Its Monday What ARe You Reading – Page 12

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

Published on April 21, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)29 Comments

Welcome to It’s Monday! What Are You Reading! This is a great way to plan out your reading week and see what others are currently reading as well… you never know where that next “must read” book will come from!

I love being a part of this and I hope you do too! As part of this weekly meme I love to encourage you all to go and visit the others participating in this meme. I offer a weekly contest for those who visit 10 or more of the Monday Meme participants and leave a comment telling me how many you visited. **You do not have to have a blog to participate! You receive one entry for every 10 comments, just come back here and tell me how many in the comment area.

Under the new and hopefully improved 2013 guidelines, the winner each week will receive a $5 Amazon gift card. This past weeks winner is:

Joy from Joy’s Book Blog!

(Congratulations! I will email you the gift card)

I have been fairly absent this week. I have an uncle who has been very sick with cancer for over the past year. It has been a long battle for him and I spent time with him and my aunt this past Wednesday when I heard that things were not looking good. I am so glad I did as he passed away on Thursday evening. On Thursday, I was working 13 hours on the Camp Benedict benefit dinner which happened to be in the middle of a snow storm and we still had a wonderful turn out! On Friday morning I had two meetings, and then my friend Amy picked me up and I went with 8 of my girl friends to Breezy Point Minnesota for a fun relaxing girls weekend. The break was needed, and as you can imagine, this week will be busy again.

With all that going on my reading was non-existent but I did get a little audio time in.

Here is what was posted this past week:

Book Expo planning and roommate update

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan (seriously, if you have not read this book I think you must!)

And wow… that was it. That was all I posted. 😯 This week I am pretty much continuing what I already has going but this is my current audio listening…

They’ve spent years at the same high school without speaking a word to one another, but that’s all about to change. Popular Bliss was having the perfect prom until she found her BFF and boyfriend making out in the back of a limo. Bad girl Jolene wouldn’t be caught dead at the prom, yet here she is, trussed up in pink ruffles, risking her reputation for some guy – some guy who is forty minutes late. And shy, studious, über-planner Meg never counted on her date’s standing her up and leaving her idling in the parking lot outside the prom. Get ready for The Anti-Prom, Abby McDonald’s hilarious, heart-tugging tale about three girls and one unforgettable prom night.

A trip to the library in search of audio brought me home with this.

The prequel to the New York Times bestselling Maze Runner series—The Kill Order is a modern classic for fans of The Hunger Games and Divergent. It can be read alone or as a companion to the action-packed series.

Before WICKED was formed, before the Glade was built, before Thomas entered the Maze, sun flares hit the earth and mankind fell to disease.

Mark and Trina were there when it happened, and they survived. But surviving the sun flares was easy compared to what came next.

Now a disease of rage and lunacy races across the eastern United States, and there’s something suspicious about its origin. Worse yet, it’s mutating, and all evidence suggests that it will bring humanity to its knees.

Mark and Trina are convinced there’s a way to save those left living from descending into madness. And they’re determined to find it—if they can stay alive. Because in this new, devastated world, every life has a price. And to some, you’re worth more dead than alive.

James Dashner (my author crush) comes through again with an engaging tale….

So what have you been reading? What will you be reading? I want to know! 😀 Please ass your Its Monday What Are You Reading post to the linky below! Oh and remember, our hashtag is #IMWAYR

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It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

Published on April 14, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)42 Comments

Under the new and hopefully improved 2013 guidelines, the winner each week will receive a $5 Amazon gift card. This past weeks winner is:

Lori from Escape with Dollycas!

(Congratulations! I will email you the gift card)

It was a busy week but with Book Club and a snow storm… I did get some reading in 😀 Here is what I posted this week:

The Best Of Us by Sarah Pekkanan (SSQQQUUUEEE!!!)

The Storyteller by Jodi Piccoult ( her latest – and this one is different!)

Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl (Bookies review – and yes, we dressed up as food critics in disguise!)

Minnesota Book Awards... I went and I had a blast!

This week I am hoping to get some good reading in. I am finally finishing up the three audio books I feel like I have been listening to FOREVER! So… I will be able to move on to some new things: 😀

When the concierge of The Alexander, a historic Atlanta apartment building, invites his fellow residents to join him for weekly screenings of Downton Abbey, four very different people find themselves connecting with the addictive drama, and—even more unexpectedly—with each other…

Samantha Davis married young and for the wrong reason: the security of old Atlanta money—for herself and for her orphaned brother and sister. She never expected her marriage to be complicated by love and compromised by a shattering family betrayal.

Claire Walker is now an empty nester and struggling author who left her home in the suburbs for the old world charm of The Alexander, and for a new and productive life. But she soon wonders if clinging to old dreams can be more destructive than having no dreams at all.

And then there’s Brooke MacKenzie, a woman in constant battle with her faithless ex-husband. She’s just starting to realize that it’s time to take a deep breath and come to terms with the fact that her life is not the fairy tale she thought it would be.

For Samantha, Claire, Brooke—and Edward, who arranges the weekly gatherings—it will be a season of surprises as they forge a bond that will sustain them through some of life’s hardest moments—all of it reflected in the unfolding drama, comedy, and convergent lives of Downton Abbey.

Now an active member of the resistance, Lena has transformed. The nascent rebellion that was underway in Pandemonium has ignited into an all-out revolution in Requiem, and Lena is at the center of the fight.

After rescuing Julian from a death sentence, Lena and her friends fled to the Wilds. But the Wilds are no longer a safe haven. Pockets of rebellion have opened throughout the country, and the government cannot deny the existence of Invalids. Regulators infiltrate the borderlands to stamp out the rebels.

As Lena navigates the increasingly dangerous terrain of the Wilds, her best friend, Hana, lives a safe, loveless life in Portland as the fiancée of the young mayor. Requiem is told from both Lena and Hana’s points of view. They live side by side in a world that divides them until, at last, their stories converge.

Hildy Good is a townie. A lifelong resident of an historic community on the rocky coast of Boston’s North Shore, she knows pretty much everything about everyone. Hildy is a descendant of one of the witches hung in nearby Salem, and is believed, by some, to have inherited psychic gifts. Not true, of course; she’s just good at reading people. Hildy is good at lots of things. A successful real-estate broker, mother and grandmother, her days are full. But her nights have become lonely ever since her daughters, convinced their mother was drinking too much, staged an intervention and sent her off to rehab. Now she’s in recovery—more or less.

Alone and feeling unjustly persecuted, Hildy needs a friend. She finds one in Rebecca McCallister, a beautiful young mother and one of the town’s wealthy newcomers. Rebecca feels out-of-step in her new surroundings and is grateful for the friendship. And Hildy feels like a person of the world again, as she and Rebecca escape their worries with some harmless gossip, and a bottle of wine by the fire—just one of their secrets.

But not everyone takes to Rebecca, who is herself the subject of town gossip. When Frank Getchell, an eccentric local who shares a complicated history with Hildy, tries to warn her away from Rebecca, Hildy attempts to protect her friend from a potential scandal. Soon, however, Hildy is busy trying to cover her own tracks and protect her reputation. When a cluster of secrets become dangerously entwined, the reckless behavior of one threatens to expose the other, and this darkly comic novel takes a chilling turn.

YAY for new audio! I am now wondering what you are reading this week. Please add your link to your What Are You Reading post below…

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It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

Published on April 7, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)39 Comments

Under the new and hopefully improved 2013 guidelines, the winner each week will receive a $5 Amazon gift card. This past weeks winner is:

BookGoil!

(Congratulations! I will email you the gift card)

It was a good week! I was busy and am still (STILL!) listening to the same three audio books but, I feel I am moving forward.

Here is what I posted:

The BIG reveal of the author event I have been working on – Wine and Words!

Book Chat with Randall Arthur (author of the unbelievably good Forgotten Road)

Wow. No book reviews. No audio reviews. 😯 That may be a first. Hopefully, a last. I have Sarah Pekkanen’s new book reviewed and ready to go live tomorrow and the book club book will be posted this week as well. With a little luck, I can finish some audio.

As far as this week, I am keeping it light… one book:

Once, a long time ago, I walked down a night-darkened road called Firefly Lane, all alone, on the worst night of my life, and I found a kindred spirit. That was our beginning. More than thirty years ago. TullyandKate. You and me against the world. Best friends forever. But stories end, don’t they? You lose the people you love and you have to find a way to go on. . . .

Tully Hart has always been larger than life, a woman fueled by big dreams and driven by memories of a painful past. She thinks she can overcome anything until her best friend, Kate Ryan, dies. Tully tries to fulfill her deathbed promise to Kate—to be there for Kate’s children—but Tully knows nothing about family or motherhood or taking care of people.

Sixteen-year-old Marah Ryan is devastated by her mother’s death. Her father, Johnny, strives to hold the family together, but even with his best efforts, Marah becomes unreachable in her grief. Nothing and no one seems to matter to her . . . until she falls in love with a young man who makes her smile again and leads her into his dangerous, shadowy world.

Dorothy Hart—the woman who once called herself Cloud—is at the center of Tully’s tragic past. She repeatedly abandoned her daughter, Tully, as a child, but now she comes back, drawn to her daughter’s side at a time when Tully is most alone. At long last, Dorothy must face her darkest fear: Only by revealing the ugly secrets of her past can she hope to become the mother her daughter needs.

A single, tragic choice and a middle-of-the-night phone call will bring these women together and set them on a poignant, powerful journey of redemption. Each has lost her way, and they will need each one another—and maybe a miracle—to transform their lives.

An emotionally complex, heart-wrenching novel about love, motherhood, loss, and new beginnings, Fly Away reminds us that where there is life, there is hope, and where there is love, there is forgiveness. Told with her trademark powerful storytelling and illuminating prose, Kristin Hannah reveals why she is one of the most beloved writers of our day.

Fly Away Home is a sequel to Firefly Lane and a pleasant surprise for those of us who read and loved that book… (I still remember exactly where I was when I finished reading Firefly Lane.

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It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

Published on March 31, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)32 Comments

Under the new and hopefully improved 2013 guidelines, the winner each week will receive a $5 Amazon gift card. This past weeks winner is:

Charlotte!!!!

(Random.org is loving you – that is two weeks in a row… I dont think that has ever happened before :D)

For those of you who do Easter – Happy Easter! I had a wonderful day of church and then spending the day with my hubby, enjoying good food and a good movie. Lets just say… I need to get back to the gym tomorrow. 😀

This week was ok for reading and blogging – here is what I posted:

Six Years by Harlan Coben (WOW OH WOW OH WOW!!!)

The Guilty One by Lisa Ballantine (it’s been a while since I have read this level of creepy crazy)

A new read a long for April: The Hobbit (looking for joiners!) 😀

Little Women by Louise May Alcott ( a March read-a-long that includes in my opinion what Marmee should really say to her daughters…)

I completed my first 7K for the year (pics of all the people!!!)

Not too bad a week. I am in the middle of three audio books that I feel like I have been listening to FOREVER. I am going to need a shorter audio when I finish these for a break 😀

Here is what is on the reading agenda this week:

An all-expense-paid week at a luxury villa in Jamaica—it’s the invitation of a lifetime for a group of old college friends. All four women are desperate not just for a reunion, but for an escape: Tina is drowning under the demands of mothering four young children. Allie is shattered by the news that a genetic illness runs in her family. Savannah is carrying the secret of her husband’s infidelity. And, finally, there’s Pauline, who spares no expense to throw her wealthy husband an unforgettable thirty-fifth birthday celebration, hoping it will gloss over the cracks already splitting apart their new marriage.

Languid hours on a private beach, gourmet dinners, and late nights of drinking kick off an idyllic week for the women and their husbands. But as a powerful hurricane bears down on the island, turmoil swirls inside the villa, forcing each of the women to reevaluate everything she knows about her friends—and herself.

Oh sweet Martha’s cookies! I am so enjoying this one. I love Sarah’s writing and I am reading this one every chance I get!

Kate Vaughan is no stranger to tough choices.

She’s made them before. Now it’s time to do it again.

Kate has a secret, something tucked away in her past. And she’s getting on with her life. Her business is thriving. She has a strong relationship with her family, and a devoted boyfriend whom she wants to love with all her heart. If Kate had ever made a list, Rowan would fill the imagined boxes of a perfect mate. But she wants more than the perfect on paper relationship; she wants a real and imperfect love. That’s why, when Kate discovers the small velvet box hidden in Rowan’s drawer, she panics.

It always happens this way. Just when Kate thinks she can love, just when she believes she can conquer the fear, she’s filled with dread. And she wants more than anything to make this feeling go away. But how?

When the mistakes have been made and the running is over, it’s time to face the truth. Kate knows this. She understands that a woman can never undo what can never be undone. Yet, for the first time in her life she also knows that she won’t fully love until she confronts those from her past. It’s time to act.

Can she do it? Can she travel to the place where it all began, to the one who shares her secret? Can the lost ever become found?

SO excited about this one… starting it later this week.

Ruth Reichl, world-renowned food critic and former editor in chief of Gourmet magazine, knows a thing or two about food. She also knows that as the most important food critic in the country, you need to be anonymous when reviewing some of the most high-profile establishments in the biggest restaurant town in the world—a charge she took very seriously, taking on the guise of a series of eccentric personalities. In Garlic and Sapphires, Reichl reveals the comic absurdity, artifice, and excellence to be found in the sumptuously appointed stages of the epicurean world and gives us—along with some of her favorite recipes and reviews—her remarkable reflections on how one’s outer appearance can influence one’s inner character, expectations, and appetites, not to mention the quality of service one receives.

I read this one a few years back but now I am reading it for book club… I am excited to freshen up this review.

Thats the weeks plan. My week is not too busy so should be doable. I am curious what you are reading…. Add your post to the line below where it says click here.

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It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

Published on March 24, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)56 Comments

Under the new and hopefully improved 2013 guidelines, the winner each week will receive a $5 Amazon gift card. This past weeks winner is:

Charlotte!!!!

What a week! I spent much of last weekend and the first part of the week sick, then went right into the three day Friends Of The Library book sale which was a lot of fun but a lot of work too. Today has been my first kick back and relax day in over a week and I took full advantage… put books away in the book room, listened to audio, read a bit, and yes.. I had a nap. 😀

Here are the posts that did go up this past week:

The First Warm Evening Of The Year by Jamie M Saul (wow!)

March With Me by Rosalie Turner (a fictional story around the non fictional Children’s March of 1963.)

Book sale recap and a chance for you to win one of my finds!

I haven’t accomplished much for this past week and seem to be deep into the audio books I have going so lets see.. what is next:

Six years have passed since Jake Fisher watched Natalie, the love of his life, marry another man. Six years of hiding a broken heart by throwing himself into his career as a college professor. Six years of keeping his promise to leave Natalie alone, and six years of tortured dreams of her life with her new husband, Todd.

But six years haven’t come close to extinguishing his feelings, and when Jake comes across Todd’s obituary, he can’t keep himself away from the funeral. There he gets the glimpse of Todd’s wife he’s hoping for…but she is not Natalie. Whoever the mourning widow is, she’s been married to Todd for almost two decades, and with that fact everything Jake thought he knew about the best time of his life—a time he has never gotten over—is turned completely inside out.

As Jake searches for the truth, his picture-perfect memories of Natalie begin to unravel. Mutual friends of the couple either can’t be found, or don’t remember Jake. No one has seen Natalie in years. Jake’s search for the woman who broke his heart, who lied to him, soon puts his very life at risk as it dawns on him that the man he has become may be based on a carefully constructed fiction.

OOH – if you have not read Coben you are missing out, I may finish this one tonight!

The closing of the grand old Fauborg Hotel in Beverly Hills is a sad occasion for longtime patrons Alex Delaware and Robin Castagna, who go there one last time for cocktails. But even more poignant—and curious—is a striking young woman in elegant attire and dark glasses, alone there and waiting in vain. Two days later, police detective Milo Sturgis comes seeking his psychologist comrade’s insights about a grisly homicide. To Alex’s shock, the brutalized victim is the same beautiful woman whose lonely hours sipping champagne at the Fauborg may have been her last. But when a sordid revelation finally cracks the case open, the secrets that spill out could make Alex and Milo’s best efforts to close this crime not just impossible but fatal.

I picked this one up at the book sale this week.

There is probably more but I have spent too much time writing this post so I am going to move on. 😀 How about you – what are you reading and how is your reading this time of year? Add your post to the line below where it says click here.

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It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

Published on March 17, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)31 Comments

Under the new and hopefully improved 2013 guidelines, the winner each week will receive a $5 Amazon gift card. This past weeks winner is:

Tanya at Mom’s Small Victories!!!!

Well I was pretty much absent this week. I wasn’t planning on being absent but working hard and playing hard usually means something has to give and unfortunately this past week it was this space here. Bookclub was last Tuesday, Wednesday I was working out with friends, Thursday was wine and horduerves with my cousins, and I was gone over the weekend doing a 7k In the cities and I took my laptop with me but had little time to be on it. Hope fully this upcoming week will be a better turn out. Here is what I did manage to post this week:

The Tale Of Lucia Grandi by Susan Speranza

BIG News from here!

Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli (Bookies Review!)

That’s all 😀 This week I am at the Pink concert Tuesday evening (I know.. I know.. so mature of me 😛 ) and then I am helping at the Library book sale Thursday – Saturday so I am going to hope to get in a little reading:

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.
So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives. In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America’s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney’s profound influence on Wright. Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan’s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah’s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel’s stunning conclusion.

Women-to-women relationships in the workplace are . . . complicated. When they’re good, they’re great. But when they’re bad, they can ruin your day, your week—even your year.

Packed with proven advice from two of today’s leading experts in workplace relationships, this one-of-a-kind guide gives women the tools they need to navigate difficult situations unique to women-to-women relationships—whether with a boss, a colleague, a client, or an employee.

Have you dealt with a woman in the workplace who:

“Accidentally” excludes you from important meetings?

Seems intent on taking you down professionally?

Gossips about you with other coworkers?

Makes you look bad by missing deadlines?

Forms a “pack” of mean girls to make your life miserable?

Mean Girls at Work isn’t just about surviving difficult situations. It’s about transforming a toxic relationship into one that benefits and supports both of you.

This book is also for women who engage in mean behavior . . . but don’t know it. After all, who hasn’t gossiped about a female coworker? Who hasn’t rolled her eyes in the presence of a woman she doesn’t like? Who hasn’t scanned another woman head to toe—which is just a nonverbal way of saying, “You’ve just been judged”? The authors provide invaluable advice to the more subtle ways of being mean—even if they’re not intended.

For the record – I do not work with a mean girl… I work with an awesome girl…. I just think the book sounds interesting 😀

I want to read more than this, but I am going to keep it low this week. How about you – what are you reading and how is your reading this time of year? Add your post to the line below where it says click here.

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It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

Published on March 10, 2013March 10, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)55 Comments

Under the new and hopefully improved 2013 guidelines, the winner each week will receive a $5 Amazon gift card. This past weeks winner is:

Lexie at Unconventional Book Views !!!!

It was a pretty fair week, I was typically busy but did get in a little reading time. Here is what I accomplished this last week:

Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner

Mater’s Birthday! One year old – rescued from abuse and amazing he was able to have a first birthday!

The Dogs Of Winter by Bobbie Pyron

Two Way Street by Lauren Barnholdt

Distant Shores by Kristin Hannah

Not too bad a week but I do need to pick up my reading again. This week I am reading:

In Warsaw in 1939, a boy wanders the streets and survives by stealing what food he can. He knows nothing of his background: Is he a Jew? A Gypsy? Was he ever called something other than Stopthief? Befriended by a band of orphaned Jewish boys, he begins to share their sleeping quarters. He understands very little of what is happening. When the Nazi “Jackboots” march into the town, he greets them happily, admires their shiny boots and tanks, and hopes he can join their ranks someday. He eventually adopts a name, Misha, and a family, that of his friend Janina Milgrom, a girl he meets while stealing food in her comfortable neighborhood. When the Milgroms are forced to move into the newly created ghetto, Misha cheerfully accompanies them. There, he is one of the few small enough to slip through holes in the wall to smuggle in food. By the time trains come to take the ghetto’s residents away, Misha realizes what many adults do not-that the passengers won’t be going to the resettlement villages at the journey’s end.

Our book club read for March.

Alcott’s story begins with the four March girls—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—sitting in their living room, lamenting their poverty. The girls decide that they will each buy themselves a present in order to brighten their Christmas. Soon, however, they change their minds and decide that instead of buying presents for themselves, they will buy presents for their mother, Marmee…

You know the story… this is a read along over at Fizzy Thoughts for March.

When someone you love vanishes without a trace, how far would you go to get them back?
For ex-FBI profiler Pierce Quincy, it’s the beginning of his worst nightmare: a car abandoned on a desolate stretch of Oregon highway, engine running, purse on the driver’s seat. And his estranged wife, Rainie Conner, gone, leaving no clue to her fate.

Did one of the ghosts from Rainie’s troubled past finally catch up with her? Or could her disappearance be the result of one of the cases they’d been working–a particularly vicious double homicide or the possible abuse of a deeply disturbed child Rainie took too close to heart? Together with his daughter, FBI agent Kimberly Quincy, Pierce is battling the local authorities, racing against time, and frantically searching for answers to all the questions he’s been afraid to ask.

One man knows what happened that night. Adopting the alias of a killer caught eighty years before, he has already contacted the press. His terms are clear: he wants money, he wants power, he wants celebrity. And if he doesn’t get what he wants, Rainie will be gone for good.

Sometimes, no matter how much you love someone, it’s still not enough.
As the clock winds down on a terrifying deadline, Pierce plunges headlong into the most desperate hunt of his life, into the shattering search for a killer, a lethal truth, and for the love of his life, who may forever be…gone.

That’s whats on for this week. What are you reading? Add your post to the line below where it says click here.

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For those of you who review mainly Middle Grade (MG) and/or Young Adult (YA) reads, please also add your link to this meme as well:

It;’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

Published on March 3, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)37 Comments

Under the new and hopefully improved 2013 guidelines, the winner each week will receive a $5 Amazon gift card. This past weeks winner is:

Escape With Dollycas!!!

Not a bad week here. Thanks to last weekends “audi-thon” while I painted, I feel a little ahead an still have three books to review. Here is what happened here last week:

The Sky Is Everywhere b Jandy Nelson Oh LOVED THIS!

The Shining By Stephen King (Its worth it to see the picture of me in the big glasses!)

The BIG Painting Project – check out what I did last weekend

A Grown Up Kind Of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson (Sooooo good!)

February Recap

Crazy Book Pitches! (Oh yeah there are some doosys out there!)

For this week I have planned:

A small boy, a cruel city, and the incredible dogs who save him.

Based on a true story!

When Ivan’s mother disappears, he’s abandoned on the streets of Moscow, with little chance to make it through the harsh winter. But help comes in an unexpected form: Ivan is adopted by a pack of dogs, and the dogs quickly become more than just his street companions: They become his family. Soon Ivan, who used to love reading fairytales, is practically living in one, as he and his pack roam the city and countryside, using their wits to find food and shelter, dodging danger, begging for coins. But Ivan can’t stay hidden from the world of people forever. When help is finally offered to him, will he be able to accept it? Will he even want to?

A heart-pounding tale of survival and a moving look at what makes us human.

Sage Singer is a baker. She works through the night, preparing the day’s breads and pastries, trying to escape a reality of loneliness, bad memories, and the shadow of her mother’s death. When Josef Weber, an elderly man in Sage’s grief support group, begins stopping by the bakery, they strike up an unlikely friendship. Despite their differences, they see in each other the hidden scars that others can’t, and they become companions.

Everything changes on the day that Josef confesses a long-buried and shameful secret—one that nobody else in town would ever suspect—and asks Sage for an extraordinary favor. If she says yes, she faces not only moral repercussions, but potentially legal ones as well. With her own identity suddenly challenged, and the integrity of the closest friend she’s ever had clouded, Sage begins to question the assumptions and expectations she’s made about her life and her family. When does a moral choice become a moral imperative? And where does one draw the line between punishment and justice, forgiveness and mercy?

I am listening to something in my jeep too but cant think of the title and really don’t want to go out there right now so ummm… yeah. 😀 What are you reading this week? Please add you link below where it says click here. I would love to see your posts!

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For those of you who review mainly Middle Grade (MG) and/or Young Adult (YA) reads, please also add your link to this meme as well:

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

Published on February 24, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)52 Comments

Under the new and hopefully improved 2013 guidelines, the winner each week will receive a $5 Amazon gift card. This past weeks winner is:

POGUE !!!!

Well another week has gone by and while my list of accomplishments is much… my reading is not. However… after paining for 12 hours over the weekend I am thrilled to say I have devoured quite a bit of audio – finished two and almost done with a third. 😛

SO here is what I did manage to post this past week:

The Lost Summer by Louisa May Alcott (Soooooo good!)

Into The Darkest Corner by Elizabeth Haynes (Fans of Gone Girl, you much check this one out!!!)

Love Is The Cure by Elton John (fantastic information on the continued fight against AIDS)

Killing Kennedy by Bill O’Reilly (Superb!)

One book, three audio. Thanks goodness for audio! 😛 For this week I have going:

Seventeen-year-old Lennie Walker, bookworm and band geek, plays second clarinet and spends her time tucked safely and happily in the shadow of her fiery older sister Bailey. But when Bailey dies abruptly, Lennie is catapulted to center stage of her own life – and, despite her nonexistent history with boys, suddenly finds herself struggling to balance two. Toby was Bailey’s boyfriend; his grief mirrors Lennie’s own. Joe is the new boy in town, a transplant from Paris whose nearly magical grin is matched only by his musical talent. For Lennie, they’re the sun and the moon; one boy takes her out of her sorrow, the other comforts her in it. But just like their celestial counterparts, they can’t collide without the whole wide world exploding.

I have books to finish and not really sure at this time where I will go from here so I am going to leave at this, but want to say I am currently listening to The Sky Is Everywhere and LOVING it so if you know any more books like this one let me know because I am flying through it. 😀

What are you reading this week? Please add you link below where it says click here. I would love to see your posts!

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For those of you who review mainly Middle Grade (MG) and/or Young Adult (YA) reads, please also add your link to this meme as well:

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

Published on February 17, 2013February 17, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)49 Comments

Under the new and hopefully improved 2013 guidelines, the winner each week will receive a $5 Amazon gift card. This past weeks winner is:

Moms Small Victories !!!!

I have not been around much this week… work and evening activities have kept me busy which is good, but have also kept me away from writing reviews. Here is what little I put up this week:

Devastation On The Delaware by Mary Shafer – SO GOOD!!!

Wow. That is it. 😯 I have reviews to write and I have been listening to a lot of audio so there is that. 😀

For this next week I have started a few new things:

Christa Parravani and her identical twin, Cara, were linked by a bond that went beyond siblinghood, beyond sisterhood, beyond friendship. Raised up from poverty by a determined single mother, the gifted and beautiful twins were able to create a private haven of splendor and merriment between themselves and then earn their way to a prestigious college and to careers as artists (a photographer and a writer, respectively) and to young marriages. But, haunted by childhood experiences with father figures and further damaged by being raped as a young adult, Cara veered off the path to robust work and life and in to depression, drugs and a shocking early death.

A few years after Cara was gone, Christa read that when an identical twin dies, regardless of the cause, 50 percent of the time the surviving twin dies within two years; and this shocking statistic rang true to her. “Flip a coin,” she thought,” those were my chances of survival.” First, Christa fought to stop her sister’s downward spiral; suddenly, she was struggling to keep herself alive.

Beautifully written, mesmerizingly rich and true, Christa Parravani’s account of being left, one half of a whole, and of her desperate, ultimately triumphant struggle for survival is informative, heart-wrenching and unforgettably beautiful.

There were no surprises in Gatlin County.
We were pretty much the epicenter of the middle of nowhere.
At least, that’s what I thought.
Turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
There was a curse.
There was a girl.
And in the end, there was a grave.

Lena Duchannes is unlike anyone the small Southern town of Gatlin has ever seen, and she’s struggling to conceal her power, and a curse that has haunted her family for generations. But even within the overgrown gardens, murky swamps and crumbling graveyards of the forgotten South, a secret cannot stay hidden forever.

Ethan Wate, who has been counting the months until he can escape from Gatlin, is haunted by dreams of a beautiful girl he has never met. When Lena moves into the town’s oldest and most infamous plantation, Ethan is inexplicably drawn to her and determined to uncover the connection between them.

That’s about it. Lots of books to catch up on. What are you reading this week? Please add you link below where it says click here. I would love to see your posts!

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