The Safety of Secrets

Listen to the author reading this great summer read! Highly recommended.

Aftermath of Dreaming

What a treat to hear author Delaune Michel, who is also an actress, read her work! I just finished The Aftermath of Dreaming (2006) and loved everything about it.

Her newest book The Safety of Secrets is being published May 27, 2008 in trade paperback.

This is an author to watch!

The Safety of Secrets

How could I resist this book! Lifelong friends, who become actresses in Hollywood, share everything including a secret from their childhood in Louisiana. DeLauné Michel writes beautifully and with great humor and insight about all the important parts of a woman's life: friendship, marriage, motherhood and career.

Fiona has a good life. She has a career, is happily married, and has just found out she is pregnant. But seeing the world through her eyes, like all of us, she frets and worries and analyzes EVERYTHING anyway. We find out why as the story takes us back and forth from the present to the past adding a little more each time until we understand the secret burden Fiona and Patricia have carried all these years.

This is one of those books that you don’t want to end because you like and care about the characters and wish they were your friends too. Luckily this is DeLauné Michel's second book (her first was Aftermath of Dreaming and all 12 reviews at Amazon awarded it 5 stars) and she is working on a third. You can recommend this title to all your friends when it is published in June 2008!

By the way, her cousin is James Lee Burke (Dave Robicheaux mysteries) and her uncle is Andre Dubus (House of Sand and Fog).

New ARC Titles

This past week I returned my first three ARCs to Bridget at the Nomad Bookhouse in Jackson promising myself that this time I would chose just ONE book to read. Instead I ended up with an armful of books and had to put all of them back except for TWO. I just couldn't stop at one.

This morning I finished reading Final Theory by Mark Alpert. In his debut thriller, Alpert has used science, history and politics to create a unique page turner. He majored in astrophysics at Princeton University and actually wrote his undergraduate thesis on an application of Einsteins's theory of relativity according to the book jacket.

After reading the first chapter where an old professor is brutally tortured, I thought about putting the book down. It's a great story but the torture throughout makes for very uncomfortable reading.

The story concerns Einheitliche Feldtheorie. There is much discussion of science and Einstein's proposed Unified Theory, which he died without finding. The story supposes that Einstein may have discovered the theory but created an elaborate plan to keep it away from those who would use it for evil. Suddenly our hero, Professor David Swift, is running for his life and trying to find the theory so it can be kept safe.

Already translated into 16 languages, this could be a big title once it is available in June 2008. Look for a movie down the road!

Here's a short video where the author talks about the book.

The other title that caught my imagination was The Safety of Secrets, a novel by DeLaune Michel. Two girls forge a friendship in first grade in Louisiana that follows them to L.A. on a quest to become actresses. According to the back cover, Michel is "from a Louisiana literary family that includes her uncle Andres Dubus (House of Sand and Fog) and her cousin James Lee Burke (Dave Robicheaux mysteries)". The book is set to go on sale in June of this year (2008).