Friday Finds

Friday Finds is hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

I am truly attracted to covers: beautiful covers, different covers, and,  I have even been know to purchase a book that sounds "marginal" for its lovely cover! Here are a few books and covers that struck my fancy this week:

Displaced Persons; Ghita Schwartz

(August 1, 2010-Wm Morrow)

(goodreads).....In May, 1945, Pavel Mandl, a Polish Jew recently liberated from a concentration camp, searches for surviving family in the Allied Zones of a crushed Germany. Alone, with no money and no prospects, he trades on the black market to survive. While searching for family members and waiting for a visa to America, he befriends a pair of refugees, Fela, and a teenaged boy named Chaim, and soon the trio form a makeshift family. For decades, these survivors have successfully compartmentalized the past. But when the Iron Curtain falls in the 1990s, Pavel, Felaa, and Chaim are reluctantly forced to confront the legacy of their experiences by a culture that has unexpectedly embraced their tragedy as a commodity in need of exploration and understanding. In Displaced Persons, Ghita Schwarz creates indelible portraits of immigrants shaped by their histories—ordinary men and women who lived through cataclysmic times—and uses them to illuminate changing cultural understandings of trauma and memory and its impact for us all. 

 The Butterfly Mosque; Willow Wilson 

(June 2010- Atlantic Monthly Press)

(paperback swap)....The extraordinary story of an all-American girl's conversion to Islam and her ensuing romance with a young Egyptian man, The Butterfly Mosque is a stunning articulation of a Westerner embracing the Muslim world. When G. Willow Wilson--already an accomplished writer on modern religion and the Middle East at just twenty-seven--leaves her atheist parents in Denver to study at Boston University, she enrolls in an Islamic Studies course that leads to her shocking conversion to Islam and sends her on a fated journey across continents and into an uncertain future.

She settles in Cairo where she teaches English and submerges herself in a culture based on her adopted religion. And then she meets Omar, a passionate young man with a mild resentment of the Western influences in his homeland. They fall in love, entering into a daring relationship that calls into question the very nature of family, belief, and tradition. Torn between the secular West and Muslim East, Willow records her intensely personal struggle to forge a 'third culture? that might accommodate her own values without compromising the friends and family on both sides of the divide.

 House on Oyster Creek; Heidi Jon Schmidt

(June 1, 2010 - NAL)

love the cover!!! they story not so sure

(paperback swap)....Sensitive but practical, Charlotte Tradescome has come to accept the reticence of her older, work-obsessed husband Henry. Still, she hopes to create a life for their three-year-old daughter. So when Henry inherits a home on Cape Cod, she, Henry, and little Fiona move from their Manhattan apartment to this seaside community. Charlotte sells off part of Tradescome Point, inadvertently fueling the conflict between newcomers and locals. Many townspeople easily dismiss Charlotte as a "washashore." A rare exception is Darryl Stead, an oyster farmer with modest dreams and an open heart, with whom Charlotte feels the connection she's been missing. Ultimately he transforms the way she sees herself, the town, and the people she loves...

In case you are wondering....yes, I LOVE all shades of blues!