My Personal Heaven

I literally heard the sound of angels singing and harps playing as I entered my own personal heaven today -- Borders OUTLET!!!!! Who knew they had an OUTLET??!!! I felt the same way I do when I go to Target or Walgreens (those of you who know me know exactly what that means -- haha). I found the same books I was eyeing on the fiction tables at the regular Borders for between $2.99 and $5.99. HALLELUIAH!!

So here's a synopsis of my picks:

Amagansett by Mark Mills
About a working-class fisherman who lives in Long Island. His postwar community is sharply divided between those who live there year-round and the wealthy who just come for summer. Lives change when his nets pull in the body of a beautiful young woman, seaweed twined in her hair ...


The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander
Though the events are almost a century old, the imprisonment and execution of Tsar Nicholas and his family still hold an aura of mystery that fascinates. In haunting prose, Robert Alexander retells the story through the eyes of Leonka, once the kitchen boy to the Romanovs, who claims to be the last living witness to the family's brutal execution. Mysteriously spared by the Bolsheviks, the boy vanished into the bloody tides of the Russian Revolution. Now, through Alexander's conjuring, he reemerges to tell his story. What did the young boy see in those last days of the Imperial Family? Does he have answers to long-standing questions about secret letters smuggled to the Tsar, thirty-eight pounds of missing tsarist jewels, and why the bodies of two Romanov children are missing from the secret grave discovered in 1991?


Forever by Pete Hamill
A magical, epic tale of an extraordinary man who arrives in New York City in 1740 and remains ... forever. Cormac comes to know all the buried secrets of Manhattan -- the way it has been shaped by greed, race, and waves of immigration, by the unleashing of enormous human energies, and, above all, by hope. Through Cormac's eyes, we watch the city grow from a tiny community on the tip of an untamed wilderness to become the thriving metropolis of the present day.

Through it all, Cormac must fight, generation after generation, a force of evil that returns relentlessly in the scions of a single family. It is a family whose path first crossed his in Ireland and whose persistence puts at risk all his hopes for fulfilling his destiny. As he searches out these blood enemies, he must watch everyone he touches slip away ... And so he seeks the one who can change his fate, the mysterious dark lady who alone can free him from the blessing and the curse of his long life.


My Dearest Cecelia: A Novel of the Southern Belle Who Stole General Sherman's Heart by Diane Haeger
Cecilia falls instantly in love with the dashing Northern cadet William Tecumseh Sherman at the Commencement Ball at West point Military Academy. A Southern Belle, she and Sherman assume prominent positions on opposite sides during the Civil War. Legen has it that Sherman's love for Cecilia was the reason he spared her hometown of Augusta during his infamous march to the sea.


And so you can probably figure out my plans for the summer -- lots of good reading on the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan! Me, a beach chair, and a book! (And maybe a margarita or two!)