Pocketful of Poseys by Thomas Reed -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

Thank you for joining me for Book Beginnings on Fridays. Please share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week. You can also share from a book that caught your fancy, even if you are not reading it right now.

MY BOOK BEGINNING

Grace Tingley always struggled letting herself into her mother's cottage, especially when her arms were full. 

-- from Pocketful of Poseys by Thomas Reed (new from Beaufort Books). 

It's hard to know where this story will go, based on this first sentence. But it makes me interested to know more. Grace and her mom must get along, because Grace is going to her mom's house and has a key. But why does her mom not let her in? Is her mom there? And what does she have in her arms? Groceries? Is she her mother's caretaker? Or is something completely different going on?

I like a book beginning that gets me asking all kinds of questions. 

YOUR BOOK BEGINNINGS

Please add a link to your Book Beginnings post in the linky box below. If you share on social media, please use the hashtag #bookbeginnings.

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THE FRIDAY 56

The Friday 56 is a natural tie-in with Book Beginnings. The idea is to share a two-sentence teaser from page 56 of your featured book. If you are reading an ebook or audiobook, find your teaser from the 56% mark.

Freda at Freda's Voice started and hosted The Friday 56 for a long, long time. She is taking a break and Anne at My Head if Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. Please visit Anne's blog and link to your Friday 56 post.

MY FRIDAY 56

-- from Pocketful of Poseys:

Their appointment with Bradford Tuttle, the stereotypically oleaginous funeral director, had struck Grace and Brian as easily lasting longer than the average college final exam — lengthened even more by the fact that almost every utterance the man voiced involved increasingly wearing references to your dear departed loved one. Grace didn't feel the least bit guilty about forgetting a detail or two.

FROM THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION

Grace Tingley and Brian Posey are forty-something twins whose lives have gone in very different directions. . . . 

When their widowed mother Cinny, a charter member of Woodstock Nation, is diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, Grace and Brian are there for her last days in hospice care. This is where Cinny reveals her staggering plan for the siblings: They're to sprinkle her ashes, mixed with their father's, at a series of exotic locations around the globe--some remote, some challengingly public, all known and loved by the Poseys.

Joined by their own immediate families, Grace and Brian set off on a funereal odyssey that uncovers more about their parents' relationship, and themselves, than the twins find it easy to admit.

Need Blind Admission by Kevin Myers -- BOOK BEGINNING

 

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

Please join me every Friday for Book Beginnings! Share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires. Please remember to include the title of the book and the author’s name.

EARLY BIRDS & SLOWPOKES: This weekly post goes up Thursday evening for those who like to get their posts up and linked early on. But feel free to add a link all week.

SOCIAL MEDIA: If you are on Instagram, Twitter, or other social media, please post using the hash tag #BookBeginnings. I try to follow all Book Beginnings participants on whatever interweb sites you are on, so please let me know if I have missed any and I will catch up. Find me on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

TIE IN: Sadly, Freda at Freda's Voice is taking a break from her weekly blog event, The Friday 56, Her event was a natural tie in with this event and there was a lot of cross over, so many people combined the two. Freda needs a break, but I hope she is back soon. Please visit her Freda’s Voice blog even if the Friday 56 is on hold indefinitely. 

MY BOOK BEGINNING

William James was beyond saving when the Parker College security guards discovered his body sprawled near the community garden by the border of the affluent South Parker neighborhood.

-- from Need Blind Ambition by Kevin Meyers, out now from Beaufort Books.

Need Blind Ambition is the second novel from Kevin Meyers, a former journalist turned college administrator. I love the play on words in the title, the moody cover, and that first sentence. Wow! It really grabs you, doesn't it?

I only just got my copy and haven't started it yet. I can't wait! A novel of suspense set on a college campus is my cup of tea on any day. (I'm adding it to my list of campus novels right now.) But that this one is set in my town of Portland, Oregon makes it even more tantalizing. 

YOUR BOOK BEGINNINGS 

Please add a link to your Book Beginnings post in the box below. If you share on social media, please use the #bookbeginnings hashtag. Have fun!

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It feels so strange to post my Book Beginning without a Friday 56 teaser! Here is more informaiton about Need Blind Ambition:

FROM THE PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION

The desire for relevance--and to save his marriage--is ultimately what pushed Peter Cook to leave his beloved Alaska for the prestigious Parker College. Lured by the chance to work with his childhood political idol turned college president, Peter moves his family to Portland, Oregon to help promote his hero's fundraising initiative that would eliminate financial status from the college's admissions process.

Peter arrives on campus as the Great Recession looms, the stock market is trending toward disaster, and the opioid crisis has breached the walls of the privileged college. He quickly learns the reality of Parker College strays far from its professed idealistic mission after discovering a plot to cover-up felonious drug activity in return for a seven-figure payday to the Need Blind Campaign.

While plumbing the depths of his conscience for the conviction to do the right thing, Peter's untreated childhood trauma resurfaces, threatening to cloud his perception when it needs to be at its sharpest. Peter must stabilize his mental health while also trying to parse competing versions of "the truth" as law enforcement investigates the criminal conspiracy.

Need Blind Ambition asks: how far will a college stray to protect its reputation?

The Mad, Mad, Murders of Marigold Way by Raymond Benson -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

Welcome back to Book Beginnings on Fridays, where participants share the opening sentence (or so) of the book they are reading this week. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

MY BOOK BEGINNING

Friends, this is a little tale about some murders.

-- from The Mad, Mad, Murders of Marigold Way by Raymond Benson (2022, Beaufort Books).

This new dramedy mystery comes out next week, on October 4, and is available for pre-order now. Not only is the book brand new, the story is set in a Chicago suburb during the covid pandemic, so feels like it takes place right this minute.

I scored an ARC from the LibraryThing early reviewer program. It looks like a perfect book to read during the October spooky season. Not too scary but just enough to put me in the mood for Halloween!

YOUR BOOK BEGINNINGS

Please add the link to your Book Beginning post in the box below. If you share on social media, please use the hashtag #bookbeginnings. Thanks!

  

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THE FRIDAY 56

Freda at Freda's Voice hosts another teaser event on Fridays. Participants share a two-sentence teaser from page 56 of the book they are reading -- or from 56% of the way through the audiobook or ebook. Please visit Freda's Voice for details and to leave a link to your post.

MY FRIDAY 56

From The Mad, Mad, Murders of Marigold Way:

As the truck approached, it slowed down. It crept past the empty Wilkins house, and then slowly moved on in front of Scott's home towards Temple Avenue. 

FROM THE PUBLISHER’S DESCRIPTION

For Scott Hatcher, a former television writer turned struggling novelist with a failing marriage to boot, social-distancing and mask-wearing feel like fitting additions to his already surreal life. When his wife Marie and neighbor John Bergman disappear in the middle of the raging COVID-19 pandemic, Scott is naturally mystified and disturbed, but he is also about to learn that his picturesque neighborhood hides more than just the mundane routines of suburban life.

When a fire claims the empty house for sale next door, the entire community is shocked when the charred remains of Marie and John are found inside. Stranger still, stockpiles of valuable Personal Protection Equipment, clearly stolen, were destroyed in the blaze alongside them. As the neighborhood reels from the loss, Scott and Bergman's earthy and enticing widow, Rachel, not only find themselves under investigation for the crime, but also inexorably drawn to one another. As tensions reach a fever pitch, the tale—which is at once familiar and ordinary, yet bizarre and eerie—shows that, just like life in 2020's uncertain times, dread and danger lurk below the hidden underside of everyday suburbia.

A Roundup of Reviews -- Six Book Reviews to Spring Clean My Blog

A ROUNDUP OF REVIEWS

I’ve gotten behind on my book reviews here on Rose City Reader. So in a bout of spring cleaning, here is a roundup of a half a dozen reviews to make a dent my backlog and my To Do list:



📘Coco at the Ritz: A Novel by Gioia Diliberto (2021, Pegasus Books)

Coco Chanel is remembered today as a fashion icon and strong businesswoman, who redefined feminine chic and built a world-famous design brand. But Chanel was a complex character with a darker side.

Gioia Diliberto’s new novel is based on the true story of Chanel's war-time romance with a German spy and how that affair led to her arrest for treason following the Liberation of Paris. The story is fascinating in how it neither glorifies nor demonizes Chanel, but portrays her honestly, as a 60-year-old woman desperate to preserve a semblance of her pre-war life even if it meant deceiving herself and lying to her friends – and her interrogators.

Coco at the Ritz is historical fiction at its page-turning best. It went straight onto my list of French Connections books.



📘Under The Orange Blossoms: An Inspirational Story of Bravery and Strength by Cindy Benezra (2021, Cindytalks)

Cindy Benezra was abused as a child by her father. She struggled with the ongoing trauma of her abuse, especially the shame and self-blame she carried with her. After much work brought her own healing and peace, Benezra wanted to write her memoir to share her story. In her book, she also grapples with her mother’s death, her own divorce, and her son’s ongoing health problems.

Benezra’s strength and bravery are an inspiration particularly for abuse survivors. But the story she tells in Under the Orange Blossoms can be a comfort to anyone who has faced trauma and helpful for anyone supporting trauma survivors.



📘One Night, New York by Lara Thompson (2021, Pegasus Books)

One Night, New York is Lara Thompson’s terrific debut novel. The story takes place on one December night in 1932, when two young women plot to get revenge on a man who has wronged them by pushing him off the top of the Empire State Building.

Frances ran away from her life in Depression-wracked Kansas for the fast life of the big city. There, she fell in love with Agnes, a photographer’s apprentice, and they both fell in with a bad crowd. It is a story of romance, corruption, art, Greenwich Village bohemians, nightclubs, and skyscrapers. This fast-paced historical fiction glimmers with the edgy glamor of old New York, right up to the nail-biting culmination.



📘The Florentines: From Dante to Galileo: The Transformation of Western Civilization by Paul Strathern (2021, Pegasus Books)

Paul Strathern offers a masterful history of 400 years of Florentine culture. He argues that the ideas that flourished between the birth of Dante in 1265 and the death of Galileo in 1642 -- ideas expressed in the art and architecture of Florence -- led to the emergence of humanism as the driving philosophy of the Western world.

By providing a cross-section of Renaissance society, Strathern shows how science, art, architecture, literature, finance, business, and economics all connected in Florence. Readers see how the Florentine leaders’ interactions – public and private – fomented the ideas that lead Florence, and eventually Europe, out of the Dark Ages and into the modern Renaissance.



📘Princes of the Renaissance: The Hidden Power Behind an Artistic Revolution by Mary Hollingsworth (2021, Pegasus Books)

Mary Hollingsworth's latest book tells the history of the patrons of the art and architecture of the Italian Renaissance, during the tumultuous period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is an excellent introduction for readers looking to learn about the famous Renaissance families of Italy whose names ring bells but details are sketchy, like Medici, Borgia, d’Este, Farnese, Visconti, Sforza, and Gritti.

Princes of the Renaissance is the kind of well-written “popular” history backed by substantive research that is a delight to read. It is also a beautiful book, filled with photographs and color prints of the of the places and art described. 

(Princes of the Renaissance and The Florentines make a perfect companion set. Good idea for Father's Day if your dad is a history buff!)



📘A Few Words about Words: A Common-Sense Look at Writing and Grammar by Joseph J. Diorio (2021, Beaufort Books)

I love any and all grammar books and A Few Words About Words is a first-rate addition to my collection. Joe Diorio is the author of a popular newsletter of the same name that has been around for 30 years. He built this book around those columns, organized by subject and theme, trimmed or expanded as needed, and connected by personal anecdotes for continuity. The end result is a lighthearted and engaging guide to English grammar and a wholehearted apologia for using it correctly.

NOTES

Have you read any of these? What do you think? Do any of them look good to you?

My thanks to the publishers, authors, and publicists who gave me review copies! With apologies for my tardy reviews.