Book Journey

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

Published on April 14, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)42 Comments

Welcome to It’s Monday! What Are You Reading! This is a great way to plan out your reading week and see what others are currently reading as well… you never know where that next “must read” book will come from!

I love being a part of this and I hope you do too! As part of this weekly meme I love to encourage you all to go and visit the others participating in this meme. I offer a weekly contest for those who visit 10 or more of the Monday Meme participants and leave a comment telling me how many you visited. **You do not have to have a blog to participate! You receive one entry for every 10 comments, just come back here and tell me how many in the comment area.

Under the new and hopefully improved 2013 guidelines, the winner each week will receive a $5 Amazon gift card. This past weeks winner is:

Lori from Escape with Dollycas!

(Congratulations! I will email you the gift card)

It was a busy week but with Book Club and a snow storm… I did get some reading in 😀 Here is what I posted this week:

The Best Of Us by Sarah Pekkanan (SSQQQUUUEEE!!!)

The Storyteller by Jodi Piccoult ( her latest – and this one is different!)

Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl (Bookies review – and yes, we dressed up as food critics in disguise!)

Minnesota Book Awards... I went and I had a blast!

This week I am hoping to get some good reading in. I am finally finishing up the three audio books I feel like I have been listening to FOREVER! So… I will be able to move on to some new things: 😀

When the concierge of The Alexander, a historic Atlanta apartment building, invites his fellow residents to join him for weekly screenings of Downton Abbey, four very different people find themselves connecting with the addictive drama, and—even more unexpectedly—with each other…

Samantha Davis married young and for the wrong reason: the security of old Atlanta money—for herself and for her orphaned brother and sister. She never expected her marriage to be complicated by love and compromised by a shattering family betrayal.

Claire Walker is now an empty nester and struggling author who left her home in the suburbs for the old world charm of The Alexander, and for a new and productive life. But she soon wonders if clinging to old dreams can be more destructive than having no dreams at all.

And then there’s Brooke MacKenzie, a woman in constant battle with her faithless ex-husband. She’s just starting to realize that it’s time to take a deep breath and come to terms with the fact that her life is not the fairy tale she thought it would be.

For Samantha, Claire, Brooke—and Edward, who arranges the weekly gatherings—it will be a season of surprises as they forge a bond that will sustain them through some of life’s hardest moments—all of it reflected in the unfolding drama, comedy, and convergent lives of Downton Abbey.

Now an active member of the resistance, Lena has transformed. The nascent rebellion that was underway in Pandemonium has ignited into an all-out revolution in Requiem, and Lena is at the center of the fight.

After rescuing Julian from a death sentence, Lena and her friends fled to the Wilds. But the Wilds are no longer a safe haven. Pockets of rebellion have opened throughout the country, and the government cannot deny the existence of Invalids. Regulators infiltrate the borderlands to stamp out the rebels.

As Lena navigates the increasingly dangerous terrain of the Wilds, her best friend, Hana, lives a safe, loveless life in Portland as the fiancée of the young mayor. Requiem is told from both Lena and Hana’s points of view. They live side by side in a world that divides them until, at last, their stories converge.

Hildy Good is a townie. A lifelong resident of an historic community on the rocky coast of Boston’s North Shore, she knows pretty much everything about everyone. Hildy is a descendant of one of the witches hung in nearby Salem, and is believed, by some, to have inherited psychic gifts. Not true, of course; she’s just good at reading people. Hildy is good at lots of things. A successful real-estate broker, mother and grandmother, her days are full. But her nights have become lonely ever since her daughters, convinced their mother was drinking too much, staged an intervention and sent her off to rehab. Now she’s in recovery—more or less.

Alone and feeling unjustly persecuted, Hildy needs a friend. She finds one in Rebecca McCallister, a beautiful young mother and one of the town’s wealthy newcomers. Rebecca feels out-of-step in her new surroundings and is grateful for the friendship. And Hildy feels like a person of the world again, as she and Rebecca escape their worries with some harmless gossip, and a bottle of wine by the fire—just one of their secrets.

But not everyone takes to Rebecca, who is herself the subject of town gossip. When Frank Getchell, an eccentric local who shares a complicated history with Hildy, tries to warn her away from Rebecca, Hildy attempts to protect her friend from a potential scandal. Soon, however, Hildy is busy trying to cover her own tracks and protect her reputation. When a cluster of secrets become dangerously entwined, the reckless behavior of one threatens to expose the other, and this darkly comic novel takes a chilling turn.

YAY for new audio! I am now wondering what you are reading this week. Please add your link to your What Are You Reading post below…

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Minnesota Book Awards

Published on April 14, 2013April 14, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)11 Comments

Last night my friend Gail and I drove the 2 1/5 hours to the Minneapolis Hilton Hotel where we were attending the Minnesota Book awards. The carefully planned spring dress with swirls of rose and powder blue was cast out of my mind once we were 6 inches deep in snow again and the warning that we were in for up to 10 inches more in the next 4 days.

*sigh*

Instead I wore black dress pants and a fun flowy shirt. Gail and I both smartly brought along our winter boots…. no questions asked as being smart Minnesota girls – you want to be prepared for anything and walking through snow in the 2″ heals I had on did not sound appealing at all.

We arrived early as planned so we could park, know where we needed to be, and then go and find something to eat. We found a Hell’s Kitchen close by and laughed that neither of us had ever eaten there so why not give it a try. As we entered we discovered that we had to (appropriately) go downstairs to enter… errr…. Hell.

We shared pulled beef nachos which sounded interesting and had pickles on it. (Don’t judge…. 😛 ) Neither of us were very hungry but we did not know what the gala would have so thought we should eat something.

We then went to the Gala at around 10 to 7 for the 7:00 pm start of the gala…

and we waited until 8 am before they opened the doors.

It wasn’t a bad wait, there was plenty to do out in the open area outside the event. Books, of course of the authors who were up for awards were available.

Coffee and drinks were available as well so Gail and I sat and chatted (seems like we never run out of things to talk about) until they opened the doors.

We walked into a beautifully set area. As a waitress walked back we asked her how many people were there tonight and she promptly told us 800. We had little plates at out place settings of cheese and grapes and crackers. I can not believe I forgot to take a picture of the lovely plate – but I did.

I did however get a picture of the event before they got started:

The emcee was Lorna Landvik and she was a delight. She had party poppers for all the winners and instantly decided that what would make the evening even more fun event would be if we all took a drink of our champagne whenever someone said the word, “book.”

The categories are as follows and the winners were….

**Novel and Short Story: The Round House by Louise Eldrich. (* fun note, Last night Louise became the first ever Minnesota author to win a Minnesota book award 5 times)**

Award For Books About Minnesota: Mni Sota Makoce: The Land Of The Dakota by Gwen Westerman and Bruce White

Award For Young People’s Literature: Nothing Special by Geoff Herbach

Award For Poetry: Odessa by Patricia Kirkpatrick

Award For Children’s Literature: It’s a Tiger! by David LaRochelle

Award for general non fiction: Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life by David Treuer

Award For Memoir and Creative Non Fiction: Turn Here Sweet Corn by Atina Diffley

Award for general fiction: Curse Of The Jade Lilly by David Housewright

One of the fun things I learned last night was that Minnesota is the 8th largest book buying state. We also seem to churn out some pretty amazing authors who support one another through workshops at The Loft and The Anderson Center.

It really was a fun evening of seeing authors and afterwards they had a reception where outside the large room we were in had now transformed to coffees and basil lemonade (which I had to try) and tiny desserts while you mingled with the authors and scoped out the books. We didn’t stay long as we still were heading back to Brainerd and arrived back home around 1:00 am. Both of us still excited about the evening and already talking about plans for next year.

For more information on the Minnesota Book Awards, you can check it out here.

Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl

Published on April 13, 2013August 16, 2024 by Sheila (Book Journey)17 Comments

Ruth Reichl was happy with her job at the Los Angeles Times as Food Critic. Yet when an opening came at the New York Times for a food critic the buzz was that it was going to be her they would pursue… while Ruth was thinking, “No… I don’t want to move to New York”, her husband, television producer Michael Singer was putting in for a transfer figuring the move was inevitable.

Michael, as it turns out was right.

After an interview with The New York Times that Ruth did not try very hard at, she started to allow herself to say dream a bit of what it would be like to take the position id offered…. then she became a little unsettled when they did not call…. had she blown it? When the call did finally come Ruth said “Yes” and she, her husband and young son made the move to New York.

What Ruth did not realize was that the restaurants were waiting for her. Her picture hung in ever highly notable kitchen so the staff would know when she came to their resistant and they could be sure to give her the best service so they would get the best reviews.

What they didn’t know was that Ruth was not about to let it play out that way. She wondered how she could give people honest reviews of the restaurants if they were catering to her because of who she was. The answer, as it turned out, came in the form of a petite friend of her mothers who was a make up artist… Ruth would go these restaurants in disguise.

Garlic and Sapphires is the true memoir of a critic in disguise who took on the personalities of who she dressed as and learned all too quickly which restaurants only cared about who were you were and what you could do for them. Her reviews were cut throat and made a lot of people angry, but they were honest… and the average person who made a reservation (or not…) would know exactly what to expect.

I read Garlic and Sapphires once before a few years back. At the time of this typing, I believe I reviewed it here at Book Journey but I am not sure and I refuse to look until I have finished writing this review so one opinion does not affect the other. Does that make sense? When my book club chose it last month to be our April read with the idea that is we read it we would all dress in disguise for the review I was in… all in. I love it when we go the extra mile. 😀

SO this second reading of Garlic and Sapphires went something like this… I really enjoyed it. I loved Ruth’s disguises and how each one transformed her. She became the character and no one was the wiser. She could walk by people she knew and they would not even do a double take. No one knew who she was and with that she could walk into any restaurant and see how the “unfamous”, unadorned, were treated. But that wasn’t all… Ruth would dress older, she would dress poorer, and on some occasions she would dress as more confident and sexier…. and of course, she would also show up as herself – actually visiting a restaurant many times before writing her review.

I enjoyed the story behind the review, and then reading her review. I loved the description of the foods she ate as my mouth watered in anticipation… could I taste it simply through her words?

I enjoy reading foodie books. I don’t know why I am so fascinated by them, by the life of a critic amazes me – at first thought I think, what a great job… tasting the best foods, in the best restaurants, but when I really think about being a critic must really be hard work. You feel with the pressures of getting it right and the backlash of those who disagree….

If you are a foodie reader as well, I think you will really enjoy this fun twist on food critiquing.

The Bookies….

Oh…. how I love my book club…..♥

When this book came up in the vote last month, Kaydi who nominated it added in that it would be fun to dress up as Ruth does in the book. YAY!!! I love bonus book club events! 😀

7 of us the 12 of us who were there the review did dress up. Brenda (back row – hot blond) said her husband told her as she left her house, “I think you really enjoy these dress up events…”

Truth is, I think we do 😀

I think personally what I love about the dressing p is you really get see some fun personalities come out and I have to smile thinking these are memories in the making. 🙂

The Bookies over all rated the book an average read, while everyone seemed to enjoy it, a few brought up that it seemed to get tedious after a while. We had a fun discussion of who we thought was Ruth’s best dress up and we mostly agreed that Brenda was her best as it really seemed to bring out the best in Ruth – and in others. A line from the book was…

Is it possible to be jealous of yourself?

Delicious food… fun conversation and then, Angie pulled out a chocolate tasting board… asn we all were able to try our own hand at being critiques:

I think this was a fun book to review as a book club and would recommend it for other book clubs as well.

I am adding this to Weekend Cooking hosted by Beth Fish Reads

Morning Meanderings… Minnesota “Narnia Style”

Published on April 13, 2013April 13, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)21 Comments

Good morning! It is Saturday and the good news is that the Minnesota Book Awards are tonight and I have a Golden Ticket to go!!! The bad news is (and this is for you Saturday Snapshot peeps)….

Minnesota looks like this right now:

Now you may be thinking “Sheila, why are you showing us a picture of snow? You hate winter!”

Well… that would be because this picture was taken at 6:30 am this morning when I got up. This is the current state of my yard after Thursdays 6″ snow storm. AND after watching the news last night… it’s not over yet, we may get more late night tonight.

………………………….

Ok….moving on. 😀

As I do now want my Saturday Spotlight pictures to be about the snowy state on Minnesota right now… I instead wish to give you pictures of…

Last weekends Chanhassen Theater! My friends Cindy, Heidi, and Sara and I drove to Chanhassen last Friday Night and went to the Ultimate 80’s Power Balladz. I thought it was going to be good fun 80’s (whats not to love?) I did not know it was going to be laugh out loud, laugh until you cry fun.

IT WAS A BLAST!

20130405_193931 — **We had dinner at the theater and they took us down this hall that looked like we were in some sort of Hobbit land…**

**It was great fun – here they were imitating Lita Ford and Ozzy Ozborne.**

They had sing a longs, asked the audience questions, dressed like the 80’s…. it was fun.

Thanks Alyce from At Home With Books for hosting Saturday Snapshot so we can talk about the fun pictures of our lives. 😀

SO… tonight’s Minnesota Book Awards is a gala. And last weekend I bought a dress. A spring looking dress… knee-length, white with pick and light blue flowers on it….

uhhh…. yeah.

So maybe I wear a snow suit, hat, mittens and boots and call it good?

SHHEEESH. 😯

The Storyteller by Jodi Piccoult

Published on April 12, 2013April 12, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)15 Comments

What is The Storyteller about? Is it about a baker? Is it about a scar? Is it about revenge? Is it about forgiveness? Is it about the Holocaust? Is is about a vampire? Yes.

~Sheila

Sage Singer is a baker who works the night shift, sifting and creating delicious concoctions, basking in her world alone. She bears a scar on her face that she tries to hide, much like herself, behind her hair, behind her mother death….

And then one day at a grief support group meeting, Sage means Josef an elderly man and they form an unlikely friendship. When Josef confesses to Sage a horrific past that involved the deaths of many people, he asks for her to do the unthinkable, to kill him, to make him pay for the crimes of his past.

As Sage is still reeling from this unthinkable request, she finds out that Josef and her lives may be closer than anyone could have imagined…. through her grandmother comes a story…. a story so painful that it has never been spoken of.

Until now…

Just moments ago, I finished listening to The Storyteller on audio. By moments, I may mean minutes ago, or I may mean a little longer because as I finished listening to this powerfully engaging read I think I held my breath…and as I listened to those closing words and my mind rushed along the conclusion, I may have lost minutes to my thoughts…

wow. If you have read Jodi Piccoult before I can say this is Piccoult at perhaps her finest. It is her, and it isn’t her. This book is different. It is more… real. It is certainly more powerful and more painfully attentive to details than any other book I have read by her, and if you have read her before you know her books can pack a powerful punch (Nineteen Minutes comes to mind.)

The Storyteller is…. complicated. Sage is not an “I will take a bullet for you!” character, I liked her well enough… but doubt if we would ever be friends. I think a more compassionate, more likable Sage, may have given a different feel to this book – and I have to say, I think “a distant Sage” may be just what this book requires…. after all, we are dealing with topics, that are painfully real, but for more of us, a distance from our own lives today… I wonder if loving Sage as a character would have taken away from the real topics… the real protagonist, which in my opinion, is her grandmother, Minka. Minka makes up for what her granddaughter lacks, she is real, she is compassionate, and she has fire within her as a survivor.

All being said, I did find The Storyteller to be engaging and powerful. I have enjoyed Piccoult’s books in the past but this one with its historical fiction content speaks to me at a little deeper level than her previous books and I have a feeling I will be recommending this one to others for a long time to come.

Morning Meanderings… We Are The Bookies. Or Are We? ;)

Published on April 10, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)15 Comments

You know I adore my Book Club the Bookies. I do. I really do. They are fun and adventurous. Last month when the book nominated to read was Ruth Reichl’s Garlic and Sapphires, the true story of a New York Times food critic in disguise it was suggested that we too arrive in disguise….

and so we did.

Seriously…. I love these women. 7 of us dressed up. I laughed as each entered my house – and I laughed because these are memories in the making. Brenda’s husband (hot blond – back row) said as she left “I think you really enjoy this part of book club, the dressing up.”

I think we do too…

We are probably too old to trick or treat – but we can do this. 😀

I love that a couple of the girls posted their pictures on Facebook about their book club…

**Lori’s facebook post says: “This is Cassandra , she went to book club tonight and had a blast…. thank you lovely ladies and gentleman 😉 see you next month!”**

and Kaydi’s said…

**Kaydi’s facebook post says “There she is”.**
**We called her ‘Gwen’ all night.**

Last night Angie brought us a Chocolate tasting. She had everything we needed, the sheets to vote and the chocolate. It was different and fun. I love that we go the extra mile time and again.

I love that we are adventurous. I love that not only does someone make a suggestion… we usually do it. It’s a way for once a month a group of awesome girls who love books to get together and have fun.

Morning Meanderings… Roommate Wanted BEA – A pitch for me ;)

Published on April 9, 2013April 14, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)10 Comments

Good morning and happy Tuesday! Today is going to be a fun day. We are reviewing Garlic and Sapphires tonight here at my house for book club. If you are unfamiliar with the book it is Ruth Reichl’s recap of being a world-renowned food critic for the New York Times. Ruth knows that the restaurants are all on the look for her having her picture posted in kitchens all over New York so they can be sure she receives the best possible service so they can receive a great review…. but that is not how Ruth rolls… she wants the true experience so she comes to these restaurants several times in different disguises to see how people are really treated and how the food really is. Honestly it is a lot of fun to read and we are going to have a blast reviewing it as the Bookies are encourages to arrive tonight in disguise.

Anyhoo…

my pitch….

This year will be my 4th year attending BEA (Book Expo America) Yes, yes, insert SSSSQQQQQQUUUUEEEEEE here. 😀 I am soooo excited and anxious to get everything booked and be done with it – however at this moment I have no roommate. The rooms can be rather pricey in New York and it is nice to have someone to share that cost with, and someone to hang out with, walk to the Javits with, etc…

My first year was wonderful – I had roommates galore: Reagan from Top Knot Blog (formerly Miss Remmers Reviews), Esme from Chocolates and Croissants, Kim from Sophisticated Dorkiness, and Care from Care’s Online Bookclub. That first year was the year I met Adriana Trigiani, Sarah Pekkanen and Sandra Brannan – just to name a few….. it was beyond wonderful!

Then my second year I was rooming with Reagan again and we had a blast! Reagan is also from Minnesota and so it was easy to meet her in the cities and fly out together and run to all of our events together as we read fairly similar. Last year, I roomed with Gail from Ticket To Anywhere. We had a blast as well! So every year I have a great time, but really want a roommate and look – I just posted 5 awesome people and long-term book bloggers who can give you references. 😛

So that is where I am at on BEA….. just waiting on that final piece so if you know of anyone who is also planning n going but would like to share room cost, please direct them my way. My email is: journey throughbooks @gmail.com

In other randomness… I think I refreshed the Amazon page for Sarah Pekkanen’s The Best Of Us around 50 times yesterday waiting for the review part to go live. I stayed up as long as I could waiting.. waiting… I really wanted to be the first review on the book on Amazon. When I went to bed at 11:25 last night it still was not active but when I woke up at 6 am, it was and I was not the first review… I was second. 😀 Anyway – woo hoo to Sarah Pekkkanen and HAPPY HAPPY book release day! It is a great read and you can find my review here and my Amazon review here.

Ok…. going to vacuum my house before work today – the critics…. er….. Bookies arrive tonight. 😛

The Best Of Us by Sarah Pekkanen

Published on April 8, 2013April 8, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)11 Comments

If you have read Sarah Pekkanen’s books before… know this is Sarah style…. all grown up. Steamy good!

~ Sheila

Tina barely recognizes herself in the mirror anymore. With 4 children under the age of ten she feels like she drops into bed as early as possible and still wakes up tired. She is barely hanging on and is only in her mid 30’s…

Allie looks together on the outside. She runs every morning, has managed to keep her cheerleader figure, and has the type of marriage that is enviable. Yet Allie is holding on to a secret that is eating her thoughts up day and night…

Savannah has always been the looker. She can still turn guys heads and likes to do it. She enjoys a good party, loves the attention on her, and smiles a beautiful smile hoping no one will see behind the look of perfection, she hides her husband’s infidelity.

Pauline married Dwight and knows she married well. Dwight is quiet and a little socially awkward but he is beyond rich and Pauline wants for nothing. Pauline can’t exactly say she married for love, but she has grown to love Dwight and all of his awkwardness. When the idea comes to her to throw him an over the top birthday party with his friends from college and their spouses…. Pauline did what she does best – she plans the ultimate get together that no one can refuse.

When invites arrived at the homes of Tina, Allie, and Savannah for a week-long all expense trip to a luxury villa in Jamaica to celebrate their college friends 35th birthday – it was the invite of a lifetime. As they pack their bags and plan for the trip, the friends have no idea the extra baggage each one is secretly carrying.

Sarah and I at the Book Expo in New York, 2011

Sarah Pekkanen taps into the pulse of many of us when we are in our 30’s. Life is starting to take shape… marriage, family, careers, bills, homes… and trying to juggle it all when in some ways you still feel like you are too young to be dealing with all of this and when and HOW did it happen? Where did the freedoms of youth go?

Now, imagine that a “blast from the past” comes a knocking on your door in the form of an invitation to the life break that your heart longs for… even without all the extra bells and whistles that are added into the trip Sarah Pekkanen has in this book, it is a sweet sounding deal! Although I admit, the extra awesomeness added to the trip in the book was fun to imagine!

In The Best Of Us, four couples are brought together for the trip of a lifetime. What really makes this work is that you as the reader get to spend time getting to know each of the couples, as each is dealing with something, even if it is not on the surface when the story begins. It is amazing what can happen in a week and we deal with it all – the good, the bad, and the ugly… all is revealed.

Fans of Sarah Pekkanen’s previous books are in for a different taste as The Best Of Us is written a little bolder and with more adult content. Don’t feel that change is bad, The Best Of Us is filled with Sarah’s great writing, humor, and I for one was thrilled to go along on this trip, and I think you will too.

You can purchase The Best Of Us Here

Check out Sarah Pekkanen’s website here

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

Published on April 7, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)39 Comments

Under the new and hopefully improved 2013 guidelines, the winner each week will receive a $5 Amazon gift card. This past weeks winner is:

BookGoil!

(Congratulations! I will email you the gift card)

It was a good week! I was busy and am still (STILL!) listening to the same three audio books but, I feel I am moving forward.

Here is what I posted:

The BIG reveal of the author event I have been working on – Wine and Words!

Book Chat with Randall Arthur (author of the unbelievably good Forgotten Road)

Wow. No book reviews. No audio reviews. 😯 That may be a first. Hopefully, a last. I have Sarah Pekkanen’s new book reviewed and ready to go live tomorrow and the book club book will be posted this week as well. With a little luck, I can finish some audio.

As far as this week, I am keeping it light… one book:

Once, a long time ago, I walked down a night-darkened road called Firefly Lane, all alone, on the worst night of my life, and I found a kindred spirit. That was our beginning. More than thirty years ago. TullyandKate. You and me against the world. Best friends forever. But stories end, don’t they? You lose the people you love and you have to find a way to go on. . . .

Tully Hart has always been larger than life, a woman fueled by big dreams and driven by memories of a painful past. She thinks she can overcome anything until her best friend, Kate Ryan, dies. Tully tries to fulfill her deathbed promise to Kate—to be there for Kate’s children—but Tully knows nothing about family or motherhood or taking care of people.

Sixteen-year-old Marah Ryan is devastated by her mother’s death. Her father, Johnny, strives to hold the family together, but even with his best efforts, Marah becomes unreachable in her grief. Nothing and no one seems to matter to her . . . until she falls in love with a young man who makes her smile again and leads her into his dangerous, shadowy world.

Dorothy Hart—the woman who once called herself Cloud—is at the center of Tully’s tragic past. She repeatedly abandoned her daughter, Tully, as a child, but now she comes back, drawn to her daughter’s side at a time when Tully is most alone. At long last, Dorothy must face her darkest fear: Only by revealing the ugly secrets of her past can she hope to become the mother her daughter needs.

A single, tragic choice and a middle-of-the-night phone call will bring these women together and set them on a poignant, powerful journey of redemption. Each has lost her way, and they will need each one another—and maybe a miracle—to transform their lives.

An emotionally complex, heart-wrenching novel about love, motherhood, loss, and new beginnings, Fly Away reminds us that where there is life, there is hope, and where there is love, there is forgiveness. Told with her trademark powerful storytelling and illuminating prose, Kristin Hannah reveals why she is one of the most beloved writers of our day.

Fly Away Home is a sequel to Firefly Lane and a pleasant surprise for those of us who read and loved that book… (I still remember exactly where I was when I finished reading Firefly Lane.

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Book Chat with Author Randall Arthur

Published on April 7, 2013 by Sheila (Book Journey)8 Comments

Let me just start by giving you my background story with this author. I read Randall Arthur’s books Wisdom Hunter as well as Jordan’s Crossing and Brotherhood of Betrayal and enjoyed them so much I became a stalker of his work… waiting and waiting for that next great read. As time went on I could not find any info of any upcoming books so sadly, stopped checking. Then, he contacted me several months ago to let me know he had a new book out and asked if I would review it. Has the word “yes, ever been typed faster? Forgotten Road was everything I enjoyed about Randall’s writing and more… it was real, and painfully so and that was exactly what I had always enjoyed about his writing… Randall does not take the easy road…

but the real one. The one that I walk, the one that many of you walk… the hard one at times.

Please welcome, Randall Arthur.

Should I call you Randall or Randy?

Randall: Randall. It keeps things more consistent with my recognized name as an author.

Randall it is. Are you a coffee drinker? And if you are, how do you take it?

Randall: This is no exaggeration; I drink maybe 5 cups of coffee a year. A couple of times I will drink it black, other times I will add a bit of cream.

Ummm… I am sorry, “5 cups a year” does not compute. 😛 Just kidding. So, as you know, I am a big fan of your past writing and was so excited when Forgotten Road came to be. What was the reason for the large time span between the books?

Randall: First of all, let me say I am not a full-writer. I write only in my spare time. Secondly, I wrote Wison Hunter, Jordan’s Crossing, and Brotherhood of Betrayal during the years I lived in Europe. The pace of life was a bit slower; therefore; I had a greater amount of spare time to write. Over the last twelve years I’ve lived in the United States, the pace of life for me and my family has been absolutely maddening, with many distractions. I’ve honestly had less spare time to write.

Forgotten Road was certainly worth the wait and I also found this newest book to be significantly different from your previous books. Why did you choose to write this story?

Randall: I don’t see Forgotten Road as being significantly different. In all my books, including Forgotten Road, I try to create characters who – because of extremely bad choices or extraordinary courageous choices to live contrary to the cultural norm – win the readers deep interest. We need these type of characters who will challenge our world views and our average behavior.

Very well put Randall. Forgotten Road deals with an incredibly hard subject, the death of a child; and I was amazed by the way you wrote that particular part of the book. What was writing about such a hard topic like, and what was the effect you were hoping it would have?

Randall: The death of the child in Forgotten Road is a scene-by-scene re-creation of a real life tragedy that happened to a two-year-old son of a lifelong friend. The book was written in memory of this little boy. I wanted this part of the story to draw the reader into the main character’s overwhelming shock and pain. I wept as I wrote it.

What is the one thing, if you had to choose only one, that you hope reader’s would take away from this book?

Randall: I learned years ago that any one of my books can relay myriad messages, even a few messages that I never even thought of. With that said, one of the main messages of Forgotten Road, as least from my perspective, is that God can not be manipulated by our faith, and that He is not predictable. Subsequently, we must learn to trust and love Him regardless of the pain and discomfort He allows to come our way. He knows ultimately what is best for us. We must learn – despite our massive self-centeredness – that we are not the center of the universe and are not entitled to everything good and easy.

With my fingers crossed, I have to ask, any more books in progress?

Randall: Yes. I hope that my first nonfiction book will be released sometime in the next 18 months. Beyond that, I have at least two more books of fiction that I eventually would like to put into writing.

A nonfiction? I will be keeping my eyes open for that one! Any other thoughts you would like to share?

Randall: My goal as a writer of Christian Fiction is to rip the smiling mask off American Christianity and tell stories that portray true-to-life-struggles, true-to-life-thoughts, true-to-life-reactions, and true-to-life-journeys. As a result, my first book Wisdom Hunter got me fired from a mission agency in 1992 after serving that agency for 17 years. Even though being fired was devastating at the time, I now count it as a badge of honor. Granted, Forgotten Road will not be as controversial, but I am pleased to the max that the reviews of Forgotten Road – from both men and women – have already exceeded all my expectations.

Wow Randall, thank you for sharing with us so openly. There is something powerful about being kicked out of our comfort zones. I have my own stories of such, and so do many of my friends. I know I truly appreciate that in your books… they are not sugar sweet, they are hard stories but they come across as real life if we like to admit it or not. It has been a pleasure chatting with you.

Randall: Thanks Sheila for being a fan, and for your special interest in Forgotten Road. I am truly honored.

Please check out Randall Arthur’s website here

You can find his books here:

Forgotten Road

Wisdom Hunter

Jordan’s Crossing

Brotherhood of Betrayal