At Least You Have Your Health by Madi Sinha

 

At Least You Have Your Health

by 

Madi Sinha, April 5, 2022, Berkley

Genre: women's fiction, contemporary fiction

About: 

Dr. Maya Rao is a gynecologist with three young children, a career, and a happy marriage. But Maya is forced to walk away from her career.

She meets Amelia, owner of an exclusive wellness clinic that needs a gynecologist for house calls to wealthy women clientele.  (publisher)

Book beginning:

When Amelia DeGilles - forty-five, tailored jeans, nude sling backs with a red sole - caught the arm of Maya Rao - thirty-six, threadbare leggings, brown stain on one off-white canvas sneaker - in the parking lot of Hamilton Hall Academy after the October parent council meeting, people noticed.

At 56% of book:

"The baby says she wants to be born in Belize." 

Maya's eyebrows shot up. She laughed, assuming this was a joke. 

Would you read on? 

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

Sunday Salon : New Books and ARCs

 Books to be read:

The Bangalore Detectives Club by Harini Nagendra, May 3, 2022, Pegasus Crime. Source: from publisher for possible review

The first in a cozy crime series set in 1920s Bangalore, India, featuring sari-wearing detective Kaveri and her husband Ramu. The two are determined to find the real killer who struck at the Century Club party.

An Honest Lie

by 

Tarryn Fisher, April 26, 2022, Graydon House

Source: review ARC from publisher 

"Lorraine—“Rainy”attends a girls’ weekend in Vegas. But after a wild night, her friend Braithe doesn’t come back to the hotel room."  And so begins the search and suspense.

Currently reading:

The Other Family by Wendy Corsi Staub, February 8, 2022

Source: NetGalley

About: "

a family making a fresh start moves into a house which was the site of an unsolved triple homicide."
There's a problem right there, in my opinion -  choosing the wrong house for a young family! But this may make a better thriller. 

 

Two Nights in Lisbon by Chris Pavone, May 24, 2022, NetGalley

Genre: international thriller

About: The novel follows Ariel Price, newly married, after she wakes up in her hotel room during a business trip to Lisbon. Her husband is nowhere in sight and she must find answers to his disappearance on her own.  

I haven't started on the first two books and am finishing up the last two ARCs. 

What are you reading this week? 

Memes: The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer. Also,  It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Mailbox Monday, and Sunday Salon, Stacking the Shelves

Book Beginning: Lemon by Kwon Yeo-sun

 

Lemon by Kwon Yeo-sun is described as loosely following the structure of a detective novel. The mysterious death of a high school beauty is revisited seventeen years later; the story is told mainly by the victim's sister and also by others at different time periods. The book "explores grief and trauma, raising important questions about guilt, retribution, and the meaning of death and life."

Book beginning: 

 I imagine what happened inside one police interrogation room so many years ago. By imagine, I don't mean invent. But it's not like I was actually there, so I don't know what to actually call it. I picture the scene from that day, based on what he told me and some other clues, my own experience and conclusions.

Page 56:

Mother, with her voice shaking, ordered me not to go anywhere, to lock the door and stay put. 

 

 Lemon by Kwon Yeo-sun, October 12, 2021, Other Press

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.

Sunday Salon: New Books Reviewed

 Currently reading:

I was curious about Reptile Memoirs, this thriller by a Norwegian writer, borrowed through NetGalley. I'm in the middle of the ebook now and trying to figure out how the woman's pet python relates to her own psyche. 

This another ebook borrowed through NetGalley. Stay Awake is a thriller involving amnesia and a crime the female suspect doesn't remember committing.

Finished reading:

 

The Housemaid by Freida McFadden, April 26, 2022, NetGalley. 

 

The book is a dark thriller with violence, cruelty, and revenge. The novel stalled in the middle of the book, making me want to stop reading, as if the story had nowhere further to go. However, luckily for this reader, it picked up dramatically in the second half, with a surprising twist at the end. 

And now for something completely different, a literary drama about a family in three generations. NetGalley. 

French Braid tells the story of Mercy and Robin Garrett - their married life together and apart, their children and grandchildren. Mercy, an artist and wife who longs to get back to painting full time, is distracted at home. Her older daughter, Alice, picks up the slack to watch out for younger sister Lily, and little David, their brother.

In one way the marriage is not a success since Mercy wants to take off on her own and leave Robin to fend for himself. However, success may be found in the children. Alice, Lily, and David go on with their lives into adulthood and marriage, regardless of their parents. Their paths are not always smooth, however - seen in the unconventional marriage choices made by Lily and David. The connections between Mercy and Robin and their offspring remain throughout, likened to a French braid that keeps its wrinkles and crinkles as a result of being so intertwined over time.
The characters make this book, as much as the stories of where their lives head.

This was a pleasure to read, as it brought lots of laughs and chuckles. 

Bookish People:

I loved the humor and the characters of a book store owner and her employees. Sophie Bernstein, 54, shop owner and recent widow in Washington DC, wants to shut herself off from society in a secret nook she discovered at the back of her bookstore. While trying to make the dusty nook into a habitable one room apartment, she has several misadventures involving a vacuum cleaner, an errant tortoise belonging to her employees, demanding customers and their dogs, and a blackout from a busted electrical system. Amid the humor, brought about by Sophie herself and her responses to these events, are the customers and their foibles, book signing authors with their strange quirks, and finally someone interesting to help Sophie take a new look at her world. A wonderful read, a laugh-out-loud entertaining rom com/women's fiction. Borrowed from NetGalley.

What are you reading this week? 

Memes: The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer. Also,  It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Mailbox Monday, and Sunday Salon, Stacking the Shelves

Sunday Salon: New Book Arrivals

 New book arrivals for possible review

In the Between: 21st Century Short Stories

by 

Brice Particelli (Editor)

Stories of people of differing and mixed cultural backgrounds, genders, sexuality, and ableness, urban or rural—all striving to forge a future in today’s divided America.

The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart

by 

Chesil,

 

Takami Nieda (Translator)

YA novel - the complexities of growing up as a Zainichi Korean in Japan, emigration, and adolescent trauma.

Death Doesn't Forget

(Taipei Night Market #4)

by 

Ed Lin

Jing-nan, owner of a popular night market food stall in Taipei, Taiwan, is framed for a string of high-profile murders—why does it seem like he's always the one left holding the skewer? Mystery and comedy.

DoubleBlind

(Georgia Davis #6)

by 

Libby Fischer Hellmann

Chicago PI Georgia Davis agrees to help after Susan Siler’s aunt died suddenly after her Covid booster, and the mother wants the death investigated. 

What are you reading this week? 

Memes: The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer. Also,  It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Mailbox Monday, and Sunday Salon, Stacking the Shelves

Sunday Salon: Rom-Coms Galore

 Romantic comedies: NetGalley

Lucy Checks In by Dee Ernst, August 16, 2022, St. Martin's Griffin

Genre: romantic comedy, women's fiction, travel

Comments: Lucia Giannetti was hotel manager for the Fielding Hotel in New York, but after hotel owner and former lover Tony Fielding disappears with millions of dollars, Lucy has to cover the lawsuits and debts with her own money.  

Broken hearted, discouraged, and broke, she accepts a job at the Hotel Paradis in Rennes, France to renovate the 200-year-old hotel. The owner, Claudine, is looking for an American manager to attract tourists. Fixing the run-down chateau with help from only the six hotel residents/co-owners, and with few resources or funding, Lucy faces a daunting challenge. 

I got a better idea of what it takes to update and run a large hotel, from clean linens, to painting the walls, repairing woodwork, plaster and plumbing, decorating each room, and then attracting and taking care of  visitors. 

It was an interesting reading experience, following Lucy and the residents/co-owners of the hotel through the process of creating a beautiful country hotel. Romance helped the story too, as of course, Lucy meets someone she becomes attracted to. A delightful read for the armchair traveler and those who enjoy romantic comedy and France.

I also liked the author's previous rom-com, Maggie Finds Her Muse. 

Rom-coms to be read:

Seoulmates by Jen Frederick, January 25, 2022, Berkley

Genre: romantic drama, multil-cultural interest

About: When Korean adoptee Hara Wilson lands in Seoul to find her birth mother, she doesn’t plan on falling in love with the first man she lays eyes on, but Choi Yujun is irresistible. (publisher)

 
The No-Show by Beth O'Leary, April 26, 2022, Berkley

Genre: rom-com, women's fiction

 

About: Three women are unwittingly stood up by the same man they all consider their boyfriend.  

Siobhan is a life coach; Miranda is a tree surgeon; Jane is a  volunteer for a local charity shop. 

Can't wait to see how each one handles this. 

What are you reading this week? 

Memes: The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer. Also,  It's Monday: What Are You Reading, Mailbox Monday, and Sunday Salon, Stacking the Shelves

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.