Mailbox Monday was created by The Printed Page. It is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their home last week.
Mailbox Monday is currently on tour, hosted by a different blog each month. The January host is Lori’s Reading Corner.
A variety this week. One print book, an audiobook and and eGalley.
For review from TLC Tours:
Scent of Darkness
by Margot Berwin
Evangeline is eighteen years old when her grandmother gives her the ultimate gift-a scent she has created just for her. From the moment Eva places a drop on her neck, her entire life changes. Previously unnoticed, she becomes the object of intense desire for everyone around her. Men dance close to her; women dip their noses deep into her hair; even the cats outside her bedroom cry to be near her. Gabriel, the quiet student Eva has admired from afar, falls head-over-heels in love with her. But soon the gift begins to control Eva’s life: strangers follow her around, sniffing and touching her at every turn. When Eva meets Michael… more
For review from Audiobook Jukebox:
Painted Girls
by Cathy Marie Buchanan
Paris. 1878. Following their father’s sudden death, the van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without his wages, and with the small amount their laundress mother earns disappearing into the absinthe bottle, eviction from their lodgings seems imminent. With few options for work, Marie is dispatched to the Paris Opéra, where for a scant seventy francs a month, she will be trained to enter the famous ballet. Her older sister, Antoinette, finds work — and the love of a dangerous young man — as an extra in a stage adaptation of Émile Zola’s naturalist masterpiece L’Assommoir.
For review from Soho Books through NetGalley:
Man In The Empty Suit
by Sean Ferrell
Say you’re a time traveler and you’ve already toured the entirety of human history. After a while, the outside world might lose a little of its luster. That’s why this time traveler celebrates his birthday partying with himself. Every year, he travels to an abandoned hotel in New York City in 2071, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, and drinks twelve-year-old Scotch (lots of it) with all the other versions of who he has been and who he will be. Sure, the party is the same year after year, but at least it’s one party where he can really, well, be himself. The year he turns 39, though, the party takes a stressful turn for the worse. Before he … more
What are you reading?
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© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Winter is not greatest time to see birds in the Midwest. There are still year-round residents here like the woodpeckers, cardinals, finches, doves and the ever present House Sparrows and starlings, but many more have gone south in search of food. Most birds can tolerate cold temperatures, but those with a primarily insect diet need to move to a warmer climate.
So it’s no surprise that I haven’t had much luck finding any new birds to photograph this past month. It’s been bleak and colorless walking along the trails. The pond is partially frozen and on my last few visits there weren’t even any ducks.
The trees are bare and sparse making it easy to see the remnants of summer bird activity in abandoned nests. In the spring they are so well hidden among the leaves that it is almost impossible to find them.
I encountered this guy at the larger, main pond. He didn’t seem too happy to see me. I tried to get closer but he kept swimming away and diving under the vegetation. I’m pretty sure this is a beaver although I have never seen one at the pond before. They are usually several miles away, messing up the river.
Robins are still here
I did find one bird this week that was willing to pose for me and that was Mr. Robin. He was featured here on Wordless Wednesday.
Contrary to popular belief, not all robins migrate south for the winter. And south is relative to the robin. The birds I’m seeing now may have come here from Canada, while my backyard robin has gone to southern Illinois.
Once nesting season ends, robins leave the backyards to form large flocks. These flocks will move around in search of food. Robins eat worms and bugs in the summer but will switch to berries in the winter. I often see groups of them in my Eastern Cedar gobbling down the berries. Never park your car under a cedar tree with robins in it, the results can be messy!
Saturday Snapshot is hosted by Alyce at At Home With Books. Visit her blog to see more great photos or add your own.
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
The Last Runaway
by Tracy Chevalier
Narrated by Kate Reading
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Publish Date: January 24, 2013
Format: Audio, 9 hours | 51 minutes
Audio Listening Level: Easy – Intermediate
Rating: 4 of 5
Honor Bright, a young English Quaker woman, is traveling with her sister on a ship headed to America. Her sister has a fiance in Ohio and Honor has accompanied her with hopes to begin a new life after a difficult romantic breakup back home. It’s 1850 and the voyage to America is not easy for Honor who suffers from constant seasickness. Soon after their arrival her sister is struck down by Yellow Fever and Honor is now on her own in a foreign country.
Honor continues the journey to Ohio and marries a local man soon after arriving. She finds America a much different and harsher land than England. She struggles to adapt and finds fitting in with her new family to be difficult. The housing is strange and unfamiliar. The words used to describe foods, birds, flowers and even the quilting styles and patterns are different.
When Honor learns about runaway slaves and The Underground Railroad, she feel compelled to help those passing through their land by offering food and shelter, much to the disapproval of her new family. Ultimately Honor must make a decision to act on her convictions or concede to the demands of her family to not interfere.
The descriptions are vivid and detailed and the setting in a small Quaker community comes to life. There is quite a lot of detail on stitching and quilting which I found interesting. Having taken a traditional hand quilting class years ago I have an appreciation of the difficulty in stitching and the amount of time involved. My ‘quilt’ is still unfinished 30 years later, but I digress.
Not only did I enjoy the story, but I loved the audio production. The narration flowed smoothly and Kate Reading’s voice was a pleasure to listen to. Her character’s voices were realistic and believable. It was very engaging and I flew through it listening to the entire book in only a few days.
From the publisher’s description I was expecting a book about slavery but this was a story about a young woman’s journey from innocence. Through Honor’s experiences and her letters back home we feel her anguish and uncertainty as immigrant far from home. She was forced to make critical decisions and The Underground Railroad became a focal point for her rather than the focus of the novel.
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Source: Review copy.
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Cover of Snow
by Jenny Milchman
Genre: Suspense/Mystery
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Publish Date: January 15, 2013
Format: Hardcover | 336 pages
Nora Hamilton wakes from a foggy sleep and immediately senses something is wrong. She has overslept for an appointment with a client; why didn’t her husband wake her up? She soon discovers the gruesome answer when she finds him hanging from a light fixture, an apparent suicide.
There was no note and Nora does not believe her husband, a member of the local police force, would kill himself. As far as she knows he did not have a reason. But did Nora really know her husband? Her mother-in-law, an evil, unlikable woman, is unwilling to answer questions and doesn’t even want Nora in her house. Brendan’s coworkers and friends on the police force are evasive and avoid direct answers.
The more Nora investigates, the bigger the mystery becomes. She finds out that Brendan had a brother that died in a drowning accident on a lake, and he never told her about it. While Nora does seem a bit clueless at times — shouldn’t she know more about her husband and his family? — she is now determined to get answers.
Set in the winter in a small town in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, the atmosphere is often moody and bleak. There is an ever-present cold chill and the snow itself becomes a character. Adding to the tension, the locals of this small town are secretive and clannish and outsiders such as Nora are viewed with suspicion.
Most of the book is narrated by Nora and written in the first person. Interspersed throughout the book are a series of chapters written in the third person from the perspective of several key characters in the story. This technique gives the reader insight into their motives and actions; things Nora didn’t know and couldn’t tell us.
The action is slow in the early chapters as Nora begins to piece together the puzzle of her husband’s death. The pace picks up dramatically after the first third of the novel and the story becomes more compelling, rewarding the reader with a suspenseful thriller.
A nice debut from a promising new author.
About the Author
Jenny Milchman is a suspense writer from New Jersey. Her debut novel, COVER OF SNOW, is forthcoming from Ballantine in January 2013 and is available for pre-order now. Her short story The Closet will be published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in November 2012. Another short story, The Very Old Man, has been an Amazon bestseller, and the short work Black Sun on Tupper Lake will appear in the anthology ADIRONDACK MYSTERIES II.
Jenny is the Chair of the International Thriller Writers Debut Authors Program, and the founder of Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day, which was celebrated in all 50 states and four foreign countries in 2011.
Jenny hosts the Made It Moments forum on her blog, which has featured more than 200 international bestsellers, Edgar winners, and independent authors, co-hosts the literary series Writing Matters, 
which attracts guests coast-to-coast and has received national media attention, and teaches writing and publishing for New York Writers Workshop and Arts By The People.
Visit the author’s website for more information.
Connect on Twitter. Click HERE for the tour schedule.
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Source: Review copy provided by JKS Communications
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Almost wordless: While out walking in the nature park a few days ago I saw a couple of robins splashing around in a stream. On Sunday there was a pair of robins in my backyard. When the winter flocks begin to break up, spring is near.
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More Wordless Wednesday. © 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Mailbox Monday was created by The Printed Page. It is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their home last week.
Mailbox Monday is currently on tour, hosted by a different blog each month. The January host is Lori’s Reading Corner.
I received a few print books for review last week.
For review from LibraryThing:
The Lost Art of Mixing
by Erica Bauermeister
Lillian and her restaurant have a way of drawing people together. There’s Al, the accountant who finds meaning in numbers and ritual; Chloe, a budding chef who hasn’t learned to trust after heartbreak; Finnegan, quiet and steady as a tree, who can disappear into the background despite his massive height; Louise, Al’s wife, whose anger simmers just below the boiling point; and Isabelle, whose memories are slowly slipping from her grasp. And there’s Lillian herself, whose life has taken a turn she didn’t expect. . . .
For review from Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam :
The Fever Tree
by Jennifer McVeigh
Frances Irvine, left destitute in the wake of her father’s sudden death, has been forced to abandon her life of wealth and privilege in London and emigrate to the Southern Cape of Africa. 1880 South Africa is a country torn apart by greed. In this remote and inhospitable land she becomes entangled with two very different men—one driven by ambition, the other by his ideals. Only when the rumor of a smallpox epidemic takes her into the dark heart of the diamond mines does she see her path to happiness.
For review from Atria Books:
The Seduction
by M.J. Rose
From the author of The Book of Lost Fragrances comes a haunting novel about a grieving woman who discovers the lost letters of novelist Victor Hugo, awakening a mystery that spans centuries.
What follows is an intricately plotted and atmospheric tale of suspense with a spellbinding ghost story at its heart, by one of America’s most gifted and imaginative novelists.
What are you reading?
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© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
The Brown Thrasher is a medium-sized song bird that can be found in the Eastern and Central US and parts of Southern Canada. Although they are fairly common, populations are declining slowly throughout their range. They like to hide in shrubby, dense cover near the ground and their song can often be heard before the bird can be seen. They can be difficult to find and, for me, almost impossible to photograph.
I took this picture on a rainy day in September during migration. It’s not the greatest photo of a Brown Thrasher (the lighting was bad and I was too far away) but this has been the only opportunity I’ve had to get a shot of one.
The image above is the entire frame at 250mm, which is full zoom on my lens. The bird is sitting in a fallen, dead tree and paused just long enough for one shot.
To get the closeup in the first picture, I cropped out just the bird and did a little cheating enhancing with photo editing software to sharpen and brighten the image. It’s not going to win any prizes but it does give you an idea of what this elusive bird looks like.
Brown Thrashers are migrants and travel north in the spring for breeding season. Some will remain in the southeast year-round.
You are most likely to see a Brown Thrasher at the forest edge near the ground when walking along wooded paths and hedgerows. I’ve seen them kicking around in the leaf litter under shrubs but generally they are secretive and hard to find. They don’t usually visit backyard feeders.
The Brown Thrasher is the state bird of Georgia and ironically when I visited Atlanta a few years ago it was one of the few birds I saw in the city. Since I was there on business, I didn’t have my camera with me.
Saturday Snapshot is hosted by Alyce at At Home With Books. Visit her blog to see more great photos or add your own.
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Under My Apple Tree 