Saturday, January 11, 2014

All in the Mind by Jenny Twist





Blurb:

Tilly is part of an experiment working on a cure for Alzheimer's disease. She and most of the other patients taking part in the experiment seem to make a full recovery, but there is a strange side effect. Tilly and her fellow experimental subjects appear to be getting younger. Can the same experiment be repeated for Tilly's beloved husband so that he can recover from a stroke? Tilly thinks it can and she will move heaven and earth to make sure it happens.

Review:

Tilly is a young nurse who lives in the East End of London during the Blitz.  One day on her way home from work, the sirens go off.  A bomb warden herds her into a tube station, and when she emerges after the attack, she finds the block on which she lives demolished.  Her parents dead, her home a bombed-out shell, Tilly has nothing but the uniform she wore to work that day.  She moves into the Nurse’s Residence until she meets and marries Johnny Thompson, son and heir of industrialist James Thompson.  Their courtship and wedding are idyllic, until she awakens in an unfamiliar room, and learns she’s almost eighty years old, she’s suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for the past seven years, and her beloved Johnny has been a patient in the same hospital for the past six months since he suffered a stroke.  Tilly is awake and lucid due to an experiment.  She’s been immersed in the past for the last several months.  Everything around her has been arranged to look like it was 1945 again.  The nurses and doctors have worn period clothing and styled their hair and make-up in forties styles and forties music has been piped into their rooms.

When she visits her beloved Johnny in another part of the hospital, Tilly is appalled at his lack of progress in recovering from his stroke.  When participants in her own experiment start physically getting younger, Tilly becomes convinced Johnny will recover more quickly if he receives the same treatment, and she has the determination and the means to implement her plan.

All in the Mind is a fascinating look at the incredible capacity of the human mind, especially when it is fueled with determination and love.  Tilly’s story is that of a semi-modern Cinderella as she rises from the ashes of her parents’ burnt-out East End home to marry the heir of a wealthy family, beating out a slew of money-hungry debutantes (many of them titled).  The characters are compelling and the book pulls you in and keeps your attention right through to the surprising end.  I highly recommend this warm and wonderful book.

Length:  176 Pages
Prices:
Paperback:  $11.66
Kindle:  $5.99

You’ll notice I always include the publisher’s buy link.  That’s because authors usually receive 40% of the book price from the publisher.  Editors and cover artists usually receive about 5%.  When you buy a book from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or another third-party vendor, they take a hefty cut and the author, editors and cover artists receive their cuts from what is left.  So, if a book costs $5.99 at E-Book Publisher.com and you buy from there, the author will receive about $2.40.  If you buy the book at Amazon, the author will receive about $0.83.

Downloading the file from your computer to your Kindle is as easy as transferring any file from your computer to a USB flash drive.  Plug the USB end of your chord into a USB port on your computer and simply move the file from your “Downloads” box to your Kindle/Documents/Books directory.  I actually download my books using “Save As” to a “Books” file I created on my computer that’s sorted by my publisher, friends, and books “to review,” and then transfer them to my Kindle from there.  That way, if there’s a glitch with my Kindle, the books are on my computer.  Your author will be happy you did when he/she sees his/her royalty statement.

Thanks for visiting. RIW

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