Literary Giveaway Blog Hop Winner

The winner of Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor (chosen using random.org) is:

MAE

I've sent Mae an email.

Thanks to Leeswammes Blog for hosting this great hop and to everyone who participated. I added a bunch of books to my TBR list!

ESCAPE TO THE PAST WITH: The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan

I finally got a chance to sit down with a good book.

The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan is a lovely, moving story of three sisters living in extreme poverty in Paris in the late 1800's. At seventeen, the eldest, Antoinette, works as a walk-on at the Opera, a dead-end job for ballet dancers who have failed to move up the ranks. Thirteen-year-old Marie is the middle child, intelligent, kind, and ambitious. Charlotte, the beautiful pampered pet of the family is eight. As the book opens, their father has just died and the wolf is at the door in the form of a landlord demanding back rent. Their mother, a laundress, cannot pay since the little money she earns she spends on absinthe.


Marie and Charlotte have little choice but to follow Antoinette to the ballet school. She presents them to the headmaster in hope that he will take them on. Marie is technically too old to start the rigorous training, but she has learned enough from Antoinette to impress the headmaster. Charlotte is talented and beautiful. There is no doubt that she’ll be accepted. But Antoinette had hoped to spare her sisters the life of the Opera. Girls as poor as they are cannot put in the hours of work needed to succeed without the support of a protector, a wealthy man to smooth the path. And the wealthy men expect things in return.

The book is told in the alternating viewpoints of Antoinette and Marie. The options available to young women in their social class are pretty grim. Working conditions are harsh and the pay poor. Sexual exploitation is rampant.

When Antoinette meets a rough young man named Emile Abadie, she trades her unsteady work as a low-level dancer for a temporary job as a low-level actress in order to spend more time with him. Antoinette has spent so much of her life mothering her sisters, sacrificing for them, defying her mother, being beaten down and rejected, that Abadie’s attention is a balm. He makes her feel adored. She feels that they understand one another. Although Antoinette believes that he loves her, Adadie is bad news and he draws her deeper into trouble.

Marie is old enough to see girls a few stages above her attracting protectors. But Marie attracts the attention of a different sort of man. The painter, Edgar Degas, who lurks around the ballet school watching the students, asks her to model for him. Despite her uneasiness, the money he offers is good.

For a brief time, the girls are succeeding, but it is a fragile success. Too many demands are placed on them by their employers, their mother, Abadie, Degas– and their own hopes and dreams.

The Painted Girls takes the reader deep into the darker side of Paris of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.  The world of the Opera is opened up for us and we are able to glimpse the desperate lives of the young dancers. The author makes the workaday world of the lower classes vividly real by showing us laundresses, actors, prostitutes, and even criminals at work and play. It’s a gripping story. But the best thing is the bond between the sisters. So much of the book is heart wrenching, yet it is an uplifting book after all.

The book is beautifully written. Inspired by the true-life circumstances of the model for Degas’ Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, the author blends in themes of love and loyalty with ambition, art, Zola’s masterpiece about poverty and alcoholism, and theories prevalent at the time of criminal physiognomy–the belief that you could tell a criminal by the shape of his skull and facial features. It all makes for fascinating reading.


I’m adding this to my historical fiction challenge (hosted by Historical Tapestry) and to the Library Books Reading Challenge (hosted by Book Dragon’s Lair).

LITERARY GIVEAWAY BLOG HOP- 2/913-2/13/13

Welcome to another blog hop giveaway!







Things have been crazy around my house these past few weeks. I haven't gotten any reading done and I'm really feeling the lack. I had to return a book to the library unopened that I'd waited a long time to get and couldn't renew. And I'm almost at that point with another library book that I'd been looking forward to but haven't even touched. I just bought a book I'm dying to read and I've won a couple books recently. . . I really need a vacation.

But that's not what this post is about. This post is about the exciting literary giveaway blog hop hosted by Leeswammes' Blog. 

This is the seventh literary giveaway hop. The rules are simple. The giveaway has to be book related and the book has to have literary merit but that merit can be broadly defined.

Isn't this a wonderful idea for a giveaway hop? I can't wait to see the books being showcased!

For my giveaway (open to US and Canadian readers), I'm offering a copy of The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa. I loved this book! My review is here.

 

The goodreads blurb is:

 

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem--ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.

 

She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.

And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities--like the Housekeeper’s shoe size--and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

 

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.

To enter, just leave a comment with your email address so I can contact you if you're the winner. You don't have to be a follower to enter, but followers will get an extra entry. Let me know if you follow by GFC or email subscription.

Be sure to visit the other participating blogs. There are over 40! And thank you to Leeswammes for hosting!



Linky List:

Leeswammes The Book Garden Sam Still Reading Candle Beam Book Blog Ciska's Book Chest Too Fond Alex in Leeds Under a Gray Sky Bibliosue The Book Club Blog Fingers & Prose Lori Howell Rikki's Teleidoscope Girl vs Bookshelf Lizzy's Literary Life (Europe) Booklover Book Reviews The Blog of Litwits Reading World (USA/Can) Seaside Book Nook Curiosity Killed the Bookworm The Book Diva's Reads Breieninpeking (Europe) 2606 Books and Counting Giraffe Days Lucybird's Book Blog

Roof Beam Reader The Relentless Reader Read in a Single Sitting My Diary (Malaysia) Heavenali Dolce Belezza (USA) The Misfortune of Knowing My Devotional Thoughts Nishita's Rants and Raves Book Nympho Kaggsysbookishramblings Quixotic Magpie Lost Generation Reader BookBelle Under My Apple Tree (USA) Mondays with Mac Page Plucker

DREAMING OF BOOKS- BLOG HOP WINNER

I can't believe how quickly this week went by. I didn't get enough of a chance to explore all the many wonderful blogs. I'll have to continue my visits in the upcoming days.

The winner of Code Name Verity and The Queen's Daughter was chosen using random.org.

Congratulations to:

AEKZ2

 

I've sent you an email. Thank you to all the participants. It is great to see so much book-loving enthusiasm. And thank you as always to the hard-working hosts at I am a Reader, Not a Writer and Martha's Bookshelf. None of this would be possible without their organizational skills and dedication!

DREAMING OF BOOKS GIVEAWAY HOP- 1/18-1/24

Once again, I'm taking part in the Dreaming of Books Giveaway Hop (this is the third annual hop.) It's a great way to liven up the middle of January! (It starts on Friday, January 18th.)

The hop is co-hosted by I am a Reader, Not a Writer and Martha's Bookshelf.

The books I'm giving away are both YA historical fiction. The first book is Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. My review is here.  The goodreads blurb is:

I have two weeks. You’ll shoot me at the end no matter what I do.

That’s what you do to enemy agents. It’s what we do to enemy agents. But I look at all the dark and twisted roads ahead and cooperation is the easy way out. Possibly the only way out for a girl caught red-handed doing dirty work like mine — and I will do anything, anything, to avoid SS-Hauptsturmführer von Linden interrogating me again.

He has said that I can have as much paper as I need. All I have to do is cough up everything I can remember about the British War Effort. And I’m going to. But the story of how I came to be here starts with my friend Maddie. She is the pilot who flew me into France — an Allied Invasion of Two.

We are a sensational team.

And the second book is my novel The Queen's Daughter.

Joan’s mother is Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, the most beautiful woman in the world. Her father is Henry II, the king of England and a renowned military leader. She loves them both—so what is she to do when she’s forced to choose between them? As her parents’ arguments grow ever more vicious, Joan begins to feel like a political pawn.

When her parents marry her off to the king of Sicily, Joan finds herself stuck with a man ten years her senior. She doesn’t love her husband, and she can’t quite forget her childhood crush, the handsome Lord Raymond.

As Joan grows up, she begins to understand that her parents’ worldview is warped by their political ambitions, and hers, in turn, has been warped by theirs. Is it too late to figure out whom to trust? And, more importantly, whom to love?

This giveaway will be for US readers only this time. To enter, just leave a comment below with an email address so I can contact you if you're the winner. If you're a follower of Reading World (GFC or email subscriber) mention that also in the comments section and you'll get an extra entry. 

As per the blog hop instructions, the hop runs from the 18th through the 24th. Be sure to visit all the participating blogs!

 

BOOK REVIEW: The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

I never would have heard of The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa except that it was on the list of Favorite Book Club Books on Anne’s blog–My Head is Full of Books. Her capsule review intrigued me, and my library had the book, so I’m starting off my library challenge (hosted by Book Dragon’s Lair) with this little gem.

The novel is quite short. I picked it up after work and read it in a couple of hours. The protagonist is a housekeeper, a single mother of a ten-year-old boy, struggling to make ends meet. She is assigned to a new job, keeping house for a middle-aged, one-time college professor with brain trauma. A car accident many years early has left him with only 80 minutes of short term memory. Nevertheless, the Professor has retained his fascination with numbers, facility with complex mathematics, and love of teaching. Each day, the housekeeper reintroduces herself to him and they begin their relationship anew. The Professor finds common ground by relating personal things (birthday, shoe size) to numbers and formulas. While this oddity has driven away nine previous housekeepers, this particular young woman is intrigued and challenged.

The relationship deepens when the Professor discovers (and rediscovers) the existence of the housekeeper’s son. He nicknames him Root because the flat shape of his head reminds him of a square root sign. Root thrives under the attentiveness and caring of this strange father figure, but he also matures as he learns how to be protective of a person who must live with the terrible knowledge that he will not remember anything he is experiencing.

The story is beautifully poignant. While terrifying to imagine a life where one has only 80 minutes of memory, the Professor’s ability to find joy and beauty in mathematics and the ability of the housekeeper and her son to build a lasting friendship out of 80 minute vignettes, demonstrates how much life can be lived in the moment.

I didn’t read it for a book club, but I can see how it would be a great book club pick!

ESCAPE TO THE PAST WITH: Trapeze by Simon Mawer

I missed the last couple meetings of my bookclub–too many end of the year commitments and too much work to do. But this month’s book choice is a historical fiction selection, making me all the more determined to be there. And so, I read Trapeze by Simon Mawer.

Trapeze is set in England and occupied France during World War II. Its heroine is Marian Sutro (alias Alice, alias Anne-Marie Larouche.) Marian is a young and beautiful woman working for the WAAF in England when she is approached by a top secret military organization that wants to recruit her as a spy. Marian’s main qualification is that she is fluent in French. (Although her father is British, her mother is French, and she grew up effortlessly bilingual.)

Marian is an adventuress at heart. She accepts even though she is given a 50-50 chance of survival. After a rather grueling training period, during which she meets some interesting and mysterious people, she finds out what she is being trained to do–she will be parachuted into France to join the resistance workers there, to serve as a courier.

The thought of going to France thrills Marian, and not simply for patriotic reasons. There is a man in Paris, a man who may have been an old school girl's crush or who may have been something very much more. The fact that he is also a brilliant physicist, and the British government would like for her to contact him on the sly, makes the journey all that more appealing–and all the more dangerous.

Trapeze is an exciting, emotional account of a young girl trying to test her own limits, to discover what she is capable of in a world turned upside down by war. Marian is an admirable, if somewhat emotionally muddled, protagonist. As a fictionalized peek into the actions of the women of the Special Operations Executive, the book is an informative story. Still, I couldn’t help drawing comparisons to Code Name Verity as I was reading, even though the plots are quite different. Trapeze is more straight-forward, and in some ways a gentler read, despite its war-time horrors. Trapeze is tension filled, but just not edge-of-my-seat, can’t-put-it-down the way Verity was. I can recommend Trapeze to historical fiction fans and to WWII book fans, but I think I might have enjoyed it more if I didn’t still have Code Name Verity so fresh in my mind. And that’s unfair to this book which is so strong in its own right.

This is book 2 in the Historical Fiction Challenge, hosted by Historical Tapestry.