Welcome to It’s Monday! What Are You Reading! This is a great way to plan out your reading week and see what others are currently reading as well… you never know where that next “must read” book will come from! Hosted by Book Journey.

Last Week:

Last week I either read and/or listened The Summer Knight by Jim Butcher (audiobook) and Havisham by Ronald Frame. Both were very good. I’m so addicted to the Dresden Files audiobooks! I, also, had two DNF with Startide Rising and Austensibly Ordinary (audiobook). Startide Rising was a book club selection and wasn’t my cup of tea. I couldn’t finish the audiobook due to the narrator not the story. I think I will have to try the print version.

This Week:

This week I’m going to be very ambitious with the following books.

Bad Girls by Deborah Doucette

Rebecca Griffin only ever wanted one thing: to be a good wife and mother.  Her own domineering Italian-American mother, as well as the rest of her big-hearted, opinionated, wild and wonderful Italian family, had been telling her how to do just that since she was little and wanted to marry Roy Rogers.  Now, it’s the 90’s and Rebecca has everything she ever dreamed of.  But she suspects her husband is having an affair and fears her daughter, Dana, is going bad; hurtling dangerously out of reach toward a self-destructive calamity.  Then Rebecca learns of the mysterious death of a distant cousin long ago at the prison bordering the small, idyllic New England town where she lives.  It’s a story she can’t shake.  Questions about the young woman’s fate nag at Rebecca as she desperately tries to reclaim the little girl she once knew, while hanging  onto the ragged remnants of her marriage.   Rebecca, her troubled daughter, Dana, and an enigmatic woman from the past, embark on a journey of discovery both distinctly their own, and shared.  Each must wrestle with the demons that nip at their heels propelling them headlong, until all three collide one desperate, enchanted autumn night.

Bad Girls, at its heart, is a story about family.  The origins, variations and connections that shaped them – even the places they came from – set these women on their path.   As the unlikely travelers come to the end of their journey, they find new paths revealed in the most unearthly of places by the most innocent of messengers.

Graciana by Trini Amador

The gripping story of Gracianna–a French-Basque girl forced to make impossible decisions after being recruited into the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris.

Gracianna is inspired by true events in the life of Trini Amador’s great-grandmother, Gracianna Lasaga. As an adult, Amador was haunted by the vivid memory of finding a loaded German Luger tucked away in a nightstand while wandering his great-grandmother’s home in Southern California. He was only four years old at the time, but the memory remained and he knew he had to explore the story behind the gun.

Decades later, Amador would delve into the remarkable odyssey of his Gracianna’s past, a road that led him to an incredible surprise. In Gracianna, Amador weaves fact and fiction to tell his great-grandmother’s story.

Gracianna bravely sets off to Paris in the early 1940s–on her way to America, she hopes–but is soon swept into the escalation of the war and the Nazi occupation of Paris. After chilling life-and-death struggles, she discovers that her missing sister has surfaced as a laborer in Auschwitz. When she finds an opportunity to fight back against the Nazis to try to free her sister, she takes it–even if it means using lethal force.

As Amador tells the imagined story of how his great-grandmother risked it all, he delivers richly drawn characters and a heart-wrenching page-turner that readers won’t soon forget.

Boxers and Saints by Gene Luen Yang

One of the greatest comics storytellers alive brings all his formidable talents to bear in this astonishing new work.

In two volumes, Boxers & Saints tells two parallel stories. The first is of Little Bao, a Chinese peasant boy whose village is abused and plundered by Westerners claiming the role of missionaries. Little Bao, inspired by visions of the Chinese gods, joins a violent uprising against the Western interlopers. Against all odds, their grass-roots rebellion is successful.

But in the second volume, Yang lays out the opposite side of the conflict. A girl whose village has no place for her is taken in by Christian missionaries and finds, for the first time, a home with them. As the Boxer Rebellion gains momentum, Vibiana must decide whether to abandon her Christian friends or to commit herself fully to Christianity.

Boxers & Saints is one of the most ambitious graphic novels First Second has ever published. It offers a penetrating insight into not only one of the most controversial episodes of modern Chinese history, but into the very core of our human nature. Gene Luen Yang is rightly called a master of the comics form, and this book will cement that reputation.

What are you reading this week?

Welcome to It’s Monday! What Are You Reading! This is a great way to plan out your reading week and see what others are currently reading as well… you never know where that next “must read” book will come from! Hosted by Book Journey.

Last Week:

I read, only, one book which was The Loyalist’s Wife. I’m hosting a giveaway for the same book. It’s really a good book; you really need to enter the giveaway!

This Week:

Havisham: A Novel

IN THE TRADITION OF WIDE SARGASSO SEA, HAVISHAM IS THE ASTONISHING PRELUDE TO CHARLES DICKENS’S GREAT EXPECTATIONS.

Before she became the immortal and haunting Miss Havisham of Great Expectations, she was Catherine, a young woman with all of her dreams ahead of her. Spry, imperious, she is the daughter of a wealthy brewer. But she is never far from the smell of hops and the arresting letters on the brewhouse wall—HAVISHAM—a reminder of all she owes to the family name and the family business.

Sent by her father to stay with the Chadwycks, Catherine discovers elegant pastimes to remove the taint of her family’s new money. But for all her growing sophistication, Catherine is anything but worldly, and when a charismatic stranger pays her attention, everything—her heart, her future, the very Havisham name—is vulnerable.

In Havisham, Ronald Frame unfurls the psychological trauma that made young Catherine into Miss Havisham and cursed her to a life alone, roaming the halls of the mansion in the tatters of the dress she wore for the wedding she was never to have.

What are you reading this week?