Monday, 12 October 2020

Mailbox Monday & Life This Week - 12th October


Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came in their mailbox during the last week. It now has a permanent home at the Mailbox Monday blog.

Life This Week is a meme created by Denyse Whelan Blogs where bloggers share snaps of what is currently happening in their lives.

Happy Monday!

It's been a busy two weeks as we have been managing to get out and enjoy the lovely spring weather. Trips to the city and lunch in outdoor cafes are things we haven't been able to do for a long time.

                         Enjoying the weather at a lovely outdoor cafe

                                  My first public transport trip this year



                     Some cute sculptures we came across in the city centre


This sign popped up on the path near my house. Everyone who lives around here knows there are always snakes sunning on the path so it was funny to suddenly see this sign installed.
                             Cafe lunch with my mother and daughter

Books received over the last two weeks:


From the publisher: 

The Shearer's Wife by Fleur McDonald

1980: Rose and Ian Kelly arrive in Barker for supplies before they begin shearing at Jacksonville Station, a couple of hundred kilometres out of town. Rose, heavily pregnant with their first babies, worries that despite Ian's impending fatherhood he remains a drifter who dreams of the open road. 

2020: When the Australian Federal Police swoop unheralded into Barker and make a shocking arrest for possession of narcotics, Detective Dave Burrows is certain there is more to the story than meets the eye.

After many months of grief over her brother's illness and death, journalist Zara Ellison is finally ready to begin a new chapter of her life and make a commitment to her boyfriend, Senior Constable Jack Higgins. But when she's assigned to investigating the Barker arrest, Jack begins to believe that Zara is working against him.

It takes a series of unconnected incidents in Zara's digging to reveal an almost forgotten thread of mystery as to how these two events, forty years apart, could be connected.
 
 

My Purchases:


 The Godmothers by Monica McInerney 

Eliza Miller grew up in Australia as the only daughter of a troubled young mother, but with the constant support of two watchful godmothers, Olivia and Maxie. Despite her tricky childhood, she always felt loved and secure. Until, just before her eighteenth birthday, a tragic event changed her life.

Thirteen years on, Eliza is deliberately living as safely as possible, avoiding close relationships and devoting herself to her job. Out of the blue, an enticing invitation from one of her godmothers prompts a leap into the unknown.

Within a fortnight, Eliza finds herself in the middle of a complicated family in Edinburgh. There’s no such thing as an ordinary day any more. Yet, amidst the chaos, Eliza begins to blossom. She finds herself not only hopeful about the future, but ready to explore her past, including the biggest mystery of all – who is her father?

Set in Australia, Scotland, Ireland and England, THE GODMOTHERS is a great big hug of a book that will fill your heart to bursting. It is a moving and perceptive story about love, lies, hope and sorrow, about the families we are born into and the families we make for ourselves.
 

Truths I Never Told You by Kelly Rimmer 

1959 - Grace is a young mother with four children under four. All she ever wanted was to have a family of her own, but Grace has thoughts she cannot share with anyone in the months after childbirth. Instead she pours her deepest fears into the pages of a notebook, hiding them where she knows husband Patrick will never look. When Grace falls pregnant again she turns to sister Maryanne for help.

1996 - When Beth's father Patrick is diagnosed with dementia, she and her siblings make the heart-wrenching decision to put him into care. As Beth is clearing the family home, she discovers a series of notes. Patrick's children grew up believing their mother died in a car accident, but these notes suggest something much darker may be true. 

The Museum of Forgotten Memories by Anstey Harris

Cate Morris and her son, Leo, are homeless, adrift. They’ve packed up the boxes from their London home, said goodbye to friends and colleagues, and now they are on their way to ‘Hatters Museum of the Wide Wide World – to stay just for the summer. Cate doesn’t want to be there, in Richard’s family home without Richard to guide her any more. And she knows for sure that Araminta, the retainer of the collection of dusty objects and stuffed animals, has taken against them. But they have nowhere else to go. They have to make the best of it.

But Richard hasn’t told Cate the truth about his family’s history. And something about the house starts to work its way under her skin.
Can she really walk away, once she knows the truth?
 

 

 I would love to hear what books you received in the mail recently! 



Sunday, 11 October 2020

Blog Tour Book Review: How to Make a Life by Florence Reiss Kraut

How to Make a Life
by
Florence Reiss Kraut

 
 
Publisher: She Writes Press
Publication date: 13th October 2020
Genre: Historical Fiction
Pages: 320
Format read: Paperback
Source: Courtesy of Smith Publicity Services 
 
About the book
 
When Ida and her daughter Bessie flee a catastrophic pogrom in Ukraine for America in 1905, they believe their emigration will ensure that their children and grandchildren will be safe from harm. But choices and decisions made by one generation have ripple effects on those who come later—and in the decades that follow, family secrets, betrayals, and mistakes made in the name of love threaten the survival of the family: Bessie and Abe Weissman’s children struggle with the shattering effects of daughter Ruby’s mental illness, of Jenny’s love affair with her brother-in-law, of the disappearance of Ruby’s daughter as she flees her mother’s legacy, and of the accidental deaths of Irene’s husband and granddaughter.
 
My review
 

How to Make a Life is an enthralling saga of a family both brought together and divided by the mental illness of one member.

Spanning four generations of the Amdur/Weissman family, the story is narrated through different members of the family over the years, highlighting their ever changing relationships with each other.

How to Make a Life begins with Ida fleeing a massacre on their land in Ukraine and taking her two surviving children to America to start a new life safe from persecution. Life is tough and there is more tragedy in store but Ida and daughter Bessie know to survive they must always look ahead.

How to Make a Life spans 106 years and to squeeze this amount into one book it quite often skips large spans of time, so you might suddenly find out a character’s husband had died some time ago and there was no previous mention. This made for a lot of telling the story and I would have liked the story to be longer to include all these momentous events in detail.

How to Make a Life is a fast-moving story filled with emotion and plenty of family drama. I became totally invested in all the characters lives and their hopes, fears and dreams.

Florence Reiss Kraut includes many themes in this generational drama including unplanned pregnancies, mental illness, unrequited love, loss, guilt, family responsibility, holding onto your faith and how the choices we make can have a ripple affect through the generations.  

 

About the author

Photo Goodreads
Florence Reiss Kraut was raised and educated in New York City. With a BA in English and a Masters in Social Work she worked for over thirty years as a clinician, a family therapist and eventually CEO of a family service agency before retiring to write and travel. Her own close family of 26 aunts and uncles and 27 first cousins and listening to stories around the kitchen table, coffee klatches and family parties inspired her to write her fictional, multi-generational family drama, How to Make a Life.

She has published stories for children and teens, romance stories for national magazines, literary stories, and personal essays for the Westchester section of the New York Times. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as The Evening Street Press and SNReview.
 



 

 
 

Saturday, 10 October 2020

Book Bingo - Round 10: About the Environment

Wasp Season by Jennifer Scoullar

You'll never see a wasp in the same way again.

 

This week I have chosen the category 'About the Environment'

The book I have chosen for this category is: Wasp Season.

In Wasp Season Jennifer Scoullar highlights the effect introduced pests, such as the European Wasp, have on the natural insect life and in turn has a rolling effect of the devastation of the environment surrounding the wasps nest. Insects and their behaviour wouldn't normally interest me however Jennifer Scoullar makes the subject fascinating and adds an ominous element of danger.


You can read my full review HERE

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Book Bingo is a reading challenge hosted by Theresa Smith Writes , Mrs B’s Book Reviews and The Book Muse. The second Saturday of each month book bingo participants reveal which bingo category they have read and what book they chose.


 
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