Teddy Rose Book Reviews Plus More


02_The Witch of Napoli CoverPublication Date: January 15, 2015
Palladino Books
Formats: eBook, Paperback

Genre: Historical Fantasy

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Italy 1899: Fiery-tempered, erotic medium Alessandra Poverelli levitates a table at a Spiritualist séance in Naples. A reporter photographs the miracle, and wealthy, skeptical, Jewish psychiatrist Camillo Lombardi arrives in Naples to investigate. When she materializes the ghost of his dead mother, he risks his reputation and fortune to finance a tour of the Continent, challenging the scientific and academic elite of Europe to test Alessandra’s mysterious powers. She will help him rewrite Science. His fee will help her escape her sadistic husband Pigotti and start a new life in Rome. Newspapers across Europe trumpet her Cinderella story and baffling successes, and the public demands to know – does the “Queen of Spirits” really have supernatural powers?

Nigel Huxley is convinced she’s simply another vulgar, Italian trickster. The icy, aristocratic detective for England’s Society for the Investigation of Mediums launches a plot to trap and expose her. The Vatican is quietly digging up her childhood secrets, desperate to discredit her supernatural powers; her abusive husband Pigotti is coming to kill her; and the tarot cards predict catastrophe.

Praised by Kirkus Reviews as an “enchanting and graceful narrative” that absorbs readers from the very first page, The Witch of Napoli masterfully resurrects the bitter 19th century battle between Science and religion over the possibility of an afterlife.

Praise for The Witch of Napoli



“Impressive…an enchanting, graceful narrative that absorbs readers from the first page.” –Kirkus Reviews

About Michael Schmicker03_Michael Schmicker Author



Michael Schmicker is an investigative journalist and nationally-known writer on the paranormal. He’s been a featured guest on national broadcast radio talk shows, including twice on Coast to Coast AM (560 stations in North America, with 3 million weekly listeners). He also shares his investigations through popular paranormal webcasts including Skeptiko, hosted by Alex Tsakiris; Speaking of Strange with Joshua Warren; the X-Zone, with Rob McConnell (Canada); and he even spent an hour chatting with spoon-bending celebrity Uri Geller on his program Parascience and Beyond (England). He is the co-author of The Gift, ESP: The Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People (St. Martin’s Press). The Witch of Napoli is his debut novel. Michael began his writing career as a crime reporter for a suburban Dow-Jones newspaper in Connecticut, and worked as a freelance reporter in Southeast Asia for three years. He has also worked as a stringer for Forbes magazine, and Op-Ed contributor to The Wall Street Journal Asia. His interest in investigating the paranormal began as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand where he first encountered a non-Western culture which readily accepts the reality of ghosts and spirits, reincarnation, psychics, mediums, divination,and other persistently reported phenomena unexplainable by current Science. He lives and writes in Honolulu, Hawaii, on a mountaintop overlooking Waikiki and Diamond Head.

Connect with Michael Schmicker on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.

Guest Post: Please welcome Michael Schmicker to Teddy Rose Book Reviews Plus.



Which authors do you admire?

Aloha Teddy, and thank you for the opportunity to talk with you and your readers.

 Which authors do I admire?

That’s a difficult question to answer. I admire so many – Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Washington Irving, David McCullough, Umberto Eco, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Studs Terkel – the list goes on and on. But I’ll name three: E.B. White, Italo Calvino, and J.D. Salinger.  That’s because each taught me to focus on a specific skill of my craft.

E.B. White taught me to be precise in choosing my words. White wrote for The New Yorker magazine for six decades; penned Charlotte’s Web, the quintessential, perennial Number 1 children’s novel; and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for his essays and short magazine pieces. Every piece he wrote was clean, chiseled, granite hard.  Each word was hand-picked and polished before being embedded in the sentence.  No waste, no fluff. Memorable prose is not accidental. His most famous work is The Elements of Style, a guide to writing clearly.  Generations of writers have studied it to improve their phrasing. I was given a copy in tenth grade and thirty years later I used it to edit and tighten the 78,000 words which collectively constitute The Witch of Napoli.    

Italo Calvino stretched my imagination. Among his many literary successes, Calvino wrote a wildly inventive collection of short stories entitled Cosmicomics. The narrator is named Qfwfq. No vowels. Qfwfq lives in a make-believe time eons ago when the earth is so close to the moon you can reach it with a ladder. An aquatic uncle still lives in the sea, left behind by family who’ve evolved and moved to land. A mollusk muses on love.  Calvino was imagination unleashed.  I deliberately re-read Cosmicomics the week before I began writing The Witch of Napoli. Why? Because I needed to move beyond the mindset of a journalist, a collector and arranger of dead, squared facts.  I would be tackling fiction, where imagination reigns supreme. My 1899 Naples wouldn’t be half as strange as Qfwfq’s world, but I would still have to create a world out of thin air – a memorable narrator, heroine, villain, and supporting cast. I would have to dress them, put words in their mouth , conjure up spirits to haunt my séance room,  invent a monumental faux pas at an upper crust, English garden party,  describe a back alley abortion,  a 19th century mental asylum, a climactic confrontation in a cathedral, multiple table levitations, demon possessions, materializations, murder,  abandonment, and ravishment. Cosmicomics helped jumpstart my right brain.

And J.D. Salinger? He taught me the primacy of emotion in storytelling.  Asking ”How do you feel?” produces and infinitely more interesting answer than “What do you know?”  It’s the difference between a novel and a textbook. Holden Caulfield, the iconic, troubled anti-hero of Salinger’s classic, Catcher in the Rye, describes a lot of things, but it’s what he feels that keeps us turning pages.  Emotion and conflict are the throbbing heart of any novel –including historical fiction. Too often, the historical novel writer is tempted to cram the novel with historical facts at the expense of human drama.  Catcher in the Rye reminded me to put emotion first.  When in doubt, I cut the academics and kept the soap opera. You’ll still get an education, I promise, but you’re in for a page-turner.

P.S. Here’s to Vancouver! I’ve skied Whistler a half-dozen times with my wife and son, and we always schedule a salmon dinner and a walk through Stanley Park before returning to the Islands.

Thanks for stopping by and sharing some of the authors you admire, Michael!

Thanks to Amy Bruno of HFVBT, I am giving away one print copy of ‘The Witch of Napoli by Michael Schmicker.  This giveaway is open to the U.S., UK, and AUS and ends on March 10, 2015.  Please use Rafflecopter to enter.

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The Witch of Napoli Blog Tour Schedule

Monday, February 16
Spotlight & Giveaway at Passages to the Past

Tuesday, February 17
Review at Book Babe

Wednesday, February 18
Review at 100 Pages a Day – Stephanie’s Book Reviews

Thursday, February 19
Review & Giveaway at A Dream Within a Dream
Interview at Books and Benches

Saturday, February 21
Spotlight at Flashlight Commentary

Sunday, February 22
Review at Carole’s Ramblings

Monday, February 23
Review & Giveaway at A Literary Vacation
Interview at Boom Baby Reviews

Tuesday, February 24
Guest Post & Giveaway at Teddy Rose Book Reviews

Wednesday, February 25
Review at Book Nerd

Friday, February 27
Spotlight at Let Them Read Books

Saturday, February 28
Spotlight at I Heart Reading

Monday, March 2
Review at A Book Drunkard
Spotlight at Historical Fiction Obsession

Tuesday, March 3
Review at Unshelfish

Wednesday, March 4
Review at Carpe Librum

Thursday, March 5
Interview at Carpe Librum

Friday, March 6
Review & Giveaway at The True Book Addict

Monday, March 9
Review at Just One More Chapter

Tuesday, March 10
Review at CelticLady’s Reviews

Wednesday, March 11
Spotlight at The Never-Ending Book

Thursday, March 12
Review at Dianne Ascroft Blog

Tuesday, March 17
Review at With Her Nose Stuck in a Book

Wednesday, March 18
Guest Post at Historical Fiction Connection

Thursday, March 19
Review at Svetlana’s Reads and Views

Friday, March 20
Review & Giveaway at Broken Teepee

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Thanks to Amy Bruno of HFVBT, I am giving away one print copy of ‘I Am Abraham’ by Jerome Charyn

02_I Am AbrahamPB Publication Date: February 9, 2015
Liveright Publishing Corporation
Paperback; 480p

Genre: Historical Fiction

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Narrated in Lincoln’s own voice, the tragicomic I Am Abraham promises to be the masterwork of Jerome Charyn’s remarkable career.

Since publishing his first novel in 1964, Jerome Charyn has established himself as one of the most inventive and prolific literary chroniclers of the American landscape. Here in I Am Abraham, Charyn returns with an unforgettable portrait of Lincoln and the Civil War. Narrated boldly in the first person, I Am Abraham effortlessly mixes humor with Shakespearean-like tragedy, in the process creating an achingly human portrait of our sixteenth President.

Tracing the historic arc of Lincoln’s life from his picaresque days as a gangly young lawyer in Sangamon County, Illinois, through his improbable marriage to Kentucky belle Mary Todd, to his 1865 visit to war-shattered Richmond only days before his assassination, I Am Abraham hews closely to the familiar Lincoln saga. Charyn seamlessly braids historical figures such as Mrs. Keckley—the former slave, who became the First Lady’s dressmaker and confidante—and the swaggering and almost treasonous General McClellan with a parade of fictional extras: wise-cracking knaves, conniving hangers-on, speculators, scheming Senators, and even patriotic whores.

We encounter the renegade Rebel soldiers who flanked the District in tattered uniforms and cardboard shoes, living in a no-man’s-land between North and South; as well as the Northern deserters, young men all, with sunken, hollowed faces, sitting in the punishing sun, waiting for their rendezvous with the firing squad; and the black recruits, whom Lincoln’s own generals wanted to discard, but who play a pivotal role in winning the Civil War. At the center of this grand pageant is always Lincoln himself, clad in a green shawl, pacing the White House halls in the darkest hours of America’s bloodiest war.

Using biblically cadenced prose, cornpone nineteenth-century humor, and Lincoln’s own letters and speeches, Charyn concocts a profoundly moral but troubled commander in chief, whose relationship with his Ophelia-like wife and sons—Robert, Willie, and Tad—is explored with penetrating psychological insight and the utmost compassion. Seized by melancholy and imbued with an unfaltering sense of human worth, Charyn’s President Lincoln comes to vibrant, three-dimensional life in a haunting portrait we have rarely seen in historical fiction.

Praise for I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War

“Thoughtful, observant and droll.” — Richard Brookhiser, New York Times Book Review

“Not only the best novel about President Lincoln since Gore Vidal’s Lincoln in 1984, but it is also twice as good to read.” — Gabor Boritt, author of The Lincoln Enigma and recipient of the National Humanities Medal

“Jerome Charyn [is] a fearless writer… Brave and brazen… The book is daringly imagined, written with exuberance, and with a remarkable command of historical detail. It gives us a human Lincoln besieged by vividly drawn enemies and allies… Placing Lincoln within the web ordinary and sometimes petty human relations is no small achievement.” — Andrew Delbanco, New York Review of Books

“Audacious as ever, Jerome Charyn now casts his novelist’s gimlet eye on sad-souled Abraham Lincoln, a man of many parts, who controls events and people—wife, sons, a splintering nation—even though they often are, as they must be, beyond his compassion or power. Brooding, dreamlike, resonant, and studded with strutting characters, I Am Abraham is as wide and deep and morally sure as its wonderful subjects.” — Brenda Wineapple, author of Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compassion: 1848-1877

“If all historians—or any historian—could write with the magnetic charm and authoritative verve of Jerome Charyn, American readers would be fighting over the privilege of learning about their past. They can learn much from this book—an audacious, first-person novel that makes Lincoln the most irresistible figure of a compelling story singed with equal doses of comedy, tragedy, and moral grandeur. Here is something beyond history and approaching art.” — Harold Holzer, chairman, Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation

“Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature.” — Michael Chabon

“Jerome Charyn is merely one of our finest writers with a polymorphous imagination and crack comic timing. Whatever milieu he chooses to inhabit, his characters sizzle with life, and his sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable.” — Jonathan Lethem

“Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer—so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible.” — Tom Bissell

“One of our most intriguing fiction writers takes on the story of Honest Abe, narrating the tale in Lincoln’s voice and offering a revealing portrait of a man as flawed as he was great.” — Abbe Wright, O, The Oprah Magazine

“Jerome Charyn, like Daniel Day-Lewis in Steven Spielberg’s superb 2012 movie, manages a feat of ventriloquism to be admired… Most of all, Lincoln comes across as human and not some remote giant… With that, Jerome Charyn has given Lincoln a most appropriate present for what would have been his 205th birthday this month: rebirth not as a marble memorial but as a three-dimensional human who overcame much to save his nation.” — Erik Spanberg, Christian Science Monitor

“Daring… Memorable… Charyn’s richly textured portrait captures the pragmatism, cunning, despair, and moral strength of a man who could have empathy for his bitterest foes, and who ‘had never outgrown the forest and a dirt floor.’” — The New Yorker

Jack Ford presents the new Lincoln novel by Jerome Charyn



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About the Author03_Jerome Charyn_Author Photo

Jerome Charyn is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works, Charyn has earned a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him “one of the most important writers in American literature.” New York Newsday hailed Charyn as “a contemporary American Balzac,”and the Los Angeles Times described him as “absolutely unique among American writers.” Since the 1964 release of Charyn’s first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until he left teaching in 2009. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn’s book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, “The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.” Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.

For more information please visit Jerome Charyn’s website. You can also find him on Twitter and Goodreads.

This giveaway is open to the U.S. and Canada only and ends on March 9, 2015.  Please use Rafflecopter to enter.

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I Am Abraham Blog Tour Schedule

Monday, February 9
Review at Flashlight Commentary

Tuesday, February 10
Interview & Giveaway at Flashlight Commentary

Wednesday, February 11
Spotlight & Giveaway at Passages to the Past

Thursday, February 12
Review at With Her Nose Stuck in a Book

Friday, February 13
Spotlight at What Is That Book About

Monday, February 16
Review & Excerpt at A Virtual Hobby Store and Coffee Haus

Tuesday, February 17
Interview & Giveaway at A Virtual Hobby Store and Coffee Haus
Spotlight at CelticLady’s Reviews

Wednesday, February 18
Review at Back Porchervations

Thursday, February 19
Spotlight at A Literary Vacation

Friday, February 20
Interview & Giveaway at Let Them Read Books

Saturday, February 21
Spotlight at Historical Readings & Reviews

Monday, February 23
Interview & Giveaway at Teddy Rose Book Reviews

Tuesday, February 24
Audio Book Review & Interview at Just One More Chapter

Wednesday, February 25
Review at Bookish

Thursday, February 26
Spotlight at Historical Fiction Connection

Monday, March 2
Review at Forever Ashley

Tuesday, March 3
Interview at Books and Benches

Wednesday, March 4
Spotlight at Caroline Wilson Writes

Thursday, March 5
Review & Reader’s Guide at She is Too Fond of Books

Friday, March 6
Review at Impressions in Ink

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Giveaway Winners Galore

Posted by Teddyrose@1 on February 22, 2015
Posted in Giveaway Winners Galore  | Tagged With: | 8 Comments

Giveaway Winners Galore

Thanks so much to all the authors, publishers, and publicists for all of the awesome giveaways! They are so much fun to host and I know my readers appreciate them!!
Thanks to everyone who entered the following giveaways! Winners, please reply to the email I sent you today within 48 hours to claim your books. After 2 days you will be disqualified and a new winner will be picked. Rafflecopter picks all winners at random.

The Housemaid’s Daughter by Barbara Mutch

The winner is Denise D.

Saving Jimani: Life and Death in the Haiti Earthquake by Rene

 

The winner is Margie T.

Lady Katherine Knollys by Sarah-Beth Watkins

The winner is Colleen T

Blood Divide by John Sadler

The winner is Denise D.

Hell and Good Company:The Spanish Civil War and the World it Made by Richard Rhodes

The winner is Anita Y.

THE NIGHTINGALE by Kristin Hannah

The winner is Carl S.

New Uses For Old Boyfriends by Beth Kendrick

The winner is Carl S.

DIRTY CHICK: True Tales of an Unlikely Farmer by Antonia Murphy

The winner is Rhonda L.

Frame of Reference by Christopher Stone

The winner is Laura T.