Who is Too Fond of Books? I’m Dawn, welcome to my book blog's page for giveaways and product reviews!
When you're done here, please return to the main She is Too Fond of Books website
If you’d like to respond to something written here, start a conversation, or want to get in touch about scheduling a giveaway, product review, etc., please leave a comment on any post, or send me an e-mail.
Shop: She is Too Fond of Books may earn a small commission through these Affiliate links.
|
 I’ve used random.org to select a winner of Jessica Maria Tuccelli’s Glow, an epic tale that covers over a century and six generations of women. It has been favorably compared to The Help with its southern setting and its illumination of the “tragedy of human frailty, the vitality of friendship and hope, and the fiercest of all bonds—mother love.”
Congratulations to #19, Beth F from Beth Fish Reads!
 Thanks to all who entered the giveaway for Rainbow Rowell’s Attachments – the hook of sending/receiving questionable email grabbed many of you!
Random.org selected a winner; it is #18, Anita.
Congratulations, Anita! Please send me your US/Canada mailing address, and I’ll forward it to the publisher.
Many thanks to Penguin/Plume for offering this giveaway!
Thanks to the generosity of the publisher, Viking/Penguin, I have one copy of Jessica Maria Tuccelli’s novel, Glow, to offer on She Is Too Fond of Books.
We shared a bit about the novel in Tuccelli’s Spotlight on Bookstores post about Three Lives & Company, a charming bookshop in Greenwich Village. Here’s the full publisher’s description:
In the autumn of 1941, Amelia J. McGee, a young woman of Cherokee and Scotch-Irish descent, and an outspoken pamphleteer for the NAACP, hastily sends her daughter, Ella, alone on a bus home to Georgia in the middle of the night—a desperate measure that proves calamitous when the child encounters two drifters and is left for dead on the side of the road.
Ella awakens in the homestead of Willie Mae Cotton, a wise root doctor and former slave, and her partner, Mary-Mary Freeborn, tucked deep in the Takatoka Forest. As Ella heals, the secrets of her lineage are revealed.
Shot through with Cherokee lore and hoodoo conjuring, Glow transports us from Washington, D.C., on the brink of World War II to the Blue Ridge frontier of 1836, from the parlors of antebellum manses to the plantation kitchens where girls are raised by women who stand in as mothers. As the land with all its promise and turmoil passes from one generation to the next, Ella’s ancestral home turns from safe haven to mayhem and back again.
Jessica Maria Tuccelli reveals deep insight into individual acts that can transform a community, and the ties that bind people together across immeasurable hardships and distances. Illuminating the tragedy of human frailty, the vitality of friendship and hope, and the fiercest of all bonds—mother love—the voices of Glow transcend their history with grace and splendor.
Ladies Home Journal says: “Fans of The Help, this one’s for you: A tale of ghosts, slavery, racism and redemption wrapped up in an epic testament to the power of maternal love.” I’m ready to sit down with a pitcher of iced tea and dig into Glow!
To enter the giveaway, simply leave a comment below. This post will be open for entries until midnight ET on Thursday, April 12, with the winner selected by random drawing and announced here on April 13. Giveaway is limited to US/Canada addresses only.
Have you ever sent an inappropriate email joke (or snarky comment about a co-worker) from your work email address? C’mon, admit it!
No one’s watching, right? As long as the person you sent it to deletes the message after she’s read it, no harm done?
Well, what if someone is watching? Here’s a novel that looks at a corporation that hires “Big Brother” to monitor email exchanges, and the unexpected results. More from the publicist:
Let’s face it—we’ve all sent a few questionable, off-color, or even downright inappropriate emails to friends at work. Just because we know that griping about relationships and gossiping about coworkers should be saved for a post-work happy hour, doesn’t mean we stop. But what if your company hired someone specifically to read and monitor your email?
This is the unfortunate job of Rainbow Rowell’s unconventional hero in her heart-warming and hilarious debut novel Attachments. Set in the Y2K-phobic days of 1999, Journalists Beth Fremont and Jennifer Scribner-Snyder, best friends and coworkers at The Courier, have a lot going on in their social lives, and they certainly don’t mind sharing it with each other at work. Naturally, the women’s emails often end up in Lincoln’s inbox, whose job is to monitor other people’s email. When he applied to be an Internet security officer at The Courier, he pictured himself protecting the newspaper from dangerous hackers—not sending out warning memos every time somebody in Accounting forwarded a lewd joke to the person in the next cubicle. He knows he is supposed to turn people in for misusing company e-mail, but Lincoln can’t help being entertained—and captivated—by Beth and Jennifer. By the time Lincoln realizes he’s falling for Beth, its way too late for him to ever introduce himself.
With her sweet story and whip-smart dialogue, Rainbow Rowell transforms an ordinary IT guy into a lovable and endearing leading man, proving that falling in love is never planned. Rainbow is a fresh, energetic debut novelist, and is sure to make a name for herself as a delightful and exciting new voice in women’s fiction.
The publisher is offering one copy of Attachments for giveaway here at She Is Too Fond of Books. To enter the random drawing, simply leave a comment below. This post will be open for entries until midnight ET on Thursday, April 5, with the winner announced on Friday, April 6. Giveaway is limited to US/Canada mailing addresses only.
 Thanks to everyone who entered the drawing for Cristina Alger’s The Darlings.
I used random.org to pull a winner — Congratulations to #9, Patti Priddy!
Don’t despair if you’re not the winner. The novel is available through your favorite bookstore, and you can read more of Cristina’s writing in this Spotlight on Bookstores post she wrote about BookHampton.
A few days ago I shared Cristina Alger’s sweet “Spotlight on Bookstores” post about BookHampton. She often visited there as a child, cementing wonderful memories that return to her each time she visits the bookshop as an adult.
Now, visitors to BookHampton (and other bookstores!) can make memories when they pick up a copy of Alger’s just-published novel, The Darlings, which has been called “a sophisticated page-turner about a wealthy New York family embroiled in a financial scandal with cataclysmic consequences.”
Here’s the publisher’s synopsis:
Now that he’s married to Merrill Darling, daughter of billionaire financier Carter Darling, attorney Paul Ross has grown accustomed to New York society and all of its luxuries: a Park Avenue apartment, weekends in the Hamptons, bespoke suits. When Paul loses his job, Carter offers him the chance to head the legal team at his hedge fund. Thrilled with his good fortune in the midst of the worst financial downturn since the Great Depression, Paul accepts the position.
But Paul’s luck is about to shift: a tragic event catapults the Darling family into the media spotlight, a regulatory investigation, and a red-hot scandal with enormous implications for everyone involved. Suddenly, Paul must decide where his loyalties lie – will he save himself while betraying his wife and in-laws or protect the family business at all costs?
Cristina Alger’s glittering debut novel interweaves the narratives of the Darling family, two eager SEC attorneys, and a team of journalists all racing to uncover – or cover up – the truth. With echoes of a fictional Too Big to Fail and the novels of Dominick Dunne,The Darlings offers an irresistible glimpse into the highest echelons of New York society – a world seldom seen by outsiders – and a fast-paced thriller of epic proportions.
Having been raised in New York City, worked as an analyst, and spent some time of her childhood summers in the Hamptons, Cristina Alger has been in contact with this world of which she speaks.
Would you like to step inside this world through the pages of The Darlings? To enter the giveaway, simply leave a comment below. This post will be open for entries until midnight on Thursday, February 23, and a winner announced on February 24. Giveaway is open to US/Canada mailing addresses only. Many thanks to Pamela Dorman Books / Penguin for providing the giveaway.
 Congratulations to Lucky #13, Trudi, who won the drawing for Krys Lee’s Drifting House!
Trudi, I hope you enjoy this short fiction collection.
I’m a huge fan of short fiction, and really appreciate the satisfaction a good story can give in just one sitting (we don’t always have time to sit and read for hours!).
Recently, Krys Lee’s Drifting House came to my attention. Lee is a Seoul-based author whose stories are set in Korea and the US; her work “explores love, identity, war, and the homes we make for ourselves.” Here’s the publishers synopsis of Drifting House:
Lee portrays nuanced, haunting characters struggling with war, religion, and the secrets and complexities of damaged families. She illuminates the difficulties of living an unmoored existence in America and she traverses the collective sorrow brought on by a legacy of political strife. Weaving intricate tales of family and love, abandonment and loss, in Korea and the US, Lee’s deeply moving stories are about people whose lives are threatened by civil war, military dictatorships, and the psychological fallout that tore Korea apart for decades.
In the title story, “Drifting House,” children escaping famine in North Korea are forced to make unthinkable sacrifices to survive. In “The Salaryman” a middle class, middle-aged man toils in the wake of South Korea’s financial crisis, and in “The Goose Father” a man deserted by his family stumbles upon love unexpectedly. “A Small Sorrow” tells of the confidence and inspiration to control her life that a painter gains after striking up a friendship with one of her husband’s many lovers.
In America, the stories are set against the backdrop of the cramped, shared apartments and vacant strip malls of Koreatowns, where makeshift families are cobbled together from fragmented pasts to forge new identities.
In turns tragic, powerful, and hopeful, Drifting House is a collection that will linger with you long after you have finished reading it.
Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? The settings, the struggles … the favorable comparisons to Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies …
The publisher, Viking/Penguin, has generously offered one giveaway copy to a lucky reader of She Is Too Fond of Books. To enter the giveaway, simply leave a comment below; this post will be open for entries until midnight ET on Thursday, February 9, at which time a winner will be drawn at random. Open to US/Canada mailing addresses only.
 Thanks to all who entered the giveaway for Taylor M. Polites’ The Rebel Wife … and for the many suggestions of books with Southern settings.
I’ve selected three winners at random, they are:
- #7 – Sherrie Gil - I love also Fried Green Tomatoes and Driving Miss Daisy
- #12 – Sue Rice - I have loved GWTW since I was 11 years old. Also, I was thrilled to see Thane’s Yankee Stranger; I own the whole series from Revolutionary War thru WWII
- #16 – Cilla - How about “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot, use of her (Henrietta’s) cells (called HELA) after her death, unknown to her family, to great advantage to health fields and pharmaceutical industry? And obviously “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett
Yahoo to each of you! You’ll now add The Rebel Wife to your collection of great books set in the south!
Please email me with your US/Canada mailing address, and I’ll pass them along to the publisher who will send the books your way. Thanks, Simon & Schuster!
Brimming with atmosphere and edgy suspense, The Rebel Wife presents a young widow trying to survive in the violent world of Reconstruction Alabama, where the old gentility masks a continuing war fueled by hatred, treachery, and still-powerful secrets.
Allow me to introduce you to Taylor M. Polites and The Rebel Wife:
In this novel, set in Reconstruction Alabama, Augusta “Gus” Branson is a young widow whose quest for freedom turns into a race for her life when her husband Eli dies of a swift and horrifying fever and a large package of money – her only inheritance and means of survival – goes missing. Gus begins to wake to the realities that surround her: the social stigma her marriage has stained her with, what her husband did to earn his fortune, the shifting and very dangerous political and social landscape that is being destroyed by violence between the Klan and the Freeman’s Bureau, and the deadly fever that is spreading like wildfire. Nothing is as she believed, and everyone she trusts is hiding something from her.
Readers will find tattered fragments of Gone with the Wind, and meet completely subverted versions of the white Southern Gentleman, the good Mammy, the conniving Scalawag, and the defenseless Southern Belle.
Author Taylor M. Polites was born in Huntsville, Alabama, the basis for the town of Albion in this book, and has been researching this novel since he was a teen. He became obsessed with the Southern experience during the Civil War – reading diaries, memoirs, and letters from that time – and ultimately imagined and mapped out the town of Albion, much like William Faulkner created his Yoknapatawpha County.
The publisher, Simon & Schuster, has generously offered THREE copies of The Rebel Wife to be shared with readers of She Is Too Fond of Books. To enter the giveaway, simply leave a comment below, indicating one novel (or work of nonfiction) set in the South, that you have enjoyed. This post will be open for entries until midnight ET on Thursday, January 26, 2012. Winners will be selected at random; giveaway open to US/Canada mailing addresses only.
|
Current giveaways:
You caught me in between giveaways - check back in a week or so. In the meantime, catch up on some of the fun posts and book reviews at She Is Too Fond of Books. Let me know what you're reading!
Giveaway guidelines: Read each giveaway offer for specifics.
Names of winners are posted when indicated, both in the original giveaway post and a "winners!" announcement at the end of the giveaway period.
It is the responsibility of the winner to contact She is Too Fond of Books to claim prize within the specified time period.
You may wish to subscribe to She is Too Fond of Books via RSS or email in order to not miss a giveaway or "winners!" announcement.
|
