A Piece of the World 

by Christina Baker Kline

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• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks; Reprint edition (January 30, 2018)

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“Exquisite. A must-read.” –Kristin Hannah

“This paperback edition includes a color reproduction of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World, along with a Q&A with bestselling author Kristin Hannah and a bonus short story, “Stranded in Ice.”

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the smash bestseller Orphan Train, a stunning and atmospheric novel of friendship, passion, and art, inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s mysterious and iconic painting Christina’s World.

“Later he told me that he’d been afraid to show me the painting. He thought I wouldn’t like the way he portrayed me: dragging myself across the field, fingers clutching dirt, my legs twisted behind. The arid moonscape of wheatgrass and timothy. That dilapidated house in the distance, looming up like a secret that won’t stay hidden.”

To Christina Olson, the entire world is her family farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. The only daughter in a family of sons, Christina is tied to her home by health and circumstance, and seems destined for a small life. Instead, she becomes Andrew Wyeth’s first great inspiration, and the subject of one of the best-known paintings of the twentieth century, Christina’s World.

As she did in her beloved bestseller Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline interweaves fact and fiction to vividly reimagine a real moment in history. A Piece of the World is a powerful story of the flesh-and-blood woman behind the portrait, her complicated relationship to her family and inheritance, and how artist and muse can come together to forge a new and timeless legacy.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Sometimes a sanctuary, sometimes a prison, that house on the hill has always been my home. I’ve spent my life yearning toward it, wanting to escape it, paralyzed by its hold on me. (There are many ways to be crippled, I’ve learned over the years, many forms of paralysis.) … You can never escape the bonds of family history, no matter how far you travel. And the skeleton of a house can carry in its bones the marrow of all that came before.

It is a terrible thing to find the love of your life, Christina… You know too well what you’re missing when it’s gone.

The day we bury her is dreary: a colorless sky, gray-boned trees, old sooty snow. Winter, I think, must be tired of itself.

… I put my hand over his, and he lays his other hand over mine. I feel the way I do when I lose something – a spool of thread, say – and search for it everywhere, only to discover it in an obvious place, like on the sideboard under the cloth.

My Review:

This was my first exposure to Christina Baker Kline’s talents and I became an instant devotee. The writing was emotive and often tinged with melancholy, lushly descriptive, thoughtfully observant, cunningly crafted, and intricately detailed. A fascinating mix of fact and fiction, I have since spent far too much time Googling Christina Olson and Andrew Wyeth’s iconic artwork.   I was immediately immersed in this beautifully and insightfully written book from the first person POV of Christina, a girl/woman with few options and limited mobility. Christina lived her entire life in the same house with her slightly odd family in small-town rural Maine and had continued to live under extremely harsh conditions without indoor plumbing, running water, or electricity, long after others in her area were enjoying these luxuries.

Christina was possibly the most obstinate woman of her time. Unsteady on her weak limbs following an life-threatening and undiagnosed illness at the age of three, she despised pity, denied most offers of assistance despite frequent mishaps and injuries from falls, refused to seek medical assistance when offered, and in her later years when her legs were no longer of use to her she steadfastly refused to use a wheelchair and drug herself by her elbows, up and down stairs and even across fields to visit her neighbor. I ached for her and wanted to pop her in the back of the head at the same time for her stubborn pride.  I was provided with a review copy of this captivating book by  TLC Book Tours and HarperCollins.

About Christina Baker Kline

Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Orphan Train as well as A Piece of the World. She lives outside New York City and spends as much time as possible on the coast of Maine. Learn more about Christina at www.christinabakerkline.com.

Connect with Christina on Facebook, and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Sunburn

by Laura Lippman 

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About The Author  

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Laura Lippman was a reporter for twenty years, including twelve years at The (Baltimore) Sun. She began writing novels while working fulltime and published seven books about “accidental PI” Tess Monaghan before leaving daily journalism in 2001. Her work has been awarded the Edgar ®, the Anthony, the Agatha, the Shamus, the Nero Wolfe, Gumshoe and Barry awards. She also has been nominated for other prizes in the crime fiction field, including the Hammett and the Macavity. She was the first-ever recipient of the Mayor’s Prize for Literary Excellence and the first genre writer recognized as Author of the Year by the Maryland Library Association.

Ms. Lippman grew up in Baltimore and attended city schools through ninth grade. After graduating from Wilde Lake High School in Columbia, Md., Ms. Lippman attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Her other newspaper jobs included the Waco Tribune-Herald and the San Antonio Light.

Ms. Lippman returned to Baltimore in 1989 and has lived there since. She is the daughter of Theo Lippman Jr., a Sun editorial writer who retired in 1995 but continues to freelance for several newspapers, and Madeline Mabry Lippman, a former Baltimore City school librarian. Her sister, Susan, is a local bookseller.

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ADD TO GOODREADS

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My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

If I didn’t need money so bad I would consider referring him to someone else. He’s so hot it’s distracting.

Earth’s atmosphere is twenty-one percent oxygen which makes my current level of breathlessness confusing.

Abby said you looked different but I didn’t believe her. You get bit by some radioactive spider in your lab man? ‘Cuz, holy shit, you’ve grown.

He smiles up at me, oblivious to the spinach leaf stuck to one of his back teeth. I point to my teeth. “You have something stuck in your teeth.” He nods, unbothered by this news. “I was saving it for later.”

That doesn’t stop me from carrying out a pretend conversation in my head. These are my favorite kind because I can control both sides of the conversation and not get in any trouble for saying what I want.

“Do you have a giant computer?” The corners of his eyes crinkle with his smile. “Huge.” “Oh, this conversation is starting to feel like foreplay.” He chokes, covering his mouth with the back of his hand as he coughs. “Science talk as foreplay. You might be my dream girl.”

My mouth waters like he’s fresh baked bread and I’m on a no carb diet.

My Review:

I am on book three of my continuing expedition of veneration and adoration for Carey Heywood and her The Fix Series. I cherish and pine for this author’s delightful wry humor and sweet and steamy stories between her releases. The books I have read so far have been a joy to read, amusingly clever, low conflict, written in my favorite dual POV, and pleasantly breezy with appealing and lovably quirky characters with a bit of edge. Her books do my heart good and tend to keep a smirk in place while reading. I adored Spencer, not only was he highly intelligent and sexy, he was patient, kind, thoughtful, polite, and a perfect gentleman who was also a gentle man – which is nirvana to me. Being a man of science and never having had a relationship, the clever and crafty Ms. Heywood has the brilliant and sexy Dr. Hill patiently and wisely applying the scientific method to his interactions with his high-school crush/current realtor Abby, he postulated a theory, formulated a hypothesis, performed his research, and gathered evidence from his experiments. Ingenious!

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Author Bio

 by Susan Wiggs

 

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Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks; Reprint edition (January 9, 2018)

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author comes a powerful, emotionally complex story of love, loss, the pain of the past—and the promise of the future.

Sometimes the greatest dream starts with the smallest element. A single cell, joining with another. And then dividing. And just like that, the world changes. Annie Harlow knows how lucky she is. The producer of a popular television cooking show, she loves her handsome husband and the beautiful Los Angeles home they share. And now, she’s pregnant with their first child. But in an instant, her life is shattered. And when Annie awakes from a yearlong coma, she discovers that time isn’t the only thing she’s lost.

Grieving and wounded, Annie retreats to her old family home in Switchback, Vermont, a maple farm generations old. There, surrounded by her free-spirited brother, their divorced mother, and four young nieces and nephews, Annie slowly emerges into a world she left behind years ago: the town where she grew up, the people she knew before, the high-school boyfriend turned judge. And with the discovery of a cookbook her grandmother wrote in the distant past, Annie unearths an age-old mystery that might prove the salvation of the family farm.

Family Tree is the story of one woman’s triumph over betrayal, and how she eventually comes to terms with her past. It is the story of joys unrealized and opportunities regained. Complex, clear-eyed and big-hearted, funny, sad, and wise, it is a novel to cherish and to remember.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

It was one of those moments Gran used to call a key moment. Time didn’t simply tick past, unremarked, unnoticed. No, this was the kind of moment that made everything stop.   You separated it from every other one, pressing the feeling to your heart, like a dried flower slipped between the pages of a beloved book. The moment was made of something fragile and delicate, yet it possessed the power to last forever.

Memories are strange things, aren’t they? You can’t touch them and hold them in your hands, but they have incredible power.

That’s the moment when everything changes. There’s before, and then after. And once a key moment occurs, there’s no going back to before. You make a choice, and it’s like ringing a bell. You can’t unring it. A key moment is a feeling. Your heart tells you. The point is, you have to pay attention.

That was how love worked sometimes… It filled every nook and cranny of your heart, and then one day you realized it had gone away. She wondered where those feelings went. Maybe they trickled into the atmosphere to be inhaled by someone else, a stranger who suddenly saw someone across the room and instantly fell I love.

 My Review:

This was my first experience enjoying Ms. Wigg’s amusing and dynamic storytelling and I immediately became an instant and ravenous fan. I adored her quirky characters, clever humor, and insightful narrative. Her storylines were poignant, entertaining, heart squeezing, intriguing, and thoughtfully written. The descriptive detail of her food preparations played havoc with my diet plan, ultimately causing me to run to the farmers market for my own fresh ingredients from her spark of culinary creativity. Her skillful wordcraft was a delight for all the senses and I doubt I could ever tire of feasting on her works.  I was provided with a review of this delicious book by TLC Book Tours and HarperCollins.

 About Susan Wiggs  

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Kat Grant and Alice Campbell have a friendship forged in shared confidences and long lunches lubricated by expensive wine. Though they’re very different women—the artsy socialite and the struggling suburbanite—they’re each other’s rocks. But even rocks crumble under pressure. Like when Kat’s financier husband, Howard, plunges to his death from the second-floor balcony of their South Florida mansion.

Howard was a jerk, a drunk, a bully and, police say, a murder victim. The questions begin piling up. Like why Kat has suddenly gone dark: no calls, no texts and no chance her wealthy family will let Alice see her. Why investigators are looking so hard in Alice’s direction. Who stands to get hurt next? And who is the cool liar—the masterful manipulator behind it all?

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Kat wasn’t just wealthy. She came from capital-M Money.

She never eats. She lives on a diet of wine and bitterness…

No one liked Howard… Not to speak ill of the dead, but he was an asshole. If everyone who thought he was an asshole was a suspect, they’d have an overly large number of people to consider.

If insanity was a side effect of Botox, every Floridian over the age of forty would be nuts.

 My Review:

I was captivated by this gripping story and was totally unprepared for the chilling and gasp-worthy ending. The writing was superb and cunningly clever – quickly setting an intense and thrumming sense of intrigue while constantly pricking at my curiosity and luring me in with enticing characters, expert storytelling, and a perplexing mystery. I was beguiled yet not fully trusting of the lovely and vivacious Kat. The storyline was brilliantly crafted and sharply honed and kept me riveted to my Kindle through all the twists and turns. I had speculated and cast out various theories but would never have anticipated or come close to Ms. Hunt’s ingenious plotting.   She has mad skills and my utmost respect, although she also scares me a little…

 Say You’ll Remember Me

by Katie McGarry

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Hardcover: 464 pages

Publisher: Harlequin Teen (January 30, 2018)

Doesn’t matter who did it. Not anymore. I did the time. It’s over.”

When Drix was convicted of a crime—one he didn’t commit—he thought his life was over. But opportunity came with the Second Chance Program, the governor’s newest pet project to get delinquents off the streets, rehabilitated and back into society. Drix knows this is his chance to get his life back on track, even if it means being paraded in front of reporters for a while.

Elle knows she lives a life of privilege. As the governor’s daughter, she can open doors with her name alone. But the expectations and pressure to be someone she isn’t may be too much to handle. She wants to follow her own path, whatever that means.

When Drix and Elle meet, their connection is immediate, but so are their problems. Drix is not the type of boy Elle’s parents have in mind for her, and Elle is not the kind of girl who can understand Drix’s messy life.

But sometimes love can breach all barriers.

Fighting against a society that can’t imagine them together, Drix and Elle must push themselves—Drix to confront the truth of the robbery, and Elle to assert her independence—and each other to finally get what they deserve.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

He must believe there’s nothing in my skull beyond the beginnings of hair follicles.

It’s creepy hanging with you… It’s like you’re the Walking Dead. I’m half expecting someone to jump out with a samurai sword and slice out your heart.

“I don’t know how to get them to leave me alone.” I pause, then the bitterness leaks out as well as a grim grin. “At least not without a baseball and a well-placed throw. Some people shouldn’t be allowed to continue their genetics.”

What does being mature mean? Mature feels an awful lot like being tamed, and so far, I’m not caring for the view from my cage.

Andrew and I are barely friends, and most days I lean toward thinking he should be neutered.

Drix gives that dog anything he wants. I’m warning you in case you guys grow up, get married and have babies. When the zombie apocalypse happens, he’s saving the dog before he saves any of us.

My Review:

I was stunned and off-balance by how much I enjoyed this skillfully crafted, engrossing, and heart-squeezing tale. I was immediately sucked in by the engaging storytelling and quick to fall for these enticing and intriguing characters, although I occasionally wanted to give several of them a pop to the back of their head and lock the bratty sister in her room. I very rarely read YA since I don’t like being reminded of those claustrophobic and hopeless feelings due to being powerless to the forces of controlling and cruel adults. But I couldn’t seem to put this one down. Adulting may be hard but it’s ever so sweet to make your own choices once out from under a menacing or suffocating thumb, as was the case for these two diversely different teens. Both were miserable and under intense pressure and scrutiny but had completely dissimilar life experiences.   Elle was a naïve and wealthy private school girl who had everything but freewill as she was little more than a trained monkey to her political parents’ dog and pony show. Hendrix was a cynically resigned, street-smart, and overly exposed delinquent fresh out juvenile detention. An unlikely pair who had been forbidden to interact while on the campaign trail, but of course, they meshed and became fast friends who eventually set off fireworks in their nether regions. I sighed with relief at the satisfying conclusion and certainly wouldn’t mind seeing the tale of this ragtag grouping further developed into a series.

About Katie McGarry 

Katie was a teenager during the age of grunge and boy bands and remembers those years as the best and worst of her life. She is a lover of music, happy endings, reality television, and is a secret University of Kentucky basketball fan.

She is the author of the Pushing the Limits and Thunder Road series. Say You’ll Remember Me will be released in 2018.

Katie loves to hear from her readers.

Connect with Katie

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