TEASER TUESDAY Nine Birds Singing by Edythe Anstey Hanen

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by

 The Purple Booker

It is very easy to play along:

Grab your current read and open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page being careful not to include any spoilers!  Share the title and author, so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my teasers this month:

“Maddie sits in heart-stopping silence, her cheeks aflame with guilt. She is more afraid of the preacher than she is of God.”

Nine Birds Singing by Edythe Anstey Hanen

Genre: Literary, Historical Fiction

Pages: 278

Publisher: New Arcadia Publishing (Dec 2017)

Praise for Nine Birds Singing
“In Nine Birds Singing, Edythe Anstey Hanen’s appealing narrator Maddie recalls and examines her own search for independence from her parents’ restrictive values. The writer and Maddie, together, gather the reader in to share an intimate, wise, and moving tale.” -Jack Hodgins, Author of Spit Delaney’s Island

“Nine Birds Singing is a finely written book, lovingly crafted, poignant and perceptive. A tale of gradual self-understanding, awakening and ultimate release.” -Nick Bantock, Author of the The Griffin and Sabine Trilogy

“If, like me, you despair for the collapse of the English language take comfort. In Nine Birds Singing you will discover a veritable Aladdin’s Cave of delights. Edythe Anstey Hanen not only uses the basic blocks of language, words, to propel her characters and her story, each word has been selected with meticulous care with attention to its meaning and its ability to resonate. The work is a symphony for the logophile. Don’t miss it.” -Patrick Taylor. USA Today, New York Times and Globe and Mail best-selling author of the Irish Country Doctor series

“Readers will enjoy the unique views and poetic pacing of Nine Birds Singing by Edythe Anstey Hanen. She savours and survives landscapes and relationships in teasing but tasty quick episodes. Her novel takes readers via circular time travelling through decades of Maddie’s life in Canada and Mexico. Enjoy this new voice!” -Bernice Lever, Small Acts, Black Moss Press, 2016

My Thoughts:
My thoughts will be posted as part of Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours on 8th June, 2018.
http://hfvirtualbooktours.com/ninebirdssingingblogtour/

TEASER TUESDAY: The Garden of Blue Roses by Michael Barsa

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by

 The Purple Booker

It is very easy to play along:

Grab your current read and open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page being careful not to include any spoilers!  Share the title and author, so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my teasers this month:

“Did the officers sense anything amiss, anything strange about the scene? No, they were dull and provincial—they just wanted to get things over with. One of them silently drove Klara and me to the station.”

The Garden of Blue Roses by Michael Barsa

Genre: Literary, Fiction, Gothic, Suspense, Psychological
Publisher: Underland Press (April 2018)

Pages: 244

Description:
“Ominous, fantastic, and wonderfully malevolent…. I felt the spirits of Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Albert Camus’ Meursault, whispering to join the fun.”— Alice Sebold, best-selling and award-winning author of The Lovely Bones

A car lies at the bottom of an icy ravine. Slumped over the steering wheel, dead, is the most critically acclaimed horror writer of his time. Was it an accident? His son Milo doesn’t care. For the first time in his life, he’s free. No more nightmarish readings, spooky animal rites, or moonlit visions of his father in the woods with a notebook and vampire make-up.

My Thoughts:
A very creepy and foreboding atmospheric tale which I’m totally absorbed in, when I get the chance to read what with my job change right now rendering me mentally exhausted by the end of the day.

My review will be kicking off the TLC Book Tour on 23rd May, 2018.
See here for my review See here for the tour schedule.

TEASER TUESDAY: VOX by Christina Dalcher

It is very easy to play along:

• Grab your current read and open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! 

• Share the title & author, too, so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my teasers this month:

“Lorenzo, I whisper inside my head, and kick the three delicious syllables away before they hurt too much. My self is becoming more and more separate.”

VOX by Christina Dalcher

Genre: Fiction, Dystopian

Pages: 336

Publisher: Berkeley (21 August 2018)

Description:
“VOX is intelligent, suspenseful, provocative, and intensely disturbing - everything a great novel should be.” Lee Child

Silence can be deafening.
Jean McClellan spends her days in almost complete silence, limited to a daily quota of just one hundred words.  Now that the new government is in power, no woman is able to speak over this limit without punishment by electric shock.

Perfect for fans of Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid's Tale’, don't miss the thrilling debut that everyone will be talking about this summer!

My Thoughts:
This is another extremely promising dystopian read and very akin to The Handmaid’s Tale atmospherically and frighteningly all too plausible in our current political climate.

Actually, I’d forgotten I had this on my list to read but fortunately Jin from Berkley jogged my memory and I started it today.

TEASER TUESDAY: SNAP by Belinda Bauer

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by

 The Purple Booker

It is very easy to play along:

• Grab your current read and open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! 

• Share the title & author, too, so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my teasers this month:

“Reynolds loved being a police officer. He’d always had a finely honed sense of right and wrong, and felt it his duty not to waste it. It wasn’t a complicated thing: he was right and everybody else was wrong.

... (Marvel) addressed Reynolds. ‘I’m a homicide detective,’ he said. ‘When I’m rushed to the scene of a crime, I expect a murder victim, not a broken TV and a shit on the rug..”

SNAP by Belinda Bauer

Genre: Adult, Mystery, Thriller

Publisher: Penguin Random House (17 May 2018) / Grove Atlantic (13 July 2018)

Pages: 352

Description:
'The best crime novel I've read in a very long time.' - VAL MCDERMID
'Snap is the best kind of crime novel - it gives you chills, it makes you think, and it touches your heart. I loved it!' SARAH PINBOROUGH, No.1 bestselling author of Behind Her Eyes

SNAP DECISIONS CAN BE DANGEROUS . . .

On a stifling summer's day, eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters sit in their broken-down car, waiting for their mother to come back and rescue them. Jack's in charge, she said. I won't be long.

But she doesn't come back. She never comes back. And life as the children know it is changed for ever.

Three years later, Jack, now fourteen, is still in charge - of his sisters, of supporting them all, of making sure nobody knows they're alone in the house, and - quite suddenly - of finding out the truth about what happened to his mother. . .

'Original, pacy and thoroughly entertaining . . . a cracking read.' CLARE MACKINTOSH, bestselling author of I Let You Go

'No one writes crime novels like Belinda Bauer, with a rare blend of darkness, humour and heart. She's a crime writing genius.' C. L. Taylor, bestselling author of The Missing

My Thoughts:
At 18% and so far this is a tense and very humorous mystery thriller. The opening scene totally demands your attention and curiosity about what happened and what will happen next.

That’s all for now…

TEASER TUESDAY: Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by

 The Purple Booker

It is very easy to play along:

• Grab your current read and open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! 

• Share the title & author, too, so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my teasers this month:

“An army post in peacetime is a dull place. Things happen, but then they happen over and over again.

There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed. The participants of this tragedy were: two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse.”

Reflections in a Golden Eye Carson McCullers

Genre: Novella, Literary Fiction

Published by Penguin Modern Classics

Pages: 128

Description:
'A masterpiece . . . as mature and finished as Henry James's The Turn of the Screw'.

Time Set on a Southern army base in the 1930s, Reflections in a Golden Eye tells the story of Captain Penderton, a bisexual whose life is upset by the arrival of Major Langdon, a charming womanizer who has an affair with Penderton's tempestuous and flirtatious wife, Leonora.

Upon the novel's publication in 1941, reviewers were unsure of what to make of its relatively scandalous subject matter. But a critic for Time magazine wrote, "In almost any hands, such material would yield a rank fruitcake of mere arty melodrama. But Carson McCullers tells her tale with simplicity, insight, and a rare gift of phrase."
Written during a time when McCullers's own marriage to Reeves was on the brink of collapse

My Thoughts:
After hearing McCullers novella being discussed amongst the guest writers Nina Stibbe (Love, Nina; Paradise Lodge) and Kit de Waal (My Name is Leon; The Trick to Time) on this afternoon’s BBC Radio 4 program, (‘A Good Read’), I had an overwhelming urge to hunt amongst my hoard of books to find it, and having just started reading, I’m rather eager to get on with it.

So that’s it for this week. Will say more about soon.

TEASER TUESDAY: The Lost Flower's of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by

 The Purple Booker

It is very easy to play along:

• Grab your current read and open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! 

• Share the title & author, too, so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my teasers this month:

“Some days Alice’s mother disappeared from her body altogether. There were no stories or walks to the sea. There was no talking with flowers. Her mother would stay in bed with the curtains drawn against the blanching light, vanished, as if her soul had gone somewhere else entirely.”

The Lost Flower's of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland

Published by Pan Macmillan (28th June 2018)

Pages: 400

Description
Flowers, fire and fairy tales are the elements that will forever shape nine-year-old Alice Hart's life, in The Lost Flower's of Alice Hart, the remarkable debut by Holly Ringland.
Alice Hart lives in isolation by the sea, where her mother’s enchanting flowers and their hidden messages shelter her from the dark moods of her father. When tragedy changes her life irrevocably, nine-year-old Alice goes to live with the grandmother she never knew existed, on a native flower farm that gives refuge to women who, like Alice, are lost or broken. In the Victorian tradition, every flower has a meaning and, as she settles into her new life, Alice uses this language of flowers to say the things that are too hard to speak.
As she grows older, though, family secrecy, a devastating betrayal and a man who’s not all he seems, combine to make Alice realise there are some stories that flowers alone cannot tell. If she is to have the freedom she craves, she must find the courage to possess the most powerful story she knows: her own.

My Thoughts at 30%
Enchanting, dreamy, mesmerising…I love this book. ‘The Lost Flower's of Alice Hart’ has introduced me to the magical language of flowers and is an absorbing heartfelt tale about grief, abandonment, loss and betrayal and about how with the love and nurturing of others any hurt can be healed, and that with time anything can be overcome.

For me this book does for flowers what Elizabeth J Church’s ‘The Atomic Weight of Love’ did for crows. Deep sigh !

Review to follow on completion.

TEASER TUESDAY: In Wolve’s Clothing by Greg Levin

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by

 The Purple Booker

It is very easy to play along:

• Grab your current read and open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! 

• Share the title & author, too, so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my teasers this month:

“My suicide dream has been recurring with increased frequency of late. At least this time I awoke before the crowd shouted, “Do it!” I take it as a sign it’s going to be a good day.”

In Wolves’ Clothing by Greg Levin

Published by White Rock Press  (11 Oct. 2017)

Synopsis:
On his best days, Zero Slade is the worst man you can imagine. He has to be. It's the only way to save the Lost Girls.

During his seven years on a team fighting sex trafficking, Zero's become quite good at schmoozing with pimps, getting handcuffed by cops and pretending not to care about the young girls he liberates. But the dangerous sting operations are starting to take a toll on his marriage and sanity. His affinity for prescription painkillers isn't exactly helping matters.
When the youngest girl the team has ever rescued gets abducted from a safe house in Cambodia, Zero decides to risk everything to find her. His only shot is to go rogue, and sink deeper into the bowels of the trafficking world than he's ever sunk.

It's the biggest mission of his life. Trouble is, it's almost certain death.

My Thoughts:
Zero Slade works undercover to rescue children who have been trafficked into the sex trade. Yup a real tough, unsavoury topic for a novel and not a read for everyone especially those averse to graphic scenes of violence or child abuse of any nature. What makes this such a compelling and surprisingly palatable read is Levin’s dark noir detective style of writing, and his characterisation of Slade being an extremely flawed individual with a cynical point-of-view, and wickedly comic internal dialogue.

I have already lined up another of Greg Levin’s novels ‘Sick To Death’ to read on the strength of what I’ve read so far.

TEASER TUESDAY: The Feed by Nick Clark Windo

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by

 The Purple Booker

It is very easy to play along:

• Grab your current read and open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! 

• Share the title & author, too, so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my teasers this month:
“When he calls for them, they take a while to emerge. They see their own fear reflected in one another’s eyes. They see the dirt on one another’s faces and where the tears have run rivulets through it..”

The Feed by Nick Clark Windo

Published by Headline Publishing Group (25th, January 2018)

‘A chilling, dystopian page-turner with a twist

that will make your head explode’

Synopsis:
THE FEED by Nick Clark Windo is a startling and timely debut which presents a world as unique and vividly imagined as STATION ELEVEN and THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS.
Tom and Kate's daughter turns six tomorrow, and they have to tell her about sleep.
If you sleep unwatched, you could be Taken. If you are Taken, then watching won't save you.
Nothing saves you.
Your knowledge. Your memories. Your dreams.
If all you are is on the Feed, what will you become when the Feed goes down?
For Tom and Kate, in the six years since the world collapsed, every day has been a fight for survival. And when their daughter, Bea, goes missing, they will question whether they can even trust each other anymore.
The threat is closer than they realise...

My Thoughts:
With blurb likening it to ‘Station Eleven’, rave reviews, and huge publicity drive, this one grabbed my full attention.
I must admit that it hasn’t had the immediate impact that ‘Station Eleven’ had on me regarding the emotional involvement with its characters thus far, but at 20% anything can happen.

TEASER TUESDAY: The Promise Between Us by Barbara Claypole White

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by

 The Purple Booker

It is very easy to play along:

• Grab your current read and open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! 

• Share the title & author, too, so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my teasers this month:
“Apparently seeing my mother stab my father at the kitchen table was enough to send any future adult loco. According to the professionals, we never escape our childhoods. Mine was short-lived after the kitchen incident. Dad ran off, and Mom prayed and drank, prayed and drank, while I raised my baby sister.”

Title:The Promise Between Us by Barbara Claypole White

Published by Lake Union Publishing (16th January, 2018)

Synopsis:
Metal artist Katie Mack is living a lie. Nine years ago she ran away from her family in Raleigh, North Carolina, consumed by the irrational fear that she would harm Maisie, her newborn daughter. Over time she’s come to grips with the mental illness that nearly destroyed her, and now funnels her pain into her art. Despite longing for Maisie, Katie honors an agreement with the husband she left behind—to change her name and never return.

My Thoughts:
So far I have only read the first few pages but 'The Promise Between Us' promises to be a real heartbreaking, tearjerker and one I’m really looking forward to reviewing as part of the TLC Book Tour during February with my blog tour date scheduled for, 12th February.

TEASER TUESDAY : Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

 Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by

 The Purple Booker

It is very easy to play along:

• Grab your current read and open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! 

• Share the title & author, too, so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my teasers this month:
“It was during the dog days, the season when the August wind blows hot, venomous with the rotten stench of Saporania blossoms.
The road rose and fell. It rises or falls depending on whether you are coming or going. If you are leaving its uphill, but as you arrive it's downhill."

Title: Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

Published by Serpent’s Tail (first published 1955)

Synopsis:
Swearing to his dying mother that he'll find the father he has never met, a certain Pedro Paramo, Juan Preciado sets out across the barren plains of Mexico for Comala, the hallucinatory ghost town his father presided over like a feudal lord. Between the realms of the living and the dead, in fragments of dreams and the nightly whispers of Comala's ghosts, there emerges the tragic tale of Pedro Paramo and the town whose every corner holds the taint of his rotten soul.

My Thoughts:
'Pedro Paramo' was sadly the only novel by Mexican author Juan Rulfo.  Originally published in 1955, it is the novel that started the genre for magical realism, and also the inspiration for Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s, '100 Years of Solitude'.

I have only just read the first page so far and will say more about it in due course.

TEASER TUESDAY: Smoke City by Keith Rosson

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by

 The Purple Booker

It is very easy to play along:

• Grab your current read and open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! 

• Share the title & author, too, so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my "teasers":
Three, four years old. I noticed the people parting for us, I remember that, but not the revulsion in their eyes, the contempt. I would realize later, of course, just what it was the townspeople had shied away from, had leered at: my father’s coat, and the stitched image of the sword on the back. The executioner’s mark.

Title: Smoke City by Keith Rosson

Expected publication date: January 23, 2018

Published by Meerkat Press

Synopsis:
From the author of The Mercy of the Tide comes another gorgeously written, genre-defying novel.
Marvin Deitz has some serious problems. His mob-connected landlord is strong-arming him out of his storefront. His  therapist has concerns about his stability. He's compelled to volunteer at the local Children's Hospital even though it breaks his heart every week.
Oh, and he's also the guilt-ridden reincarnation of Geoffroy Thérage, the French executioner who lit Joan of Arc's pyre in 1431. He's just seen a woman on a Los Angeles talk show claiming to be Joan, and absolution seems closer than it's ever been . . . but how will he find her?
When Marvin heads to Los Angeles to locate the woman who may or may not be Joan, he's picked up hitchhiking by Mike Vale, a self-destructive alcoholic painter traveling to his ex-wife's funeral. As they move through a California landscape populated with "smokes" (ghostly apparitions that've inexplicably begun appearing throughout the southwestern US), each seeks absolution in his own way.

My Thoughts:
I have just started to read what promises to be an entertaining and interesting book. One which appears to be intelligently well written with the maturity of an accomplished author, and I am thoroughly enjoying it thus far.

Review to follow in due course.

TEASER TUESDAY: All The Beautiful Girls by Elizabeth J. Church

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by

 The Purple Booker

It is very easy to play along:

• Grab your current read and open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! 

• Share the title & author, too, so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my “teasers”:
‘It was the Depression,” Mama once said. “It made your Aunt Tate hard. Deprivation made her think that being rigid was the only way to survive. But there’s a soft centre there; she has a heart, I swear.” Still, Lily thought that even Mama had been more than a little cautious when faced with her sister’s perennial judgment.’

All The Beautiful Girls by Elizabeth J. Church

Expected publication: US March 6, 2018 & UK April 5, 2018

Ballantine Books (Random House Publishing Group) & 4th Estate (Harper Collins Publishers)

Synopsis:
The dazzling, powerful story of a gutsy showgirl who tries to conquer her past amongst the glamour of 1960s Las Vegas - finding unexpected fortune, friendship and love.
Now, as Ruby Wilde, the ultimate Sin City success story, she discovers that the glare of the spotlight cannot banish the shadows that haunt her. As the years pass and Ruby continues to search for freedom, for love and, most importantly, herself, she must learn the difference between what glitters and what is truly gold.

My Thoughts:
I absolutely loved and devoured Elizabeth J. Church’s debut novel, The Atomic Weight of Love’ which through the storyline also introduced me to the wonderful world of birds, in particular crows.  I’ve loved seeing and watching these amazing creatures ever since. This is still a book that I cannot bring myself to part with and on completion of reading desperately wanted to read another of Church’s novels and here it is at last.

All The Beautiful Girls, feels a slightly different novel but it is still reminiscent of Church’s intelligent exquisitely written prose and full of her charming, or misunderstood damaged personalities. These female characters are vividly painted gutsy women striving to achieve their gaols in an extremely competitive glamourised entertainment industry run and controlled by men.

Halfway through and I already know it’s another keeper.

My review will follow in due course. 

TEASER TUESDAY: The Night Market by Jonathan Moore

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by

 The Purple Booker

It is very easy to play along:

• Grab your current read and open to a random page

• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! 

• Share the title & author, too, so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my “teasers”:
‘Carver crouched, holding his light close to the small bird’s broken body. Its left eye had been smashed. A thin steel ring was visible in the back of the socket. Tiny shards of black glass lay on the floor and in the empty socket. Its feathers were threaded with shiny black strands that Carver guessed were photovoltaic filaments. There was no blood.’

(Yeah I know, it’s 6 sentences but they’re very short so I added a few!)

From The Night Market by Jonathan Moore

Expected publication: January 11, 2018 by Orion Publishing Co

Synopsis:
'Do you ever think there's maybe something that's gone wrong with the world?'
A man is found dead in one of the city's luxury homes. Homicide detective Ross Carver arrives at the scene when six FBI agents burst in and forcibly remove him from the premises.
Two days later...
Carver wakes in his bed to find Mia a neighbor he's hardly ever spoken to, reading aloud to him. He has no recollection of the crime scene, no memory of how he got home, and no idea that two days have passed. Carver knows nothing about this woman but as he struggles to piece together what happened to him, he soon realizes he's involved himself in a web of conspiracy that spans the nation. And Mia just might know more than she's letting on...'Moore has a great gift for the macabre and the creepy.' The Times’

My Thoughts:
With such an explosive and heart pounding opening scene, The Night Market had me riveted to the edge of my seat.

It is the final in a loosely connected trilogy with all three set in San Francisco at different time periods and genre category. The Poison Artist is a taut noir psychological thriller; The Dark Room more a police procedural storyline, and The Night Market being the first I’ve read is set in the near future with a dark, tense, creepily claustrophobic sci-Fi setting.

Definitely readable as a stand-alone novel, the writing and world building is incredibly vivid and frightening plausible.  With a likeable cast of complex characters, and strong storyline The Night Market is an absolutely recommended read for 2018.

Full review to come.