Lesley M.M Blume

By: K. D.

Books Written By Lesley

• Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of The Somerset Sisters.

• The Rising Star of Rusty Nail• Tennyson

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.

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.”

Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset

Sisters• Eleven-year-old Cornelia is the daughter of two

world-famous pianists—a 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.

Book Covers that Lesley has wrote.

TennysonWhen 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 family’s 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 family’s 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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Characters in all the books by Lesley M.M Blume

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

Best Selling Book

Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset

Sisters

Sources

• Amazon.com• Google.com• Bing.com