The Lucky One

Description

When U.S. Marine Logan Thibault finds a photograph of a smiling young woman half-buried in the dirt during his third tour of duty in Iraq, his first instinct is to toss it aside. Instead, he brings it back to the base for someone to claim, but when no one does, he finds himself always carrying the photo in his pocket. Soon Thibault experiences a sudden streak of luck—winning poker games and even surviving deadly combat that kills two of his closest buddies. Only his best friend, Victor, seems to have an explanation for his good fortune: the photograph—his lucky charm.
Back home in Colorado, Thibault can’t seem to get the photo—and the woman in it—out of his mind. Believing that she somehow holds the key to his destiny, he sets out on a journey across the country to find her, never expecting the strong but vulnerable woman he encounters in Hampton, North Carolina—Elizabeth, a divorced mother with a young son—to be the girl he’s been waiting his whole life to meet. Caught off guard by the attraction he feels, Thibault keeps the story of the photo, and his luck, a secret. As he and Elizabeth embark upon a passionate and all-consuming love affair, the secret he is keeping will soon threaten to tear them apart—destroying not only their love, but also their lives.
Filled with tender romance and terrific suspense, The Lucky One is Nicholas Sparks at his best—an unforgettable story about the surprising paths our lives often take and the power of fate to guide us to true and everlasting love.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, by Kim Edwards

This stunning and heart-rending novel begins on a winter’s night in 1964.  David and Norah, married barely a year and very deeply in love are expecting their first child.  Because of a blizzard, David is forced to take charge of the delivery, and immediately after the birth of a baby boy, he is shocked to see a twin sister.  On seeing her, he tells his wife that the twin was very tiny and was dead at birth.

Pretty Little Liars

Pretty Little Liars Flawless Perfect Unbelievable Wicked Heartless Killer Wanted Twisted Ruthless
Author	Sara Shepard
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Young-adult fiction
Publisher	HarperTeen
Media type	Print (paperback)

Pretty Little Liars is a series of young adult novels by Sara Shepard. The series follows the lives of four girls — Spencer, Hanna, Aria, n Emily  — whose clique falls apart after the disappearance of their leader, Alison. The year later, they begin receiving various messages from someone using the name "A" who threatens to expose their secrets. Originally developed as a television series by book packaging company Alloy Entertainment, the idea was described as "Desperate Housewives for teens." Alloy met author Shepard and gave her the property to develop into a book series. The first novel, Pretty Little Liars, was released in October 2006. It was followed by Flawless and Perfect in March and August 2007, Unbelievable and Wicked in May and November 2008, Killer in June 2009, and Heartless in January 2010. Wanted, announced as the eighth and final installment, was released on June 8, 2010. In December 2010 Shepard announced that she would write four more novels in the series, beginning with Twisted, to be released on July 5, 2011.
A television series based on the novels premiered on ABC Family on June 8, 2010. The series stars Troian Bellisario as Spencer, Ashley Benson as Hanna, Lucy Hale as Aria, and Shay Mitchell as Emily.

Added to my books! add my review Loading... Loading... Pretty Little Liars by Sara Shepard (Goodreads Author) Pretty Little Liars (Pretty Little Liars, #1) 4.07  ·  rating details  ·  8,768 ratings  ·  1,715 reviews Three years ago, Alison disappeared after a slumber party, not to be seen since. Her friends at the elite Pennsylvania school mourned her, but they also breathed secret sighs of relief. Each of them guarded a secret that only Alison had known. Now they have other dirty little secrets, secrets that could sink them in their gossip-hungry world.

Book Jacket Summary BookPage calls Nicholas Sparks, "a modern master of fateful love stories," and his phenomenal bestsellers- The Notebook, Message in a Bottle, and A Walk to Remember- have made him one of America's most beloved storytellers. Here, in his newest work, Sparks tells a story about making the greatest commitment of all...loving someone forever. The Rescue When confronted by raging fires or deadly accidents, volunteer fireman Taylor McAden feels compelled to take terrifying risks - risks no one else in the department would ever take - to save lives. But there is one leap of faith Taylor can't bring himself to make: He can't fall in love. For all his adult years, Taylor has sought out women who need to be rescued, women he leaves as soon as their crisis is over, as soon as the relationship starts to become truly intimate. Then, one day, a raging, record-breaking storm hits his small Southern town. Denise Holton, a young single mother, is driving through it when her car skids off the road. With her is her four-year-old son, Kyle, a boy with severe learning disabilities and for whom she has sacrificed everything. Unconscious and bleeding, she-but not Kyle-will be found by Taylor McAden. And when she wakes, the chilling truth becomes clear to both of them: Kyle is gone. During the search for Kyle, the connection, the lifeline, between Taylor and Denise takes root. Taylor doesn't know that this rescue will be different from all the others, demanding far more than raw physical courage. That it will lead him to the possibility of his own rescue from a life lived without love. That it will require him to open doors to his past that were slammed shut by pain. That it will dare him to live life to the fullest by daring to love. In The Rescue Nicholas Sparks weaves his inimitable spell, immersing us in the passions and the surprising complexities of modern relationships-and in doing so, teaching us something about our own.

The Rescue Media Reviews

Kirkus Reviews High-stakes weepmeister Sparks (A Walk to Remember, 1999, etc.) opts for a happy ending his fourth time out. His writing has improved-though it's still the equivalent of paint-by-numbers-and he makes use this time of at least a vestige of credible psychology.  Library Journal Though detractors may say he writes "like a girl," the would-be king of romance continues to please his readers.... This novel will appeal to female readers seeking another romantic story with a happy ending.  Publishers Weekly Because these characters are preordained lovers, their feelings prescribed by fiction conventions, their psychology amounts to little more than a profusion of banality. Yet Sparks's narrative acquires immediacy when his characters' exaggerated emotions compel immoderate actions, and his readers will surely delight at these moments of heightened expressiveness.

The Rescue Reader Reviews Rated of 5 by Audrey The Rescue - Heartwarming Book I too read this book in two days. I absolutely loved it, and identified with all the aspects of their relationship - the falling in love, the heartbreak. Also the relationship between Kyle the young boy and his mum made me cry. Thoroughly ...   Rated of 5 by Claire Amazing! This book is so heartwrenching. It is one of Sparks' best. I cried, laughed and smiled throughout the entire text. I could not put it down. Read this and all Nicholas Sparks books.

Book of the week
Africa on the doorstep




Lawrence Norfolk on a shocking encounter that reverberates from a Nigerian beach to middle England


Nigerian beach A beach at sunset in Lagos, Nigeria. Photograph: Brennan Linsley/AP


A Frankenstein-like irony attends writers and books overtaken by the events they describe. In 1805, in the Prussian town of Jena, the philosopher Hegel was racing to finish The Phenomenology of Spirit with a draconian publishing contract hanging over his head. The Spirit hypothesised by Hegel was exemplified by Napoleon - a "world soul" whose armies were sweeping across Europe. But the emperor's arrival with his army, his victory at the battle of Jena and his occupation of the university town were more "world" than the philosopher needed. He promptly decamped to Bamberg to edit a small newspaper, and The Phenomenology was published (late) to minimal applause.


Hegel's example might have warned Chris Cleave what can happen to books when their stories escape the covers. In late June 2005, I reviewed Cleave's first novel, Incendiary, which took the form of a book-length "letter" from a working-class woman (brilliantly ventriloquised by Cleave) to Osama bin Laden after the suicide bombing of Arsenal football stadium, in which her husband and son have perished. The book's official publication date was July 7. That, of course, was the date chosen by a group of Islamic suicide bombers to blow up three tube trains and a bus in London, killing more than 50 people.


The 7/7 attacks dwarfed the mere publication of a book. At the end of the year, the publisher, which had hoped with justification for great things, cited the coincidence as the cause of the book's relative lack of success. Incendiary got lost in the smoke that billowed prophetically from its pages: too much "world". After that bruising encounter with the news, one might have expected Cleave to draw in his horns, shy away from the engagé or otherwise take the road to Bamberg. One would be wrong.


The Other Hand is an ambitious and fearless gallop from the jungles of Africa via a shocking encounter on a Nigerian beach to the media offices of London and domesticity in leafy suburbia. Part-thriller, part-multicultural Aga saga, the book enmeshes its characters in the issues of immigration, globalisation, political violence and personal accountability. Lists of themes are often review-speak for "worthy but dull", but not in this case. Cleave immerses the reader in the worlds of his characters with an unshakable confidence that we will find them as gripping and vital as he does. Mostly, that confidence is justified.


The book begins in an immigration detention centre where Little Bee, a 16-year-old Ibo girl from Nigeria, has spent the last two years honing skills that point back to horrific past events and forward to a hoped-for future. Making herself look unattractive to men is the first of several mysterious threads that Cleave slowly winds in. Learning the Queen's English (from the quality broadsheets only, she specifies) has a more obvious relevance. "Excuse me for learning your language properly. I am here to tell you a real story. I did not come here to talk to you about the bright African colours."


The colours, when they come - on a beach in Nigeria - are certainly not bright. The route back to them begins with Little Bee's inadvertent escape from the centre with three women, variously cheerful, bewildered and suicidal, and a phone call to a columnist and journalist, Andrew O'Rourke. Little Bee encountered Andrew and his wife Sarah in Nigeria. Now he is dismayed to hear from her.


From this small mystery, the rest of Little Bee's story begins to unfold. Something has happened that has not only left its mark on a teenage Ibo girl but has shaken the O'Rourke family to its foundations. Ensconced in Kingston-upon-Thames, Andrew suffers from depression. Sarah, who edits a women's magazine called Nixie, pursues an unhappy affair. Their young son Charlie dresses and lives as Batman. Their story is narrated by Sarah - necessarily so, because in the time between Little Bee's telephone call and her arrival in Kingston, Andrew commits suicide.


"It started on the day we first met Little Bee, on a lonely beach in Nigeria. The only souvenir I have of that first meeting is an absence where the middle finger of my left hand used to be. The amputation is quite clean. In place of my finger is a stump, a phantom digit that used to be responsible for the E, D and C keys on my laptop."


The "it" is teasingly unspecified, and the term "amputation" is not quite honest, as it turns out, but Cleave's unobtrusive skill in sentences like that allows the world of the machete to be glimpsed through the world of the laptop. Most of the action has already happened when Little Bee and Sarah reunite. Through their recollections, an African past surfaces slowly in an English present. Cleave doles out clues and hints. Then, within a perfectly paced flashback, he has Little Bee tell how she first met the O'Rourkes in Nigeria, and what happened on the beach.


A special place in hell is reserved for the taxi-drivers who shout the name of the murderer outside Les Misérables to under-tipping passengers. Right next door to them sit the reviewers who give away the surprises in books. Cleave showed in Incendiary that he was equal to the challenges of a large-scale violent setpiece scene. This one is more compressed, more intense and more chilling. I never thought I would read the phrase "rang like a bell" with anything but a yawn. But I shuddered.


The book's kernel of violence throws up a stark choice and drives a wedge between Sarah and Andrew O'Rourke. The different choices each makes on the beach together drive the action and raise a larger question. Whose experience should we accept as authentic? Is The Other Hand a book about what happens in Africa (to Little Bee), or what people in Kingston-upon-Thames (such as Sarah) think about what happens in Africa?


Like the unnamed heroine of Incendiary, Sarah O'Rourke is a far from perfect heroine: a semi-neglectful mother and unfaithful wife (the trip to Nigeria was an ill-conceived marriage-saving exercise). Cleave has some fun at her expense. Here she recalls getting ready to go to work the last time she saw her husband alive. "I always dressed up for deadline days. Heels, skirt, smart green jacket. Magazine publishing has its rhythms, and if the editor won't dance to them, she can't expect her staff to. I don't float feature ideas in Fendi heels, and I don't close an issue in Pumas."


Magazine publishing, middle-aged affairs, nurseries and funerals all come in for this kind of satirical close observation. But Cleave does not mock Sarah (and life in Kingston-upon-Thames) any more than he does Little Bee and her experiences in Nigeria. Life in England may appear superficial compared to a life-and-death struggle for existence in the tropical forests east of the Niger. Little Bee, however, has voted with her feet. One can have too much authenticity. Too much world.


Cleave makes no judgment on these two existences and, more interestingly, he eschews the postmodern back-pedal into irony. The Other Hand is emphatically not ironic. For all the characters' faults, none of them is presented as inauthentic or standing for something that we are intended to disbelieve. There are no straw targets. Nothing in the novel is included only to be derided. As a consequence, the story of Little Bee, Sarah and Charlie/Batman becomes heated to the point of melodrama. A thoughtless act on Sarah's part delivers Little Bee into the clutches of immigration officials. To right that wrong, she pursues a course of action that is not quite credible; but by this stage, the tremendous momentum of the story carries the reader through.


There are no nods or winks to the reader. Cleave follows his story to a powerful and emotive end. If The Other Hand flirts with melodrama, that is a fault Cleave shares with Dickens, and for the same reason. He means it.