In My Mailbox: Week of November 27

In My Mailbox: Week of November 27

Title: Princess of Park Avenue
Author: Daniella Brodsky
Received: Via CLP Blog Tours
Synopsis: Anyone can see Lorraine Machuchi is no ordinary Brooklyn girl. Anyone except for Lorraine, that is. She’s been too busy obsessing over Tommy Lupo to notice. Living day to day on his confusing midnight phone calls and big-haired memories of their relationship in the early nineties, she’s given up any opportunity of leaving Brooklyn. And though she never saw the home she loves as a failure, there’re a lot of folks she’s pissed off by staying put—her mother, her dead grandmother’s ghost, not to mention the old Italian ladies who shake their heads at her in the pork store. And what’s worse, the very guy she tossed everything away for just told her he’ll never wind up with her—a girl who’s not going anywhere.

…Okay, so you might disapprove of her motive—changing for a guy. But then you probably haven’t seen Tommy with three shirt buttons undone. Besides, when Lorraine crosses the bridge to Manhattan she begins to realize she’s got a lot to offer. She starts coloring hair at a swank salon where they actually appreciate a little talent, even if you have to bend some rules to use it. She gets a fabulous Park Avenue sublet, even if it does involve chasing around a dog/horse named Pooh-Pooh. She meets a guy who’s actually…perfect, even if she might be too hung up on Mr. Wrong to notice. She’s asked to become the newest member of the Princesses, an elite group of Park Avenue’s most powerful socialites, even if the reasoning behind it might be a little fishy. Sure, their $400 cashmere sweaters, charity balls for poor girls with small boobs, and ‘sexy’ yoga are a bit over-the-top, but a Brooklyn girl can learn a lot by discovering her own inner princess…

Title: Binding Arbitration
Author: Elizabeth Marx
Received: Via CLP Blog Tours
Synopsis: Libby pleads her case at the cleats of celebrity baseball player, Banford Aidan Palowski, the man who discarded her at college graduation, begging him to live up to his biological duty. Libby’s worked her backside bare for everything she’s attained, while Band-Aid has been indulged since he slid through the birth canal and landed in a pile of Gold Coast money. But helping her might jeopardize the only thing the jock worships: his baseball career.

If baseball imitates life, Aidan admits his appears to be silver-plated peanuts, until, an unexpected confrontation with the most spectacular prize that’s ever poured from a caramel corn box blindsides him. Libby reveals his son desperately needs him and it pricks open the wound he’s carried since he abandoned her.

All Libby wants is a little anonymous DNA, but Band-Aid has a magical umpire in his head who knows Libby’s a fateball right to the heart. When a six-year-old sage, and a hippy priestess step onto the field there’s more to settle between Libby and Aidan then heartache, redemption, and forgiveness.

Title: The Queen Gene
Author: Jennifer Coburn
Received: From Jennifer Coburn
Synopsis: If It s Not One Thing, It s Your Mother. “You are so lucky to have a mother like Anjoli.” — That s what all my friends say. But really, my friends weren t there when I was eight and my theatre-savvy, drama queen of a mother said she didn t want to take me to the Central Park Zoo because the animals didn t put on a good show. My mother is like a vapor: when she enters a room, she occupies every bit of space. Don t get me wrong — I adore my mom…from a distance. It s just, well, what can you say about a woman who takes her teacup Chihuahua to every new age healer in Manhattan, who has a living-beauty will so her eyebrows will still look great if she s in a coma, and who tells my cousin Kimmy that the sperm bank has too many rules and suggests a new lipstick and a train ride to Princeton instead?
To top it off, she calls me ten times a day to say, “Darling, I m in crisis!” What, like I m not? In addition to mothering my mother, I m also trying to keep my marriage hot with a two-year-old under foot — babysitting the artists in residence at my Berkshires artists colony, which seems to be the Bermuda Triangle of creativity but a breeding ground for seriously insane — resisting an attraction to a man so sexy he could give your eyeballs an orgasm — and trying to rid my 100-year-old home of mischievous ghosts. Yeah, sort of got my hands full. The way I see it, I ve got two choices: go completely mad, or start living my own life on my own terms, starting with my mother. I m just not sure which option is crazier…

Title: A Summer in Europe
Author: Marilyn Brant
Received: From Kensington Publishing/Unsolicited
Synopsis: On her thirtieth birthday, Gwendolyn Reese receives an unexpected present from her widowed Aunt Bea: a grand tour of Europe in the company of Bea’s Sudoku and Mah-jongg Club. The prospect isn’t entirely appealing. But when the gift she is expecting — an engagement ring from her boyfriend — doesn’t materialize, Gwen decides to go. At first, Gwen approaches the trip as if it’s the math homework she assigns her students, diligently checking monuments off her must-see list. But amid the bougainvillea and stunning vistas of southern Italy, something changes. Gwen begins to live in the moment: skipping down stone staircases in Capri, running her fingers over a glacier in view of the Matterhorn, racing through the Louvre, and taste-testing pastries at a Marseilles cafe. Revelling in every new experience — especially her attraction to a charismatic British physics professor — Gwen discovers that the ancient wonders around her are nothing compared to the renaissance unfolding within…