Ages 18+.
Blog Post
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #605
by muffy
A best-seller in Europe, the first foreign-language romance novel to be translated and published in the U.S, All In * by Swedish author Simona Ahrnstedt is "sexy, smart, and completely unputdownable." (Tessa Dare)
David Hammer, the upstart, infamous venture capitalist and corporate raider, known for his brutal take-overs is poised to pull off the biggest deal in the history of Swedish finance, make it world-wide finance. His sight is set on Investum - one of Sweden's biggest and oldest financial institutions, owned and controlled by the De la Grip Family. After years of planning, all the players are in place; he needs just one member of the owning family on his side—Natalia De la Grip. He invites her to lunch.
(Countess) Natalia is everything David despises - upper-class, traditional, as close to royalty as you could get without actually being royal and yet he finds her brilliant, driven to succeed in a man’s world, and enchanting. Natalia is intrigued by this way-too handsome man who is rich, dangerous, and in the business circles - utterly unethical. However, the powerful chemistry between them leaves both of them exhilarated and vulnerable.
As the deal goes through, it turns out that it is not all about business. Past history, family secrets and revenge will force David and Natalia to confront their innermost fears and desires as they make deeply difficult choices.
“The author’s ability to skillfully fuse a luxurious lifestyle, a refreshingly different Swedish setting, a plot riddled with revenge and financial intrigue, and plenty of steamy romance means All In will be the must-have leisure read everywhere this summer.” (Booklist). For fans of the glitz-and-glam novels of Judith Krantz, Beatriz Williams, and perhaps Sylvia Day.
* = starred review
Blog Post
An Unexpected Path to Redemption
by mansii
Ramona Ausubel's newest expertly crafted novel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, explodes with searing heartache and shocking joy. Through failure, she reveals the mysterious grace that sometimes a person’s most devastating choices are also their means to redemption.
Beginning with all the glitz of Gatsby, we are introduced to a young couple in their 20s, Fern and Edgar, who enjoy the life of the rich while romanticizing visions of laboring for every penny. But when their wealth completely and suddenly disappears, Edgar and Fern catapult away from each other. Fern wants Edgar to take over his father’s business, be a man, and make them an income. Edgar revolts against Fern pushing him into the shackles of a life he does not want and runs head-long into his first affair.
In rage, and gasping for escape, both husband and wife set out on their own trips, paired with the temporary salves of other lovers, willing to risk their marriage to force their idea of happy. As wrongly motivated as their respective journeys are, these turn out to be pathways to redemption. Edgar becomes aware of his weakness as he incurs temporary blindness, causing him to long for the comfort of the wife who knows him in all his forms. Fern's journey confronts her with past regrets and destructive inherited values, a catharsis that reminds her that she is more whole not in isolation, but in the history and struggle of family.
Edgar and Fern return, softened, back into each other’s lives. Though their choices will undoubtedly scar, they have been rescued to a healing they had yet to know. Before the road they imagined existence and meaning might be found in a way of life they had not attained, with a different heritage and fulfilled dreams. Now, Fern and Edgar understand that completeness is found through giving of oneself, through allowing oneself to be defined in terms of another: a wife, a husband, a mother, a son, a neighbor, a friend.
In language emotional and gripping, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty affirms the worth and beauty of that sacred word: family.
Blog Post
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #604 "It washed over me for the first time in my life how much importance the world had ascribed to skin pigment... " ~ Sue Monk Kidd
by muffy
With references to William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Suzanne Feldman's debut (and a winner of the Missouri Review Editors' Prize) Absalom's Daughters * is a tale of sisterly adventure through the 1950s Jim Crow South.
Young Cassie helps run the family laundry with her mother and grandmother in the black part of Heron-Neck, Mississippi. She has no idea that Judith who is white, is her half-sister, though she knows that it is her grandmother's plan to orchestrates the births in her family so that her descendants can, one day, pass for white.
When their father Bill Forrest runs off leaving the family destitute, Judith finds a letter from a mysterious sender in Virginia explaining they are heirs to a rumored family fortune, surely enough money for her to run off to New York City to be a singer. Sensing her grandmother's design on the jazz-playing Albino boy from New York City visiting one of the white families on the hill, Cassie realizes this may be her only opportunity to escape. The girls steal a car, and with a ham, a gun, and a map so old that state lines are blurred, they head north. While getting their first taste of freedom, courting danger at every turn, they are reminded of the tyranny of skin color, and the heavy responsibility of being the master of your own fate.
"Feldman’s prose blisters and pops with sparks... In this novel, most things are not as they seem, and Feldman doesn’t hew too close to reality. The sisters encounter mules who were once men, discover towns that appear in one place on the map and another on the road, and Cassie even spends a few days as a white girl. Eventually she decides to return to the skin she was born with; as a mysterious woman tells her near the end: 'What’s important is the past.' " (Kirkus Reviews)
* = starred review
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Fabulous Fiction Firsts #603 “Women of Manhattan, magnificent as they were, they forgot sometimes they weren’t immortal...” ~ Marisha Pessl
by muffy
If you loved Jennifer Close's Girls in White Dresses (2011), you would not be disappointed with these two debuts just now hitting the shelves.
A Dangerous Age by former model and the editor of Elle Accessories Kelly Killoren Bensimon catches up with four friends over the course of a sweltering Manhattan summer.
These fortysomething best friends have been meeting every Tuesday night for twenty years. Once the toast of the town, they are secretly falling apart at the seams. As Lucy, once a supermodel, now a freelance writer, watches her marriage to a renowned artist slowly falling apart, she becomes reckless when she starts receiving mysterious text messages from another man. Billy, an unemployed food and wine expert, quietly struggles to make rent each month, is exploring supper-club subscriptions. Lotta, a successful art dealer, dependent on cocktails and recreational drugs, is courting a total breakdown; while Sarah, a well-heeled socialite chasing after reality-show fame is paying the price with her reputation.
As these women of a very dangerous age navigate their ways around a city that worships only the young, it is anyone's guess how they will emerge at the end of a very bumpy summer.
"The dialogue is funny, and a plotline involving a mysterious blogger who’s terrorizing all of New York is intriguing and twisty."(Kirkus Reviews). A breezy beach read for fans of Sex and the City.
Bestselling author Emma Straub praised Rich and Pretty as "smart, sharp, and beautifully made", Rumaan Alam's portrait of two childhood best friends transitioning into their adult lives is vividly rendered, set against a tantalizing background of moneyed New York City that is impossible to resist.”
Sarah is rich - the only child of a prominent intellectual and a socialite. Lauren is pretty, and smart enough to snag a scholarship to a fancy private school in Manhattan where they met. They have been inseparable through high school and college, first jobs, first loves, and the uncertainties of their twenties. Now in their thirties, Sarah works at a charity thrift store and is planning her wedding to her doctor fiance. Lauren, steadily making a good name for herself in publishing is care-free and single. As a way to reconnect, Sarah asks Lauren to be her maid of honor and help plan the wedding. But the closeness Sarah was hoping to reignite seems like a thing of the past when Lauren misbehaves on a bachelorette trip.
"With astute descriptions of how values, tastes, desires, and ambitions change over two decades, Alam’s tale of a divergent friendship smartly reflects the trial and error nature of finding a mate and deciding how to grow up." (Publishers Weekly) Try this if you enjoyed Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead.
Blog Post
More Shakespeare Re-Imagined
by Lucy S
"A riff on Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, reimagining the character of the queen who becomes a statue as a devastatingly popular cheerleader who refuses to become a cautionary tale after she's sexually assaulted.” E.K. Johnston's web site
In Exit, Pursued By a Bear, a brilliant update of , E.K. Johnston takes one of Shakespeare’s most unconventional plays and turns it on its head. With character names and some plot points heavily inspired by the play, E.K. Johnston uses A Winter’s Tale as a platform from which to launch her well constructed and extremely relevant YA novel. Hermione Winters, the story’s main character, is the captain of a cheerleading team in a small town in Ontario, at a school for which cheerleading is a very big deal. At the beginning of the book, Hermione is heading off to her last summer of cheerleading camp with her best friend Polly and her boyfriend Leo. While at camp, Hermione is drugged and raped, and her life as she knows it changes. No longer the confident leader of the squad, Hermione struggles to come to terms with what happened to her and the way in which it alters her forever.
Shakespearean influences aside, E.K. Johnston’s book is an important contribution to young adult literature for a number of reasons. This book takes on the ugly but germane topic of rape in a brave and forthright manner. E.K. Johnston does not shy away from what happens to Hermione nor does she spend time focusing on the graphic details of it. What is central to the novel is the support that Hermione receives from many, sometimes unexpected people and the constant reminders to Hermione from these characters that she is not at fault. These messages are ones that cannot be reiterated enough for young adult readers, both male and female, today.
The strongest relationship in this book is the friendship between Hermione and Polly, and for E.K. Johnston to put this first speaks to the complexity teens face in balancing friends and romance and also to the idea that teens can feel many kinds of love. Acceptance is a theme that runs through , religious acceptance, acceptance of sexual orientation, acceptance of choices made, no matter how difficult. The strength in E.K. Johnston’s female characters comes through both physically and in spirit. Polly is a stellar example of this fortitude. There are many character throughout Exit, Pursued By a Bear that will stay with me for while.
In her note at the end of the book, E.K. Johnston recognizes that many sexual assault and rape victims might not have the support network that Hermione finds, and provides readers with resources for support in both the US and Canada. E.K. Johnston is giving us Hermione’s story as a possible outcome and in this, it is an exceptionally worthy pursuit.
Blog Post
National "Ask" Day - June 21
by iralax
The Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office is holding their annual Gun Safety Week from June 20-25. This week was chosen because June 21 is National “Ask” Day (“Asking Saves Kids”) which encourages parents to help prevent gun injuries and deaths to our children by asking relatives, friends, and neighbors where families and children visit and play if guns are in the home, and if so, are they secured safely so that they cannot be accessed by children or young people. The Sheriff’s Dept. has information available about gun safety and free gun safety locks available. Call 734-973-4613 to find out more.
Blog Post
Emerald & Orange: Prison Life
by manz
It is that time of year once again…. Not only does AADL’s Summer Game launch on Friday, June 17, but Orange is the New Black’s 4th season premieres on Netflix as well! Are you caught up? Are you ready?
When thinking of television shows set in prison one cannot forget Oz. Yes, we are talking about a show that premiered in 1997, but it has totally stood the test of time.
Some think The Sopranos put HBO hour-long dramas on the map, when in was in fact Oz. It was the first one-hour dramatic television series to be produced by HBO. The show aired from 1997-2003 and featured many actors from your favorite shows that came after Oz. (So many actors that went onto The Wire!)
Set in Oswald State Correctional Facility, better known as Oz, the show chronicles inmates in “Emerald City,” an experimental unit within Oz that has strict rules and is focused on prisoner rehabilitation. Through six seasons there is amazing character development as we watch the men in "Em City" come and go.
While Orange is the New Black has its sad moments, it also has plenty of comedic bits. Oz does not. (Well, the show's narrator does add his humor to the episodes.) Oz is dark, violent, intense, gripping, and worth a viewing if those are things you can stomach in a television show.
Blog Post
Rediscovering a masterpiece: Helen DeWitt’s Last Samurai
by bengelty
Those looking for Tom Cruise to don ceremonial armor and gallivant around 19th century Japan might be better off checking out the completely unrelated movie that unfortunately shares its name with Helen DeWitt’s remarkable debut novel. If instead you’re looking for a highly original yet compulsively readable book about language, art, and what it means to be intelligent, look no further.
Originally published in 2000, The Last Samurai concerns single mother Sibylla, a displaced American living in London, and her precocious savant of a son, Ludo. When, at the age of four, Ludo shows a voracious appetite for learning, Sibylla starts him out with a few passages from Homer’s Iliad (in the original Greek). Before long, Ludo is carrying around a backpack filled with everything from The Odyssey and The Metamorphosis to The House at Pooh Corner (he’s still a kid, after all).
As a stand in for Ludo’s biological father, Sibylla naturally turns to her favorite film, Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Samurai), which she and her son watch hundreds of times in order to impart the virtues of respect, honor, and discipline. Not surprisingly, this proves to be lacking for the ever-curious Ludo, who embarks on a quest of his own to find his real father in light of the wisdom conveyed within the film.
If you aren’t afraid of being outsmarted by a five-year-old; this book is for you. If you believe boredom to be “a fate worse than death”; this book is for you. And if you would simply rather watch a samurai movie; at least give some Kurosawa a try.
Recently republished by New Directions, The Last Samurai can also be requested using the MeLCat database.
Blog Post
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #602
by muffy
Inspired by Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and sets out to write stories of Chinese women who succeeded in mapping their own destinies, debut novelist Weina Dai Randel tries to redress the often misrepresented and misunderstood Empress Wu with The Moon in the Palace *
When a monk foretells that 5 year-old Mei will one day be both the mother of emperors and an emperor in her own right, her father takes this to heart and sees that she is schooled in poetry, history, mathematics, calligraphy, and even Sun Tzu's The Art of War.
At 13, the orphaned Mei enters the palace to serve in the royal household where she will need to draw on all she had learned from her father to survive the intrigue and duplicity of the Imperial Court, and to earn favor with the emperor. Her only ally is a boy named Pheasant but their involvement might put both of them in danger.
Mei's story continues in The Empress of Bright Moon as she ascends to rule as China's only female emperor in more than four millennia.
For historical fiction readers who enjoyed Empress Orchid and The Last Empress by Anchee Min.
* = starred review
Blog Post
Shakespeare Re-imagined
by Lucy S
"The Hogarth Shakespeare project sees Shakespeare’s works retold by acclaimed and bestselling novelists of today. The series launched in October 2015 and to date will be published in twenty countries."
As the third installment of the The Hogarth Shakespeare Project, Anne Tyler re-imagines The Taming of the Shrew in her newest book, Vinegar Girl. This version of the story is set in Tyler’s familiar territory of Baltimore. And as in many of her previous novels, Tyler deftly addresses relationships in the family and between the sexes. For long time Tyler readers, Vinegar Girl will provide a comfortable tone and setting. Her effortless writing is wholly absorbing. Tyler's Kate Battista is the daughter of an absented-minded research scientist, Louis. Kate is 29, single and a preschool teacher, though she doesn't really like children. She is stuck in a life taking care of her preoccupied father, whose prize research assistant, Pyotr, is visiting from Russia on a 3 year visa that is about to expire. In order to keep Pyotr in the country, Dr. Battista tries, through comical twists, to persuade Kate to marry Pyotr.
In keeping with Shakespearean comedy, Tyler's romp is predictable, playful, and delightfully entertaining. Her characters, the matronly pre-school teachers, the blond, ditzy sister, seem slightly overdone, but this gives Vinegar Girl an edge of bite. The one exception to this characterization is Kate herself, who is forthright, intelligent and endearing. In an interview in The Guardian, Tyler said of The Taming of the Shrew, “I hate it. It’s totally misogynistic. I know it thinks it’s funny, but it’s not. People behave meanly to each other, every single person.” Tyler steers clear of this trap through her portrayal of Kate as a singular woman and through the way in which Kate and Pyotr come together. "I loved Kate and Pyotr and the way they discover the oversized, tender, irreverent relationship that fits them...It is joyful," says author Rachel Joyce. Tyler’s firm grasp of family dynamics shines in her lovely interpretation of this Shakespeare classic.
Prior knowledge of The Taming of the Shrew is not necessary to enjoy Tyler’s giddy tale. She provides an enjoyable read for both her avid readers and Shakespeare fans.
Tyler’s work follows Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time (A Winter’s Tale) and Howard Jacobson’s Shylock is my Name (The Merchant of Venice).
Next up, Margaret Atwood takes on The Tempest in Hag-Seed, and then we can look forward to contributions from Jo Nesbo, Tracy Chevalier, Gillian Flynn and, Edward St. Aubyn.