Teddy Rose Book Reviews Plus More


Queen for a Day: A Novel in Stories by Maxine RosalerQueen for a Day: Novel in Stories by Maxine Rosaler


Thanks to Deb Zipf of Meryl Moss Media, Inc., I am giving away one print copy of ‘Queen for a Day: A Novel in Stories’ by Maxine Rosaler.

Description Queen for a Day: Novel in Stories by Maxine Rosaler


After Mimi Slavitt’s three-year-old son, Danny, is diagnosed with autism, she finds herself in a world nearly as isolating as her son’s. It is a position she shares only with mothers like herself, women chosen against their will for lives of sacrifice and martyrdom. Searching for miracles, begging for the help of heartless bureaucracies while arranging every minute of every day for children who can never be left alone, they exist in a state of perpetual crisis, normal life always just out of reach.
 
In chapters told from Mimi’s point of view and theirs, these women emerge as conflicted, complex individuals, totally unsuited for sainthood, often dreaming of the day they can just walk away. Taking its title from the 1950s reality TV show in which the contestants—housewives living lives filled with pain and suffering—competed with one another for deluxe refrigerators and sets of stainless steel silverware, Queen for a Day portrays a group of imperfect women coping under enormous pressure.
 
In her impressive debut, Rosaler tells their stories in ironic, precise, and vivid prose, with humor and insight born of firsthand experience, and offers readers “the gut-heaving, throat-choking, darkly comic truth—about parenthood, marriage, love, rage, and hard-won survival” (Eileen Pollack, author of The Bible of Dirty Jokes). 

Praise Queen for a Day: Novel in Stories by Maxine Rosaler


“With intelligence and sympathy, this compassionate and darkly humorous debut tells the stories of mothers of children with disabilities”-Alison Lurie, Pulitzer Prize–winning author

“An engrossing and compassionate collection showing motherhood in its most unrelenting form.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

 “I was both moved and impressed by this novel, and the intelligence and sympathy with which the author presents her afflicted characters.” —Alison Lurie, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Foreign Affairs and The Language of Houses

 “Maxine Rosaler’s ‘novel in stories’ resembles Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, except rather than surviving an absurd and unjust war, the burden here is one of mothering an autistic child. Like O’Brien, Rosaler explores the mettle and morality of Mimi Slavitt on the ‘battlefield of her existence.’” —DeWitt Henry, founding editor of Ploughshares, author of Sweet Marjoram: Notes and Essays

 “Maxine Rosaler’s stories are both hard-edged and comic, both laced with despair and hopeful against all expectation. New York City is the setting, a struggle to prosper in the face of bad choices and deeply ingrained perversity is the theme. Constant, however, is a narrative voice that proves irresistible, and a craftsman’s approach to the construction of these contemporary parables.” —C. Michael Curtis, fiction editor, The Atlantic

About Maxine Rosaler


MAXINE ROSALER has had fiction and nonfiction published in The Southern Review, Glimmer Train, Witness, Fifth Wednesday, Green Mountains Review, The Baltimore Review and other literary magazines. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for Fiction. Her short stories have been cited in editions of Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays.

Buy Queen for a Day: Novel in Stories by Maxine Rosaler


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Giveaway Queen for a Day: Novel in Stories by Maxine Rosaler

This giveaway is open to the U.S. only and ends on June 221, 2018 midnight pacific time.  Entries are accepted via Rafflecopter only.

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A Drop In The Ocean by Jenni OgdenA Drop In The Ocean by Jenni Ogden


Thanks to Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity, LLC, I am giving away one print copy of A Drop In The Ocean by Jenni Ogden.

Description of A Drop In The Ocean by Jenni Ogden


On her 49th birthday, Anna Fergusson, Boston neuroscientist and dedicated introvert, arrives at an unwanted crossroads when the funding for her research lab is cut. With her confidence shattered and her future uncertain, on impulse she rents a cabin for a year on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.  However Turtle Island, alive with sea birds and nesting Green turtles, is not the retreat she expected. Here she finds love—for the eccentric islanders who become her family; for Tom, the laid-back turtle whisperer; and for the turtles whose ancient mothering instincts move her to tears. But Anna finds that even on her idyllic drop in the ocean there is pain, and as the months fly past her dream for a new life is threatened by a darkness that challenges everything she has come to believe about the power of love.

Evocative and thought-provoking, A Drop in the Ocean is a story about second chances and hard lessons learned in the gentlest of ways.

Praise for A Drop In The Ocean by Jenni Ogden


“Readers will enjoy this novel of second chances, not only at love but at life, reminiscent of Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back.”—Booklist

“Reading A Drop in the Ocean was everything a reading experience should be, endearing and enduring, time spent with characters who seem to be people I already knew.”—Jacquelyn Mitchard, New York Times #1 best-selling author of The Deep End of the Ocean and Two If By Sea

“ . . . . brilliantly written  . . . . A powerful read that I highly recommend to readers everywhere.”—Danielle Urban,  Readers’ Favorite

About Jenni OgdenA Drop In The Ocean by Jenni Ogden


Jenni Ogden grew up in a country town in the South Island of New Zealand, in a home bursting with books and music. Armed with NZ and Australian university degrees in zoology and psychology, she took up a postdoctoral fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked with H.M., the most famous amnesiac in history, before returning to an academic position at Auckland University. There, she immersed herself in clinical psychology and neuropsychology, as well as traveling extensively and writing about her patients’ moving stories in two books, Fractured Minds: A Case-Study Approach to Clinical Neuropsychology and Trouble In Mind: Stories from a Neuropsychologist’s Casebook.

Jenni has had a love affair with the Great Barrier Reef since her twenties, when she spent summers on a coral cay rather like Turtle Island, tagging sea turtles. Ogden and her husband now live off-grid on a spectacular island off the coast of NZ, with winters spent traveling and at their second home in tropical Far North Queensland. When she is not writing or traveling, Jenni can be found on the beach—always with a book—or spending time with her family.

Please visit Jenni online at the following places

www.jenniogden.com

facebook.com/JenniOgdenbooks?_rdr=p

twitter.com/jenni_ogden

https://nz.linkedin.com/in/jenniogdenbooks

goodreads.com/author/show/227694.Jenni_Ogden

Or check out her blog “Trouble in Mind” on Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/trouble-in-mind-0.

Buy A Drop In The Ocean by Jenni Ogden


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Giveaway of A Drop In The Ocean by Jenni Ogden


This giveaway is open to Canada and the U.S. only and ends on May 20, 2016 at midnight pacific time.  Entries are accepted via Rafflecopter only.

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