The Narrowboat Summer by Anne Youngson - my first summer reading recommendation

Title: The Narrowboat Summer
Author: Anne Youngson
Publication: Flatiron Books, hardcover, 2020
Genre: Fiction
Setting: England

Description: Three women meet by chance and reassess their priorities in this novel about friendship and second chances.

Tear Me Apart by J.T. Ellison (Book Review)

Title: Tear Me Apart
Author: J.T. Ellison
Publication: Mira Books, Trade Paperback, September 2018 (ebook also available)
Genre: Psychological Suspense
Giveaway:  I have one copy to give away to US or Canadian readers. Please leave an email by 9/7/18 if you are interested!

Plot: The follow-up to her critically acclaimed Lie to Me, J.T. Ellison’s Tear Me Apart is the powerful story of a mother willing to do anything to protect her daughter even as their carefully constructed world unravels around them.

One moment will change their lives forever…

Competitive skier Mindy Wright is a superstar in the making until a spectacular downhill crash threatens not just her racing career but her life. During surgery, doctors discover she’s suffering from a severe form of leukemia, and a stem cell transplant is her only hope. But when her parents are tested, a frightening truth emerges. Mindy is not their daughter.

Who knows the answers?

The race to save Mindy’s life means unraveling years of lies. Was she accidentally switched at birth or is there something more sinister at play? The search for the truth will tear a family apart…and someone is going to deadly extremes to protect the family’s deepest secrets.

Moving through time, Tear Me Apart examines the impact layer after layer of lies and betrayal has on two families, the secrets they guard, and the desperate fight to hide the darkness within.

Audience: Readers who don’t mind staying up late!

My Impressions: I could not put down this thriller and finished it about 2 am! It starts with an attractive young skier bound for the Olympics who instead has a bad fall – a situation we have all seen and sympathized with – and then it takes off as years of lies are exposed, bit by bit, moving from the past to the present and back again. I especially liked the talented and empathetic aunt (surprise!), Juliet, who is devoted to her niece, Mindy, but still clearsighted about the issues surrounding her medical situation. I did not find the segments from the past to be very convincing; moreover, certain aspects of the plot were signposted to the reader and there were holes that a self-respecting detective should have investigated, which lessened the impact of the last 20% of the book. Despite these flaws, this was an enjoyable if not entirely convincing read by an author who knows how to deliver suspense, and it was perfect for the last few weeks of summer!  I had read and reviewed Lie to Me by this author but I liked this much better.

Purchase Links: Barnes & Noble * IndieBound * Amazon * Books-A-Million

Source: I was provided a copy of this book by Mira Books and TLC Book Tours for review purposes. You can visit other stops on the tour and read the reviews by clicking below:

Monday, August 27th: @prose_and_palate

Monday, August 27th: Patricia’s Wisdom

Tuesday, August 28th: Bewitched Bookworms

Thursday, August 30th: Palmer’s Page Turners

Friday, August 31st: Jathan & Heather

Monday, September 3rd: Books & Bindings

Tuesday, September 4th: Moonlight Rendezvous

Wednesday, September 5th: @katyslibrary

Thursday, September 6th: The Book Diva’s Reads

Friday, September 7th: Becky on Books

Monday, September 10th: Novel Gossip

Tuesday, September 11th: 5 Minutes for Books

Wednesday, September 12th: Midwest Ladies Who Lit

Wednesday, September 12th; @girlwithnoselfie

Thursday, September 13th: @basicbsguide

Friday, September 14th: Girl Who Reads

Monday, September 17th: Helen’s Book Blog

Monday, September 17th: @bookishconnoisseur

Tuesday, September 18th: Thoughts on This ‘n That

Wednesday, September 19th: @bookenetics

Thursday, September 20th: Why Girls Are Weird

Friday, September 21st: Cheryl’s Book Nook

Monday, September 24th: @hollyslittlebookreviews

Tuesday, September 25th: Thoughts from a Highly Caffeinated Mind

Wednesday, September 26th: No More Grumpy Bookseller

Thursday, September 27th: A Bookworm’s World

Friday, September 28th: Book Reviews and More by Kathy

Something in the Water (Book Review)

Title: Something in the Water
Author: Catherine Steadman
Publication: Ballantine, various formats, 2018
Genre: Suspense

Plot: Told in the first person, this is a chilling story of how one bad choice causes a ripple effect that irrevocably changes two newlyweds. Erin, a brilliant filmmaker, and her fiancé, Mark, a London banker, have the perfect life – until Mark loses his job and his self-confidence.

The Mapmaker's Children (Book Review and Giveaway)

Title: The Mapmaker’s Children
Author: Sarah McCoy
Publication: Crown Publishers, hardcover, May 2015
Genre: Historical Fiction
Setting: 19th century and 21st century United States
Purchase Links: Amazon | IndieBound | Barnes & Noble

 

Plot: When Sarah Brown, daughter of abolitionist John Brown, realizes that her artistic talents may be able to help save the lives of slaves fleeing north, she becomes one of the Underground Railroad’s leading mapmakers, taking her cues from the slave code quilts and hiding her maps within her paintings. She boldly embraces this calling after being told the shocking news that she can’t bear children, but as the country steers toward bloody civil war, Sarah faces difficult sacrifices that could put all she loves in peril.

Eden, a modern woman desperate to conceive a child with her husband, moves to an old house in the suburbs and discovers a porcelain head hidden in the root cellar—the remains of an Underground Railroad doll with an extraordinary past of secret messages, danger and deliverance.

Ingeniously plotted to a riveting end, Sarah and Eden’s woven lives connect the past to the present, forcing each of them to define courage, family, love, and legacy in a new way.

Audience: Fans of historical fiction; those interested in the Civil War and/or strong heroines

What I liked: The Mapmaker’s Children was one of my favorite books of 2015 and should be included on your summer reading or future book group list. I was fascinated by the description when I first read about it, months before it came out, and I immediately asked if I could participate on the blog tour. I particularly enjoy books that move from the present to the past, especially when written by a skillful author such as this one, and which feature a strong heroine. McCoy moves effortlessly from prevent day West Virginia where Eden, a troubled woman, is trying to make a new start in a quirky and appealing community, to one of the most troubled times imaginable, and a heroine who moves from New York to West Virginia to Massachusetts to California in a time where most women stayed within a few miles of where they were born. Her description of John Brown’s surviving family and how they coped with the notoriety that was his legacy to them kept me reading late into the night. I loved the character of his daughter, Sarah – her ingenuity and courage and dedication to her father’s dream. I almost resented whenever we left her story for Eden’s modern-day problems and unreasonable quarrels. Those interested in the Underground Railroad will also be interested in Sarah’s clever way of disguising maps to freedom.

Author Information: I was delighted to see that Sarah McCoy was going to be in Massachusetts on her tour for The Mapmaker’s Children and caught up with her at the Brookline Booksmith in May when she appeared with Jenna Blum (a writer whose work I look forward to exploring). It was so much fun to hear how her upbringing in the South has informed her love of history and her ability to convincingly evoke a Civil War setting and heroine. In common with other readers, I loved the characters of the Hill family, especially Freddy Hill, who is a perfect combination of handsome hero and loyal friend. As little is actually known about Sarah Brown, McCoy walks a careful line between factual information (such as her artistic talent and the time spent being educated with the Alcotts in Concord) and the fictional information necessary to craft a novel. I yearned for a happy ending that would not have been supported by what is known about Sarah.  For more information on author Sarah, please visit her website.

Because I am usually more interested in the English Civil War than the American Civil War, I did not know much about John Brown (except the doleful song) and surprised Sarah by asking how he became so associated with the Harper’s Ferry plot when he was from New York (I am still astonished that he would bring his family down from NY for the proposed raid, putting them in grave danger, but I suppose it is not so different from those who picnicked while watching the battle at Bull Run). Hearing about her research was fascinating. In turn, she was pleased to hear that I and others in the audience immediately started reading more about John Brown after we finished reading, and she told us that is a great compliment to the author to know she has inspired that much interest in the period.

Giveaway: Thanks to the generosity of TLC Book Tours and the publisher, I have a copy to give away.  US and Canada only, please.
a Rafflecopter giveaway

 

Source: I received this book from TLC Book Tours but all thoughts and opinions are my own.  You can visit other stops on the tour by clicking here.  I bought an earlier book, The Baker's Daughter, at the event and look forward to reporting on that soon.

The Daughter (Book Review)

Title: The Daughter

Author: Jane Shemilt @janeshemilt

Publication: William Morrow, trade paperback, 2015 (first published in England in 2014)

Genre: Suspense/Fiction

Plot: How well do you really know your family? Jenny thinks she has the perfect life, with a busy medical practice in Bristol, England, a successful surgeon husband, and three teenagers. Of course, she’s busy and tired, but isn’t everyone? Then her daughter Naomi fails to come home one night after starring in West Side Story, and Jenny and her family will never the same again.  Jenny looks at everyone around her with suspicion, blames herself for failing to notice changes in her daughter’s behavior, and can no longer handle everyday life.  She realizes that she will never be able to cope with Naomi’s disappearance until she knows what happened, but her search into Naomi’s last months reveals a girl Jenny barely recognizes.

Audience: Fans of Jodi Picoult, Anita Shreve, Sue Miller

What I liked: The book is well written and deliberately paced, moving back and forth from the days before and just after Naomi’s disappearance to a year afterwards.   Told from Jenny’s perspective, the story begins with what seems like a reasonably happy family but, once Naomi is gone, their apparently perfect life is over, and the tension and suspicions slowly escalates to a controversial conclusion.  The author is especially skillful depicting some minor characters: Jenny’s kindhearted partner in her medical practice, Michael the police/family liaison officer, and a dreadful mother whose daughter was Naomi’s friend – neither mother nor daughter is very willing to help with the investigation.  Parts of the book were very painful to read.

I found Jenny and her family all quite unlikeable.  I don’t require engaging characters in order to enjoy a book but their lack of appeal kept me at a distance and prevented me from being very emotionally involved in Naomi’s disappearance.  To me, that is usually where Jodi Picoult is so successful: even with some of her more outlandish plots, I am usually sufficiently captivated by the people in jeopardy that I can’t stop reading.  Here, I felt sorry for Jenny but I didn’t agonize over her pain.  On the other hand, I did care what happened to her and am indignant on her behalf that the she had very ineffective investigators on the case, not to mention a useless husband.  Overall, an entertaining summer read, helped by the fact that the author is a doctor herself.

Source: I received The Daughter from the TLC Book Tours and invite you to visit the tour to read other reviews of this book.

Tour schedule:

March 3rd: A Bookish Way of Life
March 4th: Kahakai Kitchen
Marcy 5th: Read. Write. Repeat.
March 6th: Sara’s Organized Chaos
March 10th: My Book Retreat
March 10th: No More Grumpy Bookseller
March 11th: FictionZeal
March 12th: Svetlana’s Reads and Views
March 17th: A Bookworm’s World
March 18th: The Well-Read Redhead 
May 27th: Living in the Kitchen with Puppies

May 28th: Mockingbird Hill Cottage

June 1st: Book Loving Hippo

June 3rd: Booked on a Feeling

June 10th: The many thoughts of a reader

June 18th: Priscilla and Her Books

Disclaimer (Book Review)

Title: Disclaimer
Author: Renée Knight

Publication: Harper Collins, Hardcover, 2015

Genre: Suspense

Plot: What if you realized the terrifying book you were reading was all about you?

Catherine Ravenscroft is a successful documentary producer with a secret she has kept for twenty years.  For reasons of her own Catherine never revealed what took place to her husband or son but now she has read a book called The Perfect Stranger – hand delivered to her home – she realizes is about what happened on that long-ago trip to Spain, depicting her as the villainess and plunging her into a nightmare.  On the disclaimer page, a red line is drawn through the “Any resemblance to persons living or dead...” statement.  Catherine thought the one other person who knew her secret is dead so who wrote the book and gave “Charlotte” a violent death?  And is it too late to tell her husband, before she ends up like the protagonist of the book?

Audience: Fans of suspense fiction; readers who enjoyed books like Before I Go to Sleep and Into the Darkest Corner.

My reaction: This was like two different books.  Told in flashbacks by two different narrators with different perspectives on the past, it started very slowly and it was hard to keep the characters and time frames straight.  About halfway through, it finally accelerated and caught my interest, becoming hard to put down, although I never warmed to anyone in the book.  Fast-paced and deftly written, this is a great summer read. The strength of the book was its unpredictability and the way it kept making me reassess my opinion of different characters. As readers, we are conditioned to recognize that a secret is likely to be revealed, sooner or later, and that will cause or add to the drama or tension of the story.  I was struck while reading Disclaimer by how it nudged at my professional responsibility - as an attorney I wanted to counsel Catherine to control the narrative by being the one to reveal her secret in her own way. The irony of her being a documentary filmmaker who is filmed instead of directing the film was not lost on me.

Interestingly, although the book is set in London, it doesn’t have a strong sense of place and I suspect this is on purpose.  Probably editor or agent, aiming for the next Gone Girl, believe that to appeal to an American audience the background should be generic (don’t they realize there are many Anglophile readers like me?).  However, I look forward to sharing this with my sisters, also big fans of thrillers.

Source: I received Disclaimer from the TLC Book Tours and invite you to visit the tour to read other reviews of this book:

Tuesday, May 19th: Booksie’s Blog
Thursday, May 21st: Kissin Blue Karen
Friday, May 22nd: A Bookworm’s World
Monday, May 25th: No More Grumpy Bookseller
Tuesday, May 26th: Man of La Book
Wednesday, May 27th: Booked on a Feeling
Friday, May 29th: JulzReads
Monday, June 1st: Book Hooked Blog
Tuesday, June 2nd: Kritters Ramblings
Wednesday, June 3rd: Ace and Hoser Blook
Thursday, June 4th: Ms.Bookish.com
Friday, June 5th:From the TBR Pile
Tuesday, June 9th: Bibliotica
Wednesday, June 10th: Novel Escapes
Thursday, June 11th: Doing Dewey
Friday, June 12th: The Well-Read Redhead
Monday, June 15th: Mockingbird Hill Cottage

What I'm Reading

Currently Reading

Boston and the Civil War / Barbara Berenson – my talented friend Barbara has followed up her successful Walking Tours of Civil War Boston with a book that reveals to Revolutionary War-obsessed fans that Boston was actually the hub of a second revolution that ended slavery.  My mother has a friend who is a descendant of William Lloyd Garrison so I was always aware of the role of the abolitionists – this provides a close look at those "dedicated to ending slavery and honoring the promise of liberty made in the Declaration of Independence."

Divergent / Veronica Roth – although tired of dystopian novels and unable to get into this in print form, I was curious enough to try it on CD a year later, and am now enjoying it (although why do heroines have to get beat up so frequently in this type of novel?).

The Great White Whale

People in my book group also swear I would like Moby Dick if I gave it the chance but I am unconvinced...

Summer Reading

Nancy Pearl, who is a charming and energetic librarian-turned-book personality, discussed the horror of being stuck on a plane without a book on NPR the other day and provided Summer 2008 reading recommendations. I thought they would all be recent fiction or nonfiction, so was delighted to see An Infamous Army (and also Sunshine by Robin McKinley - I can see its rank shot right up on Amazon). Pearl is also a fan of Betsy-Tacy.