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Beside Still Waters: Not Your Average Amish Fiction Story

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Beside Still Waters is an unexpected and gorgeous treat of a book. It’s like buying a trip off the Internet for the first time. You cross your fingers and take a leap of faith. Then you get there and discover you landed a 5 star resort with world class dining and an unexpected room upgrade. It is clear from page two on that Beside Still Waters is the equivalent of landing a five star resort. On this journey there is fine writing with great and moving characters and a stunning, heart-wrenching, plot. From the first page the author grabs you and won’t let you go. Tricia Goyer has a real talent for gripping your heart, evoking emotion, and inspiring imagination. Beside Still Waters: A Big Sky Novel is the first book in a new series by Goyer. The book begins with a terrible tragedy, and an early birth that follows hot on the heels of the tragedy – life asserting itself even as grief reigns down on the Sommer family. The plot that unfolds reveals themes of growth, grief, romance, faith, differences and tolerance. Marianna is the infant born the same day her parents experience a horrible life-altering tragedy. She is, at once, a blessing and a lifelong reminder of their tragedy. Not surprisingly her character is sobre beyond her years. Marianna is the eldest daughter in her family and therefore often charged with child care. When we first meet her she is 18 planning a life in her community in Indiana, a place she has known all of her life. But her family is unable to move past their losses. They have also lost an older son, Levi, the brother to Marianne, who chose to leave Amish life for the world of the Englisch. In Indiana, Aaron Zook is the near perfect Amish young man who has her in his sights and quickens her heart. He is already building their home together despite having never really even asked her for an official date. Despite the many sadnesses that plague and follow Marianna, she believes she can see a future with Aaron. But her father shocks her with news they will leave their home and try to start fresh in Montana. Marianna agrees to give the new home six months and then she will return to her church, her home and the life that is waiting with Aaron. Or will she? A long train trip with her family is Marianna’s first real experience with the Englisch. And while there is a lovely older woman who speaks to her of faith and trusting God on the train trip, there is also a belligerent drunk young man who hits on Marianna prompting her father to step in and threaten physical retaliation. Goyer has an interesting way of illustrating the good with the bad and through her character’s psychological journeys, showing that black and white sometimes make grey.

Tricia Goyer is a remarkable talent. Goyer is the author of 24 books including Songbird Under a German Moon. She has also written a Mommy memoir called Blue Like Play Dough. She has been published in magazines and has written for Today’s Christian Woman and Focus on The Family. She doesn’t rely on the old standby stereotypes, or even the predictable Amish fiction romance plots. Her characters challenge the norms for Amish tradition. They have strong psychological lives. For instance, while it is common that Amish people live all their life in one area, this family in Beside Still Waters, moves to Montana. Despite the fact that the Amish are peaceful people, they can also be moved to violence should the opportunity demand it. Marianna’s father threatens to hit a young man hitting on Marianna when she is on the train ride. Marianna questions him after and he tells her he was merely calling the young man’s bluff. Goyer magically balances the allure of that which is different, the English culture, and the appeal of a familiar Amish life. She has created in Marianna a really strong, authentic, and lovely character I hope readers get to see more of in future books. To assume that this is a simple romance is to do great injustice to this novel, a book that could hold its own with any best-selling fiction novel I have read.

Beside Still Waters, by Tricia Goyer, released April 2011, paperback, is published by B&H books, 320 pages and $14.99 US.

I give this one a $$$$ 1/2 out of $$$$$.

I was provided with a free copy of this book to review. This in no way impacts my opinion.

Tricia Goyer has her own blog over at http://www.triciagoyerblogspot.com/

She is running a giveaway there right now offering five readers each a copy of this book. She also has a unique Amish salt and pepper set for one winner.

Lazarus Awakening: Finding Your Place in the Heart of God: A Review and a Giveaway

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Joanna Weaver’s latest book is an honest look at moving faith beyond your head to your heart. For those who need to periodically reexamine their faith and their role in accepting religion, this book is a must read, especially for women. Lazarus Awakening is a look at how to open your heart to God’s voice and to his actions. It is not a ten quick steps guide to living through God or anything quite so simplistic. In a world that seeks so much scientific proof to back up theory, it is a compelling essay on how to move beyond that to a place where a Christian can see the actions of God and trust that he is there even when those desperate times appear and he seems absent. In many ways this is a book about trust.
Weaver speaks of her childhood and her intuitive knowledge that God was there guiding her and accepting her as something that was almost a nursery rhyme in its familiarity. And yet, she notes that while she knew this to be true and she felt safe in God’s love, she also experienced this as a somewhat threatening and heavy-handed type of love. As she writes: “I saw my heavenly Father as a stern teacher with a yardstick in His hand, pacing up and down the classroom of my life as He looked for any and all infractions…Most of the time I lived in fear of the yardstick.”
Lazarus Awakening: Finding Your Place In The Heart of God is the third book in a series by Weaver that started with Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World and then followed with Having a Mary Spirit. The poetic title Lazarus Awakening is a reference to the Biblical character Lazarus, brother to Mary and Martha, who falls ill and dies. Mary and Martha bury him and Jesus comes back to show them his power and ressurect Lazarus from the dead. The stones in front of Lazarus’ grave are also metaphors for blockages in our lives impeding belief and faith. The three stones, according to Weaver are: unworthiness, unforgiveness and unbelief.
And in many ways Lazarus is a metaphor here – a smart one – for the absence of something and the experience of faith. Lazarus is mostly known in the Bible for his absence, his death and then his reawakening. The parallel of course is that God’s love is like that, and so is faith. Weaver sees the reader as Lazarus and the intention within this book then must be to reawaken the audience.
There are interesting little snippets of scripture and also some quizzes to help readers access more self knowledge throughout the process of reading this book. There are also some cultural references the author draws on to make a point and a nice study guide is in the book for Bible study groups and Christian women’s groups who may choose this book to explore further. All in all this is an easy read and relevant. I liked the metaphor and also found the writing style accessible. I think this author is quite appealing because she draws on the universal childhood experience of religion being taught to you as something that is done to a child and for a child, but not necessarily internalized by the child. Lazarus Awakening is a guide that helps explain the process of growing from that passive child into an active adult relationship with God.
Lazarus Awakening by Joanna Weaver, published by Waterbrook Press, US $19.99 and Canadian $22.99 Christian Living, Women, Non Fiction, Self Help, 221 pages
Thriftymommas rating is $$$1/2 out of $$$$$. An easy read. This would make a great choice for a Christian women’s book club.
I received a copy of this book for free to facilitate this review. This in no way impacts my opinion.
I enjoyed this book so much I would like to share a copy with my readers.
To enter this giveaway:
1. Follow me on GFC and leave a comment as to why you’d like to win.
2. Don’t forget to leave me your contact information so I can get the book to you.
I will draw for this one on April 25th.

Five Trends To Watch in Publishing

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Five Trends To Watch in Publishing:
An Industry in Flux
by Paula Schuck

Anyone following trends in print media and book publishing will know that this is nothing if not an industry in flux. I am fortunate enough to have front row seats to the evolution of books and media and it is at once a challenging and exciting time. The publishing world was quick to recognize the threat, but they were also, in print media incredibly slow to act upon it and challenge their traditional genre. But over the past few months I have noticed a number of increasingly savvy and interesting approaches to forcing interactivity upon readers. So if ebooks are the new norm and social media is the fastest growing media ever, how then are books, three dimensional handheld books, making themselves relevant or reasserting themselves in an industry in flux?
In the past few months I have seen a number of really creative ideas.
1. The new standard for book tours – is the book blog tour. I have run several here at thriftymommasbrainfood. The virtual book tour makes a lot of sense. Authors don’t need to knock themselves out quite as much criss-crossing Canada to flog their newest release. Instead they do so by pitching bloggers, simply sending books out to a select group with on line influence. There are often accompanying contests, giveaways and reviews.
2. CDs/trailers other media. Sing You Home by blockbuster best-selling author Jodi Picoult has a CD tucked inside the front of the her latest novel, you are to play the CD as a supplement to the chapters. The songs by Ellen Wilber are essentially a soundtrack to the book. This book was published by Simon and Schuster Canada.
3. Complementary use of social media. I just finished a book being promoted by Graf-Martin Media called The Heart Revolution. The author is Sergio De La Mora. The book itself is an empowering faith-based book teaching people to reconnect with their heart and trust the power of that to drive your actions throughout life. Punctuating the book, published by Baker Group, are several links to web sites. The links take you to sermons on line. Creative.
4. Kids books are employing on line games and tricks that kick it up a notch. Best example I have seen of this lately is The Search For Wondla, by Tony Diterlizzi, also published by Simon and Schuster. Main character Eva Nine’s life comes to a computer near you if you hold parts of the book upto a camera on your computer. Bizarre and yet how very logical for sci fi children’s fiction, especially for this generation of children.
5. But truly the smartest thing I have seen so far is The Zen of Social Media Marketing by Shama Hyder Kabani. A book about marketing with this fast-growing media form, the savvy author takes her material to an entirely different dimension. She clearly indicates at the start of the book, that buying it also gives you access to to the continuously updated digital version. Access the site for http://www.zenofsocialmedia.com/ and put the password in provided in her book and receive her latest data and expert opinion. 

Money and Marriage by Matt Bell

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I have been reading excellent bloggers this week on how to smartly title a blog post so that it gets noticed. Now normally I would think that a literary title about money might be savvy, but it turns out that I am wrong. All the smart bloggers I admire say simple is best. Apparently Google doesn’t really get literary flowery post titles. So what does that have to do with Money and Marriage? Well clearly this title is succinct. But essentially it tells you everything you need to know to buy the book. Money and Marriage. There is arguably no greater issue in a marriage than money. It can make your relationship challenging to say the least. Luckily author Matt Bell is here to help.
“Couples who disagree about finances at least once a week are over 30 % more likely  to divorce than couples who disagree about finances a few times a month.”
Money and Marriage: A Complete Guide for Engaged and Newly Married Couples contains many excellent guides, charts and activities designed to help new couples discover more about each other’s financial goals, debts and worth. Remember that marriage course you had to take before you walked down the aisle? Well Money and Marriage is like that course, neatly contained in a book, for your finances. Matt Bell begins by outlining the many ways in which men and women are different in terms of spending, saving and investing. Men, for instance, follow business news more often than women. Men cite investing and entrepreneurship as high on their list. Women cite saving and spending as key issues with money. Women are more likely than men to give time and money to charity. If our approaches to money are so different, then is it any wonder than most couples argue about it a lot?
Financial literacy is nothing if not a hot topic these days in light if such severe economic woes in much of North America. Bell, also the author of Money, Purpose, Joy and Money Strategies for Tough Times, provides a helpful guide to start couples on the right track in their new lives together.
There are some helpful practical and common sense tips here, that I like. For instance, continue learning outside the workplace for as long as your are able, especially before children arrive. You increase your worth as a worker if you are always on top of trends and information. Also many workplaces have some sort of tuition reimbursement or cost savings program. Accelerate your payments whenever possible. Avoid debt and where you have debt prior to your marrige be honest with each other about it. Also contact the bank or credit card company to ask for a lower interest rate on your credit cards. Often this is a simple phone call and this is a practical strategy I use here as well.
For this review and book tour there is also an excellent contest going on. I hope every one of my readers takes time to enter. Thanks to Matt Bell for the great giveaway!

Matt About Money Nest Egg Giveaway 

Money and Marriage, by Mat Bell NavPress, 2011, $14.99 softcover, 219 pages

Thriftymommastips rating is $$$1/2 out of $$$$$. The price is right for this book about money. I learned a lot about how spending habits and investing strategies differ by gender.This is clearly an American book with US references throughout. That’s perfectly fine and Canadians can still use a lot of the common sense information here. I am unsure that prayer and money belong together in a book.

I received a free copy of this book to review. This, in no way impact my honest opinion.

The Heart Revolution

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The Heart Revolution by Sergio De La Mora is a book that surprised me with its power, creativity, and positive messages. Sergio De La Mora invites you to take a 40-day heart challenge reading along and rethinking your life, framing it in a positive light and allowing yourself to trust entirely your heart. It is the power of your heart that can lead you to success or keep you from fully embracing your greatness. I was skeptical when I began this book, but the author Sergio De La Mora won me over with his authenticity and his passion. De La Mora is the founder of the Cornerstone Church of San Diego, California, one of the fastest growing churches in the USA. He lives in San Diego with his wife and six daughters. But almost more importantly than any of that he came from a background of poverty as a Mexican immigrant to the US and was quickly initiated into gang culture as were some of his brothers. Sergio De La Mora was using drugs regularly as a young teen, smoking PCP and hanging with a gang his brother’s friends had started to keep from getting beaten up. Tragically, De La Mora was stabbed in the back when he was in grade eight and he spent many months recuperating. A good deal of that time was spent listening to radio and as he grew to appreciate the power of words, he realized he wanted to become an on air radio personality. He got his DJ’s licence and became quite well known as a celebrity Disc Jockey. The entertainment industry only fueled his drug habit. On a day when De La Mora, was promoting one of his own dance events, he discovered a flyer for the Cornerstone Church and he followed his instincts into a meeting there. De La Mora describes his young self, anticipating an imminent spiritual and physical break down, attending the meeting while high on cocaine. “So the night before I had come to church I had done two things. One, I did half a gram of cocaine, because I never went anywhere without being high. And two I told God these words: If You can change my life and take this monkey off my back I will do anything You want.” He knew he needed to get out of the life he was living and he found this particular church just when he needed it. The pastor there won him over and Sergio quit his job and became active at the church. Prior to the meeting he had felt that God couldn’t forgive him, a strung out Cholo. Regardless of your particular spiritual beliefs, or your degree of religiosity, this is a book that comes down to passion and life goals and philosophy. It is incredibly innovative. I loved that there were small breaks after some chapters directing the reader on line to sermons that supplement the writing. This is a smart way to encourage two things books to become more interactive and relevant and people to become more involved in the actual revolution itself. I applaud Baker Publishing and Sergio De La Mora for being creative and innovative in an industry that is in flux. Here for instance http://www.sergiodelamora.com/heartrev is an example. The foreword of the book is by Ed Young Jr. I will keep this book for a long time as a reminder to recharge and revisit the idea of leading with your heart. In fact I didn’t want it to end in some ways. The chapter on Revolutionizing Your Beliefs is particularly intelligent and discusses the difference between living religiously and having a relationship with Jesus. I love that I can extrapolate from that whole chapter what I need to illustrate even in my own life the power of negativity to drag you down and zap energy and the opposite and empowering nature of having an active relationship with your heart and your belief systems. It is more than just a semantic debate. It is the difference between passive religion and actively living your best life. Throughout the book there are numerous personal stories of people who felt unloved and people who were grieving giving themselves over to the heart revolution. Most of the examples are relevant and well used. But my only criticism is one example used in a chapter on Forgiveness that I found jarring. A family of children is sexually abused by an acquaintance. The repercussions of this are devastating for the entire family. However, the father of the children finds it in his heart to forgive the abuser. He confronts the person, a family friend and tells him he has to apologize, essentially. As a parent I find that to be really hard to believe, and I think the example will lose some readers. Aside from that poor example there is a lot here to like. Sergio De La Mora is smart and savvy and his passion is infectious and young enough to not yet come off jaded or overpackaged.

Thriftymommastips ranks this one a $$$$ out of $$$$$
The Heart Revolution by Sergio De La Mora, 2011, Baker Publishing Group, $17.99 US, Non Fiction, Christian Life, 278 pages.

Jodi Picoult Sings You Home and a Surprise #giveaway

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Anyone who knows anything about me at all is fully aware of how much I love Jodi Picoult’s novels. She is one of my favourite authors and the launch of a new book is always an occasion to celebrate. When twitter pal and fellow book lover Wanda over at @YMCBookalicious asked if I’d like to participate in a Simon and Schuster twitter book club party I was wholeheartedly enthusiastic. Thanks Wanda! Anyways on to the review. Sing You Home is ultimately a book about love and family and the many different forms that takes. It has all the traditional Jodi Picoult elements: strong characters, ripped from the headlines type of plots, a court case, some grand philosphical battles, this time between church and state, gay rights, procreation as biology versus choice, as well as a small rumination on when life actually begins and a whole mashup of themes that drive you headlong towards the end of the book. Sing You Home also has a couple of surprises which I will not give away so I save the good stuff for you. The main character is Zoe Baxter, a music therapist, married with a family on the way. But issues of infertility, told with heartwrenching and great dramatic detail, drive larger rifts between husband and wife until they are no longer even wanting the same life goals. Picoult handles the infertility theme here with amazing grace and such emotion that let’s just say a couple of us in the recent on line book club revealed that we probably shouldn’t have been reading this book on the treadmill at the gym. I was not actually expecting a court case in this one and my chief complaint here is that the court battles in her books – although always well told – are predictable. I would love to see the next book happen entirely without relying on that as a plot. Zoe and Max inevitably end up living apart. Max, a slightly two-dimensional character and a recovering alcoholic, revisits his old wounds until he moves in with his zealous and wealthy older brother, also oddly struggling with infertility issues. Sing You Home comes with an interesting and creative supplement to the book, a CD of songs that act like a soundtrack to the book. The CD is folksy and peformed by Ellen Wilber. It is appropriate and clever given that the main character makes her living out of music. In the scenes where Zoe is using music as a breakthrough bridge between people who are grieving, or struggling in some way, and herself the therapist it is intriguing and educational to see how music can be used to reach remote corners of people’s hearts. There might have been a bit more detail or explanation woven in here because it is a unique and compelling vocation for a main character. Picoult is the author of 18 books. Many, like House Rules, Nineteen Minutes and My Sister’s Keeper, have been runaway best-sellers.

Sing You Home, by Jodi Picoult, Simon and Schuster Canada, 2011, 466 pages, $28 US and $32 Canadian.

I give this one a $$$$ out of $$$$$.

I received this book for free from Simon and Schuster Canada. This in no way impact my opinion.

I also have a giveaway for you. One lucky reader will receive a copy of House Rules.
To enter: Mandatory You must do the first two steps. Twitter is optional.
Open to US and Canada. I will draw for the winner on April 14th with random.org.
1. Leave me a comment with your name and email so I can contact you.
2. Follow my blog with GFC (see side bar) or tell me that you already do so.
3. Extra entries if you follow @inkscrblr on twitter. (Two extras)

Scribbling Women Blog Tour and a Huge Giveaway

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The author Marthe Jocelyn, photo credit Tom Slaughter

Welcome to Day Two of the Scribbling Women Blog Tour. Scribbling Women: True Tales From Astonishing Lives is a series of stories about little known female authors who documented their lives and the trials, tribulations and triumphs along the way. There are several stories here that I found captivating. Some of these interesting women travelled the world, some escaped slavery, others were mainly homebodies. All were intriguing and help us gain insight into a period in history when women were less likely to be written about or acknowledged. Many of their stories are authentic and colourful, told through letters, this compilation will be historical in its own right as this dying artform continues to give way to technology.

Marthe Jocelyn is an award-winning author and illustrator of over 20 books. She was born in Toronto and now lives in Stratford, Ontario. Her novel Mable Riley won the first ever TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award. Her non fiction book A Home For Foundlings won wide critical acclaim. In 2009 she won the Vicki Metcalf award for body of work. In this new non fiction collection of women’s stories, aimed at age 14 and up, there are many different women, many different personalities. Mary Hayden Russell, for instance, followed her husband and took her son on board a whaling ship in 1823 where they lived for more than a year. She noted their pursuit of whales and the challenges of life at sea. Harriet Ann Jacobs was a slave, remarkable because she was literate and she left her story for history. She wrote a book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the time when slavery and literacy were so feared by most that laws were passed making it illegal to teach a slave to read or write. She assumed a pen name and recounted a brave life. Most of these mini biographical slices of life are compelling but most interesting to me was the snippet regarding Nellie Bly, perhaps the first ever female investigative journalist, who took on some incredible stories in her day, going under cover in a women’s insane asylum to reveal the deplorable conditions.

Scribbling Women is part of Tundra Books blog tour and a giant giveaway also being hosted by author and publisher. This giveaway consists of 28 books. That’s right. One lucky winner will be sent 28 books, the full range of author Marthe Jocelyn’s writings. This contains toddler books right on upto young adult novels and all are sure to please. What a great collection! Take a peek here:

Scribbling Women: True Tales From Astonishing Lives, by Marthe Jocelyn, Tundra Books, Hardcover, 208 pages, age 14 and up, Canadian $21.99 and US $19.95. 

Thriftymommastips review is $$$$ out of $$$$$ for the variety of stories within this book. I received a copy of the book in order to complete this review. This is no way impacts my opinion.

An Interview with the author: Thriftymomma was lucky enough to be able to interview the author for this blog tour. Here are the answers to my questions. A Big thank you to Marthe Jocelyn for taking the time to speak with my readers..

Q 1. How did you come to writing and illustrating as a career?

Marthe: I was a late bloomer as far as writing is concerned. I had a small toy design company in New York City, and also made children’s clothing. When I had my own kids, I began to make books just for them. I took a couple of writing classes and read a thousand books and slowly learned how to do it. Although I call myself a writer, I don’t quite think of myself as an illustrator just yet.

Q 2. For Scribbling Women you have such a variety of women in the book…how did you choose?


Marthe: Choosing the women to fit into the book was the biggest challenge and took me about a year of reading and mulling and writing and more reading… I still have a file full in case I get the chance to write More Scribbling Women.

Once someone had landed on my long list, I began to research and write about her as if I was using her. If the work faltered, it was usually a sign that she might not make the final cut – perhaps there wasn’t enough information about her that would appeal to children, maybe her writing had not been translated into English, or possibly I couldn’t sustain my own interest, let alone that of a young reader. So the ones who were left at the end, the eleven finalists, were the ones, as I say in my introduction, whose stories made me catch my breath.

Q 3. What motivates you to get out of bed every morning?

Marthe: Some mornings I don’t get out of bed. I slip down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and then climb right back into bed to work. However, when I do get up? If it’s light and sunny, I want to go for a walk. If it’s snowing, I might go sledding. If it’s pouring rain, I think about making a living… which means work.

Q 4. What advice do you have for aspiring writers or illustrators?

My advice for aspiring writers is to read, read, read. Write for a few minutes a day, stop before you’ve run out of steam, and read some more. For illustrators, I’m not so clear, but I think the same advice applies. Look at pictures, draw something, and do it again the next day.

(I love these answers. Especially the some days I don’t get out of bed one. Ha! That’s what I am doing wrong! I need more time in bed to become a successful author like Marthe!)

Giveaway:
To WIN: Enter to win a full collection of 28 Marthe Jocelyn books by leaving a comment on this post.That’s right just leave me a comment here at thriftymommasbrainfood. Tell me why you want to win or what you learned from this post or any old thing pertaining to books.
Rules: Entrants can enter across all of the blogs taking part in this Scribbling Women blog tour. You can enter a total of 30 times if you enter on each blog taking part in the tour. The contest starts Monday, March 28th, 2011 and closes Sunday, April 10, 2011 at 11: 49 p.m. EST. One winner will be selected from all the entries

The Mountains Bow Down Blog Tour and A Cruise Giveaway

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Picture the cruise from hell. That’s where Raleigh Harmon, a newly engaged FBI agent, finds herself with mother, aunt and a dead movie star’s wife. This story The Mountains Bow Down has one of the best mystery plots I have read in awhile. Raleigh Harmon is a beautiful but athletic and very capable FBI agent asked to come on a cruise to Alaska to simultaneously relax and also act as a consultant for a B grade movie being filmed on the cruise ship. She is no sooner there when a body turns up, a young woman, apparently a suicide. But the clues don’t add up. The ship turns back to the sea before it has even reached the first port of call and the vacation cruise is over for many. Raleigh knows the evidence is indicating this can’t have been an ordinary suicide. Initially they point to movie star Milo Carpenter, husband of the deceased. But is it him? Or is he just a washed up actor with a drinking problem? Despite the limitations of being on a boat, she manages to cleverly manipulate the tools available to analyze and collect evidence. Petroleum jelly becomes an agent to reflect ultraviolet light on a bracelet and create a glow in the dark lure for a thief. These are the types of smart tricks that Raleigh uses and they complement the strong female character. She runs her own investigation and uncovers a whole lot of criminal activity on the cruise ship. Her nemesis Special Agent Jack Stephensan, a good-looking cowboy with an eye for Raleigh, shows up to help and soon begins to make her question  her engagement. As the one week cruise sails through the Inside Passage Raleigh and Jack have to solve this crime in the span of five days. After that the cruise ship passengers disperse to various countries and suspects and evidence will be gone.  Sibella Giorello lives in Washington with her family. She began her writing career as a news features reporter. Raleigh Harmon is also the main character in two other novels by Giorello The Rivers Run Dry and The Clouds Roll Away.

The Mountains Bow Down is by Sibella Giorello, Thomas Nelson publishers, paperback $14.99 US, 369 pages.

I was not compensated for this post. I received a free copy of the book to facilitate the review and the blog tour.

This one gets $$$$ out of $$$$$. It was suspenseful and had a great main character. Very plot driven.

Sibella’s celebrating the release of The Mountains Bow Down by giving away a Cruise prize pack worth over $500.00!
Giorellos Cruise Giveaway

One Grand Prize winner will receive:
A $500 gift certificate toward the cruise of their choice from Vacations To Go.

The entire set of the Raleigh Harmon series.

Click the button for cruise giveaway details.
Then tell your friends. And enter soon – the giveaway ends on 4/1! The winner will be announced at Sibella’s Raleigh Harmon Book Club Party on FB April 5th, 2011! Don’t miss the fun – prizes, books and gab!

Join Sibella and fans of the Raleigh Harmon series on April 5th at 5:00 pm PST (6 MST, 7 CST & 8 EST) for a Facebook Book Club Party. Sibella will be giving away some fun prizes, testing your trivia skills and hosting a book chat about the Raleigh Harmon books. Please RSVP and if you have questions you’d like to chat about – leave them on the Event page.

Left Neglected: Lisa Genova’s New Soon To Be Bestseller

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Sarah is a juggler, like many working Moms and stay-at-home Moms and women, in general, she has so many balls in the air at any given time that one of them must fall eventually. And it does, when one day on her commute to work, she roots around in her purse for her cell phone and crashes the car. Sarah, a bright and savvy business woman, a wife and mother to three children, is suddenly left with brain damage, a condition called Left Neglect. Basically the portion of her brain that sees the left and controls the left side of her body  cannot anymore. She can’t make her left side work at all. Her left hand is impossible to control and her left leg slowly comes along with therapy and hard work. Left Neglected is the story of how she gets her life and health back and the lessons she learns on the way back to her former life. The title is also a clever twist on what she might have neglected before the accident forced her to slow down and reexamine her world. Lisa Genova is a unique storyteller. Sure there are many doctors that have come before her and spun beautiful stories, poems and literature. In fact doctors as writers could be an entire course taught in university English departments. Genova burst onto the scene a couple of short years ago with the blockbuster bestseller Still Alice, the story of a woman slowly being overcome by Alzheimer’s Disease. It was a stunning glimpse into the workings of the brain and the effects of that disease on the various relationships within a family. This is the thing I adore about Genova. She gives us great stories and brilliant insights into how the mind works. Sarah is a great character, very real and humane. There is a scene at the beginning of the novel where she describes her work day and the breakneck speed with which things happen. And then she simply observes when it gets away from her she closes her office door and permits herself a 10 minute cry before resuming her job. Shortly after her accident, her eldest son Charlie, rambunctious and impulsive is also diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and he also has to learn how to make his brain work differently. It is an interesting parallel that provides smart lessons on how people with different brains change things to make them work. In some respects Sarah is living an American dream before it all comes crashing down around her and her dream changes. I enjoyed this fiction story in a different way from Still Alice. Both books offer some truly insightful pictures of how the brain works, but Left Neglected is a more universal story of the human condition. My only mild criticism is that the writing is secondary to the plot. The characters are strong and the subplot with Sarah’s mother is a nice touch, but I never felt as if the writing leapt off the page and sang. This is a book I couldn’t put down and also a story we are discussing at the National Book Club on EverythingMom.com http://www.everythingmom.com/ Buy the book, read along for the month of March and come join us!
Left Neglected, by Lisa Genova, Simon and Schuster, 2011, $25 US, $28.99 Canadian, 327 pages.
$$$$ out of $$$$$
I received a copy of this book free from the publisher in order to review. My opinions on this blog are my own.

A Promise You Will Want to Savour

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Grab your coziest sweater, your slippers and a cup of tea, then curl up for the weekend with Ann Tatlock’s Promises To Keep. This is a comfortable slightly familiar story with an extremely endearing child narrator named Roz, a plot that never quits moving and a great cast of characters. It conjures up moments of nostalgia and sad truths about adults and their weaknesses. This is my first experience with author Ann Tatlock and I was hooked almost before I even cracked the spine of the novel. Promises to Keep is the story of a mother who flees her abusive alcoholic husband, after many years of his empty promises to sober up and make it upto his family. Told from the point of view of Roz, his 11-year-old daughter, it is a story of domestic violence and love and the limits of dreams. The story begins with Roz and her family moving into a new home in a tiny city far from their old life. When an older woman named Tillie shows up on their doorstep and refuses to leave they find themselves in a bit of a strange predicament.
Tillie presents a plot complication, as the former owner of the house, which she argues is still hers. Her sons have moved her into an old age home against her wishes and every now and then she wanders back to the place that holds her heart and her memories. Roz’s older brother, Wally, a bitter young man about to turn 18 right at the time of the war in Viet Nam, is rigid in his beliefs and angry at yet another intrusion forced upon his tiny healing family. He wants Tillie gone. He was the man in his family that stood upto the father and on the occasion of one final big fight nearly ended up beaten to death for it. Wally was Janis’s first child from a different relationship and the very volatile stepfather seemed to hate Wally from the start, referring to him only as the boy and refusing to adopt him. After that initial visit in chapter one Tillie keeps returning and she makes the argument that the home will always be hers in sweat equity. It is clear that the house will not be big enough for both Tillie and Wally. One will have to go. Janis has three children and the youngest is a toddler. When Janis takes on a job in sales to support her family Tillie becomes invaluable helping out around the home and acting as grandmother to the girls Roz and Valerie. Although she is safe in this new home, Roz finds herself tortured by the vision of her father crying when they drove away and she is unable to move forward. She believes his final words that he will change and she needs to remember the good about him for fear there might not be anything good or loveable about her. Roz begins seeing her Dad everywhere and cannot tell if it is her imagination playing tricks or not. Roz, the newcomer at school, meets a lonely bright creative girl named Mara who dreams of being a writer, but whose skin colour makes her a bit of an outcast. Together they form a friendship and a bond, as they both have been harbouring secrets about their fathers. Their pact to get their fathers back leads them into dangerous territory and threatens more than one family’s fate. Slowly Roz glimpses tiny memories of the violent and sadistic moments they’ve endured at the hands of her father, but she is a guarder of secrets and refuses to share her pain or her misgivings with anyone. Her memories are revealed in an organic manner that flows and is somehow just perfectly in keeping with the timing and the characterization throughout the book. It is an amazing and artistic trick that proves the talent of the author. The reader is never jarred from the plot by a flashback. Ann Tatlock is the author of eight novels, including The Returning. She has won The Christy Award for her novel All The Way Home and the Mid-West Independent Booksellers Association Book of The Year for All The Way Home and I’ll Watch The Moon. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina with her family. In the beginning Promises to Keep is a powerful story about domestic violence and it packs an explosive punch at the end. But there is a great deal here about the nature of family and love and friendship that is every bit as uplifting as well. This is a truly beautiful story and Roz is a dynamite choice for narrator. Even the cover image is a gorgeous artistic shot of a girl’s pigtails. This is one I will keep on my bookshelf for a long time, so I can return to it and study the writer’s technique. Promises To Keep is the total package.

Promises to Keep, by Ann Tatlock, Bethany House, US $14.99, Feb. 1, 2011, 348 pages.
This one gets a 4 and a half rating out of five. It was a charming pageturner and a comfortable read with great characters.and 1/2

My only criticism is the title. There must be 90 books on Amazon.com with the same title and I think it might have been a tiny bit more original.

This book was provided for free courtesy of Baker Publishing Group and Graf-Martin Communications House. The opinion on this blog is all my own and is in no way impacted by this. This book is available from Bethany House, a division of Baker Publishing Group.