I just found out that I was selected to review Away, by Amy Bloom from the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program.  I’m excited about this, I think it should be a neat thing to do.  I like doing book reviews and I’d like to push myself to do more of them.  I think this should be a nice little shove in that direction.

I first read about the Early Reviewer program on the LibraryThing blog and while I thought it sounded like an interesting idea, I didn’t sign up for it.  I think I was a little embarrassed to do so and I felt a little shy about the idea.  A couple weeks later I got a comment on my LibraryThing profile saying that I am in the top 1000 prospects for the books currently available and that I’m number 703 out of 205,000 members in terms of how my library matches up with their super-secret similiar titles list generated by the publisher.  The direct marketing worked - I looked into it a bit more and decided to sign up for a couple books the next day.

Here’s the blurb about the book I’m getting (from the publisher)

Panoramic in scope, Away is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York’s Lower East Side, to Seattle’s Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. All of the qualities readers love in Amy Bloom’s work—her humor and wit, her elegant and irreverent language, her unflinching understanding of passion and the human heart—come together in the embrace of this brilliant novel, which is at once heartbreaking, romantic, and completely unforgettable.

I’m looking forward to reading it!