Growing with gratitude for life's challenges
Fellow blogger, Leslie Noyes (Praying for Eyebrowz) has a quirky style that often brings a smile, so I was curious when she published a book to know if I’d have the same response. I put Mayhem at the Happy Valley Motor Inn and Resort on my Amazon wish list and was excited when the 490 […]
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I first heard sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski on Brené Brown’s podcast, Unlocking Us. Wanting to know more, I ordered an audio version of their book Burnout: The Secret To Unlocking the Stress Cycle. As a woman, their words resonate from beginning to end. Emily Nagoski, PhD and her twin sister, Amelia Nagoski, DMA, exam […]
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I ordered Lois Hoitenga Roelofs’ book, Caring Lessons: A Nursing Professor’s Journey of Faith and Self, after having been a fan of her blog for several years. Lois writes with candour about her life challenges, and on the blog in particular, about her journey through her husband’s terminal cancer. It is the candour with which […]
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When nineteen-year-old Faby attends the annual Vaudeville Show in her small town, she is hoping to escape to the drudgery of day-to-day life in the Gauthier household, where chores are watched over by the critical eye of Maman and Maman Aurore. The year is 1924, the setting small town Vermont, USA, and even though she’s […]
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In 1958, Cuba is experiencing political unrest. The Perez sisters, sheltered from the uprising by their social standing, look for opportunities to sneak out of the house. During one of these outings, nineteen-year-old Elisa meets a man who steals her heart. He is a revolutionary. Their forbidden romance heats up as the plots against the […]
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The atrocities of Auschwitz are no secret, and yet, every surviving story reveals another angle, not only of suffering and inhumanity, but also of the incredible endurance of the human spirit and kindness in the darkest of moments. The Tattooist of Auschwitz is about a young man, Jewish, who volunteers for work duty and finds […]
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The letter that arrives decades after it is post-marked is the first indication that Edie’s mother has been keeping secrets. Although her mother is not sharing any information, Edie is intrigued enough to investigate on her own. She finds herself visiting a decaying castle, where she encounters the Blythe sisters, and the mystery deepens. Fluctuating […]
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Some books hook you right from the beginning and won’t let you go until you’ve drained every last word out of them. A Land More Kind Than Home is such a novel. Told through the perspective of three narrators, Wiley Cash’s tale of fanaticism in the south is a coming of age story, a murder […]
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Subtitled My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin, Apprenticed to Venus is the part memoir, part novel of Tristine Rainier, who mentored under the famous diarist. Although I have been inspired by Nin’s words, I have known very little about her, so I was eager to read this book. Rainier, on an errand from her artist aunt, encounters […]
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Before We Were Yours, by Lisa Wingate introduces the shameful story of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, an organization run by Georgia Tann, a woman who made money by abducting poor children from their homes and selling them into adoption. Wingate’s novel imagines what life would be like for siblings taken from their homes and […]
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One Woman's Quest II 