First Frost
I picked this book completely by the author. I didn't even glance at what it was about. Sarah Addison Allen is almost a Maeve Binchy, though not quite as classy or maybe just not as British Isles, so it's an easy choice for me. I really enjoyed her first book, Garden Spells, but not as much her second book, Lost Lake (which I think I wrote about here but can't find) so I was excited to find that this is a sequel to Garden Spells. It's the sweet story of four generations of Southern women with a variety of mystical gifts, mostly connected to cooking and their mysterious garden. As is often true, the sequel is a bit of a let down when you find the characters changed too much or not enough, or the glamour or surprise of the first book is missing. But for the most part, this is another sweet study of human nature with some interesting bits of magic and a little suspense thrown in. Again, a lot like my friend Maeve.
Middle Grade Fiction by Dan Gemeinhart
This is exciting to me because the author is a local school librarian! Teachers can write books, and even get published! Yay! It's so encouraging. It took me a few pages to get into the book and I think that's a result of switching genres as rapidly as I have been. I have readers' whiplash. But once I got into it, I whipped right through this story of a young cancer patient who runs away to climb a mountain on his own. I liked all the characters, especially his chance encounters along the way. I LOVED that this is very real story that shows how full of hurt kids' lives can be and the realities our children face today, but without anything that I couldn't recommend to my own daughter or students. No swearing, sex, or scary stuff. Just real hardship and real hope. I also like that it's set in Wenatchee. It got me thinking about the settings of my two manuscripts.
Searching for Sunday
I'm not actually done with this book but since it's non-fiction and therefore won't devastate me with a terrible ending, I think it's fair to say I will keep liking it. There was more of the genre-confusion at the beginning and again it took me a while to get into it, but now that I am, I'm really interested. This more than the others on this page makes me want to talk to other people about it (in person, I mean, not just in my head here). I've said before that I don't read many self help books or religious books because they make me feel more guilty than helped. That is so not the case here. That's why I said I think Rachel would question the genre label on this book, and why I re-assigned it in my sub-title. I think this is more a memoir, a kind of story that Rachel is telling about how she came to question the church and question God and BE OK WITH THE QUESTIONS. She also wrote her story in Faith Unraveled, but this time there is more a bent on why other young Christians are leaving church, and why some are coming back but in a different way. At a time when church is coming to mean many different things, I'm finding a lot of "me toos" in the book. And I think that's what it's meant to be about. Having a conversation about how we understand God today and being able to find someone to say "me too" with.
No comments:
Post a Comment