In My Mailbox: Week of April 6

Title: Dear Internet: It’s Me, Avery

Author: Jennifer Ammoscato

Received: CLP Blog Tours

Synopsis: Oh, please! Don’t pretend you’ve never checked out that weird mole on WebMD. Or how to fold meringue on Epicurious. And I can’t be the only one who clears her search history after looking up how to give a great bl— (Um, that last one’s not important.)

Do I have an unhealthy Internet advice dependency? Probably. But it would NEVER steer me wrong. Right…?

When newspaper reporter Avery Fowler figures out that her husband is having an affair, she turns to HowTo.com to navigate this challenging stage of her life. Cell phone clutched firmly in hand, she enlists her HowTo.com life coach, Clementine, to tackle such tricky questions as on-line dating (Dear HowTo.com: Is it lying if I say they’re real?”) and sex once nothing points north anymore.

Add into the mix a new boss (the Wicked Bitch of the West), and Avery needs all the help she can get! The former gossip writer must now up her game to keep her job. (“Dear HowTo.com: how do I cover an attempted murder scene (despite a paralyzing fear of blood)?”

Co-worker and ace journalist Ryan Whiteford intimidates her with his first-class prose and daunting knowledge of shorthand. But they must join forces to topple their boss when, one fateful night, they learn her guilty secret.

Can all life’s questions be answered with a keystroke? Or should the journey to becoming Avery Fowler 2.0 begin in our intrepid heroine’s heart?

GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22724138-dear-internet

Title: French Coast

Author: Anita Hughes

Received: St. Martin’s Griffin

Synopsis: Serena has the job she’s always dreamed of and Chase, the man her heart never dared to. As a new editor at Vogue, she bags the biggest interview of the year with Yvette Renault, the infamous former editor of French Vogue, in The Carlton-InterContinental Hotel during the Cannes Film Festival. She eagerly jets off to France while Chase stays home, working with her father, a former senator, on his upcoming mayoral campaign.
Everything feels unbelievably perfect…until it doesn’t. The hotel loses her reservation hours before her big interview. Serena fears that she’ll have to go home without her story, but then she meets Zoe, a quirky young woman staying in the suite below Yvette’s who invites Serena to stay with her. Serena is grateful for her mysterious roommate’s generosity, but it seems that there’s more to her story than meets the eye. To make matters worse, soon after arriving in Cannes, Serena learns a shocking secret about her parents’ marriage, and it isn’t long before she begins to question her own relationship.With her deadline looming and pressure mounting, Serena will have to use her investigative journalism skills, new

friendships, and a little luck to get her life and love back on track. Fast paced and impeccably written,

French Coast will draw readers in to the intoxicating world of the Cote D’Azur. Hughes’ beautiful prose and sense imagery bring the food, fashion, and feel of the ocean to life in this audacious new novel.

Title: Inside the O’Briens

Author: Lisa Genova

Received: Simon and Schuster

Synopsis: From the New York Times bestselling author of Still Alice Lisa Genova comes a powerful and transcendent new novel about a family struggling with the impact of Huntington’s disease.

Joe O’Brien is a forty-four-year-old police officer from the Irish Catholic neighborhood of Charlestown, Massachusetts. A devoted husband, proud father of four children in their twenties, and respected officer, Joe begins experiencing bouts of disorganized thinking, uncharacteristic temper outbursts, and strange, involuntary movements. He initially attributes these episodes to the stress of his job, but as these symptoms worsen, he agrees to see a neurologist and is handed a diagnosis that will change his and his family’s lives forever: Huntington’s Disease.

Huntington’s is a lethal neurodegenerative disease with no treatment and no cure. Each of Joe’s four children has a 50 percent chance of inheriting their father’s disease, and a simple blood test can reveal their genetic fate. While watching her potential future in her father’s escalating symptoms, twenty-one-year-old daughter Katie struggles with the questions this test imposes on her young adult life. Does she want to know? What if she’s gene positive? Can she live with the constant anxiety of not knowing?

As Joe’s symptoms worsen and he’s eventually stripped of his badge and more, Joe struggles to maintain hope and a sense of purpose, while Katie and her siblings must find the courage to either live a life “at risk” or learn their fate.

Praised for writing that “explores the resilience of the human spirit” (The San Francisco Chronicle), Lisa Genova has once again delivered a novel as powerful and unforgettable as the human insights at its core.

 

Title: Her Name is Rose

Author: Christine Breen

Received: St. Martin’s Press

Synopsis: People used to say Iris Bowen was beautiful, what with the wild weave of her red hair, the high cheekbones, and the way she carried herself like a barefoot dancer through the streets of Ranelagh on the outskirts of Dublin city. But that was a lifetime ago.

In a cottage in the west of Ireland, Iris–gardener and mother to an adopted daughter, Rose–is doing her best to carry on after the death of her husband two years before. At the back of her mind is a promise she never intended to keep, until the day she gets a phone call from her doctor.

Meanwhile, nineteen-year-old Rose is a brilliant violinist at the Royal Academy in London, still grieving for her father but relishing her music and life in the city. Excited but nervous, she hums on the way to an important master class, and then suddenly finds herself missing both of her parents when the class ends in disaster.

After the doctor’s call, Iris is haunted by the promise she made to her husband–to find Rose’s birth mother, so that their daughter might still have family if anything happened to Iris. Armed only with a twenty-year-old envelope, Iris impulsively begins a journey into the past that takes her to Boston and back, with unexpected results for herself and for Rose and for both friends and strangers.

Intimate, moving, and witty, Christine Breen’s Her Name is Rose is a gorgeous novel about what can happen when life does not play out the way you expect.