ARE YOU LISTENING? Z: A NOVEL OF ZELDA FITZGERALD: A REVIEW AND GIVEAWAY

 

THE GREAT GATSBY is a new movie just out and based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. “The Great Gatsby” follows Fitzgerald-like, would-be writer Nick Carraway as he leaves the Midwest and comes to New York City in the spring of 1922, an era of loosening morals, glittering jazz and bootleg kings. Chasing his own American Dream, Nick lands next door to a mysterious, party-giving millionaire, Jay Gatsby, and across the bay from his cousin, Daisy, and her philandering, blue-blooded husband, Tom Buchanan. It is thus that Nick is drawn into the captivating world of the super-rich, their illusions, loves and deceits. As Nick bears witness, within and without the world he inhabits, he pens a tale of impossible love, incorruptible dreams and high-octane tragedy, and holds a mirror to our own modern times and struggles.

And so, with this movie out now in mind, I decided to post about a best selling audio book also out now that you have a chance to win...keep reading!

WELCOME TO BOOKIN' WITH BINGO'S" 
ARE YOU LISTENING? DAY"
I AM EXCITED TO ANNOUNCE TODAY'S
AUDIO BOOK CHOICE....

GIVEAWAY ENDED 
 Z: A NOVEL OF ZELDA FITZGERALD

Read By Jenna Lamia 

  BY THERESE ANNE FOWLER

ABOUT THE AUDIO BOOK: 
I wish I could tell everyone who thinks we’re ruined, Look closer…and you’ll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed.

When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the “ungettable” Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn’t wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner’s, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and take the rest as it comes.

What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined attention and success and celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda legends in their own time. Everyone wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel—and his witty, perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, adopts daring new fashions, and revels in this wild new world. Each place they go becomes a playground: New York City, Long Island, Hollywood, Paris, and the French Riviera—where they join the endless party of the glamorous, sometimes doomed Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Gertrude Stein.

Everything seems new and possible. Troubles, at first, seem to fade like morning mist. But not even Jay Gatsby’s parties go on forever. Who is Zelda, other than the wife of a famous—sometimes infamous—husband? How can she forge her own identity while fighting her demons and Scott’s, too? With brilliant insight and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler brings us Zelda’s irresistible story as she herself might have told it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Therese Anne Fowler has an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina University. The author of three contemporary novels, Fowler was inspired to capture Zelda’s life on paper when she learned that the famous flapper and her own mother passed away the same day. When Z first sold to a publisher in London the same day The Great Gatsby was published, she knew it was fate. Fowler lives in Boca Raton, Florida.

ABOUT THE NARRATOR:

Jenna Lamia made her Broadway debut in 1988 in Ah, Wilderness, and she's also appeared off-Broadway in The Glory Of Living, directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Her other acting credits include appearances on Oz, Law & Order: SVU, The Jury, and NYPD Blue.  She's also appeared in the films The Fighter, The Box, and Something's Wrong in Kansas.

Jenna's audiobook credits include reading Mary E. Pearson's The Adoration of Jenna Fox, which won a YALSA Amazing Audiobooks for Young Adults award, and Carol Lynch Williams's The Chosen One, for which Jenna received the 2010 solo narration (female) Audie Award.  She attended Amherst College, New York University, and the Sorbonne in Paris. 

AN EXCERPT FROM Z: A NOVEL OF ZELDA FITZGERALD:

Picture a late-June morning in 1918, a time when Montgomery wore her prettiest spring dress and finest floral perfume—same as I would wear that evening. Our house, a roomy Victorian on Pleasant Avenue, was wrapped in the tiny white blooms of Confederate jasmine and the purple splendor of morning glories. It was a Saturday, and early yet, and cloudy. Birds had congregated in the big magnolia tree and were singing at top volume as if auditioning to be soloists in a Sunday choir.
 

From our back stairway’s window I saw a slow horse pulling a rickety wagon. Behind it walked two colored women who called out the names of vegetables as they went. Beets! Sweet peas! Turnips! they sang, louder even than the birds.  

To finish reading this excerpt, visit the publisher's website HERE. 

MY THOUGHTS/REVIEW: 

Z: A NOVEL OF ZELDA FITZGERALD by Therese Anne Fowler was a delight to listen to. The story wraps around you as you meet these charismatic characters. Once 17-year-old Alabama belle, Zelda Sayre, met F. Scott Fitzgerald, her life totally changed. Little did Zelda realize how much it would change as she and Scott are married and off to New York. Scott was not Zelda’s typical rich southern gentleman but rather a “Yankee” who would lead her to a life filled with indulgence, desire, decadence, and glamour. Through their life of excess, love/hate, and ups and downs, Zelda longs to shine on her own while Scott is quite the opposite. With Zelda’s bipolar condition and her attempt to live a fulfilled life with Scott, the reader is taken on a ride with so many twists and turns but one that is also a very spellbinding love story. The tragic and heartbreaking conclusion is so well written that like the entire audio book, the listener can not stop as we listen to the wonderful narrative by Therese Anne Fowler. 

 

GIVEAWAY

THANKS TO ESTHER AND THE GOOD FOLKS

AT MACMILLAN AUDIO BOOKS, I HAVE ONE

COPY OF THIS FASCINATING STORY TO

GIVE AWAY TO A LUCKY FOLLOWER

   

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HOW TO ENTER:

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GIVEAWAY ENDS AT

6 PM, EST, MAY 31

GOOD LUCK!