Member Reviews

These samplers are so fun to read! I'm obsessed with these right now! I'm gonna dig all the way down to find th rest!

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I always enjoy these sampler books with excerpts for upcoming releases! This was soo fun! I'm going to dig down for the older ones!

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This was a really enjoyable look back at some of the debuts from 2015. It was interesting to see what books were coming up at the time and which authors have continued to have illustrious careers in publishing.

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Fantastic sampler to understanding the booking coming out during a time period. We enjoy using these during book club meetings when trying to plan future reads. Please keep these coming.

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I’m so addicted to these I’ve even been hunting down the old ones to see if there’s any interesting books I’ve missed!

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Always enjoy the sampler books with excerpts from upcoming releases; especially the introductions by authors outlining the inspiration for the story.

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These fiction samplers are so helpful in creating a course syllabus or figuring out next best book group read. Also a window into new voices in literature.

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I love this.
I love being able to see books that I wouldn't normally see.

I like seeing what others thought about different genres. I do have a primary genre that I read but I am open to all different ones. This gave me insight into other books that normally would not make it on my radar.

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Even though this sampler was put out in 2015, I had never read or even heard of most of these books. I love these samplers because I can read little bits of a lot of books and decide which ones I want to add to my TBR list.

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I requested this before my brain had the chance to register the date. Even though, I enjoyed the opportunity of reading excerpts of books that may have passed me by and have now been added to my TBR pile.

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Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for the chance to read these excerpts!

THE SILVER SWAN by Elena Delbanco is about a terrible father who's a brilliant cellist, and how he takes away his daughter's inheritance because she did not become a professional musician. I have a lot of personal baggage around musicianship, and I'm not particularly drawn to daddy issues stories, so even though I enjoyed the author's voice I won't be reading more of this book.

THE GHOST NETWORK by Catie Disabato has the kind of high-concept structure I love: it's portrayed as a true crime investigation, complete with fictitious citations of New York Times articles and editor's notes both from the "original" investigator and from Disabato, acting as editor of the man's files. The idea of fictional true crime is amusing to me, although the meticulous documentation of what happened doesn't appeal to me and I prefer my mysteries fictional and with much more of a narrative.

HOUSE OF ECHOES by Brendan Duffy seems like it will be a ghost story about this author and his family who have bought this giant old house and are fixing it up. We get an ominous death of a deer and a mysterious book found in a desk, plus a prologue with a dramatic letter from 1777 about the demons in the house.

I'm guessing that HAUSFRAU by Jill Alexander Essbaum is supposed to be taking the "bored housewife" story and doing...something literary with it, although I can't tell what and it's not enticing me to read any further.

MUSE by Jonathan Galassi is set in the publishing world. The publisher is very specialized and pretentious and probably nothing I would ever read, and it seems like the focus will be on the author-editor relationship and the personalities of Genius Authors, with flagship author Pepita Erskine and her editor Paul.

I kind of wish I hadn't read the LIBRARY AT MOUNT CHAR excerpt because it freaked me out so much (again, selling point for people who are not me). There's this weird cult looking for their leader, and they're kind of human but have no idea how to blend in with regular people, and also they murder people all the time. Very creepy and bloody.

The excerpt for THE STAR SIDE OF BIRD HILL by Naomi Jackson was fairly short and didn't give me much of a sense of what it is about. The scene is with a bunch of teenagers on Barbados, one is visiting from the US and I think the others are locals, and they talk then get in a fight and one of them throws a rock at another's head for no reason.

BRADSTREET GATE by Robin Kirman had another take on true crime, though the structure is much more of a typical fiction novel. Here our protagonist Georgia Calvin was involved in some sort of murder of her friend at Harvard 10 years ago and with the anniversary is getting annoying attention from the press. It seems like maybe she either accused or defended the professor who took the blame (she was sleeping with him), and we get hints that she might not be the most reliable narrator as she just wants everything to go away so she can focus on her baby daughter and terminally ill husband.

FREEDOM'S CHILD by Jax Miller was kind of like CHAR STREET in that it was extremely offputting. I mean, the first page is about Freedom killing her kid. The setting is rough-and-tumble, with bikers and casual violence and lots of swearing, and I have no interest in reading any further.

GIRL AT WAR by Sara Novic is a historical novel about war between Croatia and Yugoslavia. I feel like a terrible American for saying this, but it's just not a topic I'm interested in.

RE JANE by Patricia Park is not very kind to our heroine Jane, who has graduated college but is working a thankless job in her controlling uncle's store and withstands bullying from her peers. It looks like she'll take a job in NYC as an au pair to a overintellectual couple who has adopted a Chinese daughter. There's a lot about how Flushing NY is very Korean and Jane is only "Korean-ish" (biracial?) so I expect there will be lots of themes about identity and feeling like you don't fit in anywhere.

There are even more war novels of different kinds -- THE VALLEY by John Renehan (low-ranking Army officer in Aghanistan, contemporary), LITTLE BASTARDS IN SPRINGTIME by Katja Rudolph (grandmother joining rebels in WWII Europe), and THE AMBASSADOR'S WIFE by Jennifer Stell (eponymous heroine is kidnapped in Middle East) and I'm sorry to say I just skimmed through all of them.

There were a lot of excerpts in the collection but unfortunately none of them caught my interest. Mostly everything was way too depressing, but I guess that's just what happens in literary fiction.

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This was a great variety sampler full of different genres. Great for when you don't know what to read next, or you don't have a lot of time. This makes it easy to read several snippets before committing to a full novel.

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I received a complimentary review copy of the Spring 2015 Debut Fiction Sampler from NetGalley.

This sampler includes extended previews of 15 novels. I really enjoyed being able to preview enough of the book to know whether I'd be interested enough to read the whole thing. Each excerpt starts with a page showing the book cover, and the publication date is listed in the table of contents.

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I love the opportunity to read excerpts from new books! I am always on the lookout for a good read and appreciate the opportunity to preview new authors or catch up with my favorites.

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Thanks for this. I love reading excerpts and figuring out which books to explore next. So many great options.

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These samplers are a great way to discover new authors and genres. I wasn't familiar with any of the authors featured in this selection, so I am looking forward to checking them out!

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Thank you so much for providing this Sampler. I'm a very avid reader and my TBR grows exponentially when I get a taste for upcoming titles.

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my apologies for being so late. I really enjoyed this book. Turned me on to authors new to me. Love the samplers. Thank you for the opportunity to discover new writings.
I understand I have to use one hundred words. that is not so easy to do.

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What fun it is to get a terrific sampler such as this and be able to graze from the season’s best upcoming titles. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the SPRING 2015 DEBUT FICTION SAMPLER its early look at these great books:

The Silver Swan
by Elena Delbanco (Other Press, May 2015)
The Ghost Network: A Novel
by Catie Disabato (Melville House, May 2015)
House of Echoes: A Novel
by Brendan Duffy (Ballantine Books, April 2015)
Hausfrau: A Novel
by Jill Alexander Essbaum (Random House, March 2015)
Muse: A Novel
by Jonathan Galassi (Knopf, June 2015)
The Library at Mount Char
by Scott Hawkins (Crown, June 2015)
The Star Side of Bird Hill: A Novel
by Naomi Jackson (Penguin Press, June 2015)
Bradstreet Gate: A Novel
by Robin Kirman (Crown, July 2015)

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Samplers are so helpful to prioritize what new books to read next. This way I can spend time with books I already know I can really dive into!

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