MONDAY MEMES: MAILBOX & WHAT ARE YOU READING? — MARCH 14

MY MONDAY MEMES

Good morning!  Welcome to our Monday Memes, in which we review the past week, in terms of blogging, reading, and life…and share it all with the rest of you.

Mailbox Monday is hosted through March by I’m Booking It.

What Are You Reading? is hosted by Book Journey.

 

MAILBOX MONDAY:

 

This week, I received one book for review, purchased one book at Borders, and ordered an e-book from Amazon by an author I know.

Here they are, in all their splendor:

1.  Tuck Your Skirt in Your Panties and Run, by Lucy Adams (review book)

Don’t you love the title and cover?  Here’s a tidbit from Amazon:

Ever laughed when you knew you shouldn’t?  Battled with Satan over chocolate?  Forgotten to wear lipstick to the Garden Club meeting?  Tried to define variorium?  At times like these, what else can you do but Tuck Your Skirt in Your Panties and Run?

In her much awaited second book, award winning writer Lucy Adams, author of If Mama Don’t Laugh, It Ain’t Funny, takes readers on a roller-coaster ride through life’s most embarrassing moments and delivers them safely on the other side.  In her usual form, Adams gives readers an eye-watering, nose-snorting, giggling gift of a good time….

2.  Untied, by Meredith Baxter (my purchase)

Here’s a snippet from Amazon:

Meredith Baxter is a beloved and iconic television actress, most well-known for her enormously popular role as hippie mom, Elyse Keaton, on Family Ties. Her warmth, humor, and brilliant smile made her one of the most popular women on television, with millions of viewers following her on the small screen each week. Yet her success masked a tumultuous personal story and a harrowing private life. For the first time, Baxter is ready to share her incredible highs, (working with Robert Redford, Doris Day, Lana Turner, and the cast of Family Ties), and lows (a thorny relationship with her mother, a difficult marriage to David Birney, a bout with breast cancer), finally revealing the woman behind the image….

3.  Children of the Fog, (e-book), by Cheryl Kaye Tardif

Blurb:

YOU HAVE 10 SECONDS TO MAKE A DECISION:
Let A Kidnapper Take Your Child, Or Watch Your Son Die.
Choose!

Sadie O’Connell is a bestselling author and a proud mother. But her life is about to spiral out of control. After her six-year-old son Sam is kidnapped by a serial abductor, she nearly goes insane. But it isn’t just the fear and grief that is ripping her apart. It’s the guilt. Sadie is the only person who knows what the kidnapper looks like. And she can’t tell a soul. For if she does, her son will be sent back to her in “little bloody pieces”….

 

Don’t these make you want to start reading?  Those are my thoughts, anyway.

 

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WHAT ARE YOU READING?

 

This past week, I’ve done quite a bit of reading…finally finished Freedom, which I’ve been working on sporadically for the past three weeks.  I’ve also done the following blog posts (among others):

HUMP DAY POTPOURRI — A LOOK BACK

THE UNCERTAINTY OF PARENTING — AN EXCERPT

THE HOUSE MOTHER’S BAGGAGE — AN EXCERPT

Then there’s my reading….

Books Read & Reviewed-Click Titles for Reviews:

1.  Wicked Appetite, by Janet Evanovich

2.  The Opposite of Me, by Sarah Pekkanen

3.  Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen

 

What’s Up Next?

1.  The Easter Parade, by Richard Yates

In The Easter Parade, first published in 1976, we meet sisters Sarah and Emily Grimes when they are still the children of divorced parents. We observe the sisters over four decades, watching them grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable and stalwart, settling into an unhappy marriage. Emily is precocious and independent, struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates’s classic novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished family’s past, and how both finally reach for some semblance of renewal.

2.  Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough, by Ruth Pennebaker (review book)

Joanie Pilcher, nearing 50 and recently divorced, is firmly entrenched in the sandwich generation. Working at a job she hates in an ad agency, she’s doing her best with her moody 15-year-old daughter, Caroline, and her depressed 77-year-old widowed mother, Ivy, who moved in six months earlier after her stock portfolio tanked. When Joanie’s ex calls to tell her that his much-younger live-in girlfriend is pregnant, it seems a final straw. Meanwhile, Caroline suffers typical teenage angst, hating her life, discovering pot, and mooning over handsome Henry in her Spanish class, and Ivy—keenly missing her old home and friends—tries to fill her days with Goggling on the Internet, with a little shoplifting on the side….

3.  Now You See Her, by Joy Fielding

Fifty-year-old Marcy Taggart is in Ireland celebrating her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary with one notable absence, that of her husband, who recently left her for the female golf pro at their country club. Ever since the mysterious disappearance of her daughter, Devon, two years ago, Marcy has been suffering one long nervous breakdown. Her soon-to-be-ex-husband and her sister are convinced that Devon, who had bipolar disorder, committed suicide. But Marcy believes Devon ran away to start a new life. When Marcy takes a break from her relentless sightseeing in Cork, she catches sight of Devon through a window, and so begins her reckless odyssey to reclaim her missing daughter….

4.  These Things Hidden (e-book), by Heather Gudenkauf

Gudenkauf’s scintillating second suspense novel (after The Weight of Silence) opens with the release of 21-year-old Allison Glenn from prison, where she has served five years for an unspecified but particularly horrible crime. Allison is reluctant to enter a halfway house in her hometown of Linden Falls, Iowa, where “even a heroin-addicted prostitute arrested for armed robbery and murder would get more compassion than I ever will.” Allison, her family’s former golden girl, secures a job at a local bookstore, but her efforts to resume some sort of normal life are undermined by her well-to-do parents’ indifference, her sister’s hatred, and the stigma of her conviction….

 

So that’s my week…past and upcoming.  What are the rest of you doing?  I hope you’ll stop by and share your comments and links.