Friday Finds - April 2, 2010

Friday Finds hosted by Should Be Reading asks us to share what great books we heard about or discovered in the past week.


My find today is The Rope Walk by Carrie Brown.

From Amazon.com:

The Rope Walk brings us the dazzling story of a pivotal summer in the life of Alice, a redheaded tomboy and motherless girl who is beloved and protected by her five older brothers and her widower father, a professor of Shakespeare. On Memorial Day, at her tenth birthday party in the garden of her Vermont village home, Alice meets two people unlike any she’s known before. Theo is a mixed-race New York City kid visiting his white grandparents for the summer. Kenneth is a cosmopolitan artist with AIDS who has come home to convalesce with his middle-aged sister. Alice and Theo form an instant bond and, almost as quickly, find themselves drawn into the orbit of the magisterial Kenneth. When the children begin a daily routine of reading aloud to the artist, who is losing his eyesight, they discover the journals of Lewis and Clark and decide to embark on their own wilderness adventure: they plan and secretly build a “rope walk” through the woods for Kenneth and in the process learn the first of many hard truths about the way adults see the world, no matter that they are often wrong.

The great gift of The Rope Walk is its exquisitely poised writing. Alice’s narrative is a profound experience of innocence, of perception balanced between childhood and adulthood. The flying spark of new friendship, the first intimation of adult love, the consolation of devotion, which allow Alice and Theo to shed light in the midst of darkness and to find joy in mutual understanding: these glistening threads are drawn together in a timeless story–profound, seductive, wise, and moving, from first to last.

What did YOU find today?

~Friday Finds~

The Oxygen Man by Steve Yarbrough

In this powerful and gritty first novel, Steve Yarbrough takes us into the deep-South world of Ned Rose, who works nights checking the oxygen levels in fish-farm ponds and does all the dirty work his wealthy boss requires. He silently shares the family home with his sister Daze, who is nearly blinded by bitterness, obsessed with her mother's reputation as a loose, lustful woman. Since his angry teenage years as a scholarship student at a posh, segregated school, Ned's life has been marred by a violence that erupts loudly and quickly disappears, leaving him filled with secrets and regret. When one last hope for deliverance emerges, however, both brother and sister are forced to come to terms with their heritage.

The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford
In his latest novel, the author of The Girl in the Glass (2005) and The Empire of Ice Cream (2007), among other genre-bending tales, takes us back in time to the 1960s, when strange doings are afoot in a small suburban community. A schoolboy has vanished; a stranger has appeared; a prowler (possibly a pervert) is lurking about; and a librarian is losing her grip on reality. Keeping track of it all are several young chums, including the sixth-grade narrator; his older brother, Jim; and their sister, Mary, who may somehow be affecting what’s happening as she rearranges figures on the toy model of the community in her basement. Imagine a young-reader amateur-sleuth novel written by someone like Kafka, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of this one: surreal, unsettling, and more than a little weird. Ford has a rare gift for evoking mood with just a few well-chosen words and for creating living, breathing characters with only a few lines of dialogue. Give this one to readers who appreciate the blending of literary fiction, fantasy, and mystery --David Pitt --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

The Colored Garden by O.H. Bennett

When his parents split up, Sarge moves with his mother and older sister to his grandparents' farm in Kentucky. After living in Germany, where his father is posted, Sarge finds down-home country life strange and the neighboring hillbillies even more so. Sarge's grandmother Ruth helps him gain a connection to the place when she asks him to help her tend the garden. The garden is really an ancient slave cemetery, and Ruth knows stories for everyone buried there--except one. The mystery of who baby "Kate" is leads Sarge on a surprising hunt into the past, with devastating and illuminating consequences. Ruth's stories will come alive for readers, as they do for Sarge. Bennett's first novel is beautiful and real; impossible to put down until the final page

What did YOU find today?

~FRIDAY FINDS~

A Widow, A Chihuahua and Harry Truman

I have not had the pleasure of reading this book yet. Since it is a Biography, I am adding it to my Non-Fiction Five Reading Challenge. Hopefully I can carve out some time this weekend to read it.

~"I will never regret having wandered into our local pet store that dreary, rainy Christmas following my husband's death, and falling head over heels for three pounds of dog that would change my live forever."~

From the inside flap:

For anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one, this story is all too familiar. Having lost her husband to cancer, Mary Beth Crain struggled to cope with the ensuing grief. Life seemed meaningless, and getting through the most mundane tasks took herculean effort.

One December day, wondering how she was going to survive her first Christmas as a widow, Mary Beth wandered into a pet store hoping to cheer herself up with a "kitten fix." Instead, she found herself face-to-face with the most adorable dog she had ever seen - a Chihuahua puppy not much bigger than her hand. Two weeks later, she was the proud, but terrified, owner of her first dog, and she was about to embark upon a singular adventure that would revive her spirit.

Mary Beth named the puppy Truman, after her idol, former President Harry S. Truman, whose down-to-earth wisdom she had often turned to during life's hard times. Inspired by the no-nonsense writings of a leader whose humility, optimism, and common sense shine through his words, and forced by the unquenchable spirit of her puppy to take a new and often hilarious view of the world, Mary Beth began her return to the land of the living.

In this touching and humorous story, Crain chronicles her journey from happiness found in mid-life, to illness, death and hopelessness, and back to happiness again. A poignant tale of widowhood is punctuated by wry and witty accounts of the high and low points of a new dog owner's life. Along the way, we also learn about Harry S. Truman and why he has earned such a hallowed place in the American consciousness.

Told with raw emotion, grace and charm, this story overflows with a warmth found only on the other side of adversity, giving the priceless gift of encouragement to all those who have ever loved and lost.

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000

202 Pages

ISBN: 9 780062 516725

~Friday Finds~

Trudy's Promise by Marcia Preston.

From Librarything.com:

An Act of desperation divides a mother and her child. Only an act of faith can reunite them.

Trudy Hulst has no idea if her husband survived his attempted escape past the newly constructed Berlin Wall. But she knows too well the consequences of his actions. Now branded the wife of a defector, she faces life in prison. With no real choice, she is forced to follow, praying she can find a way to claim her child once she's in West Berlin.

Trudy survives a harrowing break from freedom...only to learn her husband was shot during his escape. Terribly alone, she wanders the wall like a ghost, living for brief glimpses of her son, now of reach behind barbed wire and armed soldiers. Desperate to regain her child, Trudy begins a journey that leads her to America, where she continues an odyssey of hope to find her son.

Publisher: Mira (March 1, 2008)
Paperback: 368 pages
ISBN-10: 0778325334

What did YOU find today?

~Friday Finds~

These are books that I found while browsing online this week...they have been added to my Wish List (LIKE I NEED MORE BOOKS...) but they sound SO GOOD! Can't resist!

The Geography of Love by Glenda Burgess:

“If I had given it much thought, I might have hesitated to marry a man for whom at the age of 45 much of the past was too painful to consider--for either of us. Truthfully, thought had little to do with it. Instinct did--the instinct to seize a sure and ebullient happiness or go down trying.”
Falling in love is arguably the greatest risk and leap of faith any of us take. There’s no guarantee for future happiness, no protection from the ugly scars of the past, no shield from tragedy--this powerful memoir reminds us why we bother.
At a lakeside café in the summer of 1988, 31-year-old Glenda Burgess is sitting across from 44-year-old Kenneth Grunzweig and falling in love. Then Ken confesses that he has already been widowed twice, under harrowing circumstances. This tragic past, the age difference, Ken’s emotionally scarred teenage daughter--all might be enough to send anyone running, but Glenda believed in her instincts, believed more than anything that this lovely, generous man would shape her life. And Ken, who with his heartbreaking losses had long said that he’d given up on love, came to share a sense of their romantic destiny. The two embark on the sort of love affair that many of us don’t believe exist anymore--a grand romance that buoys them through the birth of two kids and fifteen magical years of marriage until tragedy strikes again in the form of a shadowy spot on Ken’s lung. The journey that follows will test their resilience and strengthen their devotion.
The Geography of Love is a book about believing in first instincts and second chances.
It is a poignant exploration of the depths of the human heart and our ability to love and to trust no matter the obstacles.
It is a reminder that “real” life is always richer, stranger, and more extraordinary than fiction.

It is the most moving love story you’ll read this year.

Jack & Rochelle by Jack & Rochelle Sutin:

“A story of heroism and of touching romance in a time of fear and danger.” —USA Today
There are two voices intertwined in the narrative: those of Jack and Rochelle. Now and then they interrupt each other. This is the way they have told these stories for the past fifty years: side by side, listening intently each to the other, at the ready to speak up lest a single detail be lost. These stories are their lives—the testament of their survival and their love for each other. —from the Preface by Lawrence Sutin In this gripping memoir, Jack and Rochelle Sutin recount their struggle to survive the Holocaust as part of a band of partisans in the forests of Poland. Told through their son Lawrence, the book brings alive the reality of months spent hidden in a dank underground bunker unaware of the outside world. Jack and Rochelle is more than just an account of stark survival, however. It is also the tale of an almost impossible love affair that has lasted more than fifty years, and an eloquent reminder that history is made up of the often deeply moving details of individual lives.

Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow by Dedra Johnson
Despite being a straight-A student and voracious reader, eight-year old Sandrine Miller is treated as little more than a servant by her mother, who forces Sandrine to clean house, do chores and take care of her younger half sister, Yolanda. On top of the despair of her life at home, Sandrine must confront growing up against the harshness of life in 1970s-era New Orleans, where men in cars follow her home from school and she is ostracized because she is a light-skinned black girl. The only refuge Sandrine has against her bleak world is spending summers with her beloved grandmother, Mamalita. After Mamalita’s death, Sandrine realizes that she must escape from her mother, from New Orleans, from everything she has known, if she is to have any kind of future. In the tradition of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow is a brilliant debut from an important new African-American voice in literary fiction.

What have you found today?