Book Reviews & Stories by Danielle
This Friday I want to share some new memoirs I’ve added to my TBR list. Memoirs are one of my favorite genres mostly because I’m writing one myself and because they are stories about real people and real experiences.
TITLE: Stir
AUTHOR: Jessica Fechtor
PUBLISHER: Penguin Group Avery
RELEASE DATE: June 23, 2015
GENRE: Memoir
BUY LINKS: AMAZON | B&N | BAM! | HUDSON | INDIEBOUND | POWELL’S | TARGET | WALMART
An exquisite memoir about how food connects us to ourselves, our lives, and each other.
At 28, Jessica Fechtor was happily immersed in graduate school and her young marriage, and thinking about starting a family. Then one day, she went for a run and an aneurysm burst in her brain. She nearly died. She lost her sense of smell, the sight in her left eye, and was forced to the sidelines of the life she loved.
Jessica’s journey to recovery began in the kitchen as soon as she was able to stand at the stovetop and stir. There, she drew strength from the restorative power of cooking and baking. Written with intelligence, humor, and warmth, Stir is a heartfelt examination of what it means to nourish and be nourished.”
Woven throughout the narrative are 27 recipes for dishes that comfort and delight. For readers of M.F.K.Fisher, Molly Wizenberg, and Tamar Adler, as well as Oliver Sacks, Jill Bolte Taylor, and Susannah Cahalan, Stir is sure to inspire, and send you straight to the kitchen. (Description found on NetGalley.com)
TITLE: Below The Water Line
AUTHOR: Lisa Karlin
PUBLISHER: Centennial Publishers
RELEASE DATE: July 20, 2015
GENRE: Memoir
BUY LINKS: AMAZON
In this intensely personal and moving memoir, Lisa Karlin provides a gripping account of her family’s hurricane evacuation experiences and all that followed in the decade after Hurricane Katrina. Her story begins in August 2005, when Lisa, her husband, thirteen-year-old daughter, eleven-year-old son, and two dogs evacuated New Orleans for what they thought would be a two-day “hurrication.”
Her day-by-day account of the weeks that follow vividly chronicles the unprecedented displacement of thousands of Americans, and on a personal level, describes how her family makes the trifecta of major life decisions: where to live, where to work, and where to enroll their children in school. With unflinching candor, Lisa Karlin provides a first-hand commentary on how everyday life has been impacted by Katrina’s aftermath and how, a decade later, there are still lingering effects of one of the most devastating events in American history. (Description found on NetGalley.com)
TITLE: The Boy In The Mirror
AUTHOR: Tom Preston
PUBLISHER: Inpress Books – Valley Press
RELEASE DATE: September 1, 2015
GENRE: Memoir
“When you turn on the bathroom light your reflection stares numbly back at you, gormless and vacant. You blink. Your eyes are yellow, as is your skin. You’ve lost weight: your pyjamas hang off your arms like the wilting leaves of a dying plant.
You stare at yourself in the mirror for several surreal minutes. The thing before you is not you. But it is.”
In January 2011, aged 21, Tom Preston was diagnosed with stage 4 advanced aggressive lymphoma. His chances of survival were optimistically placed at around 40%. This short, autobiographical work tells the story of the fight in the months that followed – but this is no ordinary cancer memoir.
The Boy in the Mirror is written in the second person – so the events in this book are happening to you, the reader, living through the hope, love, suffering, death and black comedy encountered by Tom during the battle to save himself. (Description found on NetGalley.com)
TITLE: Eight Hundred Grapes
AUTHOR: Laura Dave
PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster
PUBLICATION DATE: June 2, 2015
GENRE: Women’s Fiction
BUY LINKS: AMAZON | B&N | BAM! | INDIEBOUND | iBOOKS
There are secrets you share, and secrets you hide…
Growing up on her family’s Sonoma vineyard, Georgia Ford learned some important secrets. The secret number of grapes it takes to make a bottle of wine: eight hundred. The secret ingredient in her mother’s lasagna: chocolate. The secret behind ending a fight: hold hands.
But just a week before her wedding, thirty-year-old Georgia discovers her beloved fiancé has been keeping a secret so explosive, it will change their lives forever.
Georgia does what she’s always done: she returns to the family vineyard, expecting the comfort of her long-married parents, and her brothers, and everything familiar. But it turns out her fiancé is not the only one who’s been keeping secrets…
Bestselling author Laura Dave has been dubbed “a wry observer of modern love” (USA TODAY), a “decadent storyteller” (Marie Claire), and “compulsively readable” (Woman’s Day). Set in the lush backdrop of Sonoma’s wine country, Eight Hundred Grapes is a heartbreaking, funny, and deeply evocative novel about love, marriage, family, wine, and the treacherous terrain in which they all intersect. (Description found on NetGalley.com)
MY THOUGHTS
Before you read this review please note that it may contain spoilers. If you want to be surprised, just know that this is an amazing book and you should definitely read it.
I started reading Eight Hundred Grapes exactly one week ago. I was so entranced by it that I read it on the train, at lunch, on the treadmill, while taking my walk, and while my husband was pumping gas at Costco. I just couldn’t put it down. It’s that good!
There are many many aspects of it that I love, so I will spare you from reading an extremely long review and give you my top three things.
The first thing I love is the cover. I’m the type of reader who ultimately decides to read a book based on what the cover looks like. I won’t even read the description if I don’t have some sort of liking towards it. Eight Hundred Grapes has a wonderfully simple cover making me wish I had purchased the physical copy. It would be a perfect addition to my bookshelf. What do you think of the cover?
The second aspect I loved is that the entire story revolves around wine. Wine tasting is a hobby that my husband and I do together. We both love our separate wines (white wines are my thing and he likes more reds), but it’s the experience that makes it worth while and finding that wine that makes you want to buy cases of it for fear of never being able to have it again.
This book made me think about wine in a different way. I know that it takes a lot of time, effort, and money to sustain a vineyard and make quality wine, but I never truly got a sense of that until I read Eight Hundred Grapes. Laura Dave created this great story with a lot of details about running a vineyard. Even getting down to the nitty gritty of what to put in the soil at each stage of the grape growing process. I wonder how much research was done to write such detailed descriptions of the vineyard and wine making process.
The third aspect I enjoyed was the family drama and boy is this book packed with it. The main character, Georgia Ford, finds out her fiancé has been keeping a very big secret from her…(spoiler) that he found out he has a child with his ex girlfriend. To top it off, it’s only days before her wedding that she sees him walking down the street, during her last dress fitting, with his ex and his daughter. He had been keeping it from her for months. That’s when she bolts from Los Angeles to her family’s vineyard in Sebastopol, CA.
What Georgia finds is that everyone she knows has something to hide; her mother, father, and brothers. I don’t want to give away too much, but there are fists thrown around, yelling, arguing, and a lot of figuring out what to do next. In Georgia’s case, she was trying to fix everyone else’s problem instead of her own.
Eight Hundred Grapes is a wonderful story about embracing where you come from and deciding what path you want to take in life. Nobody knows where their path will lead, but it’s about taking a leap of faith and hoping that you land on your feet (possibly in some well tended vineyard soil).
Overall, I would HIGHLY recommend Eight Hundred Grapes to all my fellow Women’s Fiction lovers, wine lovers, and good old family drama lovers.
P.S. I actually asked my husband (during our Costco gas trip) what he would do if he found out he had a kid while we were engaged. After giving me a look of pure terror, he said he’d definitely tell me. I gave him points for that answer.
FAVORITE QUOTES
“Maybe that was just childhood? You hurry up, pick the opposite path, try to make childhood end. Then, as an adult, you have no idea why you were running away.”
“Here’s why my mother fell in love with him, she said. She was sitting at the Chinese restaurant, hearing him talk of soil, about the importance of foundation. And she heard the rest. His belief, at the center of his winemaking, that with work, you can give something the strength at the beginning that it needs later on. Before it even knows how it’s going to need it.”
OVERALL RATING
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WEBSITE | FACEBOOK | GOODREADS | TWITTER | INSTAGRAM
Laura Dave is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The First Husband, The Divorce Party, London Is The Best City In America, and the forthcoming Eight Hundred Grapes. Dave’s fiction and essays have been published in The New York Times, ESPN, Redbook, Glamour and Ladies Home Journal.
Dubbed “a wry observer of modern love” (USA Today), Dave has appeared on CBS’s The Early Show, Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends and NPR’s All Things Considered. Cosmopolitan Magazine recently named her a “Fun and Fearless Phenom of the Year.”
Three of her novels have been optioned for the big screen with Dave adapting Eight Hundred Grapes for Fox2000. (About the author found on her website at www.lauradave.com)
Thank you to Laura Dave and Simon & Schuster for providing a copy in exchange for an honest review. Book provided through NetGalley.com.
It’s that time of the week again when I participate in WWW Wednesdays hosted by Should Be Reading. Feel free to leave a link to your WWW Wednesday post in the comments.
To participate in WWW Wednesday, you need to answer three questions.
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
TITLE: Eight Hundred Grapes
AUTHOR: Laura Dave
PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster
PUBLICATION DATE: June 2, 2015
GENRE: Women’s Fiction
BUY LINKS: AMAZON | B&N | BAM! | INDIEBOUND
A breakout novel from an author who “positively shines with wisdom and intelligence” (Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I leave You). “Laura Dave writes with humor and insight about relationships in all their complexity, whether she’s describing siblings or fiancés or a couple long-married. Eight Hundred Grapes is a captivating story about the power of family, the limitations of love, and what becomes of a life’s work” (J. Courtney Sullivan, Maine).
There are secrets you share, and secrets you hide…
Growing up on her family’s Sonoma vineyard, Georgia Ford learned some important secrets. The secret number of grapes it takes to make a bottle of wine: eight hundred. The secret ingredient in her mother’s lasagna: chocolate. The secret behind ending a fight: hold hands.
But just a week before her wedding, thirty-year-old Georgia discovers her beloved fiancé has been keeping a secret so explosive, it will change their lives forever.
Georgia does what she’s always done: she returns to the family vineyard, expecting the comfort of her long-married parents, and her brothers, and everything familiar. But it turns out her fiancé is not the only one who’s been keeping secrets…
Bestselling author Laura Dave has been dubbed “a wry observer of modern love” (USA TODAY), a “decadent storyteller” (Marie Claire), and “compulsively readable” (Woman’s Day). Set in the lush backdrop of Sonoma’s wine country, Eight Hundred Grapes is a heartbreaking, funny, and deeply evocative novel about love, marriage, family, wine, and the treacherous terrain in which they all intersect. (Description found on NetGalley.com)
RECENTLY FINISHED READING
TITLE: What You Left Behind
AUTHOR: Samantha Hayes
PUBLISHER: Crown Publishing
RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2015
GENRE: Suspense & Thriller
BUY LINKS: AMAZON | B&N | BAM! | INDIEBOUND | POWELL’S | WALMART
Two years after a terrifying spate of teenage suicides, the remote village of Radcote has just begun to heal. Then a young man is killed in a freak motorcycle accident and a suicide note is found among his belongings. When a second boy is found dead shortly thereafter, the nightmare of repeat suicides once again threatens the community.
Desperate for a vacation, Detective Inspector Lorraine Fisher has just come to Radcote for a stay with her sister, Jo, but the atmosphere of the country house is unusually tense. Freddie, Jo’s son, seems troubled and uncommunicative, and Jo is struggling to reach out to him. Meanwhile, Lorraine becomes determined to discover the truth behind these deaths. Are they suicides, or is there something more sinister at work? Finding answers might help Freddie, but they’ll also lead to a shocking truth: whatever it is–or whoever it is–that’s killing these young people is far more disturbing than she ever could have imagined, and unraveling the secret is just as dangerous as the secret itself.
Wicked, intense, and utterly compulsive, What You Left Behind confirms Samantha Hayes as a top thriller writer. (Description from NetGalley.com)
WHAT I MIGHT READ NEXT
TITLE: Stir
AUTHOR: Jessica Fechtor
PUBLISHER: Penguin Group Avery
PUBLICATION DATE: June 23, 2015
GENRE: Memoir
BUY LINKS: AMAZON | B&N | BAM! | HUDSON | INDIEBOUND | POWELL’S | TARGET | WALMART
An exquisite memoir about how food connects us to ourselves, our lives, and each other.
At 28, Jessica Fechtor was happily immersed in graduate school and her young marriage, and thinking about starting a family. Then one day, she went for a run and an aneurysm burst in her brain. She nearly died. She lost her sense of smell, the sight in her left eye, and was forced to the sidelines of the life she loved.
Jessica’s journey to recovery began in the kitchen as soon as she was able to stand at the stovetop and stir. There, she drew strength from the restorative power of cooking and baking. Written with intelligence, humor, and warmth, Stir is a heartfelt examination of what it means to nourish and be nourished.”
Woven throughout the narrative are 27 recipes for dishes that comfort and delight. For readers of M.F.K.Fisher, Molly Wizenberg, and Tamar Adler, as well as Oliver Sacks, Jill Bolte Taylor, and Susannah Cahalan, Stir is sure to inspire, and send you straight to the kitchen. (Description found on NetGalley.com)
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Jenn of A Daily Rhythm. It’s easy to participate. Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
TITLE: Eight Hundred Grapes
AUTHOR: Laura Dave
PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster
RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2015
GENRE: Women’s Fiction
BUY LINKS: AMAZON | B&N | BAM! | INDIEBOUND
A breakout novel from an author who “positively shines with wisdom and intelligence” (Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I leave You). “Laura Dave writes with humor and insight about relationships in all their complexity, whether she’s describing siblings or fiancés or a couple long-married. Eight Hundred Grapes is a captivating story about the power of family, the limitations of love, and what becomes of a life’s work” (J. Courtney Sullivan, Maine).
There are secrets you share, and secrets you hide…
Growing up on her family’s Sonoma vineyard, Georgia Ford learned some important secrets. The secret number of grapes it takes to make a bottle of wine: eight hundred. The secret ingredient in her mother’s lasagna: chocolate. The secret behind ending a fight: hold hands.
But just a week before her wedding, thirty-year-old Georgia discovers her beloved fiancé has been keeping a secret so explosive, it will change their lives forever.
Georgia does what she’s always done: she returns to the family vineyard, expecting the comfort of her long-married parents, and her brothers, and everything familiar. But it turns out her fiancé is not the only one who’s been keeping secrets…
Bestselling author Laura Dave has been dubbed “a wry observer of modern love” (USA TODAY), a “decadent storyteller” (Marie Claire), and “compulsively readable” (Woman’s Day). Set in the lush backdrop of Sonoma’s wine country, Eight Hundred Grapes is a heartbreaking, funny, and deeply evocative novel about love, marriage, family, wine, and the treacherous terrain in which they all intersect. (Description from NetGalley.com)
“I understood the thousand steps between where he’d started and where he’d ended up. And, more than that, I understood the versions of him he contended with along the way: the version of him that was proud of what he’d built and the version buried far beneath that still felt like an outsider. Which might have been why all the versions of me I’d ever been – all the versions of me that I hoped to be – made sense when I was with him.”
TITLE: Carry Me Home (Off the Map #3.1)
AUTHOR: Lia Riley
PUBLISHER: Forever Yours
RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2015
GENRE: New Adult, Romance, Contemporary
BUY LINKS: AMAZON | B&N | KOBO | IBOOKS | GOOGLEPLAY
Love doesn’t have to be perfect to be true…
Years ago, Tanner Green loved Sunny Letman. She was meant to be his first kiss, first love, first everything. Then their world spun upside-down and out of control.
Free-spirited Sunny doesn’t do commitment. Sure, guys are great for a night or a week, but she always leaves first. That is, until professional skateboarder and town golden boy, Tanner Green, unexpectedly walks back into her life.
Despite their broken history, a fragile and undeniably electric connection still holds them together. Now Tanner has to convince Sunny that even though love isn’t always perfect, it’s worth sticking around for…(this stand alone novella is part of the Off the Map series) (Description found on Amazon.com)
MY THOUGHTS
I’m a huge fan of Lia Riley. Over the last year she has become one of my favorite authors, so I’m always up for reading anything new of hers. Carry Me Home is a novella focused on a few side characters in her Off the Map series.
Tanner and Sunny’s story started years ago when they were children. They understood each other and what their situations were, but drama between their mother’s pulled them apart. As they got older they grew even further apart. It’s not until later that they finally start developing that relationship again. That’s where their story begins in Carry Me Home.
I enjoyed reading the story that Lia Riley developed for these two characters from the Off the Map series, especially Tanner. They both had difficult back stories that, in the end, brought them closer together. Sunny was one of the more frustrating characters. I kept saying to myself, “Ugh Sunny! Why don’t you just give in already. You know you like him”. Her noncommittal and stubborn attitude kept pushing Tanner away, but thankfully he wouldn’t let her. I liked Tanner because he knew exactly what he wanted and was fighting to obtain it. I believe their differing personalities balanced each other out and they eventually gave into their feelings.
The only thing I didn’t enjoy was how short it was, but that’s the nature of a novella. I definitely wanted more. I wonder how the story would have developed if Riley wrote it as a full novel. I guess I’m just going to have to ask her.
Overall, I would highly recommend Carry Me Home especially if you’re a fan of the Off the Map series. Even in it’s short length it showed you how love can develop no matter how different people are or how dire their circumstances might be.
If you’re interested in reading the Off the Map series, you can check out my reviews below.
FAVORITE QUOTES
“We’ll never be the same again. We each carry a piece of the other. The way he watches me, I know he’s in this for a long time, not just a good time. And that idea doesn’t seem so scary anyone. In fact, I can’t wait.”
“Sunny is like her name. you can’t hope to hold sunshine. You can only bask in it for as long as it’s there. But weather changes. There are storms. Night always follows day. I know what I want can’t happen, but who ever said wanting needs to be reasonable or even sane?”
OVERALL RATING
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WEBSITE | FACEBOOK | GOODREADS | TWITTER
After studying at the University of Montana-Missoula, Lia Riley scoured the world armed only with a backpack, overconfidence and a terrible sense of direction. When not torturing heroes (because c’mon, who doesn’t love a good tortured hero?), Lia herds unruly chickens, camps, beach combs, daydreams about as-of-yet unwritten books, wades through a mile-high TBR pile and schemes yet another trip. She and her family live mostly in Northern California.
Thank you to Lia Riley, Forever Yours publishing, and NetGalley for providing a copy in exchange for an honest review.
TITLE: What You Left Behind
AUTHOR: Samantha Hayes
PUBLISHER: Crown Publishing
RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2015
GENRE: Suspense & Thriller
BUY LINKS: AMAZON | B&N | BAM! | INDIEBOUND | POWELL’S | WALMART
A mesmerizing new thriller from the author of Until You’re Mine
Two years after a terrifying spate of teenage suicides, the remote village of Radcote has just begun to heal. Then a young man is killed in a freak motorcycle accident and a suicide note is found among his belongings. When a second boy is found dead shortly thereafter, the nightmare of repeat suicides once again threatens the community.
Desperate for a vacation, Detective Inspector Lorraine Fisher has just come to Radcote for a stay with her sister, Jo, but the atmosphere of the country house is unusually tense. Freddie, Jo’s son, seems troubled and uncommunicative, and Jo is struggling to reach out to him. Meanwhile, Lorraine becomes determined to discover the truth behind these deaths. Are they suicides, or is there something more sinister at work? Finding answers might help Freddie, but they’ll also lead to a shocking truth: whatever it is–or whoever it is–that’s killing these young people is far more disturbing than she ever could have imagined, and unraveling the secret is just as dangerous as the secret itself.
Wicked, intense, and utterly compulsive, What You Left Behind confirms Samantha Hayes as a top thriller writer. (Description from NetGalley.com)
MY THOUGHTS
At times, I feel I need a little bit more adventure, suspense, and mystery in my life so I wander away from my usual Women’s Fiction genre books and go towards a book like What You Left Behind by Samantha Hayes. Its books like this that keeps be wanting more suspense and thriller type novels to read.
There were many twists and turns throughout the book and Hayes did a great job tying up the loose ends. This is what kept me engaged and is what I loved most about the book. I was surprised by the plot twists. At times, I can predict what twists will be, but with this book many of the twists were a mystery. That’s not to say I didn’t guess a few of them, but for the most part I was like “oh my gosh” when something was revealed.
The characters, including the minor ones, were well developed and their stories were perfectly intertwined. The way Hayes created the characters made you believe they were different than they turned out to be. I think this created a much more impactful thriller and made me second guess my predictions (commence the applause).
What You Left Behind is a riveting psychological thriller riddled with secrets and lies and is well worth staying up until 1am to finish it.
I was generously provided a copy of this book for an honest review from NetGalley. Thank you Samantha Hayes and Crown Publishing.
OVERALL RATING
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WEBSITE | BLOG | FACEBOOK | TWITTER
Throughout the years, I always strived to improve my writing. In 2003 I won a short story competition and subsequently had a novel published by a small independent press. It’s out of print now. Since 2007 I have had four novels published by Headline under the name Sam Hayes—BLOOD TIES, UNSPOKEN, TELL TALE and SOMEONE ELSE’S SON.
I am now represented by Oli Munson at A M Heath Ltd and my books are published by Century and Arrow. I have written three novels in a new detective series – set in and around Birmingham, featuring my married DIs Lorraine Fisher and Adam Scott. The first is UNTIL YOU’RE MINE, followed by BEFORE YOU DIE, and finally YOU BELONG TO ME. These are all written as Samantha Hayes. You can find details of all my recent novels by visiting the bookspage. Meantime, I’m busy working on my next novel!
About the author was found on her website and you can click here to find out more.
I did it! I submitted my PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellowship application last Monday. It was an exciting feeling putting everything together and sending it off. The post office employee actually asked me if I was sending a book and I sort of was. It was only the first 20 pages of my memoir, but I had to put together 5 copies of the entire application which included the 20 pages, short answer questions, professional CV, 2014 tax summary, (2) letters of recommendation, and a $10 application fee. It was a thick piece of mail that’s for sure.
My husband has been my sounding board for all my nervous energy. He listens to me talk about how difficult it is writing this personal story and tells me not to get discouraged if I don’t get the Fellowship (he’s completely right and completely amazing). This is the first time I’ve ever submitted my work to be judged. Whoever looks at my submission will be the first to read a large portion of my memoir. It’s actually quite scary when I think about it. A person I don’t know will be judging what I’ve written. Their opinions will determine if I get to participate in this Fellowship.
If I don’t get it this year, there’s always next year or the year after. Now that I know about this great program I’m going to keep applying until I get it.
Now I just have to wait until October when they inform the finalists. I really hope I get this Fellowship because I think it will help me develop a clearer picture of my memoir and help me finish a first draft.
Stories Unfolded 