Tag Archives: Women's Fiction

TMI MOM: OVERSHARING MY LIFE by Heather Davis

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Disclaimer: Heather Davis is a personal friend and fellow co-writer for the pop culture blog, Chick Wit. Some might say that me writing a book review for her is too easy, it’s a slam-dunk, a home run, other sports-related metaphors, but NO, I say.

Yes, writing this review is easy, but not because she’s a friend, it’s because she tells stories I can relate to. If you’re a busy, tired, overworked mother with children who test your patience and a husband who tests your sanity on a daily basis, I’m betting you will too.

TMI MOM: OVERSHARING MY LIFE is a collection of essays based on Heather’s real life as a wife, mother of two young daughters, and middle school English teacher. The book was just released this week but it’s quickly gaining popularity for its refreshing and honest look at life in the trenches – of suburbia. Realllly honest.

Unabashed – Definition – “Not embarrassed, disconcerted or ashamed.” 

If you follow Heather’s blog, Minivan Momma, you know she is unabashed when it comes to sharing about life with her husband and the Daughters. Capitalized because that’s how she refers to them in her stories, Daughter 1 and Daughter 2. In the Introduction Heather writes, “Names have been changed to lessen the time they spend in therapy.”

This is a Momma who adores her children, loves her husband and just likes to share. ‘Cause she knows if it’s happening to her, chances are it’s happening to someone else.

Like the time her daughter got upset because she wore her Momma’s crappy hair tie to school and it came out halfway through the day only to discover she’d accidentally grabbed Heather’s leopard thong instead.

Or the time she was chopping fresh jalapenos and inadvertently got the juice not only in her eyes but also up her nose, AND on her delicate lady business. “. . . all of a sudden I’m the new spice girl, I’m in the hot seat. I’m a hunka, hunka, burnin love. My loins belong in a Harlequin novel. . . ”

Or the time her daughter joined a soccer team and Heather realized not only was soccer a loathed sport to watch, but the overachieving moms gave new meaning to the phrase, organized sports, particularly on the day they played against the Bright Yellow Team. “The Bright Yellow Team came out of their Bright Yellow smoke-filled tunnel and assembled on their Bright Yellow bench. The half-time water bottles had little yellow label wraps, personalized with a message for each kid, by name. I wasn’t even sure a couple of our boys had names.”

A few of my favorite pages were those where she shares Actual* conversations and of course the asterisk means the conversations took place mostly in her mind. Oh my goodness, the conversations that happen in my mind are the BEST!

TMI MOM: OVERSHARING MY LIFE is heartfelt, raw, and ultimately shows, (I’m stealing lyrics from country crooner, Gary Allen now) life aint always beautiful, but it’s a beautiful ride. It’s funny too. Just ask Heather.

TMI MOM: OVERSHARING MY LIFE is now available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble

Also available by Heather Davis, TMI MOM BITES THE BIG APPLE: ESSAYS

 

Jennifer Johnson Part 2: The Redemption

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In the spring of 2009, my fledgling book club read the novel, Jennifer Johnson Is Sick Of Being Single by Heather McElhatton. It’s the story of a quirky single woman named Jennifer who works as a copywriter for a large department store. The novel followed her dating trials and tribulations as she desperately tried, emphasis on desperate, to find her personal Prince Charming. The book is still considered to be one of our favorites due in large part to the witty, over-the-top, hilariously insane writing style.

Do you ever find yourself laughing while simultaneously apologizing to the baby Jesus at the subject matter for which you are laughing? Yes, well, I did a lot of that.

Then I came to the end of the book and I was deflated. Not just for the ending the author chose for Jennifer but because it was over. I wanted more. I wanted Jennifer to take a different path but mostly, I just wanted more Heather McElhatton.

Guess what? She’s baaaaaaack!

In Jennifer Johnson Is Sick Of Being Married (JJSOBM), we pick up where we left off with Jennifer and her husband on their honeymoon. For those of you who haven’t read the first book yet, I’ll do my best not to give away any spoilers. Also, why haven’t you read the first book yet? Gah! Go. It’s so good.

It doesn’t take Jennifer long to wonder if she made the right decision. Marrying a man with wealth and power is one thing, marrying one whose parents have conservative Christian beliefs, conniving behavior and controlling tendencies is quite another.

Like the first Jennifer Johnson novel, McElhatton’s writing is descriptive, lovely and often wholly inappropriate. Here are a few of my favorite lines:

Describing a moonlit riverbank Heather writes, “The wind picks up and the moon casts a bright blue light across the glistening snowbanks, so they look like sheets of waving diamonds.”

Describing a personal *ahem* bleaching situation at a salon: “Starfish is burning. Starfish is burning!” She says not to worry, it’s a normal situation.” I’m just going to let you use your imagination there.

Making a list of things couples typically fight over: “10. Heat. To turn up or not to turn up? That is the eternal question. Someone is constantly trying to freeze or bake the other one to death. That much we know.”

When Jennifer Johnson decides she’s had enough and she really is sick of being married, the resulting series of events is nothing short of a giggle-filled madcap caper. Really, couldn’t we all use a few more madcap capers in our lives? Hell, I’d love to be IN a madcap caper. Picture Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding.

I would be remiss not to mention the huge cast of wacky characters in this book who helped to make it such an impossibly fun read. From Christopher, her gay bestie to B’ich, her Hmong maid, you’ll fall in love and love to hate the people who make up Jennifer’s inner circle.

Jennifer Johnson Is Sick Of Being Married has heart, depth, madness and profanity. In a word, perfection!

Dude Reads Like a Lady

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Hello, my name is Mark and I like Chick Lit, though I don’t care for the term. While snappy, I think it’s silly and narrow. I think the only labels should be on bathroom doors (Ally McBeal offering an exception even there). I stand before you (sit actually) as a guy on a predominantly women’s book review site who likes women writers. I like guy writers too. Hemingway was a guy’s guy after all, but lets not mess with my meme.

I’m a normal guy, providing you use abnormal definitions, and grade on a curve. I am neither exceptionally macho, nor exceptionally not. I like purple more than most men who also prefer boobs. And like most men I am entertained at the sounds the human body can produce, and I can be sent into a positively juvenile giggle fit at their creation. But I also love romantic comedies and what is considered women’s fiction.

This was not by design, I just noticed a few of the books that over the last year or so I enjoyed the most were of this genre: Saving Cee Cee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman @wordrunner; Pictures of You by Caroline Leavitt @leavittnovelist; and The Bird Sisters by Rebecca Rasmussen @thebirdsisters. There are of course more, but those are among my favorites. All three are beautifully told stories with characters I laughed and ached with, and might have even cried with, were I not so damned manly.  All three of these were written by women. That’s just a fact. But why aren’t they read by more men? I looked up all three of these on Amazon and looked at the reviews. Overwhelmingly women. Why? In two of the three, the main characters were mostly women. Is that it?

Labels are great for boxes. They can help us know what’s in the box. But they can be equally limiting, and can lead to mislabeling. I once had my father’s things boxed up in storage for years. He had a wood carving kit that I looked through almost every box for. I looked in every box with a label that even remotely seemed that might contain it.  In the end, I found it in a box labeled “photo albums.”

I read fiction for the story. Do you write a good story? Do you create characters I care about? This is why I read. And of course hedging my bets. If (when) women take over the world I hope to be considered with favor. Treated kindly and given books often. And on my very good days, tacos.

 

 

Stuffed Sleigh Contest

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While many of you may be over the stove cooking up something delicious for Thanksgiving, I am thankful my mother in law said I don’t have to BRING A THING. (Except for my beautiful family, of course.) Now, my MIL has known me for 17 years and she’s grown to accept that I don’t like to cook, am not very good at it and I’d be happy eating a turkey sandwich for T-day, let alone a big fancy meal. But fancy we shall have! So it gives me great pleasure to offer one of our Sleigh Ride readers a “thank you” gift for purchasing the anthology that’s sure to get you in the mood for the holidays. It even has a fruitcake! And it wouldn’t be a sleigh ride without hot cocoa, right? And some hot guys? So, without further ado, I present to you SLEIGH RIDE: A Winter Anthology and the awesome BIG STUFFED SLEIGH contest. Remember, you can always gift it to a friend, too.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

All this plus a cozy throw!
Package includes:

Michael Buble “Christmas” album (Target edition with 3 extra songs) ~ $17 value

Lady Antebellum “A Merry Little Christmas” album ~ $7 value

ILU “text” Coffee mug, in honor of Dani Stone’s, “No Place Like Home” story and her crazy coffee cup collection ~ $7 value

Cozy throw to cuddle up and read Sleigh Ride with! ~ $30 value

Box full of books including:

FALLING TOGETHER by Marisa de los Santos (hardback, $26 value)

YANKEE DOODLE DIXIE by Lisa Patton (hardback, $25 value)

RECKONING FOR THE DEAD by Jordan Dane (mass market paperback, $8 value)

AND SHE WAS by Alison Gaylin (mm paperback, ARC, no retail value)

SLICKER by Lucy Jackson (trade paperback, $15 value)

SPIN by Catherine McKenzie (trade paperback, ARC, no retail value)

THE ATLAS OF LOVE by Laurel Frankel (trade paperback, $15 value)

DRAGONSWOOD by Janet Lee Carey (trade paperback, ARC, no retail value)

How to Enter:

Send (forward) your receipt from the purchase of SLEIGH RIDE by end of day Nov. 30th, 2011 to buzzbooksusa (at) me (dot) com. A confirmation e-mail in return will confirm your entry in the contest.

Where to buy Sleigh Ride: (as of 11/11/11)

print book from our Buzz Books site here

for the nook: BN.com for nook

or the print book or ebook for the kindle: Amazon

Sleigh Ride includes short stories by Samantha Wilde, Maria Geraci, Maggie Marr, Megan Barlog, Malena Lott, Dani Stone, Jenny Peterson.

Oprah + Franzen, Take 2

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by Malena Lott

Are you on board with Oprah's book club pick?

As a book club (and a book club that promotes reading whatever strikes your fancy), Book End Babes is thrilled that Oprah has a book club, period. She has a big voice, a world-wide audience, and she gets people to bookstores. I’d heard mid-last week that Oprah selected another Jonathon Franzen book (her 2001 choice, Franzen’s The Corrections never made it onto her show because he didn’t want her logo on his book. She disinvited him.) This time around, she told her audience on Friday’s show that the author sent her a galley with a personal note, so I’m guessing that was his way of apologizing. I mean, not everyone that sends a galley to Oprah gets it into her hands. He’s a big literary deal, and I really want to be on board and love his books, but I gave up on The Corrections after a page that was one looooong sentence. My daughter talks like that, but she’s a kid and I don’t know what she’s saying half the time. Oprah said of his new book, and her fresh pick, Freedom, that it would be one of our favorite reads of all time. Somebody tell me when it gets to the good stuff, because I’m not feeling anything differently reading it as I did reading the last one. Does it take away his brilliance? Absolutely not. Whoever among us claims to the scion of good literary taste should be drug around back for Tony Soprano to take a whack at you. I’ll let the New York Times drool over Franzen, while I keep my pom-poms high in the air for the stories that do for me what Oprah’s picks do for her.

I don’t even think it’s an issue about literary versus commercial fiction. To me, fiction is fiction, a story a story, and if it works, it works. I suppose Oprah is looking for BIG stories, but I’d just as soon have her select a steampunk novel. How cool if everyone was reading Gail Carriger’s books at the same time. Or, insert some book you thought was fresh and cool that not enough people know about. That’s about 99% of all books out there! The ones who get the big ad budgets and get the attention of the big media (and big voices like O’s) get the sales.

One person’s BEST THING EVER is another’s MEH. As the editor at Book End Babes, I get a lot of books in the mail, though only a tiny fraction compared to my husband’s mail call each day for his site Bookgasm. Combined, I get to peruse at least twenty new titles a week. I give new authors a chance all the time. I love to discover new voices, which is, I suppose, what rubs me a little wrong about Oprah’s choice. She could’ve made someone’s career with her selection, yet she chose a book that’s already had huge buzz, huge best-seller status and I was really hoping for her to help me find someone new to love. Yet, does one actor deserve to win the Academy Award twice? Sure, why not? If she wants to give the same author her coveted seal of approval, it’s her show. I often recommend sophomore and junior efforts here on BEB of authors I think are hitting home runs again and again.

And this is your book club. Sure, we want to be your resource to find out about great books. We list four good reads all month long in the sidebar, and they aren’t all women’s fiction, either. Our Bookettes, our featured bloggers, also introduce our readers to books they have loved. What I care most about is that you find something you connect with and then share that with people in your life. Each of us can light a spark. As always, we welcome authors to discuss their lives here. We genuinely want to get to know readers and authors and share the stories of our lives. Our real estate is yours.

Thank you for reading whatever you choose, as often as you can. If you’re reading FREEDOM, we’d love to hear your thoughts on it. If you were Oprah and could get millions to read a book of your choosing, what would that book be?