In My Mailbox/Monday Mailbox: May 3, 2010

Story Siren hosts In My Mailbox where book bloggers offer a peek into the books that arrived in their homes over the past week. Mailbox Monday hosted by Marcia at the Printed Page has the same objective. These memes are great in that they offer us a chance to see what others are reading- it's like candy for book addicts!

As a form of comfort for myself after a grueling week at work, I made a stop on my way from CT to NYC at a little slice of book heaven - The Book Barn in Niantic, CT. I heard about this bookstore via the Spotlight on Bookstores feature on She is Too Fond of Books. The feature was written by author Sarah Pekkanen and she extolled the virtues of all the used books available at the barn and the variety of rooms and sheds dotted about the property each chock full of books. Well, the Book Barn didn't disappoint and I picked up 8 books! I could have brought many more home but I had to draw the line . . . I figure I can always go back!



Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel by Lisa See - I have heard wonderful things about this author and may read this book for the May selection of the World Party Reading Challenge hosted by Fizzy Thoughts

The Young Wan by Brendan O'Carroll - I have read all the others in the Agnes Browne series so I was excited to be able to pick this one up.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith - I somehow missed this classic growing up but definitely want to read it

A Minor Indiscretion by Carole Matthews - this looked like a fun beach read!

A Summer Affair: A Novel by Elin Hilderbrand - I haven't read anything by this author yet but she seems to have quite a following and the cover made me think of the beach during the upcoming summer!

Rory & Ita by Roddy Doyle - I was looking for some of his fiction but saw this non-fiction work he wrote about his parents and thought it sounded interesting

Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd - this was recommended on a list of Irish fiction I saw on Reading Matters

Forget me Not by Isabel Wolff - it appears this was never released in the US but I have a weakness for "Brit Chick Lit" so I had to snag it.

And the lovely STRAND mug and pen (there was also a tin of "NY mints" but I finished those before taking the picture!) arrived from Jill at Fizzy Thoughts - it was the prize for the March mini-challenge of her NY Challenge - thanks so much Jill!

What came into your home this week?

Sunday Salon: May 2, 2010 - April in Review

It feels good to have surfaced and joined the land of the living again! Work has been absolutely horrific over the past few weeks and I essentially dropped out of life as I pulled all-nighters and responded to one crisis after another at work. It has become clear that this the crazy schedule at work is now the new normal so I made a decision last week to stake out some boundaries and maintain work/life balance as best as possible. With that, I am headed back to bootcamp tomorrow morning and am back in the land of book blogs - yay!

April was definitely light in terms of reviews (see above) but I did do a lot of reading. Here is what I read this month - the links take you to my reviews if I have completed them:

Very Valentine: Adriana Trigiani
Brava Valentine: Adriana Trigiani
The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott: Kelly O'Connor McNees
Hiking Through: Paul Stultzman
Alexandra, Gone: Anna McPartlin
The Guest House: Barbara Richardson

I am also remiss in posting my review of The Season of Second Chances by Diane Meier but I will have that up (along with a giveaway of my ARC) this week.

On to a better month in May!

Review: Very Valentine by Adriana Trigiani

Very Valentine by Adriana Trigiani introduces the Roncalli clan and the world of custom shoes, the West Village and the beauty of Italy. What a combination - the premise sounded irresistible to me and the book certainly delivered.





My Summary: Valentine Roncalli lives with her grandmother in an apartment above the West Village shop that houses the Angelini custom shoe business in which Valentine works with her grandmother. The business has been in the family for generations and Valentine has a passion for her family, their history and for the artistry of making one of a kind shoes using luxurious materials. Amid the stresses of keeping a small niche business afloat, Valentine attempts a romance with a handsome restauranteur and tries to fit their lovelife into their crazy schedules. When Valentine accompanies her grandmother to Italy on her annual buying trip, she steps back into time and her passion for the art of shoemaking deepens. While there, she also begins to question work/life balance and the importance of trying to achieve it all.

My Thoughts: I absolutely loved this book! Valentine is a dynamic protagonist - she is pushed to taking her family business into the current century by financial pressures but then learns she has a real head for business and a true passion for the artistry of the craft of custom shoe design. I found myself rooting for her from the start whether in her struggles with the business or her relationship with the complicated and ambitious Roman Falconi. When she traveled to Italy (a dream of mine!) and observed how much Italians value work/life balance, I found I really related to her desire for a slower pace. This quote, spoken by Valentine, certainly gives me pause,

"You [her Italian friend] live a balanced life. You work, you eat, you rest. We don't. We can't. We live as though we have something to prove. There's never enough time, we eat on the run, and we sleep as little as possible. We believe the one who works the hardest wins."

What I really love about this book, however, is the boisterous Roncalli clan and the vivid descriptions of both New York City and Italy (especially the scenes in Isle of Capri). In addition to their matriarch, Gram, the Roncalli clan includes Valentine's two sisters, Tess and Jaclyn, her brother Alfred, her funny, larger than life mother and her drily humorous Dad. Despite their bickering and the fact that are all involved in each other's lives, their love for each other and the value they place on family is clear. Although not nearly as boisterous (or boisterous at all for that matter!), my family also places a lot of importance on pulling together and being there for each other above all so I could relate to Valentine's involvement with and true affection for her family.

The Roncalli's are from Queens, which is where I grew up, and I enjoyed all the references to local spots in the neighborhood including Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church in Forest Hills and Leonard's of Great Neck (I attended a prom there!) If I didn't know that author grew up in SW Virginia, I would think she hailed from Queens - her references were spot on! The level of detail she provides about locales - Queens, Italy, The West Village - really add to the novel and serve to draw the reader even further into her story.

This was one of those books where I was dreading the end because I didn't want to leave the characters or the life the author had created. Fortunately, this is the first in a 3 book series and I was able to quickly move on to the 2nd book Brava, Valentine (review will be posted soon) but it will be a long wait for the 3rd book due to come out in February 2010. If you want a little more from the author in the meantime, check out her website, or listen to her interview with Book Club Girl on Blog Talk Radio where she talks about Very Valentine.

I received this book for review from TLC Book Tours; although the author is orignally from SW VA, she currently lives in NYC and her book is decidedly set in NYC so this review meets the criteria for the Literary Road Trip

MIA

Just writing a short post to apologize for being absent so long - things have well and truly blown up at work and my days and nights are consumed with crisis management at the moment. I miss reading the blogs and posting my reviews but I cannot carve the time out right now. I pulled two all nighters last week alone (and I realized I don't bounce back from them the way I did in college!). I hope things settle down soon so I can once again take comfort in my book blogs!

Fortunately, I am still reading since it does help me unwind and sleep at night so I will have lots of reviews to post soon! Hope to be back to blogging shortly!

In My Mailbox/Mailbox Monday: April 19, 2010

Story Siren hosts In My Mailbox where book bloggers offer a peek into the books that arrived in their homes over the past week. Mailbox Monday hosted by Marcia at the Printed Page has the same objective. These memes are great in that they offer us a chance to see what others are reading- it's like candy for book addicts!

This was a very light week - two books arrived from paperbackswap.com. Since my IMM/MM post was the only one that made it up last week due to a CRAZY schedule at work, it's probably for the best that I didn't receive too many books! It would only have put me further behind!


Home Safe: A Novel by Elizabeth Berg. I have read several of Berg's books over the years and always find her writing to be thoughtful and almost poetic. I have seen good reviews of this book and am looking forward to reading it.









The Accidental Family by Rowan Coleman. I discovered the prequel to this novel,The Accidental Mother, one day at the bookstore - I saw it on a table and since I like British authors and the story looked interesting, I picked it up. Since then, I have read several of Coleman's books and am excited to get back to the characters that initially drew me to the author!

What came into your home this week?

Review: Alexandra, Gone by Anna McPartlin

From Simon and Schuster.com:

Once, Jane Moore and Alexandra Walsh were inseparable, sharing secrets and stolen candy, plotting their futures together. But when Jane became pregnant at seventeen, they drifted slowly apart. Jane has spent the years since raising her son, now seventeen himself, on her own, running a gallery, managing her sister’s art career, and looking after their volatile mother—all the while trying not to resent the limited choices life has given her.

Then a quirk of fate and a faulty elevator bring Jane into contact with Tom, Alexandra’s husband, who has some shocking news. Alexandra disappeared from a south Dublin suburb months ago, and Tom has been searching fruitlessly for her. Jane offers to help, as do the elevator’s other passengers—Jane’s brilliant but self-absorbed sister, Elle, and Leslie Sheehan, a reclusive web designer who’s ready to step back into the world again. And as Jane quickly realizes, Tom isn’t the only one among them who’s looking for something . . . or traveling toward unexpected revelations about love, life, and what it means to let go, in every sense.

In this insightful and irresistible novel, by turns profound, poignant, and laugh- out-loud funny, acclaimed Irish writer Anna McPartlin tells a story of friendship and love, of the families we are born into and the ones we create for ourselves, and of the hope and strength that remain when we fi nd the courage to leave the past behind at last.

My Review:
Alexandra, Goneby Anna McPartlin opens with the disappearance of Alexandra one afternoon in Dublin. The reader knows little about her but witnesses her disappearance and the subsequent devastation of her husband, Tom, and her family as they desperately hold out hope that she will be found healthy and safe. While looking for Alexandra, Tom has a chance meeting in a broken elevator with Leslie, Elle and Elle's sister, Jane. The four soon band together in the search for Alexandra and through that process come to know each other and to share their personal tragedies.

Each of the four main characters has their own storyline:

Jane is raising her teenage son alone but still loves her son's father, her teenage sweetheart. She is the matriarch of her family and takes responsibility for not only her sister Elle's career but the rest of life too - she manages her money, provides her with a home and is the rock upon which Elle relies. In addition to Elle, Jane is responsible for their alcoholic mother who lives with her and is prone to rude outbursts.

Elle is the boisterous and unpredictable artist who makes unwise decisions in love and tends to live life in extremes - she is very much the opposite of Jane but their love and affection for each other is clear.

Leslie is the solitary remaining living member of her family - cancer has ravaged the family's gene pool and she has lost both parents and two sisters to the disease. She knows she has the faulty gene that led to the early demise of her sisters due to ovarian or breast cancer and she essentially shuts down, closes herself off from people and relationships while she waits for her inevitable diagnosis and early death.

Tom is devastated by his young wife's disappearance and his life slowly unravels after she goes missing. His relationship with his in-laws is strained as many of them blame him for her disappearance; as a result, he finds himself increasingly alone in his search for his wife and his desperation until he is trapped in the elevator with the three women who sign on for his search and rally around him.

The story is essentially told around the absence of Alexandra - we learn very little about her throughout the novel and the real revelations are in the lives of the four main characters who are tied together in their search for Alexandra. At some point, I found myself almost forgetting about Alexandra as I became more and more drawn into the stories of the four main characters. Because the story is told from the points of view of these four main characters (with a few other minor ones thrown in for good measure), the novel seemed a little choppy to me in the beginning - I felt as if I barely knew any character well enough to care about them and kept wondering when I would learn more about Alexandra. But once I realized that the book was really not about Alexandra and the stories behind each of the four main characters began to unfold, I found I could not put the book down! In the last third of the novel, the revelations come fast and furious for each of the four main characters. Their stories were often very emotional as they dealt with histories of mental illness, sacrificed dreams and the loss of loved ones. I definitely shed a tear or two in the last part of the book.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel - even though some of the themes are quite heavy (death, loss, mental illness), the author infuses the dialogue with humor and quips which helps to lighten the mood of the novel. I am now eager to move onto the other novels by the author currently on my shelf - Pack Up the Moon,Apart from the Crowd, and As Sure As the Sun.

Thanks to Sarah Reidy from Simon and Schuster for sending me the review copy of this novel. The review meets the criteria for the Ireland Challenge 2010

In My Mailbox/Mailbox Monday: April 12, 2010

Story Siren hosts In My Mailbox where book bloggers offer a peek into the books that arrived in their homes over the past week. Mailbox Monday hosted by Marcia at the Printed Page has the same objective. These memes are great in that they offer us a chance to see what others are reading- it's like candy for book addicts!

Here is what arrived this week . . .







Everyone Else's Girl by Megan Crane: This looks like a light fun read - I am looking forward to it.

The God of Small Things: A Novel by Arundhati Roy: This arrived from Bookmooch. I ordered after many recommendations. I plan to read it for the South Asian Authors Challenge.

Guest House by Barbara Richardson: This arrived for review - I will be reviewing it in the last week of this month.

Saving CeeCee Honeycutt: A Novel by Beth Hoffman: Everyone seems to have loved this book - I am looking forward to reading it! Thanks to Dar at Peeking Between the Pages - it was a win from her site!

What came into your home this week?