The Comfort of Lies

Motherhood is at the crux of The Comfort of Lies, a novel that braids the stories of three, very different women - women bonded by secrets, lies and a child conceived out of wedlock, the byproduct of an illicit affair between Tia, a young woman grappling to find her place in the world, and Nathan, a happily married man and father of two boys. 

When Tia tells Nathan that she's pregnant, he suddenly vanishes from her life. Thus, Tia decides to give her baby girl up for adoption to a woman named Caroline, a workaholic doctor/pathologist, whose husband is pressuring her to start a family.  

Fast forward five years: Caroline, the girl's adoptive mother, persists in working long hours, making excuses and skirting her responsibilities for the child,which takes a toll on her marriage.  Maybe she's just not cut out to be a wife and a mother, after all?

In the meantime, Nathan's wife, Juliette, believes she's put the knowledge of her husband's affair behind her. But when a letter arrives addressed to her husband from Tia, "the other woman," and she discovers that Nathan has a child, a daughter, he's never told her about, Juliette's seemingly re-created life and marriage is again shattered. She secretly goes in search of both Tia and Caroline in order to learn more.

Issues of trust, vulnerability and forgiveness emerge as these three women's lives intersect. Each is forced to face the facts of her life and make hard decisions for the future. Is there any way this five year-old child might be loved by all three women?

Randy Susan Meyers (The Murderer's Daughters) has written a multi-faceted, thought-provoking novel about the complicated lives and challenges contemporary women--and families--face. Chapters told from alternating viewpoints allow readers to experience the psyches of the characters as their private motivations and pain are examined until truth is ultimately exposed.

The Comfort of Lies by Randy Susan Meyers

Atria Books, $25.00, Hardcover, 9781451673012,  336 pp

Publication Date: February 12, 2013

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This book was provided for review by Atria Books/Simon and Schuster

Documentary: SET FOR LIFE

"Ageism is alive and well . . . " According to statistics put forth by SET FOR LIFE, a compelling, award-winning documentary that delves into the stark realities of Baby Boomers who are faced with the trickle-down effects of the faltering U.S. economy, the unemployment rate for workers 50 years of age and older is worse than it was during the Great Depression. While the national job report numbers appear to be improving every month (on paper), negative trends for older workers are not reversing.  It takes, on average, 14 months or longer for older workers to find new employment - if they can find work at all.  

SET FOR LIFE fleshes out the personal stories behind these statistics to great effect. Between 2010 and 2012, Susan Sipprelle and Samuel Newman of Tree of Life Productions traveled around the United States and documented the stories of 100 unemployed Americans, 50 years of age and older.  (These interviews can be viewed on the "Over 50 and Out of Work" project website. Link HERE)

The related documentary, SET FOR LIFE, follows, in depth and with compassion, the lives of three Baby Boomers who have been thrust into unemployment and forced to face the erasure of their American Dream. Each story brings into focus exacerbated personal hardships, struggles and downsized expectations, where those out of work submit hundreds of resumes, often for jobs beyond/beneath the scope of their expertise, while house payments cannot be met, health insurance lapses and retirement benefits are cashed in.

One case study revolves around a 52 year-old husband, a third generation steelworker and cancer-survivor in West Virginia, who, after a twenty-five year history of being laid-off and rehired, must choose between the continued cycle of working intermittently at the mill or pursuing another line of work, which offers more steady employment.

 

Another thread of the film follows the decisions made by a 60 year-old, single woman in South Carolina who is laid off as a college records officer due to "federal and state cutbacks" and becomes dependent on her sons to help pay her mortgage, put food on the table, etc. Can a part-time job she finally lands as a grant researcher for a non-profit organization--that barely pays minimum wage--prove enough to make ends meet?

The most moving story of the trio is that of a 58 year-old I.T. Specialist in California whose high-tech professional life goes belly up around the same time his son, a young father of two children, returns home from active military duty as a double amputee and now depends on the help, care and support of his extended family.

Sipprelle and Newman have created an important, engaging documentary that addresses the personal perils of a national crisis. This situation may become even more grave if and when the eligibility age for Social Security benefits is raised. The film asks viewers to contemplate larger questions of self-worth, resilience and the necessity for change and reinvention in the midst of an uncertain world.

To watch the trailer for SET FOR LIFE, link HERE

To purchase a copy of SET FOR LIFE, link HERE

To learn more about TREE OF LIFE PRODUCTIONS, link HERE

To learn more about writer and photojournalist Susan Sipprelle, link HERE

To learn more about filmmaker Samuel Newman, link HERE

  

Vanity Fare: A novel of lattes, literature, and love

Molly Hagan is a struggling, forty-year-old single mother who lives in Brooklyn, New York. She suffers the sting of a husband who left her for a younger woman; a traumatized six-year old son who asks too many questions and is begging for an exotic pet; a mother who's financial future has gone belly-up and now has nowhere to live; and well-meaning friends and a shrink who pressure Molly to make changes in her life. Molly's troubles grow even deeper when she learns that she's penniless and can't even pay the rent.

When an old friend offers Molly a copyrighting job for a new bakery, Molly jumps at the chance for employment. The venue is located near the New York Public Library and the owner wants to make the bakery "a destination point, just like the library." Inspired by the challenge, Molly comes up with a "literary-food-is-delicious" schematic for what she envisions will become, "Vanity Fare." In the midst of pulling together her presentation, Molly suddenly finds herself being wooed by a sexy British pastry chef with an "upper-crust, devil-may-care Hugh Grant accent" and his aloof business partner, who becomes more attractive as he forms a bond with Molly's son.

Each chapter commences with blurbs that cleverly pair a syrupy literary reference/pun with a bakery offering such as "Much Ado about Muffins," "A Room of One's Scone" and "Catcher in the Rye Bread." Author Megan Caldwell has whipped up a delicious, well-plotted romance where her smart, self-deprecating heroine conquers real-world issues with good humor.

Vanity Fare: A novel of lattes, literature, and love  by Megan Caldwell

William Morrow, $14.99, Trade paper, 9780062188366,  416 pp

Publication Date: December 26, 2012

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Please note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (1/9/13), click HERE.

Happy 200th Birthday, Pride and Prejudice!

Opinion: Shades of Jane Austen

Would Pride and Prejudice be a bestseller if it were released today?

January 29, 2013

Opinion/Editorial (Section A-9)

BY KATHLEEN GERARD

To read the article in its entirety, click on the highlighted title above

NEWS: IN TRANSIT featured in USA Today

The story-behind-the-story 

of my novel of romantic suspense

 IN TRANSIT 

has been featured in 
USA TODAY 

To read the article, link HERE

                                                   

                                                      

American Ghost

A town and culture are haunted by acts of violence in American Ghost by Janis Owens (My Brother Michael, The Cracker Kitchen). Set in Hendrix--a fictional, contemporary, hardscrabble Florida Panhandle town--this perceptive, well-paced novel was inspired by true events and centers upon a notorious lynching from 1938, the result of a white shop owner who was brutally shot and killed in a robbery by a black man. Secrets and long-buried acts of racism are unearthed when Sam Lense, a Jewish, Miami graduate student in anthropology, comes to town to study and write an academic paper about the ethnic inhabitants of the region, a group of close-knit townsfolk who are distrustful of outsiders.

While doing his research, Sam falls in love with Jolie Hoyt, the humble, sheltered daughter of a protective, old-school preacher. The intensity of the young couple's three-month affair is the talk of the town. Some believe Jolie is rapt by Sam because he is a "rich Jew" while others feel that Sam is using Jolie and her connections to the "useless old lynching" for his own gain. Tensions mount and threaten the small community until Sam's work is dramatically cut short and the bond between the lovers is ultimately severed. 

The second half of the book fast-forwards twelve years. Jolie and Sam, transformed for better and worse, are reunited when a black businessman embarks upon Hendrix to reconcile his father's memory. Complex strands weave together this captivating narrative rife with historical context and characterizations that reflect the foibles of human nature.

American Ghost by Janis Owens

Scribner, $25.00, Hardcover, 97814516774637,  288 pp

Publication Date: October 9, 2012

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Please note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (10/19/12), click HERE.

New Year Resolve

May Sarton

To stop allowing the clutter
To clutter my mind
Like dirty snow,
Shove it off and find
Clear time, clear water.

Time for a change,
Let silence in like a cat
Who has sat at my door
Neither wild nor strange
Hoping for food from my store
And shivering on the mat.

Let silence in.
She will rarely speak or mew,
She will sleep on my bed
And all I have ever been
Either false or true
Will live again in my head.

For it is now or not
As old age silts the stream,
To shove away the clutter,
To untie every knot,
To take the time to dream,
To come back to still water.

"New Year Resolve" by May Sarton, from Collected Poems 1930-1993. © W.W. Norton & Co., 1993.  Reprinted with permission.  As featured on The Writer's Almanac 12/30/12 

Purchase more of May Sarton's work HERE

Man in the Blue Moon

A land war in a Florida coastal town during World War I is the centerpiece of Man in the Blue Moon by Michael Morris (A Place Called Wiregrass, Slow Way Home). Ella Wallace's gambling, opium-addicted husband has disappeared. Struggling to raise their three young sons and keep her general store and land from foreclosure, Ella is forced to choose between making a partial payment on the property or paying the freight charges for a fancy clock her husband must've ordered before he vanished in the hope it might pay off her debt.

Ella's decision complicates matters in the quiet little town. And when Lanier Stillis, a distant cousin of Ella's absent husband shows up under mysterious circumstances, her dilemma takes surprising twists and turns. Is this man, with "Samson-like" blond hair and eyes that sparkle with "either hope or mischief," running from trouble? When Lanier miraculously heals one of Ella's sons and makes a lame mule walk, Ella suspects he might be an answer to prayer. But as interest in the stranger mounts, some in town perceive him as a charlatan. His presence exacerbates the land battle, forcing a conniving banker and the local preacher to begin to claw at each other.

Spiritual undercurrents abound in this well-plotted novel that raises provocative questions about faith and providence. With astute perception, Morris has crafted a story, rooted in true events, about survival at the turn of the century, plausibly fathoming small town life - and the judgments and modus operandi found therein.

Man in the Blue Moon by Michael Morris

Tyndale House Publishers, $19.99, Hardcover, 9781414368429,  400 pp

Publication Date: September 1, 2012

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Please note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (9/11/12), click HERE.

Confessions of Joan the Tall

Joan Cusack Handler's adolescent self narrates short vignettes, diary-like entries, in her memoir of growing up as an Irish-American Roman Catholic in a predominantly working class neighborhood in the Bronx (NY) in the 1950s. Twelve year-old Joan is a bright, sensitive girl who believes that "Jesus counts on me to come see Him at Mass as much as possible..." Joan--self-conscious, awkward and plagued by nervous ailments--is a misfit who stands five feet eleven and a half inches tall, wears a size eleven, quadruple A shoe, and is often mistaken for being older. The journal offers Joan a safe place to purge feelings on subjects ranging from the father-son relationship between God and Jesus, sin, the Eucharist, obedience, purgatory, lying, honoring her mother and father, snitching on her siblings and her thoughts about some of the quirky nuns and kids at school. 

Young Joan has three siblings, most notably a brother who is a bully. She is fiercely devoted to her father, a devoutly religious man who works hard and likes an occasional whiskey, and her mother, who is a no-nonsense disciplinarian and tows the line on the home front. A beloved aunt, a nun, visits the family weekly and indulges in Blackberry Brandy and likes to drive past all the pretty houses in the upscale section of town, and she also expresses high hopes that Joan will someday join a religious order. This disparity of a familial culture anchored in the practice of religious faith versus the tug toward secular interests makes it hard for Joan, who wants "more than anything... (to have) a clean and pure soul," to navigate her own way in the world in this gentle, gracefully told, coming-of-age tale.

Cusack Handler's prose reverberates with evocative imagery, insight and emotion, conjuring not only the physicality, mystery and allure of the Roman Catholic faith of the 1950s, but also the authentic intensity and vacillation of adolescent feelings. The story, constructed in slice-of-life fragments and steeped in the present tense, deepens the intimacy of this well-drawn, psychologically astute narrative.

Confessions of Joan the Tall by Joan Cusack Handler

CavanKerry Press, $21.99, Trade Paper, 9781933880334,  246 pp

Publication Date: November 13, 2012

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This book was provided for review by TLC Book Tours

Never Hug a Nun

Patrick Cantwell is a good kid, however misguided. He's a seven-year-old with a conscience, growing up in the 1960s in Webster Groves, a middle-class suburb of Saint Louis. The nuns at Mary Queen of our Hearts parochial school have done a good work in Patrick - he feels guilty about playing on the train tracks (and lying about it afterward), sneaking orange soda during lent, throwing tomatoes at buses and failing to sell enough raffle tickets for church. Swept up in a quest to help his brother get a drum set, Patrick's level of mischief escalates until he gets caught up in a robbery at the neighborhood convenience store. Amid his antics, Patrick must deal with a secret crush on schoolmate Ebby Hamilton, the impending prospect of his first confession, his 39 year-old mother being pregnant again and how pretty, young Aunt Jenny, who is "almost" a nun, is having second thoughts about her choice of vocation.

Kevin Killeen's novel breathes life and nostalgia into a bygone era. You can almost smell the pomade, see the paperback James Bond novels, S&H Greenstamps, Frank Sinatra 45 records, the family's Ford Falcon and hear the cheers for The Beatles. The story follows young Patrick's life over the course of a few months, from Easter until Christmas. The book is filled with a balanced blend of humor and poignancy, structured in short chapters that are richly woven with period details and a pitch-perfect re-creation of the  Roman Catholic Church of the 1960s (the rituals, tenets and mindsets therein) and how morality and faith were once the cornerstones of American family life.

Never Hug a Nun by Kevin Killeen

Blank Slate Press, $14.99, Trade Paper, 97809850071,  182 pp

Publication Date: December 8, 2012

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This book was provided for review by TLC Book Tours

The Christmas Tree

The Christmas Tree by Julie Salamon (illustrated by Jill Weber) is a compact story about trees and the deep-rooted emotional meanings they can hold in our lives. 

It is narrated by the chief gardener from Rockefeller Center in New York City and his quest to acquire the immense Norway Spruce from a convent in New Jersey. The book tells the story of Sister Anthony, an elderly nun at the Mother House, who refuses to accommodate the gardener's agenda to cut the tree down for use as the centerpiece in the annual Rockefeller Center Christmas display.  

During the process of many years of negotiations, Sister Anthony ultimately shares her back-story about how, when she was a shy, orphan girl named Anna, she was sent from New York City to live at the convent. Once there, she felt incredibly lonely, but she befriended a tiny fir tree whom she came to call, "Tree." Anna and Tree grew up together and it was through their life-long union that Anna came to love and appreciate the wonders of nature - a breadth of knowledge she generously passes on to the next generation. 

One winter, when a harsh storm threatens Tree's safety, Sister Anthony begins to have second thoughts about the tree becoming the crown jewel at the Rockefeller Center.

This is a sensitive, simply told and moving story, a perfect December read about growth, memory, love and letting go. You'll never look at a tree, or Rockefeller Center at Christmas-time, the same way.

The Christmas Tree by Julie Salamon; Jill Weber (Illustrator)
Random House, Paper, 9780375761089, 128pp.
Publication Date: October 29, 2002
To purchase this book via INDIEBOUND click HERE

This blog post was originally featured on "Reading Between the Lines" on December 5, 2010. The full post from that date can be read HERE.

The Devil's Garden

Author Brady Christianson cures writer's block by target practicing with his knives. "I can spend hours throwing them," he says. "Focusing on the target helps focus my thoughts." 

It's no wonder this former Marine, who served in the Reconnaissance Division, has centered his first novel, The Devil's Playground, around a retired Recon Marine who thinks he is enjoying a quiet, civilian life but who has his world suddenly turned upside-down when heavily armed Arab terrorists break into his house and try to kill him and his family. It is clear that his former military "secret identity" has been compromised and ghosts from the past have come back to settle old scores. 

 

This action-packed mystery/thriller was inspired by true events, after Christianson learned that a laptop was stolen from the Department of Veterans Affairs. "It contained the names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth and social security numbers of every veteran who served this country since the Vietnam conflict. The missing laptop was not recovered until about a month later, which was an eternity for someone to copy the information and sell it...Considering these events and weighing them against the fact that there are those in the military services whose identities are protected—and they are protected for good reasons—the potential for disaster becomes painfully apparent...The story almost wrote itself."

I am pleased to welcome Brady Christianson to Reading Between the Lines to share his thoughts, in his own words, about The Devil's Garden:

The fog of war is a place where confusion rules, innocence dies and demons are born. Sometimes these demons come back to haunt a man and other times they simply come back to kill him. Few men would welcome the fight, which is to say, a proud and terrible few. The Devil’s Garden twists a Recon Marine’s worst nightmare into a deadly reality.

There is a saying in Recon: There is no life after Force. The lack of adrenaline and ensuing boredom will kill a warrior’s spirit. However, former Recon Marine Brandon Colson has a different kind of death to fear. After years spent in remote deserts and jungles on the other side of the planet dreaming of a quiet, civilian, family life, he finally has it. The problem is he has a large price on his head that even his family doesn’t know about: He is wanted by terrorists he worked to bring down.  With revenge in their hearts and murder on their minds, Colson’s enemies plan to revisit his sins upon him, his wife and his children. When a heavily armed squad of assassins arrives at his home in the middle of the night, he quickly dispatches the men, but knows the identity he buried deep in his past is no longer a secret. With his family in hiding, he makes it his personal mission to eliminate the threat to his family and reclaim the life he’s made.

The Devil’s Garden captures the irreconcilable thoughts and trepidation of a military man turned family man who must now fight to protect his family. As Colson’s crucial mission leads him to the Devil’s Garden of Florida, a forgotten wasteland of swamps, collapsed shacks, and lost souls, he finds that the midnight attack on his home was simply an omen of what is to come. With his fate in the balance until the last second, Colson must navigate a trail littered with bloodshed and revenge.

To learn more about The Devil's Garden and Brady Christianson (and read excerpts from the novel), link HERE

Follow the book blog tour for this novel at Tribute Books 

The Devil's Garden by Brady Christianson
Two Harbors Press, Trade Paper, 9781938690167, 392 pp
Publication Date: November 11, 2012
To order this book via AMAZON link HERE