Author Glenda de Vaney

on Tour

January 15-19

with

Journeys Through France and Life

(memoir)

 Release date: March 23, 2013
at Journeys Press

296 pages

ISBN: 978-0615660875

Website | Goodreads

***

SYNOPSIS

Month-long trips to France twice a year – that was the life! Until real life intervenes and everything changes. Come on a journey through France with the author and her husband, eating delicious cuisine, seeing fabulous sights, mixing it up with the French. Stay on the journey as a crisis reveals that her son from a previous marriage has schizophrenia, and that her husband is not only unsympathetic, but something more.

Travel with the author as she faces her fears, and finds a way back to her true self. Through her experience, others may find insight regarding dark corners of their own lives. She puts a human face on the stigmatized illness of schizophrenia, while sharing her love of France, where she finds frustration, humor, and joy.  [provided by the author]

***

Smitten with France, Glenda de Vaney has traveled there
over thirty times to photograph châteaux, gardens,
villages and whatever is beautiful.
She presents slide shows on France and sells framed pictures.
The author is a former volunteer for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill
and an advocate for those suffering from mental illness.
She is also an avid table tennis player
who strikes fear in her opponents’ hearts,
or at least wishes she did.
Glenda lives in a historic home
in a suburb of San Diego with the younger of her two sons.

Visit her website.

Buy the book | on  Amazon 

 ***

The Fictional 100

This is an unusual memoir. It combines vivid travel writing spanning a lifetime of visits to France with an account of de Vaney’s personal journey of self-discovery in the midst of crisis. She endows her memoir with the instinctive pacing of a thriller, and I read it in just two sittings, driven by the suspense generated by the two intertwined crises she faced.

The Discerning Reader

I enjoyed touring France through the eyes and experiences of de Vaney.
An uplifting story exemplifying the power of positive thinking, a woman’s new found independent streak, embracing the future and sojourn of self discovery.

Words And Peace

Combined with interesting descriptions of France, this memoir is a wonderful testimony of what a mother is ready to do to help her son suffering from schizophrenia. It contains very helpful advice if you have a friend or relative with this illness.

Mirasol Press

The author writes very well.

***

Today is the official

release day of

The City of Blood

[police procedural / thriller]

(translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman)

 Release date: January 20, 2015
at Le French Book

212 pages

ISBN: 978-1939474186

Website | Goodreads

***

SYNOPSIS

When a major Parisian modern art event gets unexpected attention on live TV, Chief of Police Nico Sirsky and his team of elite crime fighters rush to La Villette park and museum complex. There, renowned artist Samuel Cassian is inaugurating the first archeological dig of modern art, twenty-seven years after burying the leftovers of a banquet. In front of reporters from around the world, excavators uncover a skeleton. Could it be the artist’s own son? And does that death have anything to do with the current string of nightclub murders by the “Paris Butcher”? On the site of the French capital’s former slaughterhouses, the investigation takes Nico and France’s top criminal investigation division from artists’ studios to autopsy theaters and nightclubs in hopes of tracking down the murderer who has turned this Paris park into a city of blood. [provided by the publisher]

***

Called, “the French Michael Connelly,” Frédérique Molay graduated from France’s prestigious Science Po
and began her career in politics and the French administration.
She worked as chief of staff for the deputy mayor of Saint-Germain-en-Laye,
and then was elected to the local government in Saône-et-Loire.
Meanwhile, she spent her nights pursing a passion for writing she had nourished since she wrote her first novel at the age of eleven.
The first in the Paris Homicide series, The 7th Woman,
won France’s most prestigious crime fiction award and went on to become an international bestseller,
allowing Molay to dedicate her life to writing and raising her three children.

 ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Read more about it here

Since the beginning of 2015, for tours counting at least 10 stops, France Book Tours offers an incentive program to the book bloggers who take time to cross-post their positive reviews to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Itunes, Kobo, Goodreads/Shelfari/LibraryThing, etc.
See more details on this post.

As this is a new program, it looks like a few bloggers forgot to send us their links.
Please be sure to send your links as soon as you publish your review on your blog.

From the book bloggers who reviewed

we received in this order the links from these bloggers:

The winner was chosen by Random.org:

Paulita will receive a $15 gift card of her choice!

Here is an excerpt of her review,
click on the link to read her full review

An Accidental Blog

Each story is like peeking into someone’s window and seeing the real them, the one they might hide from the rest of the world.
The black and white cover is foreshadowing of the stories to come as they definitely have a melancholy feel throughout. The richness of Gallant’s words only deepen the effect.
This is a book filled with stories of deep emotion that dig beneath the surface Europe we love.

 Buy the book:  Amazon |  Barnes & Noble  |  Apple iBookstore  |  Google Play  |  Kobo