Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Five Days Left

Summary:
Mara Nichols is a successful lawyer, devoted wife, and adoptive mother who has received a life-shattering diagnosis. Scott Coffman, a middle school teacher, has been fostering an eight-year-old boy while the boy’s mother serves a jail sentence. Scott and Mara both have five days left until they must say good-bye to the ones they love the most.

Through their stories, Julie Lawson Timmer explores the individual limits of human endurance and the power of relationships, and shows that sometimes loving someone means holding on, and sometimes it means letting go. 

Review:
Wow. This book had me hooked from page one and did not let me down! I was enthralled by the stories of Mara and Scott, especially Mara. While this book had a depressing subject matter, I found it to be extremely interesting. I was unfamiliar with Huntington's Disease before reading this novel and found myself learning more while reading. I truly felt for Mara and Scott. Timmer has the gift to make her characters come to life and for her readers to truly feel for them. 

5 STARS!

Sunday, September 14, 2014

The Glass Kitchen

"Portia Cuthcart never intended to leave Texas. Her dream was to run the Glass Kitchen restaurant her grandmother built decades ago. But after a string of betrayals and the loss of her legacy, Portia is determined to start a new life with her sisters in Manhattan... and never cook again. 

But when she moves into a dilapidated brownstone on the Upper West Side, she meets twelve-year-old Ariel and her widowed father Gabriel, a man with his hands full trying to raise two daughters on his own. Soon, a promise made to her sisters forces Portia back into a world of magical food and swirling emotions, where she must confront everything she has been running from. What seems so simple on the surface is anything but when long-held secrets are revealed, rivalries exposed, and the promise of new love stirs to life like chocolate mixing with cream. 

The Glass Kitchen is a delicious novel, a tempestuous story of a woman washed up on the shores of Manhattan who discovers that a kitchen—like an island—can be a refuge, if only she has the courage to give in to the pull of love, the power of forgiveness, and accept the complications of what it means to be family."


Review: 3.5 Stars. 

After reading Ruth Reichl's Delicious, I have been on a kick reading books about food. Although food was not the primary topic of this novel, I still enjoyed the story of three Texan sisters and the Kane family as well. Recommend!