Promise Me by Richard Paul Evans... A Review

"Beth Cardall has a secret. For eighteen years, she has had no choice but to keep it, but on Christmas Eve 2008, all that is about to change."

Promise Me by Richard Paul Evans is filled with the magic of the Christmas season. It's 1989 and Beth Cardall's life is falling apart. Her six-year-old daughter, Charlotte, is suffering with a mysterious illness, the man of her dreams, her husband, betrays her, and she's in danger of losing her job because of all the time she has had to take off to take care of Charlotte. Most of all she's lost her ability to trust- herself or anyone else. But in a simple twist of fate, she drives in a blizzard to the 7-Eleven, the only place open on Christmas morning, and literally bumps into a gorgeous mysterious stranger as she's paying for her buttermilk. Beth noticed him starring at her... but when she see's him again at the grocery store, it seems too coincidental... his name is Matthew... he asks her out... she says no... he seems to know things about her... he pursues her anyway, and will prove to change her life dramatically... He's like an angel sent from Heaven, and Beth finally begins to trust him, ultimately falling in love... but Matthew has a secret...

Promise Me is romantic, it's about truly being in love, it's about making sacrifices for the people you love. It's a wonderful story! And a story I really enjoyed reading! The chapters are short, and at the beginning of the chapter is a short little insight from Beth's diary...

This man just keeps coming back like a flesh-covered boomerang. I hope he's not crooked too.

*Beth Cardall's Diary*

You can read this in little doses, or like I did at one sitting!( I couldn't help myself ). Richard Paul Evans writes wonderful inspirational stories, and Promise Me is no different. I was so taken by the story. The characters come to life off the pages, they feel real and are dealing with life as you and I would. But then the story is sprinkled with just a bit of magic, where you'll need to let your guard down just a little, because the story takes a wonderful little detour (a smidgen of time travel- which I loved!) that will have you falling in love and at the same time bring a tear to your eye, as Beth and Matthew take a journey together that will change the course of lives of the people around them.

This would make a wonderful gift for the reader on your list that enjoys romantic inspirational stories. Fans of Richard Paul Evans, known for his "Christmas fiction" such as The Christmas Box, and The Gift, will love this newest offering! This would also make a great Christmas read for a reading group! The choices Beth makes, the journey Beth and Matthew make, and ultimately the results of those choices would make for a great discussion. And a wonderful story for the season!

I want to thank Simon & Schuster for sending along a copy of Promise Me to review! I loved it! Promise Me is available right now from your local bookstore! *P.S. This Book is Kindle Ready!

Promise Me by Richard Paul Evans... A Review

"Beth Cardall has a secret. For eighteen years, she has had no choice but to keep it, but on Christmas Eve 2008, all that is about to change."

Promise Me by Richard Paul Evans is filled with the magic of the Christmas season. It's 1989 and Beth Cardall's life is falling apart. Her six-year-old daughter, Charlotte, is suffering with a mysterious illness, the man of her dreams, her husband, betrays her, and she's in danger of losing her job because of all the time she has had to take off to take care of Charlotte. Most of all she's lost her ability to trust- herself or anyone else. But in a simple twist of fate, she drives in a blizzard to the 7-Eleven, the only place open on Christmas morning, and literally bumps into a gorgeous mysterious stranger as she's paying for her buttermilk. Beth noticed him starring at her... but when she see's him again at the grocery store, it seems too coincidental... his name is Matthew... he asks her out... she says no... he seems to know things about her... he pursues her anyway, and will prove to change her life dramatically... He's like an angel sent from Heaven, and Beth finally begins to trust him, ultimately falling in love... but Matthew has a secret...

Promise Me is romantic, it's about truly being in love, it's about making sacrifices for the people you love. It's a wonderful story! And a story I really enjoyed reading! The chapters are short, and at the beginning of the chapter is a short little insight from Beth's diary...

This man just keeps coming back like a flesh-covered boomerang. I hope he's not crooked too.

*Beth Cardall's Diary*

You can read this in little doses, or like I did at one sitting!( I couldn't help myself ). Richard Paul Evans writes wonderful inspirational stories, and Promise Me is no different. I was so taken by the story. The characters come to life off the pages, they feel real and are dealing with life as you and I would. But then the story is sprinkled with just a bit of magic, where you'll need to let your guard down just a little, because the story takes a wonderful little detour (a smidgen of time travel- which I loved!) that will have you falling in love and at the same time bring a tear to your eye, as Beth and Matthew take a journey together that will change the course of lives of the people around them.

This would make a wonderful gift for the reader on your list that enjoys romantic inspirational stories. Fans of Richard Paul Evans, known for his "Christmas fiction" such as The Christmas Box, and The Gift, will love this newest offering! This would also make a great Christmas read for a reading group! The choices Beth makes, the journey Beth and Matthew make, and ultimately the results of those choices would make for a great discussion. And a wonderful story for the season!

I want to thank Simon & Schuster for sending along a copy of Promise Me to review! I loved it! Promise Me is available right now from your local bookstore! *P.S. This Book is Kindle Ready!

Memoir Monday... The Other Wes Moore

The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore

One Name, Two Fates...

Two young men who didn't know each other, growing up in the same tough neighborhood, in the same city, about the same age, but whose lives would turn out drastically differently... Oh and coincidentally, both young men shared the same name - Wes Moore.

"On December 11, 2000, The Baltimore Sun ran an article about how Wes, despite his troubled childhood, had just received The Rhodes Scholarship. At the same time, The Sun was running stories —eventually more than 100 in all—about four African-American men who were arrested for the murder of an off-duty Baltimore police officer during an armed robbery. One of the men convicted was just two years older than Wes, lived in the same neighborhood, and in an uncanny turn, was also named Wes Moore..." ...About the Author from his website

From Publisher's Weekly... Two hauntingly similar boys take starkly different paths in this searing tale of the ghetto. Moore, an investment banker, Rhodes scholar, and former aide to Condoleezza Rice, was intrigued when he learned that another Wes Moore, his age and from the same area of Greater Baltimore, was wanted for killing a cop. Meeting his double and delving into his life reveals deeper likenesses: raised in fatherless families and poor black neighborhoods, both felt the lure of the money and status to be gained from dealing drugs. That the author resisted the criminal underworld while the other Wes drifted into it is chalked up less to character than to the influence of relatives, mentors, and expectations that pushed against his own delinquent impulses, to the point of exiling him to military school. Moore writes with subtlety and insight about the plight of ghetto youth, viewing it from inside and out; he probes beneath the pathologies to reveal the pressures—poverty, a lack of prospects, the need to respond to violence with greater violence—that propelled the other Wes to his doom. The result is a moving exploration of roads not taken...

When Wes Moore the author read about the "other" Wes Moore, he was curious - how could two men with similar backgrounds, with the same name, turn out so differently. He wrote to the "other" Wes Moore in prison and got a response... This book sounds so interesting to me. Does this bring up the age old question of Nature versus Nurture? And how the choices we make always have consequences... sometimes good, sometimes not so good.

This book was published this past April with glowing reviews. It's available in hardcover right now, but is scheduled to be released in paperback at the end of the year (Dec. 2010). And of course, this book is Kindle Ready!

Memoir Monday... The Other Wes Moore

The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore

One Name, Two Fates...

Two young men who didn't know each other, growing up in the same tough neighborhood, in the same city, about the same age, but whose lives would turn out drastically differently... Oh and coincidentally, both young men shared the same name - Wes Moore.

"On December 11, 2000, The Baltimore Sun ran an article about how Wes, despite his troubled childhood, had just received The Rhodes Scholarship. At the same time, The Sun was running stories —eventually more than 100 in all—about four African-American men who were arrested for the murder of an off-duty Baltimore police officer during an armed robbery. One of the men convicted was just two years older than Wes, lived in the same neighborhood, and in an uncanny turn, was also named Wes Moore..." ...About the Author from his website

From Publisher's Weekly... Two hauntingly similar boys take starkly different paths in this searing tale of the ghetto. Moore, an investment banker, Rhodes scholar, and former aide to Condoleezza Rice, was intrigued when he learned that another Wes Moore, his age and from the same area of Greater Baltimore, was wanted for killing a cop. Meeting his double and delving into his life reveals deeper likenesses: raised in fatherless families and poor black neighborhoods, both felt the lure of the money and status to be gained from dealing drugs. That the author resisted the criminal underworld while the other Wes drifted into it is chalked up less to character than to the influence of relatives, mentors, and expectations that pushed against his own delinquent impulses, to the point of exiling him to military school. Moore writes with subtlety and insight about the plight of ghetto youth, viewing it from inside and out; he probes beneath the pathologies to reveal the pressures—poverty, a lack of prospects, the need to respond to violence with greater violence—that propelled the other Wes to his doom. The result is a moving exploration of roads not taken...

When Wes Moore the author read about the "other" Wes Moore, he was curious - how could two men with similar backgrounds, with the same name, turn out so differently. He wrote to the "other" Wes Moore in prison and got a response... This book sounds so interesting to me. Does this bring up the age old question of Nature versus Nurture? And how the choices we make always have consequences... sometimes good, sometimes not so good.

This book was published this past April with glowing reviews. It's available in hardcover right now, but is scheduled to be released in paperback at the end of the year (Dec. 2010). And of course, this book is Kindle Ready!

Memoir Monday... Let's Take The Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell

Let's Take The Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

There's something special about women's friendships. They can be intense, emotional, fulfilling. A common thread can link us together and sustain a friendship through long separations, careers, and men. Gail Caldwell and Caroline Knapp found that common thread. Let's Take the Long Way Home is Gail's homage to that friendship. A friendship that was the perfect recipe, except that Caroline was diagnosed with terminal cancer... Here's what the publisher writes,

“It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.”

So begins this gorgeous memoir by Pulitzer Prize winner Gail Caldwell, a testament to the power of friendship, a story of how an extraordinary bond between two women can illuminate the loneliest, funniest, hardest moments in life, including the final and ultimate challenge.

They met over their dogs. Both writers, Gail Caldwell and Caroline Knapp, author of Drinking: A Love Story, became best friends, talking about everything from their shared history of a struggle with alcohol, to their relationships with men and colleagues, to their love of books. They walked the woods of New England and rowed on the Charles River, and the miles they logged on land and water became a measure of the interior ground they covered. From disparate backgrounds but with striking emotional similarities, these two private, fiercely self-reliant women created an attachment more profound than either of them could ever have foreseen.

The friendship helped them define the ordinary moments of life as the ones worth cherishing. Then, several years into this remarkable connection, Knapp was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

With her signature exquisite prose, Caldwell mines the deepest levels of devotion and grief in this moving memoir about treasuring and losing a best friend. Let’s Take the Long Way Home is a celebration of life and of the transformations that come from intimate connection—and it affirms, once again, why Gail Caldwell is recognized as one of our bravest and most honest literary voices.

I've got my box of tissues ready, because I'll be reading Let's Take the Long Way Home this week. It's gotten a lot of praise from the reading community, and I look forward to reading it even though I know that ultimately it's a sad tale...

Memoir Monday... Let's Take The Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell

Let's Take The Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

There's something special about women's friendships. They can be intense, emotional, fulfilling. A common thread can link us together and sustain a friendship through long separations, careers, and men. Gail Caldwell and Caroline Knapp found that common thread. Let's Take the Long Way Home is Gail's homage to that friendship. A friendship that was the perfect recipe, except that Caroline was diagnosed with terminal cancer... Here's what the publisher writes,

“It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.”

So begins this gorgeous memoir by Pulitzer Prize winner Gail Caldwell, a testament to the power of friendship, a story of how an extraordinary bond between two women can illuminate the loneliest, funniest, hardest moments in life, including the final and ultimate challenge.

They met over their dogs. Both writers, Gail Caldwell and Caroline Knapp, author of Drinking: A Love Story, became best friends, talking about everything from their shared history of a struggle with alcohol, to their relationships with men and colleagues, to their love of books. They walked the woods of New England and rowed on the Charles River, and the miles they logged on land and water became a measure of the interior ground they covered. From disparate backgrounds but with striking emotional similarities, these two private, fiercely self-reliant women created an attachment more profound than either of them could ever have foreseen.

The friendship helped them define the ordinary moments of life as the ones worth cherishing. Then, several years into this remarkable connection, Knapp was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

With her signature exquisite prose, Caldwell mines the deepest levels of devotion and grief in this moving memoir about treasuring and losing a best friend. Let’s Take the Long Way Home is a celebration of life and of the transformations that come from intimate connection—and it affirms, once again, why Gail Caldwell is recognized as one of our bravest and most honest literary voices.

I've got my box of tissues ready, because I'll be reading Let's Take the Long Way Home this week. It's gotten a lot of praise from the reading community, and I look forward to reading it even though I know that ultimately it's a sad tale...

The Cradle by Patrick Somerville... A Review & Giveaway!

"There are two kinds of people in the world," Marissa said.

"There are people who understand that everything matters and people who don't understand that everything matters."

Congratulations to Linda, Darcy & Ashley who each won a copy of The Cradle! Thanks to EVERYONE who joined the fun, blogged and tweeted!

The Cradle by Patrick Somerville opens with a very pregnant Marissa describing "the cradle" that she was rocked in as a child, that was supposedly from the Civil War, and went missing after her mother abandoned the family when Marissa was 15, and a mysterious break-in occurred shortly there after. Marissa asks her husband Matt to find it. She wants the cradle for her baby, just as she had it as a baby. It is important to her... he wouldn't understand because he was an orphan... What this means is finding Marissa's mother, even though Marissa has no idea where she is... Matt is a hero to her, he's pretty good at finding keys, why should a cradle be so different?

The next chapter fast forwards 10 years to another family, Rene Owen and her husband Bill, dealing with their 19 year old son going off to war. Rene is desperate not to have her son go off to war. The reason is a deep down pain, a lost love in another war many years before, and a secret that she's kept hidden just as long.

How Patrick Somerville weaves these two stories together is what is magical. When I started reading The Cradle, I thought I was in for a light read. What I got was a deceptively complicated story, that surprised and delighted me. When Matt makes the simple gesture of humoring his wife and trying to find the cradle, little does he know that he's going on quite an adventure that will take him all the way to Antarctica! As he follows the trail of the cradle, he stumbles upon long kept secrets of Marissa's family, which stir his own childhood memories and dormant feelings. Rene Owen's story alternates with Matt and his search for "the cradle", and in doing so the anticipation of each story grows. Hints of a connection are sprinkled in both story lines and there are no earth shattering revelations, but that is what makes the story special- the seamless connection you find at the end. Along the way, the author challenges the reader to think about what being a family means, what being a parent means, and what value a human life holds. The characters are believable, the writing is good, and the story innocently captures your attention. Thought-provoking and at times heartbreaking, The Cradle by Patrick Somerville is a very satisfying read in a mere 200 pages. The search may have started out for the cradle, but everyone finds something different at the end of the story. One thing we all find at the end is hope...

The Cradle would make a great reading group pick. There is definitely great material for a discussion! Here's the Reading Group Guide for The Cradle. You can learn more about Patrick Somerville by visiting his website, and Patrick also has a wonderful essay about how the story for The Cradle came about at Hachette Book Group. I want to also thank Valerie of Hachette Book Group for sending me a copy of The Cradle for review!

Courtesy of Hachette Book Group I also have 3 copies of The Cradle by Patrick Somerville to give away! Here's how to enter...

To Enter this giveaway...

*For one entry leave me a comment with your email address!

*Get an extra entry for following my blog! Just leave a comment letting me know you're a follower! ( Not a follower yet? No problem, sign up by clicking on the 'followers" button on the sidebar to the right! Just let me know you became a new follower!)

*Blog or tweet about this giveaway and leave me the link.

This giveaway is open to US and Canadian residents only (No PO boxes). The books will be shipped to the winners directly from the publisher. Contest ends 11:59pm EST on May 8th. I will randomly pick the winners the next day and email them! (please check your email.. winner must reply to me within 3 days! Thanks!) Good Luck!

*P.S. This Book is Kindle Ready!