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Showing posts from August, 2014

Review: Madame Picasso

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Publication Date : August 26, 2014 Publisher:  Harlequin MIRA Formats: eBook, Paperback Genre: Historical Fiction Acquired:  Through Historical Fiction Virtual Tours  Teaser :  When Eva Gouel moves to Paris from the countryside, she is full of ambition and dreams of stardom. Though young and inexperienced, she manages to find work as a costumer at the famous Moulin Rouge, and it is here that she first catches the attention of Pablo Picasso, a rising star in the art world.   A brilliant but eccentric artist, Picasso sets his sights on Eva, and Eva can’t help but be drawn into his web. But what starts as a torrid affair soon evolves into what will become the first great love of Picasso’s life.  Praise for Madame Picasso “Early twentieth century Paris and Picasso’s lost love come to enchanted, vivid life in Madame Picasso. With a deft eye for detail and deep understanding for her protagonists, Anne Girard captures the earnest young woman who enthralled the f

Review: Daisy Goodwin's The Fortune Hunter

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Author:   Daisy Goodwin Publisher:  St. Martin's Press Pub Date:  July 29, 2014 How acquired:  New York Public Library What it's about:   Empress Elizabeth of Austria, known as Sisi, is the Princess Diana of nineteenth-century Europe. Famously beautiful, as captured in a portrait with diamond stars in her hair, she is unfulfilled in her marriage to the older Emperor Franz Joseph. Sisi has spent years evading the stifling formality of royal life on her private train or yacht or, whenever she can, on the back of a horse. Captain Bay Middleton is dashing, young, and the finest horseman in England. He is also impoverished, with no hope of buying the horse needed to win the Grand National—until he meets Charlotte Baird. A clever, plainspoken heiress whose money gives her a choice among suitors, Charlotte falls in love with Bay, the first man to really notice her, for his vulnerability as well as his glamour. When Sisi joins the legendary hunt organized by Earl Spencer in En

August Book of the Month: Women Heroes of World War I

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Title:  Women Heroes of World War I - 16 Remarkable Resisters, Soldiers, Spies and Medics Author:   Kathryn J. Atwood Publisher:  Chicago Review Press (June 1, 2014) Pages:  254 From the back cover:   A commemoration of brave yet largely forgotten women who served in the First World War In time for the 2014 centennial of the start of the Great War, this book brings to life the brave and often surprising exploits of 16 fascinating women from around the world who served their countries at a time when most of them didn’t even have the right to vote. Readers meet 17-year-old Frenchwoman Emilienne Moreau, who assisted the Allies as a guide and set up a first-aid post in her home to attend to the wounded; Russian peasant Maria Bochkareva, who joined the Imperial Russian Army by securing the personal permission of Tsar Nicholas II, was twice wounded in battle and decorated for bravery, and created and led the all-women combat unit the “Women’s Battalion of Death” on the eastern