A mothers love so deep for her son that she fights the system to get the answers and help she needs to make him well. My heart wept. ~ Sheila
The summer before entering sixth grade, Sammy, a bright and charming boy who lived on the coast of Maine, suddenly began to exhibit disturbing behavior. He walked and ate with his eyes shut, refused to bathe, burst into fits of rage, slithered against walls, and used his limbs instead of his hands to touch light switches, doorknobs, and faucets. Sammy’s mother, Beth, already coping with the overwhelming responsibility of raising three sons alone, watched helplessly as her middle child descended into madness. Sammy was soon diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and later with Tourette syndrome. Unwilling to accept the doctors’ prognoses for lifelong mental illness and repeated hospitalizations, Beth fought to uncover what was causing this decline. Racing against time as Sammy slipped further from reality, Beth’s quest took her to the center of the medical community’s raging debate about whether mental illness can be caused by infection. With the battle lines firmly drawn, Beth searched until she found two cutting-edge doctors who answered that question with a definitive yes. Together, they cured Sammy. Five years later, he remains symptom free.
My Thoughts:
First of all, what a powerful book and I have to say I am so impressed with Beth’s perseverance. I really felt for her as she struggled to find out what was happening to her son coming up against wall after wall. As Beth’s life takes a back burner to put her sons needs in front of all else. This book is a strong picture of the power of a mothers love. The fact that she wrote this book is going to be such a gift to others who are going through their own similar battles.
I picked up this book with a thought that I knew what I was about to read. I had an inkling of what this was about and getting further into the book I found I had truly no idea how deeply emotional this book would be. Having raised two sons of my own and battling one teacher myself who said that my oldest had ADD to the point that I put him on the medication prescribed by a doctor only to later find out he did not have it…. I barely grazed what Beth’s life must have been like and not even begin to know what it must have been like for Sammy.
Beth Maloney is a successful Maine attorney. In addition to representing writers and producers, her practice has focused on representing the best interests of children as their Court appointed Guardian ad Litem, primarily in cases of neglect and abuse. Before moving to Maine, the author was an executive and attorney in the entertainment business in Los Angeles, where it was her good fortune to work with a number of creative and athletic stars. Her experience includes serving as Vice-President of Legal Affairs for Orion Pictures Corporation, producing motion pictures, and handling matters in private practice for celebrity entertainers and athletes including Johnny Carson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaquille O’Neal. SAVING SAMMY is Ms. Maloney’s first book.
Recently I had the opportunity to chat a bit with Kath from Insert Suitably Snappy Title Here. We were discussing her post on the the book, The Rights Of The Reader. Of course, it was the title that drew me in…. Here is a bit of our discussion, followed by Kath’s review.
Kath, how long have you been blogging?
Kath: I have been blogging for almost 4 years now. My blog started off as a way of finding my writing style but has
Meet Kath!
grown and developed into a book blog. Which is not surprising, given that I’m a complete book nut.
Hmmmm…. a complete book nut huh? I would know nothing about that….LOL. What do you find most enjoyable about blogging?
Kath: The thing I enjoy most about this blog is the fact that it has grown and developed with me. Now that I am in a position to spend more time on the things I love (reading and writing) I’ve really enjoyed making my blog into the sort of thing I’d always wanted to but never quite found the time to achieve.
Kath, why are you so excited about this book, Rights of the Reader?
Kath: The main thing that got me about this book is that it’s so true and so applicable. Right now, kids all over the world are learning to read and the accepted teaching methodologies risks turning a lot of kids off reading which is a huge loss not only to their lives but to the world. A more widely read population can only make for a better world, right? I also loved the way this book is written. Pennac uses the most gorgeous language to describe even the most ordinary situations which makes life sparkle.
It does sound interesting. What are you hoping that people take away from this book?
Kath: I’m hoping that people will take away inspiration and understanding, as well as the tools to ensure that future generations love books as much as many of us have.
Thank you Kath for sharing your review here with us today. Please be sure to stop by Kath’s blog at Insert Suitably Snappy Title Here and check out what else Kath is talking about!
Cast your mind back. You’re seven years old and you’ve just got your very own library card. Surrounded by silence and the smell of words and promised adventures, you run giddily towards the children’s section. You run your hand over the shelves of books, some smooth, some bumpy, all tagged with some weird and unfathomable code. Before you know it, you’ve picked up something that has caught your attention and you’ve settled into the bright red beanbag for the long haul. You forget where you are, consumed by the voices and exploits of Asterix or the Famous Five and you can’t believe it’s time to go already when, an hour later, your Mum comes round the corner to find you.
Every week you come back and you always leave with a pile of books, one of which you’re usually half way through by the time you get home. The need to read consumes you: you sneak off to the toilet to get in a few pages, you read late at night with a torch under the bedcovers. You are, in fact, a veritable addict, looking feverishly along the shelves to find your next hit.
Then, somewhere along the line, something happens. Reading loses some of the joy it once held – it becomes, unthinkably, a chore. A task that has to be completed by next Monday, with an 800 word essay to boot. High school literature studies have come home to roost. English class is now peering over your shoulder, pointing out that you shouldn’t be reading that book, you should read this one, the required text. You know, the one sitting ominously on your desk, unreadable and daunting.
This is where the education system, according to Daniel Pennac, fails our kids. I recently read his amazing book The Rights of the Reader (translated by Sarah Adams) as part of a bookring through Bookcrossing and was very pleasantly surprised. I was expecting something completely different – a fun and lighthearted look at reading as a hobby – but was met with an entertaining and brilliantly written manifesto on the importance of teaching our future generations to love reading and not make it a “should” – a word sure to kill any desire to do something.
Pennac points out that as kids, we loved to hear stories and would beg our parents again and again to read us our favourite books. It is in this tradition of oral storytelling, he argues, that reading is based. It’s our desire to hear new stories and follow new heroes on new adventures that drives us from one finished book to the next new one. But as soon as interfere with our child’s relationship with books and we disturb the private “alchemist’s voice” in their minds, we start to suck their joy out of their reading experience. This, claims Pennac, is a crime of epic proportions. A relationship with books is one of the most consistent and satisfying ones that most people will have in their lives, after all.
The solution? Simple, claims Pennac. Take it back to the basics – oral storytelling. Read to those who have become disenchanted by the hard slog of required textbooks and compulsory reading. Re-introduce that spark. Draw them back in. Before you know it, they’ll have rediscovered that “alchemist’s voice” and they’ll be off in their own private world of books again.
This book was a really fascinating read for me as I recognised that I had suffered a period of book fatigue until pretty recently. As a kid, I was the one hiding under the sheets with a book and a torch. I read an insane amount of books from all sorts of genres, right up until the age of 15 – that’s when it started for me. Required reading to be completed within a ridiculously short period of time, essays to write and not to mention maths homework and geography study…. Luckily, I’ve rediscovered that old spark and have come back to the ranks of the voracious reader – one “right” at a time. If there’s anyone out there that has lost their spark, or knows someone who is struggling with reading – I highly recommend this book. It’ll surely help you bring them back from the brink of a world without books.
If you could only read one more book for the rest of the year – this is the book to read. ~ Sheila
Synopsis
Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.
Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.
My Thoughts:
I love a book that makes you feel, and that is exactly what I found in the pages of The Help by Kathryn Stockett. The book spoke out with the voices of the maids, “the help”, of Jackson Mississippi. It is 1962 and I quickly found myself enjoying those voices as Aibileen speaks in words such as “Law, that child’s legs so spindly she done look like she grow them last week.“
From the white folk who either were upper class, or liked to pretend they were, to the maids filled with opinions that some like Aibileen keep to themselves and others like Minny(who by description is anything but Minny) who cant help but speak their mind and wind up being fired time and again. Or Skeeter, a person who sees things that others do not… sees clearly right from wrong. These characters are colorful, delightful, and I could easily picture the white women playing bridge as Aibileen waits on them hearing their conversations.
And this book did make me feel. I felt anger over how some of the help was treated. I laughed out loud when once again, Minny’s hot head got the best of her – and yet wept for her when she went home with uncertainties that she may be beat again by her husband.
I never like to give away too much of a book in the review yet I have to share this part with you. Towards the end of the read there is a moment when Aibileen and Minny are discussing lines. Those invisible lines that we draw in our minds. That line that we dont cross when we think someone is better than us or if we feel they are beneath us. I loved that.
I hope I can be a person who always lives without lines. I can’t encourage you enough to pick this book up and read it. I am forever changed by doing so.
This book was purchased by me from Amazon
I would rate this book PG
Stay tuned to read what the Word Shakers On LIne Book Club are saying about this book
Woven between two worlds…. one woman desperately seeking the truth to her families heritage and one seeking a world where all people are free…. and both women more similar than they would ever know…. ~ Sheila
Every slave story is a ghost story. The haunting words of an historian and former cane worker on the Caribbean island of Nevis launch Meghan Owen on her quest to unlock the secrets of an abandoned sugar plantation and its ghosts. After Meg’s parents die in a car accident on the night of her engagement party, she calls off her wedding, takes leave of her job in Annapolis, and travels to land she’s inherited on Nevis. A series of discoveries in an old plantation house on the property, Eden, set her on a search for the truth surrounding the shameful past of her ancestors, their slaves, and the tragedy that resulted in the fall of the plantation and its inhabitants. Through a crushing phone call with her lawyer, Meg learns that her father’s estate was built on stolen money, and is being sued by multiple sources. She is faced with having to sell the land and plantation home, and deal with the betrayal she feels from her deceased father. In alternating chapters, the historical drama of the Dall family unfolds. Upon the arrival of British abolitionists to the hedonistic 19th century plantation society, Catherine Dall is forced to choose between her lifestyle and the scandal of deserting her family. An angry confrontation with Catherine’s slave, Leah, results in the girl’s death, but was it murder or suicide? Hidden texts, scandalous diaries, antique paintings, and confessional letters help Meghan Owen uncover the secrets of Eden and put the ghosts to rest.
My Thoughts:
At first this book that travels in alternating chapters from present time Meg to 19th century Catherine left me struggling to get a grip on both worlds as they unfolded. And unfold they did. In past reads that had a similar layout of alternating people or times I had found that I favored one story line over the other. In Receive Me Falling, I quickly found myself enjoying both Meg’s journey into the past as well as Catherines hopes for the future.
This was not a light story line either. Author Erika Robuck hits hard on the lives of the slaves in Catherines world. At times the description of the beatings, the rapes, and even the deaths were enough to grab my breath and tighten my heart strings. There is even one part of the book that was so vivid, so richly described that I placed a post it in the space to hopefully be able to ask the author about this particular scene.
A read with strong characters both female and male. A taste of plantation reality as well as modern day heartbreak when your family is not who you thought or hoped they were. A masterpiece in writing and I do not say these words lightly.
Erika is an historical fiction writer. Her first novel, Receive Me Falling, was released in March of 2009. She is currently at work on a novel set in depression-era Key West in the home of Ernest Hemingway.
Erika has a keen interest in all things historical, and spends her time reading, writing, researching for her writing, and visiting local, national, and international historic sites.
Night skies and little eyes… a book of soft words and pictures with comforting scriptures for the little ones in your life. ~ Sheila
Nine great things happen when the sun sets for the evening. Each page includes a statement about what is happening and then some fun facts and information about that event. Written from a Christian perspective, the story describes how God made things when He created the Earth. While the story was written specifically for ages 3-8, children of all ages will enjoy this book. Even adults can admire the beautiful watercolor artwork.
My Thoughts:
This book for young children is just a sweet read. It is small with great night pictures and short sentences and scriptures that will hold a young childs attention. I can almost picture a little 3 year olds eyes getting big at the latge moon and desriptions of the sounds of the crickets as they chirp you to a peaceful sleep.
I think this is just the perfect length for the little ones. The pictures have a water color look to them that compliments the authors words….
I received this book as an e read from Tribute Books
A girl and a tree… which one really has the deeper roots? Which one really is the stronger? ~ Sheila
Synopsis
A moving coming-of-age story set in the 1900’s, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn follows the lives of 11-year-old Francie Nolan, her younger brother Neely, and their parents, Irish immigrants who have settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Johnny Nolan is as loving and fanciful as they come, but he is also often drunk and out of work, unable to find his place in the land of opportunity. His wife Katie scrubs floors to put food on the table and clothes on her childrens’ backs, instilling in them the values of being practical and planning ahead.
When Johnny dies, leaving Katie pregnant, Francie, smart, pensive and hoping for something better, cannot believe that life can carry on as before. But with her own determination, and that of her mother behind her, Francie is able to move toward the future of her dreams, completing her education and heading oft to college, always carrying the beloved Brooklyn of her childhood in her heart.
My Thoughts:
A tree grows in Brooklyn was a pleasant read for a classic. By saying that I mean that some of the classics we have read in the past have just been hard reads – hard to understand and hard to get into. This books writing was smooth and I could follow the story easily. The book is centered around Francie and her family in the back drop of World War One. Told from the perspective of Francie, I quickly was engrossed in the absolute and utter level of poverty they were.
Food is a big theme in this book and while they had very little, Francie’s mom Katie could work wonders with it. There is always stale bread and crushed pies, and bone marrow to spread on bread as a treat after the bone has been used in soups. Meat was a rare treat. This book reminded me a bit of The Book Thief as far as the poverty and making the best of what they have.
I enjoyed the theme of the book, yet found it for the most part non eventful. The book goes page by page through Francie’s life, what she sees in her parents (her dad drinks too much and her mom works hard cleaning homes to make ends meet). You see Francie is school and you learn her love for books and for learning. The book carries you through Francie’s life and through this I see comparable to the tree that grows outside their home… the tree seems to represent Francie – strong and yet with struggles, continuing to grow.
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn was published in 1943. The book sold 300,000 copies in the first six weeks after it was published. How amazing is that! I find it astonishing that I have never read this book before. This as well as most of the other greats were never required reading in our local schools.
This was our book club read for October. Each October we pick a Classic and this was the pick for 2009. We gathered at my home and we potlucked around the theme of the book. I made minestrone and strata, which is an egg bake with sautéed onion and mushroom and peppers. It was actually pretty good and it was fun to cook for the group. Some of the other book club members brought bread pudding, and desserts. We even had Klondike Bars in honor of the Klondike dance that takes place in the book.
We found Katie’s sister Sissy the most colorful character by far. She was truly a woman who was 100% true to who she was and even today you have to find those people who do not wear masks, refreshing. We discussed how Betty wrote this book to show people what Brooklyn was like in that day.
We also discussed the pride that people had then. Although they were all levels of poor, they would not be the one to raise their hand when pie was offered in class. Friends and neighbors were more – well friends and neighbors. You helped one another get through and that is not always the case today.
Overall this book rating by the Bookies came up as an above average read and that would be our highest rating we have had yet on a classic.
Laugh out loud… Mp Kavanaugh writes in a style that caused me to open up the book, read the first page and my legs gave out from under me as I hit the couch and did not put it down until the end. ~ Sheila
Synopsis
Family Plots is a fresh and funny autobiographical novel about a young mother trying against all odds to create a normal family life with her new husband, a criminal attorney, who—it turns out—is committing a few crimes of his own. The novel offers readers a wry, unsentimental account of a marriage barreling toward calamity. In an attempt to find romance, family, and financial stability, its struggling heroine stumbles into a world of pseudonyms, fake weddings, and hidden bank accounts. Events that land many of the players into the family cemetery plot also reveal unexpected secrets and stashes that manage, in small ways, to transform a tale of seeming tragedy into one of surprising healing and redemption.
Book Tour
My Thoughts:
So here I am again… tiptoeing into a book that makes me wonder what I am about to read. With a title like Family Plots, Love, Death, and Tax Evasion… I admit I am concerned yet intrigued. As I started reading chapter one I relaxed into what I can say is a pleasant and easy read. The words flowed off the pages and I was instantly there – with Mary – at the mailbox, studying her neighbors whose life she envisions as near perfect, and I am there as she pulls the letter out of the mailbox on page 4:
Dear Mary,
I am very sorry to hear that you still haven’t set any kind of wedding date. You surely must want to give your darling Rachel a family name, or just what is it today? Are you one of the turncoats of today? There is just no morality any more and soon the United States will be a mess, as you will probably live to see. I thought you said your college boyfriend Kevin was a wonderful man. Also you told me that he was a catholic. You are 27 years old and a mother! What on earth is wrong with you? Get yourself married and be decent. You’ll be lot happier.
Love and prayers, Grandma Hazel
I thought about showing the letter to my “college boyfriend Kevin” also known as the Impregnator-a nickname I’d invented recently, after struggling to find a proper title when asked if he were my husband.
Ok – ha ha…. I was in! When I picked up this book the plan was to to just read a few pages to get the flow of the read and then get back to it later. Instead, I found myself sinking on to the couch in the position that I was going to get back up any minute and read on later. Uhhh… yeah… about that… 2 hours later I am still onthe couch but now curled up and engrossed deeply into this delightfiul read.
M P Kavanaugh writes in a style that reached out from the pages and pulled me in. As our main character mary leaps out of one relationship into another, changes career choices and finds herself in a situation that is spinning her out of control. I laughed out loud many times (thank goodness I was usually alone while reading!) and have to say that the publishers that passed on this one made a mistake.
M P Kavanaugh says that much of this book is based on actual happenings…. well, whatever it was that made this book happen – I am all for.
The Author – Mary Patrick Kavanaugh
Mary Patrick Kavanaugh has a lively work history that includes time served in a wide range of professions, ranging from private investigator to Avon Lady. Being bossy and entrepreneurial by nature, she has spent the majority of her adult career providing executive management and strategic marketing planning for start-up businesses and organizations.
A writer since the age of eight, Mary’s award winning creative non-fiction has been published in Alligator Juniper, Room of One’s Own, San Jose Mercury News, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her professional writing has appeared in numerous trade journals. Mary is the 2003 recipient of the nonfiction award from the Soul Making Literary Competition sponsored by the American Pen Women, and winner of a 2004 honorable mention. She was awarded writing fellowships at The David and Julia White Artist Colony, Hedgebrook: Women Authoring Change, and The Vermont Studio Center. She recently published her first book, Family Plots: Love, Death, and Tax Evasion.
Despite public displays of disappointment over the rejection of her novel, the author celebrates having one perfect daughter, one happy marriage with a loving (but now dead) husband, one well-adjusted cat that prefers to live with her aunt, a great day job, and a confusing, yet fun, personal life. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from University of San Francisco (2003), a BA in History from San Francisco State University (1988), good teeth, and an excellent credit rating. Mary currently serves as director for an educational peer networking organization at the University of California at Irvine.
Talk about your author with a great sense of humor! After her book was rejected by sixteen (16!) top NYC publishers, Mary self published her book and then had a funeral for her dreams of landing a mainstream book contract. The following video clip is this funeral.
This book was given to me for review from Pump Up Your Book Promotions
Michale Connelly’s thriller is set mostly in Hong Kong. I was so glad I had my passport ready for this one! ~ Sheila
From the streets of L.A. to the shimmering skyline of Hong Kong, Harry Bosch must find his missing daughter.
Harry Bosch is assigned a homicide call in South L.A. that takes him to Fortune Liquors, where the Chinese owner has been shot to death behind the counter in a robbery. Joined by members of the department’s Asian Crime Unit, Bosch relentlessly investigates the killing and soon identifies a suspect, a Los Angeles member of a Hong Kong triad.
But before Harry can close in, he gets the word that his young daughter Maddie, who lives in Hong Kong with her mother, is missing.
Bosch drops everything to journey across the Pacific to find his daughter. Could her disappearance and the case be connected? With the stakes of the investigation so high and so personal, Bosch is up against the clock in a new city, where nothing is at it seems.
Book Tour
My Thoughts:
Michael Connelly is an author I just became a reader of this year. This is actually his 14th book where he uses Detective Harry Bosch as the main character and I was a bit concerned that this would put me on the outside looking in to a series of books that had started long ago. This was not a concern in this book, Michael Connelly writes his character so well that I did not feel that I was missing information needed to fully understand Harry Bosch, who he was, and where he was coming from.
I don’t know what it is about this time of year but my reading style actually changes up from the lighter reads of summer (beach reads, vacation themes, chick lit…) to almost a need for a more hearty style book as the cooler weather creeps into Minnesota. Michael Connelly delivers such a read. A gripping and colorful background layout of Hong Kong lead me deeper into this story. Twists and turns galore I was not lacking for adventure as I hit the road with Detective Harry Bosch.
Fast paced – starting the book out in LA and our Detective has his hands full right from the start with a homicide with connections (leaving that for the reader to discover), a partner who is causing concern, and leading up to the kidnapping of Harry’s own daughter, Maddie.
I thoroughly enjoyed this read and found it hit the literary spot that I was craving!
Michael Connelly decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing — a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews.
After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat. In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler,
had written.
Michael lives with his family in Florida.
Thank you to Hachelle Book Group who has offered me four copies of this wonderful book to give away. Here is how to enter:
1) Leave a comment here with the name of a Michael Connelly book you have read OR if you have not read Michael Connelly before please look at his books here and leave me the title of one you think you would enjoy. (*This must be done to receive your entry into the drawing for this book)
For Additional Entries:
2) Receive a second entry if you Twitter, Facebook, or blog about this. Be sure to leave me a separate comment here with where you did this.
3) A third entry is available if you comment on any other non giveaway post here and be sure to let me know on a separate comment which post you commented on
Thats it! Have fun! This giveaway is open to USA and Canada. Giveaway will end on November 20.
My review copy came from Valerie from Hachette Book Group
Cindy Woodsmall writes an Amish love story… a story of heartbreak and restoration… written in a way that touched my heart as well. ~ Sheila
The Sound of Sleigh Bells
Beth Hertzler works alongside her beloved Aunt Lizzy in their dry goods store, and serving as contact of sorts between Amish craftsmen and Englischers who want to sell the Plain people’s wares. But remorse and loneliness still echo in her heart everyday as she still wears the dark garb, indicating mourning of her fiancé. When she discovers a large, intricately carved scene of Amish children playing in the snow, something deep inside Beth’s soul responds and she wants to help the unknown artist find homes for his work–including Lizzy’s dry goods store. But she doesn’t know if her bishop will approve of the gorgeous carving or deem it idolatry.
Lizzy sees the changes in her niece when Beth shows her the woodworking, and after Lizzy hunts down Jonah, the artist, she is all the more determined that Beth meets this man with the hands that create healing art. But it’s not that simple–will Lizzy’s elaborate plan to reintroduce her niece to love work? Will Jonah be able to offer Beth the sleigh ride she’s always dreamed of and a second chance at real love–or just more heartbreak?
My Thoughts:
I read Cindy Woodsmall earlier this year when I had the opportunity to review Hope For Refuge. Once again I find myself in an Amish setting as I relaxed into a book of a world so different than my own. Beth is a single woman in the Amish country who does not know where she fits. She feels she is too old to sit with the young single girls, but does not fit with the married groups either. She lives her days in a state of mourning a loss that has gone on too long, and her family is worried about her future.
In this book I was surprised at the reaction to Beth’s time of mourning being a concern t o those around her. It seemed that the Amish had a strong feel for the importance of being married. At first I was thinking that was the Amish way, but as I read more, I know it was more the family not wanting Beth to drown in her grief, and certainly to not live her life alone. That I would think would be the case for any of us.
A book on grieving and loss hits home for me. I felt Beth’s need to mourn in her own way in her own time. I know first had that you can not put a time limit on grief and I think that is where I became sort of stuck in this book. This book reminds me of forgiveness in yourself… and caused me to take pause, take a deep breath and read on. When Jonah steps into the book, you are given a romantic interest for Beth and a connection of hearts. A quick light Christian read with a pleasant flow.
Cindy Woodsmall is a veteran homeschool mom. As her children progressed in age, her desire to write grew stronger. After working through reservations whether this desire was something she should pursue, she began her writing journey. Her husband was her staunchest supporter as she aimed for what seemed impossible.
Her first novel released in 2006 to much acclaim and became a Christian Book Association best seller. Cindy was a 2007 ECPA Christian Book Award finalist, along with Karen Kingsbury, Angela Hunt, and Charles Martin.
I received this book for review from Liz Johnson Publicist
Multnomah Books, a division of Random House
Written with a witty pen that caused moments of out loud laughter and an occasional wipe of the eye, Jess Walters writes a book that takes the pain of financial destruction and twists it into a novel of a man pushed too far and trying to make his way back. ~ Sheila
Meet Matt Prior. He’s about to lose his job, his wife, his house, maybe his mind. Unless . . .
Following Matt in his week long quest to save his marriage, his sanity, and his dreams, The Financial Lives of the Poets is a hysterical, heartfelt novel about how we can reach the edge of ruin—and how we can begin to make our way back.
In the winning and utterly original novels Citizen Vince and The Zero, Jess Walter (“a ridiculously talented writer”—New York Times) painted an America all his own: a land of real, flawed, and deeply human characters coping with the anxieties of their times. Now, in his warmest, funniest, and best novel yet, Walter offers a story as real as our own lives: a tale of overstretched accounts, misbegotten schemes, and domestic dreams deferred.
A few years ago, small-time finance journalist Matthew Prior quit his day job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse. When his big idea—and his wife’s eBay resale business— ends with a whimper (and a garage full of unwanted figurines), they borrow and borrow, whistling past the graveyard of their uncertain dreams. One morning Matt wakes up to find himself jobless, hobbled with debt, spying on his wife’s online flirtation, and six days away from losing his home. Is this really how things were supposed to end up for me, he wonders: staying up all night worried, driving to 7-Eleven in the middle of the night to get milk for his boys, and falling in with two local degenerates after they offer him a hit of high-grade marijuana?
Or, he thinks, could this be the solution to all my problems?
Book Tour
My Thoughts…
In all honesty, the title of this book, the cover too… this would have been a book that I more than likely would have passed on if I had seen it in the book store. I am here now writing this review telling you not to do that! When Matt Prior loses his job he finds himself wallowing in reruns of The Rockford Files and becoming more paranoid about his wife’s on line flirtations…. when Matt winds up with an opportunity to sell drugs to help out his financial woes, at this point only days away from losing his home and pulling his kids out of a private school… he jumps into a humorous look at what people will do at the breaking point.
I would say in today’s world of economic uncertainties this book is surely a timely fictitious story of riches to rags… to living with the knowledge that it is possible to take a deep breath and live within our means… even if our means isn’t what we had hoped and dreamed. There are more important things than money, big homes, and two cars…. and Matt Prior takes the long way around to finding this out.
Jess Walter is the author of five novels, including The Zero, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award and Citizen Vince, winner of the 2005 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel. He has been a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and the PEN USA Literary Prize in both fiction and nonfiction. His books have been New York Times, Washington Post and NPR best books of the year and have been translated into twenty languages.
The summer before entering sixth grade, Sammy, a bright and charming boy who lived on the coast of Maine, suddenly began to exhibit disturbing behavior. He walked and ate with his eyes shut, refused to bathe, burst into fits of rage, slithered against walls, and used his limbs instead of his hands to touch light switches, doorknobs, and faucets.
Book Journey 