I am delighted to welcome another brilliant book blogger to damppebbles today, Rebecca Foster of Bookish Beck.  Rebecca is an avid reader who manages to devour 300 books a year, although she is one of those lucky souls who gets to review books for a living.  I am thrilled to have Rebecca join me today to reveal her #R3COMM3ND3D2017 reads.

#R3COMM3ND3D2017 is where I invite authors and book bloggers to share the book love.  To shout about three books they have loved over the past 12 months.  Any author, any genre providing the book was published in 2017.

Here are Rebecca’s choices…

The Velveteen Daughter by Laurel David Huber
The name Margery Williams Bianco might not seem familiar, but chances are you remember her classic children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit. This lovely debut novel is about Margery and her daughter, Pamela Bianco, a painter and child prodigy. Themes of creativity, mental health, and motherhood are nestled in a highly visual book full of cameos by everyone from Pablo Picasso to Eugene O’Neill.

Fragile Lives by Stephen Westaby
This is a vivid, compassionate set of stories drawn from the author’s long career in heart surgery. Westaby conveys a keen sense of the adrenaline rush a surgeon gets while operating with the Grim Reaper looking on. I am not a little envious of all that he has achieved: not just saving the occasional life despite his high-mortality field – as if that weren’t enough – but also pioneering various artificial heart solutions and a tracheal bypass tube that’s named after him.

The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker
Though it seems lighthearted on the surface, there’s a lot of meat to this tale of the long friendship between two female animators. The cartooning world and the Kentucky–New York City dichotomy together feel like a brand-new setting for a literary tragicomedy. I appreciated how Whitaker contrasts the women’s public and private personas and imagines their professional legacy (plus I love a good road trip narrative, and this debut novel has two).

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Thanks so much for joining me today, Rebecca and for your brilliant recommendations.

If Rebecca has managed to tempt you or if you would like to find out more about the books she has suggested then please see the following amazon.co.uk links:

The Velveteen Daughter by Laurel Davis Huber | Fragile Lives by Stephen Westaby | The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker |

About Rebecca:
Rebecca is an American transplant to England. She is a full-time freelancer, editing science journals and reviewing books for a number of print and online publications on both sides of the pond (besides her blog!).

Rebecca’s Blog and Social Media Links:
Bookish Beck | Twitter |

My thanks to Rebecca for joining me today.  Make sure you stop by the blog again tomorrow when I will be welcoming Ayo Onatade of Shotsmag Confidential with her #R3COMM3ND3D2017 reads.