Spotlight Post: My Summer of Love & Misfortune by Lindsay Wong
Excerpt from Chapter 1: FLOWER HEART
I, Iris Wang, was born to be unlucky.
This is because I was born in the Year of the Tiger, and everyone in our Chinese family knows that girls born in Tiger Year are bad luck.
A flower-hearted tiger girl, such as yours truly, means that I’m destined to pick loser boys and never listen to my parents. A flower-heart is someone who shows up hungover to her SATs and half-asses her college admission essays. She’s also addicted to Starbucks lattes, expensive makeup, and super-fun parties.
But a tiger son born into the family is supposed to make a lot of money and bring honor to his family name. Total sexist bullshit, am I right? Maybe that superstition existed in China in the time of Confucius, but not in 21st century America, where Siri and iPhones practically run our lives.
Can I tell you an embarrassing and hideous secret?
When I was born, I was covered with thick, abundant hair all over my entire body, like I was an actual tiger cub. According to my parents, I even had coarse hairs growing on my chin, forehead and cheeks.
My mom likes to joke that I actually looked like a hairball spat out by a designer cat.
My dad says that he dreamed that my mom had given birth to a tiger cub two weeks before I was born, but he’s deeply superstitious. He’s the kind of guy who checks with a feng shui master before buying a painting for the house or making a new friend. My dad is born in the Year of the Goat, so he believes that anyone who isn’t a farm animal, like his tiger daughter, i.e. me, brings him bad luck. Before he could propose to my mom, who is a Zodiac Dog, he consulted the Chinese almanac. Then he hired a Chinese monk to work out the math and interview his future bride.
When my mom told him she was going to give birth to a tiger, he was extremely worried. “A Dog and Goat for parents are no match for a tiger!” he exclaimed.
When he found out that his tiger cub was going to be a girl, I think he actually cried from anxiety.
Anyway, I was lucky that a lot of my facial hair fell off by kindergarten. But it doesn’t explain the gross, extremely long mustache-like hairs that sometimes appear when I’m super stressed. These hairs sprout above my upper lip and even grow out of my ears. I swear, those hairs are like, my whiskers. Thank god for the invention of hair wax and affordable laser treatment.
Without deluxe Nair Wax-Ready Strips, I don’t think I could ever be seen in public during times of great personal duress.
That, and I have to blame my bad luck on my sometimes too loving, overprotective parents. As soon as I was born, they took me to a famous fortune-teller who was visiting from China to ask her how to fix my life trajectory.
It all went wrong from the very beginning.
You see, the fortune teller, Madame Xing, found a funny-shaped mole under my right eye and said it looked like a teardrop. Like I was born to be permanently crying.
“This flower-heart is no good,” she announced to my parents after a quick examination. My mom and dad were probably horrified and praying that they could send me back to the hospital and switch me for a Tiger Boy.
It also didn’t help that I was one of those babies who was always crying and puking everywhere. My mom said that I just barfed on Madame Xing’s mink fur and she got flustered and started cussing nonstop. My dad swears that this was bad luck, as it offended a powerful fortune-teller, who must have put a double curse on me.
After our first and only fortune-telling session, Madame Xing cryptically said, “Keep both eyes on your tiger daughter. If you take one eye off, she will bring shame on your family with her weak flower-heart.”
Whatever she said was true. Since I was born, I guess I was destined to be a flower-heart. I have a weakness for terrible choices and terrible boys.
This brings me to my current situation.
In between Walmart parking lot holidays, Lindsay spends her time as a muscle for hire teaching writing workshops and editing manuscripts as a freelance editor.Website | Twitter | Instagram | Goodreads
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5/25/2020
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5/25/2020
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5/26/2020
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5/26/2020
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5/27/2020
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5/27/2020
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5/28/2020
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5/28/2020
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5/29/2020
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5/29/2020
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6/1/2020
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The Bookish Libra
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6/1/2020
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Locks,Hooks and Books
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6/2/2020
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Eli to the nth
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6/2/2020
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Books A-Brewin’
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6/3/2020
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Popthebutterfly Reads
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6/3/2020
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Bookwyrming Thoughts
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6/4/2020
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lifeofafemalebibliophile
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6/4/2020
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Yna the Mood Reader
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6/5/2020
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Review: THE PRISONER’S WIFE by Maggie Brookes
The Prisoner's Wife by Maggie Brookes 
Published by Berkley Books on May 26, 2020
Genres: Historical Fiction
Pages: 400
Source: Netgalley
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | The Book Depository
Goodreads
FTC Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley. All opinions are my own.
Set during WWII, Maggie Brookes’ new novel The Prisoner’s Wife follows a British soldier named Bill and a Czech girl named Izzy. Bill is a POW who has been sent, along with several other prisoners, to labor at Izzy’s family’s farm. As soon as Bill and Izzy meet, sparks fly and they quickly fall in love. Izzy is desperate to get away from life on the farm and arranges for her and Bill to secretly marry so that they can run away and be together. Their honeymoon – and their freedom – is short-lived, however, when they are almost immediately captured by the Germans and sent to a POW camp. To hide her identity while they were fleeing, Izzy had cut her hair short and donned men’s clothing, but keeping her identity and gender a secret in a POW camp is practically an impossible task. Bill knows they need help and enlists some fellow prisoners to help keep their secret, and most importantly, to keep Izzy safe. If she’s found now, Izzy will almost certainly be executed as a spy.
I’ve read a lot of WWII historical fiction in my day, but this one really got to me. Bill and Izzy’s journey is so fraught with danger at every turn and it just had my heart in my throat the entire time I was reading. The author paints such a vivid picture of the horrors of the POW camp – the brutality, the lack of proper rations, the unsanitary conditions and sickness, not to mention the complete lack of privacy. Even just the act of trying to use the bathroom posed a threat to Izzy’s well being. The author created such a tense and suspenseful environment that hardly a page went by when I wasn’t convinced that Izzy’s identity would be revealed at any moment.
I just adored Izzy and Bill too. How can you not root for a young couple in love to outwit the Germans and survive? I was rooting that a happy ending for them from the moment they met. I especially loved Izzy, who not only wanted to get off that farm, but she specifically wanted to find and join up with her father and brother who were members of a resistance group. I loved her spark and her strength and was sure that if anyone could survive their impossible situation, it was Izzy.
I also loved the group of prisoners that banded together to protect Izzy from the Germans. I was just so moved by their immediate willingness to put themselves in harm’s way to save a complete stranger, especially when it would have been so much easier to just look out for themselves and not try to help. This group becomes Izzy and Bill’s “found family” and I found myself rooting for them all to survive just as hard as I was for Izzy and Bill.
Inspired by true events, The Prisoner’s Wife is an unforgettable story of courage, resiliency, and survival. It’s also a story about love and the lengths people will go to for those they care about.
About Maggie Brookes
Maggie Brookes is a British ex-journalist and BBC television producer turned poet and novelist.
The Prisoner’s Wife is based on an extraordinary true story of love and courage, told to her by an ex-WW2 prisoner of war. Maggie visited the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany as part of her research for the book, learning largely forgotten aspects of the war.
The Prisoner’s Wife is due to be published by imprints of Penguin Random House in the UK and in the US in May 2020. Publication in other countries, including Holland, Italy, Portugal, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic will follow.
As well as being a writer, Maggie is an advisory fellow for the Royal Literary Fund and also an Associate Professor at Middlesex University, London, England, where she has taught creative writing since 1990. She lives in London and Whitstable, Kent and is married, with two grown-up daughters.
She has published five poetry collections in the UK under her married name of Maggie Butt. Poetry website: www.maggiebutt.co.uk
Top Ten Tuesday – 10 Tantalizing Opening Lines in Books
Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. Top Ten Tuesday has been one of my favorite memes ever since I started blogging, so huge thanks to Jana for taking over the hosting duties!
This week’s TTT topic is Opening Lines (Best, favorite, funny, unique, shocking, gripping, lines that grabbed you immediately, etc.). I love this topic because I think opening lines are just so important, so much so that they can either make or break a book. I love opening lines that immediately grab my attention so that I’m off to the races to find out more about the story. I love funny openers, openers that tease, and I also really enjoy atmospheric openers that really set the tone of the story right away. Below are some of my favorites.
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10 Tantalizing Opening Lines in Books
1. “We must, by law, keep a record of the innocents we kill.” Scythe, by Neal Shusterman
Talk about an opening line that makes you want to keep reading to find out what the heck is going on!
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2. “The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.” The Night Circus, by Erin Morganstern
The mysterious and atmospheric quality of The Night Circus is why it’s one of my favorite books and I was hooked as soon as I read this opener about a circus that just appears out of nowhere. I immediately wanted to know more about that circus.
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3. “I’m pretty much f*cked. That’s my considered opinion. F*cked.” The Martian, by Andy Weir
Well, that’s certainly not what you want to hear when you open up a book about a mission to Mars. I love the ominous tone it sets from the start and I knew I was in for a wild and yet fun ride based on the humorous undertone of that line.
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4. “For the better part of my childhood, my professional aspirations were simple–I wanted to be an intergalactic princess.” Seven Up by Janet Evanovich. The Stephanie Plum series is always fun to read anyway, but my Star Wars- loving self really got into the idea of Stephanie Plum as Princess Leia.
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5. “Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she’d been told that she would kill her true love.” – The Raven Boys, by Maggie Stiefvater. This was definitely an attention-grabbing opening line because I immediately wanted to know how this person could possibly kill their true love and I also wanted to know under what circumstances she had been told this not even just once, but numerous times.
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6. “How does one describe Artemis Fowl? Various psychiatrists have tried and failed.” Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
This line immediately makes me want to meet this person who has managed to leave various psychiatrists befuddled. He sounds like an interesting fellow.
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7. “Kell wore a very peculiar coat.” This line is just such a great teaser. It’s so simple and yet it immediately got my wheels turning with curiosity about said peculiar coat. What was peculiar about it and what is so important about this coat to make the opening line of a brand new series?
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8. “On the second Sabbat of the Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky.” Strange the Dreamer, by Laini Taylor
I love this one because it starts off with an almost fairy tale-like quality and then bam! A girl falls from the sky. What the heck?!
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9. “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee.
This one grabbed my attention because I wanted to know how in the world a child could have badly broken his elbow. Was he in an accident? Did someone hurt him? Was he abused? etc.
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10. “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone By J.K. Rowling
This opening line made me chuckle and immediately wonder why being perfectly normal was something worth bragging about in this couple’s mind.
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Do any of these opening lines resonate with you?