Lesley%20M.M%20Blume

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Lesley M.M Blume

• By K. D.

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Books Written By Lesley

• Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of The
  Somerset Sisters.
• The Rising Star of Rusty Nail
• Tennyson

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Lesley M.M Blume

• Lesley Is a author journalist, columnist,
  cultural observer, and bon vivant, based in New
  York City where she was born.
• Most of her heroes sadly are dead or fictional.
  Her heroes are Diana Vreeland, Marlene Dietrich,
  Isak Dinesen, Katharine Graham, Zero Mostel,
  Royal Tenenbaum, the Marchesa Casati, Oscar
  Wilde, Peggy Guggenheim, Elsa Schiaparelli,
  Anthony Blanche, Flora Post, Eleanor Roosevelt,
  Lee Miller, Edith Wharton, and Collette.

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Her Life

• She lives in Greenwich Village with her husband
  and their French bulldog, who was a featured
  character in her bestselling book, Cornelia and
  the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters.
• Lesley was recently hand-picked by Vogue as a
  founding member of the Vogue 100, an organization
  of influential decision makers and opinion
  leaders known for their distinctive taste in
  fashion and culture, and who personify the
  rising influence of women over the past several
  decades.

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Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the
Somerset Sisters

• Eleven-year-old Cornelia is the daughter of two
  world-famous pianistsa legacy that should feel
  fabulous, but instead feels just plain lonely.
  She surrounds herself with dictionaries and other
  books to isolate herself from the outside world.
  But when a glamorous neighbor named Virginia
  Somerset moves next door with her servant Patel
  and a mischievous French bulldog named Mister
  Kinyatta, Cornelia discovers that the world is a
  much more exciting place than she had originally
  thought.

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Book Covers that Lesley has wrote.
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Tennyson

• When Emery goes off in search of his wife, he
  leaves the girls with their Aunt Henrietta, at
  his childhood home, Aigredoux. Aigredoux is the
  ancestral Fontaine family home in Louisiana, that
  Emery and Sadie left far behind when they
  married. In ruins since the end of the Civil War,
  the family has lost all their money and their
  place in high society. Aigredoux itself has been
  overrun by vines, moss, and the weight of its own
  past. While there, Tennyson is haunted by dreams
  of her familys past and the blood money that
  built Aigredoux, on the backs of slaves. The
  dreams horrify her and at the same time inspire
  her to write the tale of her familys demise. She
  knows that if she can get the story published in
  the one magazine her mother always reads, Sadie
  will see it and come back home.

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Lesley Extra Biography

• Lesley M. M. Blume is a writer and journalist
  based in New York City. Her first book for young
  readers, Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of
  the Somerset Sisters, was published by Knopf last
  July and was called "a fabulous read that will
  enchant its audience with the magic to be found
  in everyday life" in a starred review by School
  Library Journal.

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Extra!!

• Born in New York City.1 Blume attended Williams
  College and Oxford University. She was granted a
  Herchel Smith Fellowship for graduate work at
  Emmanuel College. As a journalist, she began her
  career at the Jordan Times in Amman and Cronkite
  Productions in New York City soon afterwards she
  became an off-air reporter for ABC News'
  Nightline with Ted Koppel. Her work has appeared
  in many publications, from Slate to Vogue.
• Blume's first book, Cornelia and the Audacious
  Escapades of the Somerset Sisters, was released
  by Knopf in July 2006.

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The Rising Star of Rusty Nail

• Franny Hansen is a 10-year-old piano prodigy
  living in Rusty Nail, Minnesota. Once the Coot
  Capitol of the world, in 1953 it's just a
  run-of-the-mill town with one traffic light and a
  bizarre cast of characters. She's long exhausted
  the talents of the town's only piano teacher and
  seems destined to perform at church events and
  school assemblies, until a mysterious Russian
  woman arrives in Rusty Nail. Franny's neighbors
  are convinced the "Commie" is a threat to their
  American way of life, but Franny's not so sure.

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Extra!!

• A novel about the daughter of a world-famous
  concert pianist growing up in Manhattan's
  Greenwich Village, Cornelia was a loosely
  autobiographical work. Blume's own mother was a
  concert pianist, and Blume created character
  sketches based on the colorful people in her
  mother's coterie.1 Cornelia was chosen as one
  of the "Best Children's Books of 2007" and a book
  of Outstanding Merit by the prestigious Bank
  Street College of Education, and selected as one
  of the Best of the Best Books of 2006 by the
  Chicago Public Library. It is a Scholastic
  bookfair bestseller. Her critically-acclaimed
  second book, The Rising Star of Rusty Nail, was
  released by Knopf in June 2007. According to
  Blume's website, the story fictionalizes her own
  mother's experience as a small-town piano prodigy
  on the road to fame. In a starred review,
  Booklist said that "Blume offers a story that is
  as rich as it is delicious."

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Extra!!

• Her third book, titled Tennyson, was released in
  January 2008, and is about a "ruined, elite
  Depression-era family in Louisiana's plantation
  country." Critics lauded Blume's "brilliant,
  poetic writing" and placed her in the same
  category as Southern writers Eudora Welty, Truman
  Capote, and Flannery O'Connor Tennyson was the
  subject of an unprecedented 15-minute interview
  with Good Morning America's Robin Roberts, who
  was raised in the Gulf Coast region depicted in
  the book.

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Characters in all the books by Lesley M.M Blume

• Mister Kinyatta
• Cornelia
• Virginia
• The Maid and Butler
• Franny
• Emery
• Aunt Henriatta

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Best Selling Book

• Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the
  Somerset Sisters

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Sources

• Amazon.com
• Google.com
• Bing.com