Books that Arrived in July 2017

Boy, where did July go? It certainly flew by for me and I’m betting for a lot of you too. I took our daughter school shopping this week and I can’t even believe we are starting school in less than three weeks. I WANT MORE SUMMER!!!

I’ve been really busy at the library this last month finalizing year-end reports and preparing to hire a new director. It’s still unreal that we are going through this because my dear friend is gone. It just still isn’t real to me. Another friend is moving this weekend and yet another has been diagnosed with breast cancer. It’s almost too overwhelming to comprehend. I’m trying to be strong and keep a handle on everything but some days I just want to escape to my porch and avoid all the responsibilities.

No surprise that I didn’t get much read last month. I kept up with my children’s book reviews every week and read a couple other books, but that’s about it. I really want August to slow down because September is when all the activities ramp up again and I’ll be starting a long-term sub job. Let’s hope I can get some serious reading time in this month!

Currently Reading: READING PEOPLE, GRACE NOT PERFECTION, ORGANIZE YOUR WAY
STILL Reading: SUNSHINE SISTERS, SEVEN THREADS
Currently Listening: LAB GIRL
Up Next:  HOW TO CHANGE A LIFE, LILAC GIRLS (I’m determined to read this book this summer)

If you would like to purchase any of the books below, clicking the photo of the book will take you directly to Amazon. If you choose to purchase the book I may receive a small commission without you having to pay a cent more for your purchase. Thanks for supporting me.

HOW TO CHANGE A LIFE
By: Stacey Ballis
Published: August 15, 2017
Publisher: Berkley
Format: Paperback

This is the quintessential beach read and sounds fun! 

Eloise is happy with her life as a successful private chef. She has her clients, her corgi, and a recipe for the world’s most perfect chocolate cream pie. What more could she need? But when her long-lost trio of high school friends reunites, Eloise realizes how lonely she really is.

Eloise, Lynne, and Teresa revamp their senior-class assignment and dare one another to create a list of things to accomplish by the time they each turn forty in a few months. Control freak Lynne has to get a dog, Teresa has to spice up her marriage, and Eloise has to start dating again.

Enter Shawn, a hunky ex-athlete and the first man Eloise could see herself falling for. Suddenly forty doesn’t seem so lonely–until a chance encounter threatens the budding romance and reveals the true colors of her friends. Will the bucket listers make it to forty still speaking to one another? Or do some friendships come with an expiration date?

WITHOUT FEAR OR FAVOR
By: Robert K. Tannebaum
Published: August 15, 2017
Publisher: Gallery Books
Format: Paperback

This book came unsolicited. It really isn’t my type of book. I’m not sure if I will give this a shot or not.

In the twenty-ninth novel in the New York Times best-selling Karp-Ciampi series featuring the best fictional prosecuting attorney in literature (Mark Lane, #1 New York Times bestselling author), Butch Karp and his wife Marlene Ciampi must stop a radical organization of armed militants bent on the cold-blooded murder of uniformed on-duty police officers. 

When a cop shoots down the son of a respected inner-city Baptist preacher, the community rises up in anger and demands to have the officer prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But there s something more than a call for justice at work here: a plot to bring down the city s police force through a conspiracy so vast and malicious only Butch Karp and his band of truth-seekers can untangle it. 

READING PEOPLE
How Seeing the World through the Lens of Personality Changes Everything
By: Anne Bogel
Published: September 19, 2017
Publisher: Baker Books
Format: eBook

I am thrilled to be a part of the Launch Team for this book. I’ve started reading it and it has caused me to pause and really think about my own personality. I took the Myers-Brigg quiz and it resoundingly stated I am an ESFJ. So, I’ve been looking into what that means more and more and I’m blown away by how accurate the information is. Just that information alone has been eye-opening, affirming, and validating to me in so many ways. I think this book is going to be an incredible read. 

If the viral Buzzfeed-style personality quizzes are any indication, we are collectively obsessed with the idea of defining and knowing ourselves and our unique place in the world. But what we’re finding is this: knowing which Harry Potter character you are is easy, but actually knowing yourself isn’t as simple as just checking a few boxes on an online quiz.

For readers who long to dig deeper into what makes them uniquely them (and why that matters), popular blogger Anne Bogel has done the hard part–collecting, exploring, and explaining the most popular personality frameworks, such as Myers-Briggs, StrengthsFinder, Enneagram, and others. She explains to readers the life-changing insights that can be gained from each and shares specific, practical real-life applications across all facets of life, including love and marriage, productivity, parenting, the workplace, and spiritual life. In her friendly, relatable style, Bogel shares engaging personal stories that show firsthand how understanding personality can revolutionize the way we live, love, work, and pray.

WHAT SHE ATE
Six Remarkable Women & the Food that Tells Their Stories
By: Laura Shapiro
Published: July 25, 2017
Publisher: Viking
Format: Hardcover

I love this idea for a book. I couldn’t turn it down! 

Everyone eats, and food touches on every aspect of our lives—social and cultural, personal and political. Yet most biographers pay little attention to people’s attitudes toward food as if the great and notable never bothered to think about what was on the plate in front of them. Once we ask how somebody relates to food, we find a whole world of different and provocative ways to understand her. Food stories can be as intimate and revealing as stories of love, work, or coming-of-age. Each of the six women in this entertaining group portrait was famous in her time, and most are still famous in ours; but until now, nobody has told their lives from the point of view of the kitchen and the table.

It’s a lively and unpredictable array of women; what they have in common with one another (and us) is a powerful relationship with food. They include Dorothy Wordsworth, whose food story transforms our picture of the life she shared with her famous poet brother; Rosa Lewis, the Edwardian-era Cockney caterer who cooked her way up the social ladder; Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady and rigorous protector of the worst cook in White House history; Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, who challenges our warm associations of food, family, and table; Barbara Pym, whose witty books upend a host of stereotypes about postwar British cuisine; and Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan, whose commitment to “having it all” meant having almost nothing on the plate except a supersized portion of diet gelatin. 

IT’S NOT YET DARK
A Memoir
By: Simon Fitzmaurice
Published: August 1, 2017
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Format: Paperback

I thought about this one for awhile before I accepted it. But, ultimately, I knew I had to read it. One of my all-time favorite books is THE LAST LECTURE by Randy Pausch and it reminds me a bit of that but so much more. 

In 2008, Simon Fitzmaurice was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was given four years to live. In 2010, in a state of lung-function collapse, Simon knew with crystal clarity that now was not his time to die. Against all prevailing medical opinion, he chose to ventilate in order to stay alive.
 
In It’s Not Yet Dark, the young filmmaker, a husband, and father of five small children draws us deeply into his inner world. Told in simply expressed and beautifully stark prose, it is an astonishing journey into a life that, though brutally compromised, is lived more fully than most, revealing at its core the potent power love has to carry us through the days.
 
Written using an eye-gaze computer, It’s Not Yet Dark is an unforgettable book about relationships and family, about what connects and separates us as people, and, ultimately, about what it means to be alive.

YOUR NO FEAR CAREER
By: Robin Fisher Roffer
Published: May 2, 2017
Publisher: Big Fish Marketing
Format: Paperback

This sounds like it would make a great gift for recent college graduates or anyone starting the workforce.

Business can be alluring, but like the jellyfish, it can also sting. There are demanding clients, bosses who bully, conniving competitors, and people who like to play politics. It seems that fear, mistrust, anxiety, and feeling overwhelmed run through the veins of business leaders at every level.

In her third book, Robin Fisher Roffer reveals the secret to navigating your career fearlessly. With lessons learned from inside the walls of the world’s largest media companies, Robin inspires rising executives, business owners and those just starting out to courageously move forward and move up in the face of uncertainty.

SAVING CHARLOTTE
A Mother and the Power of Intuition
By: Pia de Jong
Published: July 11, 2017
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Format: Hardcover

I purchased this with the Amazon Prime Day book coupon. I don’t remember where I heard about it, but it is definitely the kind of book I love to read. I truly believe in a Mother’s Intuition or Gut Instinct and this mom had it.  

When her newborn daughter Charlotte is diagnosed with a rare and deadly leukemia, Pia and her husband Robbert make a momentous decision: they reject potentially devastating chemotherapy and instead choose to “wait for what will come.” As the following year unfolds, Pia enters a disorienting world of doctors, medical procedures, and a colorful cast of neighbors and protectors in her native Amsterdam. Her seventeenth-century canal house becomes her inner sanctum, a private “cocoon” where she sweeps away distractions in order to give Charlotte the unfiltered love and strength she needs. Pia’s instinctive decision, now known as “watchful waiting,” has become the standard medical protocol for Charlotte’s type of leukemia.

This deeply felt memoir reveals the galvanizing impact one child can have on a family, a neighborhood, and a worldwide medical community. Vivid and immersive, Saving Charlotte is also a portrait of one woman’s brave voyage of love, of hope, and, in its inspiring climax, of self-discovery.

THE SILENT SISTER
By: Diane Chamberlain
Published: October 7, 2014
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Format: eBook

This was a Kindle Daily Deal and you can’t pass up a Diane Chamberlain book on a Daily Deal!

In The Silent Sister, Riley MacPherson has spent her entire life believing that her older sister Lisa committed suicide as a teenager. Now, over twenty years later, her father has passed away and she’s in New Bern, North Carolina cleaning out his house when she finds evidence to the contrary. Lisa is alive. Alive and living under a new identity. But why exactly was she on the run all those years ago, and what secrets are being kept now? As Riley works to uncover the truth, her discoveries will put into question everything she thought she knew about her family. Riley must decide what the past means for her present, and what she will do with her newfound reality.

WHERE THE LIGHT FALLS
A Novel of the French Revolution
By: Allison Pataki and Owen Pataki
Published: July 11, 2017
Publisher: The Dial Press
Format: Hardcover

This came in my Page Habit monthly subscription. I chose Historical Fiction for my category and have gotten two books that I’ve never heard of and both sound extremely interesting. The best part is that the books have the author’s notes all the way through them. THIS is the book I received last month. 

From the courtrooms to the battlefields to the alleyways of Paris, with cameos from infamous figures in French history, the Patakis have crafted an epic, action-packed novel of the French Revolution as it has never been seen before. Three years after the storming of the Bastille, Paris is enlivened with the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The monarchy has been dismantled and a new nation, for the people, is rising up in its place. Jean-Luc, a young optimistic lawyer, moves his wife, Marie, and their son to Paris, inspired by a sense of duty to contribute to the new order. André, the son of a former nobleman, flees his privileged past to fight in the unified French Army with his roguish brother. Sophie, a beautiful young aristocratic widow, and niece of a powerful, vindictive uncle, embarks on her own fight for independence.

Underneath the glimmer of hope and freedom, chaos threatens to undo all the progress of the revolution and the lives of these compatriots become inextricably linked. As the demand for justice breeds instability, creates enemies out of compatriots, and fuels a constant thirst for blood in the streets, Jean-Luc, Andre, and Sophie are forced to question the sacrifices made for the revolution. Liberty proves a fragile, fleeting ideal, and survival seems less and less likely—both for these unforgettable individuals and indeed for the new nation itself.

OUR STORY BEGINS
Your Favorite Authors and Illustrators Share Fun, Inspiring, and Occasionally Ridiculous Things They Wrote and Drew as Kids
Edited by: Elissa Brent Weissman
Published: July 4, 2017
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Format: Hardcover

This may be my favorite book in the stack this month. I can’t wait to read this one!

From award-winning author Elissa Brent Weissman comes a collection of quirky, smart, and vulnerable childhood works by some of today’s foremost children’s authors and illustrators—revealing young talent, the storytellers they would one day become, and the creativity they inspire today.

Everyone’s story begins somewhere…

For Linda Sue Park, it was a trip to the ocean, a brand-new typewriter, and a little creative license.
For Jarrett J. Krosoczka, it was a third-grade writing assignment that ignited a creative fire in a kid who liked to draw.
For Kwame Alexander, it was a loving poem composed for Mother’s Day—and perfected through draft after discarded draft.
For others, it was a teacher, a parent, a beloved book, a word of encouragement. It was trying and failing, and trying again. It was a love of words, and pictures, and stories.

Your story is beginning, too. Where will it go? 

OH SUSANNAH: Things That Go Bump
By: Carole P. Roman
Illustrated by: Mateya Arkova
Published: July 11, 2017
Publisher: Chelshire, Inc
Format: Paperback

I’m a huge fan of Roman’s books and this new chapter book series looks awesome!

Susannah Maya Logan is not having a good day. She doesn’t want to go to her best friend, Lola’s sleepover. Susannah thinks the house is big and spooky, not to mention the ghost that is said to live there. Lola’s big brother, Kai, loves to tease Susannah with scary stories. 

Throughout her day, she sees people deal with things that scare them. Her sight-impaired friend, Macy, is terrified of unicorns, of all things. She sees a boy at a party who’s frightened of clowns. Her teacher is afraid of getting a cold. Susannah realizes everybody is scared of something. She wishes she was more like Lola, who is not afraid of anything, or so it seems. 

Susannah discovers people have different ideas of what is scary and what is not, and only they can determine the difference. 

Join Susannah as she learns to confront her fears and not let her imagination prevent her from having fun.

OH SUSANNAH: It’s in the Bag
By: Carole P. Roman
Illustrated by: Mateya Arkova
Published: April 24, 2017
Publisher: Chelshire, Inc
Format: Paperback

From award-winning author, Carole P. Roman comes a new chapter book featuring Susannah Logan, a young student having a very bad day. 

It all begins with homework trouble and an invitation to a sleepover that she doesn’t want to go to. Would you want to go to a sleepover in a creepy house? Rather than dealing with her problems, Susannah stuffs them into her backpack. But how much can a backpack take? Will she be able to confront her worries before the backpack bursts? Or will she just continue to hide them away? 
Join Susannah and her friends in this story sure to charm busy young readers everywhere.

IF YOU WERE ME AND LIVED IN…CUBA
By: Carole P. Roman
Illustrated by: Kelsea Wierenga
Published: June 6, 2017
Publisher: Chelshire, Inc
Format: Paperback

One of my favorite read-to-learn series for kids! I always learn something while reading these books!

Join Carole P. Roman when she visits the exciting island of Cuba in the newest book of her informative series. Learn about the varied customs and cultures. Travel to the Caribbean to discover what you would eat and do for fun. See the country through the eyes of a youngster like you and understand what life is like in this exciting place. 

KISSES FOR KINDERGARTEN
By: Livingstone Crouse
Illustrated by: Macky Pamintuan
Published: June 1, 2017
Publisher: Silver Dolphin
Format: Hardcover Picture Book

This is the perfect book to quell those First Day of School jitters.

Stella Isabella Harden
contemplating kindergarten
declared she didn’t have to go,
because her puppy told her so.

School is about to begin, and Stella Isabella Harden decides that kindergarten just isn’t for her. Instead, she decides to spend the day learning from her puppy named Buster. Together these two adventurers plan a day full of playtime, tea time, naptime, and story time. After every “lesson,” Stella gets the best reward: a kiss from her best friend and favorite puppy. But will she change her mind about kindergarten before the first day of school? Join Stella and Buster in this lyrical read-aloud and heartwarming story about growing up.

DUCK AND HIPPO: Lost and Found
By: Jonathan London
Illustrated by: Andrew Joyner
Published: August 15, 2017
Publisher: Two Lions
Format: Hardcover Picture Book

I reviewed the first in the DUCK AND HIPPO series a few months ago. From the author of the FROGGY books, this one looks just as fun!

Duck and Hippo have a picnic and a new adventure!

Duck and Hippo invite their friends Turtle, Elephant, and Pig to a picnic at their favorite pond. Yippee! It’s time to dance and sing, swim and eat. Everyone brings goodies to share…except Hippo. He didn’t bring ANYTHING. So Hippo sets off into the forest to find some berries. But he is gone a long time, and Duck begins to worry that Hippo is lost. What should his friends do to find him? Join Duck and Hippo on another fun adventure! 

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC KIDS WEIRD BUT TRUE! DAILY PLANNER
365 Days to fill with School, Sports, Friends, and Fun
Published: June 13, 2017
Publisher: National Geographic Kids
Format: Spiral Bound Paperback

Oh my gosh, my planner-loving-self thinks I would have loved this planner as a kid. I think I’ll be gifting it to my niece for her birthday this month!

Prepare to be amazed each day with weird-but-true facts that will impress your friends and stump your parents. Turn the page and record your school work, keep track of activities, and plan your social life, all while learning wild and wacky things about the world around you!

Fun prompts invite you to celebrate weirdness. Plus there are homework help sections and tons of space to write or doodle your daily schedule any way you wish. With beautiful full-color artwork and engaging information and activities, this is the must-have planner. It’s a great way to stand out from the crowd!

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC KIDS UNITED STATES ATLAS
Fifth Edition
Published: July 11, 2017
Publisher: National Geographic Kids
Format: Paperback

This atlas is something every household should have. Yes, you can “google” countries and see maps, but having one in your hands along with interesting facts is great for all those upcoming school projects or when you child hears a country on the news and wants to know where it is. Just tell them to check the atlas!

Kids will have fun learning about every U.S. state in this amazing atlas, packed with maps, stats, facts, and pictures. National Geographic’s world-renowned cartographers have paired up with education experts to create maps of the 50 states, U.S. territories, and Washington, D.C., that pinpoint the physical features, capitals, and towns and cities of each state. Discover the latest data and trends along with colorful photography of each state and the people who live there.

Key points reflect the latest information about land and water, people, and places. Lively essays cover each region of the country. Eight specially themed maps on nature, population, energy, climate, and more, delve deeper into key issues. State birds and state flags add to the high visual interest. This is a great reference for home and school with all the basics kids need to know to succeed in middle school, high school, and beyond.

There are some really awesome books that I am super excited about in this list. I am really hoping I can find time to read. The good thing is I have a trip to Colorado at the end of the month. Twelve hours each way should give me plenty of reading time….if I don’t fall asleep!

As always, be sure to let me know what you are reading or what has piqued your interest from my list!

I’m linking up with THE DELIBERATE READER for her monthly feature NEW ON THE STACK. To see other bloggers new books from July, click HERE.