Living in a war torn land brings out  the best and worst out of humanity. In his novel  A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Anthony Marra beautifully captures his characters’ hopes, dreams, and loss. The novel is not about life in Chechnya, but how strangers bond over challenging times. Though not strangers, Akmed rescues little Havaa after her father is taken away and her home is burned down. Akmed comes to Sonja for help, even though he only knows her through her reputation as a doctor. Together, they find ways to survive, both physically and spiritually.

Today is book club day for our June pick.  Join our book club members as we discuss A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. Head over to their sites and read what themes resonated for them:

• Rebecca from Life of an Army Wife identifies with the characters’ PTSD
• Ashley at Bunker Memoirs of a Modern Day Wife shares her curiousity and her grief
• Jennifer Wolfe of mamawolfe learned lessons from the game of Risk
• Janaki from More Than Four Sides mends her sister strife
• Kim Werker at Kimagination Station offers gratitude to her neighbors
• Bay of Queen Mother Blog is the opposite of her sister
• Michelle from Honest & Truly! reminds us that each child is different
• Julia Coney at All About the Pretty always wanted a sister
• Melanie of tales from the crib confesses that her kids are mysteries
• Julie from A Good Joe is strong enough
• Catherine at everyday epiphanies learns more about Chechnya
• Robin (noteverstill) of The Not-Ever-Still Life remembers a dragon and a friend
• Cindy Fey from We All Fall Down remembers her family
• Thien-Kim at I’m Not the Nanny honors her passion for art
• Brenda Bartella Peterson of Grit and Grace shares the story of her namesake

Don’t forget to grab your copy of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.You can also follow Anthony Marra on Twitter.

I’ve been a fan of M.J. Rose ever since I read The Reincarnationist. When I was invited to join a virtual book tour for her newest novel, Seduction, it was a no-brainer. Like her previous books that deftly intertwine the mystical past and our present, her new novel does not disappoint. Seduction continues the story of Jac, short for Jacinthe, whom Rose introduced to readers in The Book of Lost Fragrances (read my review here). (You don’t have to read the first book to read Seduction but I highly recommend it.)

Here’s the official book description:

In 1843, novelist Victor Hugo’s beloved nineteen-year-old daughter drowned. Ten years later, Hugo began participating in hundreds of séances to reestablish contact with her. In the process, he claimed to have communed with the likes of Plato, Galileo, Shakespeare, Dante, Jesus—and even the Devil himself. Hugo’s transcriptions of these conversations have all been published. Or so it was believed.

Recovering from her own losses, mythologist Jac L’Etoile arrives on the Isle of Jersey—where Hugo conducted the séances—hoping to uncover a secret about the island’s Celtic roots. But the man who’s invited her there, a troubled soul named Theo Gaspard, has hopes she’ll help him discover something quite different—Hugo’s lost conversations with someone called the Shadow of the Sepulcher.

While readers were connected with ancient Egypt in Book of Lost Fragrances, we travel back to the time of the Druids.  As Jac researches the ruins and ancient caves on the island, she is also confronting her past. Her teen years were dark and tumultuous. At a crossroads of who she wants to be versus a version of her true self, Jac must decide between the two. Her conflict parallels that of Rose’s fictional account of Victor Hugo, who faces demons of his own.

I enjoyed the alternating between present as past.  Victor Hugo’s growing obsession over spirits took over his life. Jac searches for a cave that is referenced in a long lost letter written by Victor Hugo. The past and present and past collide violently (and beautifully, I might add).  While the novel had a rocky start for me, once I begin to see the connections between Victor Hugo’s story and Jac’s story, I could not put it down.

I finally convinced my sister to read The Book of Lost Fragrances late last year, so I know she’ll want to read Seduction as well.

Big thanks to Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours for a copy of the book! Want to learn more about the book? Visit the Seduction Book Tour page for more.

There are very few books that I want to read again immediately after turning the last page. That’s exactly how I felt after I finished reading  The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma. I was hooked from the opening paragraph. My friends even warned me the novel would be a wild ride.

I usually write my own synopsis for each book I review but I doubt I can do it justice, so here’s what the book blurb tells us:

From as early as he can remember, the hopelessly unreliable—yet hopelessly earnest—narrator of this ambitious debut novel has wanted to become a writer.

From the jazz clubs of Manhattan to the villages of Sri Lanka, Kristopher Jansma’s irresistible narrator will be inspired and haunted by the success of his greatest friend and rival in writing, the eccentric and brilliantly talented Julian McGann, and endlessly enamored with Julian’s enchanting friend, Evelyn, the green-eyed girl who got away. After the trio has a disastrous falling out, desperate to tell the truth in his writing and to figure out who he really is, Jansma’s narrator finds himself caught in a never-ending web of lies.

Right away, we learn that our narrator will be unreliable; we cannot trust everything he tells us. Still I cannot resist the way he tells the truth, but “with slant,” as he is taught in his college writing class.  Personally, I’m not a fan of unreliable narrators in my books, but I felt challenged after reading  the Author’s Note. It’s as if he dares us to call him a liar. Dares the reader to find the discrepancies throughout his pages over which he’s toiled.

So I read each chapter, knowing full well it is full of half truths, yet I’m sure I can decipher the truths. Each chapter throws me in a new setting of new slants and disarms me with this new and semi-improved version of the narrator. As soon as I settle into the chapter, I realize, Hey, this character has a new name, new history but the same heartache as the previous chapter. . . I want to read it again, slowlier this time so I can connect the dots. I’m not sure if it’s even possible, but I’m sure going to enjoy trying.

I’m sorry for such a vague review, but I don’t want to give anything away. You have to discover it yourself.

The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma will take you on a wild ride and leave you begging to jump back on for more.

Don’t forget to enter my giveaway for a copy of Glow by Jessica Maria Tuccelli. It ends May 15.

I received a review copy of the novel. This post contains affiliate links.

The closest book to me (without having to get out of bed) was The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma. I was not sure if I really wanted to invest in a new book while in the middle of another. I know, I know. I’m a promiscuous reader. I’m usually reading 2-3 books in tandem. Let’s just say my brain was tired, ok?

I remember reading a review of it on The Relentless Reader and thought, “That sounds like an interesting novel.” I couldn’t remember what the book was about. Just that it sounded like a good read. I grabbed the book and propped up my pillows at the right angle for reading a hardback. You know what I’m talking about right? Hardbacks are bigger and heavier so the in-bed reading position is different compared to a paperback. It’s harder to read laying on my side with a hardback.

Usually I don’t pay extra attention to the opening lines of a book. However in The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, the very first line in the opening paragraph  of The Author’s Note hooked me and reeled me in:

I’ve lost every book I’ve ever written. I lost the first one here in Terminal B, where I became a writer, twenty-eight years ago, in the after-school hours and on vacations while I waited for my mother to return from doling out honey-roasted peanuts at eighteen thousand feet.

Does that make you want to read more? As soon as I finished reading the Author’s Note, I knew I was in trouble. Since it was 1AM, I forced myself to set the book down or I would be even more sleep deprived than usual.

I promised myself that if I got all my work done today, then I would pick up the The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards again.

Have you read any great opening paragraphs lately? What book was it from?

And if you’ve read The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, no spoilers please! I promise to read fast so we can talk about it!

I received a review copy of the book. All opinions are my own. This post contains affiliate links.

It takes skill to write a novel that weaves together ghosts, the Civil Rights Movement, slavery, and a lost child. In her debut novel Glow, Jessica Maria Tuccelli whisks her readers from urban Washington, DC in the 1940s to the rural Georgia mountains. Eleven-year-old Ella McGee goes missing on a bus ride from DC to her mother’s Georgia hometown. Ella’s disappearance becomes the catalyst that stirs up memories of life in the mountains. Not only is there so much history and hurt in those mountains, but they are full of ghosts and haints who are searching for a home of their own.

When the pitch for Glow arrived in my inbox, it was described as “fans of The Help, this one’s for you.” I know there was a lot of controversy surrounding The Help (both book and film), but I thought its portrayal of racism in the south honest and realistic. More so in the book than the film. That one sentence made me curious enough to read Glow.

Besides their common themes of racism, I don’t really think the two books have much in common. I guess that’s how marketing works?

Glow follows are large cast of characters, each with their rich story of love, loss, and pain. Each character’s race determines the path and roles they are allowed to take in life. Ella’s mother Mia is part Cherokee and never quite fits in herr small town, but folks turned the other way because her father was large white man. Travel a little further back in time and meet Willie Mae was born into slavery and torn away from her mother at a young age. Her hair glows and she can see spirits. Her new mistress, Miss Emmaline is part Cherokee but no one speaks of it since she is married to a white slave owner. Then there’s Marse Riddle who is the overseer at Miss Emmaline’s home. He is also her brother. He’s fallen in love with his employer’s slave housekeeper Lossie. Everyone becomes connected in these quiet, yet significant ways. Even ghosts and spirits play a supporting role in some of the characters’ lives.

Each character that Tuccelli introduced enthralled me.  Each story was a gift to me. The United States’ history is very complicated when it comes to race and indigenous people. As a mother of biracial children, I felt drawn to these stories. This was how our country, my people, treated black people, Native Americans, and mixed race offspring. Sometimes it doesn’t seem so different from today.

As much as I enjoyed each character’s tale, I thought the novel as a whole was muddled. It was beautifully written; I couldn’t put down the novel. Yet as I closed the last chapter, I was not sure what message the author wanted me to take from the novel. What really happened? What was real and what was haunted? What life would Ella return to in those mountains?

Want to read  Glow by Jessica Maria Tuccelli for yourself? Thanks the publisher, I have a copy to giveaway to a reader. Just leave a comment letting me know why you want to read it. I’ll draw a winner via random.org on May 15th. (US addresses only, please)

Share and Enjoy:

]]> http://www.fromlefttowrite.com/book-review-giveaway-glow-by-jessica-maria-tuccelli/feed/ 7 http://www.fromlefttowrite.com/may-book-club-a-constellation-of-vital-phenomena-by-anthony-marra/ http://www.fromlefttowrite.com/may-book-club-a-constellation-of-vital-phenomena-by-anthony-marra/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 12:15:48 +0000 Thien-Kim http://www.fromlefttowrite.com/?p=3191  

Before I read our May book club selection A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, I never gave Chechnya a second thought. Bad American, I know. Recently war torn country has been mentioned in the news quite often because of the recent tragedy in Boston. I read this book months before recent events.

As someone who only knew of Chechnya as a name on a map, author Marra brought the country’s people to life. Lives of people I never even considered or thought about until I cracked open his novel. Here’s the blurb for the novel:

In his brilliant, haunting novel, Stegner Fellow and Whiting Award winner Anthony Marra transports us to a snow-covered village in Chechnya, where eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night, accusing him of aiding Chechen rebels. Across the road their lifelong neighbor and family friend Akhmed has also been watching, fearing the worst when the soldiers set fire to Havaa’s house. But when he finds her hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.

For the talented, tough-minded Sonja, the arrival of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. Weary and overburdened, she has no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. And she has a deeply personal reason for caution: harboring these refugees could easily jeopardize the return of her missing sister. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weave together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.

The novel is not about life in Chechnya, but how strangers bond over challenging times. Join me and From Left to Write members in reading A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra. Then come back on May 20th as we discuss the novel.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is currently available for pre-order and will be released on May 7. Don’t forget to follow Anthony Marra on Twitter.

I do this every time I fly on a plane. I debate on purchasing an e-reader.

Even though I’m an early adopter when it comes to technology (hello, social media!), I’m still old school when it comes books. I still prefer print copies. I love shuffling through my cityscapes of books in search of my next read. I had a revelation a few weeks ago about my aversion to e-books. I stare at a computer for many hours of my day. For work, not playing Farm Heroes Saga on Facebook (ok, maybe a little of that too). I don’t always feel like staring at another screen to read a book.

E-books have been slowly slithering their way into my life. I read e-galleys from NetGalley. Authors send me PDFs of their books. When it comes to e-books, I usually read them on my smartphone via the Kindle app. Sometimes I read on my iPad but only if I’m lounging in bed. The iPad just feels to unwieldy. Plus, who wants to wipe off sticky fingerprints every time I sit down to read on it? My kids use the iPad more than I do.

Now when I travel, the benefits of owning an e-reader are glaring. I can fit piles and piles of books in a device that will fit in my purse, all without the new book smell of course. It won’t weigh me down and I don’t have to worry about running out of something to read. I could use my phone, but reading on app drains my battery pretty quickly. The only downside of an e-reader when flying on the plane is the 15-20 minutes “no electronics” rule at the beginning and end of the flight. I still need to bring a print book for that. I can get a lot of reading done in twenty minutes!

So hear I am again, considering purchasing a Kindle Paperwhite (affiliate link). I’m going on several trips in the next four weeks, which makes a dedicated e-reader more and more attractive. Especially since Amazon has the Kindle Paperwhite on sale: $20 off with the code KINDLEPW, making it only $99. (Code might not work for everyone). If I order today, it’ll arrive in time for my trip on Thursday. Hmmm.

How do you feel about print books versus e-readers?

Photo by Fiona Harding via Creative Commons.

I broke my no books from the library rule last week and borrowed a book for me. The kids had their piles of picture books (which can get heavy!). On my way to the checkout station, I spotted Laura Childs’ latest Tea Shop Mystery: Sweet Tea Revenge. Her Tea Shop Mysteries are one of my favorite cozy series. “m sure our amateur detective Theodosia Browning will be up to her shenanigans in order to solve the murder. I’m looking forward to diving in!

Last night I read the first 5 pages of Glow a novel by Jessica Maria Tuccelli. If the first 5 pages is any indication of how good a book it, I knew I was in for a sleepless night of frantic reading. So I forced myself to put it down. Also, the book cover is gorgeous? Yes, I do sometimes judge books by their cover.

Here’s the publisher’s description of Glow:

In the autumn of 1941, Amelia J. McGee, a young woman of Cherokee and Scotch-Irish descent, and an outspoken pamphleteer for the NAACP, hastily sends her daughter, Ella, alone on a bus home to Georgia in the middle of the night—a desperate measure that proves calamitous when the child encounters two drifters and is left for dead on the side of the road.

Ella awakens in the homestead of Willie Mae Cotton, a wise root doctor and former slave, and her partner, Mary-Mary Freeborn, tucked deep in the Takatoka Forest. As Ella heals, the secrets of her lineage are revealed.

Shot through with Cherokee lore and hoodoo conjuring, Glow transports us from Washington, D.C., on the brink of World War II to the Blue Ridge frontier of 1836, from the parlors of antebellum manses to the plantation kitchens where girls are raised by women who stand in as mothers. As the land with all its promise and turmoil passes from one generation to the next, Ella’s ancestral home turns from safe haven to mayhem and back again.

As a mother of biracial children, this portrayal of race relations in this period of American history intrigues me. Perhaps we have not come s far along in that department?

Stay tuned for a review and giveaway of Glow!

What’s on your list this week?

I love how all my friends know I’m a book geek.

My trip to Philly this weekend was really for  Type-A Philly, a one day blogging conference. Several friends made a point to introduce me to other book geeks or point out how much they loved From Left to Write. (Side note: you like me! you really like me!)

Saturday night we had a networking cocktail party and I spent most of the night chatting about books. With cocktail in hand of course. Thanks to Rachee, a From Left to Write member, I met Jessica. Jessica blogs at Don’t Mind the Mess and also runs Red Letter Reads. Turns out Jessica and I have similar tastes in literary fiction. We compared recent favorites and she advised me on which Junot Diaz book I should read first. (It’s Drown for those who are curious.) We talked so much, I had to get another tequila and coke to wet my parched throat.

That’s how we book bloggers party. So if you’re going to BEA Blogger, be prepared.

And in case you’re wondering. I did absolutely no reading this weekend, even though I packed extra books.

However, a good reader is always prepared! Here are the books I plan on packing in my bags:

I only have a few chapters left to read in Making Your Creative Mark: Nine Keys to Achieving Your Artistic Goals by Eric Maisel. As someone who never thought I was creative until my last year in college, I think this book hits the mark (no pun intended) on many issues creative people face. Maisel references to visual artists and writers quite a bit but his suggestions will translate to any artistic endeavor, even blogging. I’ve been highlighting this book like crazy! It’s definitely a keeper.

I just got my hands on a copy of Measure of Love by Melissa Ford.  Over winter break on my sick bed, I totally devoured its prequel Life From Scratch. Both book is about Rachel Goldman, who started a food & cooking blog after her divorce. Life From Scratch shows how she finds herself and perhaps a another chance at love. The sequel Measure of Love finds Rachel planning a wedding! Books about food hold a special spot in my heart since I love cooking. Ford’s books are about food AND blogging so a double whammy!

I almost added another book to this list but I will be realistic (sigh). Who knows, I might stick a third book in my suitcase.

What are you reading this weekend? Any new books to recommend?

I received review copies of both books.