Books were a way to navigate life, my love for my horse, and just being
an awkward feeling person. For me, the most powerful thing that stories
provide is revealing that everyone is awkward. No one really feels like
they fit in, have everything figured out, and know what this whole,
crazy existence is about. A book offers a perspective
that makes me see my world just a little more clearly. When I find relatable characters in books, I feel comforted because it makes
me realize that no one is all good and no one is all bad. We are flawed and
beautiful all at once,
just like the characters that draw me into their worlds.
Fourteen-year-old Reese’s dream of winning the Black Elk race is shattered when her beloved horse, Trusted Treasure, falls at the last jump. While reeling from the loss, her family suffers a second tragedy—one that results in the end of their family business, the loss of Trusted Treasure, and irreparable damage to Reese’s relationship with her father.
Heartbroken and still longing to find Trusted Treasure, Reese meets Wes, a Lakota Indian whose way of training horses is unlike anything she’s ever seen. If anyone can win the Black Elk, it’s Wes, but he’s struggling with his troubled past. Through heartaches and triumphs, Reese must prove her worth if she wants to heal her family, help Wes, and show them all that some dreams are worth fighting for.
The voice of the main character Will Tweedy pulled me right in. I was drawn into the world of rural Georgia in the turn of the century as if it was yesterday. I could see, smell, taste, and feel everything Olive Ann Burns described. The main character brought me along on his journey in a Huck Finn sort of way that made me feel like his best buddy.
The one thing you can depend on in Cold Sassy, Georgia, is that word gets around—fast. When Grandpa E. Rucker Blakeslee announces one July morning in 1906 that he's aiming to marry the young and freckledy milliner, Miss Love Simpson—a bare three weeks after Granny Blakeslee has gone to her reward—the news is served up all over town with that afternoon's dinner. And young Will Tweedy suddenly finds himself eyewitness to a major scandal. Boggled by the sheer audacity of it all, and not a little jealous of his grandpa's new wife, Will nevertheless approves of this May-December match and…
I read this book on my honeymoon twenty years ago, and I couldn’t put it down. It made me laugh out loud to the point that I couldn’t help but read parts of it out loud to my husband.
I couldn’t help but root for Owen on the first page. His voice plunged me deep into the world and made me feel like I didn’t want the book to end. There’s such a bittersweet component to the story that felt comforting to me as well as spiritual.
'Marvellously funny . . . What better entertainment is there than a serious book which makes you laugh?' Spectator
'If you care about something you have to protect it. If you're lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.'
Summer, 1953. In the small town of Gravesend, New Hampshire, eleven-year-old John Wheelwright and his best friend Owen Meany are playing in a Little League baseball game. When Owen hits a foul ball which kills John's mother, their lives are changed in an instant.
Gail Honeywell gave me a gift when she wrote the character of Elinore Oliphant. I felt so sorry for her one minute, and the next, I could relate to her crazy life and insecurities. I felt like I wanted to protect her, and I also wanted to shake her and tell her to stop being so weird. I wanted to give her a big hug, and I wanted to tell her to snap out of it.
Honeyman provided a magical experience for me that all the best authors are able to do. It’s like she is able to point at her character and say, “Look at this crazy human and her crazy behavior,” at the same time as holding up a mirror in front of my face.
"Beautifully written and incredibly funny, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is about the importance of friendship and human connection. I fell in love with Eleanor, an eccentric and regimented loner whose life beautifully unfolds after a chance encounter with a stranger; I think you will fall in love, too!" -Reese Witherspoon
No one's ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine.
Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she's thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of…
I always love a strong voice. The fact that there was this horrific past in her family, and it hung like a dark cloud over them, gave such an interesting juxtaposition to the sweet, innocent voice of Sarah.
I felt the strain of the relationships with her brothers, her dad, and her mother. I felt her pain around her relationship with her brother, Cassie. I was filled with that sense of love and loss you can only have for a sibling that you’re fighting with one minute and having the best time of your life the next.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION
'A major book that I suspect will come to be considered among the essential memoirs of this vexing decade' New York Times Book Review
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant - the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would…
The main character, Robert was so relatable to me as he played around his family’s farm and I loved all of the beautiful descriptions of the countryside and surrounding farmland.
I fell in love with him even more when he got to keep the piglet. I could feel the pure joy of watching their bond grow. I was brought back to my own childhood and fully immersed in the setting, the characters, and the way that childhood decisions and perspective can be robbed from you in one day.
Originally published in hardcover in 1972, A Day No Pigs Would Die was one of the first young adult books, along with titles like The Outsiders and The Chocolate War. In it, author Robert Newton Peck weaves a story of a Vermont boyhood that is part fiction, part memoir. The result is a moving coming-of-age story that still resonates with teens today.
It began with a dying husband, and it ended in a dynasty.
It took away her husband’s pain on his deathbed, kept her from losing the family farm, gave her the power to build a thriving business, but it’s illegal to grow in every state in the country in 1978.
It even brings her first love from high school back; the only problem is that he works for the FBI. Will their occupations implode their romance, or will the opposite happen?
A second chance at love, opposites attract, rags to riches heroine trope story.
It began with a dying husband and it ended in a dynasty.
It took away her husband’s pain on his deathbed, kept her from losing the family farm, gave her the power to build a thriving business, but it’s illegal to grow in every state in the country in 1978. It even brings her first love from high school back; the only problem he works for the FBI. Will their occupations implode their romance or will the opposite happen? A second chance at love, opposites attract , rags to riches heroine trope story.
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