What People Magazine is Reading This Week

For those Kindle readers who, like me, read for entertainment, scanning the book reviews in People magazine is good way to check out new people-related books - celebrity bios, popular novels, absorbing nonfiction - just hitting bookstore shelves. Featured in the July 25th and August 1st issues of People:

Conquistadora, by Esmeralda Santiago. Publisher. Print Length: 432 p. NOVEL. Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (23 reviews). People's slant: "The adventures of a Scarlett O'Hara-style heroine in 19th century Puerto Rico." Kindle edition $12.99; Hardcover $15.12. Text-to-Speech: Enabled. Also available in a Spanish edition for $9.99.
"Ana grows up the willful daughter of aristocratic parents during the waning years of Spain’s colonial era... a not-so-innocent convent girl who marries her best friend’s fiancé’s twin brother, then heads to Puerto Rico without her friend, but with both twins in tow. The young men intend to make their fortunes, but it is Ana who has the savvy and determination to persevere through hurricanes, slave revolts, cholera and any other challenge the island has to offer. Santiago makes Caribbean history come alive through characters as human as they are iconic. The richness of her imagination and the lushness of her language will serve saga enthusiasts well..." - Publishers Weekly.

The Summer of the Bear, by Bella Pollen. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011. Print Length: 448 p. NOVEL. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (8 reviews). People's slant: "A thrilling tale that also unravels mysteries of the human heart..." Kindle edition $9.99; $14.04. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"In 1980 Germany, under Cold War tension, a mole is suspected in the British Embassy. When the clever diplomat Nicky Fleming dies suddenly and suspiciously, it’s convenient to brand him the traitor. But was his death an accident, murder, or suicide? As the government digs into Nicky’s history, his wife, Letty, relocates with her three children to a remote Scottish island hoping to salvage their family. But the isolated shores of her childhood retreat only intensify their distance, and it is Letty’s brilliant and peculiar youngest child, Jamie, who alone holds on to the one thing he’s sure of: his father has promised to return and he was a man who never broke a promise..." - Amazon.

Then Came You, by Jennifer Weiner. Atria Books, 2011. Print Length: 352 p. NOVEL. Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (31 reviews). People's slant: "Then isn't as comical as her past novels, but its sharp take on class and famly keeps it juicy." Kindle edition $12.99; Hardcover $14.84. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"...savvy tale of a profoundly unorthodox family, unspooling the impossibly complicated and hopeful tale of how baby Aurora was born. The players: beautiful, lonely Princeton student and egg donor Jules, who uses the proceeds from selling her eggs to help save her drug-addled dad; surrogate Annie, a restless married mom-of-two trying to dig her way out of debt, a lifelong rivalry with her successful sister, and a marital rut; Bettina, India's step-daughter, who feels betrayed by her divorced parents and is desperate to rebuild the imagined happiness of her youth; and Aurora's legal mom, India, a gold digger who inadvertently falls in love with the man she married for money." - Publishers Weekly.

Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles. Viking, 2011. Print Length: 352 p. NOVEL. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (13 reviews). People's slant: "Put on some Billie Holiday, pour a dry martini and immerse yourself in the eventful life of Katey Kontent, a smart young woman trying to find herself in Manhattan in the late 1930s." Kindle edition $12.99; Hardcover $14.52. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"...the story of a watershed year in the life of an uncompromising twenty-five-year- old named Katey Kontent. Armed with little more than a formidable intellect, a bracing wit, and her own brand of cool nerve, Katey embarks on a journey from a Wall Street secretarial pool through the upper echelons of New York society in search of a brighter future. The story opens on New Year's Eve in a Greenwich Village jazz bar, where Katey and her boardinghouse roommate Eve happen to meet Tinker Grey, a handsome banker with royal blue eyes and a ready smile. This chance encounter and its startling consequences cast Katey off her current course, but end up providing her unexpected access to the rarified offices of Conde Nast and a glittering new social circle. Befriended in turn by a shy, principled multimillionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, and a single-minded widow who is ahead of her times, Katey has the chance to experience first hand the poise secured by wealth and station, but also the aspirations, envy, disloyalty, and desires that reside just below the surface. Elegant and captivating, Rules of Civility turns a Jamesian eye on how spur of the moment decisions define life for decades to come." - Amazon.

It Looked Different on the Model: Epic Tales of Impending Shame and Infamy, by Laurie Notaro. Villard, 2011. Print Length: 240 p. HUMOR. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (10 reviews). People's slant: "She takes the quotidian moments that pass the rest of us by and makes them milk-snorted-out-the-nostrils funny." Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"... Laurie Notaro is just trying to find the right fit, whether it’s in the adorable blouse that looks charming on the mannequin but leaves her in a literal bind or in her neighborhood after she’s shamefully exposed at a holiday party by delivering a low-quality rendition of Jingle Bells. Notaro makes misstep after riotous misstep as she shares tales of marriage and family, including stories about the dog-bark translator that deciphers Notaro’s and her husband’s own 'woofs' a little too accurately, the emails from her mother with 'FWD' in the subject line (which in email code means Forecasting World Destruction), and the dead-of-night shopping sprees and Devil Dog–devouring monkeyshines of a creature known as 'Ambien Laurie.' At every turn, Notaro’s pluck and irresistible candor set the New York Times bestselling author on a journey that’s laugh-out-loud funny and utterly unforgettable." - Publisher.

One Flight Up, by Susan Fales-Hill. Atria Books, 2010. Print Length: 368 p. NOVEL. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (23 reviews). People's slant: "...a delicious tale of desire, betrayal and forgiveness among Manhattan's seemingly charmed elite." Kindle edition $8.99; Paperback $10.29. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"India Chumley, Abby Adams, Esme Talbot, and Monique Dawkins-Dubois have been friends since attending Sibley, an exclusive Manhattan prep school. Now that they are all grown up, they're discovering that their lives and relationships aren't quite what they'd expected...It would be easy for readers to dismiss this as another look at four privileged Manhattanites and their midlife sexcapades but this is a surprisingly good look at the struggles of women in relationships. While it is definitely heavy on the luxury and brand-name dropping, the characters are funny, the writing is deft, and the story is oddly compelling." - Publishers Weekly.
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