Book-ticipation

Eagerly awaiting this to come from my library request....

The Lone Texan by Jodi Thomas

The Lone Texan by Jodi Thomas

April selection for Barnes and Noble Romance Readers group.

The tall, dark hero pictured on the cover coupled with the "She's always been his destiny" snippet led me to think this would be just another toss-away romance. To my surprise, there was a good deal of story to read about a hero and heroine with background and character depth. A good secondary character story added to the enjoyment of this book.

Rating:  3/5 (Romance Scale)

Update:  The B&N Group met last night (April 5) to discuss The Lone Texan which received a unanimous thumbs up.  Everyone enjoyed the secondary character story and felt that there was a lot to the story--a nice change from 250+ pages of will-they/won't-they get together (even though the happily ever after is a given in the romance genre).

Arcadia Falls by Carol Goodman

Carol Goodman's 7th novel, Arcadia Falls, brought hours of reading ambivalence mixed with pleasure last week as we waited for basements to dry out and flood-closed roads to reopen.

From Publishers Weekly
Goodman delivers the goods her fans expect in this atmospheric and fast-moving gothic story: buried secrets, supernatural elements, and a creepy setting. Following the death of her husband, Meg Rosenthal accepts a job teaching at an upstate New York boarding school and moves there with her teenage daughter, Sally. The school, Arcadia Falls, also happens to be central to her thesis, which focuses on the two female coauthors of fairy tales: Vera Beecher, who founded the school, and her friend Lily Eberhardt, who died mysteriously in 1947. While the campus is bucolic, school life proves anything but—Meg thinks she sees ghosts and Arcadia's brightest and most ambitious student, Isabel Cheney, is found dead in a ravine. Feeling Sally drifting further from her each day, Meg finds refuge in Lily's preserved diary and begins to unravel the secrets behind Isabel's death.

A favorite passage
My new home...seems to be engaged in a duet with the wind.  Gusts whoosh out of the pine forest and fling themselves onto the house, which sighs and moans as if it were being carressed and then, as the wind sweeps back into the forest, keens like an abandoned lover.

At first, it was difficult to find the rhythm of the parallel stories of Meg Rosenthal's present and the past history of Vera Beecher and Lilly Eberhardt linked by the retelling of a changling fairy tale.  Then the middle drew me fully back into the story.  The ending?  Well, you'll have to read Arcadia Falls and decide for yourself!

Rating:  3.5/5 (Fiction Scale)

One Good Dog by Susan Wilson

Tami Hoag in her back cover blurb for One Good Dog by Susan Wilson says, "Nowhere can we see the potential for our own redemption more clearly than in the eyes of our dog...." 

From Booklist
Adam March is a married father and successful businessman poised to become a CEO—that is, until the day his troubled past catches up with him. Soon Adam has lost his job, his family, and his house and is living in a lonely apartment working off his community-service sentence in a local men’s shelter. Adam’s story alternates with that of Chance, a former fighting pit bull who has escaped, lived on the streets, and is now back at the animal shelter. When circumstances require Adam to adopt and care for Chance, he comes to realize the joy and comfort of animal companionship. Adam’s and Chance’s tale is one of love, loyalty, and determination, as both fight to begin new lives and relationships.

Several times I was tempted to set this book aside because of some of the descriptions of events, especially in the chapters narrated by Chance, the dog.  I hung in there, however, and am glad I did.  This novel of responsibility, redemption, and love brought both tears and smiles.

Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware of giving your heart to a dog to tear.  -Rudyard Kipling

Rating:  4.5/5 (Fiction Scale)

Dare To Die by Carolyn Hart

Dare To Die is the 19th in Carolyn Hart's Death on Demand Mystery Series featuring Annie and Max Darling, owners of Death on Demand bookstore ("the best mystery bookstore north of Miami"). 

From Publishers Weekly:
In Agatha-winner Hart's 19th Death on Demand mystery set in Broward's Rock, S.C., Annie Darling and husband, Max, invite Iris Tilford, a troubled young woman who used to live in the island community and has recently returned, to a party they're giving at the Broward's Rock pavilion. The party ends in tragedy with Annie and Max's discovery of Iris's strangled body on a path in the surrounding pine woods. Annie promises police chief Billy Cameron she won't meddle in the investigation, but when the killer targets her and Max, she breaks her vow. The plot neatly builds to an exciting climax in the Agatha Christie tradition, with all the suspects gathered near the scene of the crime, each with a strong motive for murder. Hart assembles her usual distinctive supporting cast, including wacky celebrity mystery writer Emma Clyde.

For some reason, I had been avoiding this series by Carolyn Heart but picked up Dare To Die on my last library visit and now will look to catch up on this series.  The book was full on allusions to actual mystery authors, and I came away with a list of mysterys to check out and add to my ever-growing Mystery Mt. TBR.

Rating:  4/5 (Mystery Scale)

Mystery Trio

Mysteries galore on the to be read shelf--three so far this week.

Death of a Valentine by M. C. Beaton.  I am a fan of the Agatha Raisin series and thought it was time to try one in the Hamish Macbeth series.  Death of a Valentine came home with me from the library.  I thoroughly enjoyed these characters and the setting and am looking forward to reading more in this series.
Rating:  3.5/5 (Mystery Scale)





The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley.  This was the March selection for On the Porch Swing (Yahoo Group).  Took me a while to warm up to Flavia de Luce; but once she drew me into her 11-year-old mind, I was enchanted.  Flavia sums it up:  "I was me.  I was Flavia.  And I loved myself, even if no one else did." 

Another favorite character was Gladys:
Until I rescued her from rusty oblivion, my trusty old three-speed BSA Keep Fit had languished for years in a toolshed among broken flowerpots and wooden wheelbarrows.  Like so many other things at Buckshaw, she had once belonged to Harriet, who had named her l'Hirondelle:  "the swallow."  I had rechristened her Gladys.

And a real mind picture painted about the local bus arriving at a stop:
There was a rumble in the distance as the Cottesmore bus approached, waddling along the lane between the hedgerows like a chicken walking a tightrope.  It stopped in front of the bench, wheezing heavily as it subsided from the effort of its hard life among the hills.  The door swung open with an iron groan.
Rating:  4/5 (Mystery Scale)

Aunt Dimity Down Under by Nancy Atherton.  The Aunt Dimity series is the one mystery series I have followed since the first book, Aunt Dimity's Death.  Aunt Dimity Down Under is far and away the best in the series so far.  Thankfully, in the more recent books in the series Lori Shepherd has stopped mooning over every good looking man she encounters as she solves mysteries in the small English village of Finch.  Aunt Dimity Down Under is far and away the best in the series so far, taking Lori to New Zealand to fulfill a request from the eccentric, elderly Pym sisters.
Rating:  4.5/5 (Mystery Scale)

Fatally Flaky by Diane Mott Davidson

Fatally Flaky, number 15 in the Goldy Schulz Culinary Mystery series by Diane Mott Davidson, is the first I've read in this series since The Grilling Season and gave me a good nudge to catch up on the books between.

From Publishers Weekly
Colorado caterer Goldy Schulz doesn't have a moment to spare as she frantically tries to pull everything together for two upcoming wedding receptions, including last-minute venue and menu changes from a spoiled bridezilla, in bestseller Davidson's entertaining 15th culinary suspense novel (after Sweet Revenge). When Harold Doc Finn, Aspen Meadow's beloved retired doctor, dies under mysterious circumstances on his way to the first wedding ceremony, Goldy wonders if it was an accident or murder. When her godfather and Doc Finn's good friend, Jack Carmichael, is also attacked, it's obvious that Goldy will have to venture out of the kitchen and put her detecting skills to use once again. Stir in a slimy spa owner, rumors of a malpractice suit and the usual cast of supporting characters—including Goldy's patient cop husband, Tom, and her capable culinary assistant, Julian Teller—and you've got another winning entry in Davidson's mouthwatering series.

No quotes or notes to report.  Just a good amateur sleuth mystery.

Rating:  4/5 (Mystery Scale)

Dedication:  To Carolyn Marino with deep gratitude for excellent editing and for possessing a kind heart and a light touch.

Epigraph:  Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. - George Bernard Shaw

Harbinger of Spring

The morning check of our small back yard brings something new each day, and today there were red winged blackbirds aplenty.  Many believe the red winged blackbird is the true harbinger of spring.

Sunday Snippet

Latest additions to my restaurant pitchers collection....

I love the detail on the rim of the smaller pitcher...

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

The split second between what was and what is, the far reaching impact of action and inaction, and the heartbreaking consequences of knowing or not knowing how the story ends—these, together with an exploration of the nature of love and war, are the background for The Postmistress by Sarah Blake.


Notes and Quotes
Wm. B. Yeats:
And bombs were falling on Coventry, London, and Kent. Sleek metal pellets shaped like the blunt-tipped ends of pencils aimed down upon hedgerow and thatch. What was a hedgerow? Where was Coventry? In History and Geography, Hitler’s army marched upon the school maps of Europe, while next door in English, the voices recited from singsong memory—I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made. Bombers flew above the wattles, over an England filled with the songs of linnets and thrush.

On time:
She wanted to push it all back. No time, no town. Nothing but each other’s hands and the tempo of their tread. The sky seemed to bowl up and away, curving like a cat. It was a mild morning, as can sometimes happen, as though May had slid in quietly for this January day. There was no wind at all. They walked along, and under the silent morning sky, she imagined she could pull Time like taffy, stretching it longer and longer between her hands until the finest point had been reached, the point just before breaking, and she could live there. A point at the center of time with no going forward, no looking back. Clasped in this way, without speaking, walking into no discernible ending, she could almost believe they tread on time.

Lucky Strikes:
And tonight, walking home from the hospital in the dark, not paying attention to where he was going, he had suddenly realized he was guiding his way forward by the single small lights of cigarettes, the sign of other people moving, disembodied, through the dark toward him: people whose faces he couldn’t see, but whose voices he heard, whose footsteps passed by. And he had nearly burst out crying on the street. Those tiny red lights in the dark going forward and moving away, those single Lucky Strikes, that’s what it was to be human. We lived and died, all of us—lucky strikes. Single lights and voices in the dark.

On reporting:
Long ago, I believed that, given a choice, people would turn to good as they would to the light. I believed that reporting-honest, unflinching pictures of the truth—could be a beacon to lead us to demand that wrongs be righted, injustices punished, and the weak and the innocent cared for. I must have believed, when I started out, that the shoulder of public opinion could be put up against the door of public indifference and would, when given the proper direction, shove it wide with the power of wanting to stand on the side of angels. But I have covered far too many wars—reporting how they were seeded, nourished, and let sprout—to believe in angels anymore, or, for that matter, in a single beam of truth to shine into the dark. Every story—love or war—is a story about looking left when we should have been looking right.

There are many more passages marked in my copy of The Postmistress, but I leave their discovery to you as you weave together for yourself the lives of Emma Fitch, the fragile bride of a small town doctor; Frankie Bard, a fearless “radio gal;” and Iris James, the Postmistress.

A small question, but a question nevertheless: Why, when every other location was accurately named and located, did the author decide to create Franklin as the small town on the tip of Cape Cod? There is a Franklin, MA, but it is not on the Cape. Every time I read Franklin, my mind’s map had to do a quick zig zag from its actual location to the fictional location of The Postmistress. Not a major quibble—just a curiosity.

Rating: 4.5/5 (Fiction Scale)

Dedication: For Josh, always.

Epigraph: War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say, and it seems to me I have been saying it forever. –Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War