SUNDAY UPDATES/MAILBOX MONDAY: A NEW MONTH! — AUGUST 4

Good morning!  Today’s post will link up to Sunday Salon, The Sunday Post, and head over to Bermudaonion for Mailbox Monday.

We’ve said goodbye to July this past week…and now we’re looking ahead to August and the final weeks of summer.

Here’s what’s been happening around my place(s) in the blogosphere.

ON THE BLOGS:

Serendipitous Tuesdays:  Intros/Teasers – Necessary Lies

Author Interview with Shalanna Collins

Monthly Wrap-up:  Goodbye to July

Thursday Sparks:  First Person or Third Person Voice

Go out on a Limb on Friday with Book Beginnings/The Friday 56

Sweet Saturday Sample:  Second Thoughts?

READING/REVIEWING: (Click Titles for Reviews)

Someone Else’s Love Story, by Joshilyn Jackson

Daddy’s Gone A Hunting (e-book), by Mary Higgins Clark

The Wednesday Daughters (e-book), by Meg Waite Clayton

The First Lie (e-book), by Diane Chamberlain (Prequel)

INCOMING BOOKS:

Amy Falls Down, by Jincy Willett (Amazon Vine Review)

Amy Gallup is an aging novelist and writing instructor living in Escondido, California, with her dog, Alphonse. Since recent unsettling events, she has made some progress. While she still has writer’s block, she doesn’t suffer from it. She’s still a hermit, but she has allowed some of her class members into her life. She is no longer numb, angry, and sardonic: she is merely numb and bemused, which is as close to happy as she plans to get. Amy is calm.

So, when on New Year’s morning she shuffles out to her backyard garden to plant a Norfolk pine, she is wholly unprepared for what happens next.

Amy falls down.

A simple accident, as a result of which something happens, and then something else, and then a number of different things, all as unpredictable as an eight-ball break. At first the changes are small, but as these small events carom off one another, Amy’s life changes in ways that range from ridiculous to frightening to profound.

This most reluctant of adventurers is dragged and propelled by train, plane, and automobile through an outlandish series of antic media events on her way to becoming–to her horror–a kind of celebrity. And along the way, as the numbness begins to wear off, she comes up against something she has avoided all her life: her future, that “sleeping monster, not to be poked.”

Jincy Willett’s Amy Falls Down explores, through the experience of one character, the role that accident plays in all our lives. “You turn a corner and beasts break into arias, gunfire erupts, waking a hundred families, starting a hundred different conversations. You crack your head open and three thousand miles away a stranger with Asperger’s jump-starts your career.”

We are all like Amy. We are all wholly unprepared for what happens next.

Also, there’s a basset hound.

Innocent, by Scott Turow (Purchased)   (Sequel to Presumed Innocent)

The sequel to the genre-defining, landmark bestseller Presumed Innocent, INNOCENT continues the story of Rusty Sabich and Tommy Molto who are, once again, twenty years later, pitted against each other in a riveting psychological match after the mysterious death of Rusty’s wife.

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The mailbox was very quiet…which is probably a good thing after the bonanza of books I received last week.  Now I just have to settle down and get some reading done!