Book Spotlight and a Giveaway! The History of Us by Leah Stewart

I have sooooo many books! I have a ton of print books and probably even more e-books. The Book Spotlight feature that I post every Saturday is a way for me to clear my shelves and to share some of the books I have. There are a lot of different reasons that I might be letting some of my books go, the biggest one is that when we moved I discovered how many books I really do have. This feature is a way for my to cull my collection and to give someone else the opportunity to enjoy them.

The book that I am featuring this week is one that I have had in my TBR pile for quite some time. I recently bought it for my Kindle when it was on sale for a great price. Now it's on my TBR list on my Kindle. Ha! I still want to read it and I'll get it read some time, I know I will. So many books, so little time.    

Good luck and be sure to stop back next week!

The History of Us

The History of Us by Leah Stewart 
Paperback, 400 pages
Published August 6th 2013 by Touchstone

From the critically acclaimed author of The Myth of You and Me, The History of Us is a heartrending story of love, loss, family, and the life you make in the path not taken.

Sometimes home is the hardest place to go

Eloise Hempel is on her way to teach her first class at Harvard when she receives the devastating news that her sister and her husband have been killed in a tragic accident. Eloise leaves her life in Cambridge and moves back into her family's century-old house in Cincinnati, pouring her own money into the house's upkeep and her heart into raising her sister's three children, Theodora, Josh, and Claire.

Nearly twenty years later, the now-grown children seem ready to leave home, and Eloise plans to sell the house and finally start a life that's hers alone. But when Eloise's mother decides that they should all compete for the chance to keep the house and Claire reveals a life-changing secret, the makeshift family begins to fall apart and ultimately must decide what in life is worth fighting for.

About the author

Leah Stewart was born in 1973 at Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas, where her father was stationed. As a child, she lived in Virginia, Idaho, England, Kansas, and Virginia again. She went to high school in Clovis, New Mexico, a town featured in her second novel, The Myth of You and Me. She always wanted to be a writer, as evidenced by her college application essay.

At Vanderbilt University Leah was the editor of the student newspaper, the Vanderbilt Hustler, and spent summers interning for the Tennessean in Nashville and the Commercial Appeal in Memphis. The latter experience inspired her first novel, Body of a Girl. After college, Leah went to the MFA program at the University of Michigan, and then moved to Boston, where she put her master’s degree to work by taking a job as a secretary for the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She had an office with a door, and she wrote most of her first novel there.

Since then, Leah has worked as a secretary at Duke, a cataloguer in a used bookstore, a magazine editor, a copyeditor, and a staff member at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She has been a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, Sewanee, and Murray State University. The recipient of a 2010 NEA Literature Fellowship, Leah teaches in the University of Cincinnati’s creative writing program, and lives in Cincinnati with her husband and two children.

Connect with Leah

Website | Twitter | Goodreads

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Husband and Wife by Leah Stewart

Sarah Price is thirty-five years old. She doesn't feel as though she's getting older, but there are some noticeable changes: a hangover after two beers, the stray gray hair, and, most of all, she's called “Mom” by two small children. Always responsible, Sarah traded her MFA for a steady job, which allows her husband, Nathan, to write fiction. But Sarah is happy and she believes Nathan is too, until a truth is revealed: Nathan's upcoming novel, Infidelity, is based in fact.

Suddenly Sarah's world is turned upside down. Adding to her confusion, Nathan abdicates responsibility for the fate of their relationship and of his novel's publication—a financial lifesaver they have been depending upon—leaving both in Sarah's hands. Reeling from his betrayal, she is plagued by dark questions. How well does she really know Nathan? And, more important, how well does she know herself? 

For answers, Sarah looks back to her artistic twenty-something self to try to understand what happened to her dreams. When did it all seem to change? Pushed from her complacent plateau, Sarah begins to act—for the first time not so responsibly—on all the things she has let go of for so long: her blank computer screen; her best friend, Helen; the volumes of Proust on her bookshelf. And then there is that e-mail in her inbox: a note from Rajiv, a beautiful man from her past who once tempted her to stray. The struggle to find which version of herself is the essential one—artist, wife, or mother—takes Sarah hundreds of miles away from her marriage on a surprising journey.

Wise, funny, and sharply drawn, Leah Stewart's Husband and Wife probes our deepest relationships, the promises we make and break, and the consequences they hold for our lives, revealing that it's never too late to step back and start over. ~~synopsis from Goodreads 

I loved this book! It sure didn't take me very long to devour it, if that is any indication. 

Right from the beginning, when Nathan confesses to his infidelity and Sarah just wants to get to their friend's wedding, I was wondering how their relationship was going to get through this crisis. The whole story revolves around their searching for what is right for them as individuals and what is right, or wrong, about their relationship. Can it ever get back to what is was and ..... is that what they want? 

There were parts of the book that had me frustrated at some of the decisions that were made but then there were parts that made me laugh. I especially got a chuckle over the scene in McDonald's when the baby has a blow-out. Been there, done that! 

The book is about a very serious topic, infidelity in a marriage and how to go on from there, but it was written in such a way that I really cared about both Nathan and Sarah. I found myself wanting them to be happy with whatever decisions they made.

Author website

Great line from........

...... Husband and Wife by Leah Stewart 

"There's what you want and there's what's good for you, and when we're children we don't realize what a luxury it is to have our parents to tell us the difference."