Melissa Senate

Just one more week until THE SECRET OF JOY arrives in bookstores (Tuesday, November 17th)! I am so excited about this novel for several reasons: 

1) It's my first with my new publishing house, Simon & Schuster.

2) It's my first to be a book club pick and come complete with a Reading Group Guide.

3) It's my first to be written in the third person instead of my usual first person (She is hot stuff instead of I am hot stuff.)

4) It's my first to send me on a virtual blog tour of over 60 blogs! I've long been a member of the fabulous Girlfriend's Cyber Circuit tour, and you'll find interviews with me on all the Girlfriends' sites (I'll list them all next week), and I'll also be reviewed by forty-plus amazing book bloggers (fingers are crossed that they like the book!). 

5) It's the first novel since my debut, See Jane Date, that helped me figure out some very personal stuff. Several years ago, I received an email out of the blue that said: "I think you might be my half-sister." Some rattling family skeletons later, I still didn't know how I felt about contact being made (and yes, there's a long-short story to go with this!). So I did what writers do: I let my questions come out on the page. Many pages.

The Secret of Joy is not autobiographical. I am nothing like Joy Jayhawk, the half-sister that my main character, Rebecca Strand, sets off to find. And I flipped everything on its head in the telling of this story so that only the most basic nugget of the premise is based in real life. But what is true, what is very real for me, is the emotional impact, the theme, the burning questions: what is meant by the word family? Do words like family, sister, brother, mother, father mean anything in and of themselves or must they be backed up by, say, actually being there? Does DNA a sibling make? Is the answer that black and white? 

It's the gray that I love exploring in my novels. And I explored these questions to help me figure out how I felt. How I feel about my situation isn't necessarily what you'll find in The Secret of Joy, though. The novel is not my story; it's Rebecca Strand's story. But again, her questions, and Joy's questions, are mine. This is what I love so much about writing. What comes out of your heart, mind and soul on the page can explain yourself to you, even though you're writing a totally fictional character, a totally fictional scenario.

Here is a sneak peek at a review that one of my favorite book reviewers will post next week about the Secret of Joy: " In The Secret of Joy, we discover two wonderfully strong, different and appealing main characters—at first they are strangers to each other, but they will unite through a shocking secret—they are half-sisters and immediately from the beginning of the novel we get a very strong idea of just how different these two "sisters" are. This only adds another layer of complexity in a novel that offers us layer after layer of secrets, sentimentality and most of all of discovery . . .  Touching, sentimental and absolutely riveting. As I write this, I am rethinking of some of the passages and they make me teary eyed. I recommend this book very, very highly!” –Tina Avon, Bookshipper

P.S. If you're anywhere near the lovely state of Maine next week, you are cordially invited to the launch day reading and signing for The Secret of Joy at Borders Books in South Portland, Maine, on Tuesday, November 17th at 7pm.

To pre-order, please see the links to online bookstores above. I love pre-orders!

As always, please feel free to contact with any comments or questions via email (MelissaSenate at Yahoo .com) — put it all together with the @ symbol; I'm just trying to stay ahead of the spammers.

Melissa

There are a few books I reread every year, usually around Christmastime, which is my very favorite time of year. Pride and Prejudice is one of those novels. I recently watched the Keira Knightley film version and it was gorgeous and I loved her as Elizabeth, but there just is no other Darcy for me than Colin Firth in the BBC version. Anyway, I love all things Pride and Prejudice and can't wait to read this delightful-sounding debut novel by fellow Girlfriend Cyber Circuit member Marilyn Brant.

ACCORDING TO JANE by Marilyn Brant

It begins one day in sophomore English class, just as Ellie Barnett's teacher is assigning Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. From nowhere comes a quiet "tsk" of displeasure. The target: Sam Blaine, the cute bad boy who's teasing Ellie mercilessly, just as he has since kindergarten. Entirely unbidden, as Jane might say, the author's ghost has taken up residence in Ellie's mind, and seems determined to stay there.

 Jane's wise and witty advice guides Ellie through the hell of adolescence and beyond, serving as the voice she trusts, usually far more than her own. Years and boyfriends come and go–sometimes a little too quickly, sometimes not nearly fast enough. But Jane's counsel is constant, and on the subject of Sam, quite insistent. Stay away, Jane demands. He is your Mr. Wickham.

 Still, everyone has something to learn about love–perhaps even Jane herself. And lately, the voice in Ellie's head is being drowned out by another, urging her to look beyond everything she thought she knew and seek out her very own, very unexpected, happy ending. . . 

"A warm, witty and charmingly original story." –Susan Wiggs, #1 New York Times bestselling author

"An engaging read for all who have been through the long, dark, dating wars, and still believe there's sunshine, and a Mr. Darcy, at the end of the tunnel." –Cathy Lamb, author of Henry's Sisters

 What does the author herself have to say about the inspiration behind ACCORDING TO JANE?: "My debut novel, According to Jane, is the story of a modern woman who–for almost two decades–has the ghost of Jane Austen in her head giving her dating advice. I first read Pride & Prejudice as a high-school freshman. Like my heroine Ellie, I raced through the novel way ahead of the reading assignments. I loved both the story and Austen’s writing style immediately. Her books changed the way I perceived the behavior of everyone around me, and I spent the rest of freshman year trying to figure out which Austen character each of my friends and family members most resembled! Also like Ellie, I had a few (okay, a lot) of less-than-wonderful boyfriends, and I would have loved to have been given romantic advice from the author I most respected and the one who’d written one of my all-time favorite love stories."

For more info, visit Marilyn Brant's blog (click on her name above). Happy reading!

And more book recommendations to come…

Oooh, I've been waiting for this book to be published and now CROSSING WASHINGTON SQUARE has arrived in bookstores! Joanne Rendell is the lovely and talented author of The Professors' Wives' Club and is a frequent and very interesting contributor to the Huffington Post and Babble and other sites/blogs that I read every morning. My to-be-read pile of delicious novels on my bedside table is high, but this is sneaking in next. (Also, must say that every time I see the cover, I want that red coat!)

Some women follow their hearts; others follow their minds. In this “charming, witty, and cerebral” second novel from the acclaimed author of The Professors’ Wives’ Club, we return to Manhattan University, where two strong-willed women are compelled to unite their senses and sensibilities.

Professor Diana Monroe is a highly respected scholar of Sylvia Plath. Serious and aloof, she steadfastly keeps her mind on track. Professor Rachel Grey is young and impulsive, with a penchant for teaching popular women’s fiction like Bridget Jones’ Diary and The Devil Wears Prada, and for wearing her heart on her sleeve.

The two conflicting personalities meet head to heart when Carson McEvoy, a handsome and brilliant professor visiting from Harvard, sets his eyes on both women and creates even more tension between them. Now Diana and Rachel are slated to accompany an undergraduate trip to London, where an almost life-threatening experience with a student celebrity will force them to change their minds and heal their hearts…together.

Advance Praise for CROSSING WASHINGTON SQUARE

 “As readers spend time with these bright and engaging women, Rendell offers an interesting debate about the merits of studying popular fiction in an academic setting.” The Romantic Times

“Rendell’s second novel is thoughtful and open, with plenty of interesting academic debate for truly bookish readers.” Booklist

"For every reader who has ever wondered why nineteenth century novels about women are called ‘the canon’, but contemporary novels about women are called ‘chick-lit’ comes a charming, witty and cerebral novel about Rachel Grey, an Austen-worth heroine fighting for love and respect in the academic shark tank." Nicola Kraus, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Nanny Diaries

About the author: Joanne Rendell was born and raised in the UK. After completing her PhD in English Literature, she moved to the States to be with her husband, a professor at NYU. She now lives in faculty housing in New York City with her family. Visit Joanne’s website at www.joannerendell.com 

Can't wait to read Crossing Washington Square! I've been reading some great novels lately and will blog about them in the next few days. 

Enjoy CROSSING WASHINGTON SQUARE!

I am no Julia Child. Not even close. So not close that I've never cooked much at all, except for the very basic kid-friendly foods that my seven-year-old son will actually eat. (And yes, there really is a cooking course called How To Boil Water, and yes, I did take it several years ago!).

Yet, yet, yet, cooking is at the center of the novel I'm now writing (tentatively titled The Love Goddess's Cooking School). My main character is both teacher and student (Italian cooking), so we're learning together. This is the first time (and this book will be my tenth!) that I'm writing about "what I don't know." (Yet, it's very interesting how the very essence of the book, what it's really about, is what I know very, very well.) The desire to write about a woman who learns how to cook–and finds herself through the process–was so powerful.

I am loving the learning adventure involved. Through my research, which has me studying Italian cookbooks, cooking (and not fretting), reading food memoirs, visiting interesting markets and Italian restaurants to learn about ingredients, and reading up on Italy and Italian culture, I'm right there along with my main character, going through what she's going through in Camilla's Cucinotta, her late grandmother's little Italian cooking school and tiny storefront shop. It's amazing to me how this manuscript seems to be writing itself, very much the way my first novel did for me. I think because the core of it holds some deeply important truth that I want to uncover for myself, just like See Jane Date did. (Most people think See Jane Date was about dating, but it really wasn't. Just like The Love Goddess's Cooking School isn't really about the cooking. Even though it is. Isn't. Is.)

Anyway: I went to the bookstore and of course came home with Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, Heat by Bill Buford, and Amarcord: Marcella Remembers by Marcella Hazan (whose Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is teaching me so much about the fundamentals). On order is Julia's My Life in France. And I just finished the marvelous Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking. 

Interestingly, though I like watching The Food Network on occasion, I haven't found "my show," someone who really draws me in (Nigella is my favorite). Someone sent me a link today to a wonderful YouTube sensation video series called "Feed Me  Bubbe," about an adorable and earnest Jewish grandmother (who sounds exactly like my late Jewish grandmother) teaching how to a cook something simple and wonderful, like marble mandle bread. I'd like to find the Italian version of that on the Food Network, an Italian grandmother, a stove and her secrets. That I'd watch every day. 

Any recommendations for books or shows or recipes, please, please, please email them to me at melissasenate at yahoo.com. (All one word, using at symbol.) Off to read more Marcella. 

What must-read novel is next on my bedside table? It just so happens to be this week's Girlfriends Cyber Circuit's touring book, a novel I've been dying to read since I first heard about it from the author herself:

CHILDREN OF THE WATERS by Carleen Brice

Still reeling from divorce and feeling estranged from her teenage son, Trish Taylor is in the midst of salvaging the remnants of her life when she uncovers a shocking secret: her sister is alive.

Oooh, I cannot wait to read this! Now it's waiting for me this rainy weekend. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Carleen Brice is author of the novels Orange Mint and Honey (which was optioned by the Lifetime Movie Network)- a #1 Denver Post best-seller and Essence Magazine Recommended Read - and Children of the Waters, which One World/​Ballantine will release in June 2009.

You can read more about Carleen's work and an interview with on her website (click on her name above). 

Enjoy!

Three things about this book jumped out at me: first, the title, which I LOVE. Second that little baby in that basket! And third: ELINOR LIPMAN said wonderful things it about (I am crazy about Elinor Lipman's novels). 

Samantha Wilde makes her literary debut with THIS LITTLE MOMMY STAYED HOME, a fresh and funny novel about a new mother who discovers the wonders and terrors of motherhood—one hilarious crisis at a time.

The novel introduces Joy McGuire who has gone from being skinny and able to speak in complete sentences to someone who hasn’t changed her sweatpants in weeks. But now with a new baby to care for, she feels like a woman on the brink and as she scrambles to recapture the person she used to be she takes another look at the woman she is: a stay-at-home mom in love with her son, if a bit addled about everything else.

As a new mom herself, Wilde, a graduate of Yale Divinity School, wrote THIS LITTLE MOMMY STAYED HOME after the birth of her son when she was experiencing the ups and downs of new motherhood. According to Wilde, “I wrote the book because I couldn’t not write it. I took my lap top to my bed during my son’s naps and wrote and wrote. I wrote the book I wanted to read. The book takes a hard look at the effects of new motherhood on a woman and on a marriage through the eyes of one stressed but insightful woman. It’s a story that will keep mothers going when they think they can’t go any further.” With THIS LITTLE MOMMY STAYED HOME, Samantha Wilde brings a candid and hilarious light to the universal story of new motherhood.

What Elinor Lipman said: “Here’s a talent: when a narrator’s doldrums make a reader laugh out loud. Samantha Wilde’s inkwell must be filled with truth-serum because this brave and funny book gets the postpartum peaks and valleys so very, winningly right.”
—Elinor Lipman, author of Then She Found Me

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Samantha Wilde is the mother of two born in under two years. A graduate of Concord Academy, Smith College, Yale Divinity School and The New Seminary, she lives in Western Massachusetts with her husband and children. She is the daughter of novelist Nancy Thayer. When she’s not mothering her toddler and baby, she writes, teaches yoga, and moonlights as a minister. Although she never sleeps, she’s never once been tempted to give her children away to the highest bidder (well, almost never). She’s currently using nap times to write her second novel for Bantam Dell. You can visit her at wildemama.blogspot.com (clickable link on her name at top of post)>

So many good books to read this summer!

Happy 4th of July! My dear boy is away for the long weekend at his grandparents' house, so it's just me and the manuscript–the new one, which I'm both loving and being tortured by (which is how writing is, it seems).

This is a particularly wonderful time, when the publication date (November) of my upcoming novel, The Secret of Joy, is still far enough away that I don't have to obsess over it, and I'm in the beginning stages of a NEW novel, which has gotten the green light from both agent and editor! This one is called The Love Goddess's Cooking School and involves an Italian cooking class, the tiniest bit of magic, lots of romance, a needy eleven-year-old, a not-touristy island off the coast of Maine, and a main character hoping to make a few dreams come true, including her own. 

I'm having my own mini 4th of July indoor bar-b-q (I never know how to spell that), complete with hot dogs and potato salad, after I finish this scene. I'm trying to actually write an entire first draft without revising as I go, which is my usual process. The thought of having THAT much work to do on revision seems overwhelming, but it is freeing to just write and not worry so much. And today, freedom is the name of the game. 

HAPPY 4th!

This week, my darling boy is on vacation from both school and camp, so it's all mom all the time, which means no time to read (I fall into bed an exhausted heap very soon after he does). But, but, but, come Monday, when he's off making macaroni eyepatches and playing freeze tag, I'll be taking some time from my writing schedule to read this novel by a very talented member of the Girlfriends' Cyber Circuit.

EVERYONE SHE LOVED by Sheila Curran

 A wise and triumphant novel about four women who've come of age together only to discover that — when it comes to the essentials — life's little instruction book will always need revising.

Penelope Cameron, loving mother, devoted wife and generous philanthropist, has convinced her husband and four closest friends to sign an outlandish pact. If Penelope should die before her two daughters are eighteen, her husband will not remarry without the permission of Penelope's sister and three college roommates. For years, this contract gathers dust until the unthinkable happens. Suddenly, everyone she loved must find their way in a world without Penelope.

For Lucy Vargas, Penelope's best friend, and a second mother to her daughters, nothing seems more natural than to welcome them into a home that had once belonged to their family, a lovely, sprawling bed-and-breakfast on the beach. This bequest was only one of the many ways in which Penelope had supported Lucy's career as a painter, declaring her talent too important to squander. But now, in the wake of a disaster that only lovable, worrisome Penelope could have predicted, Lucy has put her work on hold as she and Penelope's husband, Joey, blindly grasp at anything that will keep the girls from sinking under the weight of their grief.

With the help of family and friends, the children slowly build new lives. But just when things start to come together, the fragile serenity they have gained is suddenly threatened from within, and the unbreakable bonds they share seem likely to dissolve after all.

In this entertaining and uplifting novel, Sheila Curran explores the faith one woman placed in her dearest friends, the care she took to protect her family and the many ways in which romantic entanglements will confound and confuse even the most determined of planners. A story about growing up and moving on, about the sacrifices people make for one another and the timeless legacy of love, Everyone She Loved is, above all, about the abiding strength of friendship.

"Curran is a beautiful writer, both witty and evocative, and she knows how to keep a reader riveted. I was up way past my bedtime, unable to stop turning pages. I had to know what happened to this family. Read this book, then pass it on to your dearest friend. She'll thank you." — Joshilyn Jackson, bestselling author of Gods in Alabama and Between, Georgia

Cannot wait to read this book! For more information, visit Sheila Curran's website (click above on her name). 

What is the Girlfriends Cyber Circuit, you ask? It's a group of varied and diverse female authors (from chick lit to mystery to literary to romance and more) who blog about each other's must-read new novels.  Such as Judi Fennell's IN OVER HER HEAD. That is some hot cover.

Here's the scoop: When Erica Peck, one terrified-of-the-ocean marina owner, finds herself at the bottom of the sea conversing with a Mer man named Reel, she thinks she's died and gone to her own version of Hell. When the Oceanic Council demands she and Reel retrieve a lost cache of diamonds from the resident sea monster in return for their lives, she knows she's died and gone to Hell.When they escape the monster and end up on a deserted island, she amends her opinion - she's died and gone to Heaven. But when Reel sacrifices himself to allow her to return to her world, she realizes that, Heaven or Hell, with Reel, she's In Over Her Head.

"A wondrous, undersea adventure–molten moments, waves of sensuality, ripples of emotion, and depths of fun. Not to be missed!" –LA Banks, author of the Vampire Huntress Legends series.

A three-time finalist in online contests, Judi Fennell has enjoyed the reader feedback she's received and would love to hear what you think about her Mer series. To celebrate the release of each of her books, Judi Fennell and the Atlantis Inn (www.AtlantisInn.com) and the Hibiscus House (www.HibiscusHouse.com) bed and breakfasts are raffling off three romantic beach getaway weekends.

All information is on Judi's website, where you can also read an excerpt of IN OVER HER HEAD and Judi's blog. Click for Judi's website!

A peek at the cover of THE SECRET OF JOY (will be published in trade paperback this November by Simon & Schuster). I am in love with the cover. In LOVE. 

Sorry it's been so long since my last post–I was chin high in revisions for both novels (THE SECRET OF JOY and THE MOSTS). I'm now working on the proposal for my next book (for adults) and am smitten with the necessary research: Italian cooking. I used to think New York City was the only place I'd ever want to live–until I traveled to Rome. I haven't been everywhere, but nowhere else has had the same kind of magical effect on me that Rome did. The book I'm conceiving takes place right here in Maine, which has a magic of its own, but it's a very, very, very different kind of magic. Interesting what the combination will bring . . . .

Melissa