WEEKLY UPDATES: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!

 

Good morning!  Today’s post will link up to Sunday Salon, The Sunday Post,  and Book Journey, for  Weekly Updates.

**Mailbox Monday is now hosted at the home site:  Mailbox Monday.

Good morning, Bloggers!  Grab some coffee (or a mimosa), and let’s talk about our weeks.

 

 

The week has been a great one, with some good reading and blogging…and a nice lead-in to my birthday weekend.  Celebration started yesterday, at my daughter’s salon, where I got my trim and color done.  This is Day II, which never looks as good as when it is fresh from the stylist’s touch.

 

 

Today I lounged around, bingeing on Gilmore Girls again, Season III now; tomorrow is lunch with family.

 

Here’s what happened last week…

ON THE BLOGS:

Weekend Potpourri:  Cozy Moments

Curl up with Intros/Teasers – “Further Out Than You Thought”

Savoring an Upcoming Release – “Driftwood”

Hump Day Potpourri:  Seasonal Treats – Bookish & Non-Bookish

My Bookish (and Not So Bookish) Thoughts:  Family Drama & Engaging Reads

Creative Friday:  Book Beginnings/Friday 56 – “The Oleander Sisters”

A Saturday of Savoring the Moments – Family Time

Review:  Dear Daughter, by Elizabeth Little

Review;  Ruin Falls, by Jenny Milchman

Review:  Further Out Than You Thought, by Michaela Carter

Review:  A Good Marriage, by Stephen King

 

***

 

INCOMING BOOKS:  (Titles/Covers Linked to Amazon)

Three books came in my mailbox from Amazon Vine; I purchased one book at Barnes & Noble; and I downloaded three e-books for Sparky.

 

 

 

The Rosie Effect, by Graeme Simsion (Vine)

 

 

 

 

Don Tillman and Rosie Jarman are back. The Wife Project is complete, and Don and Rosie are happily married and living in New York. But they’re about to face a new challenge because— surprise!—Rosie is pregnant.

Don sets about learning the protocols of becoming a father, but his unusual research style gets him into trouble with the law. Fortunately his best friend Gene is on hand to offer advice: he’s left Claudia and moved in with Don and Rosie.

As Don tries to schedule time for pregnancy research, getting Gene and Claudia to reconcile, servicing the industrial refrigeration unit that occupies half his apartment, helping Dave the Baseball Fan save his business, and staying on the right side of Lydia the social worker, he almost misses the biggest problem of all: he might lose Rosie when she needs him the most.

 

Saving Grace, by Jane Green (Vine)

 

 

 

Grace and Ted Chapman are widely regarded as the perfect literary power couple. Ted is a successful novelist and Grace, his wife of twenty years, is beautiful, stylish, carefree, and a wonderful homemaker. But what no one sees, what is churning under the surface, is Ted’s rages. His mood swings. And the precarious house of cards that their lifestyle is built upon. When Ted’s longtime assistant and mainstay leaves, the house of cards begins to crumble and Grace, with dark secrets in her past, is most vulnerable. She finds herself in need of help but with no one to turn to…until the perfect new assistant shows up out of the blue.  To the rescue comes Beth, a competent young woman who can handle Ted and has the calm efficiency to weather the storms that threaten to engulf the Chapman household. Soon, though, it’s clear to Grace that Beth might be too good to be true. This new interloper might be the biggest threat of all, one that could cost Grace her marriage, her reputation, and even her sanity.  With everything at stake and no one to confide in, Grace must find a way to save herself before it is too late.

 

Getting Even, by Sarah Rayner (Vine)

 

 

 

Revenge has never been such fun

How would you feel if your best friend at work betrayed you? Was secretly having an affair with an influential colleague? Won a coveted promotion, then teamed you up with a mere junior, leaving you feeling completely demoted? What would you do? For Ivy there’s no choice. The only person she has ever trusted, Orianna, has blown it big time. So there’s only one way forward: revenge.

Ivy’s campaign is brilliant, if horribly destructive, and she’s determined to get even with the woman who has dared to cross her. But is Ivy really the innocent party? Or is she hiding secrets of her own?

 

Copper Beach, by Jayne Ann Krentz (Purchased)

 

 

 

A New York Times Bestselling Author — Within the pages of centuries-old books lie the secrets of the paranormal. Abby Radwell’s unusual psychic talent has made her an expert in such volumes — and sometimes taken her into dangerous territory. After a deadly incident in the private library of an obsessive collector, Abby receives a blackmail threat and rumors swirl that an old alchemical text has reappeared on the black market. So Abby hires Sam Coppersmith, an investigator who can also play bodyguard.

 

***

Downloads:

Leaving Time (e-book), by Jodi Picoult

 

 

 

For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe she was abandoned, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice’s old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to her mother’s whereabouts.

Desperate to find the truth, Jenna enlists two unlikely allies in her quest: Serenity Jones, a psychic who rose to fame finding missing persons, only to later doubt her gifts, and Virgil Stanhope, the jaded private detective who’d originally investigated Alice’s case along with the strange, possibly linked death of one of her colleagues. As the three work together to uncover what happened to Alice, they realize that in asking hard questions, they’ll have to face even harder answers.

As Jenna’s memories dovetail with the events in her mother’s journals, the story races to a mesmerizing finish. A deeply moving, gripping, and intelligent page-turner, Leaving Time is Jodi Picoult at the height of her powers.

 

Florence Gordon (e-book), by Brian Morton

 

 

 

Meet Florence Gordon: blunt, brilliant, cantankerous and passionate, feminist icon to young women, invisible to almost everyone else. At seventy-five, Florence has earned her right to set down the burdens of family and work and shape her legacy at long last. But just as she is beginning to write her long-deferred memoir, her son Daniel returns to New York from Seattle with his wife and daughter, and they embroil Florence in their dramas, clouding the clarity of her days and threatening her well-defended solitude. And then there is her left foot, which is starting to drag….

 

Some Luck (e-book), by Jane Smiley

 

 

 

 

On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different children: from Frank, the handsome, willful first born, and Joe, whose love of animals and the land sustains him, to Claire, who earns a special place in her father’s heart.

Each chapter in Some Luck covers a single year, beginning in 1920, as American soldiers like Walter return home from World War I, and going up through the early 1950s, with the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change. As the Langdons branch out from Iowa to both coasts of America, the personal and the historical merge seamlessly: one moment electricity is just beginning to power the farm, and the next a son is volunteering to fight the Nazis; later still, a girl you’d seen growing up now has a little girl of her own, and you discover that your laughter and your admiration for all these lives are mixing with tears.

 

***

 

WHAT’S UP NEXT?  (Titles/Covers Linked to Amazon)

 

When We Fall, by Emily Liebert

 

 

 

The Oleander Sisters, by Elaine Hussey

 

 

 

The Children Act (e-book), by Ian McEwan

 

 

 

***

As we look back at our week, and contemplate the new one, let’s enjoy the moments.  Thanks for stopping by!

 

 

 

***