Lisa reads: Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda
Secret Daughter
There is a part of me that really enjoyed this book. It’s well-written, it paints very vivid pictures of India, and you are definitely drawn into the story and the characters. You are honestly worried for Kavita’s future. It’s easy to get caught up in Somer and Krishnan’s romance. You want Somer and her daughter to really form a bond. You can sense the clear and immediate dangers in the slums of Mumbai, and picture the lovely, well-decorated apartment, staffed with servants and scented with wonderful, spicy food. Gowda is wonderfully descriptive. That’s one face of the book.
The second face of the book nagged at me, irritated me to no end. It starts with the diagnosis from Somer’s doctor:
“By the time she reaches the age of thirty-two, she will no longer have the ability to bear children, the one thing that defines her as a woman. What will I be then?“
What?!? The only thing that makes her a woman is her ability to have babies? [Read more →]
by David R. Fett and Stephen Langford never lives up to the promise. 
, Irene America is a woman in an abusive marriage, who discovers that her husband has been reading her diary. Instead of lashing out, she takes advantage — she starts a secret journal and uses her diary to manipulate her violent husband, Gil. 
starts with a very clever idea: crime novelist Lisa Lutz asks ex-boyfriend David Hayward, a published poet, to collaborate on a mystery novel with her. Lisa writes the first chapter and sends it to David; he writes the second chapter and sends it back. They alternate, odd and even chapters, and manage to write a funny, interesting crime novel with some great twists and turns. The story is good, but the interaction between the two co-authors (their footnotes on each other’s chapters and their emails between chapters) is better. 
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, it’s pretty simple: if you find 
by Melissa Marr, thinking I would read the first chapter while they finished boarding and got through the announcements. I planned to sleep the rest of the way home…187 pages later, we landed in Cleveland. I hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep. Instead, I was utterly absorbed in the book, wishing I had just another hour in the air so I could finish it. 
describes itself as “a novel in stories.” To some extent, I think that’s true of all novels, but it is very pronounced in The Civilized World. Each chapter is a distinct story, although the stories overlap in a way that gives a much broader picture. Like real life, you don’t know every detail of every story, which sometimes leaves you wondering about how things happened. The stories draw you in — they are interesting on their own, and they leave you wondering how and when they will tie in with the first storyline.
, so I decided to give it a try before I passed it along. I had a stressful business trip on the schedule and I thought that some chiseled, supernaturally handsome vampires would be great company in my lonely hotel room – and I was right. Dark Prince is literary junk food – no nutritional value but oh, so tasty. 
