Guest Review: A Good Home, a Memoir by Cynthia Reyes

Title: A Good Home: A Memoir by Cynthia Reyes

Publisher: BPS Books (May 6, 2013)

A Good Home describes the author’s early life in rural Jamaica, her move to urban North America, and her trips back home.

I, a non-bookworm, read Cynthia Reyes' just-released book,

“A Good Home” and found it so riveting and so totally interesting,

it was difficult to put down once I turned a chapter.

Her down-to-earth style of writing is a boon to people who are

not avid book readers but are selective in their choice of books,

fiction or otherwise. I highly recommend “A Good Home” for

entertainment and for feeling good.

It is all about family, struggles, life-changes and determination.

Many readers can relate to the author’s experiences.

Philip Young
Guest reviewer

Philip Young is a writer in Toronto. 

A Woman of Angkor by John Burgess

Teaser Tuesdays  is hosted by MizB; choose sentences from your current read and identify author and title for readers.  First Chapter, First Paragraph is hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea.

I: The Brahmin

Brahmin priests chart the turnings of the cosmic engine. They counsel princes and craft judgments of holy law. But concerning simpler things, such as getting where they want to go? They often need some help.

Perhaps that is why I felt no apprehension when I first caught sight of the priest that rainy season afternoon. All I saw was a man who looked to be lost, and my sympathy went to him. With two soldier-guards, he had arrived on foot at the tiny settlement in the Capital's eastern reaches that was home to my family at the time. Then he began a search for someone or something that wasn't being found.

A Woman of Angkor by John Burgess
Published 2013  by River Books Press
Genre: historical fiction

Goodreads description:
"12th Century Cambodia, birthplace of the lost Angkor civilisation.
In a village behind a towering stone temple lives a young woman named Sray, whom neighbors liken to the heroine of a Hindu epic. Hiding a dangerous secret, she is content with quiet obscurity, but one rainy afternoon is called to a life in the royal court. Her faith and loyalties are tested by attentions from the great king Suryavarman II. She struggles to keep her devotion to her husband Nol, s palace confidante and master of the silk parasols, symbols of the monarch's rank.

This novel revives the rites and rhythms of the culture that built the temples of Angkor, then abandoned them to the jungle. Sray witnesses the construction of the largest temple, Angkor Wat, and offers an explanation for its greatest mystery - why it broke with centuries of tradition to face west instead of east."

Based on the opening chapter, would you keep reading?

It's Monday/Mailbox Monday/July 8

This post lists new books and links up to It's Monday; What Are You Reading? at Book Journey; to Mailbox Monday hosted by Book Obsessed; and to Stacking the Shelves by Tynga's Reviews.

Books for review:

A Once Crowded Sky by Tom King, fantasy (Touchstone)
The Other Room by Kim Triedman, fiction (Owl Canyon Press)
Mystery Girl by David Gordon, thriller (New Harvest)
Hour of the Rat by Lisa Brackmann, thriller (Soho Crime)
TheTilted World by Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly,  historical fiction ARC (William Morrow)

Uncorrected proofs for review:

Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman by Minka Pradelski, fiction (Macmillan)
Goat Mountain by David Vann, fiction (Harper)
Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival by Nate Jackson, memoir (Harper)
Lineup by Liad Shohan, Israeli crime fiction (Harper)

I borrowed these from the library:

Snapper by Brian Kimberling, fiction (Pantheon). Enjoying the bird watching aspects of this novel set in rural Indiana
The Third Son by Julie Wu, historical fiction (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill). The history Taiwan is something I'd like to know more about.

What are you reading this week?

FINDING COLIN FIRTH by Mia March

 Welcome to the Sunday Salon.

I am so excited to announce that Gallery Books is offering two copies of the novel, Finding Colin Firth by Mia March, to readers of this blog. The great news is that the giveaway contest is open to both U.S. and Canadian residents. Yaah! and thank you, Dominique at Gallery Books!

Please scroll down to enter.

Title: Finding Colin Firth: A Novel by Mia March
Publication date: July 6, 2013; Gallery Books
Genre: fiction, women's fiction

Publisher's description:
"From the author of The Meryl Streep Movie Club, comes a new novel about three women, connected in secret and surprising ways, who are in for a life-changing summer when rumor has it that actor Colin Firth is coming to their Maine town to film a movie.

After losing her job and leaving her beloved husband, journalist Gemma Hendricks is sure that scoring an interview with Colin Firth will save her career. Yet a local story about women, family ties, love, and loss captures her heart--and changes everything. The story concerns Bea Crane, a twenty-two-year old who learns in a deathbed confession letter that she was adopted at birth. Bea is in Boothbay Harbor to surreptitiously observe her biological mother, Veronica Russo, a thirty-eight-year-old diner waitress famous for her "healing" pies. But when Veronica is hired as an Extra on the bustling movie set, she wonders if she's hiding from the truth . . . and perhaps the opportunity of a real life Mr. Darcy.

These three women will discover more than they ever imagined in this coastal Maine town, buzzing with hopes of Colin Firth."

GIVEAWAY CONTEST:  U.S. and Canadian residents, please leave a comment for a chance to win one of two books. No P.O. addresses, please. Contest is open through July 12, 2013; winners will be chosen at random and notified on July 13, with a response due by July 15.  The publisher will mail out the books to the winners. Good luck and thanks for entering!

UPDATE: Congrats to the winners: Creations by Laurel Rain-Snow and Julie@ Knitting and Sundries. Thanks everyone for entering the contest!

Book Review: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Title: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Published March 12, 2013; Viking Adult
Genre: fiction
Source: library book

My comments: Nao, the young Japanese writer of a diary found by Ruth will break your heart several times over during the course of the novel. A victim of extreme bullying in school, she contemplates suicide, then meets her great-grandmother, a 104-year-old Buddhist nun who will have a great effect on her life. Nao's grand-uncle Haruki #1 will also grab your sympathies through his diaries, the writings of a conscripted kamikazi pilot on the hardship and brutalities of his military life. If I could give this novel a higher rating than 5, I would.

The characters are so real that you easily become involved in their lives and care deeply about what happens to them. The book also combines in its mixture, religion, quantum physics, history, biology, dreams and paranormal events, and philosophy.  Kudos to an outstanding author.

Goodreads book description:

“A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.” 

 "In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine.

 Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.

 Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home."

Submitted for the Japanese Literature Challenge 7 hosted by dolcebellezza.
Submitted to Cym Lowell's Book Review Link-Up Party

Whistling Past the Graveyard by Susan Crandall

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by MizB; choose sentences from your current read and identify author and title for readers. First Chapter, First Paragraph is hosted by Bibliophile By the Sea.

Title: Whistling Past the Graveyard by Susan Crandall
Published July 2, 2013; Gallery Books

Opening sentences:

July 1963
My grandmother says she will pray for me every day. Which was funny, as I've only ever heard Mamie pray, "Dear Lord, give me strength." That sure sounded like a prayer for herself - and Mrs. Knopp in Sunday school always said our prayers should only ask for things for others. Once I made the mistake of saying that out loud to Mamie and got slapped into next Tuesday for my sassy mouth. My mouth always worked a whole lot faster than my good sense.

Book description:
From an award-winning author,  a wise and tender coming-of-age story about a nine-year-old girl who runs away from her Mississippi home in 1963, befriends a lonely woman suffering loss and abuse, and embarks on a life-changing roadtrip.

Nine-year-old Starla Claudelle. born to teenage parents in Mississippi, is being raised by a strict paternal grandmother, Mamie, whose worst fear is that Starla will turn out like her mother. Starla hasn’t seen her momma since she was three, but is convinced that her mother will keep her promise to take Starla and her daddy to Nashville, where her mother hopes to become a famous singer—and that one day her family will be whole and perfect.

When Starla is grounded on the Fourth of July, she sneaks out to see the parade. Starla’s fear that Mamie will send her to reform school cause her to panic and run away from home. Starla is offered a ride by a black woman, Eula, who is traveling with a white baby. She happily accepts a ride, with the ultimate goal of reaching her mother in Nashville.

As the two unlikely companions make their long and sometimes dangerous journey, Starla’s eyes are opened to the harsh realities of 1963 southern segregation. Through talks with Eula, reconnecting with her parents, and encountering a series of surprising misadventures, Starla learns to let go of long-held dreams and realizes family is forged from those who will sacrifice all for you, no matter if bound by blood or by the heart. (publisher)

Based on the opening sentences and the book description, would you read on?

Thanks to the publisher for a complimentary review copy of this book.

Mailbox Monday: ARCs and Finding Colin Firth

This post lists new books and links up to It's Monday; What Are You Reading? at Book Journey; to Mailbox Monday hosted by Book Obsessed; and to Stacking the Shelves by Tynga's Reviews.

New ARCs for review:

The Wife, The Maid, and the Mistress by Ariel Lawhon (Doubleday).
A tantalizing re-imagining of a scandalous mystery that rocked the nation in 1930-Justice Joseph Crater's infamous disappearance-as seen through the eyes of the three women who knew him best. (Goodreads)

Songs of Willow Frost by Jamie Ford (Random House).
Twelve-year-old William Eng, a Chinese-American boy, has lived at Seattle’s Sacred Heart Orphanage since his mother’s death five years ago. On his birthday, at the historical Moore Theatre, William glimpses an actress by the name of Willow Frost. Struck by her features, William is convinced that the movie star is his mother, Liu Song. Set in the Great Depression and the 1920s. (Goodreads)

Love All by Callie Wright ( Henry Holt).
Love, fidelity, sports, and growing up when you least expect it, told through the irresistible voices of three generations, Set in New York in 1994. (Goodreads)

Mrs. Poe by Lynn Cullen (Gallery Books).
A vivid and compelling novel about a woman who becomes entangled in an affair with Edgar Allan Poe—at the same time she becomes the unwilling confidante of his much-younger wife. Set in 1845, New York. (Goodreads)

Anton and Cecil: Cats at Sea by Lisa Martin and Valerie Martin (Algonquin Young Readers)
A swashbuckling story of two very different cat brothers and their adventures at sea. For ages 8-12. 

and a paperback:

Finding Colin Firth by Mia March (Simon & Schuster)
A novel about three women, connected in secret and surprising ways, who are in for a life-changing summer when rumor has it that actor Colin Firth is coming to their Maine town to film a movie. (Goodreads)

What's in your mailbox this week?