September Books From the Book Expo

Continuing in my series of posts from the BookExpo, I'm posting about the books I picked up at the Book Expo in June. September is a big month for publishing, and I got nine books that I'm looking forward to reading.

Jacqueline Woodson's novel Red at the Bone is described as "an extraordinary novel (that) uncovers the role that history and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships" in "two families from different social classes joined together by an unexpected pregnancy." It tells the story of 16-year-old Melody and her relationship with her parents and grandparents. It's getting rave reviews.

The Starlet and the Spy by Ji-Min Lee is a slim historical fiction set in Korea immediately following the war. Alice is a translator for the American forces when she meets Marilyn Monroe, who is in Korea on a USO tour. The two women make a connection and it changes Alice's life.

Cathleen Schine's novel The Grammarians introduces us to twins Daphne and Laurel, who are obsessed with words. One grows up to become a poet, the other a famous language columnist. You know this book will be filled with beautiful language.

Dominicana is Angie Cruz's novel that was inspired by her own mother's story.  Ana is fifteen years old when she is married off to a thirty-year-old Juan who takes her from her home in the Domincan Republic in 1965 to move to New York City. Ana's family hopes that Ana will be able to bring them all to the United States, so Ana lives with her unhappiness for her family's sake.

William Kent Krueger's novel This Ordinary Land is set during the Great Depression and tells the story of four Native American orphans who escape from the school where they were sent to live, and make their way across the country, encountering others who are also lost souls.

The World We Knew is Alice Hoffman's highly-anticipated new novel. Set in Berlin in 1941, it's about a young girl sent away by her mother to escape the Nazis. She meets a rabbi's daughter, who creates a golem to protect the young girl. Fans of The Book Thief will like this one.

Ann Patchett's newest novel, The Dutch House, has been getting fantastic reviews. Set over 50 years, it tells the story of the Dutch House, a hugh estate outside Philadelphia, and the two siblings who grew up there and then were banished by their stepmother. Patchett never disappoints and I'm looking forward to reading this one.

Akin is Emma Donoghue's latest novel, about a retired chemistry professor who receives a phone call that he has an eleven-year-old nephew who is immediate need of a caretaker. He agrees and takes the young boy on his planned trip to France to discover more of his family history.

Lara Prescott's debut novel, The Secrets We Kept, was chosen as one of the BookExpo Buzz Books. It's about an attempt by secretaries recruited by the CIA to help smuggle the novel Dr. Zhivago out of Russia. This one has been talked about by everybody.

I've got to get busy catching up with all these great September books.

August Books from the Book Expo

Every year I attend the Book Expo, one of the biggest publishing conferences in the country where publishers give out copies of the books they will be promoting in the near future. Each month I will post a photo of the books I picked up that will be published that month.
(June books are here.)
(July books are here.)

Here are the books I picked up that publish in August.

 Karen Abbott's The Ghosts of Eden Park recounts the true story of legendary bootlegger George Remus, who owned 35% of all the liquor in 1921. Mabel Willebrandt, a pioneering female prosecutor sets her sights on bringing down Remus' empire, along with her investigator Franklin Dodge. When Dodge begins an affair with Remus' wife, things get really crazy. This one has gotten rave reviews and sounds fantastic for people who like true crime that reads like fiction.

In thriller writer Karen Slaughter's newest novel The Last Widow, Atlanta medical examiner Sara Linton and her partner, Georgia Bureau of  Investigations Will Trent, are tasked with investigating a two deadly bombings when Sara is kidnapped and Will must save her and prevent more bombings from happening. Slaughter is at the top of her game here.

Lisa Lutz's The Swallows is about "a teacher at a New England prep school who ignites a gender war- with deadly consequences". I loved her last novel, The Passenger, and this one looks to be pretty intense and a little controversial.

Sarah M. Broom' memoir The Yellow House is about the shotgun house she and her family of eleven siblings grew up in a poor neighborhood in New Orleans. Her widowed mom raised her family in that house until Hurrican Katrina came along. It's about race, class, inequality and family and it's gotten great reviews.

Rob Hart's novel, The Warehouse, was chosen as one of the Editor's Buzz Books at the Book Expo. Paxton works for Cloud (think Amazon) that has taken over a large portion of the American economy. Zinnia has gone undercover at Cloud trying to discover exactly what is going on there. It sounds fabulous and a little scary.

In Brock Clarke's Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe, when the titular hero's mother passes away, a mysterious woman shows at her funeral and claims to be his aunt. She convinces Calvin to accompany her to Europe, where he is followed by secret agents, religious fanatics, and his stalker ex-wife. It's  being called a cross between a Wes Anderson movie and John Irving book, with that odd comic sensibility.

 Rick Moody tells the tale of the first month of his second marriage in his memoir The Long Accomplishment. His hope for a smooth matrimonial start is beset by "miscarriages, the death of friends and robberies, just for starters." Moody wrote the book The Ice Storm, so it will interesting to read his take on a real marriage.

See you in September.

July Books From the Book Expo

Each month I will share with you the books that I got at the Book Expo that publish this month. The July books are particularly interesting.

The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt is a debut novel by Andrea Bobotis. Set in the small town of Bound, South Carolina, Judith discovers that she has inherited everything from her family- "the pie safe, the copper clock, the murder no one talked about." From Sourcebooks Landmark, it sounds like a book to read on the front porch with a cold glass of lemonade.

I read Marcy Dermansky's novel Bad Marie and thought that she was a remarkable writer. In Very Nice Rachel kisses her writing professor and when he needs a place to stay, she invites him home to her large Connecticut where he begins an affair with Rachel's divorced mom. Dermansky excels at writing complicated characters and this "brilliantly funny novel of money, sex, and bad behavior" should continue in that vein. Published by Knopf.

No one is getting more press than Colson Whitehead for his novel The Nickel Boys. Set in 1960's Florida, young Elwood is sentenced to a reform school, Nickel Academy, for an innocent mistake. The academy is supposed to provide "physical, intellectual and moral training" to help the boys grow into fine men. In reality it is a place of horrors where the boys, particularly the black boys, are beaten and sexually abused. Whitehead's last novel, The Underground Railroad, was a powerful novel about slavery in the South, and this one looks to be just as gut-wrenching. It's from Doubleday.

Karen Dukess has a perfect summer book, The Last Book Party, set in Cape Cod and the publishing world of 1980s New York (when times were good and the money flowed). It's a coming-of-age story about a young woman who wants to be a part of the literary scene, until she sees what it's really like. Henry Holt publishes.

I read Lisa Taddeo's nonfiction Three Women, where she writes about the sexual desires of three distinct women- Maggie (who had a sexual relationship with her high school teacher and when she reveals it, she is the one who suffers), Lina (an Indiana thirty-something housewife who has an affair with her high school boyfriend after a disappointing sexual relationship with her husband) and Sloane (a forty-something successful restaurateur who has sex with other men while her husband watches). There's a lot to be sad about here, as the women are not in great relationships, and it is very sexually graphic and brutally honest. Avid Reader Press publishes.

Laura Lippman follows up her fantastic novel last year, Sunburn, with the even better Lady in the Lake. It's set in 1960s Baltimore where middle-aged housewife Maddie leaves her husband and son, has an affair with a black police officer, and becomes a newspaper reporter trying to solve the murder of a young black woman. The characters are wonderfully drawn, and I loved the newsroom setting. It's published by William Morrow.

See you in August!

June Books From Book Expo

I spent some time organizing my books from the Book Expo, and this year I organized them by the month they publish. It's going to make it so much easier to read the books as they publish so I can keep current with my reviews.

The June books  are all about family, and I've read three of them so far.

Mary Beth Keane's third novel, Ask Again, Yes is one of my favorite books of the year. Keane writes so beautifully in her story of two Irish families who live next door to each other. A tragedy tears them apart and years later it still reverberates through the families. My full review is here, but suffice to say, you must read this book.

Jean Kwok's book Searching for Sylvie Lee is also a family drama and wonderfully written as well. Sylvie Lee leaves her home in NYC to go to the Netherlands to visit her dying grandmother. When she disappears, her younger sister Amy goes to the Netherlands to find out what happened. Family secrets are revealed, and the story is told from Sylvie, Amy, and their Chinese immigrant mother's point of view. Jenna Bush Hager chose it as her Today Show June Book Club pick, and Jean will be on Today with Hoda and Jenna on Friday, June 28th.

Jennifer Weiner's Mrs. Everything tells the story of two sisters' lives, from their childhood in the 1950s through the current day. It's really the story of women in America through those years and it's her best book yet, I just inhaled it. It debuted at number two on the NY Times bestseller list last week.

I'm starting Elin Hilderbrand's Summer of '69, which I have heard great things about. It's her first novel set in a different time period and it's about the Levin family and what happens to them during that historic year.  She signed books at the Book Expo, and gave out Corona beers. I wish I liked beer, it looked refreshing.

Grant Ginder's Honestly, We Meant Well is a family story about a Classics professor who finds that her perfect husband is cheating on her and her college-bound son's life is a mess. She takes them to Greece for a month to fix things and it sounds like a good summer read, funny and heartfelt.

Claire Lombardo's novel, The Most Fun We Ever Had follows Marilyn and David and their four adult daughters. One of the daughters gave birth to a son and gave him up for a closed adoption fifteen years ago, but he reappears in their life. Lombardo is being compared to Celeste Ng and Elizabeth Strout, high praise indeed.

Eloisa James' fourth novel in her Wildes of Lindow Castle series is Say No to the Duke, and it continues the story of the Wilde family, with this story focusing on young Lady Betsy Wilde who loses a billiards game and bet to Lord James Roden and now must spend the night with him. I really enjoyed the first three books in the series, the first historical romances I have read in a long time, and I'm looking forward to this one as well.

The Friday 5ive- June 14th Edition

Welcome to the Friday 5ive, a weekly recounting of things that caught my attention.

1) On my visit to the annual Book Expo, I found many treasures. I spent some time organizing my books and in keeping with the theme of Friday 5ive, I chose five books that I want to read first from the Expo.

• Angie Kim's debut novel Miracle Creek has been on many best of the summer lists, it's billed as a "literary courtroom thriller about an immigrant family and a young single mother accused of killing her autistic son." One of my favorites, Laura Lippman, blurbed it so I know I'll like it.
• Julie Satow's The Plaza is the history of NYC's iconic Plaza Hotel. I saw her on The Today Show this week with Jenna Bush Hager. We enjoy the Plaza's food hall, and I'm intrigued by the backstory of the hotel.
• Jeanine Cummins' novel American Dirt was the book everyone was talking about at the Book Expo. It's a story about a Mexican mother and her young son fleeing a drug cartel to make it to America. It's timely and Stephen King called it "an extraordinary piece of work". It publishes in January.
• I love everything Ann Patchett, from her brilliant novels to her essay collection to her marvelous Nashville bookstore, Parnassus, so it's a no-brainer that I will devour her newest novel The Dutch House, about a family and their house outside Philadelphia.
• Cara Wall's novel The Dearly Beloved tells the story of two pastors and their families in New York City. Enough said.

2) The Tony Awards were on Sunday night, and as you know, I'm a big Broadway fan. It's the one award show that is actually entertaining, where you get to see live performances from some of the most talented people working in the industry. The opening number with host James Corden and performers from the nominated shows was amazing. After seeing the performances, I put Choir Boy and winner for Best Musical Hadestown  on my list of must-sees. Oklahoma's performance was fabulous too, and I'm glad Ali Stroker won for her performance as Ado Annie- she is a knockout! 

3) On Tuesday evening I dodged the rain to go to Barnes & Noble on the Upper East Side to hear Lauren Willig talk about her fabulous new historical novel The Summer Country with author and PopSugar book columnist Brenda Janowitz. The book is terrific, set in 1816 and 1854 Barbados, and Willig drops the reader right into the setting; you'll feel like you are there as you read it. It was an interesting discussion, Willig is so smart and so funny. I'll review her book on June 20th. (Spoiler alert- I loved it!)

Lauren Willig and me at Barnes & Noble

4) There are so many interesting sights in NYC, and this one in front of Mel's Burgers on First Ave. made me laugh.

5) In this week's reading, I finished Susan Lewis' One Minute Later, about a young woman who has everything going for her and then finds out she needs a heart transplant. It's a love story with a mystery inside, and you learn about the importance of organ donation. It's a powerful story. I'm just starting Laura Lippman's The Lady in the Lake, a mystery set in 1960s Baltimore about a middle-aged housewife who leaves her husband, goes to work at a newspaper, and tries to discover who murdered a young woman. Lippman's books are always page-turners.

Lady in the Lake

I hope you had a good week and Happy Father's Day to all the terrific dads out there!

Cookbooks from Book Expo

This post is part of Beth Fish Reads' Weekend Cooking.  If you have anything related to food, cookbook reviews, novel or non-fiction book reviews, recipes, movie reviews, etc., head over to Beth Fish Reads and add your post. Or, if you want to read food related posts, head over to read what some interesting people have to say about food.

Each year at Book Expo I look to see if there are any cookbooks that I would like to pick up. In years past I have been introduced to wonderful cookbooks like Marlene Koch's Eat What You Love series of healthier cookbooks. (I've made her Steak Diane and French Onion Chicken several times. Her website is here.)

I also found The Great Rotisserie Chicken Cookbook by Eric Akis, which is perfect for when I pick up a $4.99 rotisserie chicken at Costco. You know that Open-faced Hot Chicken Sandwiches With Onion Gravy will be on the menu for dinner for dinner that night.

This year I only picked up two cookbooks- The Peach Truck Cookbook, which has "100 recipes for all things peach". I do like peaches, but I didn't know anything about Jessica and Stephen Rose or their Nashville peach truck, featuring Pearson Farm peaches from Georgia. Next time I'm in Nashville, I'll be sure to look them up.

Glancing through the book, I'd like to try The Grilled Cheeserie's Shaved Peach Melt from another food truck in Nashville, Proscuitto, Burrata and Pan-Roasted Peach Salad and Bourbon Peach Bread Pudding. It's a gorgeous book, with beautiful photos and lots of great information for anyone visiting Nashville. Their website is here.

The other book I found was Taste of Home 201 Recipes You'll Make Forever. Taste of Home usually has a presence at the Book Expo, and this year's book is perfect for someone who has limited space for cookbooks and likes to make simple, crowd-pleasing, traditional dishes. All of the recipes are submitted by readers, and they are time-tested winners.

I'm going to try Aunt Frances' Lemonade, a recipe from Debbie Reinhart who said that her aunt always had a pitcher of this in her refrigerator.  It consists of mixing the juice of four lemons, four limes, four oranges, three quarts of water and 1 1/2 to 2 cups of sugar, and garnishing with lemon, lime and orange slices over ice. It sounds so refreshing.

The Chicken Gyros, Toasted Reubens and Hearty Pasta Fajioli will all get a tryout in my kitchen very soon. This cookbook is good for all skill levels, and most of the recipes are made with fresh ingredients. Taste of Home's website is here for more information on their multitude of cookbooks.

After reading through these books, I feel like I should get moving in the kitchen. Until next week!

The Friday 5ive- June 7, 2019 Edition

Last week there was no Friday 5ive- I attended the Book Expo at the Javits Center in NYC (I'll have some upcoming posts on that next week). But I'm back this week with five things that caught my attention.

Just Ask

1) Book Expo is an annual conference for book publishers, booksellers, librarians, authors, bloggers and more. It's a lot of fun catching up with friends and seeing what's coming up in the world of books. This year the main speaker was Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who spoke about her children's book Just Ask: Be Different, Be Brave, Be You, illustrated by Rafael Lopez, who interviewed her. She likes to walk through the audience, touching people on the shoulder and I was one of the lucky ones- she held my hand! Her talk was inspiring and moving, and she is quite funny too.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor at Book Expo- Photo by Steve Kagan

2) On Saturday, my daughter-in-law's parents were visiting from Catalonia, and we took them up to Woodstock, a little town in upstate New York. (Yes, the famous 1969 music festival was named after the town even though it was held in nearby Bethel.) We had a lovely lunch at Shindig, recommended by my sister-in-law, and then we walked up and down the main street. There's lots to look at in town, so many interesting people and signs. We hit up the weekend Flea Market where my son scored a pristine copy of Bruce Springsteen's album Born in the USA, which is 35 years old this week. (Yikes, that makes me old, I remember going to see him in concert in Buffalo for that album.)

A birdhouse in front of a B&B in Woodstock

The Blues Brothers guarding the entrance to a shop in Woodstock

3) On Tuesday I attended a Lifetime TV Book Club discussion for their initial movie in their Books to Screen series, Adriana Trigiani's Very Valentine. We got to see a screening of the movie, and the star of the movie Kelen Coleman made a surprise appearance! She is so lovely, very down-to-earth and funny. She is exactly who I pictured as Valentine Roncalli. The book discussion was aired as a Facebook Live and you can see it below. Adriana Trigiani was the perfect host for the discusssion and she was hilarious as always. We had a delicious lunch with desserts made by Rossella Rago from Cooking With Nonna. Her ricotta cookies were fabulous. Don't miss Very Valentine 's premiere Saturday, June 8th at 8pm on Lifetime, the movie is wonderful, with great performances- and Jacqueline Bissett is Teodora. It's got romance, beautiful scenery, laughs, a few tears, and it's just heartwarming. 

Adriana Trigiani, Rossella Rago, Kelen Coleman

4) Billions is winding up its current season on Showtime, and I liked this season much better than last year. You never  know where it is going, and the writing is superb. Damien Lewis, Paul Giamatti, Maggie Siff, Asia Kate Dillon, and my favorite, David Costabile, are all amazing in their roles. My husband and I are happy that Below Deck- Mediterranean in back on Bravo. It's a reality show about the crew of a luxury yacht and we so enjoy watching how a ship like that operates. Captain Sandy is not taking any nonsense this season, and Chef Mila seems to be struggling in episode one (did she really microwave the steaks????).

5) I didn't have much time for reading this week- I re-read Very Valentine for the book club discussion, and I had forgotten how much I love this book. It was one of the first books I reviewed when I started my blog ten years ago. (Has it been ten years already?) I'm also halfway through The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna by Juliet Grames. It's the story of young woman (Stella) who grows up in Italy and moves to Hartford, Connecticut just as WWII breaks out. During her lifetime she has come close to death seven or eight times. It's intriguing so far, and you learn a lot about life in rural Italy in the 1930s.

Stella Fortuna

I hope you had a great week and enjoy the weekend!

Book Expo- Adult Editors' Buzz

Each year at the end of May, the Book Expo is held at the Javits Center in NYC. Publishers, booksellers, librarians, authors and bloggers gather to talk about books, especially the exciting books that are coming up for fall and winter.

On day one, the Adult Editors Buzz panel is the highlight of the day for most people. Six editors get a chance to talk about one book, and the room is usually packed with attendees. I love this event because the books presented are usually new to me, and I always end up wanting to read most of them.

Editors Panel

This year was no different. The firstbook presented was Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (January 20200), her memoir about bridging the gap between the works of art and culture in New York City and technology in San Francisco.  Anna left her low-paying job in publishing for a job in a big data startup. Farrar, Straus & Giroux editor Emily Bell called it "a deeply felt memoir of ideas" and said that it is very funny. She likened it to Michael Lewis' Wall Street book Liar's Poker.

Jonathan Cox from Simon & Schuster also presented a  memoir- Saeed Jones' How We Fight For Our Lives (October 2019). Cox called essayist/poet Jones' "one of the most powerful voices of his generation", and this  memoir describes Jones growing up as a black gay man, living in the South with his single mother. He has a tumultuous relationship with his mother and deeply religious grandmother. Fans of Claudia Rankine's Citizen and Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me will be drawn to this book, which he calls a "love letter to" to Jones' mother.

Sally Kim from Putnam has been involved in many terrific books- The Immortalists and Sharp Objects- and she called her book- Kiley Reid's novel Such A Fun Age (January 2020)- a cross between the book Mothers and the HBO show Insecure. It's a story about a black nanny who is accused by a security guard of kidnapping the white child in her charge. Kim called it a "good soap opera", with timely issues that beg conversation, as well as being "damn funny to read."

Crown Books editor Julian Pavia specializes in science fiction thrillers, having edited The Martian, Ready Player One and Dark Matter and his book, Rob Hart's The Warehouse (August 2019), sounds like it will be a solid hit as well. Our hero works for Cloud, a giant tech company that has its claws in every part of the American economy (if this sounds familiar, think Amazon). It's set in the near future, where climate change and a crumbling infrastructure have wreaked havoc on the country. Cloud steps in and runs much of the economy, but they are not necessarily the bad guys. They step in to a fill a vacuum.  Pavia said that one of his coworkers said after reading this "it will haunt you every time you see a box on your front step."

Laura Prescott's The Secrets That We Kept (September 2019) was presented by Knopf editor Jordan Pavlin. This debut novel deals with the CIA's efforts to smuggle Dr. Zhivago author Boris Pasternak out of Russia at the height of the Cold War. The novel's most interesting characters are the CIA secretaries who become spies to aid in the mission. Pavlin called it a cross between Hidden Figures and TV's Mad Men, saying that many of the women were smarter than most of the men in the room, and they used their "invisibility to subvert behind the scenes". I am most excited to read this one, it is on the top of my TBR pile.

Jessica Williams from William Morrow presented Kate Elizabeth Russell's My Dark Vanessa (January 2020), a timely tale of a beloved high school English teacher accused of sexual abuse by a student in 2017. In 2000, 15 year-old Vanessa had an affair with this same teacher, and when the new student contacts  Vanessa, she must decide what really happened back then. Was it consensual or was she coerced? Williams said that it tackles the issue of consent and complicity, and will make the reader uncomfortable reading it. She likened it to The Lovely Bones and Room.

Keep an eye out for these books, I'll review them as we get closer to publication dates.