Chasing Utopia by Nikki Giovanni

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: Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid by Nikki Giovanni
Published October 29, 2013; William Morrow
Genre: a combination of prose and poetry

First paragraph:

So here is the actual story. I was bored. Well, not bored because I had the privilege of interviewing Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in space, who said she pursued a degree in physics and also became a medical doctor to keep her mind occupied. Mae's IQ must be nine hundred and fifty-five or thereabouts. I asked, "How do you keep from being bored?" And she replied, "A friend of my father's once told me "'If you're bored you're not paying attention.'" 

Poetry teaser:

Poets shouldn't commit
Suicide
That would leave the world
To those without imagination
Or hearts
(from the poem, "Poets")

Publisher description:
"Nikki Giovanni's poetry has spurred movements and inspired songs, turned hearts and informed generations. She's been hailed as a healer and as a national treasure. But Giovanni's heart resides in the everyday, where family and lovers gather, friends commune, and those no longer with us are remembered. And at every gathering there is food--food as sustenance, food as aphrodisiac, food as memory. A pot of beans is flavored with her mother's sighs--this sigh part cardamom, that one the essence of clove; a lover requests a banquet as an affirmation of ongoing passion; homage is paid to the most time-honored appetizer: soup.

With Chasing Utopia, Giovanni demands that the prosaic--flowers, birdsong, win-ter--be seen as poetic, and reaffirms once again why she is as energetic, "remarkable" (Gwendolyn Brooks), "wonderful" (Marian Wright Edelman),"outspoken, prolific, energetic" (New York Times), and relevant as ever."

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

Book Feature: The Purchase by Linda Spalding

Title: The Purchase: A Novel by Linda Spalding
Published August 6, 2013: Pantheon
Genre: historical novel

About the novel: 
Winner of Canada's 2012 Governor General's Award for Fiction

In this historical novel, a Quaker family moves from Pennsylvania to the Virginia frontier, where slaves are the only available workers and where the family’s values and beliefs are sorely tested.

In 1798, Daniel Dickinson, recently widowed and shunned by his fellow Quakers when he marries his young servant girl to help with his five small children, moves his family down the Wilderness Road to the Virginia/Kentucky border. Although determined to hold on to his Quaker ways, and despite his belief that slavery is a sin, Daniel becomes the owner of a young boy named Onesimus, setting in motion a chain of events that will lead to tragedy and murder, forever changing his children’s lives and driving the book to an unexpected conclusion.

A novel of sacrifice and redemption set in a tiny community on the edge of the frontier, this narrative unfolds around Daniel’s struggle to maintain his faith; his young wife, Ruth, who must find her own way; and Mary, the eldest child, who is bound to a runaway slave by a terrible secret. The Purchase is as hard-edged as the realities of pioneer life.

Excerpt from the novel: 

Daniel looked over at the daughter who sat where a wife should sit. Cold sun with a hint of snow. The new wife rode behind him like a stranger while the younger children huddled together, coughing and clenching their teeth. The wind shook them and the wagon wounded the road with its weight and the river gullied along to one side in its heartless way. It moved east and north while Daniel and all he had in the world went steadily the other way, praying for fair game and tree limbs to stack up for shelter. “We should make camp while it’s light,” said the daughter, who was thirteen years old and holding the reins. But Daniel wasn’t listening. He heard a wheel grating and the river gullying. He heard his father – the memory of that lost, admonishing voice – but he did not hear his daughter, who admonished in much the same way. 

Some time later the child pulled the two horses to a halt, saying again that they must make camp while the sky held its light. The new wife arranged dishes on the seat of the wagon, and the child, whose name was Mary, pulled salted meat out of a trunk at the back. It was their fifth day on the road and such habits were developing. By morning there would be snow on the ground, the fire would die, and the children would have to move on without warm food or drink. They would take up their places in the burdened wagon while Daniel’s fine Pennsylvania mares shied and balked and turned in their tracks. A man travelling on horseback might cover a hundred miles in three days, but with a wagon full of crying or coughing children, the mountainous roads of Virginia were a sorrow made of mud and felled trees and devilish still-growing pines. 

The children, being young and centered on their own thoughts, were only dimly aware of the hazards of the road and of the great forest hovering. They hardly noticed the mountains, which were first gentle and then fierce, because all of it came upon them as gradually as shapes in an unhappy dream. The mountains only interrupted a place between land and sky. The forest got thicker and darker on every side. They had, within a few weeks, watched their mother die, given up home and belongings, landscape and habits, school and friends. They had watched people become cold to them, shut and lock doors to deny them entrance. How were they to understand? There were other wagons leaving Pennsylvania and going south and west, but none were so laden with woe as the one that carried the five children and the widower and his new bride. 

Excerpted from The Purchase by Linda Spalding. Copyright © 2013 by Linda Spalding. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the author:
Linda Spalding was born in Kansas and lived in Mexico and Hawaii before immigrating to Canada in 1982. She is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, Daughters of Captain Cook, The Paper Wife, and (with her daughter Esta) Mere. The Purchase received Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award and its Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Spalding lives in Toronto, where she is the editor of Brick magazine.

Visit Linda's website at http://www.lindaspalding.com/.

Thanks to Wiley Saichek,  Marketing & Publicity Consultant, for the excerpt and author and book information. 

Book Review: The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan

Welcome to the Sunday Salon!  I want to discuss this intriguing book I've just finished reading. 

Title: The Valley of Amazement: A Novel by Amy Tan
Published November 5, 2013; Ecco
Genre: historical novel

Comments: Finishing this novel has led me to read more of Tan's books and I have started The Kitchen's God's Wife, her second book after the popular Joy Luck Club. I seem better able to put myself into the cultural context of those first two books, more than I was able to the first time I tried reading them. The emphasis on superstition and ghosts and women who lived in a feudal environment was not something I understood very well or could relate to, as an example.

The Valley of Amazement is a novel about courtesans in early 19th century Shanghai, and revolves around a tense and tenuous mother-daughter relationship, as well as the lives of courtesans in China, their customs, formalities, behavior and norms. As I read along, I was reminded of Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, then Puccini's Madame Butterfly without the tragic ending, and later on of the Chinese film Raise the Red Lantern, which is about women in a household with multiple wives. These themes are all in Tan's new book.

The second half of the book had its own drama and some excitement for a reader who loves a chase. There are themes of sisterhood among the "flower sisters" or courtesans who bond and help each other in difficult situations. There are themes of different kinds of love in men-women relationships, themes of reunion and forgiveness.  I can't get into specifics without revealing plot!

This was an enlightening as well as entertaining and informative book. It took me effortlessly into another time and place and culture through its characters' ups and downs during a dangerous and daring time in Chinese history.

Publisher's book description:
"Moving between the dazzling world of courtesans in turn of the century Shanghai, a remote Chinese mountain village, and the rough-hewn streets of nineteenth-century San Francisco, Amy Tan's new novel maps the lives of three generations of women connected by the mystery of an evocative painting known as "The Valley of Amazement."

Violet is one of the most celebrated courtesans in Shanghai.  Half-Chinese and half-American, she struggles to understand who she really is. Abandoned by her mother, Lucia, Violet's quest to truly love and be loved will set her on a path of danger and complexity.

Lucia, a willful American woman who was once herself the proprietress of Shanghai's most exclusive courtesan house, nurses her own secret wounds, which began when, as a teenager, she fell in love with a Chinese painter and followed him from San Francisco to Shanghai. Her search for redemption will bring her to a startling reunion.

Spanning fifty years and two continents, The Valley of Amazement is a narrative of family secrets, the legacy of trauma, and the profound connections between mothers and daughters, that returns readers to the compelling territory Amy Tan so expertly mapped in The Joy Luck Club."

The book is set between 1905 to around 1937-38, just before the war broke out with the Japanese. The book ends there, but as a reader I wondered what could have happened had the novel continued. That's how real the characters became for me.

Thanks to Ecco for an ARE of this novel for review.

Book Beginning: Labor Day by Joyce Maynard

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.

Book beginning:

It was just the two of us, my mother and me, after my father left. He said I should count the new baby he had with his new wife, Marjorie, as part of my family too, plus Richard, Marjorie' son, who was six months younger than me though he was good at all the sports I messed up in. But my family was my mother, Adele, and me, period. I would have counted the hamster, Joe, before including that baby, Chloe. 

Page 56: 

"How long since the last time you rotated your tires, Adele? he asked.
She just looked at him. 

Book description:
"With the end of summer closing in and a steamy Labor Day weekend looming in the town of Holton Mills, New Hampshire, thirteen-year-old Henry--lonely, friendless, not too good at sports--spends most of his time watching television, reading, and daydreaming about the soft skin and budding bodies of his female classmates. For company Henry has his long-divorced mother, Adele--a onetime dancer whose summer project was to teach him how to foxtrot; his hamster, Joe; and awkward Saturday-night outings to Friendly's with his estranged father and new stepfamily.

As much as he tries, Henry knows that even with his jokes and his "Husband for a Day" coupon, he still can't make his emotionally fragile mother happy. Adele has a secret that makes it hard for her to leave their house, and seems to possess an irreparably broken heart.

But all that changes on the Thursday before Labor Day, when a mysterious bleeding man named Frank approaches Henry and asks for a hand. Over the next five days, Henry will learn some of life's most valuable lessons: how to throw a baseball, the secret to perfect pie crust, the breathless pain of jealousy, the power of betrayal, and the importance of putting others--especially those we love--above ourselves. And the knowledge that real love is worth waiting for."

Title: Labor Day: A Novel by Joyce Maynard
To be published December 3, 2013; William Morrow paperback

What book is next on your list to read?

Happy Thanksgiving/Hanukkah!

Saw this colorful Turkey Honeycomb Centerpiece and thought it was right for today! Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours! And Happy Hanukkah!

Reading for today:

Finishing up Amy Tan's The Valley of Amazement and may even have time to start
Ann Patchett's This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. I also want to get into Tatiana by Martin Cruz Smith.

Do you have time for reading today?

Foreign Gods Inc. by Okey Ndibe

Waiting on Wednesday is hosted weekly by Jill @ Breaking the Spine. Let us know what new releases you are eagerly awaiting. Link your post to Breaking the Spine

Foreign Gods, Inc. by Okey Ndibe, to be released January 14, 2014 by Soho Press.

Publisher description:
"This tells the story of Ike, a New York-based Nigerian cab driver who sets out to steal the statue of an ancient war deity from his home village and sell it to a New York gallery. Ike's plan is fueled by desperation. Despite a degree in economics from a major American college, his strong accent has barred him from the corporate world.

Forced to eke out a living as a cab driver, he is unable to manage the emotional and material needs of a temperamental African American bride and a widowed mother demanding financial support. When he turns to gambling, his mounting losses compound his woes. And so he travels back to Nigeria to steal the statue, where he has to deal with old friends, family, and a mounting conflict between those in the village who worship the deity, and those who practice Christianity.

 A meditation on the dreams, promises and frustrations of the immigrant life in America; the nature and impact of religious conflicts; an examination of the ways in which modern culture creates or heightens infatuation with the "exotic," including the desire to own strange objects and hanker after ineffable illusions; and an exploration of the shifting nature of memory, Foreign Gods  illuminates our globally interconnected world like no other."

What new book release are you waiting for?

Book Teaser: The Queen's Gambit by Elizabeth Fremantle

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: Queen's Gambit: A Novel by Elizabeth Fremantle
Published August 6, 2013; Simon and Schuster
Genre: historical fiction
Source: publisher

page 56/teaser:

"Kit," he says, eventually, "you can trust me." His voice has a supplicant's tone.
"How can I?"
"I didn't know you then...I know you now."

First chapter:

The notary smells of dust and ink. How is it, Larymer wonders, that when one sense blunt another sharpens. He can pick up the scent of everything, the reek of ale on the man's breath, the yeasty whiff of bread baking in the kitchens below, the wet-dog stink of the spaniel curled up in the hearth. But he can see little, the room swims and the man is a vague dark shape leaning over the bed with a grimace of a smile.

Publisher description:
"Widowed for the second time at age thirty-one Katherine Parr falls deeply for the dashing courtier Thomas Seymour and hopes at last to marry for love. However, obliged to return to court, she attracts the attentions of the ailing, egotistical, and dangerously powerful Henry VIII, who dispatches his love rival, Seymour, to the Continent. No one is in a position to refuse a royal proposal so, haunted by the fates of his previous wives, two executions, two annulments, one death in childbirth, Katherine must wed Henry and become his sixth queen. 

Katherine has to employ all her instincts to navigate the treachery of the court, drawing a tight circle of women around her, including her stepdaughter, Meg, traumatized by events from their past that are shrouded in secrecy, and their loyal servant Dot, who knows and sees more than she understands. With the Catholic faction on the rise once more, reformers being burned for heresy, and those close to the king vying for position, Katherine's survival seems unlikely. Yet as she treads the razor's edge of court intrigue, she never quite gives up on love."

Katherine Parr was Henry VIII's last queen, one who survived his reign and married again. I am eager to read this one.