upcoming releases – The Bookish Libra

“Waiting On” Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted at Breaking the Spine, which encourages fellow bloggers to spotlight upcoming releases that we’re excited about.

My “Waiting On” Wednesday selection for this week is Once, In Lourdes by Sharon Solwitz. I just unexpectedly received an ARC of this book from the publisher yesterday, along with a message saying that if I enjoyed Emma Cline’s The Girls, then I should enjoy this book as well. That piqued my curiosity because even though The Girls has had very mixed reviews, I loved it. It was one of my favorite reads from last year. Reading the synopsis and the advance praise for Once, In Lourdes makes me think that I could easily love this book as well.

Once, In Lourdes by Sharon Solwitz

Publication Date: May 30, 2017

From Amazon.com:

In the turbulent summer of 1968, four high school friends make a pact that will change their lives forever.

As the Vietnam War rages overseas, four friends make a vow. For the next two weeks, they will live for each other and for each day. Then, at the end of the two weeks, they will sacrifice themselves on the altar of their friendship.

Loyal Kay, our narrator, dreams of being an artist and escaping her stifling family—the stepmother and stepsister she gained after her mother’s early death, and the father she no longer feels she knows. As she struggles with her weight, her schoolwork, and her longing for her mother, she feels loyalty only to her three friends, determined to keep their group together at any cost. Brilliant, charismatic CJ appears to have everything—though even those closest to him can’t see him as he really is. Steady, quiet Saint wants to do right by everyone, trying not to let his emotions destroy himself and those around him. And beautiful Vera’s family secrets are too dark to share, even with her closest friends; caught in a web of family dysfunction, she can only hope the others won’t get tangled up in the danger she senses around her.

In the two-week span in which the novel takes place, during the summer before their senior year of high school, the lives of Kay, CJ, Saint, and Vera will change beyond their expectations, and what they gain and lose will determine the novel’s outcome. Once, in Lourdes is a gripping, haunting novel about the power of teenage bonds, the story of four young people who will win your heart and transport you back to your own high school years. As the heady 1960s shift the ground beneath their feet, all of them must face who they are—and who they want to be.

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Praise for Once, In Lourdes

“After writing a spate of short stories, [Sharon Solwitz] returns to the longer form with a ravishing sense of place . . . and a heightened, almost surreal, feel for how intense emotions alter our perception of the world, especially in youth. Solwitz’s surging, many-threaded, complexly insightful tale dramatizes not only personal crises, but also the violence of the infamous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Timely and timeless.”—Booklist (starred review)

“What makes Once, in Lourdes such a moving read is how deeply and finely Sharon Solwitz has observed and portrayed her characters. They are recognizable teenagers with recognizable desires and miseries and hardships, but they are so well rendered in their particulars that we follow them less and less as familiar types and more and more as the actual friends with whom we attempt to struggle through this part of life, making promises and pacts, breaking and keeping them, living and dying by them.”—Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Tinkers and Enon

“This is a story that reads achingly true to young angst, then, now, and always. It’s an achievement of remarkable empathy—and gorgeous prose.”—Janet Burroway, author of Raw Silk and Writing Fiction

“Sharon Solwitz has an ear so attuned to teen speech, teen humor, and, finally and most convincingly, teen angst that her novel crackles with urgency. She follows the rise and fall of adolescent moods, patient with their extremes and sympathetic to the neediness her characters struggle to hide. Once, in Lourdes will make you think you’re eavesdropping on what you’re not supposed to hear.”—Rosellen Brown, New York Times bestselling author of Before and After

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I’d love to hear what upcoming book releases you’re waiting on this Wednesday? Leave me your link in the comments below and I’ll stop by and check out your WoW selection for this week. 🙂

“Waiting On” Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted at Breaking the Spine, which encourages fellow bloggers to spotlight upcoming releases that we’re excited about.

My “Waiting On” Wednesday selection for this week:

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

Publication Date: September 13, 2016

From Amazon:

From prize-winning, bestselling author Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

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I’ve always been a big fan of historical fiction and all of the advanced reviews I’ve read about The Underground Railroad have me very excited to get my hands on this book. Just give them a read yourself and see how incredible this book sounds!

Posted on Amazon:

“Nothing, not one thing or activity, can replace the experience of a good read—being transported to a different land, a different realm, through words and language. I just finished an advance copy of Colson Whitehead’s new novel, The Underground Railroad. Every now and then a book comes along that reaches the marrow of your bones, settles in, and stays forever. This is one. It’s a tour de force, and I don’t say that lightly.”
— Oprah Winfrey, O Magazine

“Whitehead, whose eclectic body of work encompasses novels playing fast and loose with ‘real life,’ both past and present, fires his most daring change-up yet. . . . Imagine a runaway slave novel written with Joseph Heller’s deadpan voice leasing both Frederick Douglass’ grim realities and H.P. Lovecraft’s rococo fantasies…and that’s when you begin to understand how startlingly original this book is. Whitehead continues the African-American artists’ inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing audacity and razor-sharp ingenuity; he is now assuredly a writer of the first rank.”
–Kirkus (starred review)

“[S]pellbinding and ferocious…. The story is literature at its finest and history at its most barbaric. Would that this novel were required reading for every American citizen.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

I’d love to hear what upcoming book releases you’re waiting on this Wednesday?