In My Mailbox: Week of February 24

In Samantha’s Mailbox:

appetitesTitle: Appetites

Author: Karen Frankola

Received: Via CLP Blog Tours

Synopsis: When Sarah suddenly hears from Harry, the Brit she almost married twenty years ago, she decides now is the time to change her life. Sarah has a great job in Manhattan, but she considers herself too fat to have a boyfriend. Harry is visiting New York in four months and she wants to turn back into the girl he fell in love with. Since she can never stick to a diet, she comes up with a drastic solution.

Sarah asks her sister Max to lock her up in her basement and feed her nothing but healthy meals. Max, a struggling waitress, agrees begrudgingly. She’s skinny, but has her own set of appetites—for drink, drugs, and great-looking losers.

Sarah thinks a summer in Max’s basement will give her a new body, a chance to reconnect with Harry, and the friendship she’s long craved from her sister. But things quickly go wrong. Max’s drinking leads her to neglect Sarah, who figures out how to get out of the basement. Sarah develops an obsession with Max’s boyfriend and manages to fulfill a sexual fantasy by pretending to be something she’s not.

Can Sarah turn back time with Harry or will she and Max kill each other first? Can either sister ever learn to say no?

anneTitle: Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

Author: Therese Anne Fowler

Received: From St. Martins Press

Synopsis: I wish I could tell everyone who thinks we’re ruined, Look closer…and you’ll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed.

When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the “ungettable” Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn’t wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner’s, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and take the rest as it comes.

What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined attention and success and celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda legends in their own time. Everyone wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel—and his witty, perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, adopts daring new fashions, and revels in this wild new world. Each place they go becomes a playground: New York City, Long Island, Hollywood, Paris, and the French Riviera—where they join the endless party of the glamorous, sometimes doomed Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Gertrude Stein.

Everything seems new and possible. Troubles, at first, seem to fade like morning mist. But not even Jay Gatsby’s parties go on forever. Who is Zelda, other than the wife of a famous—sometimes infamous—husband? How can she forge her own identity while fighting her demons and Scott’s, too? With brilliant insight and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler brings us Zelda’s irresistible story as she herself might have told it.

power tripTitle: The Power Trip

Author: Jackie Collins

Received: From Get Red PR

Synopsis: A luxurious yacht in the Sea of Cortez, a birthday cruise for one of the world’s most beautiful women and an invitation no one can refuse. The Power Trip—take it if you dare.

From Hollywood icon and mega-seller Jackie Collins comes a thrilling new novel, The Power Trip, set on a state of the art luxury yacht off the coast of Cabo San Lucas. A tropical getaway with a cast of global power-hungry elites turns sour when they find out maybe they don’t control as much of the world as they thought . . .

In The Power Trip you will meet Aleksandr Kasianenko, a billionaire Russian oligarch, as he sets sail on The Bianca. You’ll meet his sexy supermodel girlfriend, whom The Bianca is named after, and five dynamic, powerful, and famous couples invited on the yacht’s maiden voyage: Hammond Patterson, a driven Senator, and his lovely but unhappy wife, Sierra; Cliff Baxter, a charming, never-married movie star, and his ex-waitress girlfriend, Lori; Taye Sherwin, a famous black UK footballer and his interior designer wife, Ashley; Luca Perez, a male Latin singing sensation with his older decadent English boyfriend, Jeromy; and Flynn, a maverick journalist with his Asian renegade female friend, Xuan.

You will also meet Russian mobster, Sergei Zukov, a man with a grudge against Aleksandr. And Sergei’s Mexican beauty queen girlfriend, Ina, whose brother, Cruz, is a master pirate with orders to hold The Bianca and its illustrious rota of guests for ransom.

The Power Trip explorers the decadent playgrounds of the super-rich . . . and leaves you hungry for more.

baby diariesTitle: The Baby Diaries

Author: Sam Binnie

Received: Avon Books

Synopsis: The hilarious and heart-warming second in the series from the author of The Wedding Diaries.

“I’d be sick right now, but I never like to reinforce a cliché.”

A few weeks after Kiki and Thom return from honeymoon, Kiki finds there’s a noticeable absence. An extremely serious noticeable absence of something, it turns out, Kiki now realises she was pretty glad about. One pregnancy test later, Kiki’s breaking the “good news” (Thom: Wow. We’re so… Edwardian.) and rewriting all the plans she’d made before.

With an ever-expanding waistline, her nightmare childhood “friend” Annie pregnant too, all the problem authors at Polka Dot Books she could (not) wish for and an army of NW London’s Smug Mothers to deal with, these nine months might not be the nine months of blooming relaxation she’d been promised…

Title: Gone With the Wedding

Author: Laura Briggs

Received: From Laura Briggs

Synopsis: Amy Pontelle is a best-selling Romance novelist and diehard GONE WITH THE WIND fan, whose just been offered the Southern belle wedding of a lifetime.

But even when Amy convinces her slower than Southern molasses fiancé, history professor Greg Willey, to play along, her dream of being Scarlett for the big day still has a few snags. The mansion is antiquated to the point of deterioration, its ancient staff is forgetful at best, and Amy can’t escape the true horrors of a corset as the price for elegance.

The worst part is, Amy is now questioning everything–her dreams, her life, and her engagement–now that she’s face to face with the reality of those dreams and the persuasive presence of a better-than-fiction Southern gentleman in an unlikely form…
In Sara’s Mailbox:

sevenTitle: Seven Night Stand

Author: Nicole Helm

Received: Katie @ Entangled Publishing

Synopsis: Reality TV scout Vivvy Marsh loves her job, but she’ll lose it if she doesn’t find a hit. When she’s sent to Demo, Kansas to scout a show, it looks like a bust. It’s flat, boring, and she’s not inspired…until she meets sexy pilot, Nate Harrington.

Nate can’t deny his feelings for Vivvy. She’s beautiful, and doesn’t blink an eye at his crazy family. He could get used to her…but her Hollywood lifestyle doesn’t fly in his small town.

Their feelings deepen, but they’re going to have to part ways at the end of seven days, or one of them is going to have to make a sacrifice that’ll change their lives forever.

harlanTitle: Six Years

Author: Harlan Coben

Received: Cassie @ Penguin Group

Synopsis: Six years have passed since Jake Sanders watched Natalie, the love of his life, marry another man. Six years of hiding a broken heart by throwing himself into his career as a college professor. Six years of keeping his promise to leave Natalie alone, and six years of tortured dreams of her life with her new husband, Todd.

But six years haven’t come close to extinguishing his feelings, and when Jake comes across Todd’s obituary, he can’t keep himself away from the funeral. There he gets the glimpse of Todd’s wife he’s hoping for…but she is not Natalie. Whoever the mourning widow is, she’s been married to Todd for almost two decades, and with that fact everything Jake thought he knew about the best time of his life—a time he has never gotten over—is turned completely inside out.

As Jake searches for the truth, his picture-perfect memories of Natalie begin to unravel. Mutual friends of the couple either can’t be found, or don’t remember Jake. No one has seen Natalie in years. Jake’s search for the woman who broke his heart, who lied to him, soon puts his very life at risk as it dawns on him that the man he has become may be based on a carefully constructed fiction.

Harlan Coben once again delivers a shocking page-turner that deftly explores the power of past love, and the secrets and lies that such love can hide.