Archived moves:

Krin steals The Thirteenth Tale from Root
Root steals Gathering Blue from HoserLauren
Lauren steals Isabella Moon from Sunny
Sunny steals The Thirteenth Tale from krin
Krin asks for Marlene's reveal Conversations with The Fat Girl
Vegan steals Gathering Blue from Root
Root steals The Thirteenth Tale from Sunnie
Sunnie asks MsJoanna's reveal:We Need to Talk About Kevin
Candy steals Ursula Under from zosime
zosime steals The Luxe from Luckaye
luckaye asks zosime to reveal The Omnivore's Dilemma
Marlene asks candy to reveal The Boy in Striped Pyjamas
Amber steals the 13th Tale
Root steals the Omnivore's Dilemma from luckaye
Lucie steals Ursula Under from Candy
Candy steals Conversations with The Fat Girl from Krin
krin steals Gathering Blue out of the game!
VeganMedusa steals The Omnivore's Dilemma from rootmartin
Rootmartin steals Survivor from AM10000
AM10000 asks camis to reveal Men In Kilts
Rosie steals Season of the Witch from Brat
Brat steals We Need to Talk About Kevin from Sunlight
Sunny took The Thriteenth Tale outta the game!

KathyB's Reveal



You Suck by Christopher Moore (TBR)

Being dead sucks. Make that being undead sucks.

Literally. Just ask Thomas C. Flood. Waking up after a fantastic night unlike anything he's ever experienced, he discovers that his girlfriend, Jody—the woman of his dreams—is a vampire. And surprise! Now he's one, too.

For some couples, the whole biting-and-blood thing would have been a deal breaker. But Tommy and Jody are in love, and they vow to work through their issues. Like how much Jody should teach Tommy about his new superpowers (and how much he needs to learn on his own). Plus there's Tommy's cute new minion, sixteen-year-old goth girl Abby Normal. (Well, someone has to run errands during daylight hours!)

Making the relationship work, however, is the least of Jody and Tommy's problems. Word has it that the vampire who nibbled on Jody wasn't supposed to be recruiting any new members into the club. Even worse, Tommy's erstwhile turkey-bowling pals are out to get him, at the urging of a blue-dyed Las Vegas call girl named (duh) Blue.

And that really sucks.

Rosie's reveal:

A Singular Hostage by Thalassa Ali

BXing link: http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/5052570



From Publishers Weekly
What's a Victorian girl to do? Twenty years old, not quite beautiful, more interested in military history than in conventional female doings, Mariana Givens sets off for India with Gov.-Gen. Lord Auckland's enormous party in hopes of finding a husband. Several eligible British officers are ready to propose, but Mariana would rather study Urdu with wise Munshi Sahib or hang out with the elephants. The officers are weepy or large-eared, except for Harry Fitzgerald, who turns out not to be eligible, after all. It's the eponymous hostage who steals her heart: Saboor, a luminous infant who was kidnapped by the ailing, one-eyed Maharajah Ranjit Singh, ruler of the Punjab, whom Lord Auckland is on his way to meet. After Saboor's mother is poisoned, Mariana is readily enlisted to return Saboor to his father, Hassan Sahib. Will she come to love Hassan as much as she loves Saboor? Although the ending is inconclusive, suggesting a sequel (one is in the works; called A Beggar at the Gate, it will be published in 2003), Mariana is unlikely to return to flower-arranging in Sussex. Sometimes lyrical and zippy, sometimes predictable and plodding, this richly populated novel is notable for an odd combination of strengths: a compelling mysticism, a convincing historicity and a flare for slapstick comedy sending up both the Indian and British patriarchies. Old-time Olympia Press readers will warm to the hair-waxing scene as Mariana is prepared for a sham (or is it?) wedding to Hassan.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Geishabird's Reveal:




Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk (TBR)

A morbidly fascinating black fantasy about a young cult member's rise to fame and his fall from grace...

When an airliner goes down, the first thing the authorities look for amid the wreckage is the black box that contains a recording of the pilot's last words, which are usually grim but fairly restrained - almost always because the pilot doesn't expect (almost always) to die. Tender Branson's situation is unusual: the last survivor of an obscure American religion known as the Creedish Death Cult, he is dictating his confession into the black box of a 747 that he knows will soon crash somewhere over the Australian outback. What you've found, he declares, is the story of what went wrong. That's putting it softly. Like all Creedalists, Branson, raised for a life of obscure service to strangers, chose to hire himself out as an unpaid domestic while still in his teens. Probably he would have spent his life keeping house for the yuppie vulgarians who took him in, but an FBI raid on the Creedish Church compound in Nebraska resulted in a mass suicide within the cult. Since then, surviving Creedalists living in the field have been killing themselves on a regular basis, so that Branson is soon the only Creedalist left. As such, he becomes a genuine celebrity, complete with an agent who gets him book contracts, movie deals - and with a good lawyer intent on winning him uncontested title to all Creedish Church properties. A marriage is arranged for him...and televised live from the Super Bowl during halftime. But things turn sour when evidence mounts that many of the suicides were, in fact, murders - and that Branson's brother Adam may still be alive. Is Branson a serial killer? Or Adam? Can they ever lead a normal life again? Brilliant, engrossing, substantial, and fun: Palahniuk carves out credible, moving dramas from situations that seemed simply outlandish and sad on the evening news.

Amberkatze's Reveal!

Season of the Witch - Natasha Mostert



Book Description

From Publishers Weekly

This spellbinding tale of magic and seduction from Mostert (Windwalker) shows that the unfettered pursuit of arcane enlightenment can sometimes come at too high a price. William Whittington, a terminally ill London investment banker, hires Gabriel Blackstone, a rakish "information broker," to find Robert, his missing 21-year-old son. Whittington's wife, who happens to be Blackstone's ex-girlfriend, knows Blackstone once belonged to an organization, Eyestorm, that used psychic methods to find missing objects and persons. When Blackstone draws on his remote viewing powers ("slamming the ride"), he discovers that Robert was murdered by one of two sisters—raven-haired Morrighan or flame-haired Minnaloushe Monk, direct descendants of Elizabethan occultist John Dee, who dabble in alchemy and the "Art of Memory." As Blackstone woos the suspects to discover which one is guilty, he falls desperately in love. Mostert, a South African writer now living in London, has produced a feverish tale that's goth SF at its finest.

Xeyra's Reveal

Coyote Blue
by Christopher Moore



Sam Hunter has spent twenty years escaping his past. Now it has caught up to him in the weirdest of all possible ways.

As a boy growing up in Montana, he was Samson Hunts Alone -- until a deadly misunderstanding with the law forced him to flee the Crow reservation at age fifteen. Today he is a successful Santa Barbara insurance salesman with a Mercedes, a condo and a hollow, invented life. The one day, shortly after his thirty-fifth birthday, destiny offers Samuel Hunter the dangerous gift of love in the exquisite form of Calliope Kincaid -- and a curse in the unheralded appearance of an ancient Indian god by the name of Coyote. Coyote, the trickster, has arrived to transform tranquility into chaos, to reawaken the mystical storyteller within Sam... and to seriously screw up his existence in the process.

From Christopher Moore, author of Practical Demonkeeping, comes a quirky, irreverent new novel of love, myth, metphysics, outlaw biking, angst and outrageous redemption.

http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/5937475/

GateGyspy's reveal



A Home At The End of The World by Michael Cunningham

Cunningham's novel focuses on the close friendship of Bobby and Jonathan. As boyhood friends growing up in Cleveland in the late Sixties and Seventies, Bobby and Jonathan form a relationship that is both average and far beyond what most kids would consider "normal.'' After high school Jonathan moves to New York City, where Bobby soon follows. They become involved with Clare, a slightly older woman who finds each one appealing in his own way. The rest of the novel centers on their unusual life together. This well-written book has lots of good dialog and will appeal to readers who want something other than the tried and true best seller.
-- Mary K. Prokop, CEL Regional Library, Savannah, Georgia

Once in a great while, there appears a novel so spellbinding in its beauty and sensitivity that the reader devours it nearly whole, in great greedy gulps, and feels stretched sore afterwards, having been expanded and filled. Such a book is Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World.
-- San Diego Tribune

This is one of the 1001 ... it is also TBR, sorry!

http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/4473208

My book is:

A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon



At sixty-one, George Hall is settling down to a comfortable retirement. When his tempestuous daughter, Katie, announces that she is getting married to the deeply inappropriate Ray, the Hall family is thrown into a tizzy. Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind. As parents and children fall apart and come together, Haddon paints a disturbing yet amusing portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely.

http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/5951331

HoserLauren's book is:


Bloodsucking Fiends by Christopher Moore
http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/3141638

Jody never asked to become a vampire. But when she wakes up under an alley Dumpster with a badly burned arm, an aching neck, superhuman strength, and a distinctly Nosferatuan thirst, she realizes the decision has been made for her.

Making the transition from the nine-to-five grind to an eternity of nocturnal prowlings is going to take some doing, however, and that's where C. Thomas Flood fits in. A would-be Kerouac from Incontinence, Indiana, Tommy (to his friends) is biding his time night-clerking and frozen-turkey bowling in a San Francisco Safeway. But all that changes when a beautiful undead redhead walks through the door ... and proceeds to rock Tommy's life -- and afterlife -- in ways he never imagined possible.

My reveal is:

Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry




Lois Lowry's magnificent novel of the distant future, The Giver, is set in a highly technical and emotionally repressed society. This eagerly awaited companion volume, by contrast, takes place in a village with only the most rudimentary technology, where anger, greed, envy, and casual cruelty make ordinary people's lives short and brutish. This society, like the one portrayed in The Giver, is controlled by merciless authorities with their own complex agendas and secrets. And at the center of both stories there is a young person who is given the responsibility of preserving the memory of the culture--and who finds the vision to transform it.
Kira, newly orphaned and lame from birth, is taken from the turmoil of the village to live in the grand Council Edifice because of her skill at embroidery. There she is given the task of restoring the historical pictures sewn on the robe worn at the annual Ruin Song Gathering, a solemn day-long performance of the story of their world's past. Down the hall lives Thomas the Carver, a young boy who works on the intricate symbols carved on the Singer's staff, and a tiny girl who is being trained as the next Singer. Over the three artists hovers the menace of authority, seemingly kind but suffocating to their creativity, and the dark secret at the heart of the Ruin Song.

With the help of a cheerful waif called Matt and his little dog, Kira at last finds the way to the plant that will allow her to create the missing color--blue--and, symbolically, to find the courage to shape the future by following her art wherever it may lead. With astonishing originality, Lowry has again created a vivid and unforgettable setting for this thrilling story that raises profound questions about the mystery of art, the importance of memory, and the centrality of love. (Ages 10 and older)

BC Journal Entry

lmn60's reveal...



Extreme: My Autobiography by Sharon Osbourne


From Publishers Weekly...

'Having raised her profile from wife of shock-rocker Ozzy and mother of three creatively dysfunctional kids to a celebrity in her own right with the hit reality TV show The Osbournes, Sharon Osbourne lets fans in on her early tumultuous years during the British rock-and-roll scene in this raunchy, take-no-prisoners memoir. Born in Brixton, London, in 1952, the only daughter of a Jewish singer from Manchester, Don Arden, and his Irish dancer wife, Osbourne grew up among entertainers grasping to survive in the cutthroat business and with little time to nurture her childhood. Indeed, a strong theme in Osbourne's frank account is how her father, who became a formidable manager of early rock-and-rollers like Gene Vincent and the Animals, used her as a pawn in his get-rich schemes; by 15 she had quit school and started working at her father's office, repelling creditors and appeasing bailiffs. Arden's fortunes rose and fell, and Osbourne met and partied with hip rockers like ELO and Black Sabbath, originally fronted by Ozzy Osbourne. From London to L.A., the riot of parties didn't quit, and the drinking usually escalated to violence and destruction of hotel rooms, especially during the Osbournes' long, improbably durable marriage. Fond of luxury and her bed, Osbourne is rip-roaring chatty and never boring.'

Krin's reveal is



Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill (TBR)

"A dangerous rescue attempt in Michigan has captured the attention of the entire country. A two-year-old girl has fallen down a mine shaft. Ursula Wong is from a poor family and referred to by one member of the TV audience as 'half-breed trailer trash', not worth all the expense.

But Ursula is the last of her family line, and her story explodes into a gorgeous saga of culture, history and heredity. Ursula's forebears include a second-century-BC Chinese alchemist; an orphaned consort to a Swedish queen; and her great-great-grandfather, Jake Maki, a miner who died in a cave-in aged twenty-nine.

Ursula's fate echoes those of her ancestors, many of whom so narrowly escaped not being born that any given individual's life comes to seem a miracle."

[doHTML]
<img src="http://www.barnstable.k12.ma.us/bhs/Library/images/thirteenth-tale.jpg" height="368" width="245" border="0" align="left" hspace="15" vspace="10" /></a>

<p align="center"><b><font size="5" face="book antiqua"><font color="#000000">zzz reveals:</font></p>
<p align="center"><font color="#DC143C">The Thirteenth Tale
</font> by Diane Setterfield</font></b></p>

<p>Former academic Setterfield pays tribute in her debut to Brontë and du Maurier heroines: a plain girl gets wrapped up in a dark, haunted ruin of a house, which guards family secrets that are not hers and that she must discover at her peril. Margaret Lea, a London bookseller's daughter, has written an obscure biography that suggests deep understanding of siblings. She is contacted by renowned aging author Vida Winter, who finally wishes to tell her own, long-hidden, life story. Margaret travels to Yorkshire, where she interviews the dying writer, walks the remains of her estate at Angelfield and tries to verify the old woman's tale of a governess, a ghost and more than one abandoned baby. Contending with ghosts and with a (mostly) scary bunch of living people, Setterfield's sensible heroine is, like Jane Eyre, full of repressed feeling—and is unprepared for both heartache and romance.
Settle down to enjoy a rousing good ghost story.</p><p>Setterfield has rejuvenated the genre with this closely plotted, clever foray into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths. She never cheats by pulling a rabbit out of a hat; this atmospheric story hangs together perfectly.</p>
<br clear="all" />
[/doHTML]BC LINK

Boomda's Reveal:




The Luxe by Anna Godbersen

Book Description

From Kirkus Reviews
A big, sumptuous tale of catty girls, dark secrets and windswept romance unfurls in this compulsively readable novel of late-19th-century New York City socialites. Godbersen weaves a tenuous web of deceit, backstabbing and pretense that follows four teens: Elizabeth Holland, a prim and proper lady of old-money society, is betrothed to one man, though furtively loves another; Henry Schoonmaker, a debauched playboy who must marry Elizabeth or be disinherited; Diana Holland, Elizabeth’s younger sister who is in love with her fiancé; and Penelope Hayes, a member of the nouveau riche who will stop at nothing to win Henry’s affections. As Elizabeth and Henry’s wedding approaches, the spectacle unfolds in a wondrously grandiose scene, making for a fun, though not entirely unexpected dénouement. A delicious new twist along the Gossip Girl vein, readers will clamor for this sharp, smart drama of friends, lovers, lies and betrayal.

Marlene's Reveal chosen by.........


Conversations with The Fat Girl by Liza Palmer.




Palmer's lighthearted debut traverses territory familiar to chick-lit fans--a young woman lets self-doubt undermine an opportunity for romance. A lifelong battle with her weight, a disastrous dating life, and a going-nowhere job have taken their toll on Maggie's self-esteem. To make matters worse, her best friend, Olivia--once a fellow plus-size shopper--has a new svelte body thanks to gastric bypass surgery and a handsome surgeon fiance to boot. A great boyfriend and the perfect job are within Maggie's reach, but first she has to feel like she deserves them. Palmer's likable characters and snappy dialogue make this novel stand out from the crowd, and it's sure to attract fans of Jennifer Weiner and other authors who offer slightly imperfect heroines. Palmer manages to infuse a message of self--acceptance that isn't heavy-handed or cloying. This quick-witted author is sure to develop a following. ("yes she got me hooked" said Marlene a well-know Dutch highly intelligent and eclectic reader, when we interviewed her)

This book has out of 56 reviews on amazon.

My BC Journal

msjoanna's reveal:

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver



From Publishers Weekly
A number of fictional attempts have been made to portray what might lead a teenager to kill a number of schoolmates or teachers, Columbine style, but Shriver's is the most triumphantly accomplished by far. A gifted journalist as well as the author of seven novels, she brings to her story a keen understanding of the intricacies of marital and parental relationships as well as a narrative pace that is both compelling and thoughtful. Eva Khatchadourian is a smart, skeptical New Yorker whose impulsive marriage to Franklin, a much more conventional person, bears fruit, to her surprise and confessed disquiet, in baby Kevin. From the start Eva is ambivalent about him, never sure if she really wanted a child, and he is balefully hostile toward her; only good-old-boy Franklin, hoping for the best, manages to overlook his son's faults as he grows older, a largely silent, cynical, often malevolent child. The later birth of a sister who is his opposite in every way, deeply affectionate and fragile, does nothing to help, and Eva always suspects his role in an accident that befalls little Celia. The narrative, which leads with quickening and horrifying inevitability to the moment when Kevin massacres seven of his schoolmates and a teacher at his upstate New York high school, is told as a series of letters from Eva to an apparently estranged Franklin, after Kevin has been put in a prison for juvenile offenders. This seems a gimmicky way to tell the story, but is in fact surprisingly effective in its picture of an affectionate couple who are poles apart, and enables Shriver to pull off a huge and crushing shock far into her tale. It's a harrowing, psychologically astute, sometimes even darkly humorous novel, with a clear-eyed, hard-won ending and a tough-minded sense of the difficult, often painful human enterprise.
------------------------------------
I've had this book on my shelf for exactly a year now and have been wanting to read it, but have been sort of scared to. Actually, come to think of it, I think it was one of the choices of the person who raided my shelf for this swap in September. So I hope that not everyone has read this one already.

zosime's reveal:

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan



A New York Times bestseller that has changed the way readers view the ecology of eating, this revolutionary book by award winner Michael Pollan asks the seemingly simple question: What should we have for dinner? Tracing from source to table each of the food chains that sustain us - whether industrial or organic, alternative or processed - he develops a portrait of the American way of eating. The result is a sweeping, surprising exploration of the hungers that have shaped our evolution, and of the profound implications our food choices have for the health of our species and the future of our planet.

Camis's reveal:

Men In Kilts by Katie McAlister



From back cover
What do they wear under those things?

So far, Kathie Williams has made a good showing as the only American author at a mystery writers' conference in Manchester, England - what with that falling asleep in public thing behind her.

The sight of Iain MacLaren wakes her up. Clad in a deliciously woolly sweater, the burly Scotsman seems to be holding up a wall at the cocktail party. So Kathie makes her move...and winds up stark naked with him in bed, where his thick Scottish brogue, thick manly chest, and thick...other parts...drive her to do things she's never done before. Like fall in love.

And if things aren't moving fast enough - and on the wrong side of the road, no less - Kathie is about to visit Iain's sheep farm in the Scottish Highlands and meet his sons. She's feeling a wee bit nervous. Because she can't tell where this mad affair is going - except north...

Candy's reveal...



From the flyleaf (this is a hardback but not a huge one)
The story of "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" is very difficult to describe. Usually we give some clues about the book on the cover, but in this case we think that would spoil the reading of the book. We think it is important that you start to read without knowing what it is about. If you do start to read this book, you will go on a journey with a nine-year-old boy called Bruno. (Though this isn't a book for nine-year-olds.) And sooner or later you will arrive with Bruno at a fence. We hope you never have to cross such a fence.




http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/5498413

Xallroyx reveal:



Bitten
by
Kelley Armstrong

It's not easy to find a fresh angle for the werewolf theme, but this debut novel from a Canadian writer proves that solid storytelling and confident craftsmanship can rejuvenate one of the hoariest of all horror clich‚s. Elena Michaels is a self-described "mutt," a werewolf who left her secretive pack in upstate New York for a life among humans. In the year since she relocated to Toronto, she's embarked on a career as a journalist and begun a pleasingly mundane relationship with a decent man. All this is jeopardized when she agrees to help her old packmates hunt some troublesome mutts who are converting common criminals to werewolves and leaving a trail of conspicuous carnage. Reunited with her former lycanthrope lover and forced into brutally predatory confrontations, Elena finds the call of the wild subtly reasserting itself. Armstrong prepares readers for her tale's twists with several key revisions of werewolf lore the werewolf taint is mostly hereditary, and werewolves can be killed as easily as any human or wolf. Her true achievement, though, is her depiction of werewolf nature in believably human context. Elena's feral sensibility, like her psychological vulnerabilities, seems a natural outgrowth of her abusive childhood, and her relationship with the pack is that of any prodigal child to a close-knit family. The sensuality of Elena's transformations and the viciousness of her kills mesh perfectly with her tough personality. Filled with romance and supernatural intrigue, this book will surely remind readers of Anne Rice's sophisticated refurbishings of the vampire story.

Bluecat's reveal is:

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie



Synopsis
The sweeping novel from the author of 'Purple Hibiscus', shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Award. This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood. The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer's house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna's twin sister, a remote and enigmatic character. As these people's lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.

Brat's Reveal

This is TBR, but shouldn't take too long.

Stardust by Neil Gaiman



Stardust is an utterly charming fairy tale in the tradition of The Princess Bride and The Neverending Story. Neil Gaiman, creator of the darkly elegant Sandman comics and author of The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, tells the story of young Tristran Thorn and his adventures in the land of Faerie. One fateful night, Tristran promises his beloved that he will retrieve a fallen star for her from beyond the Wall that stands between their rural English town (called, appropriately, Wall) and the Faerie realm. No one ever ventures beyond the Wall except to attend an enchanted flea market that is held every nine years (and during which, unbeknownst to him, Tristran was conceived). But Tristran bravely sets out to fetch the fallen star and thus win the hand of his love. His adventures in the magical land will keep you turning pages as fast as you can--he and the star escape evil old witches, deadly clutching trees, goblin press-gangs, and the scheming sons of the dead Lord of Stormhold. The story is by turns thrillingly scary and very funny. You'll love goofy, earnest Tristran and the talking animals, gnomes, magic trees, and other irresistible denizens of Faerie that he encounters in his travels. Stardust is a perfect read-aloud book, a brand-new fairy tale you'll want to share with a kid, or maybe hoard for yourself.

Sunnie's reveal is:


Wild Swans:Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang

Synopsis
Through the lives of three different women - grandmother, mother and daughter - this book tells the story of 20th-century China. At times scarcely credible in the details it reveals of the suffering of millions of ordinary Chinese people, it is an unforgettable record of tyranny, hope and ultimate survival under conditions of extreme harshness. In 1924, at the age of 15, the author's grandmother became the concubine of a powerful warlord, whom she was seldom to see during the ten years of their "marriage". Her daughter, born in 1931, experienced the horrors of Japanese occupation in Manchuria as a schoolgirl, and after their surrender joined the Communist-led underground fighting Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang. She rose to be a senior Communist official, but was imprisoned three times. Her husband, also a high official and one of the very first to join the Communists, was relentlessly persecuted, imprisoned and finally sent to a labour camp where, physically broken and disillusioned, he lost his sanity. The author herself grew up during the Cultural Revolution, at the time of the personality cult of Mao and the worst excesses of the Gang of Four. She joined the Red Guard but after Mao's death she was to become one of the first Chinese students to study abroad.

[/QUOTE]

Glass Houses: The Morganville Vampires, Book I by Rachel Caine

Welcome to Morganville, Texas.

Just don't stay out after dark.

College freshman Claire Danvers has had enough of her nightmarish dorm situation, where the popular girls never let her forget just where she ranks in the school's social scene: somewhere less than zero.

When Claire heads off-campus, the imposing old house where she finds a room may not be much better. Her new roommates don't show many signs of life. But they'll have Claire's back when the town's deepest secrets come crawling out, hungry for fresh blood.

My reveal:



Women of the Silk by Gail Tsukiyama (TBR)

"In Women of the Silk Gail Tsukiyama takes her readers back to rural China in 1926, where a group of women forge a sisterhood amidst the reeling machines that reverberate and clamor in a vast silk factory from dawn to dusk. Leading the first strike the village has ever seen, the young women use the strength of their ambition, dreams, and friendship to achieve the freedom they could never have hoped for on their own. Tsukiyama's graceful prose weaves the details of "the silk work" and Chinese village life into a story of courage and strength."

boogal's reveal:




Touch the Dark by Cassandra Palmer

From the Back Cover:

Cassandra Palmer can see the future and communicate with spirits-talents that make her attractive to the dead and the undead. The ghosts of the dead aren't usually dangerous; they just like to talk...a lot. The undead are another matter.

Like any sensible girl, Cassie tries to avoid vampires. But when the bloodsucking Mafioso she escaped three years ago finds Cassie again with vengeance on his mind, she's forced to turn to the vampire Senate for protection. The undead senators won't help her for nothing, and Cassie finds herself working with one of their most powerful members, a dangerously seductive master vampire-and the price he demands may be more than Cassie is willing to pay...

Stellarv's reveal:

Black & White
Dani Shapiro
http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/4781627



From Publishers Weekly
Clara, the protagonist of Shapiro's uneven fifth novel (after Family History), is the youngest daughter and muse of Ruth Dunne, a famous Manhattan photographer who made her name shooting Sally Mann–style (read: nude and provocative) photos of a young Clara. Unable to bear the humiliation of being "the girl in those pictures," Clara runs away from home at 18. Fourteen years later and still estranged from her mother, Clara's living in Maine with her husband and daughter when her older sister calls and tells her Ruth is in failing health. Clara travels back to Manhattan, where she comes to terms with her family and herself. Though Clara's frequent bemoaning of her emotional scars tries the reader's patience, Shapiro's sharp depictions of love and shame go a long way toward putting the self-pity into relief. It's unfortunate that Ruth fails to comes across as anything more than a narcissistic artist, but the novel offers some fine insights into marriage, the making of art and the often difficult mother-daughter dynamic.