Earth Day Giveaway

In celebration of the approach of Earth Day on April 22, I am featuring Gillian Deacon's new book, There's Lead in Your Lipstick, with a giveaway! To introduce you to the author of this wonderful book, here is a special Earth Day message from her:

          Earth day shouldn't just be an annual tip of the hat to greener living. This year, make it the day you recalibrate your everyday patterns to be more earth-friendly all year long.
You don't have to be a treehugger to care about avoiding toxins in your everyday bodycare. Synthetic chemicals in personal care products contaminating groundwater and wildlife is alarming enough—but they’re also contaminating us. Those hard-to-read ingredients you squint at on the back of a product label? They’re building up inside your body and in your children’s bodies—on Earth Day and everyday.
Make today the day you start paying attention to that fine print. Turn a product over and read the ingredients label before you are seduced by the “green” imaging on the package. The good news is, there are lots of safer products on the market.
Good luck and I hope you’ll check out There’s Lead in Your Lipstick for more ideas on how to clean up your act!

Here is a very informative excerpt from her book that makes me glad I choose not to wear make-up!

          Researchers in Finland tested eighty-eight colours from twenty-five brands and found forty-nine eyeshadows contained lead, cobalt, nickel, chromium, and arsenic. Eyeshadows also often contain petrochemicals, such as mineral oil, dimethicone to make the powder stick to the eyelid, and a binding agent like methacrylate, which in addition to being a strong skin irritant is also a contributor to 1,4-dioxane, a known carcinogen. Glitter eyeshadows use pure aluminum to create the shimmery effect; the aluminum can migrate into the eye and cause injury to the cornea.
From There’s Lead in Your Lipstick by Gillian Deacon (Penguin Canada). Copyright © Backbone Inc. FSO Gillian Deacon, 2011

So on to the giveaway! Penguin.ca has generously offered one lucky reader one copy of There's Lead in Your Lipstick by Gillian Deacon along with an Eco Kiss Kit from Saffron Rouge, with a retail value totaling approximately CDN $48.95. Because this prize is coming from Penguin Canada, the giveaway is for Canadians only, sorry!
According to Saffron Rouge, the Eco Kiss Kit is a collection of three moisture-rich lip balms that are all-natural, USDA certified organic, and petroleum-free. The three vintage style tins come in Lavender Vanilla, Chair Mandarin, and Pepperminty. As chapped as I get in this cold and dry climate, I wish I could keep them for myself!

I like to keep my giveaways simple. To enter this giveaway, you must be a follower of Jacob's Beloved's Books through one of three ways: Google Friend Connect, RSS Feed, or Email Subscription. Once you have done that, fill out the form below and you are done! Comments are always welcome, but not necessary to enter. This giveaway ends on April 29, 2011. I will email the winner for his or her mailing address, and Penguin Canada will be shipping the prize package to the winner.

Teaser Tuesday: Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

1. Grab your current read.
2. Open to a random page.
3. Share two “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page.
4. BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!).
5. Share the title and author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!


My Teaser:

          Are you one of the new wolves? I wondered in my head, but I didn't say it aloud, in case my voice startled him. He tilted his face upward, and I saw his nose working in my direction. I felt I knew what he wanted: I slowly lifted a hand in his direction, proffering my palm. He recoiled, as if from the scent, not from the movement, because after he had jerked back, his nose continued working.
I didn't have to bring my palm to my own nose to know what he was smelling, because I could still smell it myself. The sweet, rotting scent of almonds, trapped between my fingers and under my nails. It seemed more ominous than the fever itself had. It seemed to say, This is more than just a fever. - pg. 184, Linger (Wolves of Mercy Falls, Book 2) by Maggie Stiefvater

What are you reading this week?

Review and Blog Tour: The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer

Book Details:
The Uncoupling
By Meg Wolitzer
Genre: General Fiction
Published April 2011, Riverhead Books
Hardback, 271 pages
ISBN: 9781594487880


Synopsis:

          From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Ten-Year Nap, a funny, provocative, revealing novel about female desire.
When the elliptical new drama teacher at Stellar Plains High School chooses for the school play Lysistrata-the comedy by Aristophanes in which women stop having sex with men in order to end a war-a strange spell seems to be cast over the school. Or, at least, over the women. One by one throughout the high school community, perfectly healthy, normal women and teenage girls turn away from their husbands and boyfriends in the bedroom, for reasons they don't really understand. As the women worry over their loss of passion, and the men become by turns unhappy, offended, and above all, confused, both sides are forced to look at their shared history, and at their sexual selves in a new light.
As she did to such acclaim with the New York Times bestseller The Ten-Year Nap, Wolitzer tackles an issue that has deep ramifications for women's lives, in a way that makes it funny, riveting, and totally fresh-allowing us to see our own lives through her insightful lens.

The story is told in a third-person narrative and divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the events leading up to the introduction of the play Lysistrata by the school's new drama teacher. The second part goes into detail about all of the different couples affected by the spell that the play casts over the town. The third part tells what happens in the night of the actual high-school production of the play and afterwards.
The spell of Lysistrata resembled a cold wind and only affected "women who were in some way connected sexually to men." No woman in the book was strong enough to resist the power of this mysterious wind, not even the ones newly in love and lust. Every woman affected imagined her own reasons for abstaining, and though all of the different reasons had a logical ring to them, only other women could relate. The men were simply left in the dark to react however he felt could change his twist in circumstances.
Early on, I felt that this book was a bit like a study of sex and the affects of sex -- or lack thereof -- on individuals and relationships. Even though the play Lysistrata was meant to be a catalyst for all of these private events, the high-school reenactment seemed to take a minor background role. The spell seemed to empower the women, though they did not act any happier with their new freedom and individuality. Many were just as baffled or depressed with the chastity as the men, but no couple was able to converse with each other about it, which I found strange and attributed to the effects of the spell. Ironically, because the issues of sex are such a private matter, very few couples shared their problems with anyone else in town, and so no one truly recognized the correlation between the abstinence of the females in town and the play Lysistrata. This irritated me to no end throughout the book.
On the night of the play, the spell is magically lifted by, quite appropriately, a warm wind when the men in the audience begin to protest the essence of the play itself and use that to try and win their women back. Throughout the whole book, the reader is lead to believe that this spell has no designer, that it has simply attached itself to the performance of the play from Lysistrata's origins in 411 B.C. Though I at first was suspicious of a certain person as casting the spell, I was also lulled into changing my mind about this. Without giving away the ending, I was quite surprised at the truth behind the spell's beginnings. There is much I could say about the thoughts that raced through my head while reading the last few pages and the conclusions that I drew from the revelation, but I will resist. I will say that the book is worth every page for its startling culmination.

The Cover: The cover image looks like a model of a suburban neighborhood, which is perfect for the focus of the book.

First Line: "People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness."
I always like a good metaphor, and this one has me contemplating how this applies to the plot of the book.

Favorite Quote: "Sex wasn't everything, but it was something. It was something to them."

Read For: Off The Shelf, Twenty-Eleven Challenge

*I received this book free of charge from the publisher for review purposes.*