The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina: Book Beginning

 

The phone booth at the edge of the world by Laura Imai Messina
Published March 9, 2021, Harry N. Abrams

Book description: "grief, mourning, and the joy of survival, inspired by a real phone booth in Japan with its disconnected “wind” phone, a place of pilgrimage and solace since the 2011 tsunami."

Yui makes a pilgrimage to the phone booth in the garden of Bel Gardia, at the foot of the Mountain of the Whale. Here people find solace in talking on the disconnected phone to the ones they lost in the tsunami of March 11, 2011, their voices carried away by the wind. 

Book beginning:

Prologue

In the vast, steep garden of Bel Gardia, great gusts of wind lashed the plants.

The woman instinctively raised an elbow to her face, rounding her back. Then, almost immediately, she straightened up again. 

She had arrived before dawn, and watched as the sun came up but the sun remained hidden....

Page 56:

"She's stopped talking, yes, but I'm optimistic, and so is the pediatrician."

 

Would you read on?

The Friday 56. Find any sentence that grabs you on page 56 of your book. Post it, and add your URL to Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginnings at Rose City Reader.

The Guests on South Battery by Karen White

What new books are you reading this weekend? 

The Guests on South Battery by Karen White
Publication Jan. 10, 2018, Berkley Books

Book beginning:
There is no escaping the dead. On the slender peninsula that is Charleston, we cannot help being surrounded by them, packed as they are into ancient cemeteries behind ornate iron fencing. Beneath our streets. And under our homes and parking garages. Land is at a premium here, and it was inevitable that over the course of time the living and the dead would inevitably rub elbows. Most residents of the Holy City are blissfully unaware of those residents who have passed on but whose names and homes we share and whose presence lingers still. Others, like me, are not so lucky. 

Wow! What an opening paragraph! Makes me want to read on, for sure.

Page 56:
She stopped and faced me. "I don't like old houses, and seeing this hasn't really changed my mind. I'm ready to list it as it is."

Memes: The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader

Book Beginning: The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet

The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet, August 14, 2018, Picador USA

Genre: comedy, literary fiction
Source: library
Book beginning:

Life is not a novel. At least you would like to believe so. Roland Barthes walks up Rue de Bievre. The greatest literary critic of the twentieth century has every reason to feel anxious and upset. His mother, with whom he had a highly Proustian relationship, is dead. And his course on "The Preparation of the Novel"  at the College de France is such a conspicuous failure it can no longer be ignored; all year he has talked to his students about Japanese haikus, photography, the signifier and the signified, Pascalian diversions, cafe waiters, dressing gowns, and lecture-hall seating - about everything but the novel. And this has been going on for three years. He knows, of course, that the course is simply a delaying tactic designed to push back the moment when he must start a truly literary work....

Page 56:

Standing behind his massive desk, Giscard points to one representing a beautiful, severe-looking woman, arms outspread, dressed in a fine white dress....

Publisher: 

Paris, 1980. The literary critic Roland Barthes dies—struck by a laundry van. The world of letters mourns a tragic accident. But what if it wasn’t an accident at all? What if Barthes was . . . murdered? The hapless police detective Jacques Bayard, whose new case will plunge him into the depths of literary theory, soon finds himself in search of a lost manuscript by the linguist Roman Jakobson on the mysterious “seventh function of language.”

What new books are you reading this weekend? 
Memes: The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader

Shot in the Dark by Cleo Coyle

Shot in the Dark by Cleo Coyle
April 17, 2018; Berkley
Genre: Coffeehouse Mystery #17

A new smartphone dating game turns the Village Blend into a hookup hot spot, until one dark night, when a gunshot leaves a dead body behind and the landmark coffeehouse becomes the center of a whole new scene--a crime scene. (publisher)

Book beginning:

"Shot down again..."My ex-husband dropped his hard body onto the soft stool of our crowded coffee bar, the thorny end of a long-stemmed rose still pricking his hand. "Three strikes in one night," I said. "Does that mean you're out?""No, Clare. That's another kind of ball game."

Page 56:

 "Yeah, sure, but do you think she's the jumper they're looking for upriver?"

The 17th in the series! We're following coffee house manager Clare Cosi and her ex-husband at the Village Blend in NYC, the setting of the mystery series where Clare helps solve crimes that crop up during their busy daily activities. 

This time Clare gets the help of her ex, coffee hunter Matteo Allegro, whose mother owns the coffee shop. The Village Blend becomes the meeting place for a dating app named Cinder, but a corpse lands up in the mix of would-be, hopeful young people looking for dates. Clare has to try and clear one of her customers of the murder charge and protect her other customers. 

Another mystery with intrigue, suspense, and recipes too. One of my favorite foodie mystery series!

Thanks to Berkley for a review copy of this book.

Memes: The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader

Book Review: The Light-Keeper's Daughters by Jean E. Pendziwol

The Lightkeeper's Daughters by Jean E. Pendziwol, July 4, 2017, HarperCollins.
Setting: Lighthouse on Porphyry Island, Lake Superior, Canada

Between 1918 and the early 1930s, a lighthouse keeper on an island in Lake Superior kept journals that would later be read by an orphan teenage girl, Morgan, to a blind woman in a retirement home. 

The blind woman is Elizabeth, one of the twin daughters of the lighthouse keeper and his wife on Porphyry Island. Elizabeth and her twin Emily lived in the lighthouse until the death of their parents, when they were taken in by old friends.  Now an old woman, Elizabeth becomes interested in her father's newly found notebooks, as she has unanswered questions about all that occurred to their family so many years ago on the lighthouse island.  

The novel reveals the  complicated lives of Elizabeth and Emily, the twin girls, and their older brother Charles, growing up largely isolated on an island in Lake Superior, especially during the long harsh winters.  

There are secrets in the family, and Morgan, who reads the lightkeeper's journals to the aged Elizabeth in the present time, is curious about the twin Emily's nature drawings. Morgan has copies of Emily's drawings, which she found long ago in her grandfather's violin case. What the connection is, between her grandfather and the twins, is what drives Morgan to read the notebooks carefully. 

Comments: The book was very suspenseful at times, and I could not wait to find out more about the intriguing characters and their lives. The story makes for excellent reading. I was curious about the similarities of parts of the plot to another lighthouse novel, The Light Between Oceans, published in 2013. However, this novel's added complexity makes up for that coincidence that readers of both books might notice. Overall, I gave The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughters  5 stars.

Book beginning:
Arnie Richardson

The black Lab is aging. His arthritic legs stiffly pick their way along the well-worn path, stepping carefully over roots and carrying his stout form between the trunks of spruce and poplar. His muzzle, flecked with gray, tracks close to the ground, gathering the scent of his master's trail. 

Page 56:

....I pause for a moment, and I hear her whisper,"Oh, dear God. It was him. All those years later. Grayson." She isn't talking to me. 

Thanks to Harper Collins for providing a proof of the book.

Memes: The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader

Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman: Book Beginning

Memes: The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader.

Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman, February 14, 2017, William Morrow, a modern day twist of To Kill a Mockingbird. 

Book beginning:
When my brother was eighteen, he broke his arm in an accident that ended in another young man's death. I wish I could tell you that we mourned the boy who died, but we did not. He was the one with murder in his heart and, sure enough, death found him that night. Funny how that works. 

It happened at the lake. Wilde Lake....

Page 56:
Summer, usually our dullest season, flew after we met Noel. 

I plan to read the book late summer, when this takes place! By the way, it's on Stephen King's list of books to read this summer! See his list of new book recommendations. 

Book Beginning: Dead to the Last Drop by Cleo Coyle

The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice.
Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Once Upon a Grind comes a new installment in the Coffeehouse Mystery series.

After the White House asks coffeehouse manager and master roaster Clare Cosi to consult on the coffee service for a Rose Garden Wedding, she discovers a historic pot was used as a CIA “dead drop” decades before. Now long-simmering secrets boil over, scalding Clare and the people around her…

Dead to the Last Drop by Cleo Coyle,  published December 1, 2015 by Berkley.
Book beginning, Prologue

He stomped the brake and glared at the BMW swerving into his lane. I could smash this  idiot's bumper, but it won't get me to her any faster.

Suppressing the urge to turn this SUV into a battering ram, he laid on the horn instead. It worked. The Beemer swung out of his path and he hit the gas, running the next two yellow lights.  

Page 56:

"Mike, why did you really come home early?"

What book are you eager to read this Friday?  

The Art Whisperer by Charlotte and Aaron Elkins

Friday 56 Rules:

 *Grab a book, any book. *Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader  *Find any sentence, (or few, just don't spoil it) that grabs you. *Post it. *Add your (url) post in Linky at Freda's Voice Also Book Beginnings by Rose City Reader.

The Art Whisperer

What would you do if your book got these kinds of one-star ratings?

Book beginning:

The Conservation of Art: Methods and Aims, A Brief Guide
By Alix London...

 Reader's Forum Reviews. Newest First 

Worse Than Useless
Don't Waste Your Money
Clueless
Shameful and Pathetic
Look Elsewhere

That was as much as Alix could take in one sitting, and not for the first time her fingers itched - literally truly itched - to send in a response of her own, a fiery rejoinder that would blow these captious faultfinders out of the water, but deep down she knew it wasn't worth the bitterness of getting into a fight with them. 

page 56:

"But I thought as lead detective on this character's cases you'd want to know and maybe -"
"Maybe get my ass over there too?"

Book description:
When art conservator Alix London spots a forgery, she knows trouble will follow. So she's understandably apprehensive when her connoisseur's eye spots something off about a multimillion-dollar Jackson Pollock painting at Palm Springs's Brethwaite Museum, her current employer. In her third mystery, Alix London must see through mirages in the desert to uncover the knotted history of the painting, and save herself in the process.