Welcome to Day #2 of
Armchair BEA and I am already having a blast. I loved all the comments yesterday and getting to know all of you a little bit. I also enjoyed the blogs I visited and plan on visiting more today - so many great blogs that I did not know about.
Day #2 is about Giveaways and Best of 2011. First let's talk about some of my favorite books in 2011, this was very hard to narrow down, I have read 72 books so far this year, but I made myself do the best 9 books I have read this year (not necessarily published this year):
- Night Road by Kristin Hannah - general fiction
- Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd (one of my husband's favorites as well) - literary suspense
- Fatal Judgment by Irene Hannon - romantic suspense
- Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal by Conor Grennan - nonfiction
- These Things Hidden by Heather Gudenkauf - suspense, general fiction
- Between Shades of Gray by Ruth Sepetys - young adult, historical
- Love You More by Lisa Gardner - suspense
- Exposure by Therese Fowler - general fiction
- Secret Daughter by Shilipi Somaya Gowda - general fiction, foreign locale
So my giveaway is simple and open internationally (if you live where the Book Depository ships). To enter comment and tell me your favorite book you have read this year. The winner will receive the book of their choice $15 or less value from the Book Depository! Giveaway ends 5/30/11.
Check out
this link for other giveaways.
Check out
this link for other Best of posts.
After her father's slow death from cancer, Carlie thought things
couldn't get worse. But now, she is forced to confront the fact that her
family in dire financial straits. To stay afloat, her mom has had to
sell their cherished oceanfront home and move Carlie and her younger
brother Keith to the other side of the tracks to dreaded Las Pulgas, or
"the fleas" in Spanish. They must now attend a tough urban high school
instead of their former elite school, and on Carlie's first day of
school, she runs afoul of edgy K.T., the Latina tattoo girl who's always
ready for a fight, even on crutches. Carlie fends off the attention of
Latino and African American teen boys, and one, a handsome
seventeen-year-old named Juan, nicknames her Princess when he detects
her aloof attitude towards her new classmates. What they don't know is
that Carlie isn't really aloof; she's just in mourning for her father
and almost everything else that mattered to her. Mr. Smith, the revered
English teacher who engages all his students, suggests she'll like her
new classmates if she just gives them a chance; he cajoles her into
taking over the role of Desdemona in the junior class production of
Othello, opposite Juan, after K.T. gets sidelined. Keith, who becomes
angrier and more sullen by the day, spray paints insults all over the
gym as he acts out his anger over the family's situation and reduced
circumstances. Even their cat Quicken goes missing, sending Carlie and
Keith on a search into the orchard next to their seedy garden apartment
complex. They're met by a cowboy toting a rifle who ejects them at
gunpoint from his property. But when Carlie finds him amiably having
coffee with their mom the next day -- when he's returned her cat -- she
begins to realize that nothing is what it seems in Las Pulgas. 
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