Tuesday, October 27, 2015

You're the Best - A Shout Out

We all know the Satellite Sisters from their current popular podcast, their previous column in O Magazine and radio satellite show.  The 5 Dolan sisters have a unique way of making all of us feel connected, part of an intimate and important conversation. Their latest collaboration is a book celebrating friendship and life through the ages and includes the voices of the Next Generation of Satellite Sisters -- ages 15-60. YOU’RE THE BEST (Prospect Park Books; October 27th) is a thank you note to our female friends, our Satellite Sisters, the women we call when the best or worst things happen in our lives.

With humor and empathy, YOU’RE THE BEST covers topics ranging from milestone birthdays, best/worst advice, fun listicles, and a frank conversation about the Grandma Gap. The Satellite Sisters and the Next Generation lend their voices to show how friendships influence choices, relationships, careers, adventures and inevitable changes. YOU’RE THE BEST is the perfect reminder that it’s our friends who get us up, get us going, get us through and, most importantly, make us laugh.

Not every conversation will change your life… but any conversation can. 


Samples of the essays and lists from the book:
When to Call Your Satellite Sister
When you need to decide between grad school and an unpaid internship.
When you discover the guy in the cubicle next to you is making $15,000 more for the same job.
When your life big issue is stay vs. go.
A Satellite Sisters’ Guide to Birthdays at Every Milestone Age: 21, 30, 40, 50, 60
Funseekers vs. Funsuckers:
Funsuckers never put their phones down. Funseekers put it on vibrate.
Funsuckers itemize the dinner check. Funseekers throw in an extra twenty.
Bad Advice from Good Friends:
Take astronomy.  It’s easy.
You don’t have to declare that as income.
You have to get a puppy.
Marry him.  He’ll change.

The Grandma Gap:
I managed to be busy and fulfilled in my 30s/40s/50s without having kids, but what am I going to do in my 60s and beyond for excitement?  Golf?  Bunco? Bank robbery?

About YOU’RE THE BEST:
In their new book, You’re The Best, the Satellite Sisters have turned their focus on one of the most important relationships in our lives – our friends, our Satellite Sisters, the women we call when the best thing in your life happens or the worst.  
 
With their trademark empathy, intelligence, and humor, You’re The Best is a collection of essays and writings about Life, Love, Family, Play, and Change.  It includes the voices of the Satellite Sisters and the Next Generation, spanning ages 15 to 60, and covering how friendships influence choices, relationships, careers, adventures and inevitable changes.
 
Available in hardcover this fall, You’re the Best is the perfect thank you note to our female friends and the perfect gift for childhood BFFs, your college roommates, your running group, your book club, your PTA friends or your actual sisters – for anyone you want to tell, “You’re the best.”
The book is the best reminder that it’s our friends who get us up, get us going, get us through and, most importantly, make us laugh.

About the Satellite Sisters and the Next Generation:
The Satellite Sisters—Julie, Liz, Sheila, Monica, and Lian Dolan—are five real sisters who believe that a sense of connection is what gives meaning to our lives.
 
The Dolan sisters created the Satellite Sisters first as a radio show and website in 2000 and then became podcast pioneers with a devoted national fan base as well as best-selling authors.  Together they have won 13 Gracie Allen Awards for excellence in women’s media, including Talk Show of the Year and have appeared on CBS Sunday Morning and had a regular column in O Magazine for several years.  You’re the Best is expanded to include The Next Generation of Satellite Sisters – their daughters, daughters-in-laws, and nieces.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Twain's End

Idgie Says:
I will be honest in that I am not a huge biography fan.  I rarely have enough interest to sit through an entire replay of a person's life who isn't in my direct family.  

Lynn has found the magic touch to keep the interest of not only bio buffs, who love all the details, but also for people like me.  She writes stories that contain more than enough factual information to make it an accounting of a life,  but then throws in imagined tidbits to create a fictionalized version of that life for readers who just want a good story. 

I have heard Lynn speak of the details behind Twain's End and there is more than enough spark and fire in her research to make all parts of her story plausible, if not probable. 

This is the third Lynn book that I have reviewed and she maintains that magic balance in all of them.  A perfect blend.



Gallery
Simon & Schuster
October, 2015

Follow this Link for  an Excerpt! 

Follow this Link for a Video of Lynn speaking about the story.
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From the bestselling and highly acclaimed author of the “page-turning tale” (Library Journal, starred review) Mrs. Poe comes a fictionalized imagining of the personal life of America’s most iconic writer: Mark Twain.


In March of 1909, Mark Twain cheerfully blessed the wedding of his private secretary, Isabel V. Lyon, and his business manager, Ralph Ashcroft. One month later, he fired both. He proceeded to write a ferocious 429-page rant about the pair, calling Isabel “a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded and salacious slut pining for seduction.” Twain and his daughter, Clara Clemens, then slandered Isabel in the newspapers, erasing her nearly seven years of devoted service to their family. How did Lyon go from being the beloved secretary who ran Twain’s life to a woman he was determined to destroy?

In Twain’s End, Lynn Cullen re-imagines the tangled relationships between Twain, Lyon, and Ashcroft, as well as the little-known love triangle between Helen Keller, her teacher Anne Sullivan Macy, and Anne’s husband, John Macy, which comes to light during their visit to Twain’s Connecticut home in 1909. Add to the party a furious Clara Clemens, smarting from her own failed love affair, and carefully kept veneers shatter.

Based on Isabel Lyon’s extant diary, Twain’s writings and letters, and events in Twain’s boyhood that may have altered his ability to love, Twain’s End explores this real-life tale of doomed love.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

If You're Lucky

Prinz_IfYourLucky_jkt_2MBIdgie Says:
This is a good story for teens as it deals a bit with mental illness and how being on or off of medication can affect the mind.  Of course this is a fictional story with embellishments, but it does actually address mental illness in teens and how others are affected also, so it brings a hidden subject out into the open. 

Now, as a fictional story there's a lot of intrigue as a stranger shows up in town professing to be a good friend of Georgia's older brother who just drowned.  But Georgia sees too many questions and decides to go off her medicine for a "clearer head".  Unfortunately that clearer head may make her a danger to herself before any mystery gets solved. 

The age of the reader needs to be mature.  There's pregnancy, drugs, adult situations, etc. in the book.  While a mature 14 year old could certainly read the book, the situation might just wash over them instead of sticking (not necessarily a bad thing).

No real life lessons in this book except to follow your intuition.  But it's a good read that will keep a teen interested in a book...........and that's the important thing!  

_________________________________


Algonquin Young Reader
October, 2015
Age 14+

Is Georgia’s mind playing tricks on her, or is the entire town walking into the arms of a killer who has everyone but her fooled?

When seventeen-year-old Georgia’s brother drowns while surfing halfway around the world in Australia, she refuses to believe Lucky’s death was just bad luck. Lucky was smart. He wouldn’t have surfed in waters more dangerous than he could handle. Then a stranger named Fin arrives in False Bay, claiming to have been Lucky’s best friend. Soon Fin is working for Lucky’s father, charming Lucky’s mother, dating his girlfriend. Georgia begins to wonder: did Fin murder Lucky in order to take over his whole life?

Determined to clear the fog from her mind in order to uncover the truth about Lucky’s death, Georgia secretly stops taking the medication that keeps away the voices in her head. Georgia is certain she’s getting closer and closer to the truth about Fin, but as she does, her mental state becomes more and more precarious, and no one seems to trust what she’s saying.

As the chilling narrative unfolds, the reader must decide whether Georgia’s descent into madness is causing her to see things that don’t exist–or to see a deadly truth that no one else can.

We Were Brothers - A Memoir


jacket image for We Were Brothers
Idgie Says:
 A story of the rendering and then healing relationship between two brothers. Perhaps a good life guiding book on how to overcome and heal strife within a close family.

______________________________________

We Were Brothers

Hardback, 192 pages 
ISBN: 9781616204136 (1616204133)
Published by Algonquin Books
$22.00(US)
This title will be available for purchase from Workman.com on Oct 20, 2015. For now you can pre-order from one of these online retailers.

about We Were Brothers

Brothers Barry and Tommy Moser were born of the same parents in Chattanooga, Tennessee, slept in the same bedroom, went to the same school, and were both poisoned by their family’s deep racism and anti-Semitism. But as they grew older, their perspectives and their paths grew further and further apart. Barry left Chattanooga for New England and a life in the arts; Tommy stayed put and became a mortgage banker. From attitudes about race, to food, politics, and money, the brothers began to think so differently that they could no longer find common ground. For nearly forty years, there was more strife between them than affection.

After one particularly fractious conversation when Barry was in his late fifties and Tommy was in his early sixties, their fragile relationship fell apart. With the raw emotions that so often surface when we talk of our siblings, Barry recalls how they were finally able to traverse that great divide and reconcile their troubled brotherhood before it was too late.

We Were Brothers, written and illustrated by preeminent artist Barry Moser, is a powerful story of reunion told with candor and regret that captures the essence of sibling relationships, with all their complexities, contradictions, and mixed blessings.

about Barry Moser

BARRY MOSER was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His work is represented in the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other museums around the world. He has illustrated and/or designed over 350 books, including Moby-Dick, Frankenstein, The Divine Comedy, and the King James Bible. His edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland won a National Book Award. He is currently Irwin and Pauline Alper Glass Professor of Art and the printer to the college at Smith College.

Monday, October 19, 2015

Flashback Recommendation #7

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1311279686l/10616074.jpgI did not have much time this week to troll through my bookcases for several Flashback Recommendations, but as I had just left Lynn Cullen's discussion at my local bookstore about her new book, Twain's End, I thought about her other books.

Mrs. Poe was quite the hit a year or so back and garnered rave reviews, such as Twain's End is already doing just a week out of the gate.

But I remember the first book of her's that I read - Reign of Madness.    I found Juana the Mad to be a terribly interesting historical figure.  Her life was told in a nice story format, which let you become involved in her life.

(2011)

Book Description:
From the author of The Creation of Eve comes a tale of love and madness, royal intrigue and marital betrayal, set during the Golden Age of Spain. 

Juana of Castile, third child of the Spanish monarchs Isabel and Fernando, grows up with no hope of inheriting her parents' crowns, but as a princess knows her duty: to further her family's ambitions through marriage. Yet stories of courtly love, and of her parents' own legendary romance, surround her. When she weds the Duke of Burgundy, a young man so beautiful that he is known as Philippe the Handsome, she dares to hope that she might have both love and crowns. He is caring, charming, and attracted to her-seemingly a perfect husband.

But what begins like a fairy tale ends quite differently.

When Queen Isabel dies, the crowns of Spain unexpectedly pass down to Juana, leaving her husband and her father hungering for the throne. Rumors fly that the young Queen has gone mad, driven insane by possessiveness. Who is to be believed? The King, beloved by his subjects? Or the Queen, unseen and unknown by her people?

One of the greatest cautionary tales in Spanish history comes to life as Lynn Cullen explores the controversial reign of Juana of Castile-also known as Juana the Mad. Sweeping, page-turning, and wholly entertaining, Reign of Madness is historical fiction at its richly satisfying best.

Saturday, October 17, 2015

My Father's Guitar and Other Imaginary Things

My Father's GuitarIdgie Says:
A slim book of random memories from Joseph.  Some are amusing, some go to the heart.  There are stories that are quite short and some more detailed, taking a full chapter's worth of pages.  

Not a book to really think about, more one to sit down and just enjoy listening to the man on the other side of the page tell his memories of life.   Good for tiny bits of time where you can sneak in a few pages only.

_____________________________________
Algonquin Books
October 27, 2015

Did Joseph Skibell’s father trick him when he offered his beautiful guitar and then delivered a not-so-beautiful one? Can it be that the telemarketer calling at dinnertime is a thoughtful, sensitive person also looking for a Utopian world? Can a father have any control over his teenage daughter’s sex life? Can a son have control over his father’s expectations? Skibell ponders these and other bewildering questions in My Father’s Guitar and Other Imaginary Things.

Each essay stands alone as a story in Skibell’s life, yet these moments strung together are what define him as a person: his father’s illness, his daughter’s transition from a little girl to a woman, his realization of the limitations of memory. Told with wit, deep personal insight, and even self-deprecating humor, each story amuses and delights.

“Taken together,” says Skibell, “these stories are about those little overlooked but extraordinary moments in ordinary life, the sort of ‘imaginary’ aspects of ‘real’ life, the strange coincidences, the odd encounters, the things we tell and don’t tell each other about ourselves.” The pleasure in these pieces is accepting, with Skibell, that life is made up of these stories, even when they’re imagined or misunderstood—and these are what make us who we are. My Father’s Guitar and Other Imaginary Things will make you laugh, make you think, and make you view the world through Skibell’s quirky lens.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOSEPH SKIBELL is the author of three novels, A Blessing on the Moon, The English Disease, A Curable Romantic, and the forthcoming nonfiction work, Six Memos From the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud. He has won the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Turner Prize for First Fiction. Recently a Senior Fellow at the Bill & Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, he is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities at Emory University. A native Texan, he lives in Atlanta and Tesuque, New Mexico. Learn more at www.josephskibell.com.

Whose Shadow Do I See

Idgie Says:
This is a very pretty book. Glossy and filled with high quality illustrations on lovely paper stock. It would make a wonderful gift to a young child's book collection.

This is a slim book, heavy on pictures and light on words, making it perfect for just before bed reading.  I would say 4 and under in age, though you might be able stretch that a bit because of the wonderful artwork. 

Rosalind is a local Marietta teacher and this is her 4th children's book.  

_______________________
Deeds Publishing
Author: Rosalind Bunn
Illustrator: Mark Braught
Available Fall, 2015

Whose Shadow Do I See?

Whose Shadow Do I See? is a bedtime story in which a little boy—who is not ready for the last story to be read and the light to be turned out—imagines that shadows are all sorts of things. Luckily, his grandfather is there to help!

This story is for any child whose vivid imagination has made them fearful of the dark.



Thursday, October 15, 2015

Untying the Moon


Idgie Says:
This slim novel has a poetic flow to it's words and phrasing.  The story itself seems a bit other-worldly, surreal and fantastical in tone at times, such as a fable being shared around a fire late at night.  It's a story of undoing regrettable choices before it's too late.  

This is the type of novel to not analyze, but just become absorbed in, letting it carry you away along it's path.

October, 2015
Story River Books
USC Press

__________________________

Untying the Moon
A Novel
Ellen Malphrus
Foreword by Pat Conroy

A road trip in a '67 Skylark convertible through blood and bone places in search of the redemptive possibilities of love and home.

"That ol' moon can bear down sometimes, but if she bears down too hard, you can untie her then too. Untie the moon and walk on."

Bailey Martin is in perpetual motion—a child of the South Carolina lowcountry tides, being pulled to and from a reckoning with destiny. A marine biologist by training and an artist by dedication and talent, Bailey is a woman of contradictions, at once a free-spirited adventurer giving deeply of herself to environmental causes and familial loyalties but also consumed by primal, isolating appetites and dangerous attractions. Restless and troubled, Bailey chafes at her existence, becoming uneasy in her success, her life, and her own skin. Untying the Moon, the debut novel from Southern storyteller Ellen Malphrus, is a vibrant tale of self-discovery, approaching the realms of myth and lore as readers ride shotgun with Bailey in Blue Ruby, her '67 Skylark convertible, from Manhattan down the eastern seaboard, from coastal Carolina to the Alaskan wilderness and back again, all in search of the embrace of love and—finally—of home.

When Bailey trades the freedom of the road for a relationship with Padgett Turner, a Vietnam veteran haunted by his past, she finds the compelling possibility of settling into one place and one relationship. But the weight of Padgett's emotional scars is too much for either to bear, even together. As Padgett's darkness escalates, a moment of horrific violence pulls Bailey homeward to the Jericho River of Kirk's Bluff, South Carolina—a river of dolphins, dreams, and portents. In her lifelong friendship with neighbor Ben Simmons and under the sheltering gaze of her fisherman father, Cecil, and Ben's parents, George and Retta, Bailey uncovers the healing connections she had been seeking elsewhere and earns her chance at the truest prize of all—a balance between her dedication to her inner life and her responsibilities to the outer world.

Recalling the writings of James Dickey, Jack Kerouac, Jack London, Pat Conroy, Mary Alice Monroe, and Lee Smith, Untying the Moon explores the redemptive powers of home, nature, creation, and storytelling itself. With prose that ebbs and flows from the lyrical and lush to the staccato and sparse, Malphrus's novel is rich with classical allusions and regional folklore, the enrapturing beauty of its settings, a racially and geographically diverse charismatic cast, and all the mystery and magic of fate.


New York Times best-selling writer and Story River Books editor at large Pat Conroy provides a foreword to the novel.
____________________________________
Ellen Malphrus lives and writes in her native Carolina lowcountry and southwest Montana. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Southern Literary Journal, Review of Contemporary Fiction, William and Mary Review, Georgia Poetry Review, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, and the anthology Essence of Beaufort and the Lowcountry. She was a student of James Dickey's and teaches at the University of South Carolina Beaufort.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Looking Through Water: A Novel - Proceeds go to Project Healing Waters

LOOKING THROUGH WATER:
A Novel
By Bob Rich

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51yt3BvL4WL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg“A loving and thoughtful grandparent can change a child’s life,” author Bob Rich says in the introduction to his debut novel, LOOKING THROUGH WATER (Skyhorse Publishing, November 3, 2015). From all outward appearances, William McKay doesn’t seem to be that grandparent; yet, when he navigates his difficult past and chooses vulnerability over vanity, he proves to be a life-changing force for both his grandson and himself.

When secrets, lies and a stiff upper lip are your legacy, tossing them aside to save a family member is no simple feat. But William McKay does just that when confronted with his surly and drifting grandson, spurred by his own grandfather’s love that warmed the frigid spot left by his absent father. LOOKING THROUGH WATER is a sage work of fiction that combines an emotionally harrowing coming-of-age tale with generational wisdom.  

Teenage grandson Kyle McKay isn’t interested in much of anything, least of all the ramblings of an old man, despite his childhood affection for his grandfather as a fishing partner. But it is their time on the lake together that breaks through the soul-killing stillness that has frozen this multi-generational family.
 
 
The elder William breaches his own emotional dams and spills his riveting tale that takes him from the Adirondacks to the Florida Keys, but always returns him to the peacefulness and turmoil of water. William’s life is ruffled with truth and lies, loyalty and betrayal, triumphs and tragedies and, although difficult to revisit, the grandfather shows his grandson (and himself) that while life isn’t smooth, the journey is exquisite.
 
 
BOB RICH fell in love with storytelling at summer camps in Northern Ontario.  As he traveled from the shores of Lake Erie to the Florida Keys, he was inspired to write by one of literature’s greatest storytellers, Ernest Hemingway.  Now, after producing three books – Fish Fights, The Fishing Club and The Right Angle – and coauthoring a fourth, Secrets of the Delphi Café, Rich’s first novel aims to portray the incredible transformations that can take place on the water while waiting for a fish.



LOOKING THROUGH WATER
A NOVEL
By Bob Rich
Skyhorse Publishing: November 3, 2015
$24.99 US: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-5107-0314-8


AUTHOR BOB RICH HELPS HEAL VETERANS BY PARTNERING WITH PROJECT HEALING WATERS


A day on the open water with a fishing pole can do wonders for the mind and body and, for veterans coping with physical and emotional traumas, they can be healing waters. Fisherman and businessman Bob Rich knows well the transformative power of fishing and has partnered with PROJECT HEALING WATERS FLY FISHING, INC. to help reach disabled veterans and disabled active duty military men and women in all 50 states. He is donating the proceeds from his new novel, LOOKING THROUGH WATER, to the organization to support veterans on their journey to physical, emotional and spiritual health.

Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing, Inc. (PHWFF) is dedicated to the physical and emotional rehabilitation of disabled active military service personnel and veterans.  PHWFF is unique in that volunteers are teaching classes on an on-going, long term basis. It is much more than a one day fishing trip. Program activities include fly fishing instruction, fly tying classes, fly casting workshops, rod building and fly fishing outings. Each program is managed at the local level by volunteers who work with Department of Veterans Affairs facilities, Department of Defense military installations and Warrior Transition Units, amongst other institutions..

BOB RICH is the author of LOOKING THROUGH WATER (Skyhorse Publishing; Nov. 2015) and the chairman of Rich Products, the largest family-owned frozen food manufacturer in the U.S. Inspired by his love for fishing and the outdoors, LOOKING THROUGH WATER explores the complex waters of familial relationships, the bond between three generations of men and the incredible transformations that can take place on the water while waiting for a fish.

Rich, a member of the South Florida Fishing Hall of Fame, fell in love with storytelling at summer camps in Northern Ontario.  As he traveled from the shores of Lake Erie to the Florida Keys, he was inspired to write by one of literature’s greatest storytellers, Ernest Hemingway.  Now, after producing three books—Fish FightsThe Fishing Club and The Right Angle—and coauthoring a fourth, Secrets of the Delphi Café. Rich is an avid fisherman who has traveled around the world to pursue his interest.

As chairman of Rich Products, Rich oversees 9,200 employees, including 1,300 at their headquarters in Buffalo, New York.  The $3.3 billion company, founded by his father Bob Rich, Sr. in 1945, is celebrating 70 years in business.
 
Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing, Inc. (PHWFF) is dedicated to the physical and emotional rehabilitation of disabled active military service personnel and veterans through fly fishing and associated activities including education and outings.

Since the first program began in 2005 at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., PHWFF now has:

·         6,300 veteran participants
·         208 operational programs
·         Programs in 50 states and in Germany.
·         More than 2,800 volunteers
·         150,000 volunteer hours donated last year

Program activities include fly fishing instruction, fly tying classes, fly casting workshops, rod building and fly fishing outings. Each program is managed at the local level by volunteers who work with Department of Veterans Affairs facilities, Department of Defense military installations and Warrior Transition Units, amongst other institutions.

For more information, visit www.projecthealingwaters.org.

Hoover Southern Voices Author Conference- February 26th and 27th, 2016

Image result for erik larson
Erik Larson
Are you ready for this line up?!?!  

The 2016 Southern Voices headliner will be Award-winning author Erik Larson! Mark your calendars now for January 8 - ticket sale date!



The authors for the conference the following day are:
 Natalie Baszile, Beth Ann Fennelly, Tom Franklin, Craig Johnson, Jamie Mason, Laura Lane McNeal and Mark Pryor.

http://mfaenglish.olemiss.edu/files/2011/11/fpi11.jpg
Tom Franklin, Beth Ann Fennelly

This is a fantastic line up of authors, very diverse in their writing styles and genres. I have read several of their books and am really excited to have the opportunity to hear them talk.

http://www.squarebooks.com/sites/squarebooks.com/files/Laura.jpg
Laura Lane McNeal
The best thing about Southern Voices is that these authors are not asked to speak about their latest books, but instead are encouraged to tell us what drives them, what gave them their start, how they evolved into the authors they are today - I always find these stories to be fascinating. 
 
Tickets for the 2016 Southern Voices Festival go on sale Jan. 8. Tickets will be sold online and by phone only from 9 to 11 a.m. that day.

The Hoover Library Theatre box office will open for walk-ups at 11 a.m., but the tickets in the past have sold out in well under an hour so there is not guarantee there will be any available then.