Monday Mood

Happy Monday bookish friends! I'm trying to catch up on some book reviews *there are many* but there are stacks of pretty books on my shelves in the dining room begging to be read. 

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt sent me this lovely package two weeks ago, a beautiful tote and two books I have been dying to read. I can't wait to start both! The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish is a bit heavy and I'm planning on starting it once the baby gets here, something I can read slowly and pick up/put down and work on in the quiet of early early morning feedings. I'm also really looking forward to Thisbe Nissen's new book Our Lady of the Prairie. I have been a fan of hers or many years. And don't get me started on that tote bag!!! I'm a sucker for a good, heavy tote and bonus points if its also really cute. 

Heres a quick summary of each in case you are interested!

The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish

Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history.   

As the novel opens, Helen has been summoned by a former student to view a cache of seventeenth-century Jewish documents newly discovered in his home during a renovation. Enlisting the help of Aaron Levy, an American graduate student as impatient as he is charming, and in a race with another fast-moving team of historians, Helen embarks on one last project: to determine the identity of the documents’ scribe, the elusive “Aleph.”   

Our Lady of the Prairie by Thisbe Nissen

In the space of a few torrid months on the Iowa prairie, Phillipa Maakestad—long-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughter—grapples with a life turned upside down. After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching in Ohio, Phillipa returns home to Iowa for her daughter Ginny’s wedding. There, Phillipa must endure (among other things) a wedding-day tornado, a menace of a mother-in-law who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator, and the tragicomic revenge fantasies of her heretofore docile husband.  Naturally, she does what any newly liberated woman would do: she takes a match to her life on the prairie and then steps back to survey the wreckage.  Set in the seething political climate of a contentious election,Thisbe Nissen's new novel is sexy, smart, and razor-sharp—a freight train barreling through the heart of the land and the land of the heart.