Waiting on Wednesday Special Edition + Giveaway!

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine.





Denis Leary is coming out with a new book called SUCK ON THIS YEAR: LYFAO @ 140 Characters or Less. Play the trailer below to see him talking about his new book. It's very funny! Please read the contest rules at the end of this post for a chance to win a copy of this book.






Suck On This Year will be published by Penguin on December 2nd. The description of the book reads:

Leary’s first reaction to the Twitter universe was to run the other direction. But then he realized that all of the jokes he was making casually to friends were going to waste unless he had a stand-up comedy tour coming up. The jokes just came and then disappeared. So he decided to give Twitter a try, and once he started, he couldn’t stop. Thus—this book. Or mini-book. Or celebrity coaster.

Here’s a sampling for your reading pleasure:

● This just in: Vatican acquires Neverland Ranch.

● Arizona residents: “We’re sick of being called racists.” That’s the thing about Arizona: it’s a dry hate.

● Lindsay Lohan to play Linda Lovelace in pornstar biopic. Exactly whose reputation is at stake here?

● Lettuce recalled in 23 states: Experts fear it could affect up to 5 Americans.

● New Jersey worried about oil residue on beaches. Not from Gulf spill. From cast of Jersey Shore.

A portion of the proceeds from this book will go towards Leary’s charity—The Leary Firefighters Foundation—so not only are readers improving their own lives by reading this and laughing out loud, they’re also helping a firefighter somewhere in America gain some invaluable training. Plus, SUCK ON THIS YEAR will make the perfect gift book this holiday season, and let’s be honest, it’s a lot more fun than those winter socks or hand-knit sweater or most of your relatives.

Penguin is sponsoring a giveaway for one of my lucky readers! For a chance to win a copy of Suck on This Year, leave a comment on this post and include a way for me to contact you should you win. For two chances, tweet about this giveaway and come back and leave a second comment letting me know. The contest deadline is Wednesday, December 1st and is open to US and Canadian residents. No P.O. boxes please!

Waiting on Wednesday

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine.











While browsing my local bookstore's website I came across Left Neglected by Lisa Genova. It will be published by Simon and Schuster in January 2011. The description of this book (by the same author who wrote Still Alice) sounds very interesting. From the publisher's website:

Sarah Nickerson is like any other career-driven supermom in Welmont, the affluent Boston suburb where she leads a hectic but charmed life with her husband Bob, faithful nanny, and three children—Lucy, Charlie, and nine-month-old Linus.

Between recruiting the best and brightest minds as the vice president of human resources at Berkley Consulting; shuttling the kids to soccer, day care, and piano lessons; convincing her son's teacher that he may not, in fact, have ADD; and making it home in time for dinner, it's a wonder this over-scheduled, over-achieving Harvard graduate has time to breathe.

A self-confessed balloon about to burst, Sarah miraculously manages every minute of her life like an air traffic controller. Until one fateful day, while driving to work and trying to make a phone call, she looks away from the road for one second too long. In the blink of an eye, all the rapidly moving parts of her jam-packed life come to a screeching halt.

A traumatic brain injury completely erases the left side of her world, and for once, Sarah relinquishes control to those around her, including her formerly absent mother. Without the ability to even floss her own teeth, she struggles to find answers about her past and her uncertain future.

Now, as she wills herself to regain her independence and heal, Sarah must learn that her real destiny—her new, true life—may in fact lie far from the world of conference calls and spreadsheets. And that a happiness and peace greater than all the success in the world is close within reach, if only she slows down long enough to notice.

Review: Regression by Kathy Bell

In this first book of the Infinion series by Kathy Bell, Adya Jordan, a forty year old woman and the mother of six children, wakes from a coma to find herself in her former fourteen year old body, her husband and children a far-off memory. She discovers to her dismay that she is in a different ‘timeline’ and woke from an accident that she has no memory of. No one around her is aware of her regression except for the elite from the mysterious Three Eleven Corporation.

I was immediately taken with this novel when I read the blurb for it. This is the sort of science fiction that appeals to me. Part of that appeal stems from the ‘what if’ factor. There are all sorts of questions that can’t be answered, but are fun to ask anyway: What if I’d been born earlier than the year I was born in? Later? What if my parents hadn’t met the day they had? Would they have gotten to know each other if they’d met another day? What if I hadn’t gone to the same school as my husband? I might have met him regardless since I already knew him slightly through a mutual friend. Regression asks all of those questions plus many others I’ve never thought of before. The plot of this novel starts almost at the first page and the action doesn’t stop. I enjoyed how the Three Eleven Company is portrayed almost as a living, breathing character and has a sinister, foreboding feeling to it. The author did a great job drawing the reader into the atmosphere of Three Eleven.

Adya is a very likeable main character. I think part of her attraction is that she does not make poor choices or (for the most part and in my opinion!) does not exercise unusually bad judgment. Nothing ruins a book for me more than a character who continually frustrates! So, despite looking like a fourteen-year-old, Adya displays the life experience and maturity of an older woman. I kept that image in my head while reading and found it an interesting perspective. She deals with all sorts of new situations and people – but what stuck out the most was the patriarchal and condescending nature of the big corporation.

The plot, action and characters of this novel do not disappoint. However, I think that the book could have used more editing. For a finished book there were a few typos that should have been corrected. Other than that, I really enjoyed this novel and plan on reading the next book in the series, Evolussion. Anyone who enjoyed reading Replay by Ken Grimwood or The Children of Men by P. D. James would also enjoy Regression.

Mailbox Monday

This meme was started by Marcia at The Printed Page and Kristi at The Story Siren. In November Knitting and Sundries is hosting MM.




I received a LibraryThing early reviewer book in the mail last week. It's called The Poison Tree and is written by Erin Kelly. I really like the deep red colour and the naked tree branches on the cover. Just seems to suit the genre of this novel. The description of the book from Erin Kelly's website reads:

It is the sweltering summer of 1997, and Karen is a strait-laced, straight-A university student. When she meets the impossibly glamorous Biba, a bohemian orphan who lives in a crumbling mansion in Highgate with her enigmatic brother Rex, she is soon drawn into their world. As the summer progresses, Karen becomes tangled up in their tragic family history and the idyll turns into a nightmare, culminating in murder.

A decade later, Karen collects Rex from prison. Together with their nine-year-old daughter Alice, they try to settle into family life. While Rex has served his time, Karen keeps dark secrets that mean she has her own life sentence to serve. What happened that summer casts a terrifying shadow over her future. Will the past catch up with her?

Mailbox Monday

This meme was started by Marcia at The Printed Page and Kristi at The Story Siren. In November, Julie at Knitting and Sundries is hosting MM.



I received two books last week. The first is The Distant Hours by Kate Morton. I really wanted this book and was thrilled to find it on my doorstep! Published by Atria Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster) The Distant Hours is described on their website:

A long lost letter arrives in the post and Edie Burchill finds herself on a journey to Milderhurst Castle, a great but moldering old house, where the Blythe spinsters live and where her mother was billeted 50 years before as a 13 year old child during WW II. The elder Blythe sisters are twins and have spent most of their lives looking after the third and youngest sister, Juniper, who hasn’t been the same since her fiance jilted her in 1941.

Inside the decaying castle, Edie begins to unravel her mother’s past. But there are other secrets hidden in the stones of Milderhurst, and Edie is about to learn more than she expected. The truth of what happened in ‘the distant hours’ of the past has been waiting a long time for someone to find it.

Morton once again enthralls readers with an atmospheric story featuring unforgettable characters beset by love and circumstance and haunted by memory, that reminds us of the rich power of storytelling.

I've started reading the second book I received because I'm so interested in the topic. I don't read much non-fiction, but I am a foodie and this one really holds my interest. It's An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage. I think the title makes it sound as if it's about cannibalism but this book's description on the author's website reads:

There are many ways to look at the past: as a list of important dates, a conveyor belt of kings and queens, a series of rising and falling empires, or a narrative of political, philosophical or technological progress. This book looks at history in another way entirely: as a series of transformations caused, enabled or influenced by food. Throughout history, food has done more than simply provide sustenance. It has acted as a catalyst of social transformation, societal organisation, geopolitical competition, industrial development, military conflict and economic expansion. From prehistory to the present, the stories of these transformations form a narrative that encompasses the whole of human history.

Waiting on Wednesday

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine.




I've got I Still Dream About You by Fannie Flagg on my wishlist. I'm a big fan and I'm happily anticipating its publication in November and being able to move it from my wishlist to the top of my TBR pile. From the Random House website, the description of this book reads:

The beloved Fannie Flagg is back and at her irresistible and hilarious best in I Still Dream About You, a comic mystery romp through the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, past, present, and future.

Meet Maggie Fortenberry, a still beautiful former Miss Alabama. To others, Maggie’s life seems practically perfect—she’s lovely, charming, and a successful real estate agent at Red Mountain Realty. Still, Maggie can’t help but wonder how she wound up in her present condition. She had been on her hopeful way to becoming Miss America and realizing her childhood dream of someday living in one of the elegant old homes on top of Red Mountain, with the adoring husband and the 2.5 children, but then something unexpected happened and changed everything.

Maggie graduated at the top of her class at charm school, can fold a napkin in more than forty-eight different ways, and can enter and exit a car gracefully, but all the finesse in the world cannot help her now. Since the legendary real estate dynamo Hazel Whisenknott, beloved founder of Red Mountain Realty, died five years ago, business has gone from bad to worse—and the future isn’t looking much better. But just when things seem completely hopeless, Maggie suddenly comes up with the perfect plan to solve it all.

As Maggie prepares to put her plan into action, we meet the cast of high-spirited characters around her. To Brenda Peoples, Maggie’s best friend and real estate partner, Maggie’s life seems easy as pie. Slender Maggie doesn’t have to worry about her figure, or about her Weight Watchers sponsor catching her at the Krispy Kreme doughnut shop. And Ethel Clipp, Red Mountain’s ancient and grumpy office manager with the bright purple hair, thinks the world of Maggie but has absolutely nothing nice to say about their rival Babs “The Beast of Birmingham” Bingington, the unscrupulous estate agent who hates Maggie and is determined to put her out of business.

Maggie has heartbreaking secrets in her past, but through a strange turn of events, she soon discovers, quite by accident, that everybody, it seems—dead or alive—has at least one little secret.

I Still Dream About You is a wonderful novel that is equal parts Southern charm, murder mystery, and that perfect combination of comedy and old-fashioned wisdom that can be served up only by America’s own remarkable Fannie Flagg.

Tuesday Teasers

Tuesday Teasers is hosted by Should Be Reading. The rules are as follows:


Grab your current read and let the book fall open to a random page. Share two sentences somewhere on that page and the title of the book that you’re getting the teaser from. Please avoid spoilers! Read the official Tuesday Teaser Rules.



My teaser this week is from a very interesting novel called Regression by Kathy Bell. From page 94:

He turned to greet the first of the men to join them in the conference room. She took a deep breath to steel herself, about to meet the most powerful group of men on Earth.

Mailbox Monday

This meme was created by Marcia at The Printed Page and Kristi at The Story Siren. In October, Avis at She Reads and Reads is hosting MM for Marcia.




I received one book in the mail last week. It's a tech noir thriller called Rivers of Gold by Adam Dunn. From Bloomsbury's website, the description reads:

Bright Lights, Big City meets The Wire in a compulsive, sexy, gritty urban thriller set in the day-after-tomorrow's financially devastated New York, by a phenomenally talented first-time novelist.

New York City has never been an easy place to make it, but in the year 2013, it's a little tougher than usual. Race riots. Massive unemployment. Rampant crime. Vacant buildings now housing a thriving black market. A worthless currency and a broken government. Welcome to the Second Great Depression. Some have adapted to life in tomorrow's Big Apple. Like Renny, a part-time fashion photographer and full-time drug dealer who oversees a network of taxicabs running contraband through the underground party circuit. He works for Reza, an enterprising immigrant who has turned the city's nightlife down a deadly road.

Others in the city are just trying to hang on. Like Detective Sixto Santiago, part of an experimental new NYPD unit known as the Citywide Anticrime Bureau (CAB), squads of undercover cops in taxicabs who are meant to hold down the chaos just enough to keep tourists coming. Santiago's new assignment will send him after the man both Renny and Reza must ultimately answer to, a criminal visionary known only as the Slav. But Santiago's most dangerous foe just might be his new partner. From the grime of the city's taxi garages to the sterilized peaks where high finance and organized crime converge, Rivers of Gold is a kaleidoscopic vision of the near future gone hideously wrong.

Review: Crescendo by Becca Fitzpatrick

I was so pleased to be asked to review Crescendo by Becca Fitzpatrick. I’ve been hearing how good the first book in the series is and have been wanting to read it for awhile so the offer of Crescendo was all the incentive I needed to read Hush, Hush. I wasn’t disappointed by either book.

Crescendo picks up where Hush, Hush leaves off. Nora Grey, a plucky but mature teenager (I would have said she is older than sixteen!) finds herself in the midst of danger once again. Nora has the kind of personality that any mother would be proud to have. Occasionally she makes wrong choices (what teenager doesn’t?) but overall she’s a good kid. Other characters we met in Hush Hush reappear in Crescendo and didn’t fail to raise some sort of feeling in me. One high school girl, Marcie Millar, is the perfect antagonist; full of venom, she reminds me of several students I knew when I was in school.

Another big plus with Crescendo (as well as Hush, Hush) are the settings. Dark roads, deserted towns, foggy fields and empty houses all take on a life of their own and give Crescendo depth and atmosphere. I particularly loved that aspect of this book.

The author has a definite knack for creating tension between characters and within plots. The chemistry between the main characters sizzles. I wanted them to be together! I won’t say what happens but I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and highly recommend it to all fans of fantasy. And even if you aren’t a fan – give this book a try – you may just become one.

Tuesday Teasers

Tuesday Teasers is hosted by Should Be Reading. The rules are as follows:

Grab your current read and let the book fall open to a random page. Share two sentences somewhere on that page and the title of the book that you’re getting the teaser from. Please avoid spoilers! Read the official Tuesday Teaser Rules.





This week's teaser is from City of Tranquil Light by Bo Caldwell. From page 54:

The woman said the girl was lazy and would not do as she was asked, and that her laziness had caused a stomachache. Katherine looked at the girl and gently placed her hand on the girl's greatly distended belly while the mother explained that as she had been unable to find any cockroach feces, the usual cure for such ailments, she had fed the girl rat feces, to no avail.