Tea with Trigiani

-
There's this fantastic contest for bloggers attending Book Expo America, (which is less than a month away now!), to win a contest to have tea with Adriana Trigiani during BEA. Of course, I want to win. I read my first Trigiani book over Christmas (Big Stone Gap), and I loved it. It was different than I expected, and it was funnier. I've really been looking forward to reading the rest of the Stone Gap books, but I'm even more intrigued with her new trilogy.
Very Valentine: A NovelBrava, Valentine: A Novel

Adriana Trigiani has a new trilogy, and its first book, Very Valentine, is now in paperback. The second book, Brava, Valentine, was released in February. Despite receiving the books for review and the deadline being extended until today, I still haven't read them. (Book blogger shame). With one week left in my hardest semester of graduate school, it just hasn't happened. I will read them before BEA, but in the meantime, I have some fun Adriana Trigiani tidbits for you all.

The books take place in Greenwich Village, and I did spend a summer living in Greenwich Village (and I still live in the land of denial when I imagine I could ever afford to live there again). Adriana did this fantastic walking tour of the neighborhood where the books are set. It's so much fun, and I know it will only make the books seem more alive when I read them.


Other cool things:

Have you read the Valentine books? What's your favorite thing about them?

Thanks to HarperCollins and TLC Book Tours for both these books and this wonderful contest!

Comments

  1. BooksnycMay 2, 2010 at 12:36 AM

    I loved the Big Stone Gap Series but it had been a while since I have read anything by Trigiani - until I read Very Valentine and Brava Valentine - I loved them both! My review for Very Valentine will be up today and Brava Valentine soon.

    Hope you get to read these soon!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Meg @ write meg!May 14, 2010 at 2:13 PM

    I loved Very Valentine and can't wait to read its sequel! Trigiani is a fantastic writer who creates such memorable characters.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to comment. Happy reading!

Popular posts from this blog

book review: A Dangerous Place by Jacqueline Winspear

-
Image
The backstory: A Dangerous Place  is the eleventh historical mystery featuring Maisie Dobbs. My reviews of the other eleven (plus Winspear's stand alone historical novel) are in my Book Review Database . The basics: Set four years after the last Maisie Dobbs novel, Leaving Everything Most Loved , in A Dangerous Place , we meet up with Maisie in Gibraltar in 1927 during the Spanish Civil War. She gets off her England-bound ship in Gibraltar because she's not quite ready to return. Note: this review contains spoilers about what happened in those four years of Maisie's life between books, all of which are revealed in this novel's first thirty pages.  My thoughts: Sunday I wrote about the Maisie Mail I received. These postcards appear in the book itself, along with many others. After setting the stage in Gibraltar in the opening pages (Maisie stumbles upon a dead body), Winspear recounts the last four years of Maisie's life in the form of postcards, letters, an
Read more

book review: Run by Ann Patchett

-
Image
The backstory: After loving State of Wonder  ( my review ), I set out to read all of Ann Patchett's books. The basics: Run  is the story of the Doyle family: Bernard, an Irish Catholic ex-mayor of Boston, his deceased wife Bernadette, their adult son Sullivan, and their two adopted college ages sons, Tip and Teddy, who are biological brothers. My thoughts: I'm beginning to think Ann Patchett is my soul sister. Her writing reaches me deeply, and I've adored everything she's written. It was a special treat to read Run , the novel of hers I knew the least about going in. Although I had the framework of two of her novels and one memoir, I didn't know what to expect. Run  isn't as universally loved as some of her other works, so I was particularly curious to see how it measured up. Admittedly, Run  started off slowly for me. It took two chapters to really get into the heart of the story, but once it happened, I was hooked. One of the things I love most about
Read more

book review: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

-
Image
The backstory: Gilead  won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2004, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2006. The basics: As Rev. Ames nears the end of his life in the 1950's, he begins a letter to his young son because Ames realizes his son is too young to really know him. Gilead  is that letter. My thoughts: Gilead  is a novel I'm been meaning to read for years. It's a character-driven, Midwestern narrative by one of our best contemporary writers. It should be a novel I love, yet I struggled to finish it and admit I was wowed by neither the story nor the writing. Gilead  seemed almost stream-of-consciousness at first. I appreciated that Robinson jumped right in: this novel is a letter from father to son; the reader's ignorance of these two characters is not the focus. As the novel progressed, more details began to be filled in, and the reader begins to understand the characters, setting and purpose. I enjoyed the fir
Read more