Mailbox Monday

~Mailbox Monday~  

is hosted by Amused by Books during the month of September.

We share what books that we found in our mailboxes last week. 

MAILBOX MONDAY

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week. (Library books don’t count, but eBooks & audiobooks do). Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists!

Mailbox Monday was created by Marcia at The Printed Page, who graciously hosted it for a long, long time, before turning it into a touring meme (details here).

Here's what arrived in my mailbox this week:

The Widower's Tale by Julia Glass from a friend, Thanks Huxy!


From Paperbackswap:



The Writing Class by Jincy Willett


The Winter Sea by Susanna Kearsley


The Calligrapher's Daughter by Eugenia Kim

The Sunday Salon: Review & Giveaway Wildflower Hill by Kimberley Freeman

About Wildflower Hill by Kimberley Freeman (from Simon and Schuster/Touchstone):

Spanning three generations and half the world, WILDFLOWER HILL: A Novel (Touchstone Books/A Simon & Schuster Trade Paperback; August 23, 2011) by Kimberley Freeman is a sweeping story of two women who share a legacy of secrets, heartbreak, courage, and love.  In present day, Emma, a prima ballerina in London suffering from a broken heart and a career-ending injury, is at a crossroads both personally and professionally. Returning home to Australia, she learns that she has inherited a sheep station in isolated Tasmania from her grandmother, Beattie. Certain she has been saddled with an irritating burden, Emma leaves for Wildflower Hill to sell the estate. At Wildflower Hill, the two women’s stories become intertwined as Emma gradually uncovers the secrets of her grandmother’s history. In the 1930s, Beattie also found herself at a crossroads as a young woman - unwed and pregnant by a married man. 

My Thoughts:

I love immersing myself into a good family saga and Wildflower Hill fits the bill perfectly adding a historical perspective. Wildflower Hill was an engrossing novel that intertwines the stories of two women, a grandmother and granddaughter who are linked through a family bond as well as life events. The story unfolds beautifully, spanning three generations and in three countries that are worlds apart - Scotland, England and Australia. 

The story is told as a double narrative, through the perspective of two women, Beattie the grandmother and Emma the granddaughter. Beattie, who grew up in Scotland, tells her story starting in the 1920's when she is 18 years old and discovers she is pregnant with her married lovers child. She is disowned by her parents and she travels to Australia with her boyfriend to start a new life. Things don't turn out as Beattie dreamed although she is a strong woman who finds a way to survive. Emma tells her story in modern  day, after an injury changes her life as a world famous ballerina. She discovers that she has inherited her grandmother Beattie's sheep farm, Wildflower Hill, which is in Tasmania, Australia. Emma discovers  secrets held by her grandmother's past as she cleans out her grandmothers house. Secrets that unfold that force Emma to reevaluate her own life and what is important to her and her own future. 

Wildflower Hill is a family saga that is beautifully written, revealing family secrets that lead to an amazing journey of self discovery and a testament to the power of love. I enjoyed the differences between the two characters and  by separating the different eras and experiences between them helped to highlight their deep connection. The characters were well developed and easy to engage with as a reader. I enjoyed reading about the backdrop of Tasmania, Australia and  many scenes were so descriptive that I could imagine them in my mind. This was a book that was enjoyable to read and one that I couldn't wait to get back to when I was forced to put it down. The last chapter left things a bit undone and left me with the thought that there may be a sequel although after reading the conversation with the author at the end of the book, it sounds unlikely. The author did share a funny story about a reader who was upset that the author didn't tell exact details of what happens in the epilogue.  We don't always get the perfect wrap up in a book and this one leaves some things to your imagination. I highly recommend this thoughtful and enjoyable novel. 

Check out Kimberley Freeman's Website, HERE.


You can read the first chapter of Wildflower Hill,  HERE.

Find a Reading Group Guide  for Wildflower Hill, HERE. This includes a conversation with the author.

*GIVEAWAY DETAILS*

  

I have TWO copies of Wildflower Hill (compliments of Simon & Schuster) to give away to two lucky readers

For 1 Entry: All you have to do is leave a comment here and what you found interesting about Wildflower Hill. Make sure to include your email address (no email, no entry)

For a 2nd Entry (Separate Comment):  Follow my blog, you can follow through Google Friend Connect to the left in my side column. If you already do, thank you, and please  make sure to let me know in your comment so I can pass the entry on to you as well. Make sure to include your email address (no email, no entry).

For a 3rd Entry (Separate Comment): Spread the word about this giveaway and Retweet, retweet button below my name at the end of this post. Make sure to include your email address (no email, no entry).

*Open to US & Canada only.

Enter by September 24 , 2011

Weekend Cooking: Demo videos on Knife Skills and Making Vinaigrette by Kathleen Flinn author of The Kitchen Counter Cooking School

In last week's Weekend Cooking post, I spotlighted Kathleen Flinn's new book, The Kitchen Counter Cooking School that will be released on October 3, 2011 from Viking and posted a book trailer. (Go HERE, to see the post) This week I want to spotlight two great cooking related videos by Kathleen Flinn where she teaches cooking lessons from The Kitchen Counter Cooking School. 

Learn Knife Skills Video

The first video is on learning knife skills where she shows you how to properly hold and use a chef's knife. I found this a helpful video for anyone who enjoys cooking and wants to learn more about basic knife skills. I've always wanted to know the "proper" way to cut an onion and Kathleen explains and demonstrates this well. I definitely plan to give this a try, although I need to find a better set of sharper knives. Kathleen makes it look pretty simple. 

Vinaigrette Lesson

The second video is on how easy it is to make your own vinaigrette salad dressing. I found this video to be very informative, I am definitely going to make my own vinaigrette salad dressing. I also learned that a simple balsamic vinaigrette has a longer shelf life unrefrigerated than I realized. Also, it is all natural and you can add different ingredients easily to make your own vinaigrette. 

THE KITCHEN COUNTER COOKING SCHOOL is essentially “What Not to Wear” meets Michael Pollan.  Inspired by a supermarket encounter with a woman loading up on processed foods, Le Cordon Blue graduate, and author of The Sharper Your Knife the Less You Cry, Kathleen Flinn decided to use her recent culinary training to help a group of nine culinary novitiates find their inner cook.  These students invited Kathleen into their kitchens where she took inventory of each person’s refrigerator, cabinets and eating habits.  After kitchen “makeovers” and a series of basic lessons where they learned to wield knives, trust their taste and improve their food choices, the women found a common missing ingredient—confidence.  In this new book, Flinn follows these women’s journeys and includes practical, healthy tips to boost readers’ culinary confidence, strategies to get the most from their grocery dollar and simple recipes to get readers cooking.   

From Viking; On-sale: October 3, 2011

* I would have loved to be part of this cooking school to learn culinary skills from Kathleen Flinn. I'll be posting a review closer to the release date of the book in October and have a great giveaway scheduled. I'm also going to post more Demo and shopping tip videos from Kathleen, recipes and information on the volunteers in my upcoming weekend cooking posts. 

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page. For more information, go to Beth Fish Reads.

Mailbox Monday

~Mailbox Monday~  

is hosted by Amused by Books during the month of September.

We share what books that we found in our mailboxes last week. 

MAILBOX MONDAY

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week. (Library books don’t count, but eBooks & audiobooks do). Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists!

Mailbox Monday was created by Marcia at The Printed Page, who graciously hosted it for a long, long time, before turning it into a touring meme (details here).

Here's what arrived in my mailbox this week:

The Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn From Viking/Penguin

The Lady of the Rivers by Phillippa Gregory complimentary advance copy from Touchstone Books 

The Sunday Salon: Review The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

About The Paris Wife by Paula McLain (from author website)
  

A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wifecaptures a remarkable period of time—Paris in the twenties—and an extraordinary love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.

In Chicago in 1920, Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she meets Ernest Hemingway and finds herself captivated by his good looks, intensity, and passionate desire to write. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group of expatriates that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

But the hard-drinking and fast-living café life does not celebrate traditional notions of family and monogamy. As Hadley struggles with jealousy and self-doubt and Ernest wrestles with his burgeoning writing career, they must confront a deception that could prove the undoing of one of the great romances in literary history.

My Thoughts:

I must admit that I have not read any of Hemingway's novels but am interested in his work and I have visited The Hemingway House in Key West, Florida. Despite this, the premise behind the novel The Paris Wife intrigued me as well as the setting of Paris. Paula Mclain does an excellent job of taking the reader to 1920's Paris featuring Hemingway's early career through the voice of his first wife Hadley Richardson. I found The Paris Wife to be a mesmerizing novel featuring the lost generation a  group of authors that included Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald who lived life in a frenzy of parties and volatility. The Hemingway's weren't prepared for the drinking, competition amongst their friends, open relationships and beautiful woman they would meet and become friends with. There was much creativity and freedom that allowed Hemingway to spread his wings and find his way as a novelist. Hadley had much to do with this through the inspiration and support she gave him. We know that Hadley was Ernest's first wife (he had 4 wives) so it was not a surprise when the marriage is challenged and crumbles but it was difficult to read. Hadley endured a great deal as she truly adored and idolized Ernest and believed in his writing and abilities. This novel captured the voice of Hadley beautifully and I often felt as if I was reading a diary or a biography experiencing their life through her eyes. 


There is an epilogue that explains what happens to Hadley and Ernest but I found myself interested in reading more and searching for more information about Hadley and Ernest's lives after their marriage ended.  I am definitely interested in reading more of Hemingway's work and plan to read A Moveable Feast, which is a memoir of Hadley and Hemingway's life in Paris which was not published until after Hemingway's death. 

Check out a recent guest post and interview with the author Paula McClain that I posted a few months ago.




Thanks to  Random House  for sending me an advance copy of the book for review. 

Weekend Cooking: Spotlight on The Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn

THE KITCHEN COUNTER COOKING SCHOOL is essentially “What Not to Wear” meets Michael Pollan.  Inspired by a supermarket encounter with a woman loading up on processed foods, Le Cordon Blue graduate, and author of The Sharper Your Knife the Less You Cry, Kathleen Flinn decided to use her recent culinary training to help a group of nine culinary novitiates find their inner cook.  These students invited Kathleen into their kitchens where she took inventory of each person’s refrigerator, cabinets and eating habits.  After kitchen “makeovers” and a series of basic lessons where they learned to wield knives, trust their taste and improve their food choices, the women found a common missing ingredient—confidence.  In this new book, Flinn follows these women’s journeys and includes practical, healthy tips to boost readers’ culinary confidence, strategies to get the most from their grocery dollar and simple recipes to get readers cooking.   

From Viking; On-sale: October 3, 2011

*This looks like a fabulous book and I would have loved to be part of this cooking school to learn culinary skills from Kathleen Flinn. I'll be posting a review closer to the release date of the book in October and have a great giveaway scheduled. I'm also going to post Demo and shopping tip videos from Kathleen, recipes and information on the volunteers in my weekend cooking posts. 

Check out the official Book Trailer:

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page. For more information, go to Beth Fish Reads.

Review: Left Neglected by Lisa Genova

About (from Simon & Schuster):

Sarah's life is on track—the fast track. She and her husband both work 80 hour weeks at high-powered jobs in Boston, while spending as much time as possible with their three small children. Sarah is a juggler extraordinaire, keeping her demanding job and her family as balanced as she can. But when a car accident leaves her recovering from Left Neglect, a neurological impairment that robs her of her ability to control the left side of her body, she can barely get out of bed on her own. As Sarah struggles to resume her over-scheduled life, she must juggle new things—her son's ADHD diagnosis, the return of her estranged mother, and her own limitations. Given a traumatic opportunity to reassess what is really important in life, Sarah must decide where her priorities lie.

My Thoughts:

I read Left Neglected a few months ago and believe it's a book that everyone should read. It is the kind of book that makes you stop and think about how life can change in an instant. Our culture and society in the U.S. is one that  has become very success driven and often for good reasons to be financially secure to take care of our families and hopefully have a retirement down the road.  This is a hard balance for many working parents. I understand that as I was a working professional in a high stress career prior to having my son and then chose to stay at home after he was born. I went back to work part time a few years ago and am able to work around my son's school schedule and have summers off,  for my family I am fortunate that I can do that. Our priorities can become unbalanced and often working 60 plus hours a week as parents with young children is an example of how that effects the family dynamics and each person individually. This is how Sarah and Bob's life was, as they both had highly stressful and demanding jobs and were raising three young children. Sarah was the master of multi-tasking often using her drive time to/from work and  taking her kids to/from daycare and to sporting events to make phone calls on her cell phone for her job.

Sarah has an accident while on her cell phone and driving. She suffers a  brain injury which manifests itself as Left Neglect, a neurological condition which causes a person to visually neglect the left hand side of space and they behave as if the left side of space is not there. Sarah has this condition of Left Neglect and although she has her vision, her brain doesn't process or register things on her left side. She cannot tell that something is on her left side and has difficulty controlling the left side of her body as well.  If  she sees a plate of food, she will only register that the right side has food and that the left side is empty. She may only see the numbers on the right side of a clock, numbers 12 through 6 and believe that the left side is blank.

The novel is written in the first person, from Sarah's point of view and follows Sarah from her accident through her rehabilitation process, her family's adjustment and her mother coming to help her and her family and their struggles working through past issue as mother and daughter. Ms. Genova did a fabulous job giving a voice to what Sarah was experiencing and thinking as she struggled through the rehabilitation process and realization of how different her life had become after her accident. As a medical professional, Occupational Therapist, I found that Ms. Genova's neuroscience background helped tremendously in explaining in layman's terms how the condition of Left Neglect can affect an individual such as Sarah.  I have treated patients with Left Neglect and understand the challenges and difficulties they face. Ms. Genova did an excellent job of allowing the reader to be inside the head of someone with Left Neglect and to get an understanding of how they may feel and what they experience. I did have some reservations about the way Occupational and Physical Therapy were presented in the book and felt that the portrayal of the roles of the two professions weren't always accurate. In my opinion, some of the treatments that the Physical Therapist was doing with Sarah would most often be done with an Occupational Therapist and I found the Occupational Therapist's role too limited in the rehabilitation process with Sarah.

This is a wonderful novel with a strong message about cell phone safety as well, as Sarah had her accident while on the phone and driving. It made me stop and think about my own cell phone use and how important a call or text can be compared to the safety of yourself and your family. I highly recommend this novel, this is the first book that I've read by Genova who is well known for her first book Still Alice. I have a copy on my bookshelf and look forward to reading that as well.

For more information on the author, go to Lisa Genova's Website.

Check out this interesting interview with the author, Lisa Genova on The Diane Rehm Show, HERE.

Check out this trailer for Left Neglected:

Mailbox Monday

~Mailbox Monday~  

is hosted by Staci at  Life in the Thumb during the month of August.

We share what books that we found in our mailboxes last week. 

MAILBOX MONDAY

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week. (Library books don’t count, but eBooks & audiobooks do). Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists!

Mailbox Monday was created by Marcia at The Printed Page, who graciously hosted it for a long, long time, before turning it into a touring meme (details here).

 I received one book in my mailbox this week: 

My Year with Eleanor by Noelle Hancock 
win from Holly at 2 Kids and Tired Books -Thanks Holly!