading

The Prophet by Michael Koryta

Books to Complete This Week

The Unseen by Katherine Webb
Potboiler by Jessie Kellerman

What are you reading this week?

Posted in It's Monday What Are you Reading This Week | 6 Comments

Review: The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Jenn

Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Random House (June 26, 2012)
ISBN-10: 0812992970
Source: Publisher

The day appeared to be normal to Julia in the California suburb where she lived with her parents. At eleven years old, Julia is dealing with the normal turmoil a girl of her age experiences: evolving friendships, changes to her body, new demands at school, crushes on boys, etc. Then, for no apparent reason, the Earth’s rotation begins to slow. The length of a day increases incrementally starting with just a few minutes at a time but eventually, it takes days to see sun again. It doesn’t take long for Julia and the rest of the world to realize that things have forever changed.

With these changes, the atmosphere is affected, weakening. Birds mysteriously begin to die, falling from the sky. Despite everything that is going on in the world around her, this is all secondary to to what is happening in Julia’s own home and the town around her. Her parents relationship, once full of love and respect, begins to crumble. Julia’s best friend moves away for a short period and returns a completely different person. Her neighbors who refuse to abide by the governments recommended 24 hour days, preferring to remain on “real time” are ostracized and in many cases targets of damage and destruction. While Julia continues to attend school, many other families have opted to evacuate, certain that the end of times is near.

In reality, The Age of Miracles is not a dystopian or science-fiction novel, but instead a truly dramatic coming-of-age story. Readers seeking elaborate explanations of the cause of the changes to the Earth’s rotation will be disappointed, for the narrator, a young and naive tween girl, doesn’t have the knowledge or insight to explain these changes. Instead, her narration focuses on how these changes affect her, potentially bringing to light issues that have remained hidden until the stress of these changes unearth them. Despite being the youngest of all the characters, Julia seems to be the only one who is able to maintain control. Her father, a doctor, is certain the government’s scientists will find an explanation and solution. Her mother becomes paranoid and begins stockpiling supplies. In order to survive this catastrophe, Julia is forced to come to terms with her own identity and the ever-evolving changes in the world around her.

Despite the fact that the narrator is a adolescent girl, I would hesitate to refer to this as a young adult novel. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t recommend this to someone of Julia’s age, I would. Her story, her transformation and the shifts in the world around her, in addition to the dramatic style of Walker’s prose make this a novel that would be appreciated by readers of all types and ages.

As indicated, Walker’s prose makes this novel a truly compelling and dramatic one. Completely engrossing, this is a novel that will demand your attention, not releasing its grasp until you turn the final page. Without a doubt this is a novel that will be talked about in coffee shops, libraries, and book clubs around the country. It truly stuns me that this is Walker’s debut novel for I felt it was certain she’d been writing, published at that, for years. Highly recommended.

Thank you to TLC Book Tours for providing me the opportunity to participate in this tour. Please visit the official tour page for more information on the author and to visit the other stops in the tour.

Posted in General Fiction, Random House, Review | Tagged coming-of-age, end of the world | 16 Comments

BEA Feature Post: A Behind the Scenes Look at eBooks

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Jenn

Rather than writing the standard BEA wrap-up post where I try (and fail!) to recall what I did each day, I’ve decided to focus on sessions/events in which I found a great deal of value.

Last week while I was in NY for Book Expo America, I joined several other bloggers on a trip to Harper Collins for an exclusive look at ebooks, including how they are made, how they are promoted, etc. This event was led by the following people from Harper Collins:

Ana Maria Allessi – VP/Publisher HarperMedia
Lucia Macro – VP/Executive Editor, Avon, Avon Impulse, William Morrow
Erica Barmash – Senior Marketing Manager, Harper Perennial and Harper paperbacks

Also contributing to the presentation were Pam Spengler-Jaffee, Senior Director of Publicity for Avon, William Morrow, and Harper Voyager, and Jennifer Hart, Senior VP/Associate Publisher, William Morrow Paperbacks. Needless to say, a huge wealth of knowledge, all in one room!

As an avid ebook fan myself, I found this event to be quite valuable. Since the advent of ebooks, a whole host of debates have popped up about ebooks vs. print, the cost of ebooks, etc. This session, in my opinion, answered a lot of questions that pop up in these discussions. This post is my attempt to provide a bit of inside into this process. In order to keep this post under control, I will focus on the two debates I see popping up most often.

Cost of ebooks: Shouldn’t ebooks be cheaper since they cost less money and are easier to produce?

Not the case. Many more steps go into the production of an ebook, including several steps and levels of proofing/editing to ensure that when books are converted to epub (the “standard” formatting for ebooks presently) that nothing is altered in the conversion. Additionally, prior to epub, publishers had to convert the book to several different formats, each time proofing the converted book to make sure it wasn’t altered unknowingly in the conversion.

In the cases of those books that were originally published and print and are now being published as ebook, the task can be challenging as well. In many cases, the print file can be located and used to create the ebook. However, if the book is older and/or if the print file cannot be located, the print copy of the book must be obtained and quite literally scanned into an electronic file that can be converted to epub, the “standard” format for ebooks currently.

If a ebook isn’t available on one retailer’s site but it is available on others, it is the publisher’s fault.

No. Now, I’m speaking about Harper Collins specifically, but generally when a publisher pushes out an ebook, it is sent all ebook retailers simultaneously. It is then up to Amazon, B&N, Google, etc. to post that book in their inventory, reformatting the ebook, if necessary, to fit their formatting. Therefore, if you see a book on B&N & it’s not available on Amazon yet, don’t blame the publisher, blame the retailer.

Ebook Marketing

Now, moving on to the marketing side of ebooks. A question was raised at this session about whether or not ebooks are marketed differently than print. The following portion of this post was provided to me by the great Erica Barmash – Senior Marketing Manager, Harper Perennial and Harper paperbacks! Special thanks to her for sharing her wealth of knowledge!

How We Market E-books

When a frontlist book that is available in both print and electronic formats comes out, most of our marketing, advertising, and publicity is format-agnostic. Any ads we do that point to retailers will point to online retailers as well, and the vast majority of our outreach focuses on the book itself—the read, the praise, the author—rather than a specific format.

One exception to that is e-book sales. Often, before a new book comes out, we will lower the price of the author’s previous book. Our regular prices range from 9.99 to 12.99, though most are 9.99, and so we will lower to anywhere from 99 cents to 4.99. We make sure to put either an ad or an excerpt for the new book into this file before it goes on sale. This is something we do very often.

Another thing we will do is release a free excerpt e-book from the new book before it goes on sale, or a free or low-priced novella or unreleased material. William Morrow has done this with some of their big authors, like James Rollins, and HarperTeen did it with the Hana e-book before Pandemonium came out.

On the Perennial side, we did it for a few of our books recently, with free excerpts from our book The Moment and This Will Make You Smarter. Both of those were compilations, so we selected pieces from some of the bigger names in there, like Jennifer Egan, and played those up in both the title and the description that we fed out to online retailer sites. The idea behind these is that we will entice new readers with the lower price and that they will then like what they read so much that they’ll order or pre-order the new book. In the case of someone like Lauren Oliver, it can also remind fans of a first book that a new one is coming out and get them excited about it.

We’ve seen varying levels of success with these. We promote these sales and free ebooks everywhere we can in terms of social media, but there are two factors that strongly influence sales: the author and the retailer. If any author has a huge following online that they can promote to, that always makes a difference. And featured placement at either the kindle, nook, or ibookstore usually has a huge impact.

There are a limited number of slots for promotion, and we’re competing with all the other low-price e-books out there. Our e-book sales reps have a set program that they present to retailers every month with featured books, but they are also always trying to get our larger e-book campaigns promoted, which brings me to the other thing we do in terms of marketing e-books.

The other main thing the marketing teams do in terms of e-books is larger, themed e-book sales. We did the Harper Perennial 20 for 20 originals promo, where we picked 20 books to sell for 99 cents each for a month. There have also been the Book Club Girl e-book bonanzas, where Jen highlighted reading group titles across all imprints, and there are also always themed promotions going on from Avon Romance.

These have been really successful for us. I think it helps a lot when there’s a similar group of titles on sale, because people know that if they’re interested in one, they’re likely to be interested in another. There’s also the cumulative effect of having 10-20 authors all promoting a sale at the same time, and we’ve had great success getting these promotions highlighted by the online retailers, and especially indie bookstores that sell e-books. A lot of them have included books that sold well at indies, and we always provide them with tile ads and other ways they can promote.

The e-book world, and the publishing world as a whole, is constantly changing. When I started my job in fall 2009, e-books were barely a blip on my radar, especially for a lot of the Harper Perennial titles, and now promoting e-books is a HUGE part of my job, especially since it’s often a day-to-day, extremely active thing. If we want to change the price of a print book, we have to wait until we’re almost out of stock, then print new books, then wait for them to be ordered and hit stores. Now, there are times when we decide to change a price on a Friday and it’s done on Monday. It can be really stressful, but it’s also really exciting.

This wraps up this post for now; I may do future posts on this and similar subjects based on interest. Special thanks again to Erica Barmash and Harper Collins for arranging this event!

Posted in Bookish Chatter | Tagged book marketing, ebooks | 3 Comments

Review: Safe Within by Jean Reynolds Page

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Jenn

Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks; Original edition (June 12, 2012)
ISBN-10: 0061876941
Source: Publisher

Elaine and her husband Carson have returned to her childhood home, a cabin nestled in the trees by a lake in North Carolina, so Carson may live out his final days in peace. At just 49 years old, Carson’s body has succumbed to pancreatic cancer. Their peace is disturbed when they learn that Greta, Carson’s mother, has let loose a group of alpacas that live in the land next to hers. They haven’t spoken to Greta in over twenty years. Greta is certain that their son, Mick, isn’t Carson’s and hasn’t forgiven Elaine for her perceived indiscretions.

When Carson passes, Elaine and Mick are forced to coexist in a world with a woman who fails to accept them. She refuses to acknowledge their existence, going so far as to avoid them at Carson’s funeral. As they are trying to heal and learn to move on, Mick uncovers questions of his own involving a local girl he dated years prior. In order to adjust to this new life that has been thrust upon them, both Elaine and Mick are forced to prove their integrity and innocence. In Elaine’s case it’s far easier, for the man who is perceived to be Mick’s biological father is still living and willing to come forth and reveal his own secrets at a severely high cost. In Mick’s case, however, he is willing to taint his name in order to protect and secure a future for other more innocent individuals involved.

Safe Within is a truly detailed character study in how small town living and the close-knit relationships that form, and the after affects, can truly change and impact an individual. Told in alternating time frames, the current and the past, readers get a glimpse inside the lives of all the major characters. In many novels, the alternating time frame is clearly discernible due to obvious breaks in chapters in passages. That’s not necessarily the case in this novel. It wasn’t until several paragraphs were read that I noted the shift in focus and was therefore forced to backtrack to reread the passages.

Additionally, while the characters were richly detailed, I had a hard time connecting with any of them. Perhaps if a bit more of their life immediately preceding Carson’s death was detailed I could have formed more of a bond with each of them. Also, there thing that were brought up and touched on, specifically mysterious blue lights in the sky at the time of Carson’s death, that I feel should have been developed further.

This is not to say that I did not enjoy this novel, I did. It truly did a successful job of examining small town family life and some of the issues that arise at the passing of a loved one. Additionally, the setting was familiar to me; my summer has spent our summers in North Carolina for the past decade. This familiarity with the setting allowed me to become immersed in the story. While the page length, just over 350 pages, may seem daunting for a summer read, I do predict it popping in book club discussions due to the number of prevalence of discussion worthy topics.

Thank you to TLC Book Tours for providing me the opportunity to participate in this tour. Please check out the official tour page for more information on the author as well as the other stops in the tour.

Posted in Review, William Morrow, Women's Fiction | 3 Comments

Welcome BEA Attendees!

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Jenn

This post is intended to serve as a welcome or intro to me for those authors, publicists, bloggers, etc whom I met while at a BEA (Book Expo America) or the BEA Blogger Conference. This is a sticky post. Just scroll down to see new posts!

Just a little info about me: I’ve been blogging for four years now, reviewing books for approximately 13 years. My favorite genres include thriller, mystery, crime fiction, horror & contemporary fiction.

I’m a full-time working mom of two boys: John (12) and Justin (6). John is a “formerly” reluctant reader. Every once in a while John does a review of a book he’s particularly enjoyed as part of his Tales of a “Formerly” Reluctant Reader feature.

Following are a few of my posts/reviews so you can get a sampling of my reading tastes:

Reviews:

The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty
Overseas by Beatriz Williams
A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash
Edge of Dark Water by Joe R. Lansdale
Helsinki White by James Thompson
Defending Jacob by William Landay

Random Posts:

Reliving Morrison: My Path Down Memory Lane
Tales of a (Formerly) Reluctant Reader: I Have Opinions
Blogiversary Special: Things I Wish I Knew As A New Blogger
Top Ten Reasons I May Block You on Twitter

Following are a few of the “features” popular here at Jenn’s Bookshelves:

Frightful Friday-Each Friday I feature a book that I found particularly chilling or frightening (in a good way!)
Tales of A Formerly Reluctant Reader-This is the feature I’m most proud of! My son, a formerly reluctant reader, reads and reviews middle-grade books. He specifically explains why the book engages him, as formerly reluctant reader.
Murder, Monsters & Mayhem: I spend the entire month of October spotlighting some of my favorite horror/thriller books. It’s a month-long appreciation of things that go bump in the night, including guest posts, giveaways & more. Stay tuned for more details about this year’s celebration!

Well, I think that about sums it up! If you have any questions or would like to learn more about me, please do not hesitate to email me at jennsbookshelfATgmailDOTcom!

Posted in Bookish Chatter | 1 Comment