THOUGHTS ON THIS 'n THAT

  Outside a rural Pennsylvania motel, nine-year-old Lulu smokes a cigarette while sitting on the lap of a trucker. Recent art grad Quinn is passing through town and captures it. The photograph, later titled "Lulu & the Trucker," launches Quinn's career, escalating her from a starving artist to a renowned photographer.  In a parallel life, Lulu fights to survive a volatile home, growing up too quickly in an environment wrought with drug abuse and her mother's prostitution.  Decades later, when Quinn has a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art and "Lulu & the Trucker" has sold at auction for a record-breaking amount, Lulu is surprised to find the troubling image of her young self in the newspaper. She attends an artist talk for the exhibition with one question in mind for Quinn: Why didn't you help me all those years ago?  Tell Me One Thing is a portrait of two Americas, examining power, privilege, and the sacrifices one is willing to make to ...

THE CRITIC'S DAUGHTER: A Memoir (WWNorton) is a unique portrait of a father-daughter relationship. Priscilla Gilman grew up the daughter of Richard Gilman, a famous mercurial writer and theatre critic. The Gilman's lived on the upper west side and they were constantly entertaining the rich and famous artists from the threatre and literary world. At ten years old, Priscilla's mother, Lynn Nesbit, a successful literary agent left the marriage. We are immersed into the complexity of being a little girl. She gets to see her father as a tortured soul. She is kind to him in her memoir, sharing a full palette of the man he was, including his struggles with his sexuality. Priscilla's story is honest, raw and courageous. It is one of loss and love, as well as grief and forgiveness. I've read so many memoirs about mother-daughter relationships. This was fresh and different. Thank you BookBrowse and WWNorton for providing an early copy to be reviewed. Priscilla Gilman  is a fo...

  What if you got a second chance to live this thing called life. What would you do differently? Would you change any decisions you've made in the past? That's what Alisha Fernandez Miranda gets to do in her memoir, MY WHAT IF YEAR (ZibbyBooks). She shares how to live life without any regrets. You might end up wanting to make a few changes too .. or not! On the cusp of turning forty, Alisha Fernandez Miranda has climbed to the peak of personal and professional success, but at a price; she’s overworked and exhausted. Alisha puts her successful career on hold for a year and explores the "What it" jobs of her dreams.  Bravely, Alisha decides to give herself a break, temporarily pausing her stressful career as the CEO of high-powered consulting firm. With the tentative blessing of her husband and eight-year-old twins, she leaves her home in London to spend one year exploring the dream jobs of her youth, seeking answers to the question, “What If?” What follows is a s...

  "A heart-wrenching exploration of the decisions women must make when their loyalties are put to the test in the most unimaginable of circumstances.” –Sarah Penner,  New York Times  bestselling author of  The Lost Apothecary A woman must rescue her cousin's family from a train bound for Auschwitz in this riveting tale of bravery and resistance, from the bestselling author of  The Lost Girls of Paris 194 2 .  Hannah Martel has narrowly escaped Nazi Germany after her fiancé was killed in a pogrom. When her ship bound for America is turned away at port, she has nowhere to go but to her cousin Lily, who lives with her family in Brussels. Fearful for her life, Hannah is desperate to get out of occupied Europe. But with no safe way to leave, she must return to the dangerous underground work she thought she had left behind. Seeking help, Hannah joins the Sapphire Line, a secret resistance network led by a mysterious woman named Micheline and her enigmatic br...

  From Icelandic author, Sigríður Hagalín Björnsdóttir comes a heart-wrenching thriller about a woman’s desperate quest to save the people she loves from a natural disaster.  Her third novel, The Fires (AmazonCrossing) is a bestseller and viral hit in Iceland.  After an eight-hundred-year slumber, the volcanoes in Iceland’s most populated region are showing signs of life. Earthquakes dominate the headlines. Echoes of the devastating eruptions in the past stir unease in the people. Volcanologist Anna Arnardóttir has spent her entire life studying the volcanic powers under the earth’s crust, but even she cannot fathom the catastrophe at hand. As a series of eruptions threaten most of Iceland’s population, she’s caught off her rational guard by the most terrible natural disaster of all―love. The world as she knows it is about to fall apart, and so is her heart. Caught between the safety of a nation and her feelings for her children, her lover, and her past, Anna embarks on a...

 

  RIVER SING ME HOME (Berkley) by Eleanor Shearer is inspired by the true stories of the brave woman who went looking for their stolen children after the abolition of slavery in 1834.  It's hard to believe its a debut novel, because Shearer's prose and narrative are so powerful and complex.  River Sing Me Home is the story of Rachel, a woman slave who has given birth repeatedly and had five children survive only to be taken away and sold.   The British King declares the Emancipation Act effectively ending slavery, but the plantation owners announce they are now apprentices and have to work on the plantation for six more years. It's at this point Rachel decides to run and search for her five children.  She doesn't know if any of them are alive, but she is driven by the fact, a mother cannot be free without knowing what has become of her children. She begins her dangerous journey in Barbados, then on a river deep in the forest of British Giana and finally across t...