After several sunny days, I woke up to rain today. Just a bit, but enough to justify a Rainy Day Reading post.
Before I started writing here, though, I was visiting blogs and seeing books that are coming soon…and recalling that I didn’t do a Waiting on Wednesday post last night. An oversight. But I was engrossed in Netflix, watching movies and a show called Lie to Me.
On March 22, a book I’ve been curious about is going to be released. The Nest, by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, is a warm, funny and acutely perceptive debut novel about four adult siblings and the fate of the shared inheritance that has shaped their choices and their lives.
Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a nineteen-year-old waitress as his passenger. The ensuing accident has endangered the Plumbs’ joint trust fund, “The Nest,” which they are months away from finally receiving. Meant by their deceased father to be a modest mid-life supplement, the Plumb siblings have watched The Nest’s value soar along with the stock market and have been counting on the money to solve a number of self-inflicted problems.
Melody, a wife and mother in an upscale suburb, has an unwieldy mortgage and looming college tuition for her twin teenage daughters. Jack, an antiques dealer, has secretly borrowed against the beach cottage he shares with his husband, Walker, to keep his store open. And Bea, a once-promising short-story writer, just can’t seem to finish her overdue novel. Can Leo rescue his siblings and, by extension, the people they love? Or will everyone need to reimagine the futures they’ve envisioned? Brought together as never before, Leo, Melody, Jack, and Beatrice must grapple with old resentments, present-day truths, and the significant emotional and financial toll of the accident, as well as finally acknowledge the choices they have made in their own lives.
This one sounds like a hot mess of a family…the kind I can relate to!
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I started reading The Shadow Year, by Hannah Richell, and even though it was engaging me, I needed something more…so I am also engrossed in Losing Me, by Sue Margolis….and I am now going back and forth, never bored!
I must admit that Losing Me is ahead by a bit. Something about the MC’s narrative voice that grabbed me. Probably because she is an older character, faced with some of the issues we all face as we come to the end of our primary careers…and are struggling to decide what to do next.
I, personally, did not have that problem, as I already knew what I wanted to do in my next phase of life. I had already started writing my first novel, Miles to Go, which I then placed on the back burner to write and publish An Accidental Life.
It wasn’t long until I discovered the world of blogging (in 2008)….and what happened next is an old story. The first year, I didn’t do much, and then I discovered the blogging community.
Even though I have six books out there now, all on Amazon, I am even more obsessed with the blogging world. For a time, I had twenty sites, then eleven for quite a while...now, I have SIX. Much better.
My website: Laurel-Rain Snow Creations, takes you into my books, my blogs, and what’s happening next.
Here is my Amazon Author’s Page.
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So….as the rain falls, and as I curl up to read, I’ll be thinking of my blogging world, and how to connect next. Below, check out my March calendar, open to all the possibilities. It is my Ireland calendar, which I always have in my bedroom, along with photos from Ireland, snapped by my photographer son Craig.
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What do you love to do on a rainy day? Come on by and share….
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RAINY DAYS AND MONDAYS 