I must confess I strayed from my commitment to finish all the books I was simultaneously reading and instead, picked up yet another, which I could not then put down.
Winter Garden weaves together the past and present (love me that historical fiction!) as it lays out the lives of Meredith Whitson, her sister, Nina, and their complicated relationships (aren't they all) with their parents. Their mother, Anya: cold and distant. The girls have never been able to please her or make her happy and quit trying a long time ago, never quite healing from the scars her withheld love has imprinted on them. Their father, Evan: warm, loving, always trying to make up for his wife's painful silence.
When their father falls gravely ill, he makes a last attempt to pull his wife and daughters together using a fairy tale Anya told the girls in their childhood, set in her native Russia. Through Anya's reluctant retelling of this tale, the girls begin to unravel the mystery that is their mother, learning about a history they never knew was part of them and breaking the barriers they've put up around their hearts in the process.
BOTTOM LINE: Have Kleenex at hand!
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Bittersweet by Shauna Niequist
"My prayer for you is not that you live a life that's only sweet and never bitter, but that in even the bitterest of moments, you will find the comfort of Christ, deep and enduring, powerful beyond all imagination."
Thus ends Shauna Niequist's reflective collection of essays on life, change, and grace. And throughout her book she shares her own life's tale of these elements and what she has learned about them through tragedy, pain, loss, joy, love - and how they all point to the great Comforter. I love that she ends with this sentence because life is a collection of days both bitter and sweet, not segregated from one another but interwoven, equal, often simultaneous. And through it all, the pain and the joy, we have One who can relate to it all and bring us to a place of peace.
BOTTOM LINE: Her book is raw and honest, as well as humorous. It sounds so cheesy, but every time I picked it up I felt kind of like I was sitting with a good friend, hearing her story, gleaning advice.
Thus ends Shauna Niequist's reflective collection of essays on life, change, and grace. And throughout her book she shares her own life's tale of these elements and what she has learned about them through tragedy, pain, loss, joy, love - and how they all point to the great Comforter. I love that she ends with this sentence because life is a collection of days both bitter and sweet, not segregated from one another but interwoven, equal, often simultaneous. And through it all, the pain and the joy, we have One who can relate to it all and bring us to a place of peace.
BOTTOM LINE: Her book is raw and honest, as well as humorous. It sounds so cheesy, but every time I picked it up I felt kind of like I was sitting with a good friend, hearing her story, gleaning advice.
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