giveaway winners: corked and the last song

Stephanie, Alison, Heather Yellen, Alysia, and holdenj are the winners of Corked. Kelly, Tiffany, and rachel are the winners of The Last Song. Congratulations!

giveaway: undress me in the temple of heaven

As part of the tour for Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven, Hachette is offering up five copies of the book!

As you know from my review, I loved the book. Here's the Publishers Weekly review as well:
"Youthfully upbeat, Gilman (Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress) delivers an entertaining memoir of her ill-starred attempt to circumnavigate the globe after college graduation in 1986. Eager to embark on life but unsure exactly how to do it, the author, a New Yorker, and her fair-haired Connecticut trust-fund friend, Claire, both graduates from Brown, resolved to backpack around the world for a year and become heroines in their own epic stories. Starting in Hong Kong, the two nave 21-year-olds, armed with Linda Goodman's Love Signs, volumes of Nietzsche and a year's supply of tampons, ran into shoals fairly immediately, freaked out by fleabag hotels, vermin, importunate fellow travelers and the debilitating effects of illness, homesickness and the sole company of each other. As they roughed it through Communist China, Claire grew increasingly paranoid and delusional, eventually bolting on a bizarre bus trip that got her picked up by the police. Gilman's amusing journey focuses tightly on these first shaky seven weeks, offering the full wallop of disorienting, in-the-moment, transformative travel adventures."

The rules: Enter by leaving a comment to this post with your email (if I can't contact you, you can't win). You can gain additional entries by leaving separate comments letting me know that you're a follower or have posted a link to the giveaway on your site. The deadline to enter is 11:59pm Pacific on March 13. Winners will be selected at random. Since this is from Hachette the winners must have mailing addresses in the US or Canada; no PO Boxes.

author interview: susan jane gilman

This post contains affiliate links.

One day I was browsing the new books shelf at the library when Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress jumped out at me. Something about the pouting little girl on the cover made me take it home. I loved every second of the book and immediately went out to get Kiss My Tiara. So I was thrilled when the opportunity to review Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven came along. I nearly fell out of my seat when Susan Jane Gilman agreed to answer some questions.

In the author’s note to Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven, you state that you changed details to hide the identity of certain people like your travel partner Claire. There are some people, like your family, whose identities you can’t hide. How have they reacted to your books?

Once they’ve finished filing their Class Action Lawsuit against me, they’ve been fine with my work…

Actually, for the most part, the people I’ve named in my books have been thrilled – or, at least, in the case of my mother, relieved. “You could’ve written so much worse about us,” she’s said.

My father is my absolute Number One fan. He literary refuses to pay his medical bills until his doctors and dentists all buy copies of all my books and put them in their waiting rooms. “And you’ve got three dental hygienists, Artie,” he’ll say. “So you’re going to buy copies for each of them as well, right?” He practices “book publicity through extortion.” Bless him.

Even though I’ve sometimes depicted my father in less than stellar light, he understands that I’ve done so not to embarrass him, but to illuminate the quirks, heartaches, and human problems that plague everyone. He –like the rest of my family –appreciates the intention behind my work. None of us thinks we’re so exceptional that our pathologies are in any way different from anyone else’s. If people derive comfort, amusement, or a good laugh from reading about us, fine.

As for those people beyond my family I’ve written about, I have worried from time to time that they’d be upset to see themselves depicted in print -- even with a pseudonym. Yet more often than not, they’ve only been upset that I haven’t used their real name. “Why didn’t you immortalize me?” they say. “I could’ve been famous.” I guess they see my books as a rudimentary form of Reality Television.

In the first chapter, you note that your college goal was “to write the Great American Novel.” As you kept a journal of your trip, did you think you would write a memoir?

Not at all. Amazingly, I was under the impression that my 21-year-old’s creativity and imagination would be infinitely more fascinating to readers than whatever really happened to me in Communist China.

To this point, your books have all been nonfiction. Any plans to write a work of fiction?

Absolutely. I think I’m done with reality for a little while. It’s time to retreat into fantasy. My next book will be a novel – either the Great American One– or, more likely, a mediocre attempt at one.

What book (your own or someone else’s) has had the most impact on your life?

Not to be coy, but just about everything I have ever read in my entire life (and written myself) has shaped and impacted me: either in terms of inspiring me, being a learning experience, or being a cautionary tale in terms of What Not to Do. My brain is sort of a cement mixer. Everything that gets put into it becomes part of the greater gray mass; being influenced is a dynamic, ongoing process.

Certainly, there are standouts from different times in my life – everything from “Pat the Bunny” and “Eloise” right up through Plato’s “Republic,” “Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I'm Kissing You Goodbye,” “Suite Francaise” and “The Fortress of Solitude.”

Even that despicable book “The Rules” had a major impact on me: I was so infuriated by it that I felt compelled to write my first book, “Kiss My Tiara” in response to it.

Outrage, I suppose, has often had as much of an impact on me as great literature.

What’s up next for you?

A bath. A nap. Maybe a chocolate milkshake. And then it’s getting my ass back in the chair again. Time to start writing that next book. Ah, the glamour never ends.

review and tour: undress me in the temple of heaven by susan jane gilman

This post contains affiliate links.

After graduating from Brown, Susan Jane Gilman and an acquaintance she calls Claire (Gilman changed identifying features and the girl’s name) embark on an around the world trip that starts with a brief stop in Hong Kong before heading to China, which had only just opened up to tourists. They planned to see many other countries on their journey, but their plans are dramatically derailed in China. The pair is fortunate in that others (both Chinese citizens and fellow travelers) are sympathetic and help; this is in contrast to their own behavior which is quite selfish when they start their adventure.

As always, Gilman creates a vivid picture about a segment of her life. When they escape the Guilin airport, the tension is high and excellently described. As the cover pull quote from O Magazine says, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven is “unputdownable.” I stayed up far too late in order to finish the book because I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway until I knew what happened with Claire.
5/5
Review copy provided by the publisher, Grand Central Publishing.

Be sure to enter the giveaway for your chance to win this amazing book. There's also an interview with the author. These are the other participating sites:
readingatthebeach.com
frugalplus.com
books-movies-chinesefood.blogspot.com
bookjourney.wordpress.com/
onemorefoggynotion.blogspot.com
bookseriesreviews.blogspot.com
thebooktree.blogspot.com
foreigncircuslibrary.blogspot.com
luanne-abookwormsworld.blogspot.com
masoncanyon.blogspot.com
sheistoofondofbooks.com
booksnyc.blogspot.com
bookinwithbingo.blogspot.com
rundpinne.com
popculturenerd.com
stacievaughansblog.blogspot.com
blesstheirheartsmom.blogspot.com
therempels4.blogspot.com
thedmlibrary.blogspot.com
aseaofbooks.blogspot.com
madeleineatbooksandphotos.com
mgpblog.com
libslibrary.blogspot.com
frommipov.blogspot.com
metroreader.blogspot.com
booksiesblog.blogspot.com
thedivinemissmommy.com
booknaround.blogspot.com
dreyslibrary.blogspot.com
chickwithbooks.blogspot.com
cindysloveofbooks.blogspot.com

second gh post

Incredibly General Hospital got new opening credits this week! I never thought I'd see that; it'd been years and there were plenty of "dead" people in it. It was always so odd since the other ABC soaps update the opens fairly quickly. This one is different from a lot of opens since it lists both the actor's name and the character played. I think it'd be nice if others followed; give credit to the actor and let new viewers know people's names.

“I am a participant in a Mom Central campaign for ABC Daytime and will receive a tote bag or other General Hospital branded items to facilitate my review.”

giveaway: two eric van lustbader books

This post contains affiliate links.

Thanks to The Book Report Network I have two books by Eric Van Lustbader to giveaway to one lucky person. The books are First Daughter and Last Snow, which is the sequel to First Daughter.

From Publishers Weekly:
"In this uneven thriller from bestseller Lustbader (The Bourne Legacy), Alli Carson, the 19-year-old daughter of the U.S. president-elect, moderate Republican Edward Carson, is abducted a month before her father's inauguration to be programmed to do something truly terrible at the inauguration ceremony. ATF agent Jack McClure is chosen to lead the search for Alli, primarily because she was the boarding-school roommate of his now-deceased daughter, Emma. Jack faces many difficulties, chief among them his own severe dyslexia. The unnamed current president, who makes religion the basis for all his decisions, wants to use the search as an excuse for all-out war on his enemies, the First American Secular Revivalists and their secret partners, the E-Two terrorist group. Lustbader does a fine job depicting the search for Alli and reconstructing Jack's past, but the confusing political message will leave many readers wondering what the book was really about."

"Bestseller Lustbader's wordy sequel to First Daughter takes dyslexic Jack McClure, former ATF agent and now adviser to recently elected U.S. president Edward Carson, to Moscow, where Carson is negotiating an important treaty with Russian president Yukin. When minority whip Sen. Lloyd Berns dies in a mysterious hit-and-run accident on Capri, the president asks Jack to investigate. Accompanied by Annika, a beautiful Federal Security Bureau agent who's part of a complicated Russian trap, and Alli, Carson's 22-year-old daughter whom Jack saved from a bad guy in the previous book, Jack travels to Ukraine, where Berns was supposed to be on a fact-finding tour. In Kiev, Jack finds a secret agency called Trinadtsat, a shadowy group of Russian oligarchs, and plenty of trouble, including a retired American general out to have him killed. Lustbader fritters away many pages with Jack's navel-gazing, time that could have been better spent in gunfights and derring-do."

The rules: Enter by leaving a comment to this post with your email (if I can't contact you, you can't win). You can gain additional entries by leaving separate comments letting me know that you're a follower or have posted a link to the giveaway on your site. The deadline to enter is 11:59pm Pacific on March 6. Winners will be selected at random. Open to residents of the US and Canada.

review and tour: yesterday's promise by linda lee chaikin

At the heart of Yesterday’s Promise is an interesting plot including a murder mystery and the cutthroat diamond business during British colonialism in Africa. Unfortunately the plot gets a bit bogged down by an excessive cast of wealthy characters with various familial ties (not all of which are known to all involved) and background information on diamonds. There were times I thought I should make a list to keep the characters straight! It probably would’ve helped if some of them had been more developed, but only the two the story centers around are really fleshed out. Although it adds to the tension, it is to the detriment of the reader’s overall enjoyment of the book that Evy and Rogan (the main characters) do not interact until the final chapters. It was at the end when all the pieces come together and one sees Rogan work with Evy that Yesterday’s Promise shines.
3/5
Review copy provided by the publisher, WaterBrook Multnomah.