REVIEW: UNBROKEN BY LAURA HILLENBRAND AND WHY I MISS OPRAH...

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

The day I finished this book I felt a deep sense of sadness that Oprah was no longer on the air.  This was the kind of book she would do a show about, and have the people on to tell their story.  She just knows how to take a subject and go deeper, and enlighten and further inspire people.  In fact, it's because of her that I even read this book at all.  She sends these emails to people who sign up and was raving about it, so I googled it and snooped around and found that EVERYBODY was raving about it!  So I ordered it and read it in about 4 days.

Unbroken is a WWII memoir, but it's so much more than that!  It tells the story of Louis Zamperini, who was an olympic athlete who joins the fight via the airforce and is shot down over the pacific and is captured by the dreaded Japanese.  What follows is his unbelievable story of survival, and redemption.  And when I say unbelievable I mean HOLY-CRAP-ARE-YOU-EVEN-KIDDING-ME????!!  Kind of unbelievable.  This book is so masterfully crafted and written as a novel that it is impossible to put down.  IMPOSSIBLE.  I hands-down loved ever second of it.

If you enjoy reading stories about WWII this book is definitely for you.  If you enjoy reading stories about the human spirit.. this book is for you.  If you like to read books that have you on the edge of your seat this book is for you.  I think it is an extremely important story that everybody needs to read.  I am not the type of blogger that writes a detailed synopsis of books, just because I usually skim over any synopsis of books on blogs or reviews because I want to go in fresh, but there are plenty of them out there that do!  Click here to read more of a summary of the book.

5/5  HUGE ASS STARS.

Here's the trailer for it as well:

MAILBOX MONDAY

For the last two weeks I have been extremely busy with work and my daughter's 10th birthday shinanigans.  Now that things are back to normal, I can concentrate on book blogging... which I have MISSED! 

First I want to send a HUGE THANK YOU to Michelle at Simon and Schuster Canada for sending me these ARC's!!!!  You are awesome!

So, in my mailbox today from a week or so ago

The 13th Hour by Richard Doetsch

This is an ARC, and I was pretty pumped when I read the premise, it sounds very cool!  It comes out December 29th.

Here's the blurb from Amazon.ca:

A mesmerizing thriller -- told in reverse! The 13th Hour is the story of a man given the chance to go back in time in one-hour increments to prevent a vicious crime from destroying his life.

Nick Quinn is being held in jail, accused of the murder of his beloved wife, Julia. He knows she's dead; he saw her bloody corpse, shot in the head at point-blank range. The police tell him they found the murder weapon with his fingerprints on it in the trunk of his car. Nick is confused, grief-stricken -- and completely innocent.

At 9 p.m. on July 28, a gray-haired gentleman visits Nick in the police interrogation room and asks him a simple question: "If you could get out of here, if you could save her, would you?" He hands Nick a golden talisman that allows Nick to go back in time, one hour at a time, for a total of twelve hours. With each hour that Nick travels back, he finds more clues to the identity of Julia's real killer, but he also discovers that his actions in the past may have unexpected repercussions in the future.

In his race against time to save the woman he loves most in the world, Nick will find that friends become enemies, old loyalties are tested, and Julia's murder is part of a larger scheme that has its roots in greed and vengeance. Nick has the ability to save Julia, the chance to put his own world in balance, but he is venturing down a precarious route. If he hasn't set things right by the thirteenth hour, his desperate attempts to save Julia's life may lead to a far greater catastrophe than he could have ever imagined.

A surprising and utterly original thriller, The 13th Hour is pure page-turning suspense -- full of double crosses, cliffhangers, and shocking revelations.
 

And an ARC of "Gone" by Lisa McMann, which will be released  Feb 9, 2010.  This is YA and looks pretty interesting.  It is the third book that follows the main character Janie, but it is not a trilogy.  I think it's more of a series.Here's the blurb from the authors website:

Janie thought she knew what her future held. And she thought she'd made her peace with it. But she can't handle dragging Cabel down with her.


She knows he will stay with her, despite what she sees in his dreams. He's amazing. And she's a train wreck. Janie sees only one way to give him the life he deserves--she has to disappear. And it's going to kill them both.

Then a stranger enters her life--and everything unravels. The future Janie once faced now has an ominous twist, and her choices are more dire than she'd ever thought possible. She alone must decide between the lesser of two evils. And time is running out...

And the third one is an ARC called "falling apart in one piece - one optimist's journey through the hell of divorce"  by Stacy Morrison.  (Release date:  March 2010) (no cover image available)  Here's the blurb on the back cover:

Just when Stacy Morrison thought she had it all, her husband of ten years announced that he wanted a divorce.  She was left alone with a new house that needed lots of work, a new baby who needed lots of attention, and a new job in the high pressured world of New York publishing.  Told with humor and heart, her honest and intimate account of the stress of being a working mother while trying to make sense of her unraveling marriange offers unexpected lessons of love, forgiveness, and dignity that will resonate with women everywhere.