Sunday Salon: Spring At Last

We have seen the last of the snow for this year, I think. It will be rain from now on, and hopefully spring!!

I'm reading I Shot the Buddha by Colin Cotterill, a mystery with a lot of humor, set in Laos. I finished The Sleepwalker: A Novel by Chris Bohjalian, a mystery about a missing mother, with a twist at the end; and finished The Kommandant's Girl by Pam Jenoff. a WWII novel set in Poland. Also finished,  Cooking for Picasso, a novel by Camille Aubray, I enjoyed them all.

Two new books on my shelf:

A proof of Chemistry: A Novel by Weike Wang, May 23, 2017, by Knopf. 
Described as " a luminous coming-of-age novel about a young female scientist who must recalibrate her life when her academic career goes off track." Set in Boston.

The Last Chance Olive Ranch by Susan Wittig Albert, April 4, 2017, Berkley.
China Bayles fears for her husband’s life as an escaped convict targets him...

My Kindle borrows from the library:

The Light in the Ruins by Chris Bohjalian, a novel published in 2013, about an Italian family, the Rosatis,  in Florence during WWII.  Fast forward to 1955, when someone is targeting the remainder of the Rosati family, and a young Florentine detective is assigned to the case.

Another intriguing historical novel of WWII. I finished the author's new novel, The Sleepwalker, and am looking up all his earlier novels. This is the first in the list that I'll be reading. 

I also have the ebook of 

The Dressmaker's Dowry by Meredith Jaeger, February 7, 2017, William Morrow.
The book description: "the story of two women: one, an immigrant seamstress who disappears from San Francisco’s gritty streets in 1876, and the other, a young woman in present day who must delve into the secrets of her husband’s wealthy family only to discover that she and the missing dressmaker might be connected in unexpected ways."

Unfinished books which I plan to get back to include: The Day I Died, The Sun King Conspiracy, and My Last Lament. 

What are you reading this week? 
Welcome to the Sunday Salon where bloggers share their reading each week. Visit The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer. Also visit It's Monday, What Are You Reading? hosted by Book Date

Book Beginning: I Shot the Buddha by Colin Cotterill

My lucky library find:

I Shot the Buddha by Colin Cotterill, published August 16, 2016, is the 11th in the Dr. Siri Paiboun mystery series, featuring retired coroner Siri Paiboun and his wife, Madame Daeng, in Laos. 

The couple share their small Vientiane house with an assortment of homeless people, mendicants, and oddballs. One of these is Noo, a Buddhist monk, who rides out on his bicycle one day and never comes back, leaving only a cryptic note in the refrigerator: a plea to help a fellow monk escape across the Mekhong River to Thailand. (publisher)

Book beginning:
It was midnight to the second with a full moon overhead when three women were being killed in three separate locations. Had this been the script of a film, such a twist of fate would have been the type of cinematic plot device that annoyed Comrades Siri and Civilai immensely. In their book coincidences came in a close third behind convenient amnesia and the sudden appearance of an identical twin. But this was real life, so there was no argument to be had. 

Page 56:
"I can't start a mission by losing face," he said.
"You're not. Nobody knows you're here. They haven't even seen your face. We can return tomorrow, refreshed, and they'll all be embarrassed about today and your face will be intact."  

What are you reading this Friday?
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.

First Chapter: The Sleepwalker by Chris Bohjalian

The Sleepwalker: A Novel by Chris Bohjalian, January 10, 2017.

"a spine-tingling novel of lies, loss, and buried desire—the mesmerizing story of a wife and mother who vanishes from her bed late one night," 

My rating on goodreads: five stars.

First chapter:
Everyone in the county presumed that my mother's body was decaying - becoming porridge - at the bottom of the Gale River. It was the year 2000, and we were but three seasons removed from the Y2K madness, the overwrought, feared end of the digital age. It was a moment in time when a pair of matching towers still stood at the tip of Lower Manhattan. Fracking and photobomb and selfie were years from becoming words, but we were only months from adding to our vocabularies the expression hanging chad.  

I was twenty-one that summer and fall and my sister was twelve. Neither of us fully recovered. 

Based on the first chapter of the book, would you read on? 

MEME: Every Tuesday Bibliophile by the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph, Tuesday Intros sharing the first paragraph or two, from a book you are reading or will be reading soon.

Sunday Salon: False Spring

The crocuses have pushed up during a brief, false spring and may survive the next several days. Snow is expected Monday-Tuesday!

I have been reading more ebooks from the library and just finished Into Thin Air, an account of the tragic expeditions in a climb of Everest in the spring of 1996, a story which had me in tears in parts.
I also whizzed through Girl in Translation, finding ebooks faster to read.

Books on my desk:

Where the Dead Lie by C.S. Harris, April 4, 2017, Berkley
Setting: London, 1813.
Plot: missing children; Sebastian St. Cyr #12 mystery

From the library:

Quicksand by Malin Persson Giolito, March 7, 2017, Other Press
Genre: courtroom thriller, drama
Setting: Stockholm, Sweden
Award: Best Swedish crime novel of the year

The Kommandant's Girl by Pam Jenoff, February 20, 2007.
Setting: Krakow, Poland during WWII
Genre: historical fiction

Welcome to the Sunday Salon where bloggers share their reading each week. Visit The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer. Also visit It's Monday, What Are You Reading? hosted by Book Date

Book Beginning: The Boat Rocker by Ha Jin

The Boat Rocker by Ha Jin, October 25, 2016

Book beginning:

Chapter One

A week before the fourth anniversary of 9/11, my boss, Kaiming, barged into my office, rattling a three-page printout in his hands.

"Look at this, Danling," he said, dropping the papers on my desk. "This is outrageous! How could they claim that George W. Bush had agreed to endorse a book by Yan Haili? Everyone can tell it's a lie the size of heaven."

Page 56:

Then she said, "I have written a script, and a movie company has been considering it."

About the book: From the award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash: an urgent, timely novel that follows an aspiring author, an outrageous book idea, and a lone journalist’s dogged quest for truth in the Internet age. (publisher)

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. 

Waiting on Wednesday: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Waiting on Wednesday is hosted weekly by Jill at Breaking the Spine. What new releases or soon to be released books are you eagerly waiting for. 

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng will be published September 12, 2017, the author's second book since the acclaimed Everything I Never Told You.

Book description: In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren – an enigmatic artist and single mother – who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town--and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides.  Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs. 

Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood – and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster. (publisher)

Book Tour: Abby's Journey by Steena Holmes

Abby's Journey by Steena Holmes, February 14, 2017, Lake Union Publishing
Publisher book description:
Twenty-year-old Abigail Turner knows her mother, Claire—who died shortly after she was born—through letters, videos, postcards, and journals. Abby’s father, Josh, has raised his precious daughter himself, but Abby longs to forge out on her own and see the world after a childhood trapped indoors: she suffers from bronchopulmonary dysplasia, which means a case of the sniffles can rapidly escalate into life-threatening pneumonia.

But when Abby’s doctor declares her healthy—for now—her grandmother Millie whisks her away to Europe to visit the Christmas markets that her mother cherished and chronicled in her travel journals.

Despite her father’s objections, Abby and Millie embark on a journey of discovery in which Abby will learn secrets that force her to reevaluate her image of her mother and come to a more mature understanding of a parent-child bond that transcends death.

My comments: Young Abby is plagued by a childhood illness that carries over into adulthood. She has to be careful as she could get ill at any time. Abby's mother died leaving a series of messages and instructions for her husband Josh and for Abby, in the form of letters of guidance, counsel, and a form of mothering that will take Abby from childhood into adulthood.

Abby visits Europe to follow in her mother's footsteps, but becomes ill in Brussels. She meets her half-brother Jackson, and learns things about her mother that will answer a lot of questions.

A little sentimental and more than a little heartfelt, Abby's Journey will touch those readers who know or who have young Abbys of their own.

For a list of other reviews, visit the TLC Tour Stop for Abby's Journey

Purchase Links

Amazon | Books-A-Million | Barnes & Noble

About Steena Holmes

After writing her first novel while working as a receptionist, Steena Holmes made her dream of being a full-time writer a reality. She won the National Indie Excellence Book Award in 2012 for her bestselling novel Finding Emma. Now both a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, Steena continues to write stories that touch every parent’s heart in one way or another. To find out more about her books and her love for traveling, you can visit her website at www.steenaholmes.com or follow her journeys over on Instagram @steenaholmes.
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First chapter:
Prologue
Claire

Dear Josh, I've written this letter a thousand times (okay, that might be exaggerating just a little, but I have written it a few times now). At first, it was a list of parenting tips, because that's what I do. I write lists. And then you would read it and memorize it,. because that's what you do to humor me.

MEME: Every Tuesday Bibliophile by the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph, Tuesday Intros sharing the first paragraph or two, from a book you are reading or will be reading soon.