Monday, June 25, 2012

On my kindle: Shelter





so, I've been missing for a while now. For that I am sorry. End of semester craziness led straight into trying to figure out my new role as 100 percent stay at home mom while also leading a bible study for a week, taking a few day trips with the little ones and all around trying to enjoy my last few months of freedom before internship grabs hold of my time and energy.

BUT, all of this "free" time with the kiddos has been great for my reading for FUN. (thats right. you read it. for FUN...when does that even happen??)

and so I hope to keep a sort of list of books I like, and recommend, on this little corner of the inter.

I picked this little gem up on a whim at the library, and instatntly fell in love and was actually pretty obsessed about reading it for the week it took me. It was the kind of book that I hoped the girls went down for naps easily just so I could read. The kind of book I could read while soaking in the tub the second the girls went to bed at night and would be sucked in until I realized the bubbles had gone and the water was only luke warm.

It is a new novel, a first for greenslade, but she has a couple of memoirs out. I fell in love with her description of the western coast of Canada. She has a definite way with words and imagery making me feel the cool streams, seeing the huge trees, even hearing the logging trucks rumble down the road.

from amazon: "For sisters Maggie and Jenny growing up in the Pacific mountains in the early 1970s, life felt nearly perfect. Seasons in their tiny rustic home were peppered with wilderness hikes, building shelters from pine boughs and telling stories by the fire with their doting father and beautiful, adventurous mother. But at night, Maggie—a born worrier—would count the freckles on her father’s weathered arms, listening for the peal of her mother’s laughter in the kitchen, and never stop praying to keep them all safe from harm. Then her worst fears come true: Not long after Maggie’s tenth birthday, their father is killed in a logging accident, and a few months later, their mother abruptly drops the girls at a neighbor’s house, promising to return. She never does.


With deep compassion and sparkling prose, Frances Greenslade’s mesmerizing debut takes us inside the devastation and extraordinary strength of these two girls as they are propelled from the quiet, natural freedom in which they were raised to a world they can’t begin to fathom. Even as the sisters struggle to understand how their mother could abandon them, they keep alive the hope that she is fighting her way back to the daughters who adore her and who need her so desperately."


I actually very much connected with Maggie, perhaps more than I've connected with a book character in a very long time. The way her thoughts race, I feel like I have the same. I have always felt like a worrier, and though she is a great bit younger than I, I feel like a bit of kindred spirit.

Looking through the reading guide at the end of the book, I was surprised to find a lot of questions surrounding the role of the mother, Irene, and the role of mothers in general. This book truly explores the role a mother plays and how taking on the role of a mother is always going to change the other roles a women fulfills in her life and the people around her.

I loved to think about this from the kids point of view (in this case the child who was abandoned by the mother). As I have grown up, experiencing being a mother and understanding what my mom went through has been something I reflect on often. Greenslade does a fantastic job weaving a story that explores these themes while setting it in a beautiful setting that has me looking for plane tickets to the pacific coast of Canada.

Need a summer or beach book? here it is!

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