Sunday, August 28, 2016

Weekly Book Haul......August 28, 2016






Stacking the Shelves is a weekly book meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews, The Sunday Post is another great site hosted by The Caffeinated Book Reviewer.  The Sunday Salon is a Facebook page where great readers share what they've read this week and Mailbox Monday is a weekly roundup of the new books people have received.


I've had a pretty busy week.  It was my birthday on Friday, so I feel like I've done nothing but go out to eat and get gifts - a nice way to spend a weekend!!

I ended up at Olive Garden Friday night, it used to be my favorite place to go eat way too much.  But I haven't been there in a long time, and I don't know if it's either my tastebuds or if their recipes have changed, but the marinara sauce was WAY different.  It tasted like tomato sauce.  So I switched to the Pasta Fagoli and it was weirdly different too.  Maybe it's just because I've been eating whole foods and a macro plan for six months, but I was wildly disappointed.  I still think they changed their sauce.  Then the manager came over and told us that the marinara sauce "used to come in pouches but now it comes in cans, so maybe that's the difference.".  Umm, yuck.  I didn't need to hear that.

Onward and upward.  My oldest daughter and I drove to Sedona yesterday and had our tarot cards read.  One of the cards drawn on me was Nothing-ness.  Which scared the crap out of me, because i thought that meant I was dying.  But apparently, it's a very powerful card which means the space before a new beginning.  Which is exactly how I feel right now.  I'm ready for the next chapter in my life.

I've got to get caught up on my reviews because I've read a bunch of great books lately, but I'm so wiped out by the time I get home from work that opening my laptop seems like an olympian task.

Has anyone read Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris?  I keep seeing a lot of buzz around it, and they had a pretty big mailing campaign around it, where I got spooky letters from a hotel.  I've got it sitting on my end table pile of books and I'll probably start it next.  I'm wondering if it lives up to the hype?

NetGalley


The Dollhouse by Fiona Davis...."The Dollhouse. . . . That's what we boys like  
to call it. . . . The Barbizon Hotel for Women, packed to the rafters with pretty little dolls. Just like you."
 
Fiona Davis's stunning debut novel pulls readers into the lush world of New York City's glamorous Barbizon Hotel for Women, where a generation of aspiring models, secretaries, and editors lived side-by-side while attempting to claw their way to fairy-tale success in the 1950s, and where a present-day journalist becomes consumed with uncovering a dark secret buried deep within the Barbizon's glitzy past.
 
When she arrives at the famed Barbizon Hotel in 1952, secretarial school enrollment in hand, Darby McLaughlin is everything her modeling agency hall mates aren't: plain, self-conscious, homesick, and utterly convinced she doesn't belong—a notion the models do nothing to disabuse. Yet when Darby befriends Esme, a Barbizon maid, she's introduced to an entirely new side of New York City: seedy downtown jazz clubs where the music is as addictive as the heroin that's used there, the startling sounds of bebop, and even the possibility of romance.
 
Over half a century later, the Barbizon's gone condo and most of its long-ago guests are forgotten. But rumors of Darby's involvement in a deadly skirmish with a hotel maid back in 1952 haunt the halls of the building as surely as the melancholy music that floats from the elderly woman's rent-controlled apartment. It's a combination too intoxicating for journalist Rose Lewin, Darby's upstairs neighbor, to resist—not to mention the perfect distraction from her own imploding personal life. Yet as Rose's obsession deepens, the ethics of her investigation become increasingly murky, and neither woman will remain unchanged when the shocking truth is finally revealed.


Hey Harry, Hey Matilda by Rachel Hulin....Hey Harry, Hey Matilda is the
story—told entirely in hilarious emails—of fraternal twins Harry and Matilda Goodman as they fumble into adulthood, telling lies and keeping secrets, and finally confronting their complicated twinship. 

Matilda Goodman is an underemployed wedding photographer grappling with her failure to live as an artist and the very bad lie she has told her boyfriend (that she has a dead twin). Harry, her (totally alive) brother, is an untenured professor of literature, anxiously contemplating his publishing status (unpublished) and sleeping with a student. 

When Matilda invites her boyfriend home for Thanksgiving to meet the family, and when Harry makes a desperate—and unethical—move to save his career, they set off an avalanche of shame, scandal, and drunken hot tub revelations that force them to examine the truth about who they really are. A wonderfully subversive, sensitive novel of romantic entanglement and misguided ambition, Hey Harry, Hey Matilda is a joyful look at love and family in all its forms.




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