My Book Haul...December 20, 2014

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by The Caffeinated Book Reviewer, Showcase Sunday is hosted by Books, Biscuits and Tea, Stacking the Shelves is hosted by Tynga's Reviews, and Monday Mailbox by Marcia to be Continued.

All four are blog roundups giving you a chance to share what your weekly book haul!

Christmas is so close!!  I love the season, but the shopping and wrapping takes so much time, it starts to feel like a second job.  I think I've done the majority of my shopping on Amazon this year.  I just love Amazon Prime.  Between the free 2 day shipping, the movie streaming, and the free books available, I don't know how I lived without it before.

I got some great additions this week.  Now I just need to make some time to read - I'm hoping that Santa is bringing me a new Kindle to load them on!

From NetGalley:

Lost & Found by Brooke Davis....Millie Bird, seven years old and ever hopeful, always wears red

Agatha Pantha, eighty-two, has not left her house—or spoken to another human being—since she was widowed seven years ago. She fills the silence by yelling at passersby, watching loud static on TV, and maintaining a strict daily schedule.

Karl the Touch Typist, eighty-seven, once used his fingers to type out love notes on his wife’s skin. Now that she’s gone, he types his words out into the air as he speaks. Karl’s been committed to a nursing home, but in a moment of clarity and joy, he escapes. Now he’s on the lam.

Brought together at a fateful moment, the three embark upon a road trip across Western Australia to find Millie’s mother. Along the way, Karl wants to find out how to be a man again; Agatha just wants everything to go back to how it was.

Together they will discover that old age is not the same as death, that the young can be wise, and that letting yourself feel sad once in a while just might be the key to a happy life.
gumboots to match her curly hair. Her struggling mother, grieving the death of Millie’s father, leaves her in the big ladies’ underwear department of a local store and never returns. (Published by Penguin Group (USA))

Single, Carefree, Mellow by Katherine Heiny.... A tender and ruefully funny look at varieties of 

love, secrets, and betrayal in ten exquisite stories that form a guided tour of the human heart.

In the title story, we meet Maya, who is torn between her wryly funny boyfriend and the allure of her veterinarian. In "Andorra," a woman's lover calls her every Thursday as he drives to meet his wife at marriage counseling. "How to Give the Wrong Impression" shows us a woman pining for her roommate, a man who will hold her hand but then tell her that her palm is sweaty. In "The Dive Bar" a girl agrees to have a drink with her married lover's wife. Revisiting Maya in several stories, chronicling her various states of love, this is a collection about how we are unfaithful to each other, both willfully and unwittingly. Populated with unwelcome houseguests, disastrous birthday parties, needy but loyal friends, and flirtatious older men, the stories are emotionally astute, sexy, and disarming-and they introduce us to a tart, and marvelous, new voice. (Published by Random House)

From Edelweiss:

Winter at the Door by Sarah Graves....Elizabeth "Lizzie" Snow was first introduced in the final book in Graves's previous series, in which she helped Jake Tiptree investigate the murder of a girl whose body was found in a church steeple. Now, Lizzie has taken over as Eastport's police chief, and is quickly finding the job-and her life-more complicated than she expected. And then she learns that a perilous piece of her past has followed her from Boston back to Maine, a mysterious stalker whose chilling intentions drive her to the edge…(Published by Random House)




The Knockoff by Lucy Sykes and Jo Piazza....When Imogen returns to work at Glossy after six months away, she can barely recognize her own magazine. 

Eve, fresh out of Harvard Business School, has fired "the gray hairs," put the managing editor in a supply closet, stopped using the landlines, and hired a bevy of manicured and questionably attired underlings who text and tweet their way through meetings. 

Imogen, darling of the fashion world, may have Alexander Wang and Diane von Furstenberg on speed dial, but she can't tell Facebook from Foursquare and once got her iPhone stuck in Japanese for two days. 

Under Eve's reign, Glossy is rapidly becoming a digital sweatshop-hackathons rage all night, girls who sleep get fired, and "fun" means mandatory, company-wide coordinated dances to Beyoncé. 

Wildly out of her depth, Imogen faces a choice-pack up her Smythson notebooks and quit, or channel her inner geek and take on Eve to save both the magazine and her career. 

A glittering, uproarious, sharply drawn story filled with thinly veiled fashion personalities, The Knockoff is an insider's look at the ever-changing world of fashion and a fabulous romp for our Internet-addicted age. (Published by Random House)

Little Beach Street Bakery by Jenny Colgan....Amid the ruins of her latest relationship, Polly Waterford moves far away to the sleepy seaside resort of Polbearne, where she lives in a small, lonely flat above an abandoned shop.

To distract her from her troubles, Polly throws herself into her favorite hobby: making bread. But her relaxing weekend diversion quickly develops into a passion. As she pours her emotions into kneading and pounding the dough, each loaf becomes better than the last. (Published by HarperCollins)

Soon, Polly is working her magic with nuts and seeds, olives and chorizo, and the local honey-courtesy of a handsome local beekeeper. Drawing on reserves of determination and creativity Polly never knew she had, she bakes and bakes . . . and discovers a bright new life where she least expected it. 

Things You Won't Say by Sarah Pekkanen..... How far would you go to save your family?

Every morning, as her husband Mike straps on his SIG Sauer and pulls on his heavy Magnum boots, Jamie Anderson tenses up. Then comes the call she has always dreaded: There’s been a shooting at police headquarters. Mike isn’t hurt, but his long-time partner is grievously injured. As weeks pass and her husband’s insomnia and disconnectedness mount, Jamie realizes he is an invisible casualty of the attack. Then the phone rings again. Another shooting—but this time Mike has pulled the trigger.

But the shooting does more than just alter Jamie’s world. It’s about to change everything for two other women. Christie Simmons, Mike’s flamboyant ex, sees the tragedy as an opportunity for a second chance with Mike. And Jamie’s younger sister, Lou, must face her own losses to help the big sister who raised her. As the press descends and public cries of police brutality swell, Jamie tries desperately to hold together her family, no matter what it takes. (Simon and Schuster)

The Daughter by Jane Shemilt.....Jenny is a successful family doctor, the mother of three great teenagers, married to a celebrated neurosurgeon.

But when her youngest child, fifteen-year-old Naomi, doesn’t come home after her school play, Jenny’s seemingly ideal life begins to crumble. The authorities launch a nationwide search with no success. Naomi has vanished, and her family is broken.

As the months pass, the worst-case scenarios—kidnapping, murder—seem less plausible. The trail has gone cold. Yet for a desperate Jenny, the search has barely begun. More than a year after her daughter’s disappearance, she’s still digging for answers—and what she finds disturbs her. Everyone she’s trusted, everyone she thought she knew, has been keeping secrets, especially Naomi. Piecing together the traces her daughter left behind, Jenny discovers a very different Naomi from the girl she thought she’d raised. (Harper Collins)

What I Blogged This Week:

Waiting on Wednesday....

Top Ten Books I Read (that were published) in 2014

Bennington Girls are Easy

I'm looking forward to a short work week so I can snuggle on the couch and read!