Cannonball Read Round Two Complete

Today I officially completed the second round of Cannonball Read. Starting last November, I started on an adventure to read a book a week for the next year.  I didn't complete a book every week during the year.  I was able to finish 52 books by the end of October this year.

Halfway during the year, I joined a book club with some friends.  I also participated in two read-a-thons.  I've found that blogging about the books I read while sometimes a burden is fun.  I've gotten to "meet" some great book bloggers over the past year.

It's not clear if another round is happening for Cannonball Read.  I'm planning to keep reading and blogging, but I'm also interested in participating in other reading challenges in the upcoming year.

Fifty-Two: The White Queen - Philippa Gregory

I have to attract the attention of a young man riding out to yet another battle, against an enemy that cannot be defeated.  He may not even see me.  He is not likely to be in the mood for beggars or flirts.  I have to excite his compassion for my position, inspire his sympathy for my needs, and stay in his memory long enough for him to do something about them both.

These are the words of Elizabeth Woodville, recently widowed during a battle of the Cousin Wars as she tries to gather favor with the soon to be named King of England - Edward.  Elizabeth comes from a long line of family who descended from Melusina, the water goddess.  Her and her mother use their "powers" to influence weather conditions or put a hex on others.  Elizabeth is able to enchant Edward and marries him in secret before he went into battle to claim his throne.  Edward and Elizabeth take over as King and Queen and arrange their advisers to make alliances between the House of York and House of Lancaster.  As their family grows, they are challenged by other family members and other usurpers that want to have the throne. 

Edward gets sick and ends up dying causing a fight for the throne yet again even though he left two sons as official heirs.  His brother Richard ends up claiming the throne for himself and locking up Edward's two sons in the Tower.  Elizabeth flees with her daughters to sanctuary and starts to plot on how to overthrow Richard.  She makes an alliance with Margaret of Beauford who son Henry Tutor is anxious to take the throne as well.
From her confinement, Elizabeth plots, schemes and uses her "powers" to continue her ambition and allow her children to claim their birthright.

This book is the first in a series about the Plantagenets from Philippa Gregory.  I really enjoyed her Tutors series, but had a hard time relating to the main character Elizabeth.  I felt that her voice was very whiny and negative.  The plot from chapter to chapter was very similar and it was hard to keep all the different family members straight. I didn't really believe that women back then would use "powers" or "witchcraft" to influence events.  I found it hard to believe that a local woman could stand at the side of the road and entrance the would-be king to marry her. 

Fifty-one: Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart

Lenny Abramov falls in love with Eunice Park one night in Rome at the end of a long vacation/work trip.  He convinces her to come back to US and stay with him in NYC.  Their romance buds as the political landscape becomes more volatile. In the end Lenny loses his love of his life.

Super Sad True Love Story is set in the future where everyone is addicted to this handheld device called apparat.  This device shares information about the owner and other people and allows folks to rate themselves real-time.  The book goes between diary entries of Lenny and GlobalTeen (like Facebook) messages from Eunice's account. 

The author clearly has opinions about how technology and public opinion influence our daily lives.  I'm not sure I understood all the pretexts and found the book to be overall strange. 

Fifty: Poison - Sara Poole

1492 Rome, Italy. Pope Innocent VIII is very ill and about to sign an edict to wipe out all the Jews within all Christiandom.  Francesca Girodano just proved her worth as a poisoner and agrees to serve Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia and ultimately avenge her father's death.

Francesca's mission is to create a poison that looks like the person died from natural causes. Her father was working on such poison before he was murdered.  While seeking help from an apothecary in the Jewish quarter, Francesca finds out that her father might have been a converso.  She also learns that the Jews are not going to let an edict wipe them out.  They are ready to fight the Pope or the Grand Inquisitor.

Francesca befriends a monk that is close to the Pope in order to deliver the poison.  She is betrayed and tricked by him within the Pope's castle.  Luckily a local captain who works for the Captain is able to help her and the leader of the Jewish rebels to safety without suspicion. Before escaping though, they are able to plant the poisonous blood within the blood supply for the Pope.  The next day the Pope is dead, but no one is sure if it was the poison or just natural causes.

Unfortunately, Francesca gave the monk she befriended a capsule with deadly poison in it before he betrayed her.  No she must stop him before he uses it to poison the Cardinal or any of the other leading candidates for Pope.

Full of mystery and intrigue, Sara Poole captures the struggle between good and evil as well as the religious strife that plagued multiple countries during this time period.  I read this book as part of Dewey's 24-hour Read-A-Thon.  It is an easy read and did provide some page turning moments.  The ending was not what I expected and I believe the author set herself up for a sequel. Even though the book takes place in 1492 - Christopher Columbus does not appear at all within the book.

Fourty-Nine: A Passion for Books

I don't remember how this book ended up on my to-read list, but I found it a few weeks ago and decided to put in on my hold list at the DCPL. 

Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan edited this collection of stories, essays, poetry, cartoons and lists regarding books, reading, and collecting.

Even though there are many well-known authors and other book related folks represented in this book, I only ended up really reading thoroughly the essays written by the two editors and Anna Quindlen - "How Reading Changed My Life". 

It was amusing to see the inclusion of lists of books and the many variations of biblio words used as titles. Also my favorite cartoon was from The New Yorker depicting a real estate agent showing a wealthy couple an apartment where one room had floor to ceiling bookcases.  The caption reads "What kind of crazy people used to live here anyway?"

At the end of the book in case you haven't had enough text about books and reading, the editors include a bibliography of books on books.  This section reminds me of one section of the Library of Congress gift shop which is a collection of books on books.

Fourty-Seven & Fourty-Eight: The King's Daughter & The Queen's Captive - Barbara Kyle

I decided to write one post for both of these books since I read them back to back and really they focus on the same time period & characters.

Barbara Kyle continues her story about the Thornleigh family as they navigate the English court under Queen Mary and eventually Queen Elizabeth.  I read the first book in this series - The Queen's Lady - almost two years ago. Having read quite a few historical fiction books with the Tutor family as the subject matter, I was hesitant to read two more books about them.  But I knew that Barbara's writing style was clever and that she would integrate the history in an unique way.

The King's Daughter focuses on the time right after Queen Mary comes to power and is trying to finalize her marriage to Prince Phillip of Spain.  The heroine of this book is actually Honor's daughter Isabel.  Isabel betrothed is helping the rebels lead by Wyatt against the Queen to bring Princess Elizabeth to power.  Isabel is able to convince Wyatt that she can be a messenger from the French Ambassador to him.  Her family's history with neighbors - the Greenvilles - ends up causing her mother to get critical injured and her father to be put in jail.  While trying to rescue her father from jail, Isabel is forced to "pay" for his freedom by being violated by the head jailer.  Of course this "payment" backfires and her father is transferred to another jail. While in jail Isabel meets Carlos - a Spanish mercenary - who she ends up freeing & hiring to help her find where her father was taken.  Isabel is torn between helping the rebels and searching for her father with Carlos. As a fellow heretic that worked along side of her parents in the past threatens to expose her family's dark secrets, Isabel must find a way to get her parents to safety and still support her own beliefs.

The Queen's Captive focuses on the later half of Queen Mary's reign and the struggles she had to produce an heir.  Once again the heroine is Honor as she is called back to England to help advise Princess Elizabeth on matters of the court.  Richard is pardoned from the murder he committed and works on reestablishing their wool business in England.  Their son Adam commissions a new ship to be built and falls madly in love with the Princess.  The feud between the Greenvilles & the Thornleighs continues as religious tensions and threat of rebellion arise again. 
 

Fourty-six: Nocturnes - Kazuo Ishiguro

Passion or necessity- or the often uneasy combination of the two-determines the place of music in each of these lives.  And in one way or another, music delivers each of them a moment of reckoning: sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes just eluding their grasp.

 
Nocturnes is a collection of short stories about music and nightfall.  My favorite stories were Crooner and Nocturne.

Crooner is told from a local musician's point of view who recognizes an American singer sitting at a cafe in Venice.  The singer is there on a trip with his wife - one last hurrah. To stage a successful comeback the singer and his wife must separate.  The local musician accompanies the singer one night as he serenades his wife one last time.

Nocturne actually is a continuation of the Crooner story.  The wife and another jazz musician meet in a hotel while recovering from plastic surgery.  They explore the hotel at night and listen to music together.

All the stories in this collection involve some type of couple either married already or not.  None of the stories really have happy endings though.  They are well written and easy to read.  Very enjoyable! 

Fourty-five: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

November Book Club Selection

October Book Club Selection is Let the Great World Spin which I've read already.

Mikael Blomkvist, a financial reporter convicted of libel, is hired to write the Vanger family history and solve the mystery of Harriet Vanger's disappearance over 40 years ago.  Lisbeth Salander, a private investigator, helps him tap into his nemesis' files and explore the mounts of research over the past years on Harriet's disappearance.

The book is set in Sweden and broken into sections as the investigations move forward. At the start of each section facts about women & sex crimes/acts in Sweden are included. The first half of the book is mostly building background of the story.  It really wasn't until 300 pages in did the book finally keep me on the edge.  Mikael started to find new clues and the investigation took off.  Some of the twists were predictable and a few chapters at the end of the book seemed to be implying background for the next book.

The geographical setting of the story was kinda hard to comprehend since I'm not familiar with many towns in Sweden even though I have visited there.  I felt like I might have lost out on a nuisance of the story. 

Fourty-four: American Wife - Curtis Sittenfeld

Amercian Wife is loosely based on Laura Bush's life.  Most of the book takes place in Wisconsin with the family business being beef.  Sittenfeld breaks the book into sections based on the address where Alice lived.

Part 1 - 1272 Amity Lane in Riley, Wisconsin and captures Alice's life through high school. 
Part 2 - 3859 Sproule Street in Madison, Wisconsin and captures Alice's life through her first years of marriage
Part 3 - 402 Maronee Drive captures the birth of her child and the later years of marriage
Part 4 - 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue captures a few days of their life in the White House

This book was very well written and pulled the reader into the book.  It was easy to relate to Alice and her relationship with her husband Charlie.  I did feel the last part of the book didn't fit well with the first three sections.  Sittenfeld ended section three like the book was ending even though there was still over 100 pages to go.  I forgot about the cliffhanger prelude pages until I went back and read them again after finishing the book.  I know that Sittenfeld didn't want to focus on the politics but more the relationship between them, but I was surprised how little time was dedicated to the campaigning and their relationship during that time. I am curious to read a biography of Laura Bush's life to compare to what Sittenfeld based the Alice character on.

Fourty-three: Adam & Eve - Sena Jeter Naslund

**Full Disclosure: I received this book free of charge at a publisher's book event at ALA Annual Conference**

Lucy watches as her husband Thom is crushed and killed by a suspended piano.  That morning Thom had told her he had discovered extraterrestrial life and gave her his thumb drive with all his research.  Unsure what to do now that Thom is dead, Lucy attends a symposium in his name a few years later.  There she meets Pierre Saad an anthropologist genuinely interested in her well-being more than Thom's research.

A few weeks later while traveling around Egypt, Lucy runs into Pierre and his daughter Arielle.  They ask her to smuggle a new codex for the book of Genesis out of the country.  Lucy agrees and flies out of Egypt on a small plane.  A few hours into the flight she loses control of the place and crashes.  She's not sure where she is but is helped to safety, after being badly burned during the crash, by a naked man named Adam.

It turns out they are in a modern day "Eden" between multiple war zones in the Middle East.  Lucy nurses herself back to health and learns to accept her nudeness as well.  Adam doesn't know how long he's been there and he shares how he was raped and left on the side of the road in Iraq. Lucy & Adam learn to trust each other and provide for themselves. They help a pilot who crashes in Eden and search for the codex that Lucy threw out of the place before she crashed.

Certain events finally cause them to leave Eden and return the codex to Pierre.  At the airport they run into "the bad guys" Perpetuity and somehow escape them.  Before escaping Lucy finally gets to see again what is on the memory stick that Thom left her that day.  She finds out that he loved other "Lucys" and not just her.

Adam and Lucy eventually make it back to Pierre & Arielle safely.  The four dive into translating and figuring out the codex.  They explore the underground caves under Pierre's house. The bad guys eventually show up and try to take the codex from them but they escape but not without injury.

This book was not what I expected after reading the brief synopsis. I thought there would be more science versus religion questioning.  But I felt the major theme was more philosophy driven.  At times I was confused how the next chapter related to the next.  The whole book was set in 2020-2021.  I think the premise of the book is interesting but the action of the plot kinda stopped three-quarters of the way through the book.  Also parts of the plot were very sparsely described.  The author tries to generate a DaVinci Code drama with the Perpetuity group but those chapters were hard to read and link to the other chapters. 

Fourty-two: By Fire By Water - Mitchell James Kaplan

**Full Disclosure: Received this book via a First Author event at ALA Annual Conference in June**

Set in 15th century Spain, By Fire By Water gives a full examination of the crisis of faith at the hear of the Spanish Inquisition. Told from the perspective of the conversos who are torn between the religion they left behind and the conversion meant to ensure their safety.

Luis de Santangel, chancellor to the court in Aragon, starts to meet with a priest and one of his aides in secret debating the philosophies of different religions.  The aide, who is a practicing Jew, gets questioned by the Chief Inquisitor of Aragon.  Under pressure he gives up information about the meetings causing Luis and the priest to plot and kill the Inquistor.  From the moment of the murder, Luis and his son Gabriel are on the run.  Luis leaves Gabriel with his brother Estefan and moves on to be with the King who is fighting a war against the Muslims.

Gabriel and Estefan get picked up by the Grand Inquistor.  Estefan ends up being tortured and put in jail.  Gabriel decides to become a priest a "confess" his "sins".  Luis is forced to give up any relationship with either of them. 

Judith, a Jew living in Grenada, learns the silver making trade after her brother and wife die trying to escape religious persecution. Levi, their son, and Naomi's father Baba Shlomo live with Judith.  Her friend Dina teaches her languages and how to read and write.  Luis meets Judith one night and is immediately attracted to her.  She sets up a trade with Chris Colon (Christopher Columbus) to exchange her silver for supplies. 

Luis ends up having to call in a favor with the King to escape the investigations of the Inquistor.  Luis ends up fiancing Chris Colon's exploration to the new world.  At the end of the book he is left with no family or lover, just a lifetime of service to the court.

I enjoyed this book because it told the Christopher Columbus story from a different angle.  Plus the book really challenged my views on different religions and brought the Spanish Inquisition alive.  It's easy to forget that being able to worship in any means that you want is a freedom that took many years in coming.  And a freedom that not everyone is able to enjoy.  I picked up this book on a whim after listening to Mitchell speak at the conference.  While it wasn't the one of the first books from the conference that I read, I will say its one of the better ARC that I picked up from the conference.

Fourty-one: The Postmistress - Sarah Blake

I rate this book in my top 10 of books I read this year.  I could not put the book down and the writing just drew me in.  I've always had a fascination with World War II even since I did a report on Schindler's List in high school.  I think also my fascination comes from trying to understand what that time period was like here in the US and what my grandparents lived through.

The Postmistress follows the lives of three woman - Iris, Frankie & Emma - as they cope with the war and telling the truth.  Frankie Bard is an American who broadcasts on Edward Murrow's radio show the conditions in London during the Fall of 1940.  She learns to capture the scene through her vivid storytelling and calm voice.  Back in the states, Emma and her new husband Will, the local doctor, listen to Frankie's stories every night.  One night after losing a patient, Will decides he wants to join up with the war effort and help out in London.  Emma cannot understand why he wants to go to the war and leave her all alone in Franklin, Massachusetts.

Iris, the local postmistress in Franklin, keeps tabs of the residents via their mail.  She has a crush on Henry Vale the owner of the local gas station.  Their courtship starts slowly and grows into an urgency of love and caring that only wartime "fears" can create. Henry is sure that the Germans will send their U-boats to attach the US.  He anxiously scans the coast line every day looking for the first sign of their coming.

After Frankie loses a journalist friend - Hannah - to the bombings, she is determined to take up Hannah's cause of showing the world what is happening to the Jews in Europe.  She persuades Murrow to let her go into the field in France and Spain and capture the voices of the travelers as they try to escape the war.

Sarah Blake intertwines these lives together both in Franklin and in London.  She allows the reader to feel the emotions that the characters are feeling.  Many times I felt I could picture Frankie in the bomb shelter or Emma sitting on the porch waiting for Will to come home.  Although the title suggests the main character is Iris - it is Frankie that ends up connecting everyone together.  I definitely recommend this book.

Fourty: Stiltsville - Susanna Daniel

***Full disclosure: This book was provided for free by Harper Collins at their Book Buzz session part of ALA Annual Conference ***

Stiltsville follows Frances Ellerloy, who is from Atlanta, as she visits Miami for a wedding and ends up meeting her future husband, Dennis, out on the Biscayne Bay.  It's the first time she's been out on the open water and she feels so alive.  The connection with Dennis is strong and she ends up coming down to Miami every weekend after that.  Finally one weekend she moves down to Miami after quitting her job and moves in with Dennis' sister Bette.

Frances & Dennis' relationship grows as they experience life together in Miami and marry once Dennis finishes law school.  They visit the family house on the bay every weekend.  Marse, their friend who originally introduced them, joins them sometimes with her boyfriend of the month.  They have a baby girl - Margo.  Frances get pregnant again multiple times but ends up miscarrying each time.  Dennis & Francis accept they will only have one child.

Susanna Daniels explores their marriage over the years as stormy weather - multiple hurricanes - and outside factors - job loss and potential affair - threaten their love.  It's heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time to see how Frances & Dennis adapt to their lives and their love of each other over the years.

This book was my savior while reading Salt.  I'm glad I pared them together to read at the same time.  Many mornings on the metro I had to force myself to remember to get off the train because I was so engrossed in the book.  The latest 100 pages or so are sad as well and many times I had to fight off the tears. 

Thirty-nine: Salt A World History - Mark Kurlansky

September Book Club Selection

I didn't realize it until a few weeks ago, but I had another book by the same author already on my 'to read' list.  I honestly didn't know what to expect with this book.  I've read other historical food (is this a genre?) books and found that 75% of the information was useful with the other 25% not as much.

Kurlansky starts our journey in ancient China and works his way West with each chapter until he hits the Americas.  He captures salt consumption through the Civil War days and then makes his way back East towards Asia again.  Different techniques for mining salt are explored throughout the chapters as well as the need for taxation on this commodity by many different countries.  Wars and independence movements were started with tracings back to salt. 

The word salt is a chemical term for a substance produced by the reaction of an acid with a base.  Salt was found useful in preserving food and protecting against decay as well as sustain life.  Growth in animal raising for consumption caused a demand for some form of salt to help preserve this meat. 

Salt helped many nations prosper in the shipping and transportation business as well.  Taxation on salt was common because salt was one commodity that was used by people of every income; therefore providing equal opportunity for taxation.

Salt helped shape many cuisines and cultures around the world as well.  Soy sauce and ketchup are two of the many sauces that have salt origins.

My favorite chapter was about the origins of the Morton Salt Company which is iconically famous in many households in the United States. The United States is the largest salt producer and salt consumer.  Only 8% of salt production is for food though.  The largest single use (51%) is for deicing roads.

I'm not a fan of Kurlansky's style of writing and often found myself skipping over multiple pages in order to move through the chapters.  I felt that he often times setup the history or background in relation to the salt usage almost in a tangential way. Halfway through the book I was hoping that the next chapter was not going to be about how another country or region used salt to preserve fish or another type of meat.

Thirty-eight: Twelve Rooms With a View - Theresa Rebeck

Tina Finn is a screw up.  Her mother dies suddenly and leaves no will.  Tina and her two sisters - Lucy & Alison - find themselves inheriting an Upper West Side apartment with a view of Central Park.  In order to stake their claim on the apartment, Tina is forced to move in.  Her mother's step sons wan the apartment for themselves and cannot understand why their father left the apartment to his second wife - who was his housekeeper. The co-op board for the building wants to split up the apartment themselves and tries to evict Tina almost immediately.

As Lucy & Alison try to figure out the red tape surrounding the apartment, Tina tries to make friends with the co-op board.  Tina also explores the apartment more and finds a whole closet full of items from her mother's husband's first marriage.  From rare plants to false arrests to secret passages this historical apartment has much more in store than it first looks. 

Thirty-seven: Between Two Worlds - Roxana Saberi

My focus shirted next to Iran.  Roxana Saberi was held for 100 days in an Iranian prison.  This book details her time in that prison and the women she met inside there.  She was accused of being a spy and using her researching a book as a cover.

Roxana makes a false confession under distress and ends up recanting that confession while in jail.  She uses hunger strikes as a way to pressure her jailers on letting her go.  She barely is able to talk to her lawyer as he prepares her defense.  She realizes early on that she can't trust anything she is told.  Eventually her parents and boyfriend - a native Iranian - make enough "noise" to get her released.

I remember seeing the press release NPR and other news organizations wrote in support of her release come across my inbox last year.  It was encouraging and motivating to see how a strong and smart woman was able to mentally survive this ordeal.  Saberi mixes in stories about Iran's culture and historical events within her own story.

Thirty-Six: A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini

August Book Club Selection

I started to read The Kite Runner a few years ago and had a hard time getting into the story.  I was concerned that this book might be the same way.  Working at NPR, I listen to stories about Afghanistan everyday.  This story - while fictional - explained life on the ground more than those NPR stories.

It was hard to imagine how these two women - Mariam and Laila - were able to adapt and cope with the conditions they faced - being unable to show skin outside of their husband's presence, having the possibility they could be violated just by leaving the house, limited food and multiple "rules" to follow are just a few.

It was interesting how Hosseini was able to integrate the history of Afghanistan throughout the fictional story.  The part that hit me the most was when the family did not have any money and had to starve basically as well as send the oldest child to an orphanage.  I'm not sure what I would do if I had no food and no options to obtain any food. 

Thirty-five: Beautiful Malice - Rebecca James

***Full disclosure: This book was provided for free by Harper Collins at their Book Buzz session part of ALA Annual Conference ***

"I didn't go to Alice's funeral." This sentence opens the book and captures the reader's attention right away.  Who is Alice and why didn't the narrator go to her funeral? 

After her sister Rachel is raped and killed one night, Katherine moves to a new school and changes her name.  She meets Alice one day after school and they become fast friends.  Katherine, Alice and Alice's "boyfriend" become close friends and hang out all the time.  Even though Alice is dating someone she does not call him her boyfriend.  She verbally abuses him and leaves him hanging all the time.  Katherine - while attracted to him - sympathizes and ends up becoming close friends with him as well.

One night they run into one of Alice's old boyfriends in a bar.  Alice ends up alienating the old boyfriends current date.  Katherine and this girl run into each other in the bathroom and bond over how rude and possessive Alice can be sometimes.  Katherine and her new friend meet up later in the week to see the friend's brother play with his band.  Katherine and the brother have an instant connection and end up becoming lovers.

Alice becomes jealous and tries to break up Katherine and her boyfriend.  No matter how much they ignore her, Alice is determined to mess up Katherine's life.  She tells Katherine's parents that she is doing drugs when she isn't.  Alice lures Katherine's boyfriend to the beach and fakes drowning so that he jumps in to save her.  Alice ends up dying - but so does Katherine's boyfriend even after Katherine - who is 5 months pregnant at the time - tries to save him.  Katherine finds out shortly later that Alice's brother was one of the boys that raped her sister and has been in jail this whole time. Everything that Alice has said or done over the past couple of months suddenly makes sense.

This book is an interesting look into how teenagers sometimes befriend each other not always in a positive way.  The plot seemed very much like Gossip Girl meets General Hospital.

Thirty-four: Juliet - Anne Fortier

***Full disclosure: This book was provided for free by Harper Collins at their Book Buzz session part of ALA Annual Conference ***

Julie Jacobs inherits a key to a safe deposit box found in Siena, Italy left to her by her mother after her aunt passes away suddenly. The family butler Umberto encourages her to go to Italy and find out what her family has left her using the name Giulietta Tolomei.

From the moment she steps on the plane, Julie is thrown into a crazy world of dueling families, hidden treasure and an old story about star crossed lovers.  Julie's mother leaves her with a box of documents all focusing on the story of Romeo & Juliet.  As Julie starts to explore these documents she realizes that she has descended from the original Giulietta Tolomei. 

Meeting her own "Romeo" - Alessandro, Julie is thrown into a full blown mystery that her mother never completely figured out before dying in a car crash.  Julie and her twin sister Janice end up helping their long lost father  - who posed as her aunt's butler all these years - find hidden jewels that were enclosed in statues of the original Romeo & Giulietta many centuries before. 

This book is an interesting look at a familiar tale.  I had a hard time putting it down.  While the ending seems very fairy tale like, it does make you think if everyone has their own Romeo out there somewhere.

Thirty-three: Russian Winter - Daphne Kalotay

***Full disclosure: This book was provided for free by Harper Collins at their Book Buzz session part of ALA Annual Conference ***

Nina Revskaya star of the Bolshoi Ballet decides to auction off her jewelry that was given to her by her husband, poet Viktor Elsin.  She met him after a performance one night and they shared an immediate connection.  Nina meets him again a few weeks later and they start to date.  She meets his best friend Gersh - a composer - "fighting" against the government ideals.

Nina is surprised one evening when her best friend from childhood - Vera - appears at the dressing room for soloists. Vera left the Krakow Ballet to come to the Bolshoi.  Vera meets Gersh shortly after that and they fall in love.  Nina ends up getting pregnant twice, but decides to end the pregnancies because of her career. Vera ends up pregnant with Gersh's baby - Grigori.

Grigori grows up to be a Russian professor.   He believed all his life that Vikor & Nina are his parents.  He translates Vikor's poems to English.  He also tries to reach out to Nina with a picture of a necklace and documents he thinks are linked to her.

Drew Brooks from the auction house  is intrigued by Nina's history.  She asks her to provide stories about the jewels to help create the supplementary book for the auction.  This book goes back and forth between post WWII Moscow and present day Boston.  As Drew explores the origin of Grigori's necklace, they find out together that his parents are not who he thinks they are.

Both intensely romantic, but historically fascinating and scrupulous, Russian Winter is a love story and an adventure which is completely riveting from the first page.