February 21, 2018

February 21, 2018
Today's Featured Title and Contest

This Bookreporter.com Special Newsletter spotlights a book releasing in the next few months that we would like to get on your radar now. Read more about it, and enter our Winter Reading Contest by Thursday, February 22nd at 11:59am ET for a chance to win one of five copies of THE MADONNA OF THE MOUNTAINS by Elise Valmorbida, which will be available on June 12th. Please note that each contest is only open for 24 hours, so you will need to act quickly!

Today's Featured Book and Contest:
THE MADONNA OF THE MOUNTAINS by Elise Valmorbida

An epic, inspiring novel about one woman’s survival in the hardscrabble Italian countryside, and her determination to protect her family throughout the Second World War --- by any means possible
 
Maria Vittoria is 25 when her father brings home the man who will become her husband. It is 1923 in the austere Italian mountain village where her family has lived for generations, and the man she sees is tall and handsome and has survived the First World War without any noticeable scars. Taking just the linens she has sewn that make up her dowry and a statue of the Madonna that sits by her bedside, Maria leaves the only life she has ever known to begin a family. But her future will not be what she imagines.
 
THE MADONNA OF THE MOUNTAINS follows Maria over the next three decades, as she moves to the town where she and her husband become shopkeepers, through the birth of their five children, through the hardships and cruelties of the National Fascist Party Rule and the Second World War. Struggling with the cost of survival at a time when food is scarce and allegiances are questioned, Maria trusts no one and fears everyone --- her Fascist cousin, the madwoman from her childhood, her watchful neighbors, the Nazis and the Partisans who show up hungry at her door. As Maria’s children grow up and her marriage endures its own hardships, she must hold her family together with resilience, love and faith, until she makes a fateful decision that will change the course of all their lives.
 
A sweeping saga about womanhood, loyalty, war, religion, family, food, motherhood and marriage, THE MADONNA OF THE MOUNTAINS is a poignant look at the span of one woman’s life as the rules change and her world becomes unrecognizable. In depicting the great cost of war and the ineluctable power of time on a life, Elise Valmorbida has created an unforgettable portrait of a woman navigating both the unforeseen and the inevitable.

- Click here to read an excerpt.
- Click here to visit Elise Valmorbida's website.
- Click here to connect with Elise Valmorbida on Facebook.

Click here to enter the contest by 11:59am ET
on Thursday, February 22nd.

This is a special newsletter for our Winter Reading Contests, which will mail on select days through February 22nd. This newsletter is separate from our weekly Bookreporter.com newsletter, which mails every Friday. You can subscribe to that newsletter here.

Please visit the other websites in TheBookReportNetwork.com: 20SomethingReads.com, ReadingGroupGuides.com, GraphicNovelReporter.com, Teenreads.com, Kidsreads.com and AuthorsOnTheWeb.com.

And be sure to connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.