In My Mailbox: February 16

In My Mailbox: February 15th

Title: Family Pieces
Author: Misa Rush
Received: From Misa Rush
Synopsis: What do you do when your once charmed life falls to pieces? Karsen Woods’ life seems charmed from her hunkalicious boyfriend to her picture-perfect midwestern roots. Away at college, even the necklace she wears serves as a constant connection home – a family tradition created when her grandfather handmade each immediate relative an interlinking charm. Each piece crafted in the shape of a puzzle piece, each one interlinking perfectly together. But when the unexpected death of her mother turns her world upside down, she discovers there is a missing piece of her treasured family tradition and her life as she once knew it may never be the same. Addison Reynolds resides in her posh Manhattan condominium and wraps her personal identity around running Urbane, the magazine empire built by her father. In a moment of haste, Addison divulges her deepest secret to her closest friend Emily – a secret she never intended to disclose. Could one choice, one secret, bond two unlikely women forever?

Title: The Atlas of Love
Author: Laurie Frankel
Received: For SheKnows Book Club
Synopsis: When Jill Mattison abruptly becomes both pregnant and single at the end of one spring semester, she and her two closest friends plunge headlong into an experiment in tri-parenting, tri-schooling, and tri-habitating as graduate students in Seattle. In a possibly crazy leap of faith, they acquire a big house, a new dog, and lots of tightly scheduled literature courses in fervent hope it will be enough to make a family.
Janey Duncan narrates The Atlas of Love with heartbreaking, heartwarming hilarity and shows how all their lives are forever changed by adventures in non-traditional parenting. Soon, these friends find their lives start to mirror their books, their books start to mirror their lives, and their alternative family becomes just as complicated as the traditional kind. And one tiny baby named Atlas upends and uplifts their entire world.
Like any good family drama, this one involves love affairs, Jewish grandmothers, Mormons, illness, betrayal, tests of the spirit (religious, emotional, and oral before a four-person examining committee), birth, death, and marriage, plus baseball, a gender-misidentified dog, and several dinner table smack downs. The Atlas of Love explores love and loss, friends and family and the fuzzy lines between the two, literature and pedagogy, and timeless mysteries such as who would you forgive for having you arrested and why must the Yankees always make the post-season.

Title: Spinning
Author: Michael Baron
Received: From Lou Aronica @ The Story Plant
Synopsis: Dylan Hunter has it made. At 29, he has great friends, a huge job, all the women he can handle, and no commitments. A public relations executive, Dylan has dashed up the ladder of success by mastering the art of the spin- bending the truth to his and his clients’ needs. But when a former lover steps back into his life with a three-year-old girl by her side (no, she’s not his), Dylan suddenly finds himself in a place he can’t spin himself out of. And when Dylan unexpectedly becomes the child’s sole guardian, he starts to feel like a circus performer trying to keep all his spinning plates from crashing to the ground. In what seems like a blink of the eye, Dylan Hunter’s life has changed completely…whether he’s ready for it or not.