Mailbox Monday February 4

Hi! Remember me? I cannot believe that I haven't posted since October! Life has been busy with work and juggling responsibilities. I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season and is doing well. I have peeked in on a few blogs now and then when I get home from work. I am still working nights and it looks like it will be that way for quite some time. It's okay but it sure makes it hard to keep up with everything.

I recently received some books in my mailbox. I thought this was a perfect post to dive back into the blogging waters.

Mailbox Monday is being hosted this month by Audra at Unabridged Chick.

A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee

Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Random House (March 12, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0812993217
ISBN-13: 978-0812993219

Summary
Once a privileged and loving couple, the Armsteads have now reached a breaking point. Ben, a partner in a prestigious law firm, has become unpredictable at work and withdrawn at home—a change that weighs heavily on his wife, Helen, and their preteen daughter, Sara. Then, in one afternoon, Ben’s recklessness takes an alarming turn, and everything the Armsteads have built together unravels, swiftly and spectacularly.

Thrust back into the working world, Helen finds a job in public relations and relocates with Sara from their home in upstate New York to an apartment in Manhattan. There, Helen discovers she has a rare gift, indispensable in the world of image control: She can convince arrogant men to admit their mistakes, spinning crises into second chances. Yet redemption is more easily granted in her professional life than in her personal one.

As she is confronted with the biggest case of her career, the fallout from her marriage, and Sara’s increasingly distant behavior, Helen must face the limits of accountability and her own capacity for forgiveness.

See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid

Audio CD
Publisher: Macmillan Audio; Unabridged edition (February 5, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1427226490
ISBN-13: 978-1427226495

In See Now Then, the brilliant and evocative new novel from Jamaica Kincaid—her first in ten years—a marriage is revealed in all it’s joys and agonies. This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters, a Mother and Father, their two children living in a small village in New England, as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future—for, as she writes, “the present will be a now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then.” Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, nonlinear. See Now Then is Kincaid’s attempt to make clear what is unclear, and to make unclear what we assumed was clear: that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Starting Now: A Blossom Street Novel by Debbie Macomber

Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books (April 2, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0345528816
ISBN-13: 978-0345528810

#1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber returns to Seattle’s beloved Blossom Street in this heartfelt tale of friendship, renewal, and discovering what’s truly important in life.

For years Libby Morgan dreamed only of making partner in her competitive, high-pressure law firm. She sacrificed everything for her career—her friends, her marriage, her chance at creating a family. When her boss calls Libby into his office, she assumes it will finally be good news, but nothing can prepare her for the shocking reality: She’s been let go and must rebuild her entire life . . . starting now.

With no job prospects in sight, Libby reaches out to old friends and spends her afternoons at A Good Yarn, the local knitting store. There she forms a close bond with Lydia, the sweet-natured shop owner; Lydia’s spirited teenage daughter, Casey; and Casey’s best friend, Ava, a shy yet troubled girl who will shape Libby’s future in surprising and profound ways.

As A Good Yarn becomes a second home—and the women a new kind of family—Libby relishes the different person she’s become. She even finds time for romance with a charming and handsome doctor who seems to be her perfect match. But just as everything is coming together, Libby must make a choice that could forever change the life she holds so dear.

Seduction: A Novel of Suspense by M.J. Rose

Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Atria Books (May 7, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1451621507
ISBN-13: 978-1451621501


From the author of The Book of Lost Fragrances comes a haunting novel about a grieving woman who discovers the lost journal of novelist Victor Hugo, awakening a mystery that spans centuries.

In 1843, novelist Victor Hugo’s beloved nineteen-year-old daughter drowned. Ten years later, Hugo began participating in hundreds of séances to reestablish contact with her. In the process, he claimed to have communed with the likes of Plato, Galileo, Shakespeare, Dante, Jesus—and even the Devil himself. Hugo’s transcriptions of these conversations have all been published. Or so it was believed.

Recovering from her own losses, mythologist Jac L’Etoile arrives on the Isle of Jersey—where Hugo conducted the séances—hoping to uncover a secret about the island’s Celtic roots. But the man who’s invited her there, a troubled soul named Theo Gaspard, has hopes she’ll help him discover something quite different—Hugo’s lost conversations with someone called the Shadow of the Sepulcher.

What follows is an intricately plotted and atmospheric tale of suspense with a spellbinding ghost story at its heart, by one of America’s most gifted and imaginative novelists.