Good Reads Book Recommendations

Delaware's own Beehive Books provides online book recommendations to help you choose your next read. Beehive owner Mel Corroto, Beehive staff, and special guests can help you find great books for yourself or to give as gifts.

In the most recent webcast, local attorney (and book lover) Casey Clark and Mel discussed the following books (all available at Beehive):

Holiday Titles:

Knit the Season by Kate Jacobs ($24.95)

Matchless by Gregory Maguire ($19.99)

Three Wise Cats by Harold M. Konstantelos & Terri Jenkins-Brady

Hercule Poirot's Christmas by Agatha Christie ($13.95)

A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas ($9.95)

Holiday Remarks & Replies ($7.95)

Recommended by Casey:

Born to Run by Christopher McDougal($24.95)

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon ($26.95)

Use this link to find the Good Reads webcasts:

http://www.thisweeknews.com/live/content/video/Good_Reads.html

Beehive Books places special orders every day, so if you can't find the item you're looking for, just ask.

Author Erin McGraw Sunday 11-15-09 3:00 pm Reading and Book Signing

Erin McGraw will read from her novel
The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard.
The San Francisco Chronicle wrote: "The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard is rich and vibrant with historical accuracy and female fortitude."

"I couldn't cook but I could sew. It would have been better the other way around." So begins this witty and transporting new novel by the acclaimed Erin McGraw, introducing us to Nell Plat, who, at age seventeen, finds herself unhappily married and the mother of two baby girls. For a young woman with a hunger for excitement and glamour, Kansas circa 1900 offers nothing but a flat horizon. Still, Nell find some joy sewing and making dresses for women in town. Dreaming over her sewing machine, she begins to entertain ambitions she knows she cannot share.

Based on Erin McGraw's grandmother's life, here is the story--told in Nell's own irreverent and wise voice--of what happens when Nell runs away to Los Angeles in the year 1901 as the new motion-picture industry is just taking root. Nell marries again, has a daughter, and goes into business as a costumer in the Hollywood of the Roaring Twenties, renaming herself Madame Annelle. But a knock on the door by her grown daughters, precisely the thing she has most feared, threatens to take apart the new life Nell has so carefully built. Forced to confront the legacy of the life she believed she had shed, Nell struggles to make the right choices the second time around and finds herself truly transformed.

In vividly bringing to life the story of Nell Plat, Erin McGraw gives voice to the stories of the countless young women who, unsatisfied with their lives, headed to Hollywood in its heyday. The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard magically recreates that glamorous time and place, and allows us to witness it beautifully dressed, well lit, and close up. The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard was recently published in paperback by Mariner Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

McGraw is the author of four previous books, includingLies of the Saints (a New York Times Notable Book). She has published in the Atlantic, Story, and many other publications, and her work has been featured on Selected Shorts. She is a professor of creative writing at Ohio State University and lives in Ohio.