Review: Thinking of You by Jill Mansell

Source: Review copy from Sourcebooks
Rating: ★★★☆☆

“You know, I think it’s a pretty good job I’m here,” she told Ginny.  “Because, basically, you’re pretty hopeless.  You’ve been wrong about everyone so far.”

(from Thinking of You)

Thinking of You is another lighthearted British chick lit novel by Jill Mansell, whose books never fail to bring a smile to my face.  The heroine of Mansell’s latest U.S. release is Ginny Holland, a woman struggling with a newly empty nest and the fact that her daughter, Jem, is doing just fine without her at university.  After mistakenly thinking a roommate would liven up the house and supply her with a new best friend, Ginny takes a waitressing job, only to learn that the owner of the restaurant/antiques shop, the irresistibly handsome Finn, is the same man who nearly had her arrested for shoplifting.

While Ginny struggles to get back in the dating game, her ex-husband, Gavin, continues chasing 20-somethings in miniskirts; her daughter, Jem, learns that the freedom to make your own decisions often is accompanied by huge mistakes; her best friend, Carla, lets her down big time; and her roommate, Laurel, can’t move past a failed relationship.  As always, Mansell gives her secondary characters plenty of time in the spotlight, and they are always just as interesting as the main characters.

Thinking of You is a great escapist read.  I found myself cringing with every mistake and misunderstanding and laughing at every embarrassment.  I wasn’t fully convinced by the main love story, mostly because I don’t think it was as developed as it could have been, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying the book.  Mansell is my go-to author for comfort reads that let me just go with the flow, and Thinking of You didn’t disappoint, even if it isn’t my favorite of her books.

I love how Mansell’s heroines are endearingly flawed women to whom I can relate in some way, and I love how she manages to balance weightier issues with humor so her books never feel too heavy.  In Thinking of You, she has created a sweet tale about the bonds between mothers and daughters and the power of female friendships.

Disclosure: I received Thinking of You from Sourcebooks for review.

© 2013 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.

Mailbox Monday — May 20

Welcome to Mailbox Monday, the weekly meme created by Marcia, formerly from The Printed Page, where book lovers share the titles they received for review, purchased, or otherwise obtained over the past week. Mailbox Monday currently is on tour, and this month’s host is 4 the LOVE of BOOKS.

Here’s what I received:

Rutherford Park by Elizabeth Cooke — from Berkley for review

For the Cavendish family, Rutherford Park is much more than a place to call home.  It is a way of life marked by rigid rules and lavish rewards, governed by unspoken desires…

Lady of the house Octavia Cavendish lives like a bird in a gilded cage.  With her family’s fortune, her husband, William, has made significant additions to the estate, but he too feels bound — by the obligations of his title as well as his vows.  Their son, Harry, is expected to follow in his footsteps, but the boy has dreams of his own, like pursuing the new adventure of aerial flight.  Meanwhile, below stairs, a housemaid named Emily holds a secret that could undo the Cavendish name.

As the clouds of war gather on the horizon, an epic tale of longing and betrayal unfolds at Rutherford Park.  (publisher’s summary)

Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey — a surprise from Serena (thank you!!)

Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South — where one of the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War.  Trethewey’s resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.  (publisher’s summary)

What books did you add to your shelves recently?

© 2013 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.

Winner of Lauren Yanofsky Hates the Holocaust

…Serena, who won a copy Lauren Yanofsky Hates the Holocaust by Leanne Lieberman!!

Congratulations and happy reading!

© 2013 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.

Review: The Publicist (Book One) by Christina George

Source: Review copy from author
Rating:: ★★★☆☆

“Miss?” a tall handsome police officer leaned into her, “you were great, you really knew what to say to calm her down.”

“Thank you,” Kate said in almost a whisper.

“May I ask who are you? Her friend, sister, lover?”

“None of the above.” Kate’s mouth turned into a slight smile. “I’m the publicist.”

(from The Publicist, page viii)

The Publicist is the first of at least two books about Kate Mitchell, a publicist for a New York City publishing house.  Kate is 34 and unmarried, too busy with her career to seek out romantic relationships.  She is used to dealing with authors who have crazy demands or are just downright crazy, but in the span of several weeks, her life becomes even more chaotic.

Kate’s worked at Morris & Dean Publishing for five years, so she can easily navigate authors who threaten suicide when a huge interview is canceled, a book signing that almost doesn’t happen because not enough books were ordered, and a has-been celebrity whose drinking problems jeopardize a television appearance.  However, when top editor MacDermott Ellis begins to show interest in her, it’s only a matter of time before she stops protesting and succumbs to his charms.  Although he’s married, Kate believes he isn’t the heartless womanizer her best friend thinks he is.  She’s even more confused when the nephew of her dearest author friend arrives for a Christmas visit, and they hit it off.

Readers not only follow Kate’s romantic troubles but also her friendship with an elderly Morris & Dean author, who never delivered on the second book of his two-book deal, and her professional life, in which Kate and Mac work together on an upcoming sequel to one of Morris & Dean’s most successful bestsellers.

Kate is good at what she does; she has the power to make or break an author’s career with a single phone call.  If only she had that same calm control in her personal life.  I liked Kate from the very beginning, and while I didn’t always agree with her choices, I was able to understand how she could overlook the reality of Mac’s situation and let her feelings guide her.  George does a great job developing both Kate and Mac and the chemistry between them.

I wanted to read The Publicist because it’s an insider’s look at publishing.  George is a publicist in the industry and, therefore, writes under a pen name, which makes the story more authentic…and makes you wonder if any of the authors with whom Kate works are based on real people.  She writes about big egos, changes within in the publishing industry, and various work-related stresses, but she does so with humor and an obvious affection for the job.

Even though the book was predictable, I couldn’t help but enjoy it.  My only complaint is that the major plot threads are not resolved by the end.  I knew there would be a second book, but I expected there to be at least some sort of closure in this first installment and then maybe a little something revealed at the end to lead into the sequel.  I was left wanting more, so I definitely plan to read the second book in search of some resolution.  Nevertheless, The Publicist is a book that will appeal to book lovers wanting to know what happens behind the scenes of a book promotion.

Disclosure: I received The Publicist (Book One) from the author for review.

© 2013 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.

Review: The Gods of Heavenly Punishment by Jennifer Cody Epstein

Source: Review copy from W.W. Norton & Company
Rating:★★★★★

What kind of a people, she wondered, does what was done that day and then has no concept of the enormity of their act?

(from The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, page 339)

On the surface, The Gods of Heavenly Punishment is a novel about the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 during World War II and a handful of people from different walks of life who are impacted by the war.  But it goes so much deeper than that.  Jennifer Cody Epstein introduces her characters before the war, when life was filled with promise, and lets readers follow them through the darkest days of the war and the period of change afterward.

The novel opens with Cam and Lacy on a ferris wheel at a fair in New York.  Cam is shy and quiet from years of being ridiculed by his father for his stutter, while Lacy is a take-charge kind of woman who sets their relationship in motion.  The hopes and dreams they have are put on hold when war breaks out, and Cam joins the U.S. Army Air Corps.  Epstein has readers sit in the cockpit with Cam as he takes part in the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April 1942.

Epstein also introduces readers to Anton, the architect behind many of Tokyo’s modern structures who is later called on by the U.S. military to help destroy them.  His son, Billy, is a sensitive soul who doesn’t fit in and feels at home only behind a camera.  Hana, a passionate, modern woman who eschews the old Japanese ways, feels abandoned by the men she has loved and is resigned to a loveless, arranged marriage.  Yoshi is torn between her love for her troubled mother and her need to escape the depression that permeates their home — and then the incendiary bombs rain down on Tokyo.

These characters were intriguing and their stories fascinating on their own, but when the pieces fell into place and the connections between them were made known, I was blown away.  Epstein does a wonderful job painting a picture of Tokyo before and after and makes you feel like you are standing beside Yoshi when the bombs drop, feeling the heat, tasting the smoke, getting lost in all the chaos and confusion.  She is a master storyteller, enabling readers to really get to know her characters as they flit in and out of their lives.

Epstein focuses on the contrasts that make war so complex: before vs. after, war vs. murder, orders vs. ethics, victors vs. victims, us vs. them.  With characters that straddle both sides, she explores the gray areas of war and identity.  Billy was born and raised in Japan but isn’t Japanese.  Yoshi speaks Japanese, English, and French, thanks to her mother, Hana, who was educated in England and feels more English than Japanese.  They desire love, acceptance, security, and to know their true selves — and the war makes their search for these essentials more desperate and necessary.

The Gods of Heavenly Punishment is beautifully written and skillfully constructed.  Epstein moves back and forth between the characters, telling seemingly separate stories, and while readers may not understand where she is taking them, they will be rewarded for their patience in the end.  It’s not an easy book to read given the subject matter, and Epstein doesn’t flinch in her descriptions of the atrocities perpetrated by both sides.  No book about war can be wrapped up neatly or painlessly, but Epstein manages to infuse the ending with hope.  Tokyo is a symbol of these characters, who are brought down by their families and the war, and those who manage to survive will be reborn.

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for having me on The Gods of Heavenly Punishment tour.  To follow the tour, click here.

Book 16 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge

Disclosure: I received The Gods of Heavenly Punishment from W.W. Norton & Company for review.

© 2013 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.

Mailbox Monday — May 13

Welcome to Mailbox Monday, the weekly meme created by Marcia, formerly from The Printed Page, where book lovers share the titles they received for review, purchased, or otherwise obtained over the past week. Mailbox Monday currently is on tour, and this month’s host is 4 the LOVE of BOOKS.

Here’s what I received:

Mother’s Day gifts:

We Fought Back: Teen Resisters of the Holocaust by Allen Zullo — from The Girl (couldn’t find this one online; she bought it for me at her school’s Scholastic book fair)

Fifteen-year-old Paul just helped blow up a Nazi supply train.  Can he escape the Germans hunting him for revenge?

Fifteen-year-old Sarah has lost many loved ones to Nazi murderers.  Will partisan fighters accept her into their secret group?

Seventeen-year-old Frank and his team are preparing to attack a heavily armed German convoy.  Can they succeed against overwhelming odds — and survive?

These and other Jewish young people took on incredible risks to fight back against the Nazis in World War II.  You will never forget their true stories of courage and survival.  (publisher’s summary)

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson — from my husband

On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife.  Ursula dies before she can draw her first breath.  On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual.  For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on toward its second cataclysmic world war.

Does Ursula’s apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny?  And if she can, will she?

Startlingly imaginative, darkly comic, deeply poignant — this is Kate Atkinson at her absolute best.  (publisher’s summary)

For review:

Letters From Skye by Jessica Brockmole — from Ballantine

March 1912: Twenty-four-year-old Elspeth Dunn, a published poet on Scotland’s remote island of Skye, receives a fan letter from an American college student, David Graham.  Their correspondence blossoms into friendship, and eventually into love.  And when David volunteers as an ambulance driver during the Great War, Elspeth can only hope he survives.

June 1940:  Elspeth’s daughter, Margaret, has fallen for a pilot in the Royal Air Force, but her mother warns her against finding love in wartime.  Then, after a nightly air raid, Elspeth disappears, and Margaret is left with only a decades-old clue as to her mother’s whereabouts — and to what happened to her family long ago.  (publisher’s summary)

What books did you add to your shelves recently?

© 2013 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.

Review: Legacy of Rescue by Marta Fuchs

I turned to Dad and asked him if he had any feelings hearing German.

“No, why should I?  You can’t blame an entire people for what happened.  I want to be for peace.”

(from Legacy of Rescue, page 95)

Legacy of Rescue is Marta Fuchs’ tribute to her late father, Morton (Miksa) Fuchs, and the man who saved his life during World War II.  Miksa Fuchs, a Jew from Tokaj, Hungary, was sent to a labor camp in 1940.  In early 1945, the Hungarian officer overseeing the Jewish workers was ordered to give them over to the Germans.  The officer, Zoltán Kubinyi, an honest man and a devote Seventh Day Adventist, ignored the order, returned the men to Hungary, and later — when he refused to change out of his uniform into civilian clothes — was taken prisoner by the Russians.  Fuchs and her family never forgot how this man, with a wife and son back home, sacrificed his life to save more than 100 Jewish men from certain death.

The book is very conversational in tone, and thus, very readable.  Fuchs’ father tells his own story here, and you can just feel the passion and strength in his words. Fuchs’ mother and aunts also contribute stories in their own words about their arrival in Auschwitz and their return to Tokaj after the war.  The inclusion of family photos throughout the book helps readers get to know Fuchs and her family and honors those who did not survive.

Fuchs offers her own reflections on fleeing Hungary as a child at the start of the revolution in 1956, talking about the Holocaust with her young son for the first time, meeting Kubinyi’s son, and returning to Tokaj to honor the town’s Jews 50 years after they were rounded up and deported.  Her older brother, Henry, narrates part of the story as well, and reflections from her children and Henry’s children add the voices of a generation far removed from the horrors of the Holocaust but affected by them as well.

Legacy of Rescue is unique among the Holocaust memoirs I’ve read because it is filled with goodness and hope.  There are no graphic depictions of life in the camps, and even though a sense of loss permeates the story, it is really an outpouring of gratitude and a celebration of life.  Fuchs and her family know that the only reason they are alive is because of one man’s selfless act.  This quote, from when Fuchs met Kubinyi’s son, sums up the book beautifully and brought tears to my eyes:

I want to thank you for your father.  I am here in this world because of what he did in saving my father.  But you didn’t have a father to love you and raise you like I had.  (page 122)

Legacy of Rescue may be a short book, but it’s not one you’ll soon forget.  One man stayed true to himself and his beliefs and gave his life to save others.  Another man recognized the chance he was given and emerged from an experience too terrible to comprehend to live a life filled with love.  I think we need stories like this, especially when so much hatred remains in this world.  Fuchs emphasizes that there are good people out there, and we should let their example guide us — and in Legacy of Rescue, these amazing people live on.  I know many people refuse to read books about the Holocaust because they are too painful, so I highly recommend this uplifting story about courage, love, honor, and remembrance.

Disclosure: I received Legacy of Rescue from Smith Publicity for review. I am an Amazon associate.

© 2013 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.