Readers to my blog will know by now that I loved Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, a book which won the 2011 National Book Award (read my review). This is not an easy book to read, but it was so incredibly written, so honest, and so powerful that I have continued to want to share it with other readers who love literary fiction.

When I saw that NPR was interviewing Ward about the novel, I was excited to listen to her speak. This interview gives terrific insight into Ward’s work on the book, and so I wanted to share it. A transcript of the interview may be found on NPR’s site here.

 Over the last several weeks there has been a treasure hunt in the book blog world. Beth Kephart, author of the wonderful novel You Are My Only (read my review) has been posting guest posts about the making of this book.  Bloggers were tasked with finding those five entries and then posting them collectively on their own blog.  Finding all five entries makes one eligible to be entered in a drawing.

Beth describes it as follows:

Two winners will be selected. Each will win these two things: A signed copy of You Are My Only AND a critique (by yours truly) of the first 2,000 words of a work-in-progress. As many of you know, I teach memoir at the University of Pennsylvania and served as the inaugural readergirlz author in residence. I have written in multiple genres and critique adult fiction for major U.S. newspapers. Your manuscript can, I am hinting, be in any genre, save for a screenplay, about which I have absolutely zero expertise.

Of course, I decided to play along! Here are the five posts with links to where you can find them:

1. The Furious Metamorphosis of Sophie posted on September 9th at Mundie Moms
2. Opening the Doors to Cloris and Helen posted on September 21st at My Friend Amy
3. When Emmy Called, I Listened posted on October 10th at The Story Siren
4. What Name Should We Give This Book? posted on October 11th at Chick Loves Lit
5. I Was Obsessed With An Asylum posted on October 11th at Bookalicious

I hope you’ll visit these terrific posts to get an inside look at the creative process of one of the most talented writers out there!

First Sentence: “I was born on a Tuesday morning. It was a difficult birth, because I was thirty-four years old.”

When Jonathan Hooper wakes up after six years in a coma due to a stroke, he is unable to speak and has lost his ability to understand numbers. His awakening is considered a miracle since he was never expected to recover. Jonathan has no memory of who he used to be. He ends up in a rehabilitation hospital where he meets Rebecca, a young woman who is also a stroke victim who is trying to rebuild her life.

From the Publisher:

A steadily accelerating story exploring the irony, humor, and opportunity that can accompany personal calamity, Me Again follows the intertwined paths of two people forced to start over in life: one looking for his place in a world that has moved on without him, the other struggling to navigate a relationship with a man who wishes she were someone else.

I read the first 75 pages of Me Again before setting it aside. Although I appreciated Jonathan’s voice and the struggle to recover from a devastating neurological event, I had a hard time buying into the novel. Perhaps because my profession is as a physical therapist, I found the scenes in the rehabilitation hospital mostly unbelievable. Jonathan’s physical therapist is represented as an unprofessional womanizer and nearly all the stroke rehabilitation scenes were inaccurate. Both Jonathan and Rebecca refer to their physical therapists as “trainers” – a phrase which I have never heard in the nearly 24 years I have been working as a PT. Rebecca’s physical therapist would rather watch a football game on television than assist Rebecca to walk in the parallel bars (this was especially odd to me given that I have never worked in a rehabilitation gym where there is a television on, much less a football game). So, although this book is getting some great reviews, it was not for me.

On a positive note – Keith Cronin is donating 25% of all proceeds from the book to the American Stroke Association.

Check out reviews by other bloggers on this tour.

About the Author:

Keith Cronin is a corporate speechwriter and professional rock drummer who has performed and recorded with artists including Bruce Springsteen, Clarence Clemons, and Pat Travers. He is also becoming informally known as “the title guy,” having provided the title for Sara Gruen’s blockbuster “Water for Elephants,” as well as Susan Henderson’s HarperCollins debut “Up from the Blue.”

Keith’s fiction has appeared in Carve Magazine, Amarillo Bay, The Scruffy Dog Review, Zinos, and a University of Phoenix management course. A native of South Florida, Keith spends his free time serenading local ducks and squirrels with his ukulele.

Visit him online at his website, keithcronin.com, or on Facebook.

Two of my favorite bloggers are hosting a read-a-long of a book I really enjoyed…so I just had to share the information with you!

Earlier this year I read and reviewed Wherever You Go by Joan Leegant – it is a beautifully written book about religious conflict. There have been several reviews of this book around the blog-o-sphere, and I have yet to see one that did not praise Leegant’s writing.

Avis of She Reads and Reads and Carrie of Books and Movies are hosting the read-a-long. You can get more information and sign up here. I hope to stop by and join the discussion as I am able. As a bonus, the author will also be participating in the read-along in the form of a guest post and author interview.

Check out the first post which includes a schedule and links to reviews, as well as links to Joan Leegant’s videos about the book and her writing process .

Readers to Caribousmom don’t often see a lot of Classic Literature here – but that does’t mean that I don’t appreciate the classic. In February 2012, Charles Dickens turns 200 years old, and The Guardian is starting the celebration early with a terrific podcast featuring writers such as Ian Rankin, Colin Thubron, Malorie Blackman, Andrew O’Hagan and Alan Bissettto who name their favorite Dickens’ novels. Claire Tomalin has a new biography of Charles Dickens and she is interviewed in the podcast.

In addition to today’s podcast, The Guardian has other Dickens features planned – check them out here.

Finally, a really fun feature is this interactive wall chart of Dickens’ characters.

So, in keeping with the celebratory theme, I thought it might be fun to share your favorite novels by Charles Dickens. I’ll start:

I absolutely LOVE The Tale of Two Cities, first published in 1859 (in 31 weekly installments in Dickens’ then new literary periodical titled All the Year Round) and set during the French Revolution. I first read this novel in high school and remember being enthralled with the story and horrified by the guillotining of Sydney Carton. I really need to re-read this book – perhaps in February in celebration of Dicken’s birthday.

How about you – do you have a favorite novel by this author? Leave me a comment and share your thoughts!

The Homecoming of Samuel Lake by Jenny Wingfield
336 pages
ISBN 978-0-385-34408-1
Random House (July 12, 2011)

I am thrilled to have author Jenny Wingfield here today for a guest post…and also to be able to offer one lucky reader a copy of Wingfield’s novel: The Homecoming of Samuel Lake.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Read my review

Read other reviews of the book by following the links on the TLC Book Tour page.

From the Publisher:

With characters who come to life like members of one’s own family, Jenny Wingfield’s THE HOMECOMING OF SAMUEL LAKE is a novel with the universal reach of the most memorable and lasting works of fiction.

ABOUT JENNY WINGFIELD:

Jenny Wingfield lives in Texas with her rescued dogs, cats, and horses. Her screenplay credits include The Man in the Moon and The Outsider. The Homecoming of Samuel Lake is her first novel.

Jenny Wingfield’s novel The Homecoming of Samuel Lake is about a family living in Arkansas in the 1950s. Included in the story, are not only the lovingly drawn human characters…but also a big white horse named Snowman whose zest for life and courage in the face of danger drew me in. In “real” life, Wingfield rescues dogs, cats, and horses…so her depiction of Snowman in the novel comes from the heart. Given that both the author and I share a common love of animals, I was delighted when Jenny agreed to post about her rescued dog, Charlie. I hope you will enjoy this as much as I did!

**************************************

MEET CHARLIE
By Jenny Wingfield

We had enough dogs. (In our household, the word “enough” is a euphemism, meaning “more than a dozen, but not more than we can count”.) Having just found forever homes for a couple of strays that we’d had so long we’d come to think of them as lifers, we were congratulating ourselves on our success.

“Just think,” we said to each other, “if we can do that again five or six times, we just might get our canine population down to a manageable number.”

Of course, things never stay manageable around here for long, because we can’t pass a starving dog without picking it up. Not to mention, people drop them off near our house knowing we’ll take them in. And other people call us to say that someone has dumped a dog at their place, and they just don’t know what they’re going to do unless we take it. Usually, they add that they reckon they’ll have to “haul it off”, since there’s no way they can give it the life it deserves.

We always take them, and that day was no different. A friend of ours came by with an emaciated female dog and five scrawny pups that she’d found scrounging beside the road. They were big-eyed bags of bones, nothing more.

Within a couple of days, one died. Another started failing. A trip to the vet and a quick surgery told us why. Those babies had been so hungry for so long that they’d been eating rocks and plastic, just to have something, anything, in their stomachs.

That was several months ago. Charlie is one of those pups, and if he remembers how bad things used to be, he doesn’t dwell on it. He’s much too busy nudging humans for love pats, or dozing in the sun. I’m sure that when he sleeps, he dreams.

Probably of a forever home.

Photograph of Charlie, courtesy of Jenny Wingfield

BOOK GIVEAWAY

• Contest open through 5:00 pm (PST) on August 16th, 2011.
• US and Canada mailing addresses only please.
• To enter, complete the form by following the link below:

Click here to take survey

• I will randomly choose one winner and announce that winner on my blog on August 17th. I will also email the winner for their snail mail address at that time.

GOOD LUCK!!!

Jeff had called her hungry. And she is, for many things – for a place in the world, a home. And for happiness. - from The Wedding Writer, page 130 -

Lucky Quinn has worked hard to move up the ranks of the bridal business. She considers herself very lucky when she manages to snag the coveted position as wedding writer for Your Wedding magazine. Under the tutelage of Grace Ralston, editor-in-chief, Lucky quietly positions herself for a coup.

Grace Ralston is the queen of the bridal business. Now in her mid-50s she lives and breathes her work and mourns the strained relationship between she and her lesbian daughter, Isla. The last thing she expects is to be ousted from her editor-in-chief position by a young woman she has come to adore. With only her two cats for company, and her hair falling out from stress, Grace begins to wonder if it is too late to find love.

Sara is also edging into middle-life and loves her job as fashion director at Your Wedding. She has immersed herself so deeply in work that her personal life is nearly non-existent and her one chance at love is many years in the past.

Felice is married to a struggling artist and becoming increasingly worried about her teenage son, Charles. Working as the Arts director at the magazine, she has appreciated that Grace understands the demands of parenthood, but now that Lucky is in the position of power, nothing is certain.

All four women vie for power and glamour, while fantasizing about love and weddings in Susan Schneider’s sardonic and hilarious look at the bridal industry and magazine publishing in New York City. Schneider, a bridal industry editor and writer herself, entertains the reader with the back-stabbing, competitive world of weddings played out between women who are not afraid to go after their dreams.

None of the characters in this book are immediately likable. Grace initially comes off as a gritty snob who is not above using her assistants to make herself look good. Lucky at first appears willing to sell her soul (and possibly her body) for prestige and power. And Sarah and Felice are so wedded to their jobs (pun intended) that their personal lives and families suffer. But, eventually Schneider redeems these four women, by exposing their weaknesses, fears, and finally their hearts.

The strength of the novel is its tongue-in-cheek humor. I especially loved the Human Resources character Nadia Milosovici and her crew of security assistants who are always happy to escort fired employees from the building.

Following Desmarie is Nadia Milosovici’s underling from Guillotine Central, the Harpy – no one know her real name – a walking nightmare with a receding hairline and an indefinably bad smell and prominent moles on her chin upon which a garden of curling coarse hairs flourish. - from The Wedding Writer, page 11 -

Schneider pokes fun at love, marriage and the aging process, keeping her novel light and entertaining while touching on more serious issues like emotional abandonment, and loneliness. The superficial world of money and prestige is characterized as a place of betrayal, pitfalls, and dissatisfaction – and yet beneath it all, friendships still flourish.

Despite the fact that Schneider wraps up all the story lines a little too neatly at the end, I enjoyed this juicy novel about love and power. Satiric, sharp-witted, and highly entertaining, The Wedding Writer will appeal to those who enjoy women’s fiction and are looking for a fun, summer read.

• Quality of Writing:
• Characters:
• Plot:

Overall Rating:

Don’t take my word for it – read other reviews:

• The Book Chick
• Booking Mama
• Lavender Lines

Have YOU read this book? Leave me a comment with a link to your review and I’ll add it above.

FTC Disclosure: I received this novel from Diane Saarinen of the Saima Agency for review on my blog.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Susan Schneider has over 10 years of experience as a bridal magazine editor; formerly she was executive editor at Bridal Guide Magazine, a national consumer magazine for engaged women, and she was also executive editor at Conde Nast’s Modern Bride and at Elegant Bride. She covers everything wedding, from fashion to flowers to food to stationery, etiquette, registry and honeymoons. She especially enjoys writing true-life wedding stories. Her first novel, The Wedding Writer, draws on her expertise as a wedding writer and from her day-to-day contribution to the business of bridal. Learn more about Schneider by visiting the author’s website.

Want to Win a Copy of this Book?

Thanks to Diane Saarinen, I’m offering one copy of The Wedding Writer to one lucky winner.

• Contest open to US and Canada addresses only.
• Complete the survey (below) by June 30th, 5:00 pm (PST) – starred (*) questions must be answered for your entry to be counted.
• I’ll randomly choose a winner and announce their name on my blog by July 1st (as well as email the winner)

CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED.

Down From Cascom Mountain, by Ann Joslin Williams

336 pages
Bloomsbury USA (June 7, 2011)

It is my pleasure to welcome author Ann Joslin Williams to my blog today. I just finished reading her wonderful novel, Down From Cascom Mountain, and was excited when Ann agreed to a guest post. I am also thrilled to be able to offer one copy of the book as a give away to one of my US or Canadian readers. Let me tell you a little about both the novel and the author…

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Read my review.

Get links to reviews from the TLC Book Tour.

Read an excerpt.

From the publisher:

In Down From Cascom Mountain, newlywed Mary Hall brings her husband to settle in the rural New Hampshire of her youth to fix up the house she grew up in and to reconnect to the land that defined her, with all its beauty and danger. But on a mountain day hike, she watches helplessly as her husband falls to his death. As she struggles with her sudden grief, in the days and months that follow, Mary finds new friendships–with Callie and Tobin, teenagers who live and work on the mountain, and with Ben, the gentle fire watchman. All are haunted by their own losses, but they find ways to restore hope in one another, holding firmly as they navigate the rugged terrain of the unknown and the unknowable, and loves lost and found.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ann Joslin Williams grew up in New Hampshire. She earned her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She is the author of The Woman in the Woods, a collection of linked stories, which won the 2005 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, and her work has appeared in StoryQuarterly, the Iowa Review, the Missouri Review,Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She was the winner of an NEA grant for her work on Down from Cascom Mountain. Williams is an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire.

Learn more about Williams and her work by visiting the author’s website.

My thanks to Ann for writing a wonderful piece for this post – I completely related to it because I grew up in New Hampshire, like the author, moved away from New England to the San Francisco Bay area, and later went on to volunteer in search and rescue. I hope that you will enjoy this guest post as much as I did.

**********************

Guest Post: Author Ann Joslin Williams

I was living in San Francisco when I started writing Down From Cascom Mountain–a long way from New Hampshire where I’d grown up.  I was homesick for the woods and mountains of New England, so it was a pleasure to write every morning, following my characters through the woods and fields I loved and knew so well.

Leah, New Hampshire is actually a fictional town, an invention my father Thomas Williams, a National Book Award winner, used in his own fiction. When I’d started writing, often setting my stories on the mountain where my parents had built a cabin and where I’d spent my childhood summers, my father suggested I use his fictional geographical names.  He passed them on to me, and I am honored to use them in my fiction now.

Much like Mary Walker’s parents’ house in Down From Cascom Mountain, my parents’ cabin was isolated.  My brother was my playmate, but when he was old enough and elected to go to boys’ camp, I was on my own.  I spent a lot of time in the woods, carting my stuffed animals on adventures, constructing houses out of branches, and befriending boulders that looked like giant creatures.  I knew my way around our land.  There were shortcuts to the brook, paths that cut across the valley, logging roads leading to open fields and trails up the mountain.  For the most part, I was content with the wilderness and my imagination.

Then, one day I “got lost” in the valley.  I stood in the middle of a field I knew well and bawled, calling out for my parents until a strange man came out of the woods.  He was a logger who’d been working nearby.  Realizing that I belonged to the cabin on the hill, he took my hand and walked me up the logging road to my incredulous mother.  She was comforting, but truly baffled at my claim, given the logger’s description of where he’d found me.

In Down From Cascom Mountain Mary has a similar memory of “getting lost” when she was a girl.  In her loneliness, she wanted her parents to notice she was “missing” and come rescue her.  Later, contemplating the autonomy her parents had encouraged, she reflects, “The mountain had raised her as much as they had.”

In many ways, my own relationship with the New Hampshire landscape has informed the way I navigate life and view the world, just as many of my own experiences have found their way into Down From Cascom Mountain, shaping events and details.

As a teenager I worked for the Appalachian Mountain Club.  I spent two summers at the lodge not far from my parents’ cabin and one summer at Pinkham Notch at the base of Mount Washington, the tallest peak in the northeastern U.S. and a wilderness rich with ghost stories.  While there, I participated in the search for a missing albino man—the spark for the legend of the ghost girl who appears in Down From Cascom Mountain.

As a crew member for the AMC we cleared trails, led hikes, cooked, cleaned, served meals, mowed, dug drainage ditches–just about anything you can think of, including search and rescue.  Later, after I left the AMC for college, I learned a crew member had fallen from a cliff and died–an event that bewildered me in the details and influenced the early chapters in my novel.

Setting my fiction in this terrain is rewarding for me, not only because it can be rugged and sometimes dangerous which is good for creating tension, but the natural world is also beautiful, full of mystery and magic.  It’s through the eyes of this wondrous  teacher that my characters find their way, sometimes lost before they can be found.

Now, having moved back to New Hampshire I treasure “getting lost” in the White Mountains whenever I can.

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BOOK GIVE AWAY

I hope I have tempted you to add this book to your to-be-read pile! You now have a chance to win a copy of the novel from the publisher. Here is how to enter:

• Leave a comment on this post no later than June 23rd by 5:00 pm PST. Tell me one thing about the natural world which deeply resonates with you.
• Contest is open to US and Canada mailing addresses only.
• I will draw one winner randomly sometime after 5:00pm on June 23rd and announce the winner here on my blog by the end of the day on June 24th. I’ll also send the winner an email.

That’s it – easy, right? Good luck!!

Love At Absolute Zero by Christopher Meeks
297 pages
September 2011

CONTEST OPEN JUNE 3 – JUNE 13, 2011

Thanks to the generosity of the author, I am delighted to be able to offer one person a copy of  Love At Absolute Zero by Christopher Meeks. Although I have not yet read the novel, I am eagerly anticipating it because I have loved previous works by Meeks (read my reviews of The Brightest Moon of the Century, Months and Seasons: Collection of Short Stories, and The Middle Aged Man and the Sea and other Stories). Before I tell you how to enter to win…let me give you some information about the book and the author.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Love at Absolute Zero is the story of Gunnar Gunderson, a 32-year-old physicist at the University of Wisconsin. The moment he’s given tenure at the university, he can only think of finding a wife, causing his research to falter. With his two partners, Gunnar is in a race against MIT to create new forms of matter called Bose-Einstein condensates, which exist only near absolute zero. To meet his soul mate within three days—that’s what he wants and all time he can carve out—he and his team are using the scientific method, to riotous results.

The book is described as “the romance of Sara Gruen (Water for Elephants), the science of Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park), and the humor of Nick Hornby (High Fidelity).”

Read an excerpt.

The book is currently available on Kindle through Amazon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Christopher Meeks writes short fiction and novels. His book of short stories, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea earned great reviews including the Los Angeles Times (“poignant and wise”) and a blurb in Entertainment Weekly that said, “A collection so stunning that I could not help but move onto the next story.” His second collection of short stories, Months and Seasons was published in 2009, and his first novel, The Brightest Moon of the Century appeared in 2009. He has published short fiction in a number of literary journals, including Rosebud, The Clackamas Literary Review, The Southern California Anthology, The Santa Barbara Review, Midday Moon, and Writers’ Forum. He now focuses mainly on writing novels.

Meeks teaches English and children’s literature at Santa Monica College, children’s literature at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and fiction writing at UCLA Extension. Read more about Meeks and his work by visiting the author’s website.

ENTER THE BOOK GIVE AWAY

• Open internationally.
• Leave a comment on this post by June 13, 2011 at 5:00 pm PST. Please tell me if you have read other books by this author, and/or why you’d like to win a copy of this book.
• I will pick ONE winner sometime after 5:00 pm on June 13th.
• The author will be mailing out the book to the winner.
• I will announce the winner here on my blog (no later than June 14th) as well as send them an email to get their snail mail address.

That’s it – easy peasy! Good luck!!

I’d Know You Anywhere AND The Girl In The Green Raincoat, by Laura Lippman

Contest open from May 14 – May 22, 2011 (at 5:00 pm PST)

Thanks to the generosity of Authors On The Web and publisher William Morrow, I am pleased to be able to offer U.S. and Canadian readers of my blog the chance to win books by Laura Lippman.

THE BOOKS:

I’d Know You Anywhere (on sale May 3rd in trade paperback) is a stand-alone novel that explores the lasting effects of lives touched by crime (read my review).

An edgy, utterly gripping tale of psychological manipulation that will leave readers racing to the final page, I’d Know You Anywhere is a virtuoso performance from acclaimed, award-winning author Laura Lippman that is sure to be her biggest hit yet.

The San Diego Union-Tribune writes about this book: “[...]an exceptional novel in every way, which is sure to gain her many new followers.” And USA Today found the book “disarming and fascinating.“

Watch this video where Laura Lippman speaks about I’d Know You Anywhere:

Read more about this book on the William Morrow website.

I’d Know You Anywhere is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award (mystery category) and for the 2011 Edgar Award in the Best Novel category. The book was also nominated for a Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Awardand has been included on numerous “Best of 2010” lists, including Stephen King’s list in Entertainment Weekly.

The Girl In The Green Raincoat was originally serialized in the New York Times, The Girl in the Green Raincoat but i s now in book form. It is a masterful thriller in the Alfred Hitchcock mode that places a very pregnant, homebound Tess Monaghan in the center of a murderous puzzle that could cost her her life and the life of her unborn child.

Learn more about the book here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: