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Looking in your teenage daughter's purse is never a good idea. After all, it ended up with Carolina Jessup opening a bed & breakfast for railroad fanatics in a tiny Georgia mountain town. Carolina knows all about, and hates, small towns. How did she end up leaving her wonderful Atlanta suburbs behind while making her husband's dreams come true?
Lei has overcome a scarred past to make a life for herself as a cop in the sleepy Big Island town of Hilo. On a routine patrol she finds two murdered teenagers - one of whom she'd recently busted. With its echoes of her own past, the murdered girl's harsh life and tragic death affect Lei deeply. She becomes obsessed - even as the killer is drawn to Lei's intensity, feeding off her vulnerabilities and toying with her sanity.
As a teenager, Jill Shannon fell victim to her stepfather's cruel abuse. Now, as an adult, Jill's made it - she has a successful career and a solid, if not static, marriage to Detective Alex Shannon. Together they live out what seems to be a perfect life in Seattle. The vow she made as a teenager to never again be a victim lies dormant - until one day a reporter lures her to his hotel room under the pretense of an interview - and suddenly it all comes rushing back.
After serving seventy years in prison for the murder of her sister, Eula, Della Lee has finally returned home to the Texas town of Puerto Pesar. She's free from confinement - and ready to tell her secrets before it's too late. She finds a willing audience in journalist Mick Anders, who is reeling after his suspension from a Boston newspaper and in town, reluctantly, to investigate a mysterious portrait of Eula that reportedly sheds tears.
The death of a teenage Amish girl in a cornfield looks like an accident, but sheriff Serenity Adams suspects foul play. To solve the murder, she must investigate the nearby Amish community with the help of a man who was shunned years ago. At first glance, the case seems obvious. The poor girl was probably accidently shot during hunting season, but when the elders of the Amish community and even the girl's parents react with uncaring subdued behavior, Serenity becomes suspicious.
Lieutenant Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels is having a bad week. Her live-in boyfriend has left her for his personal trainer, chronic insomnia has caused her to max out her credit cards with late-night home shopping purchases, and a frightening killer who calls himself "The Gingerbread Man" is dumping mutilated bodies in her district.
Looking in your teenage daughter's purse is never a good idea. After all, it ended up with Carolina Jessup opening a bed & breakfast for railroad fanatics in a tiny Georgia mountain town. Carolina knows all about, and hates, small towns. How did she end up leaving her wonderful Atlanta suburbs behind while making her husband's dreams come true?
Lei has overcome a scarred past to make a life for herself as a cop in the sleepy Big Island town of Hilo. On a routine patrol she finds two murdered teenagers - one of whom she'd recently busted. With its echoes of her own past, the murdered girl's harsh life and tragic death affect Lei deeply. She becomes obsessed - even as the killer is drawn to Lei's intensity, feeding off her vulnerabilities and toying with her sanity.
As a teenager, Jill Shannon fell victim to her stepfather's cruel abuse. Now, as an adult, Jill's made it - she has a successful career and a solid, if not static, marriage to Detective Alex Shannon. Together they live out what seems to be a perfect life in Seattle. The vow she made as a teenager to never again be a victim lies dormant - until one day a reporter lures her to his hotel room under the pretense of an interview - and suddenly it all comes rushing back.
After serving seventy years in prison for the murder of her sister, Eula, Della Lee has finally returned home to the Texas town of Puerto Pesar. She's free from confinement - and ready to tell her secrets before it's too late. She finds a willing audience in journalist Mick Anders, who is reeling after his suspension from a Boston newspaper and in town, reluctantly, to investigate a mysterious portrait of Eula that reportedly sheds tears.
The death of a teenage Amish girl in a cornfield looks like an accident, but sheriff Serenity Adams suspects foul play. To solve the murder, she must investigate the nearby Amish community with the help of a man who was shunned years ago. At first glance, the case seems obvious. The poor girl was probably accidently shot during hunting season, but when the elders of the Amish community and even the girl's parents react with uncaring subdued behavior, Serenity becomes suspicious.
Lieutenant Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels is having a bad week. Her live-in boyfriend has left her for his personal trainer, chronic insomnia has caused her to max out her credit cards with late-night home shopping purchases, and a frightening killer who calls himself "The Gingerbread Man" is dumping mutilated bodies in her district.
Oberlin, Ohio, 1868. Lisbeth Johnson was born into privilege in the antebellum South. Jordan Freedman was born a slave to Mattie, Lisbeth's beloved nurse. The women have an unlikely bond deeper than friendship. Three years after the Civil War, Lisbeth and Mattie are tending their homes and families while Jordan, an aspiring suffragette, teaches at an integrated school. When Lisbeth discovers that her father is dying, she's summoned back to the Virginia plantation where she grew up.
It is 1911, and Jean is about to join the mass strike at the Singer factory. For her, nothing will be the same again. Decades later, Connie sews coded moments of her life into a notebook, as her mother did before her. More than 100 years after his grandmother's sewing machine was made, Fred unpicks the secrets of four generations, one stitch at a time.
In Nell Lillington's small Midwestern town of the 1870s, marriage is the obvious fate of a young woman of some social standing. Yet Nell is determined to elude the duties and restrictions of matrimony. So when she finds herself pregnant at the age of 17, she refuses to divulge the name of the father and even her childhood friend Martin is kept in the dark. Nell's stepfather Hiram sends Nell to live at the Poor Farm of which he is a governor, to await the day when her baby can be discreetly adopted.
General Travis Bains has two daughters, one who is good and one who is bad. Everyone knows Lindsey is the good one, and Jessie is the bad one. Jessie Bains is the other sister, the bad sister, which she has proven more often than not until the day she gets kidnapped and brutally raped. Will Hendricks, one of her father's soldiers, rescues her and brings her home but fears she may be nearly destroyed by what has been done to her. The most important thing, however, is that no one can know.
Carl Logan was the perfect agent. A loner with no real friends or family, he was trained to deal with any situation with cold efficiency, devoid of emotion. But Logan isn't the man he used to be or the asset he once was. Five months ago his life changed forever when he was captured, tortured and left for dead by Youssef Selim, one of the world's most violent terrorists. When Selim mysteriously reappears in Paris, linked to the kidnapping of America's attorney general, Logan smells his chance for revenge.
After the sudden death of her troubled mother, struggling Harvard grad student Kate Drayton walks out on her lecture - and her entire New England life. Haunted by unanswered questions and her own uncertain future, she flees to Charleston, South Carolina, the place where her parents met, convinced it holds the key to understanding her fractured family and saving her career in academics. Kate is determined to unearth groundbreaking information on a failed 1822 slave revolt - the subject of her mother's own research.
In the summer of 1905, Katherine Arthur's mother arrives on her doorstep, dying, forcing her to relive a past she wanted to forget. When Katherine was young, the Arthur family had been affluent city dwellers until shame sent them running for the prairie, into the unknown. Taking her family, including young Katherine, to live off the land was the last thing Jeanie Arthur had wanted, but she would do her best to make a go of it. For Jeanie's husband, Frank, it had been a world of opportunity. Dreaming, lazy Frank.
December 1943. In the years before the rise of Hitler, the Gerber family’s summer cottage was filled with laughter. Now, as deep drifts of snow blanket the Black Forest, German dissenter Franka Gerber is alone and hopeless. Fervor and brutality have swept through her homeland, taking away both her father and her brother and leaving her with no reason to live.
Boston, 1868: The dawn of the Gilded Age, an era of burgeoning commerce and invention, of unimaginable new fortunes and lavish excess—for some. Born into dismal poverty, young Nell Sweeney scratches by on her wits and little else until fortune blesses her with a position as nursery governess to the fabulously wealthy Hewitts. But she soon learns that ugly secrets lurk beneath the surface of their gold-plated world.
Tom Reed is a crime reporter with The San Francisco Star whose superb journalistic skills earned him a Pulitzer nomination. But years later Reed's life is coming apart. His editor wants him fired. His wife has left him to wrestle with his demons. Alone, Reed is tormented by the fear he may have caused the suicide of an innocent man suspected of murdering a two-year-old girl.
When schoolteacher Elsie Mitchell meets rugged William Benton on a train platform in Albany, it appears they have nothing in common. He isn't the sort of fellow a proper young woman of the 1890s would ever speak to, much less become involved with. But when she arrives at her small town in the Adirondack Mountains, Elsie is offered a job as caregiver for this mysterious out-of-towner's niece and nephew, who've been tragically orphaned. Heartbroken for them, she accepts.
Police Officer Tuck Chandler is good at his job. He's also good at holding women at arm's length. Jilted by his fiancée for his dedication to his job, he's not about to open himself up to hurt like that again. Laurie Blake is a struggling photographer. After growing up in a wealthy family, she's determined to make it on her own, even if it means doing it the hard way.
In the midst of the Partition of Poland, while armies and rebellious forces are tearing apart villages and families, young Anna Maria Berezowska finds herself forced to flee from her home. Without the aid of her parents, and faced with the jealous wrath of her cousin, Anna must navigate this world of war and romance alone. Performed with a warm intensity from veteran Dawn Harvey, Push Not the River is the romantic and thrilling journey based on the true diary of the young countess who survived one of the more tumultuous periods in Poland’s history.
A panoramic and epic novel in the grand romantic style, Push Not the River is the rich story of Poland in the late 1700's - a time of heartache and turmoil as the country's once peaceful people are torn apart by neighboring countries and divided loyalties. It is then, at the young and vulnerable age of seventeen, that Lady Anna Maria Berezowska loses both of her parents and must leave the only home she has ever known. With Empress Catherine's Russian armies streaming in to take their spoils, Anna is quickly thrust into a world of love and hate, loyalty and deceit, patriotism and treason, life and death. Even kind Aunt Stella, Anna's new guardian, who soon comes to personify Poland's courage and spirit, can't protect Anna from the uncertain future of the country. Anna, no longer a child, turns to love and comfort in the form of Jan, a brave patriot and architect of democracy, unaware that her beautiful and enigmatic cousin, Zofia, has already set her sights on the handsome, young fighter.
Thus, Anna walks unwittingly into Zofia's jealous wrath and darkly sinister intentions. Forced to survive several tragic events, many of them orchestrated by the crafty Zofia, a strengthened Anna begins to learn to place herself in the way of destiny - for love and for her country. Heeding the proud spirit of her late father, Anna becomes a major player in the fight against the countries who come to partition her beloved Poland.
Push Not the River is based on the true eighteenth century diary of Anna Maria Berezowska, a Polish countess who lived through the rise and fall of the historic Third of May Constitution. Vivid, romantic, and thrillingly paced, it paints the emotional and unforgettable story of the metamorphosis of a nation - and of a proud and resilient young woman.
I very strongly disliked this narrator. There were pronunciation mistakes and each voice was more annoying than the last (Zophie!! The servants!!! UGH!!!!). The recording seemed hastily and sloppily done. It completely detracted from my enjoyment of the book. That being said--I wasn't very enamored of the story. It lacked great character development--Anna is sort of too good to be true; her aunt rather simple; the love story is not compelling. I wasn't invested in any of this. The Polish history and culture was rather bare boned too ...
6 of 6 people found this review helpful
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I thought the story interesting and gripping. It's hard to believe it's based off of a real person. I thought Anna grew from a naive country girl into a smart and calculating patriot. The only problem I had was with the narrator. Her choice of voices for most of the characters was annoying and very distracting. However, the story was written well and held my attention enough to ignore the irritating narration.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
I remained engaged, although some parts moved somewhat slowly, while others shipped months at a time.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
The characters were very difficult to believe due to the melodramatic and exaggerated vocalizations of most of them. I suppose the narrator did the best she could, but the males all sounded so effeminate.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
I was completely captivated by this historical novel about the Countess Anna Maria Berezowska and her family during the Partition of Poland in the l790s. First of all, Polish history is something I knew very little about, but when looking a a map of that time frame, I found that Poland was a large land mass, beside Russia. This novel, based on a 200 year old diary of the countess, provides great insight into the battle for Poland's right to remain an aristocracy. Anna, living through the historic Third of May Constitution in 1791, which gave rights of land ownership to the peasants, paints a vivid picture of the rise and fall of the hopes and dreams of the Polish people, while suffering great losses of her own. Her colorful cousin, Zofia, her complete opposite, foils many of Anna's plans . . . while Zofia is wild and unconventional, her schemes sometimes backfire, even on her . . . I've already started the second book in the series . . . You can't go wrong with Push Not the River . . .
3 of 4 people found this review helpful
I enjoyed the story and the audio performance made it come alive. I'd like to listen to the trilogy.
I really enjoyed the storyline which was varied and unpredictable, but the different voices the narrator used were annoying and distracting. The men all had high-pitched breathy voices and the maid had a bad lisp. It's good historical fiction, if you can overlook the narration. Maybe the best the narrator could do, but didn't suit me.
I was hooked right from the beginning. It takes place in Poland in the seventeen hundreds. The story line is about the nobility and their privileges, attitudes and downfalls, and spans over several years.
Being of Polish decent, the pronunciation of surnames and towns made me feel like I was part of the story. Kudos to the narrator for pronouncing them correctly.
The only complaint, is that the actions were predictable. There were no surprises, no aha moments or "who done it" (to me it was obvious). And some of the situations were hard to believe.
All in all, the book was worth it. Looking forward to listening to Book 2 and 3.
Anna is the main character. Story start as she is a child. Follows her through adversity challenges, loss of loved ones. When she goes to live with her aunt, she becomes close to her cousin. But her cousin is disloyal and manipulative. They love the same man and vie for his hand in marriage. Poland is going through political upheaval. Very interesting and accurate history. The only draw back is the narrator's voices for other characters is high pitched and difficult. However the story is great and worth getting by
I chose this book for its Polish background however it is no Downton Abbey that set in England.
The book is a love story and not a male reading book.
An epic tale that had me enthralled.
My only issue was the reader's irritating accent whenever she narrated the dialogue of a servant or any character that wasn't a noble - she made them all sound like half-wits and drove me to distraction.