Review: And They Called It Camelot by Stephanie Marie Thornton

Release Date: March 10, 2020 (still playing catch up on my ARCs, sorry)

This fictional account of Jackie Kennedy's life, as told through her own eyes, was pulling me in all different directions emotionally. On one hand, I could really see why she fell so hard for Jack, and even why she stayed with him through all his infidelity. On the other hand, her choice of men in general had me smacking my forehead. 

I didn't know much about Jackie before reading this. Obviously, I knew about the eventually tragic fates of her family members, and that she remarried at some point. This book really highlights how tragic her life was, and how she never really recovered from losing the love of her life, but also shows how strong she was to endure everything she did, and eventually find her own way in the world, in spite of the crappy way the men in her life treated her. Absolutely heartbreaking but also uplifting.

Advanced review copy from publisher via NetGalley. My opinions are my own.

August Releases Part 2

NOTICE: Blogger recently did an interface update, and as you can probably tell, since then, images added by URL are no longer working, at least for my blogs. The URLs themselves are still working, just not on Blogger. I don't know what is causing it or how to fix it. I did report it to them so bear with me, hopefully it gets resolved. If not, I'm going to have to go through the tedious act of downloading images to my PC and uploading them to Blogger instead of adding them by URL. Seems like every time Blogger make an "update" they make it more difficult for me to maintain my blog the same way.

 

The Queen of Tuesday: A Lucille Ball Story by Darin Strauss

Release Date: August 18, 2020

This indelible romance begins with a daring conceit—that the author’s grandfather may have had an affair with Lucille Ball. Strauss offers a fresh view of a celebrity America loved more than any other.

Lucille Ball—the most powerful woman in the history of Hollywood—was part of America’s first high-profile interracial marriage. She owned more movie sets than did any movie studio. She more or less single-handedly created the modern TV business. And yet Lucille’s off-camera life was in disarray. While acting out a happy marriage for millions, she suffered in private. Her partner couldn’t stay faithful. She struggled to balance her fame with the demands of being a mother, a creative genius, an entrepreneur, and, most of all, a symbol.

---

Atomic Love by Jennie Fields 

Release Date: August 18, 2020

Chicago, 1950. Rosalind Porter has always defied expectations--in her work as a physicist on the Manhattan Project and in her passionate love affair with colleague Thomas Weaver. Five years after the end of both, her guilt over the bomb and her heartbreak over Weaver are intertwined. She desperately misses her work in the lab, yet has almost resigned herself to a more conventional life.

Then Weaver gets back in touch--and so does the FBI. Special Agent Charlie Szydlo wants Roz to spy on Weaver, whom the FBI suspects of passing nuclear secrets to Russia. 

(Full description at Goodreads)

---

The Wright Sister: A Novel by Patty Dann 

Release Date: August 18, 2020

On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the world’s first airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, establishing the Wright Brothers as world-renowned pioneers of flight. Known to far fewer people was their whip-smart and well-educated sister Katharine, a suffragette and early feminist.

An inspiring and poignant chronicle of feminism, family, and forgiveness, The Wright Sister is an unforgettable portrait of a woman, a sister of inventors, who found a way to reinvent herself.

(Full description at Goodreads)

---

Jackie and Maria: A Novel of Jackie Kennedy & Maria Callas by Gill Paul

Release Date: August 18, 2020

Jackie Kennedy was beautiful, sophisticated, and contemplating leaving her ambitious young senator husband. Life in the public eye with an overly ambitious--and unfaithful—man who could hardly be coaxed to return from a vacation after the birth of a stillborn child was breaking her spirit. So when she's offered a holiday on the luxurious yacht owned by billionaire Ari Onassis, she says yes...to a meeting that will ultimately change her life.

(Full description at Goodreads)

---

The Royal Governess: A Novel of Queen Elizabeth II's Childhood by Wendy Holden

Release Date: August 25, 2020

In 1933, twenty-two-year-old Marion Crawford accepts the role of a lifetime, tutoring the little Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose.  Her one stipulation to their parents the Duke and Duchess of York is that she bring some doses of normalcy into their sheltered and privileged lives.

 

At Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and Balmoral, Marion defies stuffy protocol to take the princesses on tube trains, swimming at public baths, and on joyful Christmas shopping trips at Woolworth’s. From her ringside seat at the heart of the British monarchy she witnesses twentieth-century history’s most seismic events. The trauma of the Abdication, the glamour of the Coronation, the onset of World War II. She steers the little girls through it all, as close as a mother.

(Full description at Goodreads)

August Releases Part 1

The Lions of Fifth Avenue: A Novel by Fiona Davis 

Release Date: August 4, 2020

It's 1913, and on the surface, Laura Lyons couldn't ask for more out of life—her husband is the superintendent of the New York Public Library, allowing their family to live in an apartment within the grand building, and they are blessed with two children. But headstrong, passionate Laura wants more, and when she takes a leap of faith and applies to the Columbia Journalism School, her world is cracked wide open. As her studies take her all over the city, she is drawn to Greenwich Village's new bohemia, where she discovers the Heterodoxy Club—a radical, all-female group in which women are encouraged to loudly share their opinions on suffrage, birth control, and women's rights.

(Full description at Goodreads)

---

Bronte's Mistress: A Novel by Finola Austin

Release Date: August 4, 2020

Yorkshire, 1843: Lydia Robinson—mistress of Thorp Green Hall—has lost her precious young daughter and her mother within the same year. She returns to her bleak home, grief-stricken and unmoored. With her teenage daughters rebelling, her testy mother-in-law scrutinizing her every move, and her marriage grown cold, Lydia is restless and yearning for something more.

(Full description at Goodreads)

---

The Woman in Red by Diana Giovinazzo 

Release Date: August 4, 2020

Destiny toys with us all, but Anita Garibaldi is a force to be reckoned with. Forced into marriage at a young age, Anita feels trapped in a union she does not want. But when she meets the leader of the Brazilian resistance, Giuseppe Garibaldi, in 1839, everything changes.

Swept into a passionate affair with the idolized mercenary, Anita's life is suddenly consumed by the plight to liberate Southern Brazil from Portugal -- a struggle that would cost thousands of lives and span almost ten bloody years.

(Full description at Goodreads)

---

The Lost Jewels: A Novel by Kirsty Manning 

Release Date: August 4, 2020

Present Day. When respected American jewelry historian, Kate Kirby, receives a call about the Cheapside jewels, she knows she’s on the brink of the experience of a lifetime. 

But the trip to London forces Kate to explore secrets that have long been buried by her own family. Back in Boston, Kate has uncovered a series of sketches in her great-grandmother’s papers linking her suffragette great-grandmother Essie to the Cheapside collection. Could these sketches hold the key to Essie’s secret life in Edwardian London? 

(Full description at Goodreads)

---

Universe of Two: A Novel by Stephen P. Kiernan 

Release Date: August 4, 2020

Graduating from Harvard at the height of World War II, brilliant mathematician Charlie Fish is assigned to the Manhattan Project. Working with some of the age’s greatest scientific minds, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard, Charlie is assigned the task of designing and building the detonator of the atomic bomb.

(Full description at Goodreads)

---

The London Restoration by Rachel McMillan 

Release Date: August 18, 2020

London, Fall 1945. Architectural historian Diana Somerville’s experience as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park and her knowledge of London’s churches intersect in MI6’s pursuit of a Russian agent named Eternity. Diana wants nothing more than to begin again with her husband Brent after their separation during the war, but her signing of the Official Secrets Act keeps him at a distance.

(Full description at Goodreads)