Where She Went by Gayle Forman
A moving story about heartache, anger, grief and love that was very hard to put down.
We normally don’t publish reviews before the release of a book, but due to next month’s focus on Australian authors, I’ve pushed the date forward for this book. If it’s not yet available in your bookshop, I hope you check again next week.
I won’t lie. I read the ending first. And it’s a good thing I did because Where She Went is an emotional, tear-jerking delight of a read, and it would have been a shame if I’d passed it up.
Twenty-one Adam Wilde is at the peak of his career—multi-platinum rock star, stalked by press, half of a celebrity couple—and he’s on the brink of a breakdown. He’s popping anti-anxiety pills, he loses it in front of a tabloid reporter and he barely even talks to the rest of the band.
Three years ago, his childhood sweetheart, Mia Hill, dumped him without explanation. A gifted cellist, Mia survived a horrific crash that killed her parents and younger brother, and although Adam was an integral part of her recovery, one day she just let him go.
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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
Without any discernible plot or direction the story is all icing and no substance. And not particularly sweet icing at that.
Rose Edelstein has a gift: when she eats, she can taste the emotions of the person who made the food. Her mother’s lemon cake has never tasted more desperate, and Rose becomes the keeper of her family’s secrets—including her own.
I picked this book up for the Goodreads Aussie Readers Summer Reading Challenge as my Oprah book. The title is just so delicious. Some of the descriptions of food and emotion are scrumptious. For example, Rose envies her best friend Eliza’s turkey sandwich:
I’d tasted that turkey sandwich before. The whole thing was just a sonata of love—the lettuce leaf, the organic tomato grown on a happy farm, even the factory mayonnaise took on such delicacy of feeling it seemed like an exquisite violin solo. It was difficult, and rude, to hate my friend so much.
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The Countess by Lynsay Sands (Madison Sisters, Book 1)
Light on plot, on character and on plausibility. And they make out next to a corpse.
The Countess was one of the first books I requested from NetGalley. In the process, I made some important discoveries:
1. DRM-protected NetGalley books expire 60 days after downloading.
2. It isn’t unusual for me to take me more than 60 days to review a book I’ve read.
3. Sony Reader’s note-taking feature is linked to the ebook file. When the ebook file expires, my notes are unreadable.
Technology sucks sometimes.
Luckily, I can still do this review, but it’ll be a little more general than usual. Except when I specifically mention making out next to the dead guy. More on that later.
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Wandergurl’s recommended reads from 2010 and a self-imposed challenge to conquer her TBR pile.
Book picks for 2010
The Forbidden Rose by Joanna Bourne
Effectively the prequel to The Spymaster’s Lady, this equally wonderfully written novel is about ‘Maggie and Doyle’. Marguerite de Fleurignac, a French noblewoman, encounters William Doyle in her burnt out chateau. They both pretend to be people they are not, as she is trying to desperately smuggle out people during the revolution and he is an English spy looking for her father. The romance is lush and lovely, the spy plot moves around nicely, and I was kept captivated. Highly recommended.
Feet of the Chameleon by Ian Hawkey
This is a largely anecdotal history of modern African football and how it has shaped various countries’ political histories. I read this book during the football (soccer) world cup while in Africa so it was especially poignant. It explained a lot of things that were interesting to me, and would be interesting for anyone with an interest in Africa, its people and its history.
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HeartMate by Robin D. Owens (Celta's HeartMates, Book 1)
A well crafted book that will appeal to fans of Jayne Castle’s series. Just ignore the attack of the apostrophes.
Rand T’Ash is a member of one of the Great Families on the planet of Celta, colonised by the people of Earth many years ago during a search to find a suitable location to develop their psychic gifts. Formerly a street rat he is now a respected nobleman with a talent for shaping stones. He has crafted a necklace as a HeartGift, as is customary in their culture, for his HeartMate, the woman who is destined to be his. Danith Mallow walks into his shop one day and is drawn to the necklace, but after some alpha grunt-type discussion and a bit of chaos caused by other customers, she leaves, and T’Ash has to find her and somehow convince her that they are destined to be together. Thus the story and the apostrophes begin.
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Decadence looks back at the books that highlighted her 2010 reading year.
If I had to sum up 2010 in one word as a reading year, it would have to be growth. I read a total of 80 books, which is the most books I’ve read in a year since I started recording them in a spreadsheet in 2007. I read an average of almost 7 books a month and doubled the number of new authors I’ve read from 15 in 2009 to 30 in 2010. I reread 11 books and have 201 books in my TBR.
My best reading month was December with 12 books, and 3 books makes February my worst reading month. I began 2010 with Salvation in Death by JD Robb and ended the year with Bloody Valentine by Melissa de la Cruz.
Genres
The numbers are a bit funny, partly because quite a few of my books cross genres (e.g. some of my paranormal reads were also YA, which is how I classified them).
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My Soul to Steal by Rachel Vincent (Soul Screamers, Book 4)
Heavy in angst and light on closure, this book should have fans in delicious agony as they wait for the next instalment in the Soul Screamers series.
My Soul to Steal is the fourth book of Rachel Vincent’s Soul Screamers series. I was excited yet apprehensive about this book because I knew—and the blurb implies—that there would be some kind of relationship triangle between Kaylee, Nash and Nash’s ex, Sabine.
Kaylee and Nash are in relationship limbo a few weeks after My Soul to Keep (book 3). She refuses to resolve anything between them until Nash is free of frost, the demon’s breath drug that he became addicted to, due to an accident caused by Kaylee. Meanwhile, Nash’s ex-girlfriend, Sabine, has moved into the area and tells Kaylee upfront that she’s there to take Nash back.
Sabine is a mara, a non-human parasitic species who feeds off people’s fears. At night she kind of sleepwalks and gives people nightmares so she can feed off them. When teachers start dying at school, Kaylee is convinced, despite Tod and Nash’s reassurances, that Sabine is behind it all.
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Marry Me by Jo Goodman
Or: OMG, Wandergurl is alive.
I lost my phone. This is not an excuse as to why I have dropped off the face of the earth but anyway, this happened. Fortunately my contract was about to expire, so I could get a new phone that wouldn’t cost me too much. And so I ended up with an iPhone 4. What does this have to do with this book, you ask? Well, I downloaded the Amazon Kindle app. And this book was free! And recommended! And I ended up reading it. And that’s how I ended up resurrecting myself from the dead and suddenly writing a review.
Coleridge Monroe moves to Reidsville, Colorado with his sister to assume the position of town doctor. It’s a town of about 800 people, which I have to say, is possibly more than some towns in Australia now. When he accompanies one of the deputies to check on one of the outlying farms in the mountains he meets Judah Abbot, the local cranky ass, and what turns out to be his daughter, Rhyne, who due to the severity of her illness and the circumstances surrounding it has to be taken to town and ends up staying with him for a while. (Note that these are not just fluffy circumstances to make up the slimmest of reasons to get the heroine to have an excuse to stay with the hero. These are hardcore OMG, this is difficult kind of circumstances. When Goodman makes things difficult, she makes things difficult.) Eventually she becomes their housekeeper and you can see where this is going from there.
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Exclusively Yours by Shannon Stacey
The premise may stretch the imagination, but the conflicts and emotions in this book felt so real they made my heart ache.
When Keri Daniels’s boss finds out that Keri had been childhood sweethearts with ‘the most reclusive bestselling author since J. D. Salinger’, she’s given an ultimatum: dish the dirt or get the sack. Keri hasn’t seen Joe Kowalski in eighteen years, ever since she left him to pursue a career in the big city. So when he agrees to an interview if she goes camping with him and his family, she figures she can endure it to guarantee her promotion.
Joe was devastated when Keri left, and his heartbreak led to some serious alcohol abuse. But he feels some old sparks and thinks Keri might be open to one last fling. His twin sister, Terry, doesn’t think it’s a good idea and is determined to make Keri pay for what she did to his brother … and for some other grudges Terry has carried over from high school.
Exclusively Yours starts off with a very category romance feel, with Keri being coerced by both her boss and Joe into stepping outside her comfort zone and into a situation where she and Joe are forced to be in close proximity. But Stacey develops the story into a well crafted exploration of the issues that turn love into something unbearable and what it takes to repair broken relationships.
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Once Upon a Mattress by Kathleen O'Reilly
An endearing heroine makes up for an underwhelming hero in this fun, sexy story.
This novel revolves around Ben MacAllister, whose family owns MacAllister Beds, a mattress company, and Hilary Sinclair, who’s an executive at the firm. Let’s get my biases out of the way: every time I’m reminded of the mattress company—which is most of the time—I think of those dodgy Captain Snooze ads. Sexiness factor: zero.
Moving on.
Ben’s parents are in the middle of getting divorced, so he’s home to help out with the family business: ‘He’d never cared much about the company; his family was the reason he was here instead of completing number thirty-seven on his “list of things to do before I die”.’ But when his dad starts talking about selling the firm, Ben is determined to prove he has what it takes to keep the business in the family.
Hilary is getting over a seven-year relationship that went nowhere. She’s in a new city, having bought a charming new place (read: needs work), and the job at MacAllister Beds is a chance to prove she make it on her own two feet.
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