The American Heiress by Daisy Goodwin (audio)

Overview from Barnes and Noble:

"Anyone suffering Downton Abbey withdrawal symptoms (who isn't?) will find an instant tonic in Daisy Goodwin’s The American Heiress. The story of Cora Cash, an American heiress in the 1890s who bags an English duke, this is a deliciously evocative first novel that lingers in the mind." --Allison Pearson, New York Times bestselling author of I Don’t Know How She Does It and I Think I Love YouBe careful what you wish for. Traveling abroad with her mother at the turn of the twentieth century to seek a titled husband, beautiful, vivacious Cora Cash, whose family mansion in Newport dwarfs the Vanderbilts’, suddenly finds herself Duchess of Wareham, married to Ivo, the most eligible bachelor in England. Nothing is quite as it seems, however: Ivo is withdrawn and secretive, and the English social scene is full of traps and betrayals. Money, Cora soon learns, cannot buy everything, as she must decide what is truly worth the price in her life and her marriage.

Witty, moving, and brilliantly entertaining, Cora’s story marks the debut of a glorious storyteller who brings a fresh new spirit to the world of Edith Wharton and Henry James.

"For daughters of the new American billionaires of the 19th century, it was the ultimate deal: marriage to a cash-strapped British Aristocrat in return for a title and social status. But money didn’t always buy them happiness." --Daisy Goodwin in The Daily Mail

The American Heiress was originally sold and distributed in the UK as My Last Duchess.

My thoughts:
I listened to this audio book last week.  I wasn't sure about the narrator at first, she made some of the characters, particularly Cora's mother, hard to like with their disdainful tone, but I think these characters would have been hard to like even reading them from the page.

Cora is a beautiful 19 year old who has plenty of money in her own right.  Her mother is determined to see her marry well and hopes to find her a title in Europe.  At first things are not going as planned, but a true accident sets things in motion that end, or in another sense begins, with her marriage to the Duke of Wareham.  Being a Duchess is harder than it seems, and it can be hard for Cora to know who to trust and who is waiting for her next faux pas. 

I've never seen Downton Abbey, but it did remind me of a movie I saw some years ago in regards to how the servants were treated and what they were expected to do and not do.  Cora brings along her own maid when she moves to England.  Her maid faces some of the same issues with fitting in and knowing what is expected of her by the rest of the household.

I wasn't sure if I was going to like Cora at first.  She seemed a bit spoiled and self centered, but as she grew and learned and faced society as the new Duchess of Wareham I found myself liking her more and more.

Product Details

• ISBN-13: 9780312658663
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 3/27/2012
• Pages: 496

Meet the Author

DAISY GOODWIN, a Harkness scholar who attended Columbia University’s film school after earning a degree in history at Cambridge University, is a leading television producer in the U.K. Her poetry anthologies, including 101 Poems That Could Save Your Life, have introduced many new readers to the pleasures of poetry, and she was Chair of the judging panel of the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction. She and her husband, an ABC TV executive, have two daughters and live in London. The American Heiress is her first novel.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Overview

Be prepared to meet three unforgettable women:

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.

Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.

Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women-mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends-view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.

My thoughts:
I don't have any real reason why it took me so long to read this book, it seemed like everyone I knew had read it and loved it.  I borrowed it from a friend months ago and read half of it.  I put it down to read some other things and didn't feel a great pull to pick it back up again, then Sunday morning I started where I had stopped and I just couldn't put it down!  I think sometimes the reader needs to be in the right place for the book and I must not have been before.

I purposely tried to picture the characters on my own without letting the casting for the movie influence my vision of them.  I managed okay except for Minny and Aibileen, I kept remembering all the Oscar buzz so I kept seeing the actors for those two, but the rest of them I managed to imagine all on my own.  I know there was some talk about dissatisfaction with the way Stockett had the maids speak, but I didn't feel like it was an issue.  I recall having a bit of trouble with it at the beginning, but then it just became a voice with an accent in my head.

Skeeter, Minny and Aibileen were very well fleshed out.  Some of the other characters felt more like stereotypes, Hilly the mean girl and queen bee who had to have her way, Elizabeth who was willing to be a follower as long as she could fit in and not feel poor, and Celia, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who can't find a way to make friends.  I felt bad for just about everyone at some point but Hilly, there is just something about a bully that really bothers me.  It would be nice to think that at some point we are able to get away from people like that but they just keep popping up. 

I felt like Stockett did a good job with making you really feel like it was the 1960's.  While I know things aren't perfect now, it is a bit heartening to see what strides have been made with civil rights since then and to think that it took so many people working together to make it so.  Reading the part they were each playing in writing a book about how the maids really felt about the white women and families they worked for, I wondered if I would have been that brave at the time.  Skeeter took big risks right along with Minny and Aibileen and her opinion was not the prevailing one.  It cost her socially in big ways.  It is so much easier to go with the flow than to stand up for what you feel is right.

I was sad to see the book end, even though I was racing along to find out how things were going to turn out.  The characters seemed like real people to me and I was sorry to see them go. 

Product Details

• ISBN-13: 9780425232200
• Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
• Publication date: 4/5/2011
• Pages: 544

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

Overview

A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.

Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she meets Ernest Hemingway and her life changes forever. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group—the fabled “Lost Generation”—that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris, which hardly values traditional notions of family and monogamy. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold on to her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. Despite their extraordinary bond, they eventually find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriage—a deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything they’ve fought so hard for.

A heartbreaking portrayal of love and torn loyalty, The Paris Wife is all the more poignant because we know that, in the end, Hemingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but Hadley.

My thoughts:
I love discovering the history behind real people and what really drove them to be who and what they were, but when reading a fictional account I am also left wondering how much is true and how much has been filled into the blanks left by history and the passage of time.  At times this story drew me in, and at others I felt like I was just waiting for something to happen.  Hadley spent a lot of time waiting for something to happen, waiting for Earnest to come home from a day of writing, waiting for him to return from a trip, waiting for her child to feel better, waiting to make a decision.  Perhaps that makes it fitting that the reader also feels a sense of waiting.

I found myself wanting Hadley to stand up for herself and to take a stand.  To not be so understanding of what her husband needed as an artist.  I think I would have enjoyed it more as well if she hadn't pointed out that there was going to be a woman who was going to be the one who would come between them at some point.  For people who already knew the history or the couple, they also already knew that someone was going to come in to break apart their bond, but I would have liked to have not known from the start what was coming.  It would have given me more of a chance to be in each of the moments instead of also being constantly on the alert for the "other woman".

This wasn't a book I loved or hated, it just didn't quite capture me as I hoped it would.  It seemed well done in the historical aspects and I enjoyed the peek into the lives of other artists of the time living in Paris.  The picture of the Fitzgerald's was definitely something!  I think for fans of Hemingway they may be disappointed by how he is portrayed.  He seems to be a very selfish man who is not fully able to love anyone else.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780345521309
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 2/22/2011
Pages: 320

Jeannie out of the Bottle by Barbara Eden with Wendy Leigh

Overview from Barnes and Noble:

A magical, heartwarming memoir from one of Hollywood’s most beloved icons

Over the past four decades, the landmark NBC hit television series I Dream of Jeannie has delighted generations of audiences and inspired untold numbers of teenage crushes on its beautiful blond star, Barbara Eden. Part pristine Hollywood princess and part classic bombshell, with innocence, strength, and comedic talent to spare, Barbara finally lets Jeannie out of her bottle to tell her whole story.

Jeannie Out of the Bottle takes us behind the scenes of I Dream of Jeannie as well as Barbara’s dozens of other stage, movie, television, and live concert performances. We follow her from the hungry years when she was a struggling studio contract player at 20th Century Fox through difficult weeks trying to survive as a chorus girl at Ciro’s Sunset Strip supper club, from a stint as Johnny Carson’s sidekick on live TV to tangling on-screen and off with some of Hollywood’s most desirable leading men, including Elvis Presley, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, and Warren Beatty. From the ups and downs of her relationship with her Jeannie co-star Larry Hagman to a touching meeting with an exquisite and vulnerable Marilyn Monroe at the twilight of her career, readers join Barbara on a thrilling journey through her five decades in Hollywood.

But Barbara’s story is also an intimate and honest memoir of personal tragedy: a stillborn child with her first husband, Michael Ansara; a verbally abusive, drug-addicted second husband; the loss of her beloved mother; and the accidental heroin-induced death of her adult son, just months before his wedding. With candor and poignancy, Barbara reflects on the challenges she has faced, as well as the joys she has experienced and how she has maintained her humor, optimism, and inimitable Jeannie magic throughout the roller-coaster ride of a truly memorable life.

Illustrated with sixteen pages of photographs, including candid family pictures and rare publicity stills, Jeannie Out of the Bottle is a must-have for every fan, old and new.

My thoughts:
I am fascinated by the lives of real people and love to read biographies and autobiographies, probably autobiographies more because there is more real anecdotes and less speculation.  I don't believe I have ever seen a full episode of I Dream of Jeannie, but I knew the premise of the show and read a good review of this one somewhere a few months ago.  I found it on the new shelf at the library before we left for our vacation and I grabbed it.  I don't like to take library books to the beach so I had to wait until we came back to finish it.

Barbara Eden's story is engaging and feels authentic.  At times there felt like a lot of name dropping, which is one of the things she accuses her second husband of doing too much of, but I think a lot of readers might be wondering which other stars she interacted with and acted with during her career.  The love she shared with her first husband, Michael Ansara, was so palpable that I really felt like the decision she made to seek a divorce was not the right one.  She states that even to this day she is not sure she made the right decision, but I couldn't tell if it was because of the love she still felt or for the effect she felt it had on their son Matthew.

The Hollywood of Barbara Eden's early career seems so different from the way it seems today.  Along with the studios steadfast decree that she could not show her bellybutton as Jeannie on her hit show.  One of the passages that rally stayed with me was when Eden was talking about how Jeannie might not have won a lot of awards at the time, but it has remained popular and known all these years later in reruns and DVD release s while many of the shows that were winning acclaim at the time from critics have not endured nearly as well.  We tend to think awards are what makes great shows, but many times the shows people love may not be the same ones that critics are putting their attention on.

Another thing that I know I have made mistakes with is questioning my first instincts about a person.  Eden's first impression of her second husband was not a positive one, but then he won her over through persistence.  She was married to him for quite a few years, but it was not a good marriage and she ended up leaving him.

I loved this glimpse into Eden's life and how she was honest with her struggles in her career and in her personal life.  How the stillbirth of her second son threw her into a depression that ended her first marriage, how her son struggles with drug addiction and repeatedly sought treatment, how she ended up in a verbally abusive marriage and stayed far longer than she should have, and how show business was there through it all with roles and jobs all over the world.

Details
•Pub. Date: April 2011
•Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
•Format: Hardcover , 288pp
•ISBN-13: 9780307886941
•ISBN: 0307886948

Meet The Author
BARBARA EDEN has been a television, film, and stage actress, and a Las Vegas headliner, for more than five decades. She is best known for her title role in the hit TV series I Dream of Jeannie. She grew up in San Francisco and currently lives in Beverly Hills with her husband, Jon Eicholtz, and their Labradoodle, Djin Djin.


WENDY LEIGH is the New York Times bestselling author of thirteen books, including Life with My Sister Madonna (as co-author) and True Grace: The Life and Times of an American Princess.



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"The Search for God and Guinness:A Biography of the Beer the Changed the World" by Stephen Mansfield

The Search for God and Guinness Stephen Mansfield gives the background history of how beer came into being and how it came to be brewed along with it’s importance to cultivating established civilizations. He also traces the Guinness family for over 200 years from the first Guinness to begin the brewery to the last one who stepped aside to allow the company to become a more public entity. Within the family he traces those who stayed with the family business, those who went into banking and those who entered ministry. Along with the history of the family he also covers what else was happening in Ireland and the rest of the world during those times.

I enjoyed learning more about how beer was discovered, experimented with and brewed and how it may have helped encourage people to settle down into cities so they could stay in one place to cultivate crops. I learned a lot about Ireland, beer and the Guinness family (I didn’t realize the Guinness book of World Records was started by the Guinness family). I did however feel that there was more repetition than necessary in some of the sections and some sort of family tree would have been helpful since so many of the same family names were reused generation after generation.

http://brb.thomasnelson.com/