She’ll be signing her new book, Wicked Appetite, which releases that day.
For more info, visit the Borders Braintree site.

Portobello by Rendell - London’s Portobello Road, a street fabled for its shops and outdoor market, provides the backdrop for Rendell’s latest suspense novel, which features a cast of colorful characters from varied classes and walks of life. Secretive 50-year-old Eugene Wren, who’s addicted to cheap candy lozenges, is toying with marrying his longtime girlfriend, physician Ella Cotswold. Rootless Lance Platt cases the neighborhood for costly homes he can break into, and clashes with his great-uncle, Gilbert Gibson, a former burglar who now preaches the gospel. One man’s losing 115 pounds triggers a series of coincidences that brings this disparate lot closer together, toward haphazard violence and death. Rendell is particularly adept at portraying young people just a dole check away from homelessness as well as the carelessness and callousness of the book’s upper-middle-class characters.

No Mercy by Kenyon - Live fast, fight hard, and if you have to die then take as many of your enemies with you as you can. That is the Amazon credo and it was one Samia lived and died by. Now in contemporary New Orleans, the immortal Amazon warrior is about to learn that there’s a worse evil coming to slaughter mankind than she’s ever faced before. Shapeshifter Dev Peltier has stood guard at the front of Sanctuary for almost two hundred years and in that time, he’s seen it all. Or so he thought. Now their enemies have discovered a new source of power- one that makes a mockery of anything faced to date. The war is on and Dev and Sam are guarding ground zero. But in order to win, they will have to break the most cardinal of all rules and pray it doesn’t unravel the universe as we know it.

[cassella]][healer]][healer]]Healer by Cassella - Claire Boehning faces a bleak future when her privileged life ends abruptly. Addison, her biochemist husband, created a lucrative drug that secured the family’s fortunes, but when tests on a new drug go awry and Addison’s backing disappears, he loses everything. After the couple is forced to move from Seattle with their 14-year-old daughter, Jory, to live in a rural, ramshackle house originally bought as a fixer-upper project when money was not an issue, Addison travels in search of new investors. Claire, meanwhile, searches for a position as a doctor, a profession she left after Jory’s birth. But with her lack of experience and board certification, she finds few opportunities until she lands a job at a nonprofit clinic that serves poor, uninsured migrant workers. There Claire meets Miguela Ruiz, a Nicaraguan native with a mysterious background, and as the Boehnings struggle to reclaim some piece of their past life, Ruiz affects them in unexpected ways.

The Widower’s Tale by Glass - Percy Darling, 70, takes comfort in certitudes: he will never leave his historic suburban Boston house, he is done with love (still guilty about his wife’s death 30 years ago), and his beloved grandson Robert, a Harvard senior, will do credit to the family name. But Glass spins a beautifully paced, keenly observed story in which certainties give way to surprising reversals of fortune. Percy is an opinionated, cantankerous, newly retired Harvard librarian, who decides to lease his barn to a local preschool, mainly to give his daughter Clover, who has abandoned her husband and children in New York, a job. Percy’s other daughter is a workaholic oncologist in Boston who becomes important to a young mother at the school with whom Percy, to his vast surprise, establishes a romantic relationship. Meanwhile, Percy’s grandson, Robert, falls in with an ecoterrorist group. Glass handles the coalescing plot elements with astute insights into the complexity of family relationships, the gulf between social classes, and our modern culture of excess to create a dramatic, thought-provoking, and immensely satisfying novel.

Getting to Happy by McMillan - Fifteen years after Waiting to Exhale, McMillan brings back Savannah, Gloria, Bernadine, and Robin–now in their 50s. As the story opens, Gloria is very happy, Savannah believes she might be happy, Bernadine is fighting addiction and losing ground, and single mother Robin is trying to resign herself to being alone while things at her job begin to unravel. Within the first few chapters, Gloria and Savannah are struck by disaster, and things go rapidly downhill from there for everyone. All four must learn to heal past hurts and to reclaim their joy and their dreams; but they retain their spirit, sass, and faith in one another. They’ve exhaled: now they are learning to breathe.

The Huffington Post launched its new book site last October, and in the past almost year it has become a thing of note. Authors beg to have their books featured, The New York Review of Books has partnered with them to provide content, and bloggers frantically try to post something witty enough to be included.

This site has articles, industry news, reviews (both professional and user-submitted), blog posts, and just a LOT of stuff about books. Check it out, entertain yourself, and pick up some useful tidbits of information as well as some more titles to read!

THE SONDERBERG CASE by Elie Wiesel - The Nobel-prize winning author of Night returns to the moral questions that characterize the post-WWII generation. Yedidyah Wasserman, a well-regarded theater critic in New York City, is split between his parents’ generation of Holocaust survivors and that of his sons, young American men who have chosen to move to Israel. Yedidyah imagines himself in the comfortable middle until he is called upon to cover the murder trial of a German expatriate. He is enthusiastic, but the trial is an unsettling opportunity for him to search the past and his family history, and also inexplicably angers his wife, Alika, a stage actress. Melancholy and almost fable-like in atmosphere, this sounds like another unforgettable read.

JULIET by Anne Fortier - Julie Jacobs’s parents died in Italy when she was very young, and she’s spent the rest of her life being raised by her Great-Aunt Rose and being overshadowed by her twin sister, Janice. So when Rose dies and Janice inherits her estate, Julie is admittedly a little bit peeved that all she gets is the key to her mother’s safe deposit box in Siena. But she travels to Italy, and discovers that her family has a legacy – for her real name is not Julie Jacobs, but Giulietta Tolomei, and she’s descended from the Giulietta Tolomei who was the real-life inspiration for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. But her family legacy seems to come with more trouble than treasure… Family feuds in Siena can linger for centuries, and now Julie’s being stalked by a mysterious and dangerous man. What’s more, the modern day descendants of the original two feuding houses believe that both of their families are living under a terrible curse, one that can only be broken if Juliet finally finds her Romeo.

SPIDER BONES by Kathy Reichs - If you haven’t checked out the TV show Bones which was inspired by this series of books, be sure to do so, it’s really quite good. now, about this newest book - A perplexing death in Quebec occupies Dr. Temperance Brennan in Reichs’s fine 13th novel featuring the forensic anthropologist. The fingerprints of a man who died during autoerotic asphyxiation indicate that the deceased is John Charles Lowery of North Carolina, but Lowery supposedly died in Vietnam in 1968. Unsurprisingly, Lowery’s father is reluctant to allow Brennan to reopen old family wounds, but she’s determined to find out who’s buried in Lowery’s grave if Lowery died in Quebec. Brennan heads to Hawaii to seek the help of an old friend at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), whose mission is to find the remains of American war dead and bring them home. But instead of clarifying matters, Brennan’s investigation only raises more questions, including parallel inquiries into a series of shark attacks and escalating island gang violence. Reichs, who once again uses her own scientific knowledge to enhance a complex plot and continually developing characters, delivers a whopper of a final twist.

Shirley Jackson Awards

• Novel - Big Machine by Victor LaValle
• Novella - Midnight Picnic, by Nick Antosca
• Novelette - “Morality” by Stephen King
• Short Story - “The Pelican Bar” by Karen Joy Fowler
• Collection - Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson and Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical by Robert Shearman (TIE)
• Anthology - Poe by Ellen Datlow

Rhysling Award

• Long Form - “In the Astronaut Asylum,” Kendall Evans and Samantha Henderson
• Short Form - “To Theia,” Ann K. Schwader Grand Master - Jane Yolen

Mythopoeic Award

• Adult Literature - Lifelode by Jo Walton
• Children’s Literature - Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin

John W. Campbell Memorial Award

• The Windup Girl Paolo Bacigalupi

Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award

• Shambling Towards Hiroshim James Morrow

A special nod to Science Fiction Awards Watch for many of these listings.

I wanted to like this book, in fact I expected to like this book. I mean, who wouldn’t want to hear bizarre stories of people being dug up and reburied for various reasons? I love sort-of “weird history” books, and this one definitely fit that category. And the actual stories of reburial were brilliant - that of John Trumbull, who was reburied not once, but twice (making total burials 3), and his wife who was reburied once more than he, was quite interesting. Most of the stories were.

For me, however, the format and style of the book - the writing between the stories - detracted and made it hard to read. The author attempted to categorize and group the stories into sections based on some similar quality - those disinterred due to religious or political reasons versus those who were moved due to demands of surviving loved ones for example. This was a good idea, but somehow left me feeling like the stories were more jumbled rather than less. And there was too much “filler” material for me. I would have preferred to have each section of stories have an introduction, an overview of what the stories in that part had in common, or some background to the overarching idea behind those reburials, and then just have each story on its own. Instead, I felt like I was reading a never-ending term paper where the author attempted to integrate all his research into one flowing work.

The amount of research Kammen did for this book is astounding, and it must have been a very interesting journey for him to take. I found most of the accounts fascinating, amusing, sad, entertaining, and educational all at once. If it was just a bit lighter on in-between verbiage and broken up differently, it would have been the perfect book.

Like with many anthologies, this collection had some that hit it out of the park and some that were less successful. There were definitely enough good ones to make it worth reading, though I did find myself a bit “zombie’d-out” after a while (I know - how can a person possibly get too much zombie action?! and yet, I did.) So I broke it up a bit by reading other things in between stories.

Some of my favorites were Lazarus by John Connolly, Second Wind by Mike Carey, Family Business by Jonathan Maberry, and The Zombie Who Fell From The Sky by M.B. Homler. They were all pretty good, interesting, and entertaining reads.

I was disappointed by Joe Hill’s entry, Twittering From The Circus of the Dead, which I expected to love. I think it was the end that failed for me. Among Us by Aimee Bender also fell short for me - I felt it just missed making the point it was trying to make. The Wind Cries Mary by Brian Keene was very lyrical and beautiful, but was missing something as well.

Overall, definitely worth a read-through, even if you skip some stories or certain ones aren’t for you. The great thing is there’s enough diversity that most people (maybe even people who don’t usually read zombie literature) will find at least one story they truly like.

I was brought to this site by a link for Book Beginnings on Friday, a meme I might actually join and start doing here. I have liked the idea of Teaser Tuesdays for a while now, but I have trouble deciding which sentences to post. With Book Beginning Fridays, that is taken away because you post the first sentence.

Anyways, on to the feature - Becky uses a star rating system in her reviews (explained in the right-hand column of her site), which is something I’ve been trying to integrate here but just have a hard time with. I think it’s helpful to have a star rating so you can tell quickly the overall impression of the book. I just have trouble pinning down exactly how many “stars” to give a book, it feels too much like grading an author’s work which I am in no position to do and I often want to go back and change the number of stars I gave a book several times. So I love that she has managed to implement this star-rating system.

She also has just really fun, interesting posts, participates in many reading challenges, and has a great blogroll. She reviews books from all over, but because of where she lives and a personal pledge to try and support her home country, she reads a lot of Australian fiction so it gives us up here a good look at some books we might otherwise not see highlighted as often.

Thanks, Becky, for a great book blog!